Closed at Dusk (11 page)

‘What? What do they say?' Troutie opened her leaky eyes wider than usual.

‘Well, that Sylvia Taylor became – a bit of a hermit?'

‘Bit of what?'

‘Closed up most of the house.'

‘When? I always took care of it, and she'd say …'

‘Say what?'

‘Eh?'

Josephine was sharp enough to see that she was faking deafness, and Troutie was sharp enough to see that Josephine was prying into what was none of her business. Score: nil-nil.

Jo was getting up to leave the old lady when there were voices outside the room, and William and Matthew Taylor came in with an attractive American woman.

‘Hullo, Jo.' William seemed pleased to see Jo in there. ‘Glad you've made friends with Mrs Trout. She's my best friend, aren't you, Troutie dear?'

After introducing the American, he and his brother were all over the old lady; Troutie this and that, and, ‘Do you remember such and such?' While the American woman talked to the mouldy budgerigar and examined the hundreds of knick-knacks and family pictures, the old lady flirted a bit with her ‘Billie'. William and Matthew were like overgrown little boys, back in the nursery with Nanny – the kind of Englishmen who want spotted dick and lumpy custard all their lives.

When Tessa was a child, Troutie must have been about sixty, and still a powerful force at The Sanctuary. With William probably spoiling his daughter and Dorothy being enlightened, this was the kind of security in which Tessa had grown up to see the world as hers for the taking.

Jo said goodbye politely, but Marigold within was working herself up through bitterness towards anger. Tessa had always had everything. Why did she have to have Rex too? Tessa was a creation of her ancestry and upbringing. Marigold was self-made, in every sense of the word. With her father never there and her mother managing the hotel and always tired and irritable, Marigold was expected to grow up early: ‘Don't be a cry-baby, be your age, use your head, don't whine, you'll be all right, you're a big girl now'.

She had never been all right. She always felt like a little girl, guiltily, since she knew that was wrong. Rex was the first grown-up who loved the little girl in her. How could she help crashing her whole defenceless being full tilt into his world?

Nannies … Daddies … Teddies … Billie … Jo saw Ruth's car in the car park, and turned off behind the stables, past the little paddock with the donkey and goats, and along the rhododendron hedge to the gardens. She was not ready yet to give Ruth a cheerful greeting.

She walked, simmering, on the springy lawn. The cat temple was insufferable, with its sentimental cards pinned up and its
pagan goddess degraded into a sort of Christian domesticity.
Who did they think they were
, this family who carried on as if they had exclusive rights to animals?

The Scottish gardener was mowing along the edge of the lake, so Jo ducked between the giant beeches and into the hidden garden, to brood on a bench, helplessly. She got up and looked at the sundial, which told the wrong time. ‘Never Too Late for Delight,' it said. The happy people were impregnable.

She bent down, picked up one of their precious totems, the life-size hare with his long paw raised and his ears straight up together like tulip leaves, and hurled it against the wall.

At Sunday lunch, Jill said to William, ‘Some news you won't like, I'm afraid.' His daughter-in-law never just told you the news and let you decide for yourself.

‘What's that?' he asked tolerantly, carving the cold beef from last night.

‘Dennis and I went to the hidden garden to count the goldfish. You know that hare – the very life-like one by the sundial?'

‘What about it?'

‘It's in a flower-bed by the wall, smashed to pieces.'

‘Damn,' said William. ‘That was a lovely old piece, one of my great-grandparents' originals.'

‘I didn't do it,' Dennis put in unnecessarily. ‘I bet it was one of the peasants … sorry' – he glanced at Keith, from whom he had got the word – ‘visitors.'

‘They don't do things like that.' His grandfather brought the dish of thinly sliced meat to the table.

‘They do everywhere else these days,' Jill said. ‘Why not here?'

‘Because they don't.'

‘You're so trusting,' Jill accused him. ‘I'm amazed that half the stuff doesn't get pinched.'

‘There's two goldfish missing,' her son put in.

‘Dennis …' William warned.

After lunch, he went off to inspect the damage. Tessa and Christopher went with him, in case the sculptor could give advice on repairs. The hare was smashed into half a dozen pieces and some small chips.

‘Hopeless.' William and Christopher poked about in the flower-bed, picking out all that was left of the graceful hare. ‘It could never be repaired,' Chris said. ‘But,' he added tentatively, ‘if you'd like, I could have a try at making another for you.'

‘Could you?' Bit awkward. Chris was a nice chap, the best Tessa had come up with since she had been on her own – suppose he made something ghastly which William couldn't use?'

‘If you didn't like it, Daddy,' Tessa read his mind, ‘don't worry. Chris makes a lot of animals, and they do sell.'

‘Draw me a rough sketch,' Chris said, ‘of what you want, and I'll have a go.'

Tessa purred at him. Smiling, William watched them duck under the low door and go off.

He strolled about the gardens, speaking to visitors, answering questions about slugs and delphiniums, and about the circular blue bed round the dwarf spruce, which had plants in it of all cerulean shades from purple to pale sky blue. He tidied away the few cunning weeds in the greenhouse which camouflaged themselves as alpines, and did some dead-heading in Lady Geraldine's rose garden, the long curving bed with hybrid teas and floribundas, backed by standards and arches of climbers, that his grandmother had laid out and he had restored. The staff never seemed to have enough time for that.

Several of the rose bushes had green shoots neatly nipped off by what looked like the teeth of the greedy little muntjack deer, which did an enormous amount of local damage. Perhaps
he should at least try George Barton's suggestion; but it did sound daft.

Frank Pargeter had come in by the paying entrance today, with the Venture Club, and would be lucky if he got the chance to sneak off up the hill to where his nightingale fledgelings must be flying by now.

Mr Taylor saw him looking at the family of pintail ducks on the artificial nesting island in the lake.

‘Hullo,' he said to Frank. ‘You here again?'

‘I haven't finished my study on deciduous exotics.' Frank gave his brief cover story.

‘Have you seen the fruit coming in on the Acmenia?'

‘Ripening nicely,' Frank hazarded. ‘I'll be making sketches, but today I'm here with a group. I drive the minibus for the Venture Club.'

‘Good,' said Mr Taylor absently. ‘Look at this.' He pointed to a mutilated rose bush. ‘Muntjack deer. Devils. We've tried spraying, but they think it's salad dressing. They're getting in somewhere. Have to check all the walls and fences again, I suppose.'

And find out where
I'm
getting in, Frank thought.

‘One of my staff says I have to hang up hair. Human hair. It's the only thing they hate, apparently.'

‘I've heard this, Mr Taylor.'

‘Where would one get that?'

‘Hairdresser?'

‘I couldn't go there.'

‘Mrs Taylor?'

‘Hers is cut in London by a girl who comes to the flat. I can't see myself prancing in to Faringdon Unisex looking for long hair. They'd think it was some kind of fetish. Do you really think it would work?'

‘It would have to be dirty. They need to get the human smell.'

Mr Taylor made a face.

‘I don't mind trying for you, if you like,' Frank said.

‘You wouldn't?' Mr Taylor's face expanded in pleasure.

‘Why not?' Frank wanted to be useful, a welcome visitor to The Sanctuary. He was already doing them a favour by watching and protecting the nightingales, who might perhaps come back next year and for years afterwards, more and more of them, so that on future summer nights the whole tangled copse on the other side of the hill would be filled with music.

Cut 'n' Curl: the sign over the shop was in looped lettering like ringlets, hard to read. The window had a blown-up picture of a sullen girl whose hair had been carefully fashioned to look like a haystack. Cosmetics, scents, a faceless bald head stuck with butterflies on skewers. Women beyond. A counter, chairs, basins, dryers. A man in tight black trousers with hoop earrings.

Frank pushed open the door and plunged in. ‘Hullo there,' the man said. (It was a girl.) ‘You want a cut?' Her eyes considered what she would do to Frank's wild, woolly hair.

‘Oh, no. Thanks. I'm – er, I'm looking for some long hair.'

You what
? The girl did not need to say it.

‘Yes, you see, long women's hair. I want it for – well, never mind, but I thought you –'
Oh help. Greater love hath no man
… ‘I thought you might …'

‘We sometimes sell clients' long hair, for wigs.'

‘Oh, I'd buy it. I mean, how much?'

‘Full head, twenty pounds.'

‘But I only want any old hair. Dirty hair.'

She shook her sleek head at him, the ear-rings flapping like dog's ears. ‘It's always washed before cutting.'

A woman reading a magazine, in an armchair so small it would get up with her when she stood up, pushed back the pink metal drying hood and patted her chipolatas of hair. If she had scowled at Frank, he could have stood it, but she smiled at him with sticky frosted lips, and he fled.

He went home and tackled Faye. She was in the back garden, up a step-ladder by the rose arbour, snipping and tidying.

‘Fairy.' Sometimes he called her that, since it was the meaning of the name which her parents had given her before they knew she would grow to six feet.

‘Frankie.' She had green rose ties in her mouth, like a walrus chewing seaweed.

‘You know the geriatric ward at the hospital?'

‘Too well.'

‘The old ladies – most of them have short hair, don't they? What happens if they come in with it long?'

‘The things the man comes out with.' Faye came down from the step-ladder, one large foot shattering a vagrant flower pot. ‘They cut it, of course. No time to wash and dry long hair, and it can't be pinned up or plaited, because it makes their old scalps sore.' Faye moved the ladder to the next post.

Frank got a hoe from the toolshed, and ran it between some nearby rows of bush beans. ‘They – er, they wash it first?'

‘What point in that? I think they just hack it off and throw it away. Frank.' She pulled down a strong arching climber, to tame it to her will. ‘When I answer these stupid questions, it's only to humour the homicidal maniac in you.'

‘Right,' Frank said cheerfully. ‘Any new geriatrics coming in, then?'

‘All the time. Hearse at the back door, ambulance at the front. There's always a waiting list.'

‘Could I have the hair?' Frank kept his head down, hoeing.

‘My lord, Frankie Pargeter, you're kinky! I wonder they let you drive the minibus.'

Carefully, because he had the fish on the hook and was reeling it in, he explained about the Asiatic muntjack deer.

‘Just get me one lot, eh, Faye?'

‘I can't. Cost me my job, married to a lunatic.'

‘I know you will.'

Frank moved along the rows of beans, tranquilly. Faye carried the ladder to the last corner post, stood it down unevenly, and crashed sideways on to a currant bush when she put her foot down on the step.

Frank said, ‘There you go,' comfortably. She would not let him pick her up. She would not be dependent.

Within a week Faye had come home from the hospital with a hank of disgusting grey hair in a shopping bag.

‘To feed the muntjacks.' She threw it on to the fretted oak table in the hall, and no more was said.

William Taylor put the hair into an onion net and a pair of tights supplied by Jo, and hung them on posts at either end of the big rose bed at the height of a muntjack's nose, about eighteen inches from the ground.

When it was nearly six o'clock, Rob went to the ticket hut to see Mr Archer, who had promised to let him ring the Closing Bell. The end of the rope was too high to reach, so Mr Archer brought his chair out to the tall cypress tree, and Rob stood on that and pealed the sad-sounding bell, once, twice, three times. He would have continued, but Mr Archer, a retired school-master, decreed that more than three pulls would mean you could not ring the bell next time, and Dennis or Annabel would grab the chance.

‘Where have you been?' As the last visitors wandered away, Dennis came up out of the cellar door at the side of the house with a bat and an armful of cricket stumps.

‘That was me ringing the bell.'

‘I might have known. You couldn't hear it, five yards away.'

‘How did you know I was ringing it then? Can I play, Dennis?'

‘No, because it was my turn to ring the bell and you cheated. Uncle Matthew's going to bowl, and I'm going to teach Lee to bat.' He had to make do with them, because his father had not come this weekend.

Lee and Uncle Matthew were going out to dinner with the other grown-ups, so after a while Dennis came indoors and went up to the top floor to upset Rob, because he was still annoyed about the bell.

‘Want to hear something really and truly disgusting?'

‘No.' Rob put his hands over his ears. ‘Jill!' Jill was in the bathroom with the baby, running water.

‘Listen to this,' Dennis said loudly, and Rob loosened his hands a little, in case it was worth hearing. ‘You're always on about Flusher, aren't you?' Rob nodded, opening his eyes wide to see Dennis through his curtain of fringe. ‘You're so proud of knowing the story, but you've got it all wrong, you know.'