Closed at Dusk (3 page)

Tessa kissed her. The old cheek was like a cobweb. ‘Here's Rob, Troutie, you remember? My little boy.'

‘She knows
that
.' Agnes's voice, relentless as the rooks, came from the other room.

‘She knows everything.' Tessa toured the room to inspect once more the photographs of people with horses, horses without people, Beatrice Cobb bottle-feeding a baby lamb, Sylvia Taylor in a hideous hat, with a goat, William and Matthew in long school shorts, on donkeys; groups, weddings, babies; a Dutch china dog pulling a cart, glass birds from Venice, painted teacups – all the trophies of trips abroad brought back for someone who had never been abroad. ‘Tell Rob some more about the old days, like you used to tell me. What do you think about?'

‘What can she think about?' Agnes answered for her mother. ‘At that age, it's a blank. Very peaceful. I can't wait.'

‘I think about the good old times.' The long old-lady hairs waved as Troutie's toothless jaw moved to talk. Why didn't Agnes pull them out? Tessa did not like to suggest it. Rob watched from a safe distance, rubbing a fat china cat against his cheek. ‘Such times we had with all the staff. I was only a little mite of twelve.'

‘Fourteen,' from Agnes.

‘First proper home I ever had. Never had a home like The Sanctuary. It was lovely.' Her voice quavered off.

‘How could it have been?' Agnes came into the sitting-room in her purple jacket, a cigarette on her lip. ‘That nasty basement with those terrible icy rooms. You ever seen the room where they washed out mops and cloths in cold water?' she
asked Tessa. ‘The tears froze on her face. Ma's told me. Who do you think it was found Maryann Button hanging from a rope at the back of the cellar where they hung the game?' Rob turned round from the army of ornaments on the mantelpiece. ‘My mother, that's who. She was fifteen.'

‘What games?' Rob asked.

‘Hares, pheasants, partridge.'

‘They hung up the birds?'

‘It's all right, Rob.' Tessa made a face at Agnes.

‘And Maryann Button with 'em.' Agnes had had a drink or two.

‘They hung up the birds
alive
?'

‘Come on, Rob.' Tessa put her arm round him. ‘We must go, darling Troutie.' She raised her voice because the old woman had closed her eyes.

‘
Go and get down a hare,' Cook says. Behind the small furred corpses hanging from the beam, Maryann Button dangles from a gammon hook in her parlourmaid dress and white apron, the cap tipped forward on the skewed surrendered head, a pickling jar broken by the chair she has kicked over on its side
.

‘
Clumsy to the last.' Phyllis Bunby sticks out her thick bottom lip before her face collapses and she sobs and slobbers for half an hour
.

William and Dorothy Taylor came home on Thursday evening. When he turned the car into the drive under the two wrought-iron lambs that pranced together above the gateway, William smiled and said, ‘There it is.'

‘You always say that.' Dorothy had known that he would. ‘Are you afraid that one day it won't be there?'

‘I can't ever quite believe it's ours.'

The house had been built by one of William's ancestors to impress guests and neighbours with a sort of domesticated
fortress. The walls were massive blocks of Cotswold stone, anchored at each corner by broad hexagonal turrets; and yet even on its most lowering days when it bulked darkly, lashed by rain against a hopeless sky, it was not grim and foreboding. Its size and weight were steadiness, and beauty was given to it by the harmonious slopes and angles of its many roofs, the elegantly placed chimneys, the calm ranks of Georgian windows, five panes high on the raised ground floor, four panes above, two under the roof, below the attic dormers.

‘Your sister Harriet wants you to smother it with ivy and Virginia creeper,' Dorothy said. ‘She thinks it looks like a prison.'

In the turret ahead of them, sunset fire signalled from watery old glass. Oatmeal stone soaked up the glow.

‘She can put her head in a bucket,' William said.

Growing up here, he had always adored this house, and now that it belonged to him in middle age, or he to it, he spent as much time here as he could, sleeping in the Chelsea flat only when he had to stay late in London.

William, a partner in a large firm of land agents, was fifty-five, a large rumpled man who was often taken for one of the gardeners, which pleased him. He was a hardworking, capable businessman, who could play at being sophisticated when necessary, but his likeable face was still boyish, his pleasures and enthusiasms vulnerably simple. His passion was this house and garden, which he had inherited twelve years ago when his mother died. His wife Dorothy, who had preferred their smaller home, had come to terms with The Sanctuary and its unending demands. With the battle finally won to repair the devastation of Sylvia Taylor's last eccentric years, Dorothy forgave the house and allowed it to make her comfortable, running it with the same energy and competence she brought to all her work. She was a child psychologist. At fifty-seven, she saw private
and NHS patients at a local clinic and was consultant to a children's home and the area fostering service, as well as giving some time to a support group for single parents in London.

She was small and purposeful; William was overgrown and careless. Now that her hair was grey, she kept it short and close to her head, her eyes, under the abrupt fringe, still a clear and startling light blue behind rather severe rimless glasses.

William loved her deeply with the love of years. He was proud of her, although felt some regret that she had grown less womanly as her children grew away from her; but Dorothy had never much cared for her more yielding maternal self. She was satisfied with her self-sufficient middle age.

William went straight round the side of the house to check his seedlings in the alpine house. Tessa and her mother laid cheek against cheek.

‘Hullo, Mum. How's Tantrum Tactics?'

‘Very good. How was your conference?'

‘All right, I hope. Bit tricky, a diversified publishing group. They seem to have been conducting a hidden war, with four different sides.'

‘So I suppose you told them to fire all the cannons, Tessa, beat each other up, say terrible things no one will ever forget?' Dorothy's problem children could say anything they wanted. For grown-ups, she favoured self-control.

A reliable granny, she had brought books and a convertible monster for Rob. Wum (the first grandchild had called him that after seeing William spelled Wm) had brought some grey plastic elbow joints he had found in a skip in Flood Street.

Rob was allowed to start his night on the couch in the study. Keith cooked the Chinese meal, then was tired and went to bed early. When he picked up the dead weight of Rob asleep and sweating gently, he could only carry him to the halfway
landing. His Uncle William, almost three times his age, took the sleeping child from his arms and carried him easily up to the cabin room.

On Friday, William Taylor's brother Matthew came with his young daughter Nina, of the dusky impenetrable hair. Matthew, a professor of English at a provincial university, was broader and shorter than William, greyer and balding, although he was a few years younger. His wife had died of cancer two years ago when Nina was twelve.

Tessa's older brother Rodney came with his wife and three children and two King Charles spaniels. Everybody brought their dogs to The Sanctuary. Rob's mother went into high gear when her brother arrived, as if she had not had any fun with anyone of her own generation for weeks. After tennis, everyone swam, and Tessa fooled about gaily and paraded her body, although it was only family. Keith watched her and bit his nails. Rodney, who strove to be a good father because he was away a lot, as an international banker, challenged his son Dennis to races and diving contests. Rob sulked and would not put on his swimming trunks.

‘Where's
your
father these days?' Nina asked Rob. With a torn man's shirt over her swimsuit, she was reading by the pool with the eye that was not concealed by hair. ‘This family – I can't keep up.'

‘My mother got sick of him, so he married another person. Where's your mother anyway?'

Nina grunted.

‘Is she dead? I forgot.'

After the Closing Bell had rung from the tall cypress tree, the visitors were gone and the window of the little ticket hut was shuttered up, the family had drinks on the terrace while the sun went down. Upstairs in the playroom, Rob had failed to frighten his cousin Annabel with a story about The Flusher, but her brother Dennis offered to tell him something so much worse, something so horrible …

‘I won't listen! Mummy!' he screamed out of the window. Tessa waved back at him gaily.

‘I wish the Sterns weren't coming,' William said at breakfast. ‘Much rather garden all day.' He had been outside with the dogs since 6.30, tying up the clematis shoots rampaging along the front balustrade of the terrace. ‘Wish I hadn't invited them.'

‘Why did you?' Dottie was in a neat pair of overalls, ironed as well as clean. She was going to paint the windowsills in the library.

‘I need him. Sir Ralph is a hot number since he made that speech about the dollar at the CBI dinner. He seems to know everybody … he can get me to a group of rich felons I want to talk to about this big land purchase at Chard, and developing an equestrian centre.'

He sighed. He resented even thinking about business on a day like this. Sir Ralph Stern, an inflated power broker, would descend as from a higher plane, hoping to impress this peaceful family as much as he impressed himself, and he would want to have closed policy sessions with William, shut up in his study with the whisky decanter.

Lady Stern would be too elegant and social, affronted to find nobody special invited to dinner. She would aerate the lawn with high heels and pretend to recognize the waterfowl.

She turned out to be quite charming. Sir Ralph got out of the Bentley, his predictably imposing self: fat nipples under a silky polo neck, tan hacking jacket, oxblood riding boots. His wife held out both hands to William and would have kissed Dorothy, with any encouragement.

‘I'm Angela,' she said. ‘We met briefly at the Mandersons', do you remember? Probably not. But I didn't forget what you told me about The Sanctuary.'

She greeted Keith and the children enthusiastically and with respect, and gave them appropriate small gifts. She had bothered to find out from William's secretary who would be here. She ran her hands through her frosted yellow hair and dropped her embroidered jacket carelessly on a chair in the hall before going straight through the glass doors to the terrace to see the lake and garden. Tessa took a look at the jacket label.

Angela swam before lunch, graceful and ripe, with firm limbs and a bloom on her skin. Although it was another amazing May day, Sir Ralph would not swim. As expected, he cornered his host, and they talked about his recent business book,
Games of Chance
, which William had bought after he invited him for the weekend.

At a quarter past two, Sir Ralph looked out of the wide dining-room window and said, ‘Good God, you are being invaded.'

‘Time to worry, if we weren't.'

‘How can you stand these people charging all over your property … spying on you?'

Two women were passing along the top lawn between the terrace and the lake. Seeing people behind the distant dining-room window, one of them waved cheerfully.

‘The garden is financed by a family trust which Matthew and I manage. We couldn't keep the garden up without the visitors.' William had told him this already.

‘I couldn't stand it,' Sir Ralph said, as if he had not heard.

Tessa took him off to see the standing stones at Avebury, although he would object to the crowds on a Saturday. Dottie, who had presided over the cold lunch still in her overalls, with specks of paint on her glasses, went back to the library window-sills, trailed by the whiskery grey dog who had come here as a stray and attached himself to her, although she showed him no consideration. She had named him Folly, for picking her, and usually addressed him as Fool.

When Angela Stern offered to help, Dottie said, not rudely, but honestly, ‘I like to work by myself.'

Angela said agreeably, ‘Good, because I didn't really want to.'

What she wanted was to put on a striped sundress and plunge out to explore the gardens with William.

Some people with classic views about the relationship of building and landscape felt that the plethora of animal sculpture at The Sanctuary was too quaint and sentimental for the uncompromising bulk of the house. But Angela was enchanted with the legacies of Walter and Beatrice Cobb.

‘When they inherited the house', William said, ‘they renamed it The Sanctuary, because that was what they wanted it to be for all living things. After their death, their eldest son Frederick was interested in the gardens, I believe, but it was his wife, my tyrannical grandmother Geraldine Cobb who ran the show.

‘Their son was killed in the First War, so their daughter Sylvia, my mother, stayed on here after she married my father. Matthew and I and Harriet, Keith's mother, were brought up at The Sanctuary.'

With the labrador Corrie, named after the buttery coreopsis ‘Sunshine' that would soon gleam in clumps all down the long border, and her bounding year-old son, they visited the animal
statues. Angela examined with eyes and hands the stone bulldog watching the front door and the mastiff on the ivied mound, broad head laid along strong paws to point towards his master's tomb. On the side of his stone slab was carved his testimonial: ‘Faithful unto Death'. William showed her the rearing wild pony on its pedestal at the entrance to the stable yard, the delicate French deer at the edge of the copse, the birds, the little field and woodland animals among the shrubs and flowers.