Closed at Dusk (13 page)

She left her bicycle in the courtyard and unlocked the tea-room. If anyone questioned her being here, she could be doing
some extra jobs, good zealous Jo. She took the postcards and souvenir mugs and garden guides off the display table and put a bowl of soapy water on it. Then she went through the door in the wall and made her way behind the carriage house and hay barn to the back garden of the lodge cottage, where the casement window stood half open on to the neglected vegetable bed and fruit bushes.

She had brought the newspaper with her. She crouched down between the house and the bushes, crumpled up a couple of sheets, and lit them with Agnes's cigarette lighter. They burned quite well, and caught some of the dry grass, which sparked and smouldered. There was not enough smoke. It diffused and spread before it reached the window. Jo crumpled two or three more pages together, lit them in her hand, and on an impulse that brought the same sense of release as hurling the accursed stone hare at the wall, she half stood up and threw the burning paper ball through the window. She pitched the cigarette lighter in after it, and fled.

Coming back to the tea-room, she found Rob, riding his old bicycle that was too small for him round the yard.

‘You promised.' He put down his feet, and dragged them to a stop on the cobbles.

‘Promised what?'

‘To come and see where the horses were burned up in the foaling stable.'

Jo had not planned what she was going to do. She might find someone and ask whether they smelled smoke. She might not. She felt perfectly serene. It did not matter what she did, so she might as well go with Rob, to please him.

‘
Get away from the range.' Cook fussed and glared, brandishing a long two-pronged fork like the devil's prodder
.

‘
Them carrots is done
.'

‘
What about the sprouts
?'

Little Mary wanted to stay by the throbbing stove, not go back to the cold muddy sink water in the freezing scullery.

‘
Useless child
.'

Mrs Belcher yanked open the oven door on a blast of heat and roasting fumes that rushed out to sizzle Mary's eyebrows and fill her throat with greasy smoke
.

‘
Told you to get away
!'

Mary gasped and coughed, bent double, sank, and disappeared from the underground kitchen scene, which went heedlessly on without her
.

‘The shed was here,' Rob told Jo. ‘Look – you can see the black scorch marks on the wall. The mother horse was inside with her foal. They could still hear them kicking and screaming, but they couldn't let them out. People still hear the screams, you know.'

He looked at Jo to see if she would swallow this. She wasn't listening. She turned quickly and ran from him along the back of the carriage house. She was running towards where someone was screaming and shouting.

Rob fell into a black hole of panic, terrified, alone. He ran out on to the drive, screaming for his grandmother. People were running, someone shouted, ‘Fire!'

‘Granny!'

They were running down the drive, to where thick smoke was coming out of the lodge. His grandmother was there. She took his hand and tried to pull him indoors. He broke free and ran round the side of the house.

When the fire engine came flashing and wailing, Rob was standing in a wheelbarrow by the cypress tree, ringing the Closing Bell, ringing, ringing, with no one to stop him.

William had been in Shropshire with the Tenant Farmers' Union, discussing changes in landlord–tenant agreements. When Dorothy telephoned, he started home at once.

Troutie
dead
? It had been possible for years, but now it wasn't possible. He had already bought her ninetieth birthday present. Shocked, and driving too fast, he remembered walking past the lodge window where she slept like a pile of wheezing old clothes and thinking, she might be better off dead. Now that she was, he wanted her alive in any shape. How easily we sentence even those we love – better to die, had a good long life; why struggle to reach ninety? He was ashamed of that thought, so lightly and stupidly tossed off, but he could not escape it, as if poor old Troutie sat beside him in the car, chiding, ‘See what you done, you naughty boy!'

By the time Agnes had woken to the smell of the fire, her mother had been suffocated by the toxic fumes given off by her smouldering foam-filled chair. Budgie was dead too, but no one noticed that, until one of the firemen brought his cage out of the swamped, wrecked room.

Agnes had been angry when she saw the bird. ‘Why didn't he call me?' She took the small feathered body out of the cage and glared at it in the palm of her hand. ‘All those years of driving me mad with, “Come on Ma!” Would it have killed you to call out to me?'

Someone had muttered, ‘It killed him not to.' Probably Keith.

Two policemen came to The Sanctuary next morning.

A saucer of cigarette stubs, a lighter, a scrap of newspaper, not quite burned. Nobody needed to say that these things pointed to Agnes.

‘I was up in my bedroom.' She sat with her hair wild, eyes baleful and jaw stuck out, although no one had accused her of anything. ‘Laying down.'

‘Did you get up and come down for a cigarette at some time?'

‘No, I – well, I don't know. How should I know?' She rubbed a hand through her disordered hair. ‘I was tired. I went up to lay down, that's all I know.'

‘That's right.' Jo was present at the meeting in the hall: police caps on the oak chest with the magazines and visitors' book, lilies overpowering, roses massed in the big Coalport bowl on the centre table. ‘She was going upstairs as I left.'

‘And that would be – when, Mrs – er?'

‘Kennedy. Between three-thirty and four, I suppose. I went off on my bike to Green Barrow. As I came back, the stable clock was chiming five – it's slow – and I met the little boy, Rob, in the yard.'

‘Why did you come back, Jo?' Dorothy Taylor asked. ‘It wasn't a working day.'

‘I thought I'd clean the souvenir table, while I had the time. But Rob took me out behind the stables to show me something. Then I heard someone scream.'

‘Who was that?'

‘Agnes, I suppose. Mrs Mutch.'

‘You'll all say it was my fault.' Poor Agnes, muddled and in a state of shock, looked round belligerently.

No one contradicted this, but no one confirmed it. They
made comforting noises, and Ruth put her short strong arms round her mother and said, ‘Don't carry on.'

The policeman's report would cite, ‘Possible careless use of smoking materials.' At the inquest later, the coroner gave an open verdict. There were no charges, but local gossip, never favourable to Agnes, made plenty of unofficial ones.

Ruth was terribly upset. She did not come to work next day. William took the dogs across the river and through the water-meadow to her cottage outside Lynnford, partly because he felt so rotten, partly because he knew Ruth did. They wallowed together in the pit of blaming themselves. Ruth was usually so calm and down-to-earth, whatever happened. It was not like her to be hysterical, but when William came and put his arms round her in great sorrow, she sobbed and cried out and would not be comforted for quite a long time.

When she was quieter, William stood up and said he would make tea, and headed vaguely for the kitchen.

‘No, I'll do it, Will.' Old habit got Ruth to her feet, glasses off, face swollen and watery, little nose red. William followed her and sat at the small table by the windowsill geraniums, while Ruth moved about with something more like her old bustle, sluicing her face at the sink and wiping it on the roller towel.

‘Maids of honour. Gran liked them.' She put a plate of little cakes by William's mug that said ‘Happy Mother's Day, 1977'. She and William looked across the table at each other, with their mouths drawn down. ‘I got the almonds yesterday, and made – I made them for – for –'

‘I know. You always thought of her.'

‘Don't, Will. I'm done crying. But who will I make little treats for now, till those silly boys grow up and give me grandchildren?'

‘She was – like a child to you, you mean?'

‘As she got old. Wasn't she to you?'

William thought, then shook his head, chewing the almond cake without tasting it. ‘She – all my life, really – was more like my mother.'

Tessa came rushing to The Sanctuary as soon as the news reached her. She went to look at the ruined room, and wanted to go and look at Troutie in the mortuary, but Dorothy restrained her. After Ruth and William had stopped blaming themselves, Tessa started it up again.

Agnes had gone to her friend in Swindon to avoid the talk, so since Tessa could not take it out on her, she blamed her father and Ruth – for allowing a foam-filled chair; for leaving Agnes in charge, which had worked all right for several years, ‘when we all knew she was a wino'.

‘Not that bad,' William said. ‘And I had it out with her last month, you know, and I really thought she would cut down.'

‘You believed that, of course.'

This uncomfortable conversation was taking place in the kitchen, while Jo was in the baking pantry, scrubbing at this morning's bowls and beaters and baking tins.

When William began mildly, ‘Well, I hoped that she –' Jo felt moved to come to the doorway and say, ‘I don't want to butt in, and I haven't told anyone this, but perhaps I'd better say that I did think Agnes was a bit – you know, when she came back that evening.'

‘But she wasn't drinking then,' William said. ‘She told me the chiropodist had cut her feet about a bit, and she felt groggy. That was why she went up to lie down.'

‘We-ell …' Jo raised her black eyebrows.

Fiery Miss Tessa rounded on her. ‘Then how dared you leave her with poor Troutie?' Outraged golden girl.

Before Jo could make the mistake of firing back, ‘How dare
you
speak to me like that?', William said, ‘Come on, Tess, we all of us left it like that, for too long.'

‘I wouldn't have, if I'd been here.'

‘You
were
here. A lot. But you weren't the one who tackled Agnes about her drinking. I was.'

‘Our hero.'

Back in the bakery, Jo thought: How very interesting. A little rift in the cosy father–daughter love affair? Nothing like sudden death to stir things up.

‘I'll never forget it,' Jo said to Mr and Mrs Richardson, when they came round to Bramble Bank to commiserate with her, and to get some inside information. ‘The little boy was showing me the remains of the old stable where a mare and foal were burned to death years ago. “Oh, that's dreadful,” I said, and he said, “Yes, and now the place is haunted.” “Are you sure?” I said.' The Richardsons liked dialogue stories. ‘“People still hear the screaming now,” he said, and just at that moment, I heard Mrs Mutch scream.'

‘What did you do, Josephine?' The Richardsons were having a lager in Jo's now habitable garden, the wooden seats unsteady on the rough flat stones her weeding had discovered outside the back door.

‘I ran down to the lodge. I'll never forget it. Never.'

‘Poor old lady,' Mr Richardson said. ‘Lived there ages, hadn't she?'

‘All her life, just about.'

‘Nice that she should die there then,' said Mrs Richardson, who quite liked a death, as long as it wasn't hers.

Right for her to die there. Right for her to die. When the Richardsons had gone Jo went upstairs and looked at herself in the mirror behind the cupboard door.

‘Murderess.'

She tried it out to see what it would do to her face. The face remained calm and enquiring.

‘I killed an old lady.'

But Jo's painted face remained alert and cool and quite attractive, and the Marigold behind it did not feel anything, now that the keyed-up, impulsive excitement was long spent.

‘You're sick,' Jo told this face, of which she was getting quite fond, ‘you know that?'

But the face smiled confidently, and she felt full of energy, and really very well. She felt better than she had in all the years since that nightmare April when Marigold was nursing the joyful secret of her pregnancy, and Rex had come home from work, calmly taken off his jacket and poured himself a drink and said without turning round, ‘I may as well tell you now. I've been seeing a girl called Tessa Taylor. She's the woman I've been looking for all my life. I'm going to live with her.'

Through friends, Marigold had found out about Tessa and her family, and a few days later, she drove through drenching rain to The Sanctuary. She had no definite plans. She was sick and desperate. She knew the gardens were open. She would prowl there, spy on the family, look through windows, see without being seen.

The motorway ran like a swirling stream. Trucks kicked up fountains of dirty spray. It took longer to get to Lynnford than she had expected, and when she reached The Sanctuary, the garden entrance was just closing.

‘Please let me in.' The gate was one more direct rebuff. Every way she turned, her life was blocked.

‘I'm sorry.' The ticket man shook his head.

‘Just for ten minutes.'

A grey car left the front of the great house and circled the drive. The ticket man turned up his coat collar, called, ‘Goodnight Mr Taylor!' and walked away.

Marigold dashed out on to the drive and grabbed at the driver's side of the car, beating her palm on the window. The
car stopped. The window went down. The middle-aged man and the small woman beside him looked at Marigold in her soaked khaki raincoat, her pale hair plastered across her face.

‘What do you want? What is this?'

‘I want to see Tessa Taylor.'

‘She's not here,' the man said. ‘Why don't you telephone, and –'

‘Mr Taylor.' Marigold clutched the top of the window glass with cold wet fingers to stop him raising it. ‘Listen to me. Your daughter – I've got to tell you what your daughter – what she – what your daughter's doing!' She was babbling and incoherent, half blind, slobbering through tears and rain.