The Water's Lovely (15 page)

Apart from sucking up the currants with a hand-held dustette, Marion had absolutely nothing to do and this suited her fine. Money for old chicken feed, it was, or rabbit food. In case Avice got wise to the fact that no rabbit-sitter was really needed, she thought she should perhaps invent some hazard or alarming incident she could say had occurred during the rabbits' owner's absence. A firework going off nearby would do – such explosions were no longer confined to Guy Fawkes Day – or even a German Shepherd barking next door. Meanwhile she explored the house.

Marion brought all the enthusiasm and precision of a scholarly researcher to investigating other people's desks, drawers and other private places of concealment,
leaving no scrap of paper or even used envelope unturned. Looking for Avice's will, she finally found a copy in, of all unexpected places, a drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets where she kept the brochures of instructions for using the oven, fridge, microwave, hair dryer and alarm clock radio. The large brown envelope contained not one will but four, each invalidating its predecessor. There were approximately two years between them and the most recent had been made some twenty months before. Of course Marion's name appeared in none of them. She would have been astonished if it had, considering the shortness of their acquaintance. But it was apparently time, or soon would be, for Avice to make a new one.

The contents of a will shed a good deal of light on the testatrix's circumstances. Who, for instance, would have supposed Avice to own not only this place but a terrace of houses in Manchester? Or so many Tesco shares? No wonder she could afford to part with twenty pounds for the unnecessary services of a rabbit-minder. The beneficiaries were the Small Mammals' Protection League – Marion, a realist, knew she couldn't shake that – a nephew with an address on Berwickshire and a woman, not apparently a relative, on the Isle of Man. Avice, who was given to making her testamentary dispositions in elaborate language, had left the Isle of Man woman fifty thousand pounds ‘in fond memory of our happy schooldays when we first learned of friendship's joys and consolations'.

If she'd been at school with Avice, thought Marion, she was no chicken. Might drop off her perch at any minute. All this required a good deal of careful consideration. She put the will back exactly where she had found it and when Avice came back half an hour later told her she had caught – and killed – a flea which she had found on Figaro's back.

‘Oh, dear, how dreadful,' said Avice. ‘I'll have to take him and his sister to the vet. I didn't actually know rabbits had fleas. But it's half a mile away and taxi drivers won't take them, you know. Afraid they'll spend a penny, which they very seldom do.'

‘I could take them. Well, separately of course. If you'd like to make the appointments. I wouldn't at all mind carrying one of them in a basket half a mile. They're so sweet, it would be a pleasure.'

‘Would it?' Avice beamed. ‘I really do need more help with them than I have. Well, I don't have any. And they deserve the best attention, don't you think?'

‘I absolutely do. And by the way, a fox came into the garden and came quite close up to the windows. I don't think Figaro or Susanna saw it but I couldn't help thinking what might have happened if one of them had been outside. If I was here on a more or less regular basis I could see to things like that.'

‘Dogs and cats have owners, Marion,' said Avice with a friendly laugh, ‘but rabbits need staff.'

Arrangements were made to their mutual satisfaction. Marion was to have a regular job with Avice as rabbit manager but to include a little shopping, limited cooking and occasionally staying overnight. Giving up her job at the South End Green estate agents came as a relief. Of course the sum Avice had named was pitifully small, well below the minimum wage, but no worse than what Mrs Pringle had provided and look what the result of that had been. Marion was never worried by illegality and had reasoned that the perks would almost make up the shortfall. For instance, she would be doing the household shopping and could manage to make Avice's weekly budget include all her own eatables. There were, too, a great many nice things lying about the house, silver ornaments, porcelain and glass, not to
mention jewellery. Avice, whose sight was fast deteriorating, would hardly miss them. In a burst of confidence she had told Marion she had diamond rings, which had been her mother's, she could no longer squeeze over her arthritic knuckles. A plan of gradual abstraction must be made.

‘It's quite pathetic the way my poor old dad looks forward to my visits,' Marion said in a suitably lugubrious voice. ‘I really do need to see him three times a week.'

Avice had just heard from her managing agent that she would be permitted to raise the rent of her houses in Manchester, so was in a gracious mood. ‘So you go. Of course you must see your dear father.'

At home, where she now went only to sleep, Marion picked up the
Daily Telegraph
, a stained and battered copy which could only have found its way there by means of Fowler. It had plainly been used to wrap a baby's disposable napkin and it was enough to make her decide to have the locks changed forthwith. Just the same, she glanced at it before going to bed, turning first to the births, marriages and deaths, as she usually did with newspapers. Halfway down the deaths column was announced the demise of Bernice Maureen Reinhardt in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. Eighty-seven years old, beloved mamma and grandmamma, greatly mourned by her devoted Morris, Emmanuel, Hephzibah, David, Lewis and Rachel. Marion had had no idea Mrs Reinhardt had so many descendants. She had kept them very dark. Surely one of them might have let her know, a great friend like she was left to find out from a newspaper rescued from a waste bin.

She put the paper down and went to examine the bottle of morphine sulphate. No use for Mrs Reinhardt now. Still, the world was full of old ladies
and Marion was slow to accept defeat. It was essential to find out if the morphine was tasteless or if it had the kind of taste that would blend unnoticeably with Avice's favourites: tiramisu and tarte tatin. Unlike most women, Marion only felt truly secure when alone in her own flat after dark. There was no possibility then of her doings – seldom entirely above-board – being witnessed.

She took the bottle, labelled
Not to be Taken Internally
out of the bathroom cabinet. She was rather frightened of it but she had to find out. Unscrewing the cap broke the seal and she took it off. It was probably colourless but she couldn't tell because the bottle was of brown glass and she had forgotten what it looked like. If she dipped her little finger in and just touched the tip of it on her tongue, would that be dangerous? Could she get hooked? Marion was very reluctant to try. She remembered the hallucinations that had resulted from her mother's regular dosage, troops of white-robed people trailing through the room, haggard faces looming out of mist and receding again. Or would she develop a craving for the stuff, like Fowler for drink and various narcotics?

Gingerly she placed the tip of her finger on the surface of the liquid and quickly withdrew it. A tiny globule adhered to the skin. She dotted it lightly on to her tongue. It was faintly sweetish, slightly metallic. So might a coin taste if dipped in icing sugar, thought Marion, fancifully for her. It would, she supposed, scarcely affect the flavour of a tiramisu.

She waited rather nervously for an hallucination but after an hour had passed and none came she reflected that this was far too soon to think about taking any action in this area yet. The land must be spied out, Avice's financial affairs investigated, what relatives
and friends she had and, most significant of all, the situation with those two most precious of Avice's possessions, her rabbits.

There were things Ismay thought she would never do. At all costs some measure of dignity had to be maintained. Better suffer in silence, be like that girl in the play who never told her love but let concealment like a worm in the bud feed on her damask cheek. Bear the agony but never show it. That was what she thought when there was no suffering and no agony. Now she told herself, if I don't find him, if I don't speak to him and ask him, I may miss the only chance I have of getting him back. It may be that he is only waiting for me to come to him and say I'm sorry, I should never have let Edmund come here, I should never have shared with my sister. Was she to humiliate herself like that? What would she care for humiliation if Andrew was back with her?

Try the wine bar in the evening. He sometimes went there after his day's work was done. On two evenings in succession she went down to Brief Lives and waited for him just inside a passage that led into one of the Inns of Court. It was a narrow winding passage such as might have figured in a novel of Dickens but lit at intervals by modern lamps attached to its walls. She stood between two of these lamps, away from direct light, and waited for him to come.

Apart from a man who passed her very close by and said ‘What're you doing later, sweetheart?' she was undisturbed. He didn't appear and she went home after two hours, disconsolate. Had he not only deserted her but all his old haunts as well? She was no longer on the edge of hysteria, her heart pounding, her mouth dry, but empty now, cold, despairing. The next night she
was in the alley a little earlier. It was April but very cold and she huddled inside the sheepskin coat which had been Andrew's present at Christmas the year before.

It was just after six when he came, but not alone. He was one of a crowd of young men, all laughing and making wisecracks, who went into the bar together. She had thought that simply seeing him would cause her to cry out, even fling herself upon him, but the reality was different. She shrank against the cold brick wall of the passage. He was a very long time in there. They served food, she remembered him saying. Perhaps he had stayed to eat his dinner there. People came out of Brief Lives and fewer and fewer went in. The City died at night. The West End might throb with noisy life, be filled with loitering crowds who made fast walking impossible, but here there would soon be solitude and silence. Then, when she felt she had spent her whole life in this Dickensian passage, when she was frozen with numb hands and feet, when it was almost nine, he came out. Alone. He began to walk rapidly in the direction of Waterloo Bridge.

She followed him. The sight of him, even the back of him, had a curious effect on her. Few people were about but it was as if there were none, that he and she were the only living creatures in the world, that he would walk and she would follow him, at this same distance apart, for ever. He would never turn, she would never call out, she would never see his face again, hear his voice. They would be like that pair of lovers she remembered reading about at university – were they called Paolo and Francesca? – doomed to drift for ever in the void, blown by the winds. But they had been together, eternally embraced. Ismay thought she wouldn't mind the wild winds and the darkness and loneliness if she was with Andrew, in his arms, for always.

The idea was so wonderful and so painful that, as he crossed the street into the Aldwych and she followed him, she could no longer resist and called out to him on a passionate anguished note, ‘Andrew!'

He either didn't hear or didn't want to, though she thought she detected a sudden stiffening of his shoulders, a momentary faltering of his step. She called again, ‘Andrew!'

On the pavement outside the doors to a restaurant he turned and looked at her, unsmiling. He stood staring like someone who knows immediate escape is impossible. Here, not very far from Brief Lives, the streets were no longer unfrequented. People were everywhere, waiting at traffic lights to cross the road, entering bars and spilling out of them, and two couples, hand-in-hand and arm-in-arm, passed between him and her. For a moment he was invisible and she thought, he will go, he will get away from me … But when the couples had gone into the restaurant he was still there, standing with his head bent and his arms hanging relaxed, the picture of exasperated patience, as if he had given up the struggle. She approached him, no longer afraid, no longer trembling, only aware that she had caught him, she had him in her net. He stepped back under an awning, his back against a plate-glass window. She went close up to him, said on a thin high strangled voice, ‘What has happened to us?' And then when he didn't answer, ‘What have I done?'

He had such a beautiful speaking voice. After this man's voice all other men's voices were harsh or high-pitched or cockney or provincial or vulgar. He said, ‘It's not what you've done, Ismay. I've told you often enough but you took no notice.'

‘I don't understand.'

‘I think you do. You brought those people into our home and though I told you repeatedly that I couldn't stand it, you absolutely refused to tell them to go.'

‘But my own sister …' she stammered, almost unable to believe what she heard.

‘I don't really see that it makes a difference whether it was your sister or somebody else. That male nurse wasn't your sister. I'm afraid, Ismay, that the plain truth is that I got tired of waiting for you to do something about it. Let's say I knew you never would. No doubt you cared for them more than for me. That's reasonable, I understand that. So I – made myself scarce.'

She didn't know why the scream of horror just inside her head failed to make its way out into the shiny dark and bright of the Aldwych. It was a calm voice she spoke in. ‘Have you got someone else?'

It was at that moment that the girl appeared. She came out of the taxi which had stopped just behind where Ismay stood and which Andrew had been staring at while he spoke. Not perhaps as tall as she seemed to be owing to the height of her heels, she was recognisably Ismay's own type, but an exaggeration of that type, slimmer, fairer, whiter, more attenuated, her features those of an elfin creature in a fairy book illustration. A fur stole wrapped round her, she came up to Andrew, laid a hand on his arm and put her face close to his.