Ellis Peters - George Felse 10 - The Knocker On Death's Door (4 page)

“Straight in at the deep end!” mused Dinah. He was evidently more disturbed by the whole thing than she had guessed. “All right, kill or cure. Maybe we’ll end up in Canada, after all.”

The door opened ponderously but silently on a long, flagged hall, none too adequately lit, that stretched clean through the house and ended at a broad Gothic window. Dinah’s alert eye noted worn mats, bare panelling, a vast oaken staircase, the stone newels of what must be the steps down to the cellar, just to the left of the terminal window, and a narrow little lobby bearing away to the right, and ending in a garden door. The coats that hung in the lobby were so old and so frequently dry-cleaned that they had outlived all their original quality and cut, and most of their colour. Even if there had been nothing else to betray their age, the length of the nearest, a woman’s classic camel coat, would have been enough. Mrs. Macsen-Martel was tall, but even on her this skirt would practically reach the ankle. Everything had been good in its day; and for everything within sight its day was long over.

Someone had heard them come. A door on the right, beyond the stairs, opened, and Robert came out to greet them.

It was the first time Dinah had had the opportunity to study him at such close quarters, and she gazed at him with candid interest, looking for some resemblance to Hugh. The long, lightweight bones were the same, the hollowed cheeks, even the deep setting of the eyes, but in place of Hugh’s vivid colouring and mobility, this one was neutral-tinted and hesitant, almost deprecating, of movement. A profound, almost a fastidious reserve dominated everything in his face, the brown eyes that were at such pains to avoid staring at her, the long, level mouth that opened stiffly to welcome her.

“Miss Cressett, I’m so glad you could come. Let me take your coat.” But he moved too slowly, and Hugh had already taken it. “Do come in, my mother’s looking forward to meeting you.” She was surprised but thankful that he didn’t say: “We’ve heard so much about you from Hugh.” Maybe he was leaving that for the old lady. Someone was certainly due to say it before the evening was over.

Hugh took her possessively by the elbow, and steered her into the drawing-room. Large, lofty, chilly, with a vast fireplace and a very modest fire in the distant wall, and a few good but threadbare rugs deployed artfully to make the maximum impression of comfort where there was little that was comfortable. A great deal of splendid but sombre furniture—there was money there, at any rate, if they cared to realise it—and one superb, high-backed, erect chair placed near the fire and facing the door, with the old woman enthroned in it. A tableau especially for Dinah’s benefit; she had to walk approximately twenty-five feet across the bare centre of the room to reach her hostess, with the faded, lofty-lidded eyes watching and appraising her every step of the way. All those exposed inches of smooth, slim thigh in honey-beige tights, the short, almost boyish cap of dark-brown hair, and greenish eye-shadow, the fashionable chunky shoes that Dave called her football boots… But if I’d worn a crinoline, she thought, watching the old woman’s face every bit as narrowly as her own face was being watched, I should still have come as a shock.

Hugh did the only thing he could do to break the tension, and did it beautifully. He dropped Dinah’s elbow and swooped ahead of her, shearing through the invisible cord that linked the two pairs of hostile female eyes; he stooped and kissed his mother’s grey and fallen cheek, and warmed her face for a moment into genuine life.

“Hullo, Mother! Here’s Dinah, I promised I’d bring her to see you, didn’t I?” He reached for Dinah’s other hand as his mother put up an emaciated claw and allowed her bony fingers to be clasped for a moment in Dinah’s short-nailed, well-scrubbed, capable hand. It was like holding a dead bird, starved in the winter cold. Two rings, old-fashioned ones, but those were surely real rubies in them… and that long string of beads dangling into her lap to complete the elongated effect of every line of her body was neither of glass nor cultures, but pearls. Of course, she’d been from the branch of the family with some money left, until she married Robert senior, and he got his hands on most of it and sent it flying like skittles… I am a right
bitch
, thought Dinah, shocked behind her dutiful smile. I should blame her for walking round me with her hackles up, what else do I deserve? And penitence gave her a surge of positive benevolence. She wondered if she dared kiss… No, there was no invitation being signalled. On the contrary, the released hand was flexing inflexible fingers delicately under the edge of the dun-coloured lace stole, as if the clasp had bruised them.

“So kind of you to give up an evening to a dull old woman like me, Miss Cressett. Do sit down…” She gestured vaguely towards a velvet hassock that would have installed Dinah at her feet, but Hugh was splendidly blind, and whisked up a comfortable leather chair close to his mother’s, to establish them as equals. Dinah gave him a lightning glance that would have liked to turn into a wink, and sat down with as little display of leg as she could manage. Appeasement was not in her nature, but whenever she looked at poor Hugh she had pacific thoughts.

“Perhaps you would care for a glass of something? I don’t drink myself, but perhaps a sherry…?”

“I brought a case of Traminer,” said Hugh unexpectedly, “we can try it with dinner if it suits. I was in town, and had to wait all day for my job, so I went shopping, and got hold of a real bargain. It’s Jugoslav, but it’s as good as most that comes out of Alsace. I know, I’ve tried it! Come and help me fetch it in, Rob, it’s in the boot of the car.”

If it really was, Dinah thought with deep interest, then he’d popped it in there before he even came into the house. Indeed he must have dropped it off inside the yard before he delivered the respray job across in Greenfields, and installed it ready for delivery on his return. Her attention was caught in a new and grave way. If Hugh was as keyed up as all that, scheming with cases of wine and worrying about the impression she was going to make on his mother (not to mention the impression his mother was probably going to make on her!) then there was really nothing else for it, he
must
be in love. And she thought, calmed, assuaged and flattered, having someone like Hugh that much in love is a good reason for being in love with him. She had always wondered. Now she began to feel certain.

Robert—how silent he was, did he never have anything to say in this household?—brought her a glass of sherry. She looked up in his face as she accepted it; such a middle-aged face, and he was only thirty-five, after all. Bleached, brownish hair, straight as pen-feathers, cropped close; not a badly shaped head at all, but so defeated, so inanimate. Tired eyes,, darker brown, so withdrawn that there was no knowing whether they were indifferent to her, or simply burdened past caring. He almost never spoke, but his voice was low, pleasantly pitched and sad; yet distantly disapproving, too. He was not on her side. Beware of the gentle people who do not rant, but nevertheless are not amenable to anyone’s wiles. In his way he was as rigid as his mother.

And that, as Dinah discovered when they were left alone together, was pretty rigid. The air seemed to clarify as soon as the men were out of the way. Like a sudden change of wind sweeping the mist from a battlefield.

“Hugh has told me so much about you, Miss Cressett.” (She’d known that was coming, sooner or later! It meant: Be careful, I’m warned, I’m on the alert!) “He thinks very highly of you. Do tell me something about yourself, my dear, I don’t think I’m acquainted with your family. What was your father?”

“He owned the same garage we run now.
His
father was a very early motorist in these parts, a pioneer, and Father followed in his footsteps. And so has my brother David— Hugh’s partner…”

“Ah, yes, of course. I know from Hugh that your brother is in trade.” It sounded like a category, the way she said it, and probably it was. “And where were you at school, Miss Cressett?”

Dinah told her, bluntly: the village primary, then the secondary modern at Abbot’s Bale. “I wasn’t an academic type. Mine are mostly manual skills. I keep house. Quite well, I believe. At least no one complains.”

“I’m quite sure you are good at everything you attempt. One feels so out of date these days.” Her long fingers strayed languidly among her pearls. The long, straight lines of brow, nose and chin, in profile, looked like a caricature of Edith Sitwell. The grey hair, drawn closely back into that great knot on her nape, weighed down her whole head and shoulders into an effete arc the moment she relaxed her guard. “In my day gels were educated to such different ends. We had not to reckon with trade, of course… This has become such a commercial world, has it not?” She leaned back with a sigh, and all the oblique grey planes of her face, and shoulders, and fleshless bust slithered downwards into a pyramid of discouragement and decay. “The name Cressett is old… are you connected with the Northamptonshire Cressetts, by any chance?”

“I doubt it,” said Dinah cheerfully. “But I don’t suppose there’s anyone in my family who can trace his ancestors back more than three generations, four at the most, so of course we could be. As far as I know, we’re Middlehope stock from way back.”

The old lady closed her eyes for a fraction of a second, perhaps praying for strength. The catechism went on steadily: What were your mother’s family? What are your interests? Are you fond of music? You play of course? (Naturally a lady plays the piano, however badly.)

Thank God, they were coming back. There went the outer door, hollowly closing, and in a moment more the two brothers came rather quietly, rather warily, into the room. At least the Traminer was real enough, Hugh had a bottle in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. They bore themselves, Dinah thought, a little stiffly, as if there was some related awkwardness even between them. They had so little in common that with all the goodwill in the world communication might well be an effort for both.

“Dinner’s ready,” Robert said. “Will you come, Mother?”

Over dinner it was much easier, though the table in the large, chilly room, even when reduced to its minimum proportions, was too big for comfortable conversation between four people. But at least there
were
four of them, and every time the catechism showed signs of being resumed Dinah could answer monosyllabically, and then address some quick remark to one of the men, even if Hugh did not anticipate her need, as he frequently did. She had felt a certain amount of childish curiosity about the meal itself, and the manner of its presentation. Would the old lady have cooked it herself? Not much doubt that she could, that was one of the things gels in her day had been expected to master. But in all probability on this occasion the cooking had been done by the same local help who brought in the dishes. Plain, good English cottage cooking, nothing elaborate and nothing expensive. And having installed the joint and vegetables on the sideboard—the pudding being cold— the cook said good night and departed, plainly for home. It was Robert who served everything, silently, unobtrusively and attentively. Once there had been some four or five servants living in at the Abbey; now there was Robert, and Robert was everything. Dinah tried to imagine Hugh shouldering this load, tamed into this grey tameness, and the picture was so absurd as to be almost indecent.

Mrs. Macsen-Martel could even say: “I’m so glad you find the veal to your liking, Miss Cressett,” in such a way as to make Dinah feel that she had been eating like a hungry wolf. And indeed she was hungry; emotional excitement always had that effect on her.

“It’s really excellent,” she said defensively, and turned on Robert with the first thing that entered her head. After all, that celebrated door was the chief event of the past week in Mottisham, what could be more natural than to show curiosity about it?

“I’ve been dying to ask you about that door you gave back to the church. It’s almost the only thing—I mean apart from bits of the stone fabric—that’s left from the Gothic church, isn’t it? The rebuilders in the last century finished off almost everything else that survived. So it’s really very important, being local work, too. With a long history like that, it must have some legends attached to it, hasn’t it?”

Robert seemed to emerge with a spasmodic effort from the glum abstraction into which he sank between his bouts of hospitable assiduity. She saw his long bones convulsed for an instant as he hauled himself back into awareness of her.

“They might be anything but true,” he said with evident reluctance. “They do exist, yes, but only as legends.”

“My dear,” murmured the old lady, her thin brows elevated into her dust-coloured hair. “The cellar door? Legends? I’ve never heard that it was anything more than a
door
. What legends?”

“There isn’t any documentary evidence, how could there be?” Robert sounded tired, but as always, obliging. “The abbey library was quite simply bundled out and burned, so we shall never know whether there were any written records. Probably not, the abbey had a blameless reputation up to the fifteenth century, its decline was part of the general rot that was partly responsible for the Dissolution—or at least for the ease and general consent with which it was carried out. And what was in the chronicles was usually a hundred years past—by the end there weren’t any chroniclers. I doubt if the last four could write English, much less Latin.”

“You mean it’s true,” asked Dinah, astonished, “that there were only four brothers left here at the end, and they weren’t any model of holiness?”

“They were anything but. And for that there
is
good evidence. You know something about the end of the abbey, men?”

“I didn’t,” she admitted honestly, “except that they were talking about it in ”The Sitting Duck‘ on Sunday night.”

“They?”

“Saul Trimble,” Hugh supplied with a reminiscent grin. “And believe me, he shouldn’t be underestimated. The essence of his nonsense is that about sixty per cent of it at least is good sense. It makes it more baffling. Even sceptics make inquiries, and get converted.”