No Love Lost (22 page)

‘I'm terribly sorry, and I don't see how I can help,' I began. ‘I don't know anything about Mr Rorke's home life, but I'll tell my husband to ring you the moment he comes in. Meanwhile, I wonder if you'd like to ring his secretary? She might know something.'

There was silence for a moment and then he said, ‘Would that be Miss Maureen Jackson?'

‘Yes. She knows …'

He cut me short. ‘As a matter of fact, Mrs Lane, I've been on to her already. I know her quite well, d'you see? She and her family are old friends of mine. I thought of her at once and I rang her because I wasn't sure if the Headmaster had gone off on his holiday or not, and I thought it would save time.' He laughed apologetically, but making it quite clear to me that he was as parochial and gossipy as anyone else in the town. He added shamelessly. ‘We have to save time, you know, Mrs Lane. Maureen, that is Miss Jackson – she's in bed with a chill, by the way – told me that Mr Lane was at home last night so I thought I'd catch him.'

I hesitated. I nearly told him that I hadn't seen Victor for twenty-four hours and that I'd lied to Maureen because she had irritated me. It would have been an embarrassing confession but I have an ingrained respect for the police and I am fairly certain I would have done it if I hadn't realized that he was on neighbourly terms with the Jacksons and guessed the sort of chatter which must inevitably have followed. As it was, I simply said good-bye.

‘I'll tell him to ring you as soon as he comes in,' I finished.

He was not satisfied. ‘Do you know where he's gone, Mrs Lane? I'd like to get hold of him.'

‘No, I'm afraid I don't.'

‘Did he take his car?'

‘Yes.'

‘And he didn't leave any message, didn't say anything at all? Just drove away?'

‘No.' It was beginning to sound awful and I groped round for something to say which would at least convey that we were more or less on speaking terms. The Superintendent forestalled me.

‘Hell be in for his lunch anyway, won't he?'

‘I don't know. I mean, the school is shut. We're not eating here. I think he will be back this morning, but I – I …' I made a great effort to struggle out of the morass of words and succeeded. ‘I know,' I said suddenly, ‘I know who is sure to be able to help you. Do you know Mr Seckker?'

‘Now that's an idea, Mrs Lane.' To my relief the Superintendent gave up worrying about Victor at once. He sounded approving. ‘Mr Seckker's a friend of Mr Rorke's, is he?'

‘I think so, in a way.'

There was a laugh at the other end of the wire. ‘You're going to say that Mr Seckker is a friend of every lame duck.' The voice had lost its slyness and sounded merely hearty. ‘You're right there. So he is. I'll get on to him immediately. But, Mrs Lane, do tell your husband the moment he comes in, because I think there may be a bit of trouble about this case – or not trouble, exactly, but publicity, and a thing like that never does a school any good. A word from your husband now might save a lot of bother later on. See what I mean?'

‘I do,' I assured him. ‘Thank you very much.'

‘Not at all. We're all very proud of the school in Tinworth, so it's in everybody's interest to keep everything clean and sweet. So if you do happen to remember where your husband's gone this morning, and you can reach him on the telephone, have a try, see? Good morning.'

‘Good morning,' I said huskily, and hung up.

I made a note on a pad for Victor and left the sheet propped up on the hall table where he could not fail to see it. Then I went slowly upstairs.

I told Mrs Veal that Mr Rorke had been run over. There seemed no harm in telling her and it kept her from chattering about Victor or, what was worse still, Andy. She had put the
bowl of flowers in the middle of the dining-room table, I saw, and was prepared to mention it as soon as I appeared. My news sidetracked her.

‘Run over? In hospital?' She echoed my words with genuine pity. ‘What a shame! What a shame after all 'e's done to keep 'imself you-know-what after all this time. Never once, never once not in two terms 'as 'e been – well, we-won't-mention-it. I was only saying so to Mr Williams. “It's a miracle,” I said, “and 'e ought to 'ave a medal for it.” It's not easy, no it's not easy, that it isn't, to keep yerself you-know-what once you've let it get ‘old of you like 'e did. And now runned over as well. I never!'

She made herself perfectly plain for all her ladylike censorship and I understood why Mr Rorke had not struck me as the drinker his reputation had suggested. His sobriety since I had met him had been the result of effort. I had not realized that.

‘I am afraid the end of term was too much for him,' I murmured.

She considered me with serious eyes and nodded her head like a Chinese mandarin.

‘The night before last, that was when it started again. Pore chap! As I said to Williams, you would 'ave thought 'e'd 'ave waited until 'e got off school premises, I said, but no, 'e couldn't. Down the town 'e went and come back when the pubs closed, swearing, Williams says – well, 'e couldn't tell me what 'e said and I'm sure I didn't want to 'ear.'

‘It's a great pity,' I said. ‘I had not realized it was a habit with him.'

‘It used not to be,' she assured me earnestly. ‘Not for years it wasn't. And then last year it seemed to come over 'im and it was quite bad. Then there was the noise at the end of the winter term and we all thought 'e'd pulled ‘isself together.'

‘Noise?' I inquired, fascinated.

She dropped her eyes modestly. ‘Some persons say “row”,' she explained primly, ‘but it's not a very nice expression. 'E did somethink and the 'Eadmaster 'eard of it and oh my! we all thought 'e'd 'ave to leave, we did really. Then it all blowed over and the next term – that was the term you come – 'e was as good as gold and sober as a judge. Did 'im good.'

I felt I ought not to gossip but she seemed to hold the key to the school and to Tinworth. No one else had been half so informative. In fact she was the only person who had treated me like a woman. Everyone else had seemed to think I was a new boy.

‘What did he do?' I inquired guiltily.

‘I'm not dead certain.' She lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘But we understood at the time that 'e said something to one of the boys – I'm not sure 'e didn't write it, which would 'ave been worse – something in the swearing line, it was. The boy was a bit soft and told ‘is parents, and the parents were a bit soft and told the 'Eadmaster. That's what we 'eard. There
was
a to-do! The 'Ead, well, 'e can use ‘is tongue, can't 'e? Sarcastic! Vinegar's milk when 'e gets goin', vinegar's milk, I say.'

She glanced at me anxiously. ‘Not that I ought to say such a thing to you, dear – I mean madam. I must get on. Still, I'm sorry that Mr Rorke's runned over, I am indeed. People are never the same again after that ‘appens, sober or – well, we won't mention it. No, they're
not
.'

She began to sweep with great vigour, and since there was nothing I could do I took Izzy and we went round the school grounds, battered and deserted in the morning sun. I saw no one at all No one was at work. No one came up the drive. No tradesmen. No visitor. No boy.

I sat down on one of the well-worn seats on which generations of children had carved their names, and waited, watching the gates, but there was no sign of Victor. Finally I saw Mrs Veal wobble off down the path on a bone-shaking bicycle. She waved to me and shouted that she'd ‘see me termorrer' and then she was gone and I was quite alone. I thought of Rorke and wished there was something I could have done for him. He seemed to be an unhappy sort of person, probably most unsuited to be a schoolmaster, and yet someone had said that he taught brilliantly. Possibly it had been Victor; I couldn't remember. At any rate, I was glad that Mr Seckker would be his rescuer on behalf of the school. I felt pretty certain that if one was in some sort of scrape it would be nicer to be rescued by Mr Seckker than by Victor.

My thoughts returned to Victor and I rehearsed what I had decided I must say to him. I could imagine his opening sarcasms as he began to reply, but I had made up my mind that I must wear all that down. I must stand up to it and defeat it and get my point into his head. Andy was always creeping back into my mind but I pushed him out resolutely. As Mrs Veal had put it so devastatingly, it was just as well he'd gone, and perhaps he'd seen it himself!

At last I went back to the house, dressed myself for the street with as much care as possible, and, taking Izzy on the lead, went down the town. Izzy loathed the lead but he was a fighter, and I seldom dared to take him into a crowd where every second woman had a dog with her. However, today I did not feel like parting with him even for a moment.

The Flower Club lecture was at a quarter after two in the Public Library's smaller room, and I thought I'd go. It seemed to me that I'd found out a great deal about Tinworth in the last twenty-four hours, and I wanted to see all these people who had seemed so unaccountably alien to me during the few months I had known them, in the light of all this new information. It was a chance I did not imagine I should have again. Everyone would be there. The Flower Club was Tinworth's latest craze. It was amusing, it was elegant, and it was cheap.

As in most British provincial towns, even the well-to-do ladies of Tinworth managed their lives on a very rigid budget, and local crafts and crazes were apt to fade very quickly if the materials required cost even a little actual money spent. Flowers had the enormous advantage of being practically free. Everybody grew flowers; the seed fields round the town were full of them and the garden bloomed like the Sunday hats of long ago. So the art of floral decoration flourished, and the cult took on a seriousness which was almost Japanese. In that year the Flower Club was definitely the thing to join, so I should have plenty of opportunity of seeing everyone. As I walked down the road I reflected that I must also eat. This idiotic business of my being taken so utterly by surprise by the sudden closing down of the school commissariat had shaken me more than I cared to admit. I am not incapable. I was quite able to cater and care for
myself and a family, and I was eager to do it. To be caught out like this suddenly, without even a saucepan or a stove to put it on and no way of telling what, if anything, was required of me, put me in wrong. I did not like to rush out and buy some temporary equipment which I should not need for long, because I had very little money. This was another irritation. I was used to earning a reasonable living, but I had no inheritance and after six months my savings were dwindling rapidly.

I bought myself a cheap lunch at the Olde Worlde Teashoppe in the High Street and managed to smuggle half of it to Izzy, hidden behind me on the olde worlde settle. We dawdled over it as long as we decently could and then went over to the Library.

The staircase was cool and quiet after the sun-baked streets and I assumed I was the first to arrive, but as I crossed the landing I saw that the doors of the lecture room were open and heard the sibilant mutter of voices inside. I picked up Izzy and, carrying him under my arm, walked in.

As I appeared on the threshold there was sudden and absolute silence.

The big shabby room was dim as a church and nearly as cool, with the same smell of dust and paper faint in the air. The rows of cane chairs stretching up towards the platform made a vast flimsy barrier between me and the four women who stood together in the aisle before the front row. For a full minute they stood quite still, a picture of arrested movement, their bodies still bent towards each other as if they had been whispering. But every head was turned, every face blank, every eye watching me. It only lasted a short time but it was long enough to tell me that they had been discussing me.

I did not care in the least. At least I felt sure once again that I knew a great deal more about my own business than anyone else did, and that was a very good feeling.

I knew all four women slightly. There was the inevitable Mrs Raye, looking at least half ashamed of herself; Mrs Roundell, the pretty, pleasant wife of the Town Clerk; Miss Bonwitt, a slightly vague spinster who was chiefly remarkable for her wonderful garden out on the hill above the golf course; and Mrs Amy Petty.

Amy Petty was rather better known to me than the others. She was Maureen Jackson's widowed elder sister, for one thing, and I had met her calling at the school several times. She had the Jackson family's direct manner, their money, and their clannishness, but her face was like a mean little hen's set atop a long flat figure clad in very good but very ugly country clothes.

I had often thought that for some reason she disliked me, but in the normal way she was polite enough. Today she astonished me by letting her eyes flicker away from me without a gleam of recognition, while her mouth shut in a firm hard button. It was a brief reaction, and by the time I had found my way round the chairs towards her she was pleasant, yet there was something new and strange about her which I did not understand. The idea seemed ridiculous, but it did go through my mind that she was behaving as if she were afraid of me.

There was something strange about them all. Even Mrs Raye did not seem sure of herself. It struck me as odd at the time because Tinworth ladies were so often caught gossiping by the subjects of their scandal that it was hardly considered a social contretemps any longer. The conversation began jerkily, with me the only person quite at ease.

Mrs Raye said it was good of me to come. Miss Bonwitt agreed with her rather too quickly. Mrs Roundell hoped the lecturer wasn't going to make flower arrangement too scientific, and Amy Petty asked me bluntly if I knew when I was going on my holiday. I was prepared for that one by this time and I said the day was not actually fixed but I expected to be off by the end of the week. Hester Raye came back into form at that point and slid her arm through mine.