The Thin Woman (16 page)

“Don’t worry about the old boy.” Ben rather reluctantly put his book down. “People of his age still manage to fend for themselves. Jonas doesn’t exert himself more than need be, but good grief, he’s no older than my father! Being seventy doesn’t make a man an ancient monument.”

“Neither is he a spring chicken,” I said. “And cooking for himself he won’t be getting his vitamins and minerals. We don’t want him ending up run-down. I suggest we invite him to share breakfast and lunch with us; that way he will have two good meals a day and if he wants to eat bread and dripping for dinner it won’t matter. A light meal at night is better for people his age anyway.”

Dorcas nodded. “Kind thought. My grandmother always said …” She paused and took a sip of coffee—“a little more water in the stew and no one notices the extra mouth to feed.”

After a round of fresh coffee, I called an organizational meeting. Ben, it was agreed, would not try to dazzle us with his culinary techniques that day. We would have a light lunch and supper. He wanted to spend the day with his book to make up for the unproductivity of yesterday.

“Baked beans on toast will do me fine.” Dorcas was already rolling up her sleeves.

“All right.” I put down my cup. “Dorcas, I think you and I should tackle Uncle Merlin’s bedroom this morning. Everybody happy?”

My enthusiasm faltered a little when we reached the room and I took another look at the dust and detritus accumulated by half a century of neglect. But I reminded myself that buried beneath the cobwebs might be another clue, or at least an explanation of the clue we had already received. A man who hoarded laundry shirt boxes must have kept other souvenirs, like newspaper clippings or letters. The first order of the day was to take down the sagging maroon velvet curtains from the window, and let in light and air.

“Not worth cleaning!” snorted Dorcas in disgust. “Thick with moth, and stiff with dirt.”

Sneezing violently, as a swirl of dust—equal to any desert sandstorm—blew out of the folds, we staggered under the enormous weight of the material. When we finally got the curtains unhooked we were faced with the question of where to put them. Mounted on chairs at both ends of the window, Dorcas and I looked at each other. Nodding like a pair of identical mechanical dolls, we flung open the casement and bailed the lot out. The same fate awaited the stained bedspread. Fifty or more years ago it had matched the curtains. In a sense it still did. Another eruption of dust almost choked us as we lumbered over to the window. Blankets and sheets followed.

“Mattress?” Dorcas raised a shaggy eyebrow.

“Right. Out it goes.” By this time we had synchronized the old heave-ho routine to perfection. The mattress sailed out the window like a magic flying carpet.

“One blessing.” Dorcas was brushing the grime from her hands onto her dungarees. “In the good old days they made windows a sensible size.”

Stripped, the room looked a little indecent, naked. Dorcas and I divided up; she took on the huge wardrobe, and I pulled up the bedside chair and opened the mahogany desk. Two drawers revealed nothing of interest, other than a large assortment of old Christmas cards. Rather surprisingly, these were neatly grouped together by year and on some, comments had been noted: “Nice pair of carpet slippers this year” and “Another box of peppermint humbugs—doesn’t
the woman know they yank my teeth out.” In addition to the Christmas cards I found several boxes of used cheque books—again nothing exciting there, other than the fact Uncle Merlin had on several occasions either given or lent money to both Aunt Astrid and Uncle Maurice. From the sums involved neither had done badly out of the old man while he lived.

In the third drawer was a large cardboard box bundled with bills. Thumbing through I found them all marked paid in full and the dates. One caught my eye; it was a subscription to a free veterinary clinic. I studied it briefly and put it down.

“Any major discoveries?”

“Not really. Except Uncle Merlin looks better on paper than he did in real life. Turns out he gave the relatives quite a bit of financial help, and here he is making donations to an animal home. You’d think if he liked the four-legged race that much he’d have had a pet of his own, which brings me back to what that waitress said about this house having the wrong atmosphere.… How about you, found anything?”

“Four boxes of those round laminated collars with studs.”

“Hang onto them. They are antiques!”

At the back of the bill drawer was another cardboard box, smaller than the other and lighter. Lifting the lid I experienced a sudden premonition. This was important. I saw at once that the letters it contained were old, but what interested me more at first were the toys. They were small and worn, remnants, I supposed, of a child’s visit long ago to Merlin’s Court. Peeling open the top letter, I saw from the date that it was sixty years old and its tone was stilted, authoritative, pompous. Hardly today’s informal letter from Daddy to his son away at boarding school.

Poor Merlin! (For the letter was addressed to him.) In one of those peculiar flashbacks which sometimes come from reading old letters, I could see him vividly—a knobby-kneed, ink-smeared schoolboy in short trousers, striped tie, and peaked cap. Stricken with a father such as his no wonder the kid had grown into an oddball. Arthur Grantham had always been a vague figure to me, the skipped step in the
family ladder. I had gleaned more about him from Brassy the waitress yesterday than I had from my mother or the family.

The letters all bore the same message. Rearing a child was an awesome responsibility at best, and to a widower like Arthur Grantham a great trial. How “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” it was to have raised a son who shared none of his father’s talents or virtues and had the audacity to resemble his mother in taste and feeling. I was heartened to discover that Arthur admitted to one mistake in the course of his lifetime; he had married a woman unworthy of him. The sins of mother and son were dissected minutely.

I laid the fifth letter with its brethren and picked up the sixth wondering if I really wanted to read any more of this pompous piety. “Oh well, in for a penny …”

The letter began:

My dearest Merlin, happy as I am that you are enjoying your visit to the seaside, I must tell you that the days go slowly by without you. Think me very selfish, but I confess I am anxious for your return and so are the animals. I was sorry that Sybil’s kitten got lost.

Uncle Arthur in a more affable mood? Turning the page, I read the signature—
Your loving Mother, Abigail Grantham
. This letter, dated four years prior to the others, had been folded into a small square. Making it, I thought, just the right size to tuck into a small clenched palm where no one could see it. A sort of security blanket for a little boy whose mother had died, and whose father did not like him much. The time-scarred toys in the box assumed a thoughtful new significance. They had not belonged to a child who had come to visit and forgotten them on his return home. The wooden camel with the broken hump and the painted train engine had been the playthings of the boy Merlin. I was sure of that. At the ripe old age of nine or ten when he was sent away to boarding school, his stiff-necked father
probably ordered him to put away the trappings of childhood and immerse himself in Greek and Latin. My mental impression of Arthur Grantham was a man dipped in starch along with his linen, slicked-down hair parted in the middle, eyes like brown cough drops and a twirled wax moustache that never came unravelled.

What had the man really looked like? I riffled through the drawer again. Pulling open the others I had already searched, I left them stacked out like a row of steps in my haste. No photographs.

“Dorcas,” I said to the wardrobe, “can you manage without me for a few minutes? Fine! Tell you about it anon!” Down to the bureau in the drawing room. From its state of chaos I knew this had been used by Aunt Sybil, but being the jackdaw she was I might find a wad of old snapshots under the litter. Besides, I remembered something about the bureau. In a rare benign mood during one of my childhood visits Uncle Merlin had shown me a secret. There was a false bottom to the main drawer. Slowly inching this out I held my breath. Nothing. Nothing but more old bills, a dilapidated telephone directory, and a yellowed travel brochure itemizing the charms of a tropical paradise. Had Uncle Merlin once planned a trip for his health? Somehow I could not envision him sitting under a striped umbrella wearing a pair of skimpy bathing trunks and oversized sunglasses. I was disappointed because the memory of the secret drawer had raised hopes of finding more than old bills. One day soon I would box up all this stuff and send it down to Aunt Sybil.

The stampeding movement of typewriter keys from the dining room across the hall informed me that Ben was hard at work. Lunch, therefore, was not imminent. I went through the kitchen to the alcove by the garden door and unhooked my raincoat from its peg. The day was overcast and thick with clouds. A buffeting wind laced with rain punched into me the moment I set foot outside. With my rain hood flapping about my ears, I ran across the courtyard. I caught a glimpse of Jonas staring round the stable door, dressed in a sou’wester and oilskin coat. Ben had set him to clean out the moat, which
had become a dumping ground for litter, but the elements had forced him to retreat to dry ground.

Cupping my hands around my mouth, I bawled across the wind, “Come up to the house for lunch, Jonas.”

“Aye, won’t say no. Had a bellyful of me own cooking these last few days. Ain’t nothing highfalutin, is it? I take me grub plain. If I want snails I’ve got plenty in the cabbage patch.”

“You’ll eat what you’re given,” I yelled, and I was off. I could feel old Jonas watching me. Goodness knows why. A fat girl running is not one of the lovelier sights of nature.

Aunt Sybil took her time answering the doorbell. Assuming she must have taken the bus down to the village, I was about to turn away when I heard her feet slapping down the hall in oversized carpet slippers. The cottage door opened an inch, then widened, rather tentatively, I thought.

“Oh, it’s you, Giselle.” Aunt Sybil sounded as though she had been hoping for someone else, the coalman perhaps on a day like this. Or the vicar? That might explain the uneven streak of lipstick across her mouth and the mismatched earrings protruding from her lobes.

I explained my search for old photographs and followed her into her overstuffed sitting room. Every surface was smothered with magazines, books, rusty tin canisters, or blobs of tangled knitting wool stabbed through with metal needles.

Aunt Sybil started to gesture vaguely that I sit down, but thought better of it. Standing about, I felt like a stranger, which in a way I was. I had never known her well.

“Sorry, Giselle, but I can’t help you.” She was glancing absently around the room. “I was devoted to Uncle Arthur, but at my age hanging onto mementoes becomes overly sentimental.” (I refused to follow her gaze which must have absorbed the mass of useless paraphernalia, making Queen Victoria look like an amateur collector.) “I destroyed all old photographs years ago.”

I was almost certain she was lying. And I could not blame her. She might well feel that Ben and I had more
than enough without demanding a piece of her past as well. But as I made a move to go, she unbent a little. She did have some snapshots of Uncle Merlin, if I would care to see them? What surprised me was that she found them so fast and when she handed them to me they were neatly wrapped in tissue paper. Alas, the package was better than the products. Every one showed Uncle Merlin taken unawares in the garden, with half his head missing. “Tact versus Truth” was an old family motto on my father’s side. My enthusiastic response to headless Uncle Merlin brought its own reward. Aunt Sybil unbent still further and offered me a verbal glimpse of Uncle Arthur. “He was a dear, wonderful man,” she volunteered, folding up the tissue package. “Would you like to know his pet name for me?” She flushed slightly at the remembered compliment and smoothed one of the inevitable wrinkles in her dress. “ ‘His little ray of morning sunshine.’ And in those days children were expected to behave—not slouch or wriggle—so you see, if Uncle Arthur thought me special it was a great compliment.

“Poor Uncle Arthur, he did not have an easy life,” sighed Aunt Sybil. “You know he was widowed early?”

“Did Abigail Grantham suffer a lingering illness?” “Oh no. Quite the reverse. At the time, you understand, I was very young and not then living in this house, so I remember nothing except that she went very suddenly. I came for the funeral, and that stands out in my memory but nothing about the cause of death. Just between us, perhaps it was a blessed release, for Uncle Arthur, too. Abigail, to put it as nicely as possible, was a bit of a social liability. Not out of the top drawer. And then, she was not the best influence on Merlin. Under her care he was growing up rather rowdy.”

Aunt Sybil was such an infernal snob, I thought, but then her sagging cheeks puckered and I felt sorry for her. Had she resented Merlin’s freedom to be naughty, while she had to be good to please? “So long ago,” she murmured. “A few years after Abigail’s death my parents died and Uncle Arthur took me into his home. Of course there was a little money which he managed for me, but I know he would have treated me the
same if I had been a pauper. He was such a good man—always wearing the knees out in his trousers praying. And now,” she squared her shoulders and I had to admire the courageous set of her heavy jaw, “another new start. And with more tree time on my hands I have decided to take up some hobbies. Being of an artistic nature I’ve always been interested in sculpture, so I’ve decided to do each member of the family a head of Merlin for Christmas. I’m working in papier-mâché as I have so many old newspapers. What do you think”—she fixed her vague no-colour eyes disconcertingly on my face—“of my using a clear varnish instead of paint, to retain the literary symbolism?”

I could see myself whiling away a dull moment reading Uncle Merlin’s head.