Elephants Can Remember (8 page)

Mrs Oliver entered the premises of Williams & Barnet, a well-appointed chemist’s shop also dealing with various cosmetics. She paused by a kind of dumb waiter containing various types of corn remedies, hesitated by a mountain of rubber sponges, wandered vaguely towards the prescription desk and then came down past the well-displayed aids to beauty as imagined by Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, Max Factor and other benefit providers for women’s lives.

She stopped finally near a rather plump girl and enquired for certain lipsticks, then uttered a short cry of surprise.

‘Why, Marlene – it is Marlene isn’t it?’

‘Well, I never. It’s Mrs Oliver. I am pleased to see you. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? All the girls will be very excited when I tell them that you’ve been in to buy things here.’

‘No need to tell them,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Oh, now I’m sure they’ll be bringing out their autograph books!’

‘I’d rather they didn’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘And how are you, Marlene?’

‘Oh, getting along, getting along,’ said Marlene.

‘I didn’t know whether you’d be working here still.’

‘Well, it’s as good as any other place, I think, and they treat you very well here, you know. I had a rise in salary last year and I’m more or less in charge of this cosmetic counter now.’

‘And your mother? Is she well?’

‘Oh yes. Mum will be pleased to hear I’ve met you.’

‘Is she still living in her same house down the – the road past the hospital?’

‘Oh yes, we’re still there. Dad’s not been so well. He’s been in hospital for a while, but Mum keeps along very well indeed. Oh, she will be pleased to hear I’ve seen you. Are you staying here by any chance?’

‘Not really,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I’m just passing through, as a matter of fact. I’ve been to see an old friend and I wonder now –’ she looked at her wrist-watch. ‘Would your mother be at home now, Marlene? I could just call in and see her. Have a few words before I have to get on.’

‘Oh, do do that,’ said Marlene. ‘She’d be ever so pleased. I’m sorry I can’t leave here and come with you, but I don’t think – well, it wouldn’t be viewed very well. You know I can’t get off for another hour and a half.’

‘Oh well, some other time,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Anyway, I can’t quite remember – was it number 17 or has it got a name?’

‘It’s called Laurel Cottage.’

‘Oh yes, of course. How stupid of me. Well, nice to have seen you.’

She hurried out plus one unwanted lipstick in her bag, and drove her car down the main street of Chipping Bartram and turned, after passing a garage and a hospital building, down a rather narrow road which had quite pleasant small houses on either side of it.

She left the car outside Laurel Cottage and went in. A thin, energetic woman with grey hair, of about fifty years of age, opened the door and displayed instant signs of recognition.

‘Why, so it’s you, Mrs Oliver. Ah well, now. Not seen you for years and years, I haven’t.’

‘Oh, it’s a very long time.’

‘Well, come in then, come in. Can I make you a nice cup of tea?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘because I’ve had tea already with a friend, and I’ve got to get back to London. As it happened, I went into the chemist for something I wanted and I saw Marlene there.’

‘Yes, she’s got a very good job there. They think a lot of her in that place. They say she’s got a lot of enterprise.’

‘Well, that’s very nice. And how are you, Mrs Buckle? You look very well. Hardly older than when I saw you last.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to say that. Grey hairs, and I’ve lost a lot of weight.’

‘This seems to be a day when I meet a lot of friends I knew formerly,’ said Mrs Oliver, going into the house and being led into a small, rather over-cluttered sitting-room. ‘I don’t know if you remember Mrs Carstairs – Mrs Julia Carstairs.’

‘Oh, of course I do. Yes, rather. She must be getting on.’

‘Oh yes, she is, really. But we talked over a few old days, you know. In fact, we went as far as talking about that tragedy that occurred. I was in America at the time so I didn’t know much about it. People called Ravenscroft.’

‘Oh, I remember that well.’

‘You worked for them, didn’t you, at one time, Mrs Buckle?’

‘Yes. I used to go in three mornings a week. Very nice people they were. You know, real military lady and gentleman, as you might say. The old school.’

‘It was a very tragic thing to happen.’

‘Yes, it was, indeed.’

‘Were you still working for them at that time?’

‘No. As a matter of fact, I’d given up going there. I had my old Aunt Emma come to live with me and she was rather blind and not very well, and I couldn’t really spare the time any more to go out doing things for people. But I’d been with them up to about a month or two before that.’

‘It seemed such a terrible thing to happen,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I understand that they thought it was a suicide pact.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Mrs Buckle. ‘I’m sure they’d never have committed suicide together. Not people like that. And living so pleasantly together as they did. Of course, they hadn’t lived there very long.’

‘No, I suppose they hadn’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘They lived somewhere near Bournemouth, didn’t they, when they first came to England?’

‘Yes, but they found it was a bit too far for getting to London from there, and so that’s why they came to Chipping Bartram. Very nice house it was, and a nice garden.’

‘Were they both in good health when you were working for them last?’

‘Well, he felt his age a bit as most people do. The General, he’d had some kind of heart trouble or a slight stroke. Something of that kind, you know. They’d take pills, you know, and lie up a bit from time to time.’

‘And Lady Ravenscroft?’

‘Well, I think she missed the life she’d had abroad, you know. They didn’t know so very many people there, although they got to know a good many families, of course, being the sort of class they were. But I suppose it wasn’t like Malaya or those places. You know, where you have a lot of servants. I suppose gay parties and that sort of thing.’

‘You think she missed her gay parties?’

‘Well, I don’t know that exactly.’

‘Somebody told me she’d taken to wearing a wig.’

‘Oh, she’d got several wigs,’ said Mrs Buckle, smiling slightly. ‘Very smart ones and very expensive. You know, from time to time she’d send one back to the place she’d got it from in London, and they’d re-dress it for her again and send it. There were all kinds. You know, there was one with auburn hair, and one with little grey curls all over her head. Really, she looked very nice in that one. And two – well, not so attractive really but useful for – you know – windy days when you wanted something to put on when it might be raining. Thought a lot about her appearance, you know and spent a lot of her money on clothes.’

‘What do you think was the cause of the tragedy?’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You see, not being anywhere near here and not seeing any of my friends at that time because I was in America, I missed hearing anything about it and, well, one doesn’t like to ask questions or write letters about things of that kind. I suppose there must have been some cause. I mean, it was General Ravenscroft’s own revolver that was used, I understand.’

‘Oh yes, he had two of those in the house because he said that no house was safe without. Perhaps he was right there, you know. Not that they’d had any trouble beforehand as far as I know. One afternoon a rather nasty sort of fellow came along to the door. Didn’t like the look of him, I didn’t. Wanted to see the General. Said he’d been in the General’s regiment when he was a young fellow. The General asked him a few questions and I think thought as how he didn’t – well, thought he wasn’t very reliable. So he sent him off.’

‘You think then that it was someone outside that did it?’

‘Well, I think it must have been because I can’t see any other thing. Mind you, I didn’t like the man who came and did the gardening for them very much. He hadn’t got a very good reputation and I gather he’d had a few jail sentences earlier in his life. But of course the General took up his references and he wanted to give him a chance.’

‘So you think the gardener might have killed them?’

‘Well, I – I always thought that. But then I’m probably wrong. But it doesn’t seem to me – I mean, the people who said there was some scandalous story or something about either her or him and that either he’d shot her or she’d shot him, that’s all nonsense, I’d say. No, it was some outsider. One of these people that – well, it’s not as bad as it is nowadays because that, you must remember, was before people began getting all this violence idea. But look at what you read in the papers every day now. Young men, practically only boys still, taking a lot of drugs and going wild and rushing about, shooting a lot of people for nothing at all, asking a girl in a pub to have a drink with them and then they see her home and next day her body’s found in a ditch. Stealing children out of prams from their mothers, taking a girl to a dance and murdering her or strangling her on the way back. If anything, you feel as anyone can do anything. And anyway, there’s that nice couple, the General and his wife, out for a nice walk in the evening, and there they were, both shot through the head.’

‘Was it through the head?’

‘Well, I don’t remember exactly now and of course I never saw anything myself. But anyway, just went for a walk as they often did.’

‘And they’d not been on bad terms with each other?’

‘Well, they had words now and again, but who doesn’t?’

‘No boyfriend or girlfriend?’

‘Well, if you can use that term of people of that age, oh, I mean there was a bit of talk here and there, but it was all nonsense. Nothing to it at all. People always want to say something of that kind.’

‘Perhaps one of them was – ill.’

‘Well, Lady Ravenscroft had been up to London once or twice consulting a doctor about something and I rather think she was going into hospital, or planning to go into hospital for an operation of some kind though she never told me exactly what it was. But I think they managed to put her right – she was in this hospital for a short time. No operation, I think. And when she came back she looked very much younger. Altogether, she’d had a lot of face treatment and you know, she looked so pretty in these wigs with curls on them. Rather as though she’d got a new lease of life.’

‘And General Ravenscroft?’

‘He was a very nice gentleman and I never heard or knew of any scandal about him and I don’t think there was any. People say things, but then they want to say something when there’s been a tragedy of any kind. It seems to me perhaps as he might have had a blow on the head in Malaya or something like that. I had an uncle or a great-uncle, you know, who fell off his horse there once. Hit it on a cannon or something and he was very queer afterwards. All right for about six months and then they had to put him into an asylum because he wanted to take his wife’s life the whole time. He said she was persecuting him and following him and that she was a spy for another nation. Ah, there’s no saying what things happen or can happen in families.’

‘Anyway, you don’t think there was any truth in some of the stories about them that I have happened to hear of, bad feeling between them so that one of them shot the other and then shot himself or herself.’

‘Oh no, I don’t.’

‘Were her children at home at the time?’

‘No. Miss – er – oh what was her name now, Rosie? No. Penelope?’

‘Celia,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘She’s my goddaughter.’

‘Oh, of course she is. Yes, I know that now. I remember you coming and taking her out once. She was a high-spirited girl, rather bad-tempered in some ways, but she was very fond of her father and mother, I think. No, she was away at a school in Switzerland when it happened, I’m glad to say, because it would have been a terrible shock to her if she’d been at home and the one who saw them.’

‘And there was a boy, too, wasn’t there?’

‘Oh yes. Master Edward. His father was a bit worried about him, I think. He looked as though he disliked his father.’

‘Oh, there’s nothing in that. Boys go through that stage. Was he very devoted to his mother?’

‘Well, she fussed over him a bit too much, I think, which he found tiresome. You know, they don’t like a mother fussing over them, telling them to wear thicker vests or put an extra pullover on. His father, he didn’t like the way he wore his hair. It was – well they weren’t wearing hair like the way they are nowadays, but they were beginning to, if you know what I mean.’

‘But the boy wasn’t at home at the time of the tragedy?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose it was a shock to him?’

‘Well, it must have been. Of course, I wasn’t going to the house any more at that time so I didn’t hear so much. If you ask me, I didn’t like that gardener. What was his name now – Fred, I think. Fred Wizell. Some name like that. Seems to me if he’d done a bit of – well, a bit of cheating or something like that and the General had found him out and was going to sack him, I wouldn’t put it past him.’

‘To shoot the husband and wife?’

‘Well, I’d have thought it more likely he’d just have shot the General. If he shot the General and the wife came along, then he’d have had to shoot her too. You read things like that in books.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver thoughtfully, ‘one does read all sorts of things in books.’

‘There was the tutor. I didn’t like him much.’

‘What tutor?’

‘Well, there was a tutor for the boy earlier. You know, he couldn’t pass an exam and things at the earlier school he was at – prep school or something. So they had a tutor for him. He was there for about a year, I think. Lady Ravenscroft liked him very much. She was musical, you know, and so was this tutor. Mr Edmunds, I think his name was. Rather a namby-pamby sort of young man, I thought myself, and it’s my opinion that General Ravenscroft didn’t care for him much.’

‘But Lady Ravenscroft did.’

‘Oh, they had a lot in common, I think. And I think she was the one really that chose him rather more than the General. Mind you, he had very nice manners and spoke to everyone nicely and all that –’