Closed at Dusk (12 page)

‘It's true!'

‘That's all you know. Listen, after Phyllis Bunby killed the baby, she didn't flush it away. She – take your hands away – she fed it to the pigs.'

Rob's heart stopped. His legs felt weak. He sat down on the padded playroom fender and got the strength to say, ‘Pigs don't eat people.'

‘
Don't
they?' Dennis came over and squatted in front of Rob, his jeering face very close. ‘What about that old man who escaped from the nursing home and they never found him?'

‘What old man?' If there had been a fire in the grate, Rob might have fallen backwards into it.

‘Wandered off into a farmyard. Weeks later, they found a pyjama button and his false teeth in the pigsty. Nothing else.'

‘I don't believe it.'

‘It was in the paper.'

‘I don't read the paper.'

‘Because you can't read.'

After the Closing Bell rang, Dorothy Taylor came to the tearoom and found Josephine alone. ‘Where's Ruth? I wanted to see what time she's coming back to baby-sit.'

‘She went off in a hurry ten minutes ago. Her husband came by with her younger son on the way to the hospital. He hurt his ankle falling off his bike – a really bad sprain.'

‘Oh dear, she was going to stay with the children while we go out to dinner, but she won't be back. Sunday evening – they'll wait ages in Casualty.'

‘Mrs Taylor.' Jo felt herself swelling with pride and nobility, padded breasts and all. ‘You know I said I'd help in the house any time … let me stay with the children for you.'

‘I couldn't.'

‘I'd be glad to, honestly. I've got nothing else to do.'

‘Well, now …' Dorothy was not one to dither about decisions. ‘There's only the three bigger ones. My daughter-in-law will take the baby with her. But look – I can't let you do it as a favour.'

‘I want to,' Jo said, ‘but if it makes you happy,' she felt powerful, ‘you can give me what you usually pay Ruth.'

Jo had quite a nice evening. Dennis watched television downstairs. Annabel and Rob had their baths, and then Jo read to them, sitting in the low rocking-chair in the playroom that must have been the nursery during Troutie's reign.

When Annabel stood up to get some juice out of the little upstairs kitchen, she asked Jo pertly, ‘Do you dye your hair?'

Well, this was bound to come, however careful she was. Jo had the story ready. ‘I've got a bit of grey coming in at the top.'

‘My mother doesn't,' Rob said.

‘Of course not. She's younger than me.' Jo was proud that her voice was smooth and amiable, though her mind was gritting its teeth. ‘I hate the grey at my age, so I colour it in a bit.'

‘Read some more.' Rob sat against Jo's legs, warm and bony.
Rex's child
! It was bizarre, part of a wild dream.

When Jo said it was bedtime, Rob and Annabel pretended to be looking for something, and pulled everything out of the toy cupboard.

Shall I make them put it back? They've got to accept me, not resent me. Jo waited a little while and then said, ‘Bedtime,' again.

‘But you promised I could show you Flusher.'

‘Oh,
Rob
,' Annabel protested, and Jo said, ‘Not at bedtime.'

‘Why not? I'm not afraid. It's just a silly old loo.'

It was. But ugly and somehow fascinating, as a testimonial to Victorian drudgery and slops. Jo could see why a family myth had been built up about it.

She got the children into their rooms. Rob took Charlotte on to his bunk. Annabel had put a large dented celluloid doll into the baby seat, which she put on the foot of her bed. When Dennis came up and listened to music on the stereo in Keith's room, Joe put all the toys and games neatly back in the cupboard and went down to the kitchen to get some supper, as instructed by Dorothy.

The empty house was too big. The high-ceilinged rooms were huge, the arched white corridors branching off to multiple corners and odd levels, the staircase a broad cavern. It ought to be frightening, alone downstairs, but it was friendly and peaceful. Open windows welcomed in night flower scents, and a cool breeze off the lake. Clocks in the hall and drawing-room struck casually, several minutes apart, noting what they
thought was the hour melodiously, not recording the relentless passing of time. In the kitchen, china on the tall dresser was a mix of every colour and pattern. The Aga was a faithful, nourishing heart. Someone – Tessa? the daughter-in-law Jill, more likely – had laid out mugs and plates and bowls for the children's breakfast.

Jo took her sandwich upstairs, and read a book in the nursery. Dennis said he could stay up until the grown-ups came back, and at ten years old Jo was not going to argue with him; but after the music stopped, she looked into the room and found him asleep on Keith's bed.

This house is mine, saith the Josephine. When the telephone rang, it was Ruth, apologetic and grateful.

‘Simon all right?' Jo asked.

‘He will be. They gave him something for the pain and swelling.
Thanks
, Jo. You are a dear.'

Yes, aren't I?

When the phone rang again, Jo answered it efficiently.

‘Tessa?' A man's voice. What if it had been Rex? Would he have known Marigold through Jo's new, louder, more assertive voice?

‘No, it's the baby-sitter. Can I take a message? Call Colin? Right. I'll tell her.'

Bad luck, Col, me old sport. I think she's quite busy with the beard.

Jo went into the cabin to look at Rob steamily asleep, the little dog limp under his outflung arm. Then she went back to Troutie's rocking-chair in the nursery and gloated. In charge of the children, in charge of the phone line coming in from the outer reaches, in charge of the huge house at the centre of the world.

In charge of Rob.

When Tessa and Jill returned, Tessa took Charlotte from
Rob's bunk, and Jill took the baby seat from Annabel's bed, unwound the baby blanket from the naked doll and threw it in the toy cupboard.

Jo put her book back on the shelves by the housemaid's closet and followed them downstairs. There was a pot of tea going in the kitchen, but she declined gracefully. There might come a time when she would sit round the kitchen table with her employers, but it was not yet.

Next afternoon the chatty clatter of cream teas was shredded by a high-pitched screaming from the garden side of the house. Cups were put down. Some people stood up. Voices shouted, a dog was barking.

‘What on earth?' Ruth pelted out across the yard and through a door in the wall that led round to the gardens.

Jo piloted the tea-room into calm, like the captain of a panic-struck jumbo jet, but some of the younger visitors went off to find the excitement. When the cash slips were tallied later, a few of them had not come back to pay.

The screaming died down. There was no more shouting. Ruth came back, red in the face and wiping her glasses on her apron.

‘Everything's all right.' She smiled and nodded. More tea was poured, jam and clotted cream bowls scraped, new visitors wandered in and found a place to sit. ‘Cream tea, Doris?' ‘Oh, I shouldn't.'

When they could get a moment together in the scullery, Ruth told Jo. ‘Poor little Rob. Screaming his head off. Hysterical, I've never seen anything like it. He was up at one of the top windows, and if it hadn't been for the bars, I swear he'd have thrown himself out.'

‘What happened?' Jo ran the taps to cover their voices.

‘That Dennis. Played him a horrible trick. His grandpa won't half give it him, silly little devil.'

It was only a joke. Last night Jo had stuffed the dented celluloid doll upside down into the thick porcelain bowl of The Flusher, patent 1882. Only a joke, but the results were far more violent than she had expected. The screams and pandemonium and shouting had been quite stimulating, with the censuring of Dennis to complete the satisfaction.

What's next? Jo had no plans. She was here. That was enough for now. She would see what came up, as the chance of the doll had turned up – a better reward than the ten pounds Dorothy Taylor had pressed on her for baby-sitting.

Jo continued to look in on Mary Trout now and again, cultivating her image of being kind to old ladies, and hoping for titbits of inside information about the family.

One Monday afternoon, Agnes had gone to have her feet seen to and Ruth was at the lodge, fussing and clucking over her grandmother.

‘We were talking about old times,' she said (as if the old Trout ever talked of anything else). She had pushed the old lady over to the back window, so that she could get the air without the breeze, and she brought up another chair for Jo to sit by her.

The old lady nodded and chuckled. She was evidently having a good day.

‘My mother's late back.' Ruth looked at the flowered china clock. ‘And I've got to get to the shops.'

It had worked before with the children. It worked now. ‘I'd be glad to stay here for a while,' Jo said.

‘Oh, no, you can't always be doing things for me.'

‘We do things for each other, Ruth. You're always helping me – with the baking, and that time the fat man had a fit and I didn't know what to do, and taking me to the fabric place for the curtain material. Besides, I like talking to your grandmother.' She raised her voice.

Tessa stopped in at the lodge after leaving Rob with his grandparents. She was wearing a mouth-watering creamy suit that would have looked like death on Marigold, but looked fantastic on glowing, tanned Tessa.

One day, Marigold thought, I shall put my two capable hands round her neck and squeeze the babbling, cocksure life out of her … Would that be enough? If Tessa were dead, she would not suffer.

Tessa talked to Troutie about coming to The Sanctuary as a child; Troutie would show her the attic store-rooms and let her take old dresses and fancy hats downstairs to give a performance.

‘Always putting on a show, you was.' Troutie had refused to talk to Jo, but she maundered and mumbled away to Tessa. ‘Lovely you was, in Lady Geraldine's frock with the glittery beads. My golden girl, I called you.'

‘I called you Toutie.' Tessa bent to kiss her. ‘I still love you best of anyone. Am I still your golden girl?'

Sickening stuff. Troutie put up a lizard's hand and patted Tessa's face. Pat, pat, mumble, mumble. Jo would have liked to throw a bucket of water over the pair of them.

When Tessa had pranced out, Jo tried to get Mary to drop the winsome-old-retainer front and remember some of the truth.

‘Rob showed me the cellars, Mrs Trout. So cold, even in
July. How did you stand it, working down there? The fireplace in the servants' hall is a joke, and that great old scullery – like an ice box.'

‘Near the kitchen range.' The old lady chuckled, gasped and coughed. ‘Then you was too hot.'

‘I've seen all over the house, you know. It must have made a shocking lot of work for all of you, being so big and grand.'

‘Local jobs,' Troutie said quite clearly and sharply. Her leathery hands fiddled with the musty stuff of her skirt.

Since she would not remember anything Jo said – she remembered nothing from less than twenty years ago – Jo risked the comment, ‘But what a waste of lives spent catering to a few rich people.'

‘This was my home.' The rusty voice started strong, quavered, and was swamped by that waterlogged cough.

Jo made herself a cup of tea, which tasted slightly flawed, as if Agnes had poisoned the water. In the newspaper she found an advertisement for the kind of small unfinished dresser she wanted, to paint for her kitchen. Now that she knew she was going to stay for some time, for as long as it took, it was worth making improvements at Bramble Bank.

Agnes was in a bad mood when she came home and found Jo there instead of Ruth.

‘Poking your face in where you're not wanted,' was her theme. She walked aimlessly from the back room to the front, lighting cigarettes. When Jo hid the lighter in her own pocket, Agnes lit one cigarette from the last, leaving sourly smoking stubs in saucers. No wonder her mother's chest was like a sewer.

Troutie was very deeply asleep. ‘You can go then, can't you,' Agnes said, as an order, not a suggestion.

‘I thought I – shall I just help you to put her to bed?'

‘She's all right there for a bit. Leave me alone, can't you? I'm tired.'

Sloshed, more like. Agnes had come home aggressive and unsteady, knocking into the door frame.

‘Perhaps you should take a nap too.'

‘Mind your own business.'

But Agnes did go upstairs, stumbling on the stair rods and banging her bedroom door savagely. Jo took the newspaper with the advertisement and left. Walking up the drive to where she had left her bicycle, she smouldered about the two of them. Agnes was vilely offensive. Troutie was vilely irritating, with her old pensioner boot-licking. Lady Geraldine. Miss Sylvia. Tessa – oh, always Tessa. My golden girl.

Chafing, too restless to go home, Jo turned off the road, down a lane to where the remains of an old burial barrow rose smoothly among grazing sheep. From the top you could see villages and farms, the lazily curling Lynn river, and the dark mass of The Sanctuary, with a glint of the lake through trees. Jo sat among the spirits of ancient Britons, arms braced and hands clenched on the turf.

She would return while Troutie slept, and tap at the window to frighten her – tap and duck down among the bushes. No one would see, because the old lady was not at her usual window by the drive. Reach up with a stick and bang on the window, and be gone before Agnes looked out.

Start a little fire outside the open window, make some smoke, so that Troutie would wake and think the house was on fire. ‘Agnes! Aggie!' ‘What do you want?' ‘Fire – oh, help!' ‘Shut your noise.'

Jo rode back towards The Sanctuary, the plan shifting back and forth in her head. One moment, it looked perfect, the next, it looked silly. Give it up? Then she'd never know if it would have worked.