The Reckoning (14 page)

‘Her gutters? Her
gutters
?' Helen had been speechless. ‘Is she out of her mind? Can't she pay someone to do these things? Lord knows, she's not short of money.'

She herself had more than once offered to take in her aged relative; or, failing that, to arrange for her to move into smaller, more manageable quarters; or even into an old-age home, if that seemed best. But her suggestions had been dismissed.

‘I intend to die in my bed,' Aunt Maud had announced, and with that the subject had been declared closed.

Arriving at St John's Wood soon after one, Madden learned that the mistress of the house had not yet risen, the news being conveyed to him by Alice, Aunt Maud's maid and loyal companion for the past forty years. Fortified with a sandwich and a
glass of beer, he settled down to work at once with ladder and broom and, having completed his labours by late afternoon, joined Alice for a cup of tea in the kitchen, only to be told that there were one or two other problems in the house that might bear looking at, since he was there. A brief inspection was enough to put the matter in its true light and, when he went upstairs a short time later to drink a glass of sherry with his hostess, it was as the bearer of bad news.

‘I'm sorry to say it looks serious, Maud. I'll have to get some workmen in. And I'd better do it quickly.'

‘Whatever you say, John, dear.'

Thin and brittle-looking as a twig, clad in a dressing gown of faded silk, and with her cheeks lightly rouged, Maud Collingwood sat with her hands folded in her lap in a posture thought suitable for young ladies a century earlier.

‘I put myself in your hands.' Feared by all in Helen's family for her sharp eye and even sharper tongue, she had always treated Madden with an indulgence denied her own kin. ‘I was sure I could count on you.'

‘I'll get someone to come in tomorrow and give an estimate,' Madden told her. ‘If he rounds up a crew, they can start work next week. I'll come up again myself and make sure things are running smoothly.'

‘What a treasure you are, my dear.' Her needle-like glance glowed with affection. ‘Helen's so lucky to have you.'

Later, after Alice had served him supper, he rang his wife to give her the news: ‘The house is in worse shape than I thought. The kitchen sink's blocked and there's rising damp in the cellar. But the wiring's the real problem. It's falling to bits. It's a wonder they haven't electrocuted themselves, or burned the place down.'

‘I might have guessed it. She's inveigled you up there and now she's got you in her clutches.'

‘Darling, she's ninety-three.' Madden laughed. ‘She can't be
expected to cope with this herself and neither can Alice. Someone has to organize the workmen and see that they do a proper job. If Lucy were here, we could send her up. But she's not, so it'll have to be me.'

‘I suppose it will.'

‘Oh, and by the way, I'm a treasure and you're lucky to have me.'

‘That woman!'

By noon the next day, having acquired the services of a local builder, shown him over the house from roof to cellar and obtained from him not only an estimate of the cost of the repairs, but an assurance that he could assemble a crew and begin work by the start of the following week, Madden was ready to depart.

‘Do be careful switching anything on,' he warned Alice. ‘And make sure Miss Collingwood knows, too. Say goodbye to her for me' – the lady of the house had not yet risen from her bed – ‘and tell her I'll be back next week to get things started.'

Before ringing for a taxi to take him to Waterloo station he called Billy at the Yard.

‘I had a thought last night. It's to do with that idea I put to you and Charlie. Why not ring Edward Gibson and get him to have another look at his brother's diaries? If there
is
a link between this business and the first war, he might find some reference to it.'

Billy chuckled. ‘I'm ahead of you there, sir. I had the same idea. In fact, after you left, I tried to ring him at his office. At the very least we could find out if Ozzie was ever in France, like you and Singleton were – in the same area, I mean; and if so, when. But unfortunately he's gone away for a few days on business. He's in Bath for a court case. I got hold of the number of the hotel where he's staying and rang him last night. He'd read about Singleton's murder and realized it must have been the
same bloke who shot Ozzie. I had to tell him we're still in the dark. He hasn't got the diaries with him. He left them in London. But he promised to look at them again as soon as he gets back at the end of the week.'

‘Then we'll just have to wait till then.'

13

N
OW THAT THE EVENINGS
were drawing in, Sally didn't like staying late at the Manor. It meant she would have to cycle back to the village in near-darkness and, though Tony had recently fitted a headlamp to her bike, it wasn't something she enjoyed doing. The narrow lane was full of holes and unexpected bumps, and you never knew what you might run into, as she had found out only the other evening when she had collided head-on with a pig, of all things.

‘What it was doing there I don't know, but it must have wandered into the middle of the road, and if I hadn't been wobbling along slowly I'd most probably have fallen off,' she told Aunt Millicent later. ‘As it was, I hit it amidships and it was simply furious. It turned and snorted at me.'

Later it was discovered that the pig had escaped from a sty close to the road – somehow it had squeezed out between two broken slats – but Sally wasn't mollified.

‘The evenings are getting so misty now. You can't see things clearly, even with a lamp. All you see are shapes and shadows. I've told Sir Horace several times that I like to get away in good time, but he always finds something for me to do at the last moment.'

That day was no exception, and what particularly annoyed
Sally was that she shouldn't really have been working, since it was a Saturday. But she had let herself be bullied into coming in, to make up for a day she had taken off earlier in the week to accompany her mother up to London on a shopping expedition. Sir Horace had also managed to imply that she owed him this extra effort, in view of her decision to terminate her employment at the end of the year and thus leave him in the lurch. Having spent a long afternoon typing up the morning's dictation and then retyping the pages he had corrected, she had been on the point of leaving when he had put a spoke in her wheel once more, reminding her that she hadn't yet typed the speech he would be giving at a civic luncheon in Winchester the following day.

‘I can't imagine how you could have forgotten, Miss Abbot.' His blue eyes had bulged in disbelief when she had stuck her head into his study to announce her departure. ‘It's a day of national mourning. What I have to say will be most important.'

Well, he might think so, Sally told herself crossly as she sat down at her typewriter again, but she doubted that anyone else would. What mattered was the Remembrance Day service in Winchester Cathedral that would precede it, along with all the other services that would be held that day, including one in Feltham, which her own Uncle Guy would conduct and which she would attend along with her mother and Tony. As far as she could tell, Sir Horace's words prepared for the luncheon afterwards were just a lot of hot air. Did the world – or, to be more accurate, the burgesses of Winchester, who would have to listen to it – really want to be told that the ‘terrible price in blood' paid by all those young men who had died in the First World War had not been in vain?

And was that even true?

Would they feel reassured to learn that ‘the flower of our youth' lay in ‘hallowed graves' and that their sacrifice would never be forgotten? Especially since it had been Sir Horace and
his lot who had sent them over the top and stumbling across no-man's-land to their deaths?

Her mood had not been improved by the latest chapter of his memoirs, which she had taken down and typed earlier that afternoon. They had reached the summer of 1917 and Sir Horace had held forth at some length on a subject that, as it happened, Sally knew something about, having heard Aunt Millicent speak of it: a battle called Passchendaele, fought near the Belgian city of Ypres in pouring rain. Shelled over and over again, the ground had become a morass of mud into which the bodies of men, dead and wounded alike, had vanished without trace. Aunt Millicent's two cousins had been among the casualties and their remains had never been found. The only record of their deaths was on a memorial in France, where the names of seventy thousand men killed during the war, but with no known grave, were inscribed in stone.

To listen to Sir Horace Canning, KBE, going on about the ‘stern but necessary decisions' taken by ‘our unflinching commander-in-chief' (he meant ‘Butcher' Haig) and ‘the heavy burdens laid on those with the responsibility of leadership' (he meant himself) had come close to turning Sally's stomach. Especially when it became clear once again that he had played no part in the fighting himself – his own corps had been stationed some way to the south – and, as far as she could tell, had simply wanted to associate his name with a battle that was already legendary. As for the losses suffered by the Allied side, Sir Horace had seemed to take them in his stride, speaking in that blind, unfeeling way that she was familiar with now, about ‘the inevitable cost in human lives of great military undertakings'.

As she finished the last page and pulled the sheet of paper out of her machine she thought of Tony and how he never talked about the war, although he had been called on to risk his life in the air, day after day. All he had ever said to her was: ‘War is
terrible, Sal. It's the worst thing in the world, and don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.'

The door to her office opened. The Lord Lieutenant thrust his head in.

‘I've finished typing your speech, Sir Horace.' She spoke before he could. ‘I can give it to you now.'

‘Just leave it on my desk, would you? I have to go upstairs and change. I'll wish you goodnight.'

With a brisk nod he withdrew his head and shut the door. A moment later she heard the click of his footsteps receding down the corridor.

‘And the same to you, with knobs on.'

Sally collected the typed pages, clipped them together, slipped the cover over her typewriter and then rose and put on her coat. Not a word of thanks; no apology for having kept her later than she wanted, yet again. He could see as well as she could that the fog was starting to thicken outside. She wondered if he was altogether human – if he was a whole man, or just a part of one: the part that had once strutted about in a uniform barking out orders; the part that no longer knew what to do with itself.

She slipped through the door and deposited the typed pages on his desk. Ready to leave now, she paused and then, acting on impulse, went out through the French windows onto the terrace. The early-morning mist had lifted for a while during the day, but now it was back, lapping at the balustrade and blanketing the garden below. Lost in thought, she wandered along the terrace. Tony was coming down from London by train later and, if the weather cleared, even for a few hours, they would go out for a picnic tomorrow after the service. They would take a blanket with them and after lunch they would lie in each other's arms and talk about the future: the long years rolling out before them, which Sally had already peopled with the children she would bear, their faces not yet known, but their presence vivid
in her imagination. Although she was still a virgin, it was not from prudishness; she would happily have given herself to the man she loved. But, as if by common consent, they continued to postpone the moment, and this sense of hesitating on the brink had brought a feeling of excitement to their engagement, just as it brought a flush to her cheeks now.

Smiling to herself, she reached the end of the terrace and, rather than return the way she'd come through the swirling wreaths of mist, went down the steps at the side, joining a path that led past the kitchen garden to the back of the house, where her bicycle was parked in the yard. Seeing the light on in the kitchen, she went in for a moment to say goodnight to Mrs Watts.

‘Oh, there you are, my dear. I was hoping you'd have gone home by now.'

A family retainer of the kind dying out in England now, Agnes Watts had worked at the Manor for close on thirty years, starting as a kitchen maid and climbing up the ladder of domestic service to her present rank of housekeeper. A plump, motherly woman, she treated Sally as she might one of her own children.

‘I ought to have left ages ago.' They knew each other well enough that Sally could speak her mind. ‘He knows I hate riding home in the dark.'

‘I heard him go upstairs just a few minutes ago, probably to change. He's dining out.' She smiled up at Sally from the table where she was sitting with a book open. ‘Cook's gone off for the weekend, and so have the maids. I'll be minding the shop. If I were you, I should get away smartly.'

Mrs Watts always referred to Sir Horace as ‘he', never by his name. It was the only indication she ever gave of her feelings towards her employer. She smiled again.

‘Is your young man coming down from London?' she asked. Sally had brought Tony to the Manor once, when Sir Horace was away, to meet her.

‘I'm expecting him later this evening. We've got all sorts of plans for the weekend.' She glanced at her watch. ‘You're right, I must run . . .'

But then, as she turned to go, she remembered.

‘Oh, dash it. I left my handbag in the office. I'll just go and fetch it.'

At that moment, however, they heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs and then the measured click of heels receding down the corridor.

‘He's gone back to the study.' Mrs Watts eyed her. ‘You'd best be quiet now or he'll find something else for you to do.'