Sweetheart, Sweetheart

by Bernard Taylor

  She smiled at me. She felt perfectly all right now, she said.

  After lunch: omelets (Jean Timpson wasn’t coming in till later), Mr. Pitkin arrived. I’d forgotten all about his arranged visit and when he rang the bell just on three-thirty I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t given the dresser a single thought since meeting him, let alone having come to a decision as to whether or not I wanted to hang on to it. But there he was, all spruce and smiling on the doorstep, hat in one hand, walking stick in the other.

  “I have to tell you the truth,” I told him once he was inside. “I haven’t made up my mind about it yet . . .”

  “Oh, that’s all right.” He smiled. “There’s no rush. And anyway, I enjoyed the stroll.” Politely declining She­lagh’s offer of coffee he waited a moment then asked if, while he was here, might he take a look at the dresser . . . ?

  “Certainly,” I said, and then, remembering the duff cellar light and the faulty torch, added: “But it’ll have to be by candlelight, I’m afraid.”

  I lit candles and led the way to the cellar door. “Be careful—the steps are steep,” I warned him, and he smiled and said, “Oh, I know,” and followed me down, with She­lagh bringing up the rear. She hadn’t been down there before and when we reached the floor and stood in the circle of light she stood looking around at the accumulation of past possessions and ahead with delighted surprise. And she wasn’t in the least fazed by Miss Merridew’s stuffed pet.

  Pitkin had moved to the dresser. I followed him with the candles and looked at it then, really looked at it, for the first time.

  Standing at least eight feet high with a length of almost six feet it was an impressive piece if only by its size. I said to Pitkin, “It must weigh a ton! They must have gone to so much trouble to get it here. How on earth did they manage it?”

  “They’d have brought it on a cart. Along with all her other bits and pieces.” He ran his fingers along the carved edge of one of the lower shelves. “But you can see why they went to so much trouble, can’t you.” It wasn’t a question. “I’d reckon her father made it for her, or else it had been in the family. Be given to her for her bottom drawer, I should reckon.” She­lagh looked at me questioningly at this and I said, translating for her: “Bottom drawer. Hope chest to you,” and she said, “Hope chest to you too,” and aimed a pathetic fist at me. “The genuine article, this is,” Pitkin said, “and a specially nice one as well. And solid. Not like those flimsy little copies they churn out today.”

  There was certainly nothing flimsy about this one. I put my shoulder to it and tried to shift it, but I couldn’t budge it an inch. “No,” the old man said, watching me, smiling, “you’d never move that on your own.” He seemed in his element. He began pulling out and pushing in the smoothly gliding drawers. “Look at that,” he murmured. “The fit. Perfect . . .” He touched it lovingly, caressing it almost; he didn’t care about the dust. “Something like this,” he said, “would stay in the family for years, being passed down from one generation to the next.” He turned to me. “I remember seeing this when I was a boy. First when the Temples lived here and then later after the Lanes moved in. Course, it was upstairs in the kitchen then. And all the china was set out of it, all the plates in neat rows, the cups hanging from the hooks. It really looked a picture. All polished. Beautiful . . .” He paused, as if seeing it as it had been. “Mind you, Bronwen Temple was the one for having things looking nice. She took such a pride in everything. Very fastidious. Everything had to be just so. Her clothes—everything—it all had to be so right, so perfect, not a mark anywhere. Your cottage here—well, it was like a palace.”

  “Maybe that’s one of the reasons,” I said, “why her husband went off and left her.”

  He nodded slowly. “Very possible. After all, a home’s for living in, not looking at,” and She­lagh said, “You’re right,” as if he’d dropped some pearl of wisdom at her feet. Remembering my previous conversation with him—and with Timpson—I said: “But he was having a little bit on the side, wasn’t he? He went off with one of the local girls, a dairymaid, didn’t you say?”

  “Effie,” Pitkin said. “She was our dairymaid.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, “Mr. Timpson said you were the one who would know all about it.”

  “. . . I don’t know that there’s anything to tell. He went off and left his wife. Went to America.”

  I asked the same question I had asked Timpson: “How does everybody know he went there? Did he tell people he was going?”

  “. . . No. Not as far as I know . . .”

  I shook my head. “Wasn’t it enough just to leave her? Did he have to kill her first?”

  “You can’t be . . . sure that he did. When she was found the doctor said she’d only been dead a few hours. And Handyman had been gone three days by then.”

  “Even worse,” I said, “if he—hit her and just—just left her to die . . .”

  “No one ever proved that’s what happened. It was never proved.”

  “What do you think happened, then?”

  For some reason the old man avoided my eyes. When he answered me his voice sounded slightly strained, his tone reluctant. He shrugged. “I was only a boy at the time . . .”

  He didn’t want to go on with the subject. I couldn’t imagine why, but for some reason I clearly felt that he didn’t want to talk about it. It only made me more curious. I approached him at a tangent.

  “Did you know them well—the Temples?”

  “Oh, yes, I knew them. I used to run errands for them. For both of them.”

  He turned a little away at this and gave his attention to the dresser again. I said, changing the subject:

  “Tell us about the Lanes . . .” And it wasn’t just an empty question. I wanted to know. “What were they like?” I asked.

  He was more forthcoming when it came to the Temples’ successors. After a moment’s pondering he said:

  “I remember . . . I met them first when I went round there with my father. There was a tree had come down . . .”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, “Mr. Timpson mentioned that.” It was the tree that had broken the sundial, I recalled, the one that had fallen the same day as Temple’s hasty, guilty departure . . .

  “It’d come down in a storm,” Pitkin said. “And it was a storm, too. Trees coming down all over the place. Really bad. Anyway, since the Temples were gone this tree just stayed there. So after the Lanes moved in we all went along to help cut it up, move it.” He grinned. “They wouldn’t have been short of firewood that coming winter, that’s for sure.”

  “Why,” She­lagh asked, “did you and your father go round to help them?”

  “Oh, wasn’t just us. A lot of the local people went. Living out in the country, folks are always ready to lend a hand if they can. Not like in the cities. In the country you never know when you might be called on. And in the same way you never knew when you might be needing help. And of course, them being newcomers—well, it was the neighbourly thing to do.”

  I remembered what Timpson had told me about John Lane—that he had become something of a recluse after the death of his wife. “How was he?—Lane—then?” I asked.

  “That’s a long time ago. Oh, he seemed all right. Tall fellow. Dark. Not unlike you, I s’pose. By all accounts he caused quite a flutter with the young women in the village when he first arrived here. But he was only interested in his wife, so I believe. She was a very quiet young woman. Shy, gentle, placid soul. It was quite a shock when that happened to her.”

  “How did it happen exactly . . . ?” This was She­lagh.

  “Who can say . . . ? Nobody knew about it till it was over. John Lane come down into the village one morning in July and said his wife was dead. He said it had happened just a few hours earlier. Apparently he’d woke up, missed her and gone outside looking for her. And saw smoke coming from the summer-house. Well, it was blazing all right. He broke the door down and managed to drag her out but it was too late. She was dead. According to
him she’d got into the habit of going out to the summer-house at all times of the day or night. He reckoned she must have knocked over the oil lamp she’d taken in there.”

  “And they believed him?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then: “Some did. He was burnt pretty badly himself—in trying to get her out. And there wasn’t really any reason you could think of as to why he’d—do away with her. Besides that, she’d begun to act a bit strange, so to some people it didn’t come as such a great surprise.”

  “And the other people?”

  “Well, of course they had their own ideas. And they let it be known, quite clearly, what those ideas were.”

  “What was the official verdict?” She­lagh asked.

  “Accident.” He nodded. “Which it probably was, I reckon. Anyway, one thing there was no doubt about—it finished Lane. Oh, yes. He never got over that. In spite of what some people said, I think he was devoted to his wife. I saw him just a day or two after it happened. He was like a changed man. He was a changed man. He was like . . . well . . . broken. And from there he just went steadily downhill. Stopped going out, stopped seeing people. When he was ill my mother came down and nursed him, but she said she didn’t think he wanted to go on very much. Well, whether he wanted to or not, he didn’t. He died while she was there.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “Smallpox. That was about three or four years after his wife’s death.”

  “Four,” I said. “I saw their gravestone in the cemetery.”

  “It’s such a sad story,” She­lagh said.

  “Yes . . .” Pitkin nodded. “After that Miss Merridew moved in.” He tapped the dresser. “I asked her to sell this to me—oh, not long before she died. She wouldn’t sell it.” He turned, looked at me expectantly, hopefully.

  I shrugged. “I just don’t know . . . not right now.”

  “But if you do decide to sell it . . .”

  “I’ll give you first chance, you can be sure.”

  “Thank you.” He gave an apologetic little smile. “I think it’s such a shame to have a lovely piece like this and just—leave it down here gathering the dust.”

  I watched his old hand resting lightly on the dusty wood. I looked at the dresser again, the whole enormous size of it; one thing was certain, we didn’t have room for it. “And you could find a good home for it, could you?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. No fear of that.”

  I nodded. “Well . . . I’ll let you know in a day or two.”

  “Good,” he said. “Fine . . . fine . . .”

  In the open doorway I stood for some moments after he had gone from sight. “What’s up?” She­lagh asked me.

  I shook my head. “Nothing . . .” But there was something the old man had said down in the cellar that hadn’t quite added up. At the time it had been too fleeting for me to grasp, and now I couldn’t put my finger on it at all . . . Ah, well, it probably wasn’t important . . .

  In the living-room She­lagh read for a while and I sat on the carpet and tried to make some progress with the jigsaw. I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, though, and in the end I gave up and went outside to mooch around the garden. It was while poking about in the toolshed that I came across an old croquet set. Back in the house, over tea, I studied the little time-discoloured book of rules. It was a game calculated to bring out the worst in people, I reckoned—though it didn’t appear to demand much in the way of energy.

  She­lagh said, raising one eyebrow, “You’re dying to have a crack at that, aren’t you?” Then she nodded. “Well, why not. I’ve always fancied my chance at croquet.”

  “It’s pronounced ‘crokey’—not ‘crokay’ . . .”

  “Arkansass to you.”

  On the lawn we hammered in the metal hoops and the sharp-pointed, colour-banded stake that was the finishing-post, and then began.

  She­lagh caught on quickly. Too quickly. After an hour-and-a-half, during which time I hadn’t managed to get beyond the third hoop, and in which time she managed to slam my ball countless whacks across the lawn in the wrong direction, I decided it was time to stop for a drink and a cigarette. Then our one drink became two, and by that time Jean Timpson had arrived and almost finished preparing dinner. Our croquet game was forgotten. After we had eaten, as we were drinking coffee in the living-room I looked out and saw that dark clouds had begun to gather. And in no time at all they were well and truly overhead and threatening. Not for long, though, the threat; the rain began to fall, gently at first and then, after a short respite, very heavily in a sudden downpour. I remembered the mallets out on the lawn and got up to fetch them in, but Jean, thoughtful Jean, had beaten me to it. “It’s all all right,” she said as I headed through the kitchen, “I saw them out there . . .” and she nodded to where the mallets and the hoops stood neatly stacked by the door.

  She went home soon afterwards and She­lagh and I settled down for another quiet evening. Beyond the window-pane the rain continued to fall, whipped by the wind that had sprung up, so that it spattered in sudden gusts against the glass. And the wildness outside only served to make me feel, there in the cottage, more secure.

  And She­lagh, too. While the rain lashed at the windows and the thunder growled in the distance she looked across at me and smiled, hugging herself. “I love it, I love it.”

  I find it difficult to describe how I felt my contentment growing, but it was, it really was. The cottage, I felt, was hourly becoming more and more ours—as if our presence there was forcing those ghosts of the past to relinquish their hold upon it. Those relics all around us, of the former inhabitants, were becoming only relics—objects, and nothing more; more interesting in their own right, increasingly divorced from the associations that had caused them to be kept and treasured. I found I could look on Sad Margaret’s samplers and be aware only of her exquisite needlework, and I could forget—though, granted, not all the time—my awareness of her unhappy days and her grotesque ending. If we stayed there long enough, She­lagh and I, the house, I knew, would one day be ours completely. They would all be gone, those past dwellers of Gerrard’s Hill Cottage—all of them. And that meant Colin and Helen too. And that I wished for most of all.

  It would only be a matter of time, I thought, and I’d be able to think again of Colin as he had lived; to take pleasure in the few memories I had of him, memories that would always be touched by the sadness of his death, but nevertheless, pleasurable. As it was, right then, he was still too close, still too much an occupant there; the loss of him still much too real and too near to the present; the book I took from the shelf was, I was so aware, his book, and when, a little later, She­lagh and I began a game of chess, it was with his chess set . . .

  Our game of chess went the way of our game of croquet. We packed it up just before ten and, yawning, She­lagh went on up to bed. I stayed down and watched some of the news on television, but it was just one story of gloom, doom and despair after another—proof that man hadn’t learned a damn thing for all his ages of evolution and progress—and, deciding that enough was enough, I switched off and started up the stairs.

  I was just setting my good foot onto the landing when I heard her cry out.

  I rushed in, put on the light and held her, trying to still her madly thrashing arms. I soothed her, rocking her in my arms like a baby. After a minute she stopped fighting me and relaxed again.

  “I had another bad dream,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. She reached out, grasped, held tight to my sleeve. “Don’t go. Come to bed now . . .”

  After breakfast, while She­lagh washed the dishes, I went into the living-room to get the piece of glass and hand it back to the shop along with a piece of my mind. The glass was gone.

  “Probably Jean moved it,” She­lagh said, “when she came in with her feather duster, doing her Mrs. Danvers bit while we were at dinner last night.”

  “Yes, I expect so.” I watched her as she dried her hands; watched the slim line of her body as she reached for
the jar of hand cream on the shelf near the sink. She smoothed the cream into her hands, fine, slender fingers working.

  “Are you going somewhere?” I asked.

  She grinned. “I thought I’d go down and have a look at Mrs. Stoner’s horses. You want to come with me?”

  “No, thanks.”

  When she was ready I walked with her round to the front of the house. We stood on either side of the gate, framed by the arch of climbing roses over our heads. She reached up, lightly ran the tips of her fingers along my jaw. “I’ll see you later.”

  We waved to each other when she got to the bend in the hill road. When she was out of sight I took the croquet mallets, hoops and balls and put them back in the toolshed. Then I exchanged my sandals for a pair of Colin’s­ wellies, took a fork, a rake and a hoe, and made my way towards the patch of unturned earth. I wanted to have it cleared and all finished for the rose-trees I would order which, according to Colin’s­ catalogue, would be planted in the autumn. Timpson would take care of that part of it for me. I thought about how it would be—my own roses blooming when She­lagh and I returned next year . . . The house would be more than ever mine . . .

  I found myself whistling as I walked along past the rear of the house, past the sunken garden. I whistled until I was close to the patch of garden I’d already cleared. Then, my feet and my tune came to an abrupt halt.

  Clearly in the fresh, still rain-damp earth new words had been written. Large round letters, childish and uncertain in the forming of their character, but by no means uncertain in the message they spelt out:

  SEND HER AWAY

  16

  In Doctor Reese’s waiting-room I sat down facing a fat woman who was trying to amuse a peevish child who refused to be amused. We all had problems. In my own mind I could still hear the words I had muttered as I’d stood by the garden patch: “Jean Timpson, this is it. You’re through.” And while the anger had still boiled inside me I had hacked at the earth until all trace of the message had gone . . .