Set in Stone, page 3
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
“Even so…”
“I have to come to terms with what’s happened. I’m on my own now. Like poor old Strathallan.”
“Nothing like him, I assure you.”
“Good. Let’s try to keep it that way.”
We swapped a tentative smile and headed downstairs, the phrase I’d used echoing in my mind as we went. Coming to terms implied negotiation. But just who was I supposed to negotiate with?
When Lucy came home, we had tea in the garden, as the warm afternoon mellowed into a sultry evening. Then we walked into Hambleton for a drink and a bite to eat at the pub. I can’t remember what we talked about. I suppose we were all feeling our way towards a restoration of casualness and ease. Neither Matt nor Lucy avoided mentioning you. But they mentioned other things as well. The ordinariness of life in the face of death is both banal and comforting. It goes on, even when you can’t believe it will. Even when you don’t want it to.
That night, a strange thing happened. When I woke the following morning, to sunlight nudging through the curtains of my bedroom and a shrill dawn chorus in which the screech of seagulls didn’t feature, I realized that, for the first time since your death, I hadn’t dreamed of you. It was only then that I realized how much I had been dreaming of you. Was this part of letting go? I wondered. Was this one of many milestones on the road that led me away from you? If so, I didn’t want it to be. But what I wanted was irrelevant. Time is a road on which there’s no slowing down, let alone turning back. You’d left the road, but I was still on it.
Nesta Worthington, the housekeeper, had been mentioned to me the previous day. I encountered her for the first time that morning. She didn’t turn out to be the stereotype I’d envisaged. Plummily accented and smartly kitted out, she looked more like the mistress of the house than the hired help. Matt had gone into the Pizza Prego office in Leicester and Lucy was in the bath after a morning run, so it was Mrs Worthington who kept me company over breakfast in the kitchen. And she was evidently no believer in silent breakfasts.
“My husband died last year,” she volunteered. “That’s when I found out how poor I really was and how futile it is to avoid uncomfortable facts. Lucy tells me you were very happily married. You have my genuine condolences on your loss.”
“Were you very happily married, Mrs Worthington?”
“I was once, but not by the end. All the love got worn out along the way. Maybe you’re lucky in that sense.”
“You think so?”
“I only said maybe. Don’t take too much notice of the things I say. Lucy will tell you I converse the way I keep house: thoroughly but heavy-handedly. I’m not allowed near the porcelain. I’ll say one thing you could do worse than bear in mind, though. The death of someone close to you acquaints you with how things really are. And they aren’t necessarily as you’d thought. Bereavement can be cruel, but enlightenment can be crueller still.”
Lucy had planned a tour of the neighbourhood for me that day and I raised no objection. It was warm and she was wearing the white shirt and cream trousers of yours she’d taken from Stanacombe. She said nothing about it, though she must have known I’d notice.
She drove me round Rutland Water, stopping to see Normanton Church, preserved and marooned on a promontory in the lake, before we headed south, through quiet farming country, to Kirby Hall, a vast and derelict Elizabethan manor house, where we wandered through roofless halls and empty courtyards, accompanied by the mournful cry of peacocks.
“This is your way of cheering me up, is it?” I asked as we walked out across the lawns and looked back at the stone skeleton of chimney stacks and gable ends,
“Actually, yes.”Lucy replied, with an ironic smile. “I always come here if I need to remind myself what’s important in life.”
“And how does it do that?”
“Well, it’s all gone, hasn’t it? The people. The power. Even the plaster. They probably thought it would last for ever, but this is what it comes down to. A ruin, maintained by English Heritage to remind us of the futility of planning ahead.”
“I’m not sure that’s English Heritage’s remit.”
“Then it should be. Live for the moment. That’s the lesson, Tony. Doesn’t Marina’s death underline that? Aren’t there things you and she put off till another day, another year, that you wish now, with all your heart, you’d gone ahead and done—before it was too late?”
“Lots of things.” I looked away, afraid she’d see the tears well up in my eyes.
“I’m not saying this to hurt you.” She hugged me, and we stood together, gazing at the hollow shell of Kirby Hall. “I’m saying it because it’s true. Matt and I have an existence most people would envy: affluence, leisure and security. But sometimes I think it’s too safe, too risk-free. One of the last things Marina said to me—talking about your move to the West Country—was that she was trying to be more spontaneous. Don’t we lose that as we grow older: spontaneity?”
“I suppose we do.”
“But we don’t have to.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Do we?” Then she set off at a smart pace across the lawn, back towards the house.
I followed, walking slowly, letting her march on ahead, watching her grow more similar to you as the distance stretched between us, watching and wondering just what had happened inside her because of your death. It was almost, though I could hardly allow myself to think it, as if something had been released, something freed that was previously captive. And it had just begun to take flight.
The next stop on Lucy’s tour was Stamford, just the other side of the Al, a lovely old town, apparently untouched by time or at least the last couple of hundred years of it. Walking round, I found it easy to imagine you enthusing over its cobbled streets and Georgian shopfronts. Seeing new places was, in that sense, worse than clinging to old haunts. I wanted to share the joy of discovering them with you. But I couldn’t. And without the sharing, where was the joy?
We had lunch in one of the town’s old coaching inns. A strange disorientation latched itself onto the beer I drank and made me begin to question my senses. Rutland Water, Otherways, Stamford, even Lucy herself all seemed to be so uncertain in their identity, looking like things they weren’t or, in Lucy’s case, people they couldn’t be.
“We’ve been invited to tea by a friend I’ve made since moving here,” Lucy announced. “You don’t mind going, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“Her name’s Daisy Temple. She lives in a gorgeous old house at Harringworth. We drove through it on our way to Kirby Hall, if you remember. The Weiland Viaduct?”
“I remember.” It was actually the viaduct, an arrow-straight span of Victorian red-brick railway arches across a valley south of Rutland Water, that I remembered more than the village it overshadowed. “How did you meet her?”
“Her sister used to live at Otherways before the war. I contacted her because I was curious about the history of the house. Nesta mentioned the connection. We’ve become friends, despite the age gap. Daisy’s eighty odd, but up here”—Lucy tapped her forehead—“ageless.”
“And has she told you anything interesting about Other ways?”
“You could say so. As a matter of fact, I ought to forewarn you about that. Not that it’ll crop up over tea. It’s hardly…Well, it’s still a painful subject for Daisy, even after all these years. Naturally.”
“What is?”
“Her sister was murdered there.”
“Murdered?” I put down my glass and looked at her. “Really?”
“Yes. Really. Ann Milner, her name was. Killed by her husband, James Milner. He was hanged for it.”
“When did this happen?”
“The autumn of 1939. Nearly sixty years ago. When Daisy was just a bright young thing.”
“Did you know about this before you bought the place?”
“No. Matt got on his high horse about that. Said the agent should have told us. Ridiculous, really. Why would the agent say something likely to put the mockers on the sale?”
“Would it have?”
“I imagine Matt might have gone wobbly if he’d known.”
“But not you?”
“No. Why should I?”
“The usual reasons, I suppose: superstition, fear of ghosts.”
“I’m not afraid of them.”
It was an odd choice of phrase. I’m not afraid of them. As if they really did exist. But it didn’t strike me as odd at the time.
“Besides,” Lucy went on, “the murder didn’t actually take place in the house.”
“Where, then?”
“In the gazebo.”
“I haven’t seen a gazebo.”
“You wouldn’t have. It was in a sunken garden north of the house, reached by a zigzag path down the rhododendron bank. The path’s been allowed to grow over, on account of the fact that neither the garden nor the gazebo’s there any more. The rhododendrons grow down to the water’s edge now.”
“It really is a shifting landscape round here, isn’t it?”
“Do you mean literally, or metaphorically?”
“Both, I suppose. But tell me, what was the background to the murder?”
“Marital strife, I believe. Look, if you want the salacious details, which aren’t actually very salacious at all, I can let you have a magazine article about it. One of the Sunday supplements picked up on it when plans for the reservoir were announced back in the Seventies. “Murder scene to vanish underwater.” That sort of thing. The Milners had exotic connections. They made the murder seem more interesting than it really was.”
“How did you come across the article?”
“I found it amongst the junk Strathallan left behind. His idea of a joke, maybe. To let us know he’d kept us in the dark. Do you want to see it?”
“Very much. You’ve whetted my appetite.”
“OK. I’ll dig it out for you when we get home. On one condition.”
“That I say nothing to Daisy about it?”
“I assume you wouldn’t anyway.”
“No. I wouldn’t.”
“There you are. Then, that isn’t the condition. It’s Matt. He mustn’t hear I’ve been through Strathallan’s stuff. He’s very old–fashioned about that kind of thing. About quite a lot of things, as a matter of fact.” She laughed. “So, can I rely on your discretion?”
“If you think it’s necessary.”
“I do.”
“All right, then. I won’t breathe a word to Matt.”
“Good.”
And so, without thinking much about it, or weighing its significance, I became party to my friend’s deception. The issue was minor enough, of course. But, as Matt himself would have said, what begins as minor doesn’t necessarily stay that way.
Maydew House was a more conventionally elegant building than Otherways, though constructed from the same grey-pink stone and brownish slate. It was a squarish, modestly gabled country residence on the outskirts of Harringworth, where the village petered out into fields, fringed by massive old horse chestnuts. I think I’d expected manicured lawns and a raked-gravel drive, but actually the garden was a jungle and the house in need of painting. As for Daisy Temple, she wasn’t exactly what I’d expected, either.
Getting no answer from the doorbell, Lucy led me round to the side of the house, where a ramshackle block of stables and outbuildings stood engulfed in ivy and wisteria. Music I vaguely recognized from your Shostakovich phase was billowing out of a sagging doorway. We entered a dusty workshop to see a small, gaunt woman with cropped iron-grey hair, dressed in dungarees and a check shirt, sitting at a stool in front of a bench, kneading thoughtfully at a clay bust.
“Daisy,” Lucy called.
The old woman looked round. She had startling cornflower blue eyes and a placid, welcoming smile. “Oh dear,” she said. “You’ve come for tea.”
“Did you forget?”
“Absolutely not.” She turned off the cassette player, stood up and wiped the clay off her fingers with a cloth. “I just got the day wrong. You must be Lucinda’s brother-in-law,” she continued, advancing to greet me. “I don’t advise shaking my hand, but I am pleased to meet you.”
“Delighted to meet you, too, Miss Temple.” Her use of Lucy’s full name had surprised me. No-one else bothered with it. But I was even more surprised by the bust standing on the table.
“Please call me Daisy. I feel as if we know each other, Tony, even though we’ve never met before. Luanda’s told me so much about you. And your late wife, of course. I was so very sorry to hear of her death.”
“Thank you.”
“I have the impression, judging by the look on your face, that Lucinda didn’t tell you she was my latest subject.”
“No, she didn’t. Nor even that you were a sculptress at all.”
“Good. That means you won’t have turned up expecting a Michelangelo. My work is on a smaller scale than some people seem to imagine.”
“And none the worse for that. It’s very good.”
“It is, isn’t it?” said Lucy.
“Not finished yet, of course,” said Daisy, glancing back appraisingly at the bust. “But shaping up nicely.”
The bust’s unfinished state was probably why I found it so disturbing. Lucy seemed unaware of the effect, though it stared out clearly enough at me from the fashioned clay. It could just as easily have been you as her. That was the point. Daisy Temple had never met you. But in the likeness of Lucy she’d shaped she’d nonetheless found you.
We went indoors for tea. Lucy took charge of preparing it, while Daisy changed out of her sculpting clothes. “Sorry I didn’t tell you about the bust,” said Lucy as we stood together in the kitchen. “I wanted your unrehearsed reaction.”
“You got it. It really is very good.”
“That’s what you genuinely think? You seemed, I don’t know, distracted when you were looking at it.”
“Did I? Well, it didn’t mean anything. What does Matt—”
“He doesn’t know yet. I’m planning to surprise him.”
“Another secret?”
“Another harmless secret.”
“Yes. Of course.”
There were several busts in the drawing room, where we had tea, dotted around on plinths and window sills. Friends and relatives of Daisy’s, I assumed, some living, some dead. I couldn’t help wondering whether they included her sister or brother-in-law, but I had no intention of asking. Their plaster faces kept us an odd kind of company as we drank our tea and talked about the places Lucy had taken me to that day. Daisy had lived at Maydew House all her life, she told me, and knew the area intimately. The changes wrought by the coming of the reservoir couldn’t be overestimated, though she thought most of them changes for the better. Lucy’s ban on any mention of the murder threatened to make this a difficult subject to discuss, but the ban turned out to be unnecessary.
“I’m sure Lucinda will have told you about my sister, Tony, so I’ll save you the trouble of mincing round the point. Her husband murdered her in a fit of unfounded jealousy at Otherways sixty years ago and was himself hanged for the crime. I have come to terms with those events long since.” There was that phrase again. Come to terms. “People seem to find me interesting on account of that one ghastly episode in my family’s past, which can be irritating, given that I believe I may claim to be interesting enough in my own right.”
“You certainly are,” said Lucy.
“Well, well, it’s kind of you to say so.” Daisy smiled. “Perhaps I shouldn’t complain. I doubt you’d ever have contacted me but for hearing about the murder. And then I’d never have got closer to a racecourse than the columns of Sporting Life.”
“We’ve become a pair of racegoers, Tony,” said Lucy, seeing my quizzical look. “Daisy’s an excellent judge of form. We’re off to Newmarket next week.”
“Are you coming, too, Tony?” Daisy asked.
“Well, I…haven’t been invited.”
“You have now,” said Lucy.
“In that case, thank you. I’d be happy to.”
“We usually have a lot of fun,” said Daisy. “It takes my mind off things to get away for a day. I find it therapeutic, even if scarcely profitable.”
What things she needed to take her mind off, I didn’t like to ask. Seeking a change of subject, I gestured around at the busts. “How long have you been doing these, Daisy?”
“Since my teens, off and on. There have been…intervals…for one reason or another. And more failures than successes. These represent the pick of an indifferent bunch.”
“Hardly that. I’m no expert, but you’re obviously talented.” She looked genuinely appreciative. “Thank you.”
“What’s the earliest piece of work you have here?”
“Over there.” She nodded towards it. “By the window.” It was the head of a young woman, cast in green-veined marble. Her chin was raised, emphasizing a slender, swanlike neck. The face was clear-browed and high-cheeked, the hair swept back flatteringly. She was beautiful, but Daisy’s sculpture revealed more than that. It revealed something approaching sadness within the awareness of her beauty.
I got up and crossed the room to admire the piece. As I stood beside it, I heard the sound of a car engine outside and glanced up to see an old grey Morris Minor pulling in through the gates. It came to a halt beside Lucy’s car. “Looks like you have another visitor,” I said, watching the driver clamber out. He was a paunchy, mop-haired man in early middle age, dressed casually in trainers, trousers, anorak and a sweatshirt. Our eyes met for an instant, but he neither smiled nor nodded, merely looked away and marched towards the front door.
“Not a visitor,” said Daisy from behind me. “My lodger, Mr Rainbird.”
“He gives me the creeps,” murmured Lucy, as the front door closed behind him. There were footsteps in the hall, then on the stairs.
“Quite possibly,” said Daisy, as another door closed somewhere above us. “But he gives me the money I need to buy clay and back leaden-hoofed racehorses, so we mustn’t complain.” She smiled at me. “Sculptresses don’t get rich, Tony. Mr Rainbird subsidizes my art.”
