Closed at Dusk (7 page)

The following weekend Tessa had a conference at Hereford; on the Thursday her only reliable overnight baby-sitter cancelled. Too late to find anybody else. Rob could not stay at The Sanctuary, because his grandparents and Keith were going to a wedding. Ruth's cottage? Not fair, when Ruth had so much to do, even though she had apparently found a new body for the busy tea-room. Rob's other grandmother? That spoiled vindictive woman who had been heard to speculate, during the mess of Rex and Tessa's divorce, ‘I've always thought Rob might not be his child anyway.' Never.

Rex? It was time he saw Rex anyway. After being with a father-and-son team like Rodney and Dennis, Rob began to say things like, ‘Why does nobody bowl balls to me?'

‘You want to play cricket, darling?'

‘No.'

Tessa rang Rex at the office, so as not to risk talking to the new woman, sweet Rosalie.

‘Rex. I won't keep you.' Tessa always said that quickly, before he could wound her with, ‘Look, I'm really tied up just now.' ‘Could you have Rob on Saturday and Sunday?'

‘What? Wait … I don't see why not.'

‘If we stay Friday night at The Sanctuary –'

‘I can't pick him up there. I'm still taboo at the holy shrine.'

‘I know that. I can bring him half way.' Rex, who was making a lot of money, lived with Rosalie in a pillared mansion near High Wycombe. ‘Could you meet me at that hotel on the M40, The Crown, where we met before?'

‘Our trysting place – ah, yes.' He put on a dreamy voice. ‘Of course, Tess.' He switched on sincerity. ‘I'll be glad to.'

It was still painful to hear the bastard's voice. Tessa hated and despised him now, but it still stabbed her to hear his voice. That voice. As irresistible as it had been when Tessa flung away everything for him in a blind consuming passion. No one had ever understood that it had been impossible to care, or even
think
, about his wife, ‘poor Marigold'. Rex obliterated everything. There was nothing else.

No right or wrong. ‘A sin?' her father had asked her once tentatively, when it came out that Marigold had tried to kill herself. ‘Do you ever have black moments when you, er, when you think that what you have done might be a sin?'

‘Nothing is a sin,' Tessa had told him then, presumptuously exalted, ‘unless you think it is.'

It was less painful to see Rex in the flesh than to hear the intimate voice that carried such shivery memories. He was absurdly good-looking, better than ever at nearly forty, his mouth a snare for your eyes. But she knew what lay beneath all that. Beneath the superb white sweater and those jazzy joggers that bounced through a muzak-fouled hotel lobby where an ecstatic little boy rushed at him.

‘Hey, old mate!' He bent to Rob, who put a puny strangle
hold on his neck. When the child let him go, Rex stood up and looked at Tessa with those shameless grey eyes.

She had her organization-and-management-consultant clothes on, careful make-up, her caramel hair swept up and back in a sophisticated French pleat like a brandy snap.

‘You look good.' Rex appraised her as if he still had the right to approve or not approve. ‘Where are you off to?'

‘Conference. Here's the hotel number, and Rob's things.' Her son was already on his way to the hotel door, holding his exercise book of drawings. ‘I should get away late on Sunday afternoon, if you could bring him here.'

‘Rosalie or I will.' (You come yourself, you bastard.) ‘Call me when you know what time.'

They were two cool strangers, making efficient plans. He took the small purple backpack that said, ‘Zermatt' and she turned away.

‘My sessions start this afternoon. I've got to go,' she said.

‘Recruitment in the Nineties' was a working conference for the personnel and training staff of a big London department store. Tessa had helped to design the programme with Dr Oscar Ferullo and the consultancy's psychologist. Oscar gave the main talks, and Tessa and the other assistants led small discussion groups.

Tessa enjoyed conferences. She liked staying in comfortable hotels. She liked knowing the language that everyone talked, and the small power of being a teacher.

By the end of a long Saturday afternoon, she was beginning to get the feel of some of this group's hidden conflicts, which Oscar would identify and work on tomorrow. ‘Issues', they would be called – less threatening than ‘problems'. In the career re-entry sessions she had to try to head off the tendency of each small group to degenerate into gossip or irrelevant
personal grievances about married women and single mothers coming into the job market for training.

A woman with pink eyelids and a man with a coarse lower lip and jaw carried on interminably – ‘I know it's true because my brother's wife –' seducing the rest into mistaking the particular for the general because they were tired, and it was better than working seriously. A man at the back with soft brown eyes and beard went quietly to sleep.

The real Tessa would have got up and told the group, ‘I don't want to hear this rubbish,' and gone away to find a drink. Consultant Tessa, weary but still spruce, said, ‘Do the rest of you really want to hear this?' The group took intelligent shape again and replied ‘No'.

‘You handled those morons pretty well.'

When Tessa was getting a drink at the bar for herself and Oscar, the man with the neat sweet beard was on a stool by her side.

‘You were asleep.'

‘Not with you in the room. Shall we get a bottle of wine and go into that other lounge where the good chairs are?'

‘Just let me take Doctor Ferullo his drink.'

His name was Chris Harvey, and he was content to be in middle-level personnel, because he was also a potter, with a wheel and a kiln in his garage, and that was his real life. Having an unreliable car, he had come to Hereford by train, so at the end of the conference Tessa drove him back to Finchley. Because he was with her and she was on a high, Tessa rang Rex to say that she would pick Rob up at the mansion on her way into London.

Rosalie was indoors, or out, or drowned in the swimming pool. Tessa had never seen her. Rob was up a tree and Rex was fiddling with his big shiny ride-on mower, out on the front lawn, for effect. Chris stayed in the car, sorting through
Tessa's tapes with a view to recognizing her taste in music.

‘How's he been?' Tessa asked Rex, leaning backwards to hold Rob, who had scrambled desperately into her arms, as if he had been rescued from purgatory.

‘No problems.' Rex always said that, as he did if Tessa rang him to discuss a difficulty, implying: no problems with
me
. ‘How has
he
been?' He looked towards Tessa's car.

‘Exciting.' Tessa stuck out her tongue at him and put Rob down, and they galloped hand in hand across the drive, which was paved with square grey tiles, like a Mercedes advertisement. Chris leaned his head out of the car window with a charming smile for Rob. Tessa looked back, but Rex had his head down to the engine of the mower.

William had called in at the lodge cottage to see his darling old nurse Troutie, and to tell Agnes about the gutters.

‘I'll get them seen to next week,' he said.

‘My mother says she'll believe that when she sees it.'

Troutie was saying nothing, but Agnes used her as a ventriloquist's dummy for rude comments. ‘She knows who's last on the list for repairs, and it's never the big house, is it?' If you caught her after lunch, with the morning hangover cleared and the foundation of tomorrow's laid, Agnes did not care what she said to anyone.

Having delivered his message about the gutters, William wanted to go, but he worried about Agnes's drinking, and so he nerved himself to say something.

‘Not happy here?' he began.

‘I do as well as can be expected, Mr Taylor.' Her mother called him by his childhood name, Billie, and Ruth had always known him as Will, but Agnes stuck to Mr Taylor in public and private, because she felt that people like him should be kept in their place.

‘And I'm sure we're all grateful.'

Agnes narrowed her eyes at him over her cigarette. What was he up to? ‘It's no more than my duty.'

‘Yes, but – well, don't take this the wrong way, Agnes, but there is a bit of a problem, isn't there?'

‘Old people are always a problem.' Agnes jerked her bulldog chin towards her mother, who was silent, lids lowered, but listening.

‘I mean – we all know you have a bit of a problem with alcohol.' He had learned that from Dottie, a modish way of saying, ‘You're a lush.'

‘
All
? Who's
all
?'

‘Well – the family.'

‘The family.' Agnes made a face as if she saw dog mess on the carpet. ‘What business is it of theirs? Hasn't
my
family given enough of their lives
to your
family?'

‘Well, of course … But look, we could get a companion for your mother.'

‘Cost the earth.'

‘We'd pay, of course.'

‘No one's ever paid
me
.'

‘Is that what you want?'

‘Mr Taylor.' Agnes tossed her head of faded thinning hair that had been permed to the consistency of breakfast cereal. ‘This is my mother.'

When Agnes had gone out of the room, Troutie opened her eyes.

‘Don't worry about me, Billie.' She croaked, as she always did after silence. ‘It's you I'm worried about.' She cleared her throat harshly, but the fluid was deeper, down in her lungs. ‘You don't look quite yourself, my dear.'

‘I'm not.' Because the anxiety was still with him, and the pain, he told Troutie about the Sterns' weekend, and the
appalling tragedy of Angela's son's death. He turned away as he told it, and looked out of the window at a flock of bicyclists in tight shiny shorts, because his eyes had begun to water and his voice was unsteady.

‘Dead.' Troutie's lungs laboured, wheezing. ‘Ah, dear. Lose a son … never get over it. Your grandmother never did.'

Dead. Just that word, like a stone dropped, after Sir Frederick has read the telegram. Dead. It passes through the house, up to Miss Sylvia in the schoolroom, and down, from lip to lip, past young Mary on her knees with the wax polish, through the pantry and the servants' hall and the kitchen and sculleries and all the endless cold passages. Dead
.

‘He died like a hero, Mr Lionel, leading his men over the top. It was as if all the lights went out at The Sanctuary.'

‘What was he – twenty? And my poor mother …'

‘Miss Sylvia was only thirteen, and young with it. At fourteen, I was years older in my ways. I saw what happened. I saw it, Billie. Lady Geraldine – it was like she had to punish Sylvia for being alive.'

William knew his mother's sad little story: how this plain shy girl had been oppressed, and forbidden to marry a man who was ‘unsuitable'.

‘I was the only one she could talk to. “Go with him,” I said. “Leave all for love.”'

‘Why didn't she?' William's memories of his mother were clouded with a thousand failures.

‘Because he got fed up of being scorned by the family, and went away to Scotland.'

Troutie went into a coughing fit. She came out of it gasping, and said weakly, ‘I loved your mother.'

‘I never understood her.'

‘No good with children. That's why I took over.'

‘Thank God you did.'

The old lady's head dropped forward and her purple lids
came down, hollowly, as if there were no eyeballs behind. William went out, and as he passed her window he looked in at the crouched heap of stuffy clothes and moulting hair. Even as she slept, the heap jerked convulsively, and she was racked with that appalling cough that sounded as if her lungs were flooded with boiling filthy water.

Coughing like that in June! Next winter would be worse for her than last. She'd drown in it. Better to die now, William thought bitterly. Why struggle on to reach ninety, when Angela's Peter, a young man of eighteen, could be obliterated in an inferno of screaming metal?

‘Like it here?' William asked the new woman in the tea-room. He had stopped in to ask Ruth about getting the doctor back for her grandmother's cough. No good asking Agnes, who mistrusted doctors.

‘
Very
much.'

Jo was scooting about with a tray, clearing tables speedily. Like Ruth, she went on working while she talked. Poor young woman, not long widowed. Cancer, what a tragedy. Should I say something about her husband? Not much good at things like that. Would I have known what to say to Angela if she had been at home when I rang her yesterday?

‘I'm fascinated by this old place and its history,' Jo said, wiping a slopped table efficiently, cupping the mess into a cloth, the way women do.

‘Ask Ruth to take you to see her grandmother,' William said. ‘She remembers everything about the old days.'

‘Could I?' Jo asked Ruth. ‘I'd love that.' She had an enthusiastic, slightly stagey voice, as if she might once have been, or tried to be, an actress. Her dark fringe was cut narrow, with the straight black hair close to her face, curving up to points at her chin.

‘Of course, my dear.' Ruth seemed to like her. William
would probably like her when he got to know her. He was depressed now, and not interested.

As Ralph's party had left the restaurant after the Barrett Mayne dinner, William had asked him, ‘How is – how is Angela?'

‘Shattered,' Ralph said too easily, his host's urbanity still operating. ‘She's gone to her sister's for a bit. Totally to pieces.'

Angela
… my dazzling brief companion. You spun in and out of my life and showed me a vision. Now I can't help you. Why should you need me?

He did not try to ring Angela again.

It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Frank's ornithological life. He had suspected that the wilder reaches of The Sanctuary estate might yield good rewards. But even he, a dreamer, a visionary, had never hoped for a prize like this.