Rainbow's End (7 page)

“
Gentlemen
, gentlemen, gentlemen . . . ” The voice ran down like a windup toy and then picked up again. “It's Mr. Plant, isn't it? How lovely to see you again. And your friend?” His peaked eyebrows rose, his liquid brown eye glittered (the other was slightly off-center), and he washed his hands in anticipation.

“Mr. Trueblood.” Plant pegged Trevor Sly as a person who would have preferred to get on a first-name basis as quickly as possible.

“A pint of my Cairo Flame? Or the Tangier?” Trevor Sly's smile split his lantern jaw. He brewed his own beer, not because he was a great believer in CAMRA but because it was both cheaper and gave him an outlet for his ingenuity.

“The last time I drank your Cairo Flame, I woke up in Cairo. Just some of the real stuff.” Melrose added, when Sly looked puzzled, “You know, the brown stuff with a bit of foam on top. How about an Old Peculier?”

Trevor Sly pursed his lips, shook his head in a no-accounting-for-tastes manner.

Trueblood said, “I'll have a pint of the Tangier.”

“Bottled lava,” said Melrose. “Draft lava,” he corrected himself, when he saw Trevor Sly's fingers touch one of the beer pulls.

“And have something yourself, Mr. Sly.”

Trevor Sly smiled broadly, winked, and went into action. His long arms, reaching for glasses, sliding about amongst the optics and beer pulls, the bowls of nuts, packets of crisps, cigarettes, and jars of pickled eggs, appeared to be involved in many more things at once than two arms could possibly be. The same could be said of his two legs, after he'd set the Old Peculier and Trueblood's pint before them, and had settled himself on a high stool behind the bar, twining and twining the spindly legs like ivy round the rungs. Trevor Sly was everywhere, and in constant jittery motion, even when he was seated.

“What's this funny sediment on the bottom?” asked Trueblood, pint raised to the light.

“I told you,” said Melrose, cherishing his pleasantly familiar Old Peculier. “They've got the same thing at Vesuvius. Mr. Sly, where did you get the fruit machines?”

“The what?” Trevor raised his eyebrows, followed the direction of Plant's gaze to the back wall and the slot machines.

“Those. They call them ‘fruit machines' in the States. Though I expect they'd call yours ‘camel machines.' ”

“Mate of mine, lives in Liverpool.” Sly studied the ceiling fan and the flies lazing round it. “I believe he's in the secondhand furniture business.”

“Lorry decor, that it?” said Trueblood, finally taking a drink of his Tangier, and coughing. “My God,” he wheezed, “that's strong stuff.”

“You were warned,” said Melrose. He added, when Trevor pushed a menu toward him, “No, nothing to eat. We had a camel for luncheon.”

“You are a treat, Mr. Plant,” said Trevor.

Weakly, Melrose smiled, and introduced the subject they had really come calling about. “You know, speaking of lorries, as we were passing Watermeadows, I could have sworn I saw a van. Removal van, it looked like. Is Lady Summerston returning, do you know?”

“Far as I know, yes.” Trevor was at the optics, eking out his portion of gin.

This totally unexpected answer left both Plant and Trueblood staring open-mouthed at the dispenser of gin and beer.

“But we—I—thought the property had been let. . . . ”

“A family, that's what I heard,” said Melrose. “Husband, wife, two children.”

“And two Labradors,” said Trueblood.

Melrose gave his ankle a kick. They'd invented the Labs themselves, for God's sake. But, then, they'd invented nearly everything, hadn't they?

“Well, I'm sure I don't know where you heard that.” Trevor Sly took a puff of his cigarette, laid it, coal end out, on the edge of the bar. And added nothing at all to Melrose's speculations.

“I think it was . . . Mr. Jenks. Yes!” Melrose snapped his fingers as if in sudden recollection. “You know him, that new estate agent in Long Pidd.”

Trevor gave a short laugh that was more of a snort. “Oh, don't I ever. I know
him
all right. Him as worked for that Sidbury firm and scarpered with their listings. Right villain, that one.”

“Really?” Melrose feigned interest in the villainous estate agent, exaggerated villainy, he was quite sure. All Melrose wanted to know was who in hell was living at Watermeadows.

Trueblood took time out to gag on another swallow of Tangier and asked, “Didn't we see a Land Rover up the drive near the fountain?”

“Can't see the fountain from the Northampton Road, can you?” Trevor rubbed his hands together, twining the fingers in his spidery way. “I seriously doubt you saw a Land Rover, Mr. Trueblood.”

Hell's bells, the man doubted and denied but wasn't telling them one damned thing. “Then you say it's Lady Summerston come back?”

“No, I didn't exactly say that, did I?” Trevor Sly rewound himself on his high stool and smiled.

“I can't imagine she'd want to live there alone, with just that butler of hers,” said Trueblood. “Not after that murder several years ago.” He was more concerned over the role played in it by his own exquisite
secrétaire à abattant.

“But she's not alone.”

“No?” said Melrose, leaning forward.

“She isn't?” Trueblood perked up.

Trevor Sly studied his fingernails, hand flat out in front of him. “Well, you know, they keep themselves to themselves, don't they? And I'm not one to talk.”

Oh, but he was, he was, which was why Melrose and Trueblood had come.

“We were told they were from London. Docklands, to be precise. Took the place for a year.” At least, that was true enough.

“Ah, yes. I expect so.”

Wasn't that just the way with gossips? thought Melrose, with a sigh. When you didn't want to listen to them, you couldn't shut them up.

Trueblood said, “And they've really taken to the Jack and Hammer.”

That
got a response. “Jack and
Hammer
?” Sly flicked the towel from his shoulder he'd lately been polishing glasses with, swatting at air as if he couldn't breathe for all the flies. “They wouldn't bother themselves. Not when the
Parrot
's here, right close and where they can get
real
beer, and not that yellow swill Dick Scroggs pulls. Why, just the other day, Miss Fludd was saying—”

“
Miss Fludd
?” Plant and Trueblood chorused, leaning across the bar like two shipwrecked sailors over the edge of their lifeboat, so eager at a report of land they'd gladly swim for it.

“That's right. Miss Fludd was just saying—well well
well
, hello hello hello!”

This gibbered greeting trilled past their shoulders and towards the door.

Melrose turned.

The girl who stood stopped in the doorway wore an old black mackintosh and had hair the color of the coat. Light was behind her and he couldn't see her eyes very clearly, their color or expression. When she moved, it was with difficulty, for she had to drag the right leg, which was in a heavy and unwieldy brace. Yet, she moved with a certain smiling energy, as if she were simply carrying a rather heavy package, an inconvenient encumbrance but one that she would soon be able to set down and get rid of. She was, actually, carrying a package, a very small one, under her arm.

“Hullo, Mr. Sly,” she said, pulling herself up on one of the high bar stools and smiling from Trevor Sly to the two other customers. She shook herself free of the shapeless black mac to reveal a plain dove-gray
dress beneath it. She studied the dress for just a moment (like a child making sure she'd put on what she'd wanted to), then smiled again.

The face was calm and gentle and the smile almost beatific, like something bestowed. She crooked her finger, calling Trevor Sly over. He moved down the bar and she engaged him in a low-voiced colloquy as she opened her package and offered him something. It looked like a thin cookie or cake, and he took a bit, munched it, and nodded. He moved back to the beer pulls to get her drink and she smiled at Plant and Trueblood as if she'd just performed a clever trick.

Melrose stared at her, rather blindly, and feeling a bit as if he'd fallen over the edge of the lifeboat. It was difficult to guess her age. Suffering might make a young face old; forbearance might make an old face young. Melrose guessed she was in her early thirties, and then he thought she could almost as easily have been thirteen. She sat there in her gray dress, looking at the beer pulls, the mirror, the shelves of beer and brandy glasses, and smiling as if the object of her outing were about to be realized.

That was what got Melrose: her smile, her expression. It was the smile of a little kid and the satisfied expression of one whose toils were finally to be rewarded. That she should turn up in a place like this, the Blue Parrot, down this dusty road (
how
had she got here?), struck him as an utter anomaly, like finding a seashell in the Strand.

Trueblood was joshing her about the half-pint Sly was setting before her. “Tangier! My God! Do you also like to crawl around inside active volcanoes?”

Trevor Sly gave his silly, high-pitched giggle. “Oh, now, Mr. Trueblood, you
do
tell tales. I'm sure it's not that strong.” Sly minced his way down the bar again to give Melrose and Trueblood refills.

“To tell the truth,” said Miss Fludd, “a volcano would make a change.” The long sigh she exhaled seemed to release something into the room. “Wouldn't it be nice to see, oh, Mount St. Helens?” Then she slid from her stool, and, carrying her half-pint of strangely orangish beer, made her difficult way across the room, her object being, apparently, to view the posters which lined the walls, as if Sly's collection were paintings in a gallery.

Miss Fludd.

Melrose said the name to himself as he picked up his own drink and moved to stand beside her. “Miss Fludd,” he said, then, aloud.

“Hello,” she said, scarcely turning her gaze from the poster. It was an advertisement for
The Sheltering Sky
, one of the newer ones in the Sly expo of desert wastes; one dark form more or less superimposed on another in dark and windblown garments. She studied it for a moment, as did Melrose. She moved on to another, Melrose following her in her silent circuit of the film posters. There must have been seven or eight big posters, new and old, most of them pictures of a desert, or at least having the suggestion of being stranded near one.

Miss Fludd said she really liked it here in the Blue Parrot. It was so exotic.

Melrose was astonished. He blushed deeply, and was glad for the dimness of the lighting, which simulated desert nights rather than days. Now they were standing in front of A
Passage to India.
The tiny figure of Peggy Ashcroft stood atop a howdah at the head of a long procession of camels, early evening sun turning the acres of sand amber.

She loved Peggy Ashcroft, she said. Had loved, she corrected herself. Now she was dead.

Beside that poster was the one of Lawrence in his flowing white garments, walking along a procession of dark boxcars. Melrose recalled Jury's speaking of the two posters, hanging side by side, how the camel train in the one and the railway train, with all of its boxcars, in the other, moved toward one another, yet were destined never to meet. Jury had said that. Melrose wondered if he himself had grown cynical or simply lacked imagination, looking at the posters, looking out over the room (trying to see it through her eyes). He told her of Jury's comment.

She said that he must be a romantic man. Sipping her beer, looking from one picture to another, she added, “And a disappointed one.”

Melrose thought about that for a moment.

Standing in front of the
Casablanca
poster, she asked him, “Have you ever been to Paris?”

He was, again, astonished. Hadn't
everyone
? But he didn't, of course, say that. Paris, to her, must have been as inaccessible as Algiers. Travelling for her was very difficult. Ruefully, she indicated her leg, hidden by the long skirt of the dove-gray dress.

“ ‘We'll always have Paris,' ” she quoted from the film. She sighed. “Isn't that what they said? ‘We'll always have Paris.' ”

He realized that one of the disarming qualities about her was her directness—her thoughts, either well- or ill-formed, right away became
words, as if there were no time to lose. And Melrose thought with a bit of a shock that rarely did he say what he was thinking. It had nothing to do with honesty or dishonesty; it was that his thoughts (and wasn't it this way with most people?) remained just that—thoughts, inarticulated.

They completed their turn around the room, a shabby old poster of
The Desert Song
, and Rudolph Valentino, and a smoky scene of dancing girls scattering veils. They returned to the bar, where she put down the dregs of her Tangier, said hello to Trueblood (smoking one of his shocking-pink cigarettes), and said she had to go.

Melrose helped her on with her coat and walked outside with her.

Standing by the dry fountain, she opened up the small package. “I just got these from Czechoslovakia. They come from Marienbad. Or what was Marienbad. I wonder if they'll change the name back again. Want a piece?” She held out the big circle of wafer-thin vanilla biscuit.

Melrose broke off a bit, tasted it. “Delicious.”

She nodded. “If you live next door, you should come and see us.”

Melrose smiled. Sounded like Ardry End and Watermeadows were a couple of terraced houses. “Thank you. I shall.”

“Well, goodbye, then.”

He looked around. There was no car except for his; he hadn't heard one before, he remembered. “But how did you get here?”

“Walked.”

“But—look, I'll be more than happy to give you a lift.”