Closed at Dusk (18 page)

William wanted to agree, but she hated him to lie to her, so he said, ‘It did happen. Ages ago. You were about twenty-five and not silly at all. You had on that white dress with a sort of sailor collar, like a child, and you'd gone up to see where we were going to sleep. I'll never forget you running down with your face quite white, and asking Sylvia, “What's that smell?” and my mother yelling up the stairs, “What are you doing up there, Mother!” and backing down again, shaking her fist and
muttering, although Geraldine had been dead for more than twenty-five years. It gave me the creeps. I'll never forget it, and I know you haven't.'

‘But I want to.' Dottie spoke through the haunting, dismissive notes of the Closing Bell. ‘I want it not to have ever happened.'

Next day, Dorothy and William both left the house very early. Dorothy had arranged a lunch for some of the local people who were involved with the Festival, but she was late getting back from the clinic. The Dawsons, who were co-ordinating the food sales, the boat decorator and the man in charge of the fireworks display had already arrived. They had been given sherry and peanuts by Ruth, who was doing the lunch, so Dorothy took them into the dining-room as soon as she got home.

The Dawsons would have liked to linger, but Dorothy was in a hurry, so while they were finishing coffee, she went upstairs to get ready for her afternoon visits. The guests were in the front hall preparing to leave when Dorothy came downstairs.

‘What's the matter, Dr Taylor?' The fireworks impresario took a step towards her. ‘You don't look well.'

‘Nothing's the matter.' Dorothy had a little difficulty focusing on him. Her voice sounded creaky to her, but no one must notice.

‘It's this treacherous weather,' Mrs Dawson said, as Dorothy stepped down into the hall and picked up her bag and briefcase from a side table. ‘Hot one day and cold the next. Does funny things to people.'

‘Not to me.' Dorothy smiled and shook hands and thanked them for coming. She would not let herself look back upstairs. She did not need to breathe deeply to find out if the rotten, sickening smell had followed her. It was all through her, in her
head and behind her eyes and in her mouth and nose, even her ears, and all the network of inner passages, like poison gas.

‘You really don't look well.' The fireworks man still watched her.

‘I'm fine. I'm preoccupied because I'm in a hurry, that's all. Please excuse me.'

‘I don't know how I got through the afternoon, Will. I had two difficult children who were sulking, and one who has regressed, and a father who had stayed home from work to blame me for his son's brain damage. I was in a sort of daze, operating automatically. Poor people. I hope I wasn't short with them.

‘I couldn't wait to get back here. I longed for it, and dreaded it. But when I got home and rushed upstairs, the smell – the smell of Geraldine's lilies – was … gone. Just a trace of it in the air. Can you smell it?'

William shook his head.

‘You don't believe me.' Dorothy sat down on the big comfortable bed and looked miserably up at him. ‘You know how Fool always follows me upstairs as if I were never going to come down again? When I went up after lunch, he didn't come. When I came down, he was sitting in the hall with those small ginger eyes peering anxiously through his face hair and one paw raised. Do you think dogs really are psychic?'

‘I hope not. I'm sure this won't happen again.'

‘It happened to Jo two days ago, and now to me. I can't say it's my imagination.'

‘Dear Dottie.' William sat beside her and put their heads together. His hair was longer than hers. ‘Let it go. It can't hurt us.'

‘But it can!' Dorothy stood up and went to the window to look out, then turned to face him, very tense. ‘That's the horrible thing. This house is safe and happy. Nothing goes
wrong here. Nothing's ever gone wrong. But now – don't you feel it? It's somehow not quite the same any more.'

‘It
is
the same,' William insisted, because he, too, had felt the faint chill stirrings of the wind of change, ever since Troutie's terrible death. ‘You know it is, because we make it the same.'

‘And I'm not prepared to give that up. That's why I never talked about the first time with the lilies and your mother, and why I wanted to push it down and bury it below my consciousness. That's why we mustn't tell anyone about this now. All's well, Will?' Dorothy put her neat head on one side.

‘I suppose so.' William was in a state of confusion and unease. ‘I've got to go outside for a while and think about this.'

‘Nothing negative,' Dorothy ordered.

‘That's not very realistic, for a professional.' William felt one side of his mouth lift up into the wry smile that Angela accused him of practising in the mirror.

‘I'm not nearly as realistic as people think I am.' Dottie suddenly burst into tears and put her hands over her face.

On Friday of the Festival weekend, everyone was very busy. Tents and booths were going up. Family and friends began to arrive, Rodney and Dennis and Keith and Tessa's Christopher were helping the electrician to wire up the coloured lights on the bridge and the terrace balustrade, and the floodlights on the trees.

Jo was helping Ruth, Mrs Smallbone, Brenda and Polly Dix in the house, and making endless tea, lemonade and sandwiches for the workers.

‘Hullo!' enthused Tessa, following Rob, who had spotted Jo crossing the lawn with a tray and run full tilt at her. ‘I do thank you for having Rob for the night.'

‘I loved it.' The wide, candid Jo smile.

‘So did he. You look good. I hear you've been working like a beaver and cooking non-stop. Aren't you worn out?'

‘Never better.'

‘You're a marvel.'

I am. I am the creator of psychic manifestations and phantasmagoria.

Jo felt that anything was within her reach. She had not felt so bold and powerful since – well, never in her whole life – not with her mother, who would not let her be a child; not with Rex the omnipotent; and certainly not after Rex.

Dorothy appeared to be her usual cool and efficient self. She
gave no sign of distress, but Jo watched her. She watched everybody. Matthew brought Nina, his American friend Lee and her friends who were going to sing Italian love songs in the boat; William's sister Harriet came, opinionated and disposed to give orders to any willing helper like Jo; also a business friend of William's with his stunning wife who put every other woman in the shade.

William was so busy with last-minute details that he could hardly spend any time with Angela, but it was enough to know that she was there.

Their first meeting in London earlier in August had been for her to unload some of her feelings about her son. For their second meeting they had taken a picnic lunch to Regent's Park. William had brought the wine and Angela brought smoked-salmon sandwiches and watercress and peaches. They sat on the tired grass under a dark-green chestnut tree. The sky was the deeper blue that leads the summer towards autumn. The surrounding buildings stood at a distance, as if the park were immense. Traffic was only a background rumble.

‘If anyone sees us,' William said, ‘I don't care.'

‘Because I don't count?' With her head lowered over the basket, Angela looked up at him under a spun-gold fall of hair.

‘Because of how much you
do
,' William said recklessly, ignoring the inner clown who was making rude faces at him to stop.

They lay on the grass like young lovers.

When they walked back to their cars, Angela said, ‘I think we won't meet any more.'

‘But you know I invited Ralph to come to the Festival of the Lake, ages ago. Won't you –'

‘I'll come, of course, Will. But don't embarrass me with that face.'

William said, ‘Don't you embarrass
me
.'

‘How?'

‘By looking like you do.'

‘I'll come in a cloak and chador,' Angela promised.

On Friday, William and Angela sat at one of the tables outside the tea-room and laughed a lot. Jo was interested. This must be the Lady Stern Ruth had talked about, whose son had been killed while she was staying at The Sanctuary at the end of May, before Jo came. What had been going on since then?

Jo brought out a jug of hot water and was introduced to the lady, who looked radiant.

As she turned away, Angela Stern dropped her voice, and Jo heard her say, ‘Will – please. I told you in the park. Don't look at me with that face.'

‘It's the only one I've got.' Boyish laugh.

Jo took a chance. Success had made her reckless. At home, she typed out a brief note:

‘Dottie,

I'm bringing this note down because I like you too much to say it to your face. I don't want to talk about it, but in case you've guessed that Will and I have been together, I want you to know it means nothing.

A.'

When Jo came back later to help with dinner, she slipped upstairs while they were having coffee on the terrace, and put the note into the biography by Dorothy's side of the bed.

Perhaps she wouldn't read that book … Perhaps she'd go straight to sleep, or have a bit of a fumble with Wum, inflamed by the presence of the Lady Angela.

Worth a try.

The gardens were closed on Saturday afternoon. They were to
open at seven for the Festival. The dogs were fed early by Jo, very much in evidence in an Austrian-type dirndl dress with a bright cotton kerchief round her hair, making herself useful wherever she could.

‘I'm feeding Charlotte,' Rob said. He was strung up and wildly excited. When you had waited so long for something, it was almost unbearable when it was actually on top of you. ‘Open the tin for me, Jo.'

‘Where is Charlotte?' she asked.

‘I saw her a minute ago.'

The bigger dogs were snorting and gulping at their bowls. Rob ran round the kitchen and pantries and passages, calling, ‘
Char
-lotte!' in the sing-song voice his mother used. Heading out of the china pantry and round the corner by the old warming chests, Rob heard a muffled yelp and a scrabbling. He screamed at the top of his voice and tugged open the door of the dumb waiter.

Charlotte was standing on the shelf, panting with a grin and wagging her tail; she didn't know what Rob knew, that in another moment she might have dropped out of sight into the basement kitchen where nobody ever went, and from where nobody would ever come back.

Rob snatched the little dog into his arms and faced Jo furiously.

‘Only a joke.' She spread her hands and laughed. ‘Charlotte likes playing hide-and-seek.'

‘I'll tell my mother.' Rob scowled at her over the dog's woolly back.

‘If you're going to be nasty,' Jo said, still laughing, ‘I'll have to put
you
in the dumb waiter, won't I?'

Tessa, coming downstairs in her long peasant skirt and Mexican blouse – all the women of the house were to dress a bit exotically – met Rob stumping up with Charlotte in his arms.

‘Has she had her dinner?'

‘Yes.' He looked at the stair carpet.

‘Has she really?'

‘You and Chris never believe me.'

‘Well, you don't always …' He did lie sometimes, especially when he was afraid, or excited, as he was now.

‘Nobody believes me.'

‘Put Charlotte down,' Tessa said patiently.

‘She likes it.'

‘She doesn't.' Charlotte's back legs were hanging uncomfortably and she was grumbling and resting her teeth against Rob's arm, which was the nearest she ever got to biting.

‘You know what, Mum?'

‘What?'

Rob dropped Charlotte, who shook herself and bounced downstairs.

‘Do I know what, Rob?'

But he was jumping down after Charlotte, making sounds like a racing car. He often said, ‘You know what?' when he had nothing to say, or ‘Listen, Mum,' to get attention.

Tessa gave the dog her dinner and shut all the dogs up in the boot room, out of the way of the crowds.

William put on his blazer with The Sanctuary crest of sparring lambs, and went to lock the alpine house; he found that Jo had already remembered to do so. The gardens looked like a glorious carnival. People were coming in, and the Silver Band struck bravely up with ‘March of the Gladiators'.

Ralph Stern was having a self-consciously jovial time, helping Jill and Annabel with the Italian ice-cream cart, but William could not see Angela anywhere.

‘Told you I'd come in a chador, didn't I?'

At the touch on his arm, William turned to see an extravagantly shawled and beaded gypsy woman, thick black veil swathed round her head and face, heavy brown make-up, armfuls of bangles and huge gold hoop ear-rings that hung to her shoulders.

‘My God, what –'

‘Dottie's and my idea.'

Dottie stood by the opening of a small tent showily labelled ‘Madame Shapiro and her Crystal Ball. She knows YOU better than YOU know YOURSELF!'

Angela draped the black veil over the lower part of her face and swished past her into the tent, fanning her exaggerated false eyelashes at William. ‘Tell your fortune, Your Grace?'

‘When you said a fortune teller, Dottie, I thought you meant a real one. You and she set this up?'

‘To surprise you.'

Dottie was laughing at him, looking childish and more relaxed in a wide Chinese trouser-suit that swallowed her short neck and hid her small feet.

‘Why didn't you tell me?' William felt clumsy and excluded.

Two young girls from the village approached, clutching each other, high heels sinking into the turf, and ducked into the lamplit tent in a frenzy of giggles.

‘Peace, little missies,' Angela welcomed them in a deep throaty voice through a reek of joss sticks.