The Secret House of Death (21 page)

‘You
are
a dark horse. I bet you'd never have said if I hadn't asked. I read all about her tragedy in the papers. It upset me properly, I can tell you. I've got the kettle on. Would you like a cuppa before you turn in? That's right. You leave them bags and I'll get my boy to take them up.'

Things were going well, far better than he had expected. There was one question he must ask. Her answer would make the difference between his staying the whole weekend or leaving in the morning. ‘Of course, she was here only last year, wasn't she?'

‘That's right, in July. End of July. Now you pop into the lounge and make yourself comfy.'

The room was small and shabby. It smelt of geranium leaves and fly spray. Mrs Spiller shut the door on him and went off to fetch the tea. Sitting down, he wondered how often Magdalene had sat in the same chair. Suppose the Norths had stayed here too and the first encounter between Bernard and Louise had been in this very room? He contemplated the décor with his critical designer's eye, the potted plants, the wedding group on an upright piano, the snowstorm in a glass dome. Two pictures faced him, a water colour of Plymouth Hoe and a nasty little lithograph of some central European city. There was another picture in the corner, half hidden by a mahogany plant stand. He got up to look more closely and his heart gave a little jerk. What more suited to this mid-Victorian room than Millais'
Order of Delease
? Susan Townsend looked through him and beyond, her mouth tilted, her eyes cool, distant, indifferent.

Before driving down here, he had done a strange, perhaps a foolish, thing. He had sent her a dozen white roses. Would she look like that when she received them, her expression changing from cold politeness as she closed the door to disgust?

‘Sugar?' said Mrs Spiller into his right ear.

He jumped, almost knocking the teacup out of her hand.

‘Bit nervy, aren't you? A couple of days down here will set you up. Very bracing, Bathcombe is.'

‘It always does Magdalene a world of good,' David said.

‘Just as well. You need your health to face up to what she's been through. What a terrible thing, him doing himself in like that, wasn't it? I've often asked myself what was at the back of it all.' Not as often as he had, David thought, sipping the hot sweet tea. ‘You being their friend, you must know what triggered it all off. You needn't mind telling me. I'm not exaggerating when I say I was more or less one of the family. Year after year Mr Chant used to bring little Mag here for their holidays and Mag always called me Auntie Vi.'

‘Still does,' David said stoutly. ‘She often talks about her Auntie Vi.' But who was Mr Chant? Her father, of course. In the newspaper bundling his slide projector had been the announcement of Heller's wedding, Bernard Heller to Miss Magdalene Chant.

‘Yes,' said Mrs Spiller, reminiscing, ‘she'd been coming here with her dad since she was so high and she knows all the locals. Ask anyone in the village if they remember little Mag Chant pushing her dad about in his wheelchair. Well, not his. They used to borrow one from old Mr Lilybeer and she'd take him down to the beach. Her and Bernard, they came here for their honeymoon and then most years after that.'

‘I don't suppose that Mrs North ever stopped here?'

‘North?' Mrs Spiller considered and her face reddened. ‘Are you referring to that woman as was Bernard's fancy piece, by any chance?' David nodded. ‘She certainly did not. Whatever gave you that idea?'

‘Nothing really,' David began.

‘I should think not indeed. He must have been out of his mind chasing a woman like that when he had a lovely girl of his own. All the local boys was after Mag when she was in her teens, or would have been if her father'd given them half a chance.'

‘I can imagine,' David said soothingly, but he was aware that for the time being at least he had spoiled the hopeful
rapport
between himself and Mrs Spiller. She was staunchly Magdalene's ally, as if she were really her aunt, and she took his introduction of Louise North's name as criticism of this adopted niece, of her beauty, her desirability. ‘I think Magdalene's exceptionally good-looking.'

But Mrs Spiller was not to be so easily mollified. ‘I'm off up the wooden hill,' she said and she gave him an aggrieved frown. ‘You can have the telly on if you want.'

‘A bit cold for that.' The room was unheated and a vaseful of wax flowers had been placed in the grate.

‘I never light no fires after April the first,' said Mrs Spiller sharply.

He had discovered one thing. The Norths had not only not stayed at the Swiss Chalet at the same time as Bernard and Magdalene. They had never stayed there at all. But they had been better off than the Hellers and perhaps they had stayed at one of the hotels in the village.

David breakfasted alone off cornflakes, eggs and bacon and very pale thick toast. He had finished and was leaving the dining-room when the only other residents appeared, a dour-looking man and a middle-aged woman in tight trousers. The woman eyed David silently while helping herself from the sideboard to four bottles of different kinds of sauce.

It was a cool cloudy morning, sunless and still. He found a path between pines which brought him within ten minutes to the top of a cliff. The sea was calm, grey and with a silver sheen. Between two headlands he saw a pointed heathy island rising out of the sea and he identified it from Turner's painting as the Mewstone. This association of nature with art again evoked Susan Townsend's face, and it was in a depressed frame of mind that he set off for the village.

At the Great Western Hotel he ordered morning coffee and was shown into a wintry lounge. The place was as yet barely prepared for visitors. Through a large curved bay window he could see a one-man manually punted ferry that plied between the Bathcombe shore and a tiny beach on the opposite side.

‘A friend of mine, a Mr North,' he said to the waitress who came for the bill, ‘stayed here at the end of July last year, and when he heard I was coming down he asked me if I'd enquire about a book he left in his room.'

‘He's left it a long time,' said the girl pertly.

‘He wouldn't have bothered only he knew I was coming down.'

‘And what would this said book be called?'

‘
Sesame and Lilies
,' said David because he kept thinking of Susan Townsend who was Ruskin's wife all over again. With what he thought must be a mad smile, he left all his change from a ten shilling note on his plate.

‘I will enquire,' said the girl more pleasantly.

David watched the ferryman come to the Bathcombe shore. He unloaded a cargo of empty squash bottles in a crate. Possibly the single cottage on the other side was a guesthouse. Come to that, the Norths could have rented a cottage here or a flat or stayed with friends. They might not have come in July, they might not have come to this part of Devon at all.

The girl came back, looking sour. ‘Your friend didn't leave that gardening book of his here,' she said. ‘He didn't even stay here. I've checked with the register. You'd better try the Palace or the Rock.'

But the Norths hadn't stayed at either place. David crossed the inlet by the ferry to find that the solitary house was a youth hostel.

Shepherd's pie and queen of puddings was served at the Swiss Chalet for luncheon. ‘Well, did you meet anyone who knows Mag?' asked Mrs Spiller when she came in to serve him instant coffee and pre-sliced processed cheese.

‘I hardly saw a soul.'

The coconut matting curls bounced and all the bobbles on the lilac jumper quivered. ‘If it's excitement you want, I don't know why you didn't settle for Plymouth. Folks come to Bathcombe to get a bit of peace.'

Suppose the Norths had ‘settled for' Plymouth? They might have come to Bathcombe just once for a day's outing. But would a passionate love affair have arisen from one isolated encounter on a beach? David couldn't picture slow, stolid Bernard, his deck-chair moved alongside Louise's, exchanging addresses surreptitiously.

‘I'm not complaining,' he lied. ‘It's a charming place.'

Mrs Spiller sat down and put her fat mauve elbows on the table.

‘That's what Mr Chant always used to say. “It's a charming place, Mrs Spiller. You get real peace and quiet here,” he'd say, and him coming from Exeter where it's not what you'd call rowdy, is it? By the way, I've been meaning to ask you, how's Auntie Agnes?'

‘Auntie Agnes?'

‘I'd have thought Mag would mention
her.
Not that you could blame Mag, a bit of a kid like her, but I've always thought she had a lot to thank Auntie Agnes for. But for her she never would have gone to London and got married.'

His mind wandering, David remarked that perhaps this wouldn't have been a bad thing.

‘You've got something there.' Mrs Spiller passed him Marie biscuits from a packet. ‘But she didn't know how it was all going to turn out, did she? I remember back in 1960 thinking to myself, that poor kid, she'll never have a proper life tied to an old man like that.'

‘Mr Chant, you mean?' David said absently.

‘Well, maybe I shouldn't call him old. I dare say he wasn't above fifty-five. But you know how it is with invalids. You always think of them as old, especially when they're crippled like Mr Chant was.'

‘Arthritis or something, was it?'

‘No, you've got it wrong there. Multiple sclerosis, that Auntie Agnes told me. She came down with them in 1960 and he was real bad then. Too much for Mag on her own.'

‘I suppose so.' David wanted to get on with the hunt. He wasn't interested in diseases of the central nervous system and he was awaiting his chance to escape from Mrs Spiller.

‘They're very slow in developing, them illnesses,' she was saying. ‘You can have sclerosis for twenty or thirty years. Mind you, he had his good days. Sometimes he was nearly as good as you or me. But other times . . . It went right to my heart, I can tell you, watching that lovely girl pushing him about in a chair and her only in her teens.'

‘Her mother was dead by then, I suppose?' David said, bored.

‘That's what they used to tell people.' Mrs Spiller put her face closer to his and lowered her voice. The middle-aged couple sat some fifteen feet from them, looking out of the window, but Mrs Spiller's extreme caution implied that they were spies whose sole mission in visiting her guesthouse was to satisfy themselves as to certain unsolved mysteries in the Chants' family history. ‘I got it all out of that Auntie Agnes,' she whispered. ‘Mrs Chant had run off with someone when Mag was a kid. They never knew where she ended up. Saw what her life would be, I reckon, and got out when the going was good.'

‘Like Magdalene.'

‘A wife's one thing,' Mrs Spiller bristled. ‘A daughter's quite another. When Auntie Agnes wrote and said Mag was going up to London to find herself a job I thought, that's the best thing that could happen. Let her have a bit of life while she's young enough to enjoy it, I thought. Of course, Auntie Agnes wasn't young, her being Mr Chant's own auntie really, and it's no joke looking after an invalid when you're past seventy.'

‘No doubt she managed.'

‘I don't reckon she looked ahead when she took it on. She wasn't to know Mag'd meet Bernard and write home she was getting engaged. Mind you, I never knew any of this till Mag and Bernard came down for their honeymoon. That was two years later and Mr Chant had passed on by then. That's why I asked if you knew what had become of Auntie Agnes. Dead and gone too, I dare say. It happens to all of us in the fullness of time, doesn't it?'

‘Depends what you mean by the fullness of time,' said David and he thought of Bernard with a bullet through his head because he had loved unwisely.

Susan had begun on the last chapter of
Foetid Flesh
when Bob opened the back door and came in softly. She stopped typing at once, a little dismayed at the look on Paul's face. He had been trundling his cars between the legs of her chair, but now he squatted still and stiff and his expression would have seemed a mere blank to anyone but his mother who could read it.

‘Where did the flowers come from, Susan?'

It was Paul who answered him. ‘A man called David Chadwick. Roses are the most expensive thing you can send anyone in April.'

‘I see.' Bob stood with his back to them, staring out of the window at the elms on which not a bud, not a vestige of green, showed. ‘Chadwick . . . And daffodils are the cheapest, aren't they?'

‘You picked your daffodils out of the garden.'

‘All right, Paul. That's enough,' Susan said. ‘It's not so long ago you said it was silly to send people flowers.' She smiled at Bob's back. ‘And you were quite right,' she said firmly. ‘I can see Richard outside. I expect he's wondering where you are.'

‘Then why doesn't he call for me?' But Paul went, dodging the hand which Bob suddenly and pathetically put out to him. Susan took it instead and, standing beside him, again felt the physical pull he exerted over her, the attraction that emptied her mind and left her weary.

‘Have you thought about what I asked you?'

For a moment her only answer was to press more tightly the hand she held. And then it came to her in a swift unpleasant revelation that this was her reply. Physical contact and then renewed, stronger physical contact was the only way she could get through to him. The closer intimacy which awaited them if they married would be just this pressure of hands on a full and complete scale, the desperate soulless coupling of two creatures in a desert.