Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  Dr. Bruce Winship, Max noticed, seemed to be paying her special attention. Bruce appeared to be sucking in his stomach and puffing out his chest, in perfect imitation of the courting pigeon; Bernadina appeared to be reciprocating with sidelong glances of appreciation for this astonishingly macho display. Bruce’s sister, Suzanna, who privately worried he might be in danger of becoming one of those quaint bachelor doctors so beloved of novelists of the thirties and forties, would approve of this mild flirtation, thought Max. Max knew too well the penchant of the women of Nether Monkslip for playing matchmaker.

  Bernadina stole a moment from gazing into Bruce’s eyes to introduce Gabrielle Crew.

  “Please call me Gabby,” she said. “Everyone does.”

  Max politely shook Gabby’s hand, noting its surprisingly firm grip. He supposed her line of work explained the grip, but overall she was a vigorous-looking woman, if older than he’d first thought. Closer inspection revealed the crosshatching of fine lines on the plump skin around her eyes and mouth.

  Lucie, an energetic woman in her late forties or early fifties, briefly emerged from the kitchen, a white dish towel looped over the leather belt at her waist. Max often thought of her as the backbone of the Cuthberts’ marriage, the frame that gave her husband’s blue-sky ambitions something to cling to. Both were of the artistic temperament, but in very different ways. La Maison Bleue, the village wine and cheese shop, ran on the engine of Lucie’s steely determination. She was what the French would call jolie laide, or pretty-ugly, with distinctive large features that taken as a whole were unforgettably attractive. At the same time, one look at Lucie and one’s thoughts inevitably drifted toward Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities. That strong and unstoppable will shone through.

  Max complemented her on one of the appetizers, a soft white cheese spread on toasted slices of French bread. It was, she told him, a Lyonnais specialty called cervelle de canut and made from fromage blanc, herbs, shallots, olive oil, vinegar, and salt and pepper. “The name means ‘silk worker’s brains,’” she told him. “Try not to think about it.”

  Max would not let it put him off. He had never eaten so well as since coming to Nether Monkslip. Awena was an excellent cook, for a start, her specialty being the ability to prepare any dish so no one suspected they were eating a vegetarian meal. Max had lost what little spare body fat he’d possessed under her gentle ministrations and had never felt as sound and whole as he did now. Lucie Cuthbert was likewise an excellent cook, but of the butter, cream, and goose-liver pâté variety.

  Lucie, taking Gabby’s arm in hers, told Max, “We call her ‘Auntie’; she and my mother were like sisters. You may be interested to know Gabby and her husband were missionaries for a while.”

  “Oh, but that was a long time ago, Father,” said Gabby. “I’m sure everything has changed. We came back to live in England some time ago.”

  Max mentioned an Anglican group often involved in missionary work.

  “No, Father, this was a Catholic organization. My husband was a very devout Catholic.”

  “He is no longer with you?” Max asked her. She cocked her head, straining to hear, and he repeated what he’d said.

  “He died last year.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Max.

  She nodded. “It’s more difficult than you realize it’s going to be. But Lucie and Frank have been very kind, very welcoming, in giving me a new place for a new start. I don’t know if you’re aware I am living in the shop over their store. I work at the Cut and Dried.”

  “Gabby comes from a long line of hairdressers,” said Lucie.

  Gabby nodded. “My mother and grandmother owned a hair salon.”

  Max became aware of a man hovering in his peripheral vision, waiting to cut in. He had been standing very near Bernadina, but having failed to entice her away from Dr. Winship, he seemed momentarily at a loss. Less by process of elimination than from the look-at-me signals the man gave off, Max knew this had to be Thaddeus Bottle. He had a frame designed for leading-man parts and, Max was to learn, a wonderful bell-like speaking voice. Brown hair sprang back from a widow’s peak—a luxuriant mane that was thinning ever so slightly, to judge by the gleaming scalp visible at the part.

  It was somehow made clear to the observer that Thaddeus was well aware of his many wonderful attributes. Max half-expected him to position himself by the window so as to—Oh, wait for it. There he goes. Thaddeus walked over to one swagged window, ostensibly to admire the darkening garden. The setting sun cooperated by silhouetting his features against a sudden burst of golden backlighting. It was all nicely staged, and Max could not help but think it was staged. The others were too taken up by their conversations to notice, and after a while Thaddeus dropped the pretense of a sudden rapt interest in horticulture and rather sulkily rejoined the group tugging at his collar, which seemed to irritate him suddenly. Max hid his amusement by taking a small sip from his glass.

  A new figure appeared beside Max and said, “Hullo.” The woman held out a hand in greeting. “I’m Melinda Bottle. I think we’ve met before.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Max.

  They had chatted briefly during one of the interminable queues in the village post office, a queue resulting from the postmistress’s need to pass along all the news of the day to whoever stood before her counter. This could be a matter of some minutes while the news was assessed, verified, and passed up and down the queue for additional input and analysis. Max recalled that Miss Pitchford had been in the middle of the queue, which seemed to be adding to the rebuttal time needed for this intricate, time-honored method of news dissemination, for Miss Pitchford was bound to uphold her reputation as the purveyor of only accurate village gossip. As she was generally the Q source for every rumor, villagers often felt it was best to consult her for clarification should any questions arise.

  On this occasion, Max recalled, the postmistress had been even slower than usual, as tidbits about the Royal Couple had to be communicated to each and every customer, with time allotted for each and every customer to comment and speculate at length.

  Max, who had been in rather a hurry, and much good had it done him, had greeted Melinda Bottle politely but with only half his attention, for the queue was making him late for an appointment and he was preoccupied with what he could do, short of faking some sort of fatal seizure, to move things along.

  Thus in meeting Melinda Bottle, he had formed a hazy impression of a thin but attractive woman, the impression of attractiveness reinforced now that Melinda was done up in her finery, with glistening hair and stagy makeup, the impression of thinness emphasized by the prominent collarbones on display at the top of her dress. She wore sky-high platform shoes, and it seemed to take all her effort to stand in them without swaying as she sipped her aperitif.

  On the day of the Great Post Office Wait Your Turn, she had been in mufti, wearing some sort of yoga costume of stretchy black fabric and clutching a purple mat under one arm. He had been standing ahead of her in the fumes of the flowery perfume she seemed to favor, since she was wearing it again now. Back then she’d been dressed for the winter in a short but bulky winter coat over the yoga togs, with a woolen scarf wrapped high around her hair and neck.

  She’d had a package destined for mailing to London, and she could be heard to mutter that she could have delivered it herself in less time than this was taking. The postmistress might have heard this, for Melinda received a rather deliberate and piercing appraisal as Mrs. Watling abruptly stopped her monologue to peer at Melinda over the top of her pince-nez.

  “Lovely to see you again,” said Max now. “Did you ever get that package mailed?”

  She laughed. “Yes, but the price was a relentless grilling by Mrs. Watling. How long do you have to live here before you’re no longer considered an outsider?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’d give it twenty more years. Until then, you’re still considered a Townie.”

  “Gawd,” she said.
/>   * * *

  After half an hour or so, Lucie, who had been dashing in and out from the kitchen, announced that dinner was served. They willingly trooped into the dining room, where they found a beautifully set table complete with scented candlelight and a low floral centerpiece of velvety tulips and pansies.

  There was a bit of a kerfuffle as they went to find their places.

  “Here you are, Gabby,” said Lucie, indicating a place next to her. Despite the small size of the party, Lucie had provided little place cards with names written in beautiful calligraphy. It was an old-fashioned touch he hadn’t seen done for years.

  But Gabby, her attention seemingly caught by one of Lucie’s paintings, ignored Lucie’s instructions. Max already thought that perhaps her hearing wasn’t good—he had had to repeat that question he had put to her during the predinner drinks, but then there had been a great deal of chatter in the small room.

  Then Gabby dropped something from her purse, and there was a scramble to retrieve it.

  And she ended up sitting by Max, who was flattered to realize she had maneuvered to arrange this proximity by switching her card with Bernadina’s. Max assumed she had some personal matter she wanted to discuss with him, or perhaps she found some comfort in sitting next to a man of the cloth. In his role as vicar, this sort of thing often happened, particularly with the recently bereaved, like Gabby.

  While pulling out her chair for her, Max noticed she wore an enameled medallion that depicted the Madonna standing on a globe with hands outstretched against a pale blue sky. It was beautiful both as a piece of jewelry and as religious art, and Max complimented her on it.

  “The nuns gave it to me as a school prize in a spelling competition. I was good at languages; in fact, they finally convinced me to go to university in France. I always wear it, the medallion, although I follow no particular religion. As I told you, Father, it was my husband who was the devout one. I do go to church, but the necklace is more like a talisman for me. I suppose you’d say I wear it in a superstitious way—isn’t that odd, that we ‘rational’ people do these things? I’m afraid to be without it, as if something might drop from the sky if I didn’t—some horrid fate befalling me.”

  Max, settling his napkin in his lap, stole a glance her. He was strongly reminded of the prototypical Miss Marple, who, according to Agatha Christie, shared some traits with the creator’s own grandmother. Gabby was tall and thin and looked to be in her mid-sixties. Her thick hair, glossy white tinged with blue, had been twirled into an elaborate bun that rested heavily at the nape of her neck; in her strong features she bore a slight resemblance to Lucie. With that bright gleam in her eye, she also looked like the type of person who never missed spotting a trick. Max wondered if, like Christie’s grandmother, she had the worst opinions of people and was often right.

  Dr. Winship, overhearing their conversation about the medallion, said, “That’s a form of religion right there, I’d say. Going back to its earliest history, mankind has fought fear with totems and amulets against evil.”

  Gabby smiled. She had a lovely smile, serene yet wistful. “I would agree with you. But I don’t seem able to help myself. I couldn’t bear to lose this necklace. It connects me to the past. And to the present.”

  “I recently read,” said Max, “that early Christian icons represent the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds because the artists used an egg tempera paint made with elements of all three.”

  “I wonder what the world would be like without religious art,” said Bruce Winship, at Gabby’s right. Her maneuvering with the place cards had disturbed Lucie’s matchmaking efforts, Max realized, for Bernadina, now sitting across the table from him, should have been seated between himself and the doctor.

  “I suspect it would be a much bleaker place,” Max replied. “One doesn’t have to believe in a divinity to see that.” Turning to Lucie, who sat to his left at the head of the table, he said, “This salad is superb.”

  Everyone nodded their agreement. The spring salad was a mix of romaine lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms, and sprouts, all lightly dressed with a raspberry vinaigrette.

  “The mushrooms came fresh from Raven’s Wood this morning,” Lucie told him.

  “There are wonderful specimens in Raven’s Wood,” said Gabby. “Orchids, too, so I’ve heard.”

  “I picked them myself,” said Frank with pride.

  “And I sorted through them to make sure they were safe,” said Lucie. “My husband is not a countryman by birth, you know.”

  “Or a chef by training,” Frank admitted.

  “I never took a cooking class in my life,” said Lucie. “One just knows.”

  Max smiled. “The French seem to be born knowing how to cook.”

  “As do the Welsh,” said Frank, with what looked alarmingly to Max like a wink. Since that was so obviously a reference to Awena and her peerless vegetarian cooking, Max hurriedly changed the subject. He said to Lucie, “But I was forgetting: You’re not actually from France, are you?” Lucie’s English, while perfect, was accented with something that sounded French to the ear.

  Lucie shook her head. “Not the mainland of France, no. I’m from the Channel Islands; my mother was French. And for a while, I lived on the Isle of Wight.” Max knew it was a matter of some particular pride in the Channel Islands that while they were possessions of the British Crown, they were volubly and idiosyncratically independent from it. Lucie illustrated this with her next words. “Most people don’t realize we were occupied by the Germans during the war.”

  No need to ask who “we” were, or which war. For Lucie and many of her generation from that region, there was only one war.

  “I was, of course, not yet born,” she said, “but the stories around the dinner table were all of the German occupation of the islands. My father was evacuated with his school to England. He was separated from his parents—my grandparents—for five years. The breaking of that bond took a long time to repair. My mother was orphaned at five—even worse. And that was just the emotional damage, terrible as it was: My grandparents often said they would have starved if not for the late arrival of the Red Cross supply ship.”

  Gabby nodded in sympathy as Lucie spoke.

  “So horrible,” murmured Bernadina.

  “I was too young to remember,” said Thaddeus.

  “As was I,” said Gabby.

  “They built Nazi concentration camps,” Lucie went on, eyes alight with outrage. “On British soil. For forced laborers, to build the fortifications. Can you imagine?”

  They could not.

  “We weren’t liberated until 1945.” She had again unconsciously adopted the “we” of handed-down suffering. “The shortages were dreadful. Food, of course, was all that mattered, and warmth, but for a while it was the everyday things that you don’t miss until they’re gone.”

  “In my mother’s day,” said Gabby, “they had already learned to make do. I wonder if we in this age of convenience would be as resourceful now. If we could even survive. Even the least important things could become important—human dignity demands a keeping up of appearances, doesn’t it? Little things: Berries for lipstick and rouge—and when berries weren’t available, they’d grind up the lead in a red pencil and smear it on their cheeks. There weren’t the shelves of cosmetics we women have today.”

  * * *

  They had reached the main course, and Bernadina, sipping at the excellent wine, was commenting on one of the paintings that hung on the Cuthberts’ wall. The wallpaper looked like prison stripes to Max, but he assumed the pattern was the height of chic. Lucie was renowned for her good taste.

  “How exquisite,” Bernadina was saying. “He is a master, is Coombebridge. One day, he’ll be worth a fortune. One day soon—he must be quite old by now. He never does portraits, though. I find that interesting, don’t you?”

  Dr. Winship turned his head to glance at the painting. “I read somewhere that he does do portraits. He just won’t sell them.”

>   “I happen to own several of his works—purchased, I can assure you, before he was discovered and rocketed out of my price range,” said Max.

  “I suppose he can do as he likes now.” This was Thaddeus, and it was spoken with what sounded like wistful envy.

  Gabby said, “My husband painted a similar scene. He must have visited this area at one time, before I met him.”

  “He was a painter?” asked Max.

  She nodded. “Quite a good one. The paintings aren’t worth much to anyone but me. I’ve been meaning to get them professionally appraised.”

  This was a topic Max knew something about. He recommended a gallery hidden among the gelato-colored houses of Monkslip-super-Mare, and invited her to drop by the vicarage, where he could provide her with the owner’s contact information.

  Thaddeus now began to show off in a foreign language, having presumably exhausted the possibilities of English. “‘A l’œuvre on connaît l’artisan.’ ‘The craftsman by his work is known,’” said Thaddeus to Lucie with a false modesty and flawless accent, turning on what Max felt sure Thaddeus regarded as a bewitching smile. He did have a charming manner, provided one was easily charmed. Overall, Max did not think that Lucie was effortlessly captivated by the actor and playwright, his gifts now on full display in the small confines of her dining room. Still, a few minutes later they were both smiling, as if they were in on a secret joke. Thaddeus seemed to miss the limelight he so recently had relinquished, and was working hard to regain it.

  He had, Max noticed, an unfortunate tendency to punctuate the end of his sentences with a Putin-like self-satisfied smirk. He had slightly protuberant front teeth, like a sleeping dormouse, an impression enhanced by a tendency to breathe through his nose. Perhaps overcompensating to hide this minor affliction, he had a habit of pressing his lips tightly together when he’d finished speaking. It must have amounted to quite a handicap for a man expected to orate from a stage.