Closed at Dusk (14 page)

‘Whatever it is you want,' the woman spoke without leaning towards Marigold, upright, dismissive, ‘we can't discuss it. I must ask you to leave. We're late for an appointment.'

‘Come on,' the man said, more kindly. ‘Let me take you to your car.'

He began to open the door, and Marigold stumbled back. Speechless, she turned and ran from them over the drive, the sodden raincoat flapping round her legs. Behind her, she heard the door shut and the car move slowly on the gravel.

When she reached her own car, she saw that the Taylors' car was waiting for her to leave. God damn them. If they had physically thrown her out, she could not have felt more humiliated.

Through her misted rear window as she reached the arch over the entrance, she saw the grey car following. She drove away fast, devastated, her vision blurred by tears and the streaming windscreen.

God damn and curse them. When Marigold later hit a car in front as it slowed down, it was
their
fault, Tessa Taylor's fault, the fault of all of them – the tinkle of glass, the angry driver, her bruising plunge against the seat-belt – out of her control, inevitable.

Jo's face in the bedroom mirror went on smiling. Inevitable that she had come back. It had taken a long time, but seven years had only strengthened the resolution of her revenge.

‘You're depressed,' Dottie diagnosed William.

‘Aren't you?'

‘Yes, but Troutie doesn't need me now, and those children at the home do, so I'm going to deal with it by going to work, and you'd better do the same.'

‘Don't be brisk with me, Dottie.'

William was really depressed. Troutie disappearing God knew where, to starch tablecloths and make Yorkshire pudding and paint wooden dolls and all the things she'd loved to do, had left an enormous chasm at the centre of his being. When Dottie had driven off in her neat little dusty car, which he had promised to wash for her and forgotten, he was drawn, inevitably, to the nursery.

He trod too heavily up the stairs for a man of fifty-five, and went slowly along the top corridor to the square sunny room at the end. His heart was heavy. That was exactly what it felt like. All the old emotional clichés described actual physical sensations. A broken heart. When Suzanne threw him over, before he met Dottie, something inside his chest was shattered, like a vase cracked all over. My heart aches. After Angela's son was killed, there was a pain in his chest like pleurisy, or a badly bruised rib. Heavy-hearted. He moved slowly now, because he was carrying a leaden weight.

A few of the old knick-knacks were still on the mantelpiece. The clock with the funny face. The fat-backed Staffordshire dog, chipped now, its smooth head and spaniel ears much licked. The earthenware mug that used to hold pencils and blunt-ended scissors. In Troutie's day there had been a motto on an oval china plaque that leaned against the wall. It said
something very significant, he could not remember what, but Troutie had set store by it, and quoted it often enough to give it biblical truth.

Perhaps Troutie would like it now. He could have it set into the middle of his funeral wreath, and drop it into her grave. He got the key and went into the attic store-room, rummaging about among mirrors, lamps, conch shells, photographs, souvenir mugs, boxes of papers and books, the old train set. He ought to get that out for Rob.

In a basket among some of the nursery stuff – a baby's hairbrush, a light-up Father Christmas, part of a doll's tea-set – he found the brown Devon china plaque upside down in a biscuit tin with a royal wedding on the lid. He turned it over. It said, ‘Tis a long lane that ‘as no turnin'.' Only that, after all? Disappointed, he put it back in the tin.

When he went up to London, he wanted to ring Angela and tell her about Troutie. Before he could decide, he got a call from her, at the office.

‘I took a chance on finding you there. Will, I – look, could you possibly meet me somewhere when you're free?'

She came to the Chelsea flat. ‘I need to talk to someone about Peter,' she said quietly. ‘Could you stand it?'

Less than three months after her son's death, Angela was finding that people expected her to be getting back to normal. Ralph had never wanted to hear much about it, and even women friends who had let her talk and weep and rage at first were showing signs that they wished she would talk about something else.

She talked and William listened, and forgot to worry about saying the right things. She was so muted and vulnerable, and he was so honoured that she had come here, that some of the pain of poor Troutie faded already, even though he hardly spoke of her.

Before Angela left, they arranged to meet again.

‘Not because of Peter.' She kissed him softly. ‘Just for you and me.'

Troutie's funeral had to wait until after the inquest. Meanwhile, they had a burial ceremony for Budgie before Tessa and Rob went home.

Ruth was there, and her younger son, and Polly Dix with her two small daughters. Rob carried the bird, in a sugar packet wrapped in Christmas paper, behind the back wall of the hidden garden to the pet cemetery, where favourite animals had been buried ever since Walter and Beatrice Cobb turned Lynnford Place into The Sanctuary.

There were some tablets set in the wall, and irregular rows of small mossed-over headstones. You could read only a few of the inscriptions: ‘Little Billie, a merry monkey, “Form'd of joy and mirth”,' from whom Troutie had taken William's nickname. ‘Nemo, good stable cat.' ‘Champion, soft mouth, soft heart.' ‘Champion, killed in action by Royal Mail van.' ‘Champion, friend of Will, 1945–53.'

William dug a small hole deep enough to foil dogs. Troutie's great-grandson laid the red and gold package in it, because Rob wouldn't, and William filled in the earth and marked the spot with a wide plant label on which was written, ‘Budgie, beloved bird of Mary Trout.' Tessa had promised Rob that she would get a little headstone engraved in the Goldhawk Road.

At Troutie's funeral a week later, almost all the close family were there. All the Sanctuary staff came, and people from several villages, retired postmen and tradesmen who had known Mary Trout for years, two district nurses, and all her descendants, including Agnes's two brothers, one spry, one ponderous, who had not lifted a finger for the old lady, but
immediately attacked Agnes for not having put ‘our mother' into a nice safe nursing home.

The funeral procession was to start at 1.30, but William, who should have been at a board meeting in London, was tied up with a long phone call, and so the first few garden visitors were coming along the cypress walk as they set out from the house with Mary Trout's short coffin, borne by William, Matthew, Rodney, Keith, George Barton and Agnes's spry brother.

At Ruth's request, Troutie was carried along the roundabout path to the church, where long ago the servants were made to walk to service behind the tall laurels, so that guests in the great house would not see them.

‘As a reminder of the bad old days?' Keith had asked Ruth. ‘To make us descendants feel ashamed?'

‘I had hoped being so ill would make you less rude,' his mother Harriet said.

Ruth said, ‘Don't be daft, Keith. It's because my Gran liked to remember how she and another young maid used to hang back on Sunday to giggle at the cook and housekeeper dressed up in their best corsets, and the stable boys would wait in the hedge and catch them at the corner.'

Visitors strolling along the spectacular perennial border stopped to look at the small procession crossing the lawn from the corner of the house and disappearing behind the line of laurels. One of the intriguing aspects of The Sanctuary was that the place was not just a preserved relic. There was family life – and apparently death – going on here every day, so a visitor could feel part of the whole scene, not just an observer.

As the mourners emerged from the laurel walk, cars on the road could see them treading slowly along the path beyond the fence of the pony paddock. The gate in the churchyard wall was always locked, so that no one could get in to the gardens
that way. The vicar now waited there with the key, to make the symbolic gesture of admitting Mary Trout into the hereafter.

Frank Pargeter, dropping easily down the hill from the copse with a buoyant heart, stopped on the stone bridge across the river and respectfully took off the green baseball cap with the long peak that shaded his binoculars when he was watching birds against the sun.

The fledgling nightingales were flying now. Frank had spotted two of the youngsters in their juvenile plumage, larger than the last sight of them before he went off to Scotland for Faye's holiday. Frank's life was considered to be one long glut of leisure since he retired, so a trip was always known as Faye's holiday. She had attended a choir festival in Inverness. Frank had seen, on an island in a small lake, a pair of red-necked phalarope.

When the funeral cortège – not a tragic passing, Frank hoped, since he felt very concerned about this family – had gone through the gate towards the church, he crossed the bridge and went round the lake to inspect Lady Geraldine's rose garden. Had those shameless muntjack deer dared to make inroads on the tender shoots while he had been away?

The rose bushes still looked in fine condition. White, yellow, apricot, deep red, all shades of pink, the heavy blooms were hanging on to their heartbreaking summer beauty. The air was giddy with their fragrance. No deep dents of little cloven hooves in the clean, turned earth. Hanging from a post at one end, the horrible old hair was still stuffed into a limp pair of cream tights. At the other end of the rose bed, it hung in a long net, stringy hanks of it escaping through the mesh, grey wisps fluttering from the top.

Well done, Frank. William Taylor and his wife must bless
thy name, as they come lovingly here with trug and secateurs to gather roses for the house. Well done, Faye and the geriatric ward.

Rob had fidgeted through the church service, with his mother on one side and Dennis on the other. Dennis knew how to behave in church, because his school had its own chapel. Rob never went to church, except on Mothering Sunday, when his mother liked to see him collect a small posy of daffodils at the altar and bring them angelically back to her.

Dennis kept jabbing Rob with his elbow and telling him to shut up.

‘Is Troutie in that box?' Rob whispered, under cover of the last hymn.

‘Clot,' Dennis muttered. ‘When you die, you go away for ever.'

‘Where?'

‘Hell,' Dennis said nastily.

So the sinister box that had been carried down the laurel path by Wum and Uncle Matthew and Uncle Rodney and George and Keith and a strange little bald man like a gnome was empty. What trick was this?

‘
Where is Troutie
?' he asked his mother, as soon as she took him out of the church with Annabel, because they weren't to go to the graveside.

‘Darling, you know.'

‘In hell.'

‘No, in heaven.'

‘She's in the box, silly,' Annabel said.

In the box, not in the box … what were they hiding from him? On the way back to the house, Annabel peeled off to the pony field, and Rob peeled off in the other direction. After being stuck in the crowded pews, he wanted to be by himself.

He took off his shoes and paddled about at the edge of the marsh, finger-trawling for minnows.

‘What are you doing?' Jo was there with a basket.

‘Nothing.'

‘Come up to the rose garden with me. I'm going to cut some roses for the tea table.'

Flowers did not mean anything in Rob's life, although everyone here made such a fuss about them, but he would take some yellow blooms to his mother, who was a bit droopy today, like everyone else.

At the end of the long flower-bed, which was shaped like an S, for Sanctuary, there was a post, and on the post at the height of Rob's eyes something very horrid hung and swung in the breeze. A long, twisted, terrible grey something.

‘
What's that, Jo
?'

She was in the middle of the flower-bed, cutting roses with the snippers. ‘Looks like poor Troutie's hair, doesn't it?' She did not look up.

Troutie's hair. All that was left of her. And in a gulping shock that brought vomit up into his mouth, Rob knew why Troutie was not in the box in church … because, like Phyllis Bunby's baby, they had fed her to the pigs!

If Rob were my child – Jo had taken to thinking in terms like that – I wouldn't have taken him to the funeral. Stupid, selfish Tessa probably had some half-baked ideas about small children being introduced to death, or else she wanted him along for adornment, his grey trousers and white shirt complementing the mauve and white dress she had probably bought specially for this non-occasion.

There had been far too much emotional fuss and hysteria about the death of an eighty-nine-year-old woman who had been spared a longer decay. No wonder the child had gone over the top again. This was getting to be quite a feature of Sanctuary opening hours. Visitors would come to expect screams for their entry money.

Tessa went back to London, which lessened the tension. When she was here, Jo was alert to find out more about her. Knowledge is power. She watched for glimpses of Tessa, listened to her voice on the tennis court, hoped she would pay one of her slumming visits to the tea-room:

‘Goodness you're busy – want any help? Ruth, if I could make fruit cake like you, I'd die happy. Can I sneak a scone?'

‘Hul
lo
! Enjoying your tea? I
am
glad. Seen the gardens, have you? Yes, I know, a lot of walking. You've earned a cream tea, I'd say.'

Jo's job now was to get herself well in with the family, not
only as the tea-room treasure, but perhaps, as time went on, an indispensable member of the household. It would take time, because if she pushed, they would resent her, but she had all the time in the world. What else did she have to do?