The Lifeline

by Margaret Mayhew

  ‘It’s cottage pie,’ Marjorie informed him from the opposite end of the dining-room table. ‘Rather a success, I think.’

  It was a warm, sunny day in May, but the old girl was dressed, as usual, in a thick tweed skirt and woollen twinset. Underneath, so far as he knew, there would also be a thermal vest. The Major had been posted abroad to hot spots for much of his army service and his wife had never re-adjusted to the English climate. Only when the temperature climbed safely above seventy-five degrees did she unearth the tropical kit that she had previously worn abroad. Privately, he thought that tweeds actually suited her better, though he would never have said so.

  ‘I called at the Manor this morning, Roger.’

  ‘Did you, dear?’

  ‘To check on some of the fête arrangements with Ruth. I must say she’s always very helpful. Quite a contrast to her late mother.’

  Nobody in the village had ‘sadly missed’ Ursula Swynford, the Major reflected. Her husband, Sir Alan, had been a very decent sort of chap but his wife had been a bit of a bitch, it had to be said. An attractive woman, though. He’d fancied her himself and she’d definitely given him the green light, or at least the amber one. He’d had serious expectations in that direction – until she’d got herself bumped off. In fact, he’d been damned lucky not to get involved. His blood still ran cold at the narrow escape.

  He took a gulp of water to wash down an unexpected chunk of something.

  ‘All going well, I trust?’

  ‘Yes. Everything under control.’

  ‘How’s Ruth managing with things – the baby and all that?’

  He knew nothing about babies – somehow he and Marjorie had missed out on one – but he understood that looking after them could be hard work.

  ‘She seems to be coping.’

  ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The baby. Girl, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, Roger. It’s a boy. And he was asleep, so I didn’t see him. But I did see Ruth’s lame duck in the greenhouse.’

  ‘I didn’t know she kept ducks.’

  ‘Not a real one, Roger. Surely you’ve heard about the chap she’s taken under her wing? They must have talked about it in the Dog and Duck? Jolly decent of her, in my view. I’m not sure if I’d have the patience myself.’

  He rarely listened to village gossip in the pub – there was too much else to discuss. Serious stuff. Damned politicians making a mess of things, foreigners up to their knavish tricks, country going to the dogs, and so forth.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Tom Harvey’s patient, Mr Deacon. He and his wife came to live at the Hall last winter and he had a stroke. Tom thought it would help him recover if he did some light gardening at the Manor, so Ruth’s been giving him small jobs to do.’

  He thought of Dusty. ‘Bit risky, isn’t it? The fellow might go and have another one.’

  ‘Tom doesn’t think so, according to Ruth. It’s like occupational therapy – weaving baskets, making clay pots, all that sort of thing – and it gets him outside into the fresh air.’

  The garden of Shangri-La was mercifully small. Crazy paving at the front of the bungalow with a narrow flowerbed on each side of the path leading up to the door; a postage stamp of grass at the back and a few shrubs dotted around. He could cut the grass in a jiffy and the old girl took care of sticking in the bedding plants when needed. Marigolds up the path in summer and some dull-looking things he could never remember the name of in winter. He couldn’t see any of it being of much help to recover from anything, but, of course, the gardens at the Manor might be a different matter.

  He took another gulp of water to send the chunk finally on its way.

  ‘Well, I hope they know what they’re doing.’

  ‘I think they do. It seems a very sensible idea. Ruth told me that Mrs Carberry from the Hall who turned up at the coffee morning today has asked her if she could do a few hours at the Manor sometimes as well. Her husband died last year and it’s left her very depressed, poor thing.’

  He wondered whether Marjorie would be left very depressed if he were to drop off his perch, like poor old Dusty. Somehow he doubted it.

  He’d spotted Mrs Carberry arriving at the village hall. A cut above the rest of the coffee-morning crowd and considerably younger. In her mid-fifties, or thereabouts. Nice figure, well-dressed, decent make-up, long hair. He always liked long hair on a woman. Put him in mind of Delilah with tresses flowing over the pillow and all that – though, come to think of it, it was Samson who’d had the long hair and Delilah who’d wielded the scissors, or the knife, or whatever she’d used to cut him down to size. Lucky chance that she’d be working at the Manor.

  ‘Good-looking woman, I thought.’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up, Roger. She wouldn’t be interested.’

  He ignored the remark. Just because the old girl hadn’t been interested for years, it didn’t follow that it was necessarily the same with all other women. By Jove, no! Not where he was concerned. Of course, you had to know how to read the signs. He flattered himself that he’d make a pretty good impression with Mrs Carberry and, in his book, it was always open season on widows.

  He said, ‘As a matter of fact, I was thinking of calling to see Ruth myself. Wanted to ask her if I could store the bottles for the stall somewhere at the Manor. It’s a damned nuisance keeping them here. We haven’t got the space.’

  ‘I should have thought you’d welcome their company, Roger.’

  He ignored that remark too. Treated it with the disdain it deserved. It wasn’t even as though people donated anything decent these days. Bottles of homemade wine brewed-up from everything you could think of – dandelions, peapods, parsnips, nettles, turnip tops – not to mention the British sherry, American Coca Cola, and Lucozade. Lucozade, for God’s sake! Might as well be cough medicine. He’d be lucky to get one bottle of spirits among them. Still, it was all in a good cause – whatever the cause was this year – usually the church roof, which was always about to fall down.

  He finished the rest of the cottage pie without further trouble and wiped his mouth on his napkin.

  ‘I think I’ll take a stroll over there later on this week.’

  Marjorie was collecting up plates, clashing them together like cymbals.

  ‘You do that, Roger, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  Tanya Carberry was already regretting her rash conversation with Mrs Harvey at the village coffee morning. She had met her once before, but only exchanged a few words. She knew Dr Harvey, of course, being a patient of his at the Frog End surgery, and he had been extremely kind when Paul had died – taken time to talk to her and done his best to cheer her up. But she hadn’t been able to stop crying, even after a year. The depression was terrible. She spent hours each day staring out of the window, seeing nothing and thinking about Paul. He had died so suddenly. One moment he’d been there, in the middle of saying something to her, and the next he’d collapsed on to the floor and was gone. There had been no warning, no clue that anything was wrong with him, no time or chance to say goodbye. Apparently, it had been his heart. Last year they had celebrated their silver wedding anniversary and this year he would have been fifty-eight. They had been planning what they’d do when he retired. Go on a long, luxurious cruise, visit India, drive across America from east to west … whatever they felt like, whatever they wanted. Now, none of those things would ever happen.

  When they had first moved into the flat, it had seemed such a good idea. With both the children grown-up and living their own lives many miles away in America, it was time to downsize. Time to move into something easier to clean, cheaper to heat and with no garden to worry about. The communal gardens at the Hall were looked after by two men who came regularly with professional machinery. Someone else came to wash the windows and somebody else cleaned the entrance hall and the stairs and corridors and watered the houseplants. She had given up the part-time job she’d never much li
ked and was enjoying the newfound freedom and leisure. It had all made sense at the time. Now, she hated the place. The flat seemed like a prison and, without Paul, she was in solitary confinement.

  The village magazine was delivered monthly through the letterbox. When Paul had been alive they hadn’t bothered with village activities or meeting the locals. There had been no need because they had had each other. But, for something to do on another long, lonely day, she had sat down and flipped through the magazine and its announcements and reports and advertisements. The notice about a coffee morning had caught her eye.

  9.30 – 11.00

  Coffee with Home-Made Cakes in the village hall.

  Everyone welcome!

  She had made herself get up much earlier than usual, washed her hair, taken time with her make-up and put on a dress and high-heeled shoes, checking everything in the mirror, like she always used to do. Her reflection had surprised her. It had been like bumping into an old acquaintance after a long absence.

  The village hall had turned out to be a scruffy sort of place with bare floorboards, a flimsy-looking stage at the far end, tubular chairs and Formica tables. There had been more people than she had expected – thirty or more, mainly women, standing around or sitting at the tables and talking loudly to each other. She needn’t have bothered about her appearance because most of them looked as though they were dressed for walking the dog. A large, overbearing woman had come up to her and informed her in a foghorn voice that her name was Marjorie Cuthbertson. The smaller man, lagging behind, had been introduced as the Major and was, apparently, her husband. When his wife had moved away to speak to someone else, he had nudged her in the ribs with his elbow.

  ‘Don’t usually come to these things, you know. Too much of a hen party. Makes me feel like a fish out of water.’

  He had mixed up his metaphors, but she knew what he meant. Paul would have felt the same.

  The Major had conducted her ceremoniously to a trestle table covered with a white cloth where the coffee and home-made cakes were being served. He had insisted on paying the one pound fifty price for hers, flourishing a five-pound note. The proceeds were, apparently, going towards the cost of new curtains for the stage. Looking at the old ones, sagging wearily on their hooks, their replacement was long overdue.

  Tanya had not enjoyed the coffee morning. People had kept watching her, although they pretended not to, and she had realized that she was an object of pity in their eyes: the lonely, sad widow. The Major had not helped with his over-the-top gallantry and it had soon dawned on her that he could easily become a tiresome nuisance. It was when Mrs Harvey had finally rescued her from him that the conversation she now regretted had taken place.

  She had known that the Harveys lived at the manor house in the village and that Ruth Harvey raised garden plants for sale. When she and Paul had lived in their previous home, she had quite enjoyed doing the odd bit of gardening, until it had eventually become too much of a chore. Too many flower beds with too many weeds and too much grass for Paul to cut when he had far better things to do. For something to say, she had asked Mrs Harvey how she coped with the Manor gardens.

  Mrs Harvey had smiled. ‘I couldn’t, without Jacob.’

  ‘Jacob?’

  ‘My mainstay. He turned up at the Manor one day, completely out of the blue, and he’s been working for us ever since. He’s a natural gardener, unlike me. I’ve had to learn the hard way, from scratch.’

  Mrs Harvey had gone on to explain how she had only begun to take any interest when she had given up her job in London and come back to the Manor to look after her mother who had been ill. Since her father’s death, the gardens had slowly degenerated, and she had decided that she had to do something about it.

  ‘Thanks to Jacob, it’s been possible to keep things going. And I have another helper now, as a matter of fact. Lawrence Deacon. He and his wife have a flat at the Hall, so I expect you’ve come across them?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘He had a stroke a while ago and got very bored and depressed sitting around at home all day, so Tom suggested he might do a bit of gardening at the Manor whenever he felt like it. There’s something about gardening that takes you out of yourself. It makes you forget other things, or, not think about them quite so much. I’ve found that out.’

  Tanya had thought about the past year, spent crying and looking out of the window and thinking of Paul who would never come back again. Never, never, never. And she had thought of the empty and silent flat waiting for her and the empty and silent days ahead. And she’d found herself saying to Mrs Harvey, ‘I don’t know anything about gardening but I wonder if I could possibly come and lend a hand sometimes?’

  The Colonel was familiar with the layout of the Hall from previous visits and, most memorably, from the time when he had inadvertently discovered the body of the actress, Lois Delaney, in her flat.

  He had been collecting for the Save the Donkeys fund, prevailed upon by Miss Butler who had been let down by the Major feigning flu. It had been snowing hard early in the New Year and he had trudged from door to door in the village, carrying a tin decorated with a picture of a sad-looking donkey with sticking-out bones, laden with a burden bigger than itself. He had also been provided with a tray of donkey face badges and a box of pins.

  The Hall had been his last stop. All but one of the flat residents had been very generous to the donkeys but there had been no answer at all from Flat 2 on the ground floor. On his way back down, the caretaker’s wife had been waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. She had been very worried about the occupant of Flat 2.

  ‘Miss Delaney, the famous actress,’ she had whispered to him. ‘Though we’re not supposed to tell anybody. She’s come here to get away from it all. She likes me to give a bit of a clean and tidy-up for her and I’ve rung her bell several times today, but she hasn’t answered.’

  She had a key to the flat, the caretaker’s wife had told him, so that she could keep an eye on things if Miss Delaney was ever away. She wasn’t away now, though. Her car was outside and you could see it hadn’t been moved because it was all covered with snow.

  At his suggestion, she had rung the doorbell again and when there was still no answer she had asked him to accompany her inside to check that all was well. All had been far from well. The flat had been in complete darkness, the lights fused. The woman had fetched a torch and the Colonel had come across the body of Lois Delaney when he had shone the beam into a bathroom. She had been lying naked in the bath, electrocuted by the hair dryer submerged beside her.

  The flat had been empty for some time after the tragedy. He wondered as he rang the bell if the new owners were aware of its unfortunate history.

  Mrs Reed opened the door.

  She was well on the wrong side of sixty, he guessed, with grey hair, no make-up that he could detect and unremarkable clothes.

  The Colonel introduced himself. He was a relative newcomer to Frog End, he said, but had had time to learn a few of the local ropes and he had called by to see if there was anything he could do to help. In fact, according to Ruth, it was Tom who needed the help with this troubled and troublesome patient.

  She had looked him over carefully as he was speaking. Evidently, he must have passed muster because he was invited inside.

  The interior had changed completely since he had last seen it. The silk upholstery and tasselled cushions, the fringed lamps, glass tables, gilt-edged mirrors and silver-framed photographs that he had glimpsed by torchlight before discovering Lois Delaney’s body had all vanished. The walls had been repainted in plain white, and the furniture and furnishings were equally muted. The only glitter came from a large illuminated glass display cabinet containing a number of silver trophies which he duly admired.

  ‘My husband’s,’ Mrs Reed said. ‘He won them for golf.’

  ‘He must be very good.’

  ‘Arthur fancies himself as another Tiger Woods but a handicap of twenty isn’t much to write home ab
out, is it? What’s yours, Colonel?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t play.’

  ‘Nor do I. The game bores me stiff. We’ve been married for more than forty years and I’ve always hoped he’d get tired of golf in the end but it’s never happened. He took early retirement so he could play all day and every day. I hardly ever see him. I should be used to it by now, but I’m not. It’s getting me down and I’m experiencing a number of health problems.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Growing older isn’t easy, is it, Colonel? I’m finding that out. Things start to go wrong, one after the other. The machine begins to wear out and I’m constantly in pain. The doctor here keeps telling me that there’s nothing wrong with me, but I know there is. Arthur doesn’t care, of course.’

  He said, ‘Do you have any family living near?’

  ‘No. Our son lives in London. He’s married to a very possessive woman. She’s made sure we see as little of him and the grandchildren as possible. I do the odd day trip to town to visit them but Arthur won’t go any more. That’s the trouble with sons, isn’t it? I expect you know the old saying: “Your son is your son till he gets him a wife but your daughter’s your daughter for all of her life”. I wish I’d had a daughter.’

  He thought of his close and enduring relationship with Alison. He’d been lucky.

  ‘May I ask why you came to live in Frog End, Mrs Reed?’

  ‘Arthur fell out with the golf club committee in Hampshire where we were before and he resigned, so we decided to move. He found another excellent eighteen-hole course not too far from here, so he’s very happy.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Well, there’s not much to do in Frog End is there?’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there’s quite a lot.’

  He proceeded to tell her all about the jumble sales, the bring-and-buys, the coffee mornings, the lectures with slides, the quiz night at the Dog and Duck, the bridge club, the tapestry circle, the painting and pottery classes, the Ladies’ Group and not forgetting the Venture for Retired People. As he did so, he watched her face closing up with boredom. He played his trump card.