He had been glad enough to let it go. She had, by then, a feeling that he was in bad odour back at the Yard for his enthusiastic espousal of her cause, and it made her more grateful to him than ever. “‘Reader, I married him’,” she quoted to herself now, and poured a second glass of sherry. Freed at last by his death, of a stroke, on the golf course one bright morning of early spring, she had found time and strength to face just what a disaster that hasty marriage had been.
She should at least have gone back to college and taken her degree. Grown up. They would have had her; they had said so. But Geoffrey had talked her out of it. “I want to take you away from it all,” he had urged. “From the whole sordid business, the headlines, the gossip. Time enough when we get back to decide what to do about the Hall.”
“Oh, I want to get rid of it,” she had said at once, but he had been lovingly urgent that she make no more of what he called her ‘rash decisions’ until the prolonged honeymoon was over.
Idiotic not to have realised what their long absence must mean in terms of his career. But there had been so much to come to terms with, in those desperately difficult weeks of getting to know the near stranger she had married. Full of guilt at feeling she did not satisfy him in bed, she thought she must have failed to listen to what he was saying to her. It was only when he casually suggested that they stay another week on their Caribbean beach that she came to and protested: “But your job, Geoffrey? You must have used up all your leave for the next several years already.”
“Oh that! Surely I told you, love? I packed it in. They were so stuffy about it all; it was a pleasure to throw their offer of a whole extra week back in their fat faces. You should have seen their jaws drop.”
“Geoffrey, you did that for me! But, what will you do? Your career … Oh, I feel dreadful.”
“No need to fret. I’ve got a much better idea.” She had learned already to recognise the tone of voice that meant he had made up his mind. “We are going home to Featherstone Hall, my sweet, and I am going for a new career. I’m going to turn the tables and boss the bureaucrats for a change. Just between you and me, I’d had enough of form filling and pen pushing at the Yard. I’m for politics. It’s the career I always aimed for, you know, but first I had to earn my living.”
“And now you don’t need to! Of course; I never thought. But, oh, Geoffrey, not Featherstone Hall.”
He had taken her to bed, and talked her round. Sussex was full of safe Conservative seats, he had explained as she lay, exhausted, in his arms.
“Conservative?” That had been a surprise too, though she was not much of a political animal, then.
“Of course,” he had said. “And the Hall is the perfect setting. We’ll need to make some changes, naturally. All that dreadful chrome and white must go. You’ll enjoy turning it back into the kind of house it ought to be, and you’ll feel quite different about it when you have finished.”
So many mistakes. She rose wearily and stacked dishes in the sink. She had indeed done her best to make the house and herself into the proper setting for a rising young politician, and he had plunged into local politics, eager to be co-opted on to any committee that would have him. As soon as the house was ready, she found herself busy giving dinners for his contacts, and coffee mornings for Conservative ladies. It had been a kind of game at first, and she had enjoyed playing it well, happy to feel that she was making up to him for the ways she felt she failed him.
The telephone rang. She dropped the duster with which she had been polishing the mahogany table and moved over to pick it up, wondering who it could be. She had insisted on a new number, and few people knew it yet. But when she gave her number only silence answered. “Leyning three-six-four two-four-two,” she said again and was answered by a click at the other end. Whoever it was had hung up: a wrong number.
At least it had distracted her from a gloomy enough line of thought. What use to brood over past mistakes? She found her gardening gloves and went out to start the autumn digging of her two small flower beds, delighted to be able to do it herself after all the years of gardeners who listened to her instructions and then did their own thing.
The sun went on shining; a robin came and watched her; she found she was singing tunelessly to herself as she worked, something she had not done for years. It was this secret garden, as much as the compact little house, that had won her at first sight, soon after Geoffrey had died. Terrified of losing it, she had bought the house at once, at auction, without a survey, though Mr Jones, her lawyer, had spoken gloomily of dry rot and inroads on her capital. She had defied him and never regretted it, though in fact that was when she had first realised how her huge inheritance had shrunk over the years of Geoffrey’s management. It had provided her with a good, public reason for selling the Hall. One thing she had learned over the years was a healthy respect for the Leyning grapevine, and it had not failed her in this instance. She was soon meeting sympathetic looks from women who had heard of her straitened circumstances and thought them worse than they were. It was the perfect reason for extricating herself gently but firmly from her commitments to the Conservative Party. No need to live that lie any longer. It had been a lie ever since Anthony Eden’s shabby handling of the Suez crisis. She had quietly voted Liberal ever since, grateful for the secret ballot and ashamed at deceiving Geoffrey. But what else could she do?
The telephone rang. She dropped her gardening gloves on the little iron table and hurried indoors to answer it, only to get the same silence, the same click. Tiresome. But she had done enough gardening. Her back was reminding her of the years she preferred to ignore. Exercise, the osteopath had said, and she had added the ones he advised to those she had learned in self-defence classes at college. She went back to the garden to do them in the sunshine, happy all over again in its privacy.
Walking was good, too. Back in the house, she combed short grey hair at the hall mirror, slapped on lipstick and a dash of pressed powder, put her keys and a ten pound note in her pocket and went out into the little town where she had chosen to live.
The house itself was so quiet that it was always a surprise to emerge directly down three steps on to the High Street, but then this, too, was quiet enough, since the shopping centre had moved to the other end of town, where Tesco was. It had been disconcerting to find, when she moved in, that the butcher, greengrocer and invaluable all-purpose store that had been round the corner when she bought the house had vanished. But you could get milk at the paper shop, she had discovered, and anyway the walk to Tesco was good for her, though she did not much like supermarkets.
It no longer surprised her to see two Conservative ladies nipping across the road to avoid her. It was not just because of her defection from the party. She had realised, early on, that people simply could not cope with the fact of bereavement, particularly not a sudden one, like hers. How long did one continue a pariah? she wondered, and remembered her friend Penelope Cunningham – only, of course, she had been Penelope Forsham by then – describing her own experience as a recent widow up in Essex. ‘They drop you, you know, once you’re not a couple any more. It hurts, but you get used to it.’ Penelope had solved her own problem by going to live with her rich brother Gerald, who had never married and lived in extreme comfort in the south of France. Patience had gone to stay with them for a while after Geoffrey’s death, but it had not worked. She sighed, remembering. She must write to dear Penelope. She turned briskly into the Post Office to buy airmail paper and stamps.
Putting the change into her pocket she crossed the road and started up the long steep track that led to her favourite view of the sea. This was the way she had come, all those years ago, when Mrs Ffeathers had sent her into Leyning with the cheque and forged prescription. She was not going to let it be haunted for her. Aside from anything else, it was much the quickest way into real country, and the driest when the weather got bad. She could not afford ghosts here, nor to be reminded of the niggling doubt that had always lurked in the back of her mind aft
er that convenient verdict.
It was dusk when she got home, and it felt more like home than ever as she drew the curtains in the front hall against High Street eyes and put on the kettle for a cup of tea. No need to draw curtains at the back of the house. One of its great virtues for her were the high flint walls on each side of the long garden and the creeper-hung one at the end where the lane cut her off from the graveyard beyond. When she had finished the flower beds she must make a start on cutting back the polygonum that had taken over that end wall. She might even find that she needed experts to do it, but hoped to manage it herself. Already she felt it her garden as the one at Featherstone Hall had never been, but it had inevitably been neglected in the months when she had had to stay on at the Hall, settling the estate and arranging the sale.
It had been a lonely time, lonelier even than she had expected. She had been angry with herself at finding she had so few friends. You don’t make friends when you are living a lie, she thought now, and she had been living at least two. Three really. She had pretended to be the happily married wife of a successful politician, and that she shared his politics. None of it true. He was not even successful. She had recognised this finally, too late, at the meeting where he was not selected as prospective parliamentary candidate for the district. That was a long time ago – but she remembered it with cruel clarity. The other candidate had spoken first, and spoken well, and then Geoffrey had stood up and got it all just faintly, fatally wrong. He had been sure and unsure of himself in all the wrong places and she had known it for a lost cause when he sat down.
Afterwards, he had blamed her, and in some ways, though not the ones he accused her of, he had been right. She had failed him because the gap between his thinking and hers had become so wide that it had been impossible for them to discuss things. Instead, she had cravenly taken to agreeing with him so as to avoid the rages he got into when she did not. Cavilling, he called it. After that bitterly disappointing failure, he had been away from home, on one pretext or another, more than ever, and it had been nothing but a relief to her. But she had been lonely. And here she was now, in her new house, with no close friend on whom she could rely, no one who would telephone and ask how she was settling. My fault, she thought. I must join things, non-political things: the University of the Third Age, the local theatre company, groups like that. How else would one meet one’s neighbours, now the age of the morning call was past?
On the thought, the front door bell rang, surprisingly loud in the small house. It was dark now. Should she put the chain on? It seemed idiotic, here in the High Street. She switched on the outside light and opened the door.
There was nobody there. She looked up and down the surprisingly empty street. Nothing. Had she really taken so long to get to the door, or had it simply been a naughty child, ringing and running? Probably.
She went back into the kitchen to put a chop into the oven for her supper, irked with herself at letting the incident upset her. But it had left her jumpy. Idiotic, but she suddenly found she did not like the feel of the black garden outside, and drew the curtains there too. That felt better.
She got out table mats and silver to set a proper table – begin as you mean to go on – and the telephone rang. She did not even expect a voice this time, and there was none. I’ll ring the operator in the morning, she thought; this is beyond a joke.
In the morning, taking out bread for the robin, she saw footprints in the newly dug flower bed. Not her own; she knew that at once. Her walking shoes left an unmistakable pattern in the soft earth, but these were the marks of trainers, and smaller ones than hers. Impossible. But they were here, in the little bed under the kitchen window where she meant to plant sweet-william for the scent. No wonder she had felt nervous last night. Someone had been standing there, watching her.
It was impossible, but it seemed to be true. She looked up at the high walls on either side of her garden. Hard to imagine either of her neighbours getting out a long ladder and manoeuvring it over the wall. Mrs Palmer on the right hand had lived in her little house all her long life and was letting it fall quietly to ruin around her. Mr Simpson, on the other side, had only moved in since Patience had bought and never seemed to be at home at all. He worked in the City, she knew, and commuting from Leyning must be no joke. She had recognised early on that neither of them would be the kind of useful neighbour who takes in parcels and messages, and had been glad that she owned the wall between her garden and Mrs Palmer’s neglected one. Anyway, there were no ladder marks in the soft earth on either side of the lawn. And no side entrance.
The impossible does not happen. Absurd not to have thought of it sooner. Her row of little houses must have been built some time in the eighteenth century as working men’s cottages, to service the big houses on the other side of the High Street. Their gardens, she knew, ran uphill behind them into open country, except where patches had been sold off for development. So where had their stables been? Obviously, across the mews lane at the bottom of her garden.
She fetched the secateurs and advanced on the rampant polygonum there. When you really looked, it was obvious enough. Someone had indeed forced their way through here, she saw as she cut savagely at the tough stems. It must have been a very small person, though, probably just a neighbouring child, who had found the way and made the secret garden their own. And here was the door, solidly set in the back wall, badly needing paint, and – she turned the handle – unlocked.
What a fright about nothing. Standing in the deserted lane, she looked at the graveyard wall facing her and saw that it was comparatively new, late nineteenth or even early twentieth century brick. The stables must have been pulled down at some point and the graveyard extended, probably when the advent of the motor car began to make horses redundant. Looking up and down the quiet lane she saw that most of the other back entrances had been bricked up. No need to do that herself; her own door seemed solid enough behind its screen of polygonum; but she would go down to the ironmonger who actually existed in the pedestrian precinct by the station and buy herself a large bolt. She even felt a little sorry for the unknown child, who had made her garden its own and would now find itself locked out. They had done no damage, after all, left no litter, lit no fires. But she did not want them watching her through her kitchen window.
She bought the bolt that afternoon and screwed it on herself, thinking with amusement that back at the Hall she would have had to wait for Barnes, the chauffeur, to get around to doing such a job for her. Inevitably it reminded her of one of the arguments she had had with Geoffrey. She had very much wanted to get Barnes to teach her to drive, but Geoffrey had been set against it. ‘Much more dignified to let Barnes drive you,’ he had insisted.
Who wants to be dignified? But, as so often, she had not said it. Perhaps she would take lessons now. Perhaps not. All her principles were against it. She had bought this house, after all, and moved into Leyning so that she would be able to get about by public transport, such as it was. By taking the short cut across the graveyard she could be at the station in ten minutes. Less, now, she thought, if she used her back gate. She must have a proper lock put on, next time she had someone working about the place, so she could go out that way and leave all safe behind her.
The telephone rang again a couple of times that night, and she remembered that she had never got in touch with the operator. The second time, instead of a click when the receiver was replaced at the other end there was the sound of slightly asthmatic breathing. She did not like it at all.
The operator, when she called next morning, was friendly, but not very helpful, making it clear that two days’ worth of odd calls on a new line were not much to complain about. It’s like someone having to get killed before you get a pedestrian crossing, Patience thought, replacing the receiver. The front door bell rang. She hurried to answer it, half expecting to find nobody there, stood for a minute, looking the strange woman up and down. Not a strange woman.
“Hullo, Patience,” said Mary Brig
ance. What was her surname now? “You never answer my letters, so I thought I’d take the bull by the horns and come and see you. Are you going to ask me in?”
For a moment, Patience hesitated. She had meant the break to be absolute, and to stay that way. But after all that time? And all that had happened? Besides, those same two Conservative ladies were hovering on the other side of the road, quite obviously watching. She swung the heavy door wider. “I suppose I am,” she said, and knew it sounded ungracious.
“Good.” Mary stripped off leather driving gloves and dropped them on the chest by the door. “Mark said I had to get in, even if it meant forcing an entrance.”
“Mark?” She had thought she would never say that name again. Moving mechanically while her heart raced, she took Mary’s jacket.
“He writes to me sometimes.” Mary was just as elegant and almost as beautiful as ever, rakishly thin with a crop of startling silver hair. “When he can. He’d been reading through back files of The Times, saw something about you. Gossipy rags they are these days; fancy hashing up all that old story. I don’t suppose you liked it much.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Strong-minded. It was the first Mark had heard of Geoffrey Crankshaw’s death. Should I condole?’ she enquired with a quick, bright glance.
“No, thanks.” They seemed to have moved into the kitchen and Patience, reached for the kettle. “Coffee?”
“I’d rather have a drink.” Mary looked at the wall clock. “Less trouble and more fun. And then I’m taking you out to lunch. I saw a friendly-looking pub a mile or so out of town. Sunshine in the garden, too. We could have a sandwich and tell each other the stories of our lives without your nosy neighbours listening in.”
“Nosy neighbours?”
A Death in Two Parts Page 11
