Other People's Worlds Page 10

  The next morning Henrietta and Katherine shopped in the town, as they had so often done on Saturdays in the past. When they were children their mother had accompanied them, with the shopping distributed on three lists, coffee and sausage-rolls in the Bay Tree Café as a reward, then the walk back to Swan House. Henrietta and Katherine had coffee in the Bay Tree this morning, though without sausage-rolls.

  ‘Apparently,’ Henrietta said, hesitating a little and then continuing, ‘Mummy should make a will.’

  ‘But surely she has?’

  ‘Granny says she hasn’t. Granny’s become all worried.’

  ‘About wills?’

  ‘About Francis.’

  When Julia had told her daughters that she’d become engaged to an actor they’d returned as soon as possible to Stone St Martin and had not been freed of their doubts until they met Francis, some weeks later. They shared with Mrs Anstey the view that their mother’s lame ducks had a way of gnawing to the bone the hand that fed them. Their mother was imbued with all the complications of goodness and the introspective nature that went with it: that was what they believed, and knew their grandmother believed it too, though none of the three of them had ever said so in conversation. ‘It’ll come better from you,’ Mrs Anstey had said to Henrietta the night before, referring to the need for a will. A week ago, she said, she’d had a dream in which Julia appeared to be no longer alive and Francis was living in Swan House. She herself had been bundled back to Anstey’s Mill, to live on charity among the people who had turned it into a geography centre.

  ‘She says it’s sometimes a nuisance,’ Henrietta reported, ‘when there isn’t a will. But there’s far more to it than that.’

  In the Bay Tree Café the Saturday morning shoppers gossiped, countrywomen laden with baskets and carrier-bags, countrymen uncomfortable in their town clothes. Children sipped orangeade through straws, middle-aged waitresses did their best to remember who had ordered scones. Young husbands and wives sat in shy silence, or whispered.

  ‘I thought Granny doted on Francis,’ Katherine said.

  ‘I thought so too.’

  The two girls played with their coffee spoons, bewildered by this development. It was true it hadn’t occurred to either of them that after the marriage Francis, would be their mother’s next of kin. When Katherine thought about it now she half understood Mrs Anstey’s sudden nervousness, but understood as well that the aged easily picked up obsessions.

  ‘What else?’ she inquired.

  ‘She wants to talk to both of us together. She doesn’t want the marriage to take place.’

  ‘A bit late –’

  ‘Well, no, it isn’t too late if there’s a reason.’

  They sat in silence, mulling over the facts. Francis Tyte was thirty-three years of age, an actor who might well become more successful than he had been, a charming, good-looking man. All marriage had an element of chance in it. There would be no divorces, and only happiness, if no risks were taken in the first place.

  ‘Poor Granny,’ Katherine said.

  ‘I know.’

  They left the Bay Tree and went their separate ways, to different shops. Morning sunshine warmed the yellow-grey sandstone of the gaunt King’s Head and the Courtesy Cleaners and the wool bank, now the co-op. It drew a mellow tinge from Lloyd’s Bank and Super Cycles; already closed for the weekend, the Post Office had a forgotten look. In the hazy summeriness of Highhill Street no one bustled; patience reigned in Dobie’s Stores. Content with the Sun and the Daily Express, old men sat in line in Ely’s Haircutting.

  Stalls had been erected in Highhill Street, as by tradition they were on Saturdays. Farm produce was for sale, and local honey, and bedding plants. Cotton dresses hung from stands, and sheepskin jackets at bargain prices because the season wasn’t right for them. There were skirts and bric-à-brac and books, leather belts with brass buckles, used gramophone records and china, knives and forks, bits of brass. Pausing by these goods, Henrietta reflected that they seemed not to have changed for years. The hanging dresses had never bothered much with fashion, leaving hemline alterations to the purchaser; the secondhand books were novels by Philip Gibbs, Bee-Keeping Days, My Autobiography by Mussolini, The Cloister and the Hearth. She passed the books by and bought some Worcesters, not thinking about her mother’s forthcoming marriage or the reassuring of her grandmother, but about a man called Colin Halifax who was taking her, on Saturday next, to Lords.

  Katherine bought Vim, Knorr cubes, caster sugar, cream and olive oil. They’d have a quiet talk with their grandmother about the will, just the three of them, and afterwards – when the old woman wasn’t present – they’d raise the subject delicately with their mother, mentioning elderly obsessions and the humouring of them.

  ‘Quite nice actually,’ Henrietta said on their way back to Swan House. ‘Plays cricket himself.’

  It was agreed that the time to talk quietly was when Julia was at mass on Sunday morning, and as soon as Mrs Anstey heard the car drawing away from the house she made the journey through the garden to the lawn on the river bank. Her granddaughters were reading the Sunday newspapers; her own chair had been left vacant for her.

  ‘They’re talking about a drought,’ she told them, ‘if this heat continues.’

  The lawn had already acquired a brown look, which Henrietta now examined, though without much interest. Rain would come all too soon, Katherine vaguely said; it always did.

  Mrs Anstey sat down. ‘It isn’t just the will,’ she said. ‘I mean, I had a silly dream, but it’s not just that.’

  The Sunday papers were put aside. ‘Now, tell us,’ Henrietta said. ‘You’re worried about Mummy?’

  ‘Well, it’s more about the marriage to tell the truth. You’ll have to be patient with me.’

  She told them, trying to make light of it and at the same time hoping they themselves would not. She hoped they would say that everything she said made sense and then somehow prove to her that her fears were unfounded and unjustified. But when she finished speaking there only was a silence. She tried to explain how the intuition had begun, how it had come out of the blue and had then remained, against her will. An instinct was all it was of course, and instincts were often wrong.

  Steadily regarding hers, their two pairs of eyes were fair. It was true that someone other than Francis might have seemed a more suitable husband for their mother, someone older, a company director perhaps, but marriage was not always a neat arrangement of two persons, and how could there be a real objection to Francis Tyte? Their mother was not a rich widow, prey to fortune-seekers. She had in common with Francis Tyte what none of the three of them, nor her first husband either, shared with her: the spiritual life of their religion, and that in middle age must mean a lot. Besides, she had fallen in love with him.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Mrs Anstey said, even though her granddaughters had not spoken. ‘I know I’m being nasty.’

  ‘It’s natural to be concerned,’ Henrietta said. ‘It’s natural for all of us to be concerned.’

  Their father had died without leaving a will, Mrs Anstey explained to them, a fact she’d remembered and which had probably played on her nerves, causing her so oddly to dream.

  ‘Not odd at all,’ Katherine corrected her.

  ‘Of course not,’ Henrietta said.

  A colour supplement was open on the grass at an advertisement for windows. Old Windows Replaced in a Day! a headline said. No more rattling old frames. Cold Shield Bay Windows and Sash Windows made to measure in Satin Aluminium. Idly, Katherine read it. She’d now worked in the china shop in South Audley Street for two years and felt it was time for a change. She’d heard there was a vacancy in the Wedgwood showrooms in Regent Street, but when she’d telephoned last week she’d been told that that wasn’t so. The woman had suggested that she should come along anyway, in case something arose in the future. The face in the window advertisement reminded her of the Wedgwood woman’s face. ‘We’ll keep your details on our files, Miss Ferndale,�
� she’d said with a smile when Katherine had called in on Thursday.

  ‘It’s just that I feel Julia shouldn’t marry him,’ Mrs Anstey said. ‘It’s a feeling that’s come into my bones.’

  Katherine’s hand reached out and turned a page of the colour supplement. A man in red swimming-trunks was sitting in an armchair beneath a palm tree. The armchair was ornate, like a throne, the man old and balding. Someone famous, Katherine thought, wondering what it was all about, an armchair out in the open. It was hard to know whether to wait for a vacancy to turn up in the Wedgwood place or to continue looking elsewhere. ‘Give it six months,’ had been Henrietta’s suggestion the night before, and that was probably best.

  Mrs Anstey went on talking, faltering now and again, which usually she never did. Henrietta was still as a statue, like a ballet dancer on the browning grass, her feet tucked under her as she sat. Katherine’s fingers were playing with a daisy.

  ‘You see, I think,’ Mrs Anstey said, ‘Julia’s paying for the honeymoon.’

  Neither of them replied, their silence implying that such economics were not their business. They were sorry for her, Mrs Anstey sensed, and couldn’t bring herself to say that they all three knew Julia was a person who easily became the victim of other people. She didn’t say she was the victim of Mrs Spanners, and of a Church which fuelled her guilt, because all that would have sounded ridiculous. Ridiculous, too, to say there were lots of people who were victims, and predators who were drawn to them.

  ‘There just seems something wrong,’ she said instead, ‘about a woman paying for her honeymoon.’

  ‘But is she?’ Henrietta inquired. ‘Has she told you that?’

  ‘Something was said, something that caught in my mind-’

  ‘But, Granny, you don’t know.’ Katherine spoke while staring at the old man in the armchair. Mrs Anstey couldn’t see her face, and when Henrietta added something she felt again the pity of both of them. She wanted to say that the art of illusion and deception was something to be expected of an actor, but did not in case the observation should make her sound even nastier. Women did have intuitions, she said instead, and mothers especially perhaps. One couldn’t explain everything, and perhaps one shouldn’t try. It was she who had first invited Francis to Swan House; airily she’d scorned away Julia’s doubts about the difference in their ages.

  ‘In a way,’ Katherine said, disturbing a silence, ‘Mummy probably knows best herself. As people often do.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henrietta agreed, too swiftly for Mrs Anstey’s liking.

  ‘It’s just,’ she began again, and realized that already they had disposed of the matter, that they were telling her to keep her forebodings to herself. Their faces did not suggest that she’d become stupid in her old age but that having been so long their mother’s companion she might naturally be jealous of an interloper.

  ‘I think if we just bring up the idea of a will,’ Henrietta said, in the same quick way, ‘we’ll be making a point.’

  ‘The will was only in a dream because all this had got into my mind.’

  ‘I don’t think Francis would ever turn you out of Swan House,’ Katherine assured her gently, ‘but I do think Mummy should put her wishes about that down on paper.’

  ‘We’d both feel happier if she did,’ Henrietta added.

  Mrs Anstey felt it had all become a mess. She had mentioned her dream in order to pave the way for the other; a will was neither here nor there. It sounded nastier than ever to speak about wishes put down on paper at a time like this. It sounded grasping.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better to forget about it. Best perhaps to leave it now.’

  ‘No, no,’ Henrietta protested.

  The newspapers were picked up again, and when the car returned to the house both girls went to have the necessary conversation with their mother, who understood at once that her own mother might be feeling left out and worried. Afterwards, over lunch, Henrietta spoke of the man called Colin Halifax, who temporarily had caused her to become interested in cricket. He’d said that Gloucestershire’s middle order wasn’t right, and supported Kent himself; he worked in a merchant bank. Katherine announced that she had come to a conclusion. She would wait six months in the hope that a suitable vacancy might occur in the Wedgwood showrooms.

  6

  Francis’s

  The telephone rang in the floor supervisor’s office. There was the urgent whirring sound which indicated that the person at the other end was attempting to use a coin-operated instrument. Then a man’s voice said:

  ‘I’m awfully sorry to bother you. I wonder if I could possibly speak to Doris Smith? From the shoe department.’

  It was a store rule that telephone calls should not be taken during working hours, but the Indian floor supervisor recognized the voice as that of Doris’s man, which was different because of Doris’s personal troubles. The exception didn’t cause jealousy among the other girls on the floor because all of them were concerned about Doris, while still considering her foolish to hang on to her man, who clearly was dodgy.

  ‘One minute, please, sir,’ the Indian said, and ran quickly to the shoe department. It was a large open area, its three walls lined with shoe-boxes. In neat black dresses girls and women crouched at the feet of their customers or mounted ladders to search for what was required. Shoe-horns eased the passage of heels, measurements were accurately taken. A heavily-built foreigner, whose laces Doris had just tied, was protesting that the selection at Selfridge’s was better.

  ‘Phone, dear,’ the floor supervisor whispered, causing Doris to suggest to her customer that she might like to walk about for a minute or two to test the comfort of the shoes she was considering.

  ‘What’s the bother, Frankie?’ she asked in the office, breathless because she’d hurried so.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s the same old story. I’ll have to spend the evening with him again.’

  ‘Him?’ she repeated, knowing what he meant, giving herself time to think. For ten evenings in a row he hadn’t been able to see her, ten times precisely he’d telephoned.

  ‘My old uncle’s taken a turn for the worse, Dorrie.’

  ‘Joy’s looking forward to the Pizzaland, Frankie. You said yesterday, love –’

  ‘I know, Dorrie. I’m awfully sorry.’

  ‘Joy mentioned it at breakfast.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  Doris stifled a sigh, not wishing to sound a drag over the telephone, not wishing to be difficult when an old man was so ill in a home. She reached into the pocket of her black skirt for a tissue. She said:

  ‘I’m only sorry the old chappie isn’t getting better.’

  ‘Unfortunately, he’s run into trouble with his water-works. On top of everything else.’

  ‘Is it serious, Frankie?’

  ‘I don’t know that poor Uncle Manchester’ll last.’

  ‘You mean, he’s dying?’

  ‘That’s why I have to sit with him.’

  ‘Poor old chappie,’ she said. She hadn’t had a drink yet, and suddenly she felt the need for one. There were hours to go until she could slip into Value Wines at lunchtime. ‘Poor old chappie,’ she said again.

  Francis nodded. He was telephoning in a room that led off the drill-hall, the room where the kettles were boiled for coffee. It contained a small gas stove, and a motor-cycle propped against a wall. There were tins of instant coffee and powdered milk, packets of lump sugar and a cardboard box full of plastic cups. While speaking, his eye slowly travelled over these objects, and over empty shelves coated with dust. The walls were dusty also, with yellowish distemper falling away. On the one in front of him numerous telephone numbers were scrawled. He read them while her voice said that as long as he kept in touch she and Joy would understand. Any night, she said, he would be welcome in the flat for a meal and a drink, no matter what time he finished with his visiting.

  He shook his head, still reading the telephone numbers. As he had before, he explained that it was always ext
remely late when he returned from Hampton Wick, it being so far away. He began his visual circuit of the room again. The motor-cycle would belong to the caretaker. It was strange that the room had no windows.

  She wanted to go on talking. She wanted just to keep him there. It couldn’t be easy for him, she said, at a time like this to be in a telly thriller that had a body down a toilet. It couldn’t be easy, sitting with a poor old chappie in a home.

  ‘He’s in a bit of pain,’ he replied. ‘They don’t quite know what it is.’

  In the floor supervisor’s office Doris repeated that she was sorry, and did in fact feel sorry, thinking of a dying man in distress. Then she added that she didn’t mind the loss of all these evenings so long as one day they could all three make up for them. The floor supervisor’s typewriter clattered noisily and Doris smacked at the receiver with her lips, as she always did. It didn’t embarrass her when the typing abruptly ceased and the kissing sound filled the small office. She returned to the shoe department, saying to herself that she’d look into the Spread Eagle before she went to Value Wines for the miniature. She’d sit in the upstairs bar for a little while, over a couple of Carlsbergs.

  *

  Constance Kent walked the white country roads, picking flowers for the child she had already chosen as her victim. An eye in her imagination observed the blade slipping through the small neck, plunging deeper in a spasm of violence. Her face remained impassive.

  On the judge’s head there was a handkerchief, representing the black square he would eventually place there. ‘I can entertain no doubt,’ he remarked, ‘after having read the evidence in the depositions, and considering this is your third confession of the crime, that your plea is the plea of a guilty person. The murder was committed under circumstances of great deliberation and cruelty.’

  The clergyman to whom the confession had been made kept his head bowed also. Clerks and policemen looked solemn. The father of the accused shuffled his feet.