Closed at Dusk (16 page)

Before she went to her own car a few streets away, Jo walked down to the post office, looked up the number of Tessa's firm, Maddox Management, and went into one of the phone booths.

‘Could I speak to Theresa Taylor?'

‘I'm sorry. She's not in the office this afternoon. Would you like to leave a message?'

‘Yes, er – thank you. It's Mrs Christopher Harvey.' This was all said in a flat, Marigold voice, nothing like Jo's. ‘Just tell her I rang.'

Tessa and Chris were going to Paris for three days.

‘What
for
?' Rob kept asking.

‘It's not
for
anything,' Tessa told him. ‘Just for fun.'

‘Then why aren't I going too?'

‘Because Granny and Wum want you to stay with them.'

Tessa was trying not to do anything that might make Rob resent Chris. So far he liked him, and Chris was very good with Rob – calm and patient, helping him to draw and make plasticine models. When Chris went back to his Finchley flat to work in the pottery, Tessa sometimes took Rob up there. While she did some cleaning and tidying in the ground-floor flat, managing subtly to make it look less purely masculine, so that Chris would be aware of her when he was here alone, Rob messed about happily with wet clay alongside him in the garage, both of them humming.

Rob had even said, ‘Must I go and see Dad before school starts?'

Tessa had said, mock-shocked, ‘Of
course
. Poor Dad, he'd be terribly disappointed,' but secretly, her heart rose. She glanced at Chris, but he was carefully not looking or listening.

The three of them were happy in the house together. Tessa had not felt so hopeful about a man since she first cast herself blindly into the dazzle surrounding Rex. She felt quietly loved. She had gradually stopped seeing the half dozen useless men with whom she had been passing the time and trying to keep her ego nourished. Her work was going well. She had been given responsibility for two students in training. Christopher, who did not give away too much too quickly, was turning out to be the most worthwhile and warmly generous man on whom she had ever pinned her hopes. And they were going to have three days and nights on their own in Paris.

When they went down to The Sanctuary to leave Rob, most of the evening was spent making final plans for the Festival of the Lake. It was an ancient custom originated by Walter and Beatrice Cobb, mostly just for family and friends. Frederick and Geraldine had kept it going for a few years, because their son, the glorious Lionel, loved it (their daughter Sylvia hated it, like all parties). It was discontinued during the First War, and because Lionel died on the Somme in his twenty-first year, it was not started again until William decided to revive it a few years ago, not just for family and friends, but for anyone who wanted to come.

‘Last year, we had nearly 800 people,' William told Christopher, ‘and there may be more.'

There would be booths and tents for food and drink, and all the usual bakery and craft stalls and sideshows and games and competitions, the silver band in the nearly finished pavilion on low wooden supports over the marsh, jugglers, strolling musicians.

A firework firm had been hired, and a man who built boats in his back yard was transforming the two row boats into tiny gondolas, with prows and canopies outlined in fairy lights. Keith and a Cambridge friend would be in one, with guitars. Lee, the lovely woman who was known as ‘Matthew's American', was bringing two friends, a tenor and a contralto, to sing old Neapolitan and Venetian love songs as the boats drifted up and down the lake, the oars flashing and glowing above and below the surface, if Rodney could get the underwater lamps fixed on to them.

They sat late on the terrace. When Tessa was first married to Rex, it had not been so peaceful here. Rex had been a good enough son-in-law, charming, amusing, showing off, arriving with bottles or smoked salmon or a new kitchen gadget from France or America, but when he was here, he made his own world, instead of adapting to theirs. He would fill the days with tennis, riding, golf, squash, phone calls, friends to be visited or to invite here, nights out in Oxford. He would not sit quietly and just talk for more than half an hour or so. That had suited Tessa then. She was infected with his restless energy. Now, with Christopher, she absorbed peacefulness, and felt closer to William and Dorothy.

The scent of the white nicotiana swelled and faded, like a pulse in the air. The stars were so bright that they were reflected in the lake, rocking in the ripples of something that plopped in the water.

Since the terrible episode of the doll being devoured by Flusher, Rob was more nervous of going upstairs than ever. He started the night on a sofa downstairs, and his mother would sleep in a room on the nursery floor.

‘Shall I come up to you, or will you come down?' Christopher asked Tessa.

‘I'll come down. He's fast asleep.'

Christopher was at the other end of the corridor from William and Dottie's room and the larger guest rooms. Tessa's girlhood bedroom was next to his, through an archway into the swell of the turret.

They stood by the window of Tessa's room and looked out at the amazing night, the bulldog statue as white as if there were a moon, and the massed heavy shapes of the trees across the park very dark against the starlit sky.

‘You're quite sure you're not married?' Tessa had asked it six or seven times since she got the telephone message at the office.

‘Surely I'd know.'

‘But you'd be too kind to hurt me.'

‘If I was kind and married, I wouldn't be here.'

‘But,
Mrs Christopher Harvey
. Who on earth …?

‘I told you. It's probably one of the women in my office, or in the store. There's a lot of jealousy and bitchiness in that place.'

‘Perhaps they need another seminar: “How to resolve your emotional difficulties without making obscene phone calls.”'

‘Someone found out where you work, and decided to play games.'

‘I'll kill them.'

‘They can't hurt us,' he said peacefully. ‘I don't know who it is, and I don't care.'

‘Nor do I, my darling.'

In the park, on the other side of the wall where the shadow was deep, Jo continued to watch Tessa's window for quite a long time after the dimly seen figures moved back into the room, and the light went out.

‘You look tired.'

Dorothy saw Jo coming up to the pantry with baking tins at the end of the day.

‘I'm never tired.' Jo always said that. ‘I hope it's not my famous silver streaks. Do they make me look dreadfully old?'

Dottie never took bait. She said, ‘Don't come in so early tomorrow. Have a lie in.'

‘I've got to go to the shops. I'm out of things like sugar and coffee.'

‘Rob and I are going shopping early. Tell me what you need and we'll drop it off on our way home.'

At Bramble Bank, Rob was fascinated by the small stream and the little bridge that led into Jo's front garden. The stream was quite meagre at this time of the year, and Rob stayed outside to plan a dam while his grandmother was in the house.

‘You have made it nice, Jo.' The rooms were small but comfortable and not cluttered. ‘I came here once or twice to see the Thompsons. They had a retarded child.'

‘It had been done over before I came,' Jo said. ‘I was lucky to find it.'

‘What brought you here, after your husband died?'

‘Oh … old associations. Birdwatching. Walking on the Downs with Alec.' She looked away, as if her eyes were filling with tears.

‘Is this him?' Dottie picked up the photograph of a young man with a small moustache, from a side table. Jo nodded without speaking. ‘He looks like a lovely man. Poor Jo. He died of cancer, didn't he? Was he ill for a long time?' Dottie sat down, so that Jo could talk if she wanted to. She waited, drinking her coffee. ‘Or don't you want to talk about it?'

Jo shook her head. She took the picture and looked at it for a long time before putting it back. Her face was quite different without the smile. It hung from her wide cheekbones, instead of rising up to them.

Outside, Mr Richardson saw Dorothy over the fence. ‘Hullo, Dr Taylor.'

Dorothy remembered him. ‘How nice to be able to see your beautiful vegetable garden. It used to be such a jungle here.'

‘Done a lot of work, hasn't she? Josephine's a good neighbour.'

Rob had to be coaxed out of the stream, and did not want to get in the car with Dottie.

‘You come again any time,' Jo told him.

‘Can I, Granny?'

‘If Jo doesn't mind.'

‘I'd love it.'

‘Soon, may I?'

‘Of course.' Jo moved to kiss him, but didn't. Dorothy saw that she had discovered that if you bent to embrace Rob, he slithered away. Not rudely. He just suddenly wasn't there.

It was sooner than either Jo or Rob expected. The next day, Dottie's children's home in Witney had a crisis. They had organized the annual combined meeting of Special Homes in the region. Their big prize, the well-known child-abuse psychiatrist who was to be the opening speaker, was stranded by an airport strike in Greece. No one else was free in August at the
last minute. Only Dr Taylor could do the job. Dorothy was a clear, down-to-earth speaker, with enough wit to keep an audience's attention, and enough knowledge and experience to tell them something new that they would not forget.

‘I've got to do it.' She came into the tea-room soon after opening time when the only customers were a few who could not face the gardens without a stomach full of hot tea. ‘Will is in London, and Rob was running a little temperature last night. I don't like to leave him with Keith. Ruth, could you possibly …?'

‘Of course I could.' Ruth's warm downy cheeks lifted in a beam of pleasure. ‘I always love to have him. Shall I take him home after work?'

‘Oh, thanks, you're such a good friend, Ruth.'

‘Hang on a minute, no, I'm not. Blow it, I forgot George's mother. It's her birthday. We've got to go over there, and she doesn't like small children. That's her own bad luck, but Rob would hate it. Oh, dear, I don't like to let you down.'

When Dorothy had gone out, Jo said to Ruth, ‘I'd love to have Rob. Do you think she'd let me? He liked Bramble Bank, and she did say he could come and visit. Would they think I was pushy, if I –'

‘You know they think the world of you, Jo, and I'd be ever so grateful, because then I wouldn't feel so bad. Go on, run after her – if you really want to have him. He can play you up, you know, to see what he can get away with.'

Now that it could pass as Ruth's idea, Jo made her offer to Dorothy, and was accepted.

‘You'll understand that Rob is liable to be a bit insecure and demanding when his mother's away,' Dorothy explained. ‘There's a continuing fear of abandonment, you see.'

‘Because of his father?' Jo enjoyed asking.

‘As with all children of broken homes.'

Yes, Doctor. As with wives.

Rob was delighted. ‘You said I could come soon, but I didn't know it was as soon as this. You are quick for a grownup, aren't you, Jo?'

He played in the stream outside with Charlotte, and came in for supper wet and sweltering and sat down at the table with filthy face and hands. It was a small round table that Jo had brought from London. In the pink corner house in Holland Park it had stood in the hall with its flaps down, and when she was Marigold Renshaw, she had imagined it going upstairs one day to be a nursery table. Now a child sat at this table at last. Jo gave Rob what he had asked for – Coca Cola and baked beans on toast – and did not tell him to go and wash his hands.

Rob hardly ate anything. He tried some ice-cream, then put his hot head in his hand and let tears fall from under his lank flop of front hair.

‘Not hungry, Rob?' Jo sat opposite with a glass of wine, watching him.

‘I want my Mum.'

Oh, of course. Marigold took over in a flash from kindly baby-sitter Jo, and dull rage poured through her like molten lead, weighing her down in mind and body. Somebody knocks themselves out for you, and because the ice-cream is the wrong flavour, it's, ‘I want my Mum.'

‘I daresay you do,' she said quite nastily, but not nastily enough to be reported back to Dorothy.

‘When's my Mum coming to fetch me?'

Damn that bloody Tessa, a selfish doting mother of the worst kind, spoiling and worshipping but giving up nothing, and getting away with it. If she beat the child black and blue, he would still ask, ‘Where's my Mum?'

‘Soon.' Jo put her elbow on the table and her chin into her
hand, copying Rob's position. ‘You don't look like her, do you?'

The golden image of Tessa sickened her. You could be mine, damn you, child – mine, the way I'm disguised now, with your dark hair and beautiful silky dark eyebrows that Rex gave you. If you were mine and Rex's, I would still possess him, through you.

‘I don't know.' Rob whined and snuffled, trailing saliva strings through his tombstone teeth.

It was past his bedtime, but he would not go upstairs with Jo. He threw himself on the floor and picked at a gap in the worn fringe of the rug. Marigold had not brought her best things here, being only poor struggling widow Josephine. Rob pulled a cushion off the sofa and put his head on it and sucked his thumb. Dorothy was right about the insecurity. It would be easy for Jo–Marigold to play on that, but the child must like and trust her. That was vitally important. The whole family were Marigold's daggers against Tessa, but Rob was her ultimate weapon. In the end, she could do more harm by establishing his security with her.

Jo shook off the relentless weight of Marigold and said lightly, ‘What does your mother do when you're a pest?' He did not answer. ‘Does she whack you, or play a game with you?'