Blood Lines, page 11
She still thought Beatrix might change her mind. She stood there with her arms folded and her head bowed, holding her breath. Beatrix signed. Lady Huntly signed, using her own Mont Blanc fountain pen. Brian signed and said he didn’t suppose the ladies would fancy coming along to an evening of nostalgia and sing along with Merle Haggard’s greatest hits. Fluttering her extended eyelashes, Lady Huntly said she would think about it and after Brian had gone back to his hedge, she and Beatrix settled down to schooners of oleroso.
Jubilant in the kitchen, Gwenda said to Clive that they had done it this time. She would take the will to the post and catch the five-thirty collection.
‘Or I could drive into town and drop it through Webley’s letterbox.’
‘We don’t want to do anything to draw attention to ourselves,’ said Gwenda. She put her arms round him, gave him a passionate kiss, and then she took the will down the road, dropping it in the letterbox at ten past five.
But the next morning she wished she had let Clive do as he suggested. She had never felt so nervous. Suppose there had been a mail robbery? Such things happened. Or a wicked postman, with no idea of his duty to the Post Office and the public, had stolen a selection of the contents of the box in the hope of discovering five-pound notes slipped into letters? She resisted for two hours and then she phoned Mr Webley. Mrs Cooper-Gibson, she said, was very anxious to know if the will had arrived. Oh, yes, certainly, he had it in his hand at that moment, said Mr Webley, sounding none too pleased and rather suspicious.
Gwenda wished she hadn’t done it. What would happen if he told Beatrix? A new will? Oh, the shame and the pain! Alexander came in the afternoon and talked for a long time in a maudlin way about how much he wished his mother and sister got on better. He implied that it was largely his mother’s fault. Had she thought of seeing a psychotherapist or perhaps a counsellor? Beatrix told him to go, she was tired, she disliked being lectured in her own house. Coming back from virtually pushing him out of the front door, she leaned back against the wall and stamped her foot. She stamped one heavily shod solid foot and then the other and a large oil painting in a gilt frame fell off the wall and struck her on the neck and back.
Her worst misgivings were realised. Beatrix yelled for Gwenda. She wasn’t much hurt but she was frightened. Her fears had been real and yet they had not been real, they were of the kind that wake the sufferer with vague apprehensions during the night but are not much more than an eccentricity by day, superstitious injunctions that if not obeyed may result in disaster, so why not obey them? But this had proved them right, proved her right. Gwenda offered to call the doctor.
‘I don’t want him,’ said Beatrix. At their last encounter she had overheard him telling Gwenda her troubles were ‘in the old soul’s imagination.’
‘Well, shall I have a look at your back, Mrs C-G?’
‘No, leave me alone. Now this has happened I shan’t sleep a wink. ‘Or if I do I shall re-live the nightmare of that picture falling on me.’
The picture, a portrait of Beatrix’s grandfather in a morning coat with some sort of chain of office hanging round his neck, was examined by Clive who found its cord badly frayed. There must have been thirty or forty pictures of equal size and weight – if not all of such unattractive subjects – in the house, and Beatrix said she would be unable to sleep ever again until she knew all the cords had been replaced. Clive set about it straight away, although it was half-past nine in the evening.
Beatrix said, ‘I may be doing a very imprudent thing, Gwenda, but I am going to take a sleeping pill.’
‘Quite right,’ said Gwenda. ‘After all, the odds against your caps coming off and sticking in your throat must be about ten thousand to one.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that. I’m not a bookmaker. As a matter of fact I would normally consider the chances quite high, as you know, only not now the picture has fallen on me.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Lightning isn’t going to strike twice, is it? It’s not in the nature of things for a picture to fall on me and then for my teeth to get stuck in my throat. You might as well say that tonight I’m just as much in danger as ever of being burnt to death by faulty electricity when obviously I’m not.’
‘If you say so,’ said Gwenda doubtfully and she found the sleeping pills and brought one to Beatrix with her hot drink.
By eleven-fifteen Clive had renewed the cords on twenty-two pictures. ‘I shall call it a day,’ he said to his wife. ‘Enough is enough.’
‘You’ll check up on the electric plugs, won’t you?’
Clive did. He went into his own flat and to bed just before midnight. Gwenda put her arms round him in her sleep. On the floor below, at the front of the house, in the big master bedroom newly fitted in shell-pink shag, Beatrix lay perilously near the edge of the bed. The drug had a powerful effect on her because in all her life she had only taken a soporific twice before. Still and totally relaxed, she lay as one dead. But some imperceptible movements must have occurred in her deep sleep, for an acute observer, if there had been one, who had watched her for the past hour, would have noticed that from the centre of the four-poster she had shifted in that time some six inches towards the edge. By half-past midnight her gradual forward progress had increased the distance to nine inches. At one-fifteen she was poised on the very edge.
The bedclothes were not tucked in. They never were. Beatrix had another phobia about that. She insisted that an inevitable result of tucking in the bedclothes was a nightmare in which she was sewn up in a sack with a snake and a monkey and thrown in the Bosphorus. So the sheet and blanket hung loose, while the quilt had slithered back to the far side of the bed. Beatrix’s left arm hung over the edge. Her left leg dipped over the edge and slowly her right leg joined it. Although she was fast asleep, she waved her right arm to save herself, but nevertheless slipped forward and tumbled on to the floor.
Beatrix lay prone with her face buried in the soft long-haired pink carpet. If her progress across the bed had been backwards she would have fallen into a supine position and very likely have recovered. But, still deeply asleep, she lay face-down with thick fluff pressing into her nose and mouth and it suffocated her. Within half an hour she was dead. The time was just before two.
Entering the bedroom at nine, Gwenda called out her usual merry ‘good morning, Mrs C-G’, a cry which turned to a shriek of terror. Her first thought was that the most-feared had happened and Beatrix had swallowed the caps off her teeth. She told the doctor that and he reacted to what she said with suspicion, not to say indignation. By then he had seen the bruise on the back of Beatrix’s neck.
The pathologist the police called in found more bruises on Beatrix’s back. Gwenda was questioned. She told the detective inspector about the picture falling on Beatrix, adding that the cord holding it in place had become frayed. When no signs of fraying could be seen Clive described how he had renewed the cord not only on the portrait of Beatrix’s grandfather but on twenty-one other paintings in the house. The inspector seemed to find this very odd especially as Alexander told him he knew nothing about a picture falling on his mother. The fear of such a thing happening was a factor in her neurosis, bearing no relation to reality.
Suspicion increased when the contents of the will were made known. The will itself was dated only two days before. Its provisions were that everything Beatrix had to leave, her house, her investments, as well as a huge capital sum, went to Clive and Gwenda. The inquest on Beatrix was adjourned while the police continued to make enquiries.
Lady Huntly told the inspector that she had been greatly surprised to be called as a witness to the will. Gwenda had rushed across the road with unseemly haste as if it were a matter of life or death. No doubt it was. Of course she had been able to see which way the wind was blowing as soon as she understood neither Clive nor Gwenda was to be the other witness. The inspector talked to Brian and Brian told him he had never been inside the house before and would have refused to have anything to do with this will business had not Gwenda implored him to ‘do this one little thing for her before the old trout changed her mind.’
Mr Webley described how astonished he had been to receive a phone call from Gwenda not five minutes after the will had come in the post. He had scarcely taken it out of its envelope. Mrs Cooper-Gibson had often in the past talked of changing her will and the process had frequently gone as far as a draft will being drawn up or even a will itself sent to her for signature, but in these cases things had gone no further.
Julia intended to contest the will. Or she said she did. That shag carpet had been fitted on Gwenda’s advice, she told the inspector. Her mother would never have got rid of her Wilton but for Gwenda and Clive who had gained an unhealthy hold over Beatrix. It was easy to imagine those two persuading Beatrix to break the rule of a lifetime, take a sleeping pill, and while she was unconscious roll her off the bed on to the floor and suffocate her by pressing her face into the carpet. The bruises were evidence of manhandling – what more did the police want?
Day after day Gwenda and Clive were questioned, sometimes at home, more often at the police station. They remained in Beatrix’s house, their house now. Their flat was repeatedly searched and scrutinised, their possessions tested and photographed and surface-scraped, examined for pink fibres that might have found their way from the floor of Beatrix’s bedroom into theirs. No one ever told them whether or not such fibres had been found. They had begun to be uneasy with each other, more polite and considerate than usual but with less to say.
Julia phoned or wrote letters to the police every day, quoting remarks Gwenda was alleged to have made on the state of Beatrix’s health, the extent of her income and the likelihood of her accidental death. After she had written thirty-five such letters she had a nervous breakdown, retired to a psychiatric hospital and gave up contesting the will.
Alexander got married. He had never fancied the idea of his mother and any wife of his in conjunction.
Sometimes Clive spent the night in a cell at the police station, they were getting used to him there, put a drop of whisky in his night-time cocoa and gave him an extra blanket, but the law restrained them from holding him for more than twenty-four hours. Gwenda they often reduced to tears by asking her why she didn’t confess and so save them all a lot of time and expense.
‘We shall never give this up,’ said the detective inspector, ‘not if it takes us twenty years.’
Lady Huntly refused to speak to Gwenda and Clive. She and her dancing partner ignored them pointedly, walking past with their noses in the air. All the neighbours followed suit. Mr Webley dined out on the tale of how he had been served mozarella tricolore, chicken a là king and charlotte russe by the notorious carpet murderers.
This went on for about a year. Gwenda and Clive gave up sharing a bed. Gwenda said she couldn’t sleep when the person beside her had such awful dreams, waking up with a yell two or three times in the night. Your own dreams aren’t in the best of taste, Clive said, moving into the spare room.
Brian went to Nashville with the band. It was a package tour and included Graceland and Disneyworld but of course they hoped to be talent-spotted. While in the United States he read a piece in a newspaper that he thought worth bringing home for the police. It told of a wealthy Texan widow from Beach City who had died through suffocation. She too had fallen out of bed and smothered in the shag pile carpeting. ‘After a ten-month investigation,’ said the newspaper, ‘her death has been ruled due to a freak accident.’
The inquest on Beatrix was reopened and a verdict of accidental death returned.
The neighbours continued to ignore Gwenda and Clive. Alexander’s wife had a baby. Julia came out of hospital and wrote a long letter to Gwenda, apologising for her insinuations and suggesting she take on, at a peppercorn rent, the flat which used to be theirs. Bertie the bank departmental manager had left her and gone to Hong Kong. Mr Webley’s partner warned him that the stories he was spreading of poisoned charlotte russe and stomach upsets after every visit he had paid to Beatrix’s house might well constitute slander.
Clive and Gwenda sold the house and moved away. They also sold most of the furniture but Clive held on to the portrait of Beatrix’s grandfather in morning coat and chain of office as a keepsake. Gwenda kept the video recorder to remind her of happier days when they had been a couple, sharing their home with a woman who had been as good as a mother to them. For they were no longer together. Their marriage, for a quarter of a century so happy, had broken up.
‘In all honesty,’ said Gwenda, for once using the phrase correctly, ‘did you kill her?’
‘You know I didn’t,’ said Clive. ‘I was asleep in bed with you. You were asleep in bed with me.’ He thought about that one. ‘Or were you?’
‘You know I was, Clive.’
‘You were just as capable of killing her as me.’
‘But I didn’t.’
‘You would say that,’ said Clive.
‘So would you.’
Clive bought a seven-roomed bungalow on the Isle of Wight, Gwenda a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Shropshire. Their notoriety travelled before them and they were rejected by the local inhabitants. Still, as Gwenda wrote, replying to Julia’s Christmas card, there was something to be said, in all honesty, for being unhappy in luxury.
The Strawberry Tree
* * *
1
THE HOTEL WHERE we are staying was built by my father. Everyone assures me it is the best in Llosar and it is certainly the biggest and ugliest. From a distance it looks as if made of white cartridge paper or from hundreds of envelopes with their flaps open. Inside it is luxurious in the accepted way with sheets of bronze-coloured mirrors and tiles of copper-coloured marble and in the foyer, in stone vessels of vaguely Roman appearance, stands an army of hibiscus with trumpet flowers the red of soldiers’ coats.
There is a pool and a room full of machines for exercise, three restaurants and two bars. A machine polishes your shoes and another makes ice. In the old days we used to watch the young men drink palo out of long thin bow-shaped vessels from which the liquor spouted in a curving stream. Now the hotel barman makes cocktails called Mañanas that are said to be famous. We tried them yesterday, sitting on the terrace at the back of the hotel. From there, if you are not gazing at the swimming pool as most people do, you can rest your eyes, in both senses, on the garden. There the arbutus has been planted and flourishes, its white flowers blooming and strawberry fruits ripening at the same time, something I have heard about but never seen before, for it is October and I was last here all those years ago in summer.
We have rooms with envelope balconies and a view of the bay. There are no fishing boats any more, the pier of the old hotel with its vine canopy is gone and the old hotel itself has become a casino. But the harbour is still there with the statue of the Virgin, Nuestra Doña de los Marineros, where, swimming in the deep green water, Piers and Rosario and I first saw Will sitting on the sturdy stone wall.
All along the ‘front’, as I suppose I must call it, are hotels and restaurants, souvenir shops and tourist agencies, cafés and drinking places, where once stood a string of cottages. The church with its brown campanile and shallow pantiled roof that used to dominate this shore has been almost lost among the new buildings, dwarfed by the gigantic Thomson Holiday hotel. I asked the chambermaid if they had had jellyfish at Llosar lately but she only shook her head and muttered about contaminación.
The house we were lent by José-Carlos and Micaela is still there but much ‘improved’ and extended, painted sugar-pink and surrounded by a fence of the most elaborate wrought ironwork I have ever seen, iron lace for a giant’s tablecloth around a giant’s child’s iced cake. I would be surprised if Rosario recognised it. Inland, things are much the same, as far as I can tell. Up to now I have not ventured there, even though we have a most efficient rented car. I climb up a little way out of the village and stare at the yellow hills, at the olive trees and junipers, and the straight wide roads which now make seams across them, but I cannot see the little haunted house, the Casita de Golondro. It was never possible to see it from here. A fold in the hills, crowned with woods of pine and carob, hides it. The manager of our hotel told me this morning it is now a parador, the first on Majorca.
When I have performed the task I came here to do I shall go and have a look at it. These state-run hotels, of which there are many on the mainland, are said to be very comfortable. We might have dinner there one evening. I shall propose it to the others. But as for removing from here to there, if any of them suggest it, I shall make up my mind to turn it down. For one thing, if I were staying there I should sooner or later have to rediscover that room or deliberately avoid it. The truth is I no longer want an explanation. I want to be quiet, I want, if this does not sound too ludicrous, to be happy.
My appointment in Muralla is for ten o’clock tomorrow morning with an officer of the Guardia Civil whose rank, I think, would correspond to our detective superintendent. He will conduct me to see what is to be seen and I shall look at the things and try to remember and give him my answer. I haven’t yet made up my mind whether to let the others come with me, nor am I sure they would want to come. Probably it will be best if I do this, as I have done so much in the past, alone.
2
Nearly forty years have passed since first we went to Majorca, Piers and I and our parents, to the house our Spanish cousin lent us because my mother had been ill. Her illness was depression and a general feeling of lowness and lethargy, but the cause of it was a lost child, a miscarriage. Even then, before there was real need, my parents were trying to have more children, had been trying to have more, although I was unaware of this, since soon after my own birth thirteen years before. It was as if they knew, by some sad superstitious prevision, that they would not always have their pigeon pair.
