The Windermere Witness (5 page)

Lucy reacted badly to her mother’s words. She opened her mouth and wailed, the sound too loud in the crowded room. Eleanor hugged her tightly and made soothing noises, looking round blindly for a place to sit. She chose a battered leather couch and flopped inelegantly onto it. Everyone
else stood uselessly around, until Russell appeared, peering around the door. ‘Ructions?’ he ventured.

George Baxter seemed disproportionately relieved to see another man. ‘The news about Markie’s just got through,’ he said tightly. ‘Poor little thing.’

‘Oh, indeed – tragic. Fancy a gin or something?’

Baxter seized the offer like a man dying of dehydration. ‘Good man,’ he accepted. Russell led the way to the kitchen, leaving the women to cope with the distraught child.

Simmy watched Eleanor, comparing the woman before her with the scraps of gossip she had gleaned over the past months, and the impression she had gained from the interview about wedding flowers, back in August. There was a well-guarded core of dignity that seemed to take precedence over everything else. She kept her chin up, whatever might be happening around her. She was not impulsive or emotional. Simmy thought her strength came from somewhere chilly and controlled. She treated her little girl more as a close acquaintance to be enjoyed than a child to be protected. The woman had her ex-husband with her, apparently because he had nowhere else to go and nobody else to be with. This implied that she held no permanent grudge against him for his part in the collapse of their marriage. Simmy always marvelled at women who forgave their men; who recovered from the shattering damage that separation and divorce wreaked on them. Sometimes she wondered whether she would have been less annihilated herself if her own parents had not remained together so steadfastly. She had grown up with the assumption that marriage was for ever, and Tony had initially endorsed this with such fervour that it had never occurred to her
to doubt him. She still could barely understand what had failed, apart from the death of their baby. Of course that was the whole and complete explanation, and it had not been Tony’s fault. Why, then, did she hate him so deeply, even now, two years later? Why could she not recover from that appalling year in which they could find no way to share their grief and console each other?

Still she looked at Eleanor. She had her two daughters, alive and well. She had a poetic Irish partner who taught magic to their little girl, and was apparently nothing more than a fey boyfriend who wandered off to Ireland when there was a wedding going on.

Lucy’s sobs were fading, and she lifted a wet face to her mother. ‘I don’t want Markie to be gone,’ she whimpered. ‘Markie’s going to marry me when I’m eighteen, just like Peter and Bridget.’

‘I know, darling, I know,’ murmured Eleanor. ‘It’s very very sad.’

Simmy was struck by the impossibility of understanding the currents and traditions of anyone’s family other than your own. These people were solidly affluent, secure, well connected, admired, and yet not invulnerable. They could die, like anybody else. They had to get through the day without too much pain, year after year. There seemed a chance that Eleanor understood this and had developed her own means of addressing it; not least in the production of a very fine little girl.

The father of the bride was a much more obscure subject for scrutiny. His reputation inevitably coloured any direct assessment. The pathos of his volatile emotions was real, but said little about his basic personality. Any man
would react with shock, rage, accusation, confusion when confronted with the murder of his only son. And many a woman, having been once married to the man, would abandon resentment and take him to her breast. Simmy’s tentative conclusion was therefore that these two people were really almost normal. And Eleanor at least might yet turn out to be likeable.

Indeed, Bridget, their daughter, had been more than likeable. She was a sparklingly lovely laughing creature. Bright, beautiful, beloved. Eleanor made nice daughters, it seemed. And Markie too had been very pleasant in the brief moments in which she had encountered him.

‘Well, we must go,’ Eleanor announced. ‘Home. I’ve got your gubbins in the car. Let’s get back to normality.’

Huh
, Simmy inwardly snorted.
Not much chance of that
.

‘I’ll go and tell Mr Baxter,’ she offered.

‘Thank you. Actually, Miss … Mrs …’

‘Simmy. Call me Simmy.’

‘Yes, well, actually, we hoped you’d come back with us for a chat. There’s some talk that you met Markie this morning, and we rather hoped you might tell us about it. George, you see … his last words to the boy weren’t very nice.’ She interrupted herself, conscious of the child on her lap. ‘Are you free this evening? We would run you home afterwards. It wouldn’t be late. Then we could give you back the clothes – unless you’d like them washed first?’

Simmy dismissed this with a quick shake of her head. She had no reason to refuse the request. Her curiosity as to how these people lived had been growing all day. She was almost flattered to be asked. But there was a thread
of resistance, alongside the instinct to accept. They were only interested in her because of Markie. They would pick her up and drop her again without a second thought. She might be seduced into regarding them as friends, only to find herself rejected within days.

Since moving to the area she had found it difficult to characterise the local attitude to incomers. There was no overt sense of closed ranks, perhaps because almost everyone she knew, other than Melanie, was also an incomer. Windermere was at the softer end of the Lake District, the fells covered with trees and the climate benign. A few miles north and the trees disappeared, the winds blew more harshly and human habitation dwindled to a smattering. Windermere saw the families and the retired, those more interested in a cruise on the lake than scrambling up High Pike or Scandale Fell. The handsome Victorian villas that filled the little town maintained an atmosphere of elegance and comfort, even now. The persistent presence of Shirley C Lingerie in the prime commercial position was an inevitable metaphor for the town. Without doubt, Eleanor Baxter bought her underwear there.

‘Okay, then,’ she said, with dubious grace.

The car was a roomy BMW, which had a child booster seat in the back. George automatically took the front passenger seat, so Simmy sat with Lucy. The interior smelt of money: a luxurious mixture of clean leather and a spicy perfume that emanated from a dangling freshener attached to the rear-view mirror. No hint of dog or mud or accidental spills, which filled her mother’s old Renault. Angie had befriended a local dairy farm and bought illegal milk there from time to time, transporting it in unreliable
containers that often slopped. The resulting smell could be dreadful on a warm day.

The lake was in shadow, the sun having almost disappeared behind High Wray and his neighbouring hilltops. The autumn colours deepened into dark chestnut and liver red, reflected in the calm water. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ Simmy breathed, her admiration all the more genuine for being involuntary.

‘Mmm,’ said Eleanor from the driver’s seat.

The woods of Rayrigg passed on the right, before Simmy’s own home turn towards Troutbeck. She had yet to experience the challenges of steep winter roads, snow and ice making the journey to and from the shop impossible without diligent attentions from the council gritting men. She had arrived in the last week of January, having missed by a few days the five weeks of serious winter that Cumbria had suffered that year. Nobody could quite convince her that all would be well in the coming months. Much more credible was a much-repeated tale of locals getting lost in a blizzard and freezing to death. Her cottage was on the steep winding road through Troutbeck, down which a car would inevitably slide, quite out of control, and stand no chance of getting up again until a thaw arrived. Melanie, Angie and others all laughed at her fears, pointing out that a system of salting the road was well established, and she was far from being the only person needing to travel back and forth every day.

Ambleside was only a few minutes further on, with the sudden looming fells embracing it on every side. Sandwiched between the river Rothay to the west, and Wansfell to the east, the town had a tighter, more chaotic feel to it than
Windermere. Charming, historic – Simmy felt there was a lot more to discover about Ambleside, when she had the time.

They turned to the right, climbing up towards the mountains, before stopping at a building that Simmy would have designated a mansion, if asked. Gables and wings, three floors and a generous parking area filled her view with a jumble of impressions. No wonder various relatives could stake a claim to their own permanent room here. At a rough estimate, there had to be at least eight bedrooms.

Constructed of the same dark stone as so many other nineteenth-century edifices, this was a villa on a significantly grand scale. ‘Wow!’ she breathed. ‘What a fabulous house!’

‘I’d like to pretend it’s been in the family since it was built, but the truth is much less glamorous,’ Eleanor said. ‘George and I bought it when we were first married. His father died the week of our wedding, and there was lots of money sloshing about.’

The parallel was too stark to be ignored. ‘Sounds a bit like a jinx,’ Simmy suggested.

‘What?’

‘Deaths and weddings,’ Simmy explained, thinking of the famous Curtis movie. ‘Although—’

‘God! I never thought of that! You realise you’ve just ensured that nobody in the family will ever get married again, don’t you?’

The tone was lighter than might have been expected. Eleanor, Simmy suspected, was not so very profoundly affected by the death of Markie, despite his regular presence in her life and her little girl’s affection for him. After all – why should she be, if the story Melanie had told was
true? Markie had been born to a … what? Paramour? Concubine? … of George’s, while he was married to Eleanor and fathering Bridget. Effectively a bigamist, conducting the two families with little effort to conceal the truth, he had a reputation for getting away with it. At least Eleanor had retained the handsome house, when they finally divorced. By that time, George Baxter had been making money by the truckload, with his hedge funds and offshore dealings. He could afford to be generous, in the feckless nineties. Since then, the world had turned against him and his kind, but his money was safe and, until this day, his serenity unruffled, as far as Simmy could gather.

‘Shame about the flowers,’ said Eleanor.

Simmy was getting out of the car, as these words were uttered, and wasn’t sure she had heard them properly. Lucy had extracted herself from her safety harness and was waiting like royalty for release from the car. George was unmoving in the front. ‘Pardon?’ said Simmy.

‘I mean – what happens to them now? All those lovely swags and sheaves and whatnot. The girls will take their bouquets home, but all the rest of them just go to waste. It seems so awful.’

‘The hotel will use a lot of them, I think. That’s quite usual. They might put some of the big arrangements in the foyer. But the swags have to come down in the morning. I’ll have to go and do that.’

‘Do you take them away with you?’

It was an awkward question, at least potentially. ‘Some of them, yes. They don’t get sold again,’ she added defensively.

‘I wasn’t imagining they did. It just seemed sad, that’s
all. So much discussion and work, getting them done, and then just over in a flash.’

‘Ephemeral,’ said Simmy. ‘That’s the whole thing about flowers, though, isn’t it? That’s why they have them at funerals – to symbolise the brevity of life.’

‘Is it? I thought it was to mask the smell of the corpse.’

‘Nell – for Christ’s sake!’ George had got himself out of the car and was leaning one hand on the warm bonnet, apparently in serious need of the support.

‘Sorry. Take no notice of me. Come on, Luce …’ She opened the rear door of the car and the little girl scrambled out. Nobody seemed to want to go into the house. The sky in the west was streaked with reds and pinks, mirroring the turning leaves on the hillsides. A puddle on the edge of the sweeping approach to the front door caught the same hues. Ambleside lay below them, and the lake stretched away to their left. It was an almost outrageous place to live.

‘Welcome, anyway,’ Eleanor added awkwardly to Simmy. ‘Come inside and we can have a drink.’

They went in through the front door, opened with a simple Yale key. Simmy waited for elaborate disabling of alarms to happen, but there was no suggestion of such precautions. The spacious entrance hall was gloomy and chilly, its stone floor uncovered by any mitigating carpet or rugs. There were doors on both sides, as well as straight ahead. Most of them stood open.

‘It’s a rambling old place,’ Eleanor said, half apologetic. ‘Impossible to keep warm, of course. We tend to huddle in the family room all winter.’

She led the way into a big square room with a high ceiling and a window taking up a fair proportion of the
rear wall. It looked eastward onto fells rising into the distant twilight, beyond a large garden. Eleanor pulled the heavy red velvet curtains across before Simmy could properly admire the view. This, it seemed, was not the family room. It contained a baby grand piano, richly patterned Turkish carpet and a set of bronze statuettes on plinths that were pure art deco. The wallpaper should have been William Morris, but was something rather more muted, in the same autumn colours that had been haunting Simmy all day.

‘Lucy, are you hungry?’ Eleanor asked, as if the thought had only just occurred to her.

‘We fed her,’ Simmy interposed. ‘But it wasn’t much. We’ve been on a long walk since then.’

‘Thank you. I was rather awful, wasn’t I – expecting you to take charge of her like that, with no warning? I just assumed you’d have little ones of your own, for some reason.’

Simmy merely shook her head. Lucy flopped down on the carpet, beside an antique revolving bookcase, and slowly sent the thing twirling round and round. The house was silent, with no hint of a cook or nanny or lady’s maid poised to fulfil such needs as might arise. George Baxter went to the piano and sat down on its stool, looking as unlike a pianist as anyone could.