Voices in Summer (12 page)

'Never said that. Never met the woman. It was Brian who couldn't stand her.'

'But men who remarry nearly always follow a pattern. I mean, the second time around they often marry somebody the spitting image of the first wife.'

‘I don't think that's happened with Alec. Brian approves of this one.'

'She's terribly young. Only a bit older than Ivan.'

'In that case, you will be able to look on her as a daughter.'

'Yes.' Eve thought about this, holding the sprig of thyme to her nose and looking at the garden.

From the terrace and the house the newly cut lawn sloped away, flanked by glossy-leaved camellias, which in May were a riot of pink and white flowers. The prospect, carefully landscaped by some long-dead gardener, enclosed the distant view much as a frame surrounds a painting. She saw the bay, the wedge of blue sea, dotted with the white sails of small boats.

Still worrying about Silvia she said, 'If we asked Ivan as well he could make up an even number for dinner, and we would tell Silvia-'

'No,' said Gerald. He fixed Eve with a stern blue eye. 'Absolutely no.'

Eve capitulated. 'All right.' They smiled, understanding, in total accord.

She was his first wife, and he was her second husband, but she loved him – although in a totally different sort of way – as much as she had loved Philip Ashby, Ivan's father. Gerald now was sixty-six – balding, bespectacled, white-haired, but still as distinguished and attractive as he had been when Eve first met him, as her husband's commanding officer, and quite the most eligible bachelor in the service. Active and energetic, he had retained his long-legged (all the Haverstocks had long legs), flat-stomached physique, and at parties was constantly surrounded by quite young ladies or cornered in sofas by elderly ones who remembered Gerald as a young man and had never ceased to be charmed by him. Eve didn't mind all this in the slightest. On the contrary, it made her feel quite smug and proud, because at the end of the day, she was the female he searched for and claimed, and took home to Tremenheere.

Gerald had put on his glasses and was once more immersed in the cricket scores. Eve got to her feet and left him there, going indoors.

The British Empire was built by naval officers with private fortunes. Although Gerald Haverstock was born a hundred years or so too late to take part in this enterprise, the principle of the old saying still applied. His success in the service was due, in the larger part, to his own courage, ability, and resource, but as well, he had the courage to take risks and to gamble on his career. He could do this because he could afford to. He loved the navy and was keenly ambitious, but promotion, although desirable, was never financially essential. As a commanding officer, faced with nerve-racking dilemmas involving the future safety of men, expensive equipment, and even international relations, he had never taken the easy, the timid, nor the obvious way out. This dashing behaviour paid off and earned for Gerald a reputation for coolheaded nerve, which had stood him in good stead and finally earned his right to a flag officer's ensign on the front of his large, black, official car.

He had, of course, been lucky as well, and Tremenheere was part of his luck. It was bequeathed to him by an elderly godmother when he was only twenty-six. With the estate went a sizeable fortune, originally amassed by astute dealings with the Great Western Railway, and Gerald's financial future was assured for the rest of his charmed life. It was thought then that he might leave the navy, settle in Cornwall, and take up the existence of a country squire, but he loved his job too much for this, and Tremenheere was left, until the day he retired, to run, more or less, on its own momentum.

A local land agent took over the administration, a tenant was found for the home farm. At times, for long periods, the house was let. Between lets, a caretaker kept an eye on the place, and a full-time gardener tended the lawns and the flowerbeds and kept the two walled gardens neatly dug and filled with rows of vegetables.

Sometimes, home from abroad and with a long leave under his belt, Gerald stayed there himself, filling Tremenheere with family, nephews and nieces, and his own naval friends. Then the old house came to life again, ringing with voices and laughter. Cars stood parked by the front door, children played French cricket on the lawn, doors and windows stood open, enormous meals were partaken around the scrubbed kitchen table or, more formally, in the panelled, candlelit dining room.

The house took all this unorthodox treatment in its stride. It remained, like an elderly sweet-tempered relation, undisturbed, unchanged: still filled with the old godmother's furniture, the curtains she had chosen, the faded prints on the chairs, the Victorian furniture, the silver-framed photographs, the pictures, the china.

Eve, brought here as Gerald's bride six years ago, had made only a few changes. 'It's dreadfully shabby,' Gerald had told her, 'but you can do what you want with it. Do the whole place over if you want to.' But she hadn't wanted to, because Tremenheere, to her, seemed perfect. There was a peace about it, a tranquillity. She loved the ornate Victoriana, the low-lapped chairs, the brass bedsteads, the faded floral carpets. She was reluctant to replace even the curtains, and when one by one they finally shredded to pieces and fell apart, she spent days searching through pattern books from Liberty trying to find designs that would match, as closely as possible, the original chintzes.

Now, she entered the house through the French windows that led from the terrace into the drawing room. After the brightness of the day outside, the interior seemed very cool and dim, and smelled of the sweet peas that, this morning, Eve had arranged in a great bowl and placed on the round marquetry table that stood in the middle of the room. Beyond the drawing room, a wide, oak floored passage led to the hall, and from this spacious entrance, a square wooden staircase with carved newels rose past a soaring window to the upper floor. Here were old portraits, a carved armoire that had once contained linen. The door to their bedroom stood open, and inside the room felt airy, the rose-trellised curtains stirring in the first breeze of the evening. Eve pulled off her towel robe and her bathing suit and went into the bathroom and took a shower, washing the salt out of her dried hair. Then she found clean clothes, a pair of pale pink jeans, a cream silk shirt. She combed her hair, which had once been blonde and was now nearly white, put on some lipstick, and sprayed herself with cologne.

She was now ready to pick raspberries. She left her room and went down the passage to the door that stood at the top of the back stairs leading to the kitchens. But, holding the door handle, she hesitated, changed her mind, and instead went on down the passage to where once had been the nursery wing, and where now May lived.

She tapped on the door. 'May?'

No reply.

'May?' She opened the door and went inside. The room, which was at the back of the house, smelled stuffy and airless. The window had a charming view of the courtyard and the fields beyond, but was firmly shut. In old age May felt the cold and saw no point in suffering what she called howling draughts. As well as being stuffy, the room was crowded, not only with the original Tremenheere nursery furniture, but as well with May's bits and pieces, which she had brought with her from

Hampshire: her own chair, her varnished tea-trolley, a fireside nig, hectic with cabbage roses, which May's sister had once hooked for her. The mantelpiece was crowded with china mementoes from forgotten seaside resorts, jostling for place with a plethora of framed snapshots, all of which depicted either Eve or her son Ivan as small children, because once, in the long distant past, May had been Eve's nursery maid and had remained, willy-nilly, to become – in the not so distant past – Ivan's nanny.

A table stood in the middle of the room, where May sat to do the mending or eat her supper. Eve saw the scrapbook, scissors, the pot of paste. The scrapbook was a new ploy for May. She had bought it in Woolworth's on one of her weekly outings to Truro, where she would lunch with an old friend and potter around the shops. It was a child's scrapbook, with Mickey Mouse on the cover, and already beginning to bulge with cuttings. Eve hesitated and then turned the pages. Pictures of the Princess of Wales, a sailing boat, a view of Brighton, an unknown baby in a pram – all clipped from newspapers or magazines, neatly arranged, but without any apparent reason or cohesions.

Oh, May.

She closed the book. 'May?' Still no reply. A sort of panic filled Eve's heart. Nowadays, she was always anxious for her, fearing the worst. A heart attack, maybe, or a stroke. She crossed to the bedroom door and looked inside, steeling herself to discover May prostrate on the carpet or dead on the bed. But this room too was empty, neat, and stuffy. A small ticking clock stood on the bedside table, and the bed lay smooth beneath May's own crocheted counterpane.

She went downstairs and found May where she had feared to find her, in the kitchen, pottering about, putting things away in the wrong cupboards, boiling up a kettle.

May wasn't meant to work in the kitchen, but she was always sneaking down there when Eve wasn't looking, in the hope of finding some dishes to wash or potatoes to peel. This was because she wanted to be useful, and Eve understood this and tried to make a point of giving May small harmless chores like shelling peas or ironing napkins, while Eve cooked the dinner.

But May stumbling around the kitchen on her own was a perpetual anxiety. Her legs had become unsteady, and she was always losing her balance and having to grab onto something to stop herself from falling. As well, her sight was bad and her coordination beginning to fail, so that the most mundane of tasks, like chopping vegetables, making tea, or going up and down stairs, became occupations fraught with danger. This was Eve's nightmare. That May would cut herself, or scald herself, or break a hip, and the doctor would have to be called, and an ambulance would arrive to wheel May off to hospital. Because in hospital, without doubt, May would be a terror. They would examine her and probably be insulted by her. She would do something mad and irrational, like stealing another patient's grapes or throwing her dinner out of the window. The authorities would become suspicious and officious and start asking questions. They would put May into a home.

This was the nub of the nightmare, because Eve knew that May was becoming senile. The Mickey Mouse scrapbook was only one of her disconcerting purchases. About a month ago she had returned from Truro with a child's woollen hat, which she now wore like a tea cosy, pulled down over her ears, whenever she went out of doors. A letter that Eve had given May to post, she had found three days later in the door of the refrigerator. A freshly made casserole May dumped into the pig bucket.

Eve unloaded her anxieties on to Gerald, and he told her firmly that she was not to start worrying until there was something to worry about. He didn't care, he assured her, if May was nutty as a fruitcake, she was doing no person any harm, and provided she didn't set fire to the curtains or scream blue murder in the middle of the night, like poor Mrs Rochester, she could stay at Tremenheere until she turned up her toes and died.

'But what if she has an accident?'

'We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.'

So far there had been no accident. But, 'Oh, May darling, what are you up to?'

'Didn't like the smell of that milk jug. Just going to give it a scald.'

'It's absolutely clean; it doesn't need scalding.'

'You don't scald jugs in this weather, and we'll all be coming down with diarrhea.' She had once been quite round and plump, but now, at nearly eighty years old, had become painfully thin, the joints of her fingers gnarled and twisted as old tree roots, her stockings wrinkled on her legs, her eyes pale and myopic.

She had been a perfect nanny, loving, patient, and very sensible. But even as a young woman, she had held strong views, attended church each Sunday, and was a passionate believer in strict temperance. Old age had rendered her intolerant to the point of bigotry. When she first came with Eve to live at Tremenheere, she refused to go to the village church, but joined some obscure chapel in the town, a grim edifice in a back street, where the minister preached sermons on the horrors of drink and May, with the rest of the congregation, renewed her pledges and raised her cracked voice in joyless praise.

The kettle boiled. Eve said, I'll pour the water into the jug,' and did so. May's expression was sour. To placate her, Eve had to think of something for May to do. 'Oh, May, I wonder if you'd be an angel and fill up the salt cellars for me, and put them on the dining room table. I've laid it and done the flowers, but I forgot about the salt.' She was searching in cupboards. 'Where's the big bowl with the blue stripe? I want it for picking raspberries.'

May, with a certain grim satisfaction produced it from the shelf where the saucepans lived.

'What time are Mr and Mrs Alec coming?' she asked, although Eve had already told her twenty times.

'They said they'd be here in time for dinner. But Mrs Marten's bringing some cuttings for us . . . she should be here any moment, and she's going to stay for a drink. If you hear her, tell her the Admiral's on the terrace. He'll look after her till I get back.'

May's mouth pursed over her dentures, her eyes narrowing. This was her disapproving face, which Eve had expected, because May approved neither of drink nor of Silvia Marten. Although it was never mentioned, everybody – including May –knew that Tom Marten had died of an excess of alcohol. This was part of Silvia's tragedy and had left her not only widowed but with very little money. It was one of the reasons Eve was so painfully sorry for her and tried so hard to help her and be kind.

As well, May thought Silvia a flighty piece. 'Always kissing the Admiral,' she would mumble complainingly, and it wasn't any good pointing out that she had known the Admiral for most of her life. May could never be convinced that Silvia did not have ulterior motives.

‘It's nice for her to come here. She must be dreadfully lonely.'