Closed at Dusk (20 page)

‘She lied.'

‘Dottie never lies.'

‘She did this time. Look.' Angela stood close behind him. She gave off a kind of perfumed electricity that made him want to whip round and assault her. ‘Whatever happens with us, it's all right, Will. It's all right.'

‘It's not. She's spoiled it.' Sulky little boy. ‘She – oh, I can't explain. She's – she's killed it.'

Charlotte never did come back. Tessa returned in a few days' time to wander desolately round the grounds, calling, whistling, but after that sad visit, she told William, ‘I think I'll have to stay away for a while. If my little dog's not going to come back … I can't go on looking for ever; but I can't be here and not look for her. I'll be all right, Daddy, I swear I will. But for now, it's sort of – not the same.'

After Tessa had gone, he dwelt on her thought. It was not the same. Was it, for him, because he did not know if he would ever see Angela again? He was nearly fifty-six, on the downhill slope towards sixty. Could The Sanctuary no longer subscribe to the fiction of William as its little boy?

Dottie seemed more like herself again, as if the spiky little conversation in the bedroom had not happened, but William had an uneasy sense of slight, subtle changes creeping over his beloved home. Once, coming up from the drive on a dull day, he caught the house looking different. The corner turrets lowered at him a little. The creamy Cotswold stone seemed darker. Or was it only because there had been so much rain?

It was the end of summer, the closing in, the twilight approaching evening by evening. John Dix had told William that when the autumn work was done, he would be leaving to find work in the West Country. Did Polly really want to be near her mother when her baby was born, or had she and John sensed something wrong?

No one else seemed to notice anything. Visitors still wandered about the September gardens as peacefully as ever; but for William, the sense of content and security was slightly clouded, like the haze on an old mirror. Once or twice he thought he heard something in the night, and went down to check doors and windows. When he was alone in the great house, he had always loved the waiting spaces and the safe breathing silences. Now, at his desk, he might turn his head to the window, listening for Dottie, or swing round to look at the high solid door. Presently, he would get up and open the door. The flowers massed in the wide hall fireplace seemed excessive, like a wake. The clock ticked too loudly. What was this quality in the stillness? What was the house waiting for?

After the festival, Keith had been up most of the night searching for Charlotte. If he had not been so exhausted the next day, he might not have got into a fight with his mother, who had two large gin and tonics before lunch, and complained that Tessa had made more fuss about one disobedient mongrel than if she'd lost her child.

‘Very clever.' Keith curled his lip across the table at her in the way he had learned at eleven. ‘The minute she's gone, you manage to insult all three of them – Tessa, Charlotte, and Rob.'

‘I'm only surprised' – Keith's mother reached for the bread basket – ‘that there isn't more missing than just a dog. I've told you, Will, it's always been a mistake, letting every man and his uncle clutter up this place as if they owned it.'

Trying to divert trouble, Angela Stern had said sunnily, ‘But Harriet, the visitors to the gardens, all those happy people who were here last night, surely none of them –'

‘Any of them,' Sir Ralph interrupted her, ‘given half a chance.'

‘Without the visitors, we couldn't keep up the gardens,' William said patiently. He knew better than to say, ‘I like them.'

‘For your vanity.' Harriet could curl a lip too. She was drinking white wine on top of the gin. ‘I saw you last night, lord of the manor: “Hullo there, Mr William. Evenin', mas'r Will.”' Her Oxfordshire accent misfired. ‘“Done it again, you 'ave, ho ho, you Taylors.”'

‘Mother, shut
up
,' Keith growled. ‘You're pissed.'

‘Don't talk to me like that. You've been here too long. Give me some more of that potato salad.'

‘I've had a great summer.' Keith did not pass her the bowl. She stretched across him.

‘And you've worked for it,' his Uncle William told him.

‘Work?' Harriet scoffed with her mouth full. ‘He doesn't know the meaning of the word. You'd better pack up your things and come home with me this afternoon, Keith. You can put some stuff into the computer for your father until it's time to go to Cambridge.'

‘You know I hate that.'

‘You hate anything that means using your brain.'

After coffee and a nod over the Sunday papers, she said to Keith more reasonably, ‘Ready in half an hour? I'll let you drive the new Audi if you want.'

‘I've got a killer headache. I want only death.'

Jo, who had been helping Dorothy with lunch, heard him as she passed with a tray, and said in her eager, solicitous way, ‘You look as if you might have a fever. Want me to take your temperature?'

‘It's all right.' Keith had a thermometer in his room. He was used to monitoring his temperature during bad spells.

Jo came upstairs to him. ‘I really do feel lousy,' he told her, flat on the bed.

‘Same old thing?'

‘I hope not. It's just, my mother gets me so wound up, and I'm worn out with looking for that wretched little dog, and seeing Tessa's face when she had to go. But I'm
better
, Jo. I'm not ill. I'm going to make it back to Cambridge. But I'm
not
going back with my mother today.'

‘Want me to fix that for you?'

‘Oh, yes. Dear, good Jo.' He groaned and turned his face into the pillow.

Dear, good Jo ran downstairs on a cushion of air. Ev-rything's go-ing my way! Keith is ill again, and I can outwit Harriet. Power corrupts, but Marigold is already corrupted.

Harriet was in the hall, nagging at Matthew, since she could not get far with William. She was the youngest, but she never gave up trying to straighten out her older brothers. ‘I've told you, Matt. What you should do with Nina –'

‘About Keith.' Jo beamed at her from the last few stairs.

‘Where is he? I want to get going.'

‘He's lying down. He wanted to get up, but honestly, I didn't think he should. Perhaps he should stay here. I'll help to look after him.'

‘He's got into this neurotic pattern. If he can't get his own way, he says he's ill again.'

‘He really is ill. A low fever, and some of the other symptoms recurring.'

‘How do you know?'

Jo had read up on myalgic encephalomyelitis after she first met Keith. ‘My brother-in-law had ME,' she invented. ‘He'd get better and be all right for months, and then something would drag him down again.'

‘Oh, blast,' said Keith's mother. ‘I mean, I can say this to you because you seem to know him quite well. Are you sure he isn't faking?'

‘I wish he was,' Jo said with simple tenderness.

By the middle of September, Keith was no better. His fever subsided, but he could not work, could hardly drag himself out of bed to study. Every morning, waking early at the bottom of a pit, he faced the dreadful doubt of whether it was worth making the effort to climb out.

‘Do something, give me something,' he begged the London consultant. His college had agreed to let him take a second-year linguistics course, but if he could not start until January … ‘I must get back to Cambridge next month.'

‘You're not going anywhere,' the doctor said, ‘except home. This new virus infection means complete mental and physical rest.'

His Aunt Dottie drove him back to The Sanctuary to pack up, then to his parents' house.

When she said, ‘I'm so sorry,' Keith said, ‘No,
I'm
sorry. Everything was going so well. But then – poor old Troutie incinerated, and Tessa losing Charlotte – I'm just one more thing that didn't go right this summer.'

Tessa kept her ‘lost dog' notice in the local paper, and continued to check with the police and the animal shelter. She missed Charlotte all the time: when Rob tore downstairs alone to greet her coming home; at the chopping board in the kitchen where there was only emptiness waiting behind her; in the park, which had lost half its point without Charlotte running circles with Rob, coming down the slide on his lap, facing up to enormous dogs, dashing back constantly to make sure she knew where Tessa was.

Thank God she woke to find Chris in her bed. The weightless reminder that no one had sneaked up in the night to lie on
Tessa's far side was too painful to bear alone. Sometimes it could only be borne alone, and she wished Chris were not there, so that she could cry feeble hot tears into the pillow.

If she forgot for a while – working, talking to people, doing something she enjoyed – a sudden black sickening jolt would knock her off balance, dragging behind it the useless, agonizing images of Charlotte trapped, starving, terrified, dying betrayed and alone.

In some dreams, Charlotte was there and it had all been a dream within a dream. In others the little dog was tearing frantically about her with ears flapping, and Tessa could not get to her.

One day Rob said chattily, ‘If Charlotte doesn't come back, we can get another dog.'

‘Oh, Rob – don't.'

When they were alone, Chris said, ‘You've got to admire a child's sensible attitude towards death.'

‘You think I'm a sentimental idiot?'

‘I want you happy again.'

‘I
am
, with you. No one was ever so good to me.'

‘Then come on, pet. Try to accept this rotten piece of bad luck. I'll find you another little dog who'll help you to get over it.'

‘I adore you,' Tessa said mechanically, not because she wanted another dog – no dog, ever at all, except Charlotte – but to smother her resentment at his insensitivity.

When criticism surfaced in her – he was too passive, too content with an undemanding job, unambitious with his pottery – she pushed it back down in a panic. Christopher had never known the kind of wholesale demonstrative love that Tessa gave him, and she had never had the chance to give it to a man she could trust. Nothing must spoil that.

At the office, about two weeks after Charlotte was lost, Tessa picked up the phone on her desk.

‘Theresa Taylor.'

Silence. Not a dead line. A sense of someone breathing, then the dial tone. An hour later, it happened again.

Tessa went out to lunch with Dr Ferullo and a woman in the Health department to discuss their workshop at the big autumn conference for hospital management.

‘Any messages?' she asked when she came back.

‘One call from a Mrs Christopher Harvey.'

Oh, God
. ‘Did she leave a number?'

‘No, no message.'

Telling Chris, she said, ‘Look, I don't
mind
. You must know that by now. Whoever there's been, if you've been married, are married, I don't care. But you've got to tell me.'

‘Should I make something up to stop you agonizing? Listen, Tessa, I've told you everything about myself. You've got to believe me.'

‘I
do
.' She stressed it tensely, because she must. Must believe. Mustn't let a pyschopath rattle her. Mustn't be robbed of what she had now.

The Sanctuary gardens were open to the public until the end of October. As the days shortened, the Closing Bell rang earlier each week to match the advancing dusk.

The visitors dwindled. A few of the specialist plantsmen came. The alpines, the chrysanthemum folk, the herbals, the hosta society. When half a dozen fern lovers came one Saturday, William got them to name and label the different varieties of which he had lost track.

Ruth had plugged in the hot-chocolate machine, but soon there were not enough visitors to make it worth keeping the tea-room open, even at weekends. After they closed it up for the winter, Jo still spent a lot of time at The Sanctuary. There were so many ways in which she could help, and
wanted to help, that Dorothy put her on the regular domestic payroll.

Dorothy did not hand out fulsome praise. You earned anything you got, and if you knew you'd done a good job, that was your satisfaction. But once when Jo had helped Ruth with the tea-party for the children from the home, organizing games, changing babies, leading the donkey up and down long after everyone else had got sick of it, especially the donkey, Dorothy was moved to say, ‘How did we ever get along without this woman?'

Jo and Marigold both purred. Indispensable. Marigold had never expected to be that to anyone.

Once, Rex had needed her. The children she taught at St Christopher's needed her. But as Rex made money and she left her job, the school survived without her, and Rex's need grew less and less until he could abandon her for an irresponsible egotist like Tessa.

Because Marigold had been nagged and jostled out of childhood – ‘Grow up. Don't be a baby' – when she was pregnant, she knew that her own child was going to matter to her more than anything in the world. In bestowing a long enchanted childhood on this baby, Marigold would also be living in a world she had never known. When the baby was lost, her phantom childhood was lost for ever.

Now she was Jo, and Jo did matter. The Taylors needed her, set store by her, told friends, ‘This is our remarkable Jo.'

Mrs Smallbone, born to grumble, never got used to Jo doing so much in the house. She would rather struggle to make a wide double bed alone than have Jo on the other side, halving the time and effort. When her rheumatism paid her out for this obstinacy, Jo was just there with an armful of sheets, taking the strain off her without triumph.

Clever old Jo. Marigold stood back and admired her for wooing Mrs Smallbone and for being careful, with Ruth, not
to look like a usurper in the kitchen, because this house was
Ruth's;
it had been ever since she was a child helping her grandmother keep abreast of Miss Sylvia's casual neglect.