by Annie Murray
‘All right, Kevin?’ George enquired in passing, on his way to the barn.
‘Oh – y-yeah. Thanks, Mr Baxter. Mornin’, Mr Baxter.’
George began to revise his tentative view that Kevin had hidden depths. Any such depths seemed to be trickling away rapidly into the main drain. The lad scuttled after him into the barn, going to look for his overall with a dazed expression.
‘Morning, Alan, Clarence!’ George greeted them.
Alan, already at work with a chisel at the bench, looked round and said good morning. He had an edgy air all the time these days, on account, George realized, of whatever his wife might be getting up to. Clarence, contemplating a Regency tea caddy in mahogany perched on slender claw feet, made a sound in his throat which George chose to interpret as an amiable greeting.
‘Taken a bit of a bashing, that, hasn’t it?’ George said, looking at the chipped edges of the box. The lid comprised five sections, four of them sloping up to meet a rectangular flat top, the sections divided by pale boxwood stringing, much of which looked as if a rat had chewed on it.
Clarence shook his head, tutting like an RSPCA volunteer facing a battered puppy. The caddy had clearly been treated very carelessly, but George decided to head off a torrent of woe on the subject. Moving closer to Clarence, with a jerk of his head towards the coat hooks at the other end of the barn where Kevin was robing up, he said quietly, ‘What’s up with the lad?’
‘Huh,’ Clarence said. ‘Can’t get any sense out of him. Caught sight of her, that’s what.’ A jerk of the head. ‘That wench.’
‘Wench? Oh – you mean Sharon?’ Rather to his bemusement, Sharon’s ominous figure had started appearing in the kitchen not twice, but thrice a week. Vera was evidently in need of Help on a large scale. Sharon had arrived this morning, already for the second time this week.
‘Sharon, is it?’ Clarence said with distaste. He leaned towards his tools with a sour expression as Kevin began to advance towards them. ‘Huh. Well – I s’pose anything warm’ll do.’
The kitchen, on his return, was presently occupied by Vera and by Sharon, dressed in her usual brown garb. The radio was on, sound crashing out of it.
‘Do I use this cloth for the upstairs, Mrs Day?’ Sharon was asking loudly, as George ventured in. Though she treated Vera with an almost exaggerated respect, George thought he could detect an underlying thread of contempt towards all of them. But then, he told himself, he so often got women wrong. And with a mother like Brenda, from the pub, how could Sharon really be otherwise? In any case, Vera did not seem to notice any undercurrent.
‘Use the cloths I’ve left up there, love,’ Vera said. ‘You’ll see the Harpic – just take the Vim up with you. You can do the bathroom now, quick, while no one really needs it – or do you, Mr Baxter?’
‘Er, no – far from it.’
Sharon – unhurriedly – drew on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, picked up the Vim and with what George could only feel was a withering look up and down his person, slouched towards the stairs in black lace-up shoes. There was something Soviet about Sharon, George decided.
‘Vera,’ he hissed once she was safely gone. He eyed the transistor radio. Vera took the hint and turned it off. ‘How old did you say that . . . person is?’
‘Seventeen.’ Vera was digging around in her basket and brought out a newspaper.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure. Look, Mr Baxter – you won’t have seen this.’ She opened the Reading Mercury and spread it on the kitchen table, pointing. ‘Terrible – look.’
ARMED BURGLARS HOLD ELDERLY LADIES IN ALL-NIGHT ORDEAL
‘Oh good heavens.’ His eyes hurried down the story. ‘Lady Byngh!’
The burglary had happened in the small hours. Three men had broken into Greenburton House, one with a loaded pistol. They tied up Lady Byngh and her housekeeper and spent several hours ransacking the place for items of value, thought to be antiques and silver, which they carried off in a van. It was only when the milkman arrived at dawn that they were able to call out for assistance. The two ladies were taken to the Royal Berkshire Hospital, suffering from minor injuries and shock.
George looked up into Vera’s sorrowful eyes.
‘Poor old thing,’ she said. ‘She didn’t deserve that. But she does live away from everyone, all the way up that creepy drive – and only that funny old dear for company . . .’
‘I wonder what they took,’ George said. ‘I don’t know what she had up there, but they could’ve emptied half the house in that time.’
‘Yes, that’s right – Chalk Hill Antiques. Can I help you?’
George, passing along the hall the next morning, heard Vera’s telephone voice from the office. He went to the door in case help was needed.
‘Oh – Lady Byngh.’ A nervous deference entered her tone. Leaning on the doorframe, George felt his innards tighten fractionally. Until that moment he had been feeling quite relaxed. There was no Sharon lurking in the kitchen today. And it was only two days until Sylvia was coming to the house, a prospect which offered acres of Sunday afternoon time, privacy and who knew what else, an unknown towards which his mind kept veering helplessly.
‘How are you?’ Vera asked. She managed not to say ‘love’ as she would have done to most people. ‘What a terrible time you’ve had. We read about it in the paper . . .’
She was interrupted down the line by what sounded, from where George was standing, like a Cairn terrier barking, though it appeared it was actually Lady Byngh. Vera removed the receiver from her ear briefly and gave it a look of consternation.
‘Oh – no,’ she interjected during a pause in the racket the other end. ‘He’s not here, I’m afraid.’ She met George’s eye and winked. ‘He’s gone to see another customer . . .’
More canine sounds jerked out from the telephone.
‘This afternoon? Yes, I think . . .’ Vera paused as if consulting a diary. ‘Yes, Lady Byngh, two o’clock should be—’
‘Woof . . . Yap . . .’
‘Sharp. Yes, Lady Byngh.’
2.
The drive of Greenburton House branched off the road at the edge of Aston Parva village, beyond a perimeter of land owned by the racing stables. George found himself steering along a tunnel of predatory-looking conifers. After squinting in the glare through the Vanguard’s windscreen, he now found his eyes widening to admit enough light in the green-tinged gloom. At the other end, he emerged to a circular sweep of grass-pocked gravel in front of the imposing house. The centre of the drive was occupied by a fountain topped by a stone dolphin, its mouth angled to spout water into the air. But there was no water and the dolphin’s mouth was chipped and dry.
George parked beside Lady Byngh’s red and black Daimler, which gave off an air of both disdain and dishevelment, its number plate still hanging off.
It had once been a fine house: Georgian, generously built, with three gables in the roof and the front door set in the middle. Mellow bricks could just be seen beneath the ancient wisteria that seemed almost to have ingested the house. The roof was lichen-covered and missing tiles; the door and window paint were chipped and leprous; flowerbeds were a tangle of weeds, grass and climbing roses. George stooped to look at the pink rosettes – Orléans roses, he was almost sure – which had mingled with the tributaries of wisteria flowing from its thick corkscrew trunk.
He felt the heat bearing down on him as he stood looking up at the house. He sensed the plants giving out moisture into the breezeless air. The only sound was of bees, stirring languidly round the flower heads. He could feel himself simmering, his whole body patched with moisture. But this was no place to remove his jacket. He stood with it swinging open for a moment, inviting the non-existent breeze to cool him and sought the shadow of the house, along a flagged path edged with desiccated leaves. His spirits sank. Even standing outside the black front door, he was aware of the seeping smell of stale cigarette smoke.
The bell pull was a metal handle in the wall o
n which he yanked, resulting in a mellow tinkling from the belly of the house. This was followed immediately by the Cairns’ enraged yapping, interspersed by an occasional ‘woof’ from the Labrador. George realized he had little idea who might answer. Had there not been mention of a housekeeper?
There was a pause long enough for the dogs to give up any expectation of imminent events and save their energy for the final push. In the resulting quiet, George heard the approach of erratic, slapping footsteps weaving inexorably closer. The huge iron latch snapped upwards.
As the door opened he heard the clicking of dogs’ toenails on stone and the barbershop trio of barking advanced towards him, borne on a gust of air flavoured with cigarettes, dog and a general grottiness. Standing before him was a woman not far off his own height, a figure of hunched, heron-like boniness, clad in a diaphanous, silver-grey dress. A lurching pearl brooch tugged on the material to the left of her flat chest. In her left hand was a cigarette holder, with a half-burned cigarette in it.
‘Back!’ she commanded in a cracked, screeching voice in which George thought he detected an American accent. ‘Get back, you damned critters!’
A pair of silver-rimmed pince-nez clung on halfway down her pointed nose, a chain undulating each side of her shinbone face as she spoke.
The dogs obeyed, seeming chastened, though the bulbous Cairns had a brief go at yapping and making little dashes back and forth. The elderly golden Labrador stood with its head half lowered but eyes raised to George with the same fixed look he had seen from Lady Byngh’s car, as if inwardly screaming for assistance.
‘Bertie, Jack, quit that – now!’ Silence arrived, abruptly. ‘That’s better.’
She peered at George over her spectacles and he found himself regarded by unnervingly pale grey eyes. Her hair, George saw, must once have been a generous, wavy headful. It still had substantial body to it. It was steel grey and swept back into some bun affair at the back. Pearl-drop earrings pendulated at her neck. She also had good cheekbones and might once, he realized, have looked rather interesting.
Before she could speak, a voice that was unmistakably Lady Byngh’s assailed them from somewhere upstairs.
‘Percy? Is that Baxter?’
Without turning her head, the woman yelled, ‘Yup!’
Muffled instructions followed from upstairs which seemed to be completely ignored.
‘You are Baxter, I presoom?’ A hand like a bony flipper extended towards him and his own disappeared momentarily into its cold clasp.
‘George Baxter. How do you do?’
‘How do I do? Hah!’ This was followed by a long drag on the cigarette and a turn of her head to puff out smoke. ‘Come on, I’ll boil some water for carfee.’ She turned, then back again. ‘Oh – I’m Percy by the way. Full name’s Marguerite Persimmon. I’ll take you up to Eleanora in a moment.’ She pronounced the name in five syllables: El-e-a-no-ra.
Up, he thought? Surely to goodness he wasn’t going to have to meet Lady Byngh in her bedroom?
He passed through the quarry-tiled porch, benches like church pews on each side, beneath hooks bearing mackintoshes and sagging jackets. The pews were littered with old newspapers, dog-leads, old gloves and a couple of threadbare tennis balls the colour of ancient moss.
The smell of smoke increased as he entered the house. One of the Cairns who had been lingering ran up to him, yapping.
‘Hello, old chap.’ George bent to stroke its scruffy coat, a development the dog greeted with every sign of ecstasy, rolling on to its back.
‘I wouldn’t encourage the stoopid critter,’ Persimmon remarked. ‘Go on all of you, git! Lie down!’ She moved into the main body of the house with her singular gait, legs widely spaced, one foot slapped down flat, then the other. Here the sound was muffled by old Turkish rugs, so grubby and trampled that their pattern had vanished into a uniform silt colour.
‘They didn’t think to steal those,’ Persimmon said, pointing down at them. George felt he could hardly blame them.
‘How is Lady Byngh?’ he asked. ‘I gather you had the most terrible time.’
‘Spitting mad,’ Persimmon shouted over her shoulder. ‘She’s still in bed after what those lousy louts did. They made a night’s work of it I can tell you. Look—’
She gestured into the room to her left. Through the filmy stuff of her sleeve George saw the anatomy of her spindly arm extending.
‘Oh dear me.’ He was standing at the threshold of a dining room. ‘I see what you mean.’
‘They couldn’t be bothered with the table. Too difficult to load, I suppose.’ Persimmon planted her feet and gathered her arms in close to her, the left hand to her mouth with the cigarette. She stared resentfully at the mayhem.
In the middle of the room, on a stained but once high-quality crimson carpet, rested a long table. From what he could see, it was a mahogany pillar and claw design, three sets of four splayed legs each gathered into a supporting pedestal. Other than the lower part of the legs it was impossible to make out much of it. A dark red chenille cloth sagged from its top. This was burdened with such a towering array of clutter – rows of cardboard cartons, albums, books and various sedimentary layers of stuff.
‘Oh dear, they did leave you in a state,’ he said, imagining that the burglars had hurriedly thrown the contents of the room onto the table. ‘What a terrible way to—’
‘No, no,’ Persimmon interrupted tetchily, with a hand gesture like the flap of a crow’s wing. ‘They never touched this. They just took everything from around it – all the chairs, and El-e-a-no-ra’s darling bur-eau.’
George uncovered in himself a certain fellow feeling with the burglars. Even for a decent mahogany dining table, that lot was not worth tangling with.
Their progress upstairs, he following Persimmon’s strange, deliberate gait, was punctuated by calls from the upper regions.
‘Percy – hurry up! What are you playing at?’
Marguerite Persimmon gave no reaction to these interjections whatsoever. George braced himself for the state of the bedroom and what he might find in it. The smell of smoke had not lessened as they ascended. Reaching the landing, they entered a passage, its carpet threadbare but elegantly patterned in green, black and gold. There was a nicotine-yellow tinge to all the walls. Persimmon stopped at a door opening to their right.
‘Here he is, dearie,’ she announced, at once retreating. ‘I’ll make the carfee.’
To George’s surprise the carpet ended at the door and he found himself treading bare, brown-painted boards, with only a small rug by the bed. It was a simple room, a single iron bedstead up against the wall to the right, sunlight, in a slanting fall through the window, lighting a strip of the dusty boards. To the other side were a dressing table and mirror and chest of drawers. Other than that, there was one wheelback chair.
‘Good afternoon, Baxter.’
Her tone was as commanding as ever. George felt himself bridle inwardly. He dragged his gaze away from the chest of drawers, a bow-fronted thing in ash, and confronted the bed. His surprise at the simplicity of the room was compounded by the sight of Lady Eleanora Byngh, sitting up very straight against her pillows. Her hair, surprisingly dark for her age, which he realized was rather less than he had assumed, was brushed and pinned severely back from her face. Apart from the fact that she was wearing a pale blue nightgown with frills down the front – she was not a woman he would have associated with frills – there was something almost nun-like about her appearance. Most striking of all was the radiating spectrum of colours from her eye and down the right side of her face.
‘Ah – oh dear,’ he said, taken aback.
‘Should have seen the other feller,’ Lady Byngh said grouchily. She reached across herself to stub out her cigarette into a saucer on the bedside table. A wince of pain passed across her features but she said nothing. ‘Fetch that chair, Baxter,’ she ordered. ‘And sit down.’
He settled on the upright chair, wondering if Lady Byngh had ever been
acquainted with the word ‘please’, while she shuffled through a few sheets of paper. Without looking up, she commanded, ‘Open the window a crack, will you, Baxter? It’s getting too warm in here.’
His mind rebelled. What did your last slave die of? Crossing the creaking floorboards, he raged inwardly at the way her manner instantly reduced everyone about her to a minion. It was like being back in the army! What an insufferable, rude old bag she was. Any sympathy he had summoned up at hearing of the assault on her was fast draining away. He raised the sash, which to his surprise slid easily, giving a view of the unkempt garden, though at least the grass had been recently mown. Why did she occupy this simple room, he wondered. There must be much grander ones at the front. It occurred to him that this was not her room at all, but a spare one into which she had moved especially to meet with him. He realized he ought to ask how she was feeling and turned to do so, but she got in first.
‘Right. Sit. I want you to help me.’ Her peat-coloured eyes tracked his return to the chair. ‘Percy will be up with coffee soon but it takes her an age. She is well into her seventies.’
‘Is she?’ George said as he sat. ‘Good heavens. Is she an American?’
‘Canadian – once, anyway.’
He found the presence of mind at last to ask after Lady Byngh. Was she recovering well from her ordeal? He managed his kindest, most gentlemanly manner, despite everything.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said dismissively, clutching her papers. ‘A couple of cracked ribs. The face. I’ll be all right. Now, Baxter –’ She pushed herself a little more upright. George looked away, disquieted by the thought that some movement might release the precarious-looking fastening at the neck of her nightgown. As she moved, a whiff of perfume stole through the lingering smoke. ‘I have, as you know, been robbed. Common little guttersnipes the pair of them, though they did know what they were looking for, I’ll give them that. I’ve a list of all I think they’ve made off with. I may add to it of course. You’re to help recover my things.’
