Not looking back, she started down Sidney Street, headed toward Market Square and the shops, preparatory to doubling back to see which way George was headed. A half-dozen awestruck undergraduates watched her silken progress. One of them wrote a highly derivative sonnet about her that night, something about women lovely in their bones.
She ignored them. She ignored traffic, with near-fatal consequences. One day, she thought, George would go too far. With the wrong person.
***
Violet was bored. Bored, bored, bored, and wondering how soon she could decently make an escape.
Redecorating Waverley Court, top to bottom, to which she had initially looked forward as the ultimate challenge, could wait, although as she looked around her sitting room now, she knew it couldn’t wait forever. With a delicate shudder-purple velvet draperies with gold tassels. Really!-she returned her gaze to the Vogue through which she had been flapping in a desultory way for the past half hour. That was boring, too, as she already owned nearly everything pictured in the issue worth owning, thanks to Adrian.
She stood up and stretched her lithe dancer’s frame. Smoothed her hair. Checked her makeup. Perfect, as always. Simple perfection. But… what, she wondered, peering closer, had happened to the girl who had set all of London on end? Where most people saw only the taut, transparent skin, Violet saw crow’s feet, the nap of loosening flesh at the jaw, and lines etching the brow and upper lip, despite the best efforts of the creams advertised on every other page of her magazines.
A phrase from a poem she had once read drifted into her thoughts. Something about “thy mother’s glass.”
When Violet had been young and aspiring to join the Aristocracy, as she thought of it, she had read straight through an anthology of famous poetry, trying to make up for her lack of formal education. But once she had breached the portals of the upper classes and realized most of them were far stupider than she was, she had given it up, specializing instead in the small talk that greased the wheels of cocktail and weekend parties, along with copious amounts of alcohol. Not that she really drank-bad for the complexion-but she had perfected the art of carrying around the same half-full highball glass for hours, flitting from group to group, laughing maniacally at jokes she only half understood. For some reason, this had gained her a reputation for wit.
What a long time ago it all seemed now. Looking back on the path her life had taken, she could only say now that she wouldn’t have changed a thing. Not really. Not even Winnie…
Perhaps a cruise…
***
Sir Adrian was stumped. He had scribbled away happily in his study for hours, rewriting the pages of the day before and adding a page or two more, but when it came time to write about the Chloe of his youth, he ran straight into a wall. It was not as though he had drained the well of his malice-far from it-but when it came to remembering Chloe as she once had been, he found only the haziest ghost could be summoned, like an out-of-focus photograph faded even more by time.
Chloe as she became, he could recall with clarity. Frequent child-bearing had inflated her, rounding her moon face like-yes, he thought: like a pink balloon. Sir Adrian laboriously scribbled the words in a margin of the page, stared at them a moment, and angrily crossed them out.
Let’s see. Tap tap tap went his sausage fingers on the desk.
The young Chloe had been tiny, with slim legs tapering down into narrow, elegant feet. A gust of wind could have blown her over. That had changed, too, the straight piano legs swelling into something like those umbrella stands made from elephant feet.
But apart from balloons, pianos, and umbrella stands, Sir Adrian had made little progress in the past hour, and the writer’s block remained cemented in place, impeding the normally smooth flow of vitriol onto the page.
He threw down his pen-that same special pen that had helped him so much in Paris. These were the times he most resented the aspic of writerly isolation. Maybe a talk with Mrs. Romano would help. Strangely enough, he did not think of going to see what Violet was doing. He was slightly afraid of Violet: Having captured his long-sought prize, he feared too much familiarity might breed contempt-on her part.
Sir Adrian reached for the tasseled bell pull to summon Mrs. Romano, then decided he would visit her in the kitchen instead.
Slowly, painfully, he raised himself onto elephantine legs and began his long progress to the back of the house.
***
Sarah was again at large in the rambling house, and without the book with which she had hoped to while away the hours. Having told Jeffrey she was needed in the kitchen, she felt morally obligated to be as good as her word, in keeping with her general inability to separate the white from the black lie, and her footsteps led her in the direction of Mrs. Romano’s domain, where she knew she was neither needed nor, probably, welcome.
The smell of something delightful on the cooker greeted her as she walked in.
“Oh, what’s this then?” she said, lifting the lid on a large saucepan.
“Sauce. For the cappelletti.”
“Alpine hats? Wonderful. I’ve published a cookbook, you know. It’s been quite well received. Perhaps I could help…”
Sarah rummaged in a drawer and produced a teaspoon. She again lifted the lid of the saucepan. Mrs. Romano, ruler of all she surveyed, watched her with growing annoyance. She had flipped through one of Sarah’s books one day at W. H. Smith’s in Cambridge. All lentils and dried grass and barley, from what she could tell. She wouldn’t have fed such food to a donkey.
“It needs some mace,” pronounced Sarah.
“Mace? Mace? Most definitely it does not need some mace.”
“I assure you-”
“This is a traditional dish. I make it always the same way. For years. Always. The. Same. No. Mace.”
“You’ll see. Mace is just like nutmeg, only slightly more robust. It’s actually made from the nutmeg shell. Few people realize that.” Sarah was now innocently rummaging among the spices over the cooker. She found the mace jar and, turning, held it aloft, beaming, triumphant, and blissfully unaware of the gathering storm.
“And you shouldn’t keep these spices right over the cooker, you know,” she went on. “They get overheated. Spoils the flavor.”
Mrs. Romano, ire thoroughly aroused, appeared to be the only thing in the kitchen in danger of overheating. Stepping smartly (for her) across the kitchen, she snapped shut the door of the cupboard over the cooker, nearly onto Sarah’s fingers.
“If I want to use nutmeg, I use the nutmeg,” Mrs. Romano said flatly. “No mace. No nutmeg. The sauce, it is perfect, just as it is.” She made a grab for the mace jar in Sarah’s hand, which Sarah held aloft, just out of reach.
“Give it to me,” demanded Mrs. Romano.
“No!”
“Testa di cavolo!”
“How dare you call me a cabbage head!”
Just then, the colossal form of Sir Adrian dropped anchor in the doorway.
“Hello, hello, what’s all this?”
“I’m just trying to help Mrs. Romano.”
“Mrs. Romano, if she needed help from the likes of you, would not be employed here.”
Stung, Sarah said, “I have written a best seller about cooking, and my publishers think the next one-”
“My books are also best sellers. That doesn’t mean I’m an expert on killing people, any more than it means you’re an expert at cooking. Stay out of this kitchen.”
“They even want me to do a cooking show on the telly,” Sarah persisted.
“Really? Then I have a title for them. One Fat Lady.” Deciding this was rather a good one, he laughed uproariously; then, seeing the injured look on her face-her sadness always infuriated him, especially when he was the cause-reverted to his former cold manner. “I’m not saying it again. You are to stay out of this kitchen and leave Mrs. Romano alone.”
“It’s my kitchen, too, isn’t it?” she said.
This he didn’t bother to answer. Mrs. Romano, a p
erson quick to anger and quicker to forget, felt sorry for the girl. Woman, she corrected herself. Sarah so clearly wanted her father to admire her intellect and achievements, while these were the last things Sir Adrian cared about in a female. Like all fathers, he wanted Sarah to make a good marriage and produce basketfuls of chubby grandchildren, to Mrs. Romano’s way of thinking.
Funny, how all of Sir Adrian’s children had let him down in that regard. It was, in her opinion, the real reason behind all this messing about with the will, like Henry VIII fiddling with papal bulls. A grandchild, especially a male, would have put an end to all that nonsense. His posterity assured, Sir Adrian might have been a happy man.
***
Albert had found the liquor cabinet, but he had found it locked, perhaps in anticipation of his visit. Mrs. Romano, he felt, and not for the first time, took a bit more upon herself than met her official job description. But Albert knew where the cellars were, and moreover, he had long ago taken the precaution of having an extra key made.
Getting to the cellar itself posed no problem, as it opened off the main hall, with entry through a narrow door, designed for tiny medieval priests, built into the paneling under the stairs. Looking exaggeratedly to left and right like a burglar in a silent film, Albert painfully opened the creaking door, exposing the stone stairway to the bottom. Good thing, he thought, he was usually sober on his way down. Coming up was another story.
The cellar, the inspiration for which might have been Tales from the Crypt, was original to the house, and Sir Adrian’s pride. Collected in temperature-controlled rooms and cabinets fitted snugly against the cold stone walls were vintage bottles-some, Albert reflected, worth more than his annual income in a bad year. Most years, he amended.
The small keys to the cabinets containing the most expensive bottles remained firmly in the care of Mrs. Romano. Albert suspected they nestled all day somewhere in the vicinity of her redoubtable cleavage. For all Albert knew she slept with them dangling from a chain around her neck. She did not appear to have a man in her life to object to that-odd, when he thought about it, because she exuded such an earthy appeal. Maybe giving birth to a shit like Paulo had put her off sex forever.
But for Albert’s purposes, the keys to the actual cabinets didn’t matter. There were plenty of good-quality spirits lying about that were not deemed worth locking up. They would do just fine. With any luck he’d be awake and sober in time for the cocktail hour.
It was a little early for whiskey, even for Albert, but he spied several cases of Guinness stout tucked against the wall. He reached up to drag a case off the top of the stack. As he did, he dislodged the case underneath, tumbling it to the floor. Bracing himself for the inevitable crash of broken glass, Albert was surprised when the box fell with a delicate thud on the stone tiles. Setting aside the top crate of beer, he bent down and pulled back the cardboard flaps of the fallen box.
Paper. A small stack of thin blue paper, slightly disarranged by the fall. The top page carried only a few words. A title page, laboriously printed in capital letters. Albert held it up to the light from one of the crenellated windows high in the wall.
“A Death in Scotland,” he read aloud. “By Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk.” It bore a recent date across the bottom of the page.
His latest manuscript, presumably. He flipped through the pages. Page after page of scrawl. Perhaps the light would be better in his room. Albert tucked the pages in his pockets, hoisted a case of the beer, and headed back upstairs.
8. HELLO MOTHER
AS ALBERT CARTED AWAY his treasure, Jeffrey was writing to his mother back home.
In coming to Waverley Court, Jeffrey had found himself in an Anglophile’s heaven. Having completed his B.A. in English back in the United States, he had found himself in the same position as all newly minted English majors-that is, unemployed and unemployable. He had mooned around his mother’s house in Minnesota for a while-Jeffrey’s father, who had emigrated from Britain, had died when Jeffrey was a toddler-implementing various of her DIY projects with decidedly mixed results. Then one day, bored and broke, he had joined the Air Force, beguiled by a recruiting poster showing hard-jawed men and women at the controls of F-15s. The Air Force had taught him Russian and transported him and his duffel bag to England, where he spent the next four years with headphones clamped to his head, translating risqué jokes swapped by Russian pilots cruising over the Baltics.
Not surprisingly, four years of this experience also left him unfit for gainful employment. But his first May week in England-one of those flawless, golden weeks only England could produce-had made him decide he must remain in the country forever-somehow. He responded to every promising advertisement in the Times without result until one day he saw an ad posted by the recruitment agency employed by Sir Adrian. That had led, by some miracle of good fortune, to his current position in the Beauclerk-Fisk household.
The woman at the agency had done her best to quell Jeffrey’s enthusiasm for the post.
“You’re the fifth one this year, you know.” It was then July.
“Then I’ll be the last,” Jeffrey had replied, with all of the optimism and determination imbued in his blood by pioneer ancestors.
The woman, Mrs. Crumpsall-middle-aged, tired, and ready for her afternoon tea-had removed her glasses, regarding him with basset-hound eyes. She felt it must be something in the American diet-all that corn, perhaps-that made them this way. But then-Sir Adrian had flattened every British specimen she’d sent his way. Perhaps Jeffrey’s unbounded, puppyish enthusiasm would see him through.
The building provided Jeffrey for his lodging predated the main house by many decades. It was a wattle-and-daub, timber-framed building that may once have housed people before being turned over to livestock in a later century. His rooms had only recently been nicely modernized into a self-contained unit over what were now the Waverley Court garages. The little flat came complete with kitchen, washing machine, and the snarl of cables required for television and Internet communication. Apart from the fact he still drove an American-model car the size of a UFO, Jeffrey had adapted admirably to his new environment.
He stared now at his laptop screen, rereading what he had written, not quite satisfied that he had conveyed in full the adventure of his new life in England:
Dear Mother:
How are you? I am fine. I just received your letter…
(This was not quite true, but she would blame the delay in his response on the overseas mail service, which she seemed to believe was still being conducted via whaling ship.)
… and was, as always, glad to hear you are feeling well…
(This was also not quite true, as Mrs. Spencer’s letters tended to be one long and tedious recitation of her various imagined ailments.
Jeffrey had found that sympathizing with these ailments only made the recitations in her toilsomely penned replies longer.)
… You asked what kind of ‘boss’ Sir Adrian was. Liege Lord is more like it, with myself in the role of vassal. Let’s just say Sir Adrian is quite a challenging employer. He cannot write a line without rewriting it a dozen times, which makes him cross. I must be the only living person who can decipher the resulting mess of a manuscript, which does at least offer me some form of job security. Yes, he writes everything by hand, unbelievable in the era of the PC…
(Here Jeffrey backspaced, realizing that she probably wouldn’t know what PC meant, substituting the word “computer” instead.)
…and passes along the resulting chicken scratch to me. I think sometimes I will go blind from trying to decipher what it is he means to say, but whatever he’s been working on lately he’s been keeping awfully close to his vest, which gives me some free time.
His family are all at Waverley Court at the moment-quite interesting for me, of course, to see them all together at last. They arrived last night.
Ruthven, Sir Adrian’s eldest son, arrived first, with his wife, Lillian. She looks a bit standoffish…
(Jeff
rey didn’t feel he could tell his mother Lillian looked like a prize-winning Rottweiler.)
… but Sir Adrian’s daughter, Sarah, is quite a jolly girl.
(Well, Jeffrey felt she had the potential to be jolly, although rather skittish at the moment.)
There is George, who is the second son, and Albert, the youngest. Both are quite well-known in London circles. George brought a young friend with him. She’s extraordinarily beautiful, perhaps in her early-to-mid thirties, sensible-looking, yet graceful as a swan.
Satisfied with what he had so far written, he resumed typing:
But the person here who is causing the most speculation is Sir Adrian’s ‘intended.’ I wrote you about her earlier. Her appearance, at long last, has been an occasion for rampant speculation among the staff. She arrived just hours before the others, which is odd in itself-that I hadn’t seen her before. I caught just a glimpse, but there is no question she is a strikingly attractive woman, for her age, slim and dark-haired…
He paused. Something had raised a flag in his mind, but he couldn’t think what the matter was-what elusive thought or memory had surfaced as he tapped away unselfconsciously. It had submerged itself again so quickly he couldn’t spear it now, whatever it was. Then he remembered his mother was probably the same age as the bride and backspaced diplomatically over the potentially offending phrase referring to her age.
Jeffrey paused, rereading, hoping he had failed to convey the toxic atmosphere he felt brewing within the house. Mrs. Romano had told him at length about her own trepidations. She had taken a liking to Jeffrey ever since she’d learned he’d been in the service. In her mind, Jeffrey was one with the World War II American servicemen who had marched through her native Italy, dispensing food, chewing gum, and hope.
“I never,” she had told Jeffrey “saw anything like this family. I suppose Sir Adrian can marry who he wants, but… She cannot possibly love him-do you think?”
Death of a Cozy Writer Page 8
