Something Wicked (12 page)

He cast off and expertly steered the
Hornet
into midstream. Verity lay back on the cushioned chair to soak up the sun and relax.

‘This is so kind of you,’ she murmured but Mr Black, intent on avoiding the many small craft wandering this way and that, ignoring the rule of the river to keep to the right, did not hear her. Verity’s eyes closed and she slept. It annoyed her that, though she did not sleep much at night, during the day and particularly if she were relaxed, she would drop off to sleep at odd moments. Dr Bladon said it was all part of the healing process, and perhaps it was, but she never liked to be caught napping.

She woke up with a start, unsure if she had slept for a few seconds or an hour. Mary was awake, trailing her hand in the water. Her father was still at the wheel, looking rather grim-faced for a pleasure outing. Perhaps, she thought, he was worrying about his daughter’s health.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked idly, sitting up straight.

‘Maidenhead. Not far now. It’s the house of a friend of mine. He’s invited us to have our picnic in his garden.’

Verity did not reply but her peace of mind was disturbed by a feeling of unease. What was she doing on this rich man’s boat? Why had Mr Black invited her? He must know she was his natural enemy. Was it pure kindness or was there something behind it? But why should there be? She was being absurd. What possible interest could he have in her?

A few minutes later, he waved to a man on the river bank and expertly brought the boat alongside a low brick wall into which steps had been cut. After he had helped the two girls out of the boat, he introduced them. ‘Jack, this is my daughter Mary.’

‘Mary! Of course I remember you. We met in London last year. I was so sorry to hear you had been ill, but you’re looking well.’

‘Thank you, Mr Amery. I am feeling better but I’m still rather weak. I hope you will forgive us if we don’t rush around too much.’

‘Of course, my dear, and this is . . .?’ He put out his hand.

‘This is the celebrated Verity Browne. She shares a room at Bladon’s place with Mary. Do you know each other?’

Amery withdrew his hand and looked first at Mr Black and then at Verity, as though wanting to know what joke was being played on him. Whether Black was being mischievous or whether he really didn’t know that Jack Amery was a fervid supporter of Franco and the rebels in Spain while she was a noisy supporter of the Republic, Verity could not say, but here she was, a guest of one of the men she and her friends most excoriated. She was taken by surprise and had no idea how to react. One thing was certain, she was not going to shake his hand.

‘Verity Browne!’ She saw that Amery was as taken aback as she was and acquitted him of being complicit in Black’s little joke, if that was what it was. She was sure he had had no idea of her identity until he heard her name. He pulled himself together, saying ‘I fear, old chap, that you have dropped a bit of a clanger. Miss Browne and I do not see eye to eye on Spain, and on much else, I suspect.’

‘Oh, but that’s rubbish, Jack. I insist on you knowing Miss Browne. She won’t bite.’

Amery seemed less than sure about this and, to Verity’s relief, said, ‘I say, if the ladies will forgive us, I’d like to have a word with you in the house.’

‘Is Una at home?’ Black inquired.

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ he replied shortly.

‘Mary, lay out the picnic, will you? We won’t be long.’

Verity’s heart was beating fast. How could she break bread with this Fascist arms dealer? She could wear a mask of courtesy when talking to people whose views she violently disagreed with but this man was disgusting. She forced herself to admit that Amery probably thought the same of her. She wondered if he would make some excuse not to return to share their picnic. The trouble was she could not escape. She had no money with her even if she had had the strength to walk somewhere to summon a taxi. She looked at the river but, perversely, it was suddenly empty. But what a wild idea even to think of hailing a passing launch to take her back to the clinic, as though she was in Piccadilly Circus hailing a taxi. No, she must wait and hope that Amery would do the decent thing.

‘Mary, is your father an old friend of Mr Amery’s?’

‘I have never heard him say so. Take the strawberries, will you? His father is a great friend.’

‘Leo Amery – the MP?’

Oddly enough, Edward had been talking to her about him the previous day and had mentioned his meeting with Jack at Turton House. He had been far from sure about Leo Amery. He said Churchill had called him the ‘straightest man in public life’ and congratulated him on a speech he had made in the House of Commons at the time of the Abyssinian crisis castigating the Prime Minister for his pusillanimous stand against Mussolini’s naked greed. The Italian dictator had been able to seize Ethiopia for his shoddy new empire without serious opposition. On the other hand, two or three years earlier Amery had returned from a visit to Hitler calling him ‘a bigger man’ than he had expected and talking of ‘the fundamental similarity of many of our views’.

Jack was a constant source of embarrassment to his father and Edward had said that he admired Amery for his loyalty to his boy whatever scrapes he got into. He had gone on to ponder how it was that so many good men in public life – even Winston Churchill and Stanley Baldwin – had unsatisfactory sons who caused their fathers much heartache. Perhaps, Verity had suggested, it was impossible to be devoted to politics and still make time for family life. Edward had wondered if she was alluding to her own reluctance to marry and have children.

To Verity’s immense relief, Mr Black came back on his own, carrying a Gladstone bag which he tossed in the launch before joining them on the grass.

‘I do apologize, Miss Browne. I had forgotten until Jack reminded me that you and he are on different sides when it comes to the war in Spain. He thought it better not to accept my invitation to share our picnic. It’s a sad thing that events in foreign countries can cause such wide divisions in our society.’

‘We have to stand up for what we think is right,’ was all Verity would say, not wishing to be rude, preferring to sound self-righteous.

He seemed rather to enjoy arguing with her and they batted between each other their views on all the main issues of the day, almost always disagreeing but neither of them becoming angry. Mary, too, quietly made her opinions known and sharply rebuked her father when he started praising Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.

By three o’clock, seeing that Mary and Verity were tiring, Mr Black gathered up the detritus from the picnic and flung it into the boat. He helped them aboard and took them back to Henley. Nothing much was said on the return journey and, once again, Verity fell asleep in her comfortable chair. She awoke as the
Hornet
bumped against her mooring to find that the chauffeur was preparing to help them disembark. The Gladstone bag was gone – no doubt already in the car – and Verity wondered idly what Jack Amery had given her host. It must have been something bulky but she had not thought it polite to ask.

Back at the clinic, she thanked Mr Black for a delightful day out.

‘I hope I didn’t tire you.’

‘I am tired,’ she admitted, ‘but nicely tired. I am sure the sunshine and the river did me good. It was very kind of you to invite me. I hope I didn’t intrude.’

‘Not at all. When you are better, you must let me give you lunch at the House. I really think I might convert you.’

Verity smiled weakly. ‘I am afraid that would be too hard a job, Mr Black, even for you . . .’

‘Please call me Roderick.’

‘Well, I was just going to say . . .’ she could not bring herself to use his Christian name so she called him nothing, ‘that, though we profoundly disagree on so many things, I very much enjoyed debating them with you. I feel so isolated here and it always helps to think things through if one can discuss them with someone who doesn’t agree with you.’ Changing the subject, she asked, ‘I wonder where Jill is?’

At that moment, Dr Bladon entered the room without knocking. ‘Not too exhausted, I trust? I’m afraid I have some bad news about Jill. She was taken ill while you were out and has had to go into hospital. I hope she will be back with us soon.’

Though he spoke confidently enough, Verity got the feeling that he did not believe it and her spirits, which had been lifted by the day on the river, fell into her boots. Selfishly, perhaps, her immediate thought was, ‘Is that what will happen to me? Will I be rushed into hospital at death’s door?’

No, she decided. That would
not
be her fate. She would get better. She had so much to do and the world was so interesting. She would fight not to lose it.

6

Mrs Booth, Hermione Totteridge’s sister, lived in Burnham Market in a pleasant house called Boltons which was – as her husband later told him – of some historical interest: Horatia, Nelson’s daughter, had been married from there. The church was just a few hundred yards away and Edward strolled across the street. The church door was unlocked and he entered the cool interior. He picked up a booklet which gave him some information about its history. The fourteenth-century tower with its battlemented parapet was its chief glory but was spoiled by two huge brick buttresses added in the 1740s when it was feared that the tower was about to collapse. A well-meaning Victorian architect had destroyed much of the original medieval interior although the seventeenth-century bells remained. Edward could well imagine the daughter of England’s greatest hero entering married life down St Mary’s long aisle.

In the churchyard he leant against one of the tombs and lit a cigarette. These Norfolk churches were surely one of England’s chief glories but he wondered how long they could survive as the population dwindled. Year after year more and more people left the land, their arduous labour no longer required when the ploughing and reaping could be done so much more cheaply and quickly by modern behemoths. The Blythe family monument, for instance, against which he was resting, was unlikely to remain the repository of twentieth-century Blythe bones for very much longer as they lived and died in cities far from the origin of their tribe.

Yet he would not say, glibly, that this was England ‘going to the dogs’ – as he knew his father would have termed it – because in previous centuries the agricultural labourer had lived a short and wretched life racked by rheumatism from damp and cold, the East Anglian wind cutting him to the bone for most of the year. Life was short when poverty, ignorance and inbreeding took their toll. The cottages he saw – so picturesque in the sunshine and now being renovated and suburbanized – had been, until the end of the Great War, insanitary sties, hardly fit for animals. He chuckled as he realized that his way of thinking could be put down entirely to Verity’s lectures on the evils of capitalism. She always claimed that, although the city slums were a disgrace to a prosperous and so-called civilized society, rural poverty was in many ways more deeply ingrained and ruined more lives.

Just as he was about to throw away his cigarette and leave, he was hailed by a good-looking, cheerful fellow wearing a dog-collar whom he took to be the rector.

‘Admiring our fine church?’

‘Indeed, though I was also wondering how it could be maintained when congregations are declining and the cost of replacing the roof is now beyond the purse of most of us. But it is a magnificent church,’ Edward added hastily, fearing he had sounded sententious. ‘No doubt God or the government will provide.’

‘We must hope so. By the way, my name is Joyce – John Joyce.’

‘Edward Corinth,’ he responded, shaking hands.

‘I encourage myself,’ Joyce went on, ‘by remembering that during the Black Death most of the population was wiped out and there were four inductions. In other words, the shepherd died with his flock but somehow some survived and even prospered. That tomb you were leaning on is a case in point. It belongs, as you probably observed, to a local family, the Blythes, who have been buried here generation after generation. You will find similar tombs for the Hammonds, the Ives, the Spencers and many others. And inside the church there is a brass on the north wall portraying a lady with three of her children. The inscription tells us that it was dedicated to John Huntley and bears the date 1523.’

‘Yes, and, to judge from the number of gravestones set up just after the war, the 1918 flu epidemic took almost as great a toll as the Black Death.’

‘Indeed, indeed!’ sighed the rector.

‘Our history – the history of the English people – is recorded in these churches, Rector, and that’s one of the reasons why they should be preserved and nurtured.’

The rector looked surprised at the stranger’s eloquence and Edward, realizing that he might have sounded pretentious, hurried on. ‘But tell me, are the current owners of Boltons churchgoers?’

‘They are, I am glad to say. Why, do you know our good doctor?’

‘I am about to call on Dr Booth,’ Edward replied, evasively. ‘He’s been here a long time?’

‘Yes, indeed. All his life. When we talk about “the doctor” round here, we mean Booth.’

When the rector had said his farewells, Edward strolled around the churchyard. He noticed several gravestones bearing the name Booth, one dating back to 1680. As he scraped off the lichen to read the inscription, he wondered why the Booths appeared to have no family tomb. Perhaps they had simply not been rich enough.

Dr Booth proved to be a mild-mannered man in, Edward judged, his late sixties. His interest in local history and Nelson in particular was obviously important to him but he was careful not to bore his visitor.

‘I suppose it’s living in this house and being so near to the sea,’ he said apologetically, ‘but the older I get, the more I enjoy researching the history of this place – Boltons in particular. You see, my family has lived in the house for almost three centuries. That is really rather remarkable, is it not?’

‘It is. I met the rector in the churchyard and he told me how well respected you are here. He said that when people talk about “getting in the doctor” they mean you.’