Closed at Dusk (17 page)

‘What game?' Rob looked up.

‘Snap, drawing – what would you like?'

They played a game of snap, and then Jo put him to bed and read to him until his straight spiky lashes fluttered and closed, and his face, pressed sideways into the pillow, performed the nightly childhood metamorphosis, as sudden and swift as death, into the original unsullied innocence of the world.

Jo's act when Dorothy was here had been good. If you can fool a psychologist, you can fool 'em all. Or, if you can't fool a
psychologist, you can't fool anyone. Tears welling up … nice work, Jo. They were real, but not for non-existent Alec. There were plenty of genuine memories to summon them.

‘How do you like being a birdwatcher?' she asked the photograph, putting it back on the shelf by its little cup of flowers.

When Dorothy had asked, ‘What brought you here?' the man with the wild white hair who was always at The Sanctuary had popped into Jo's mind. Just before closing, he had come into the tea-room and had confided in Jo the real reason why he prowled about these grounds, and the passion of his life. That gave her the idea of adding birdwatching to her reasons for coming to this area.

Jo poured herself another large glass of wine. ‘Have something to eat with it,' Alec suggested mildly from his frame on the shelf.

‘Later. Don't interfere.'

Presently, she went up the short stairs to look at the sleeping child. Charlotte, curled up on the blanket, lifted her lip in an ugly little snarl. Rob's face was flushed, as if he had a touch of fever again. He had pushed down the bedclothes, and flung out his spindly arms. His narrow chest rose and fell rapidly, pushing out his rosy lips in rhythm. Above his collarless pyjama top, his frail neck throbbed like a bird's breast.

Charlotte jumped off the bed and followed Jo downstairs, looking suspicious. When Jo let her out into the garden, she barked outside the door. When she came in, she sat inside the front door, lifting her ears at imaginary sounds, lying down with her nose pointing under the door, jumping up when a car went by, to whine and bark.

‘Shut up!' The dog was on the lookout for Tessa too.

Jo took off the false bosoms and the jewellery and the bright cyclamen cotton trousers she had worn for Dorothy, and pulled
on a colourless shift, half-way between a smock and a nightdress, from the old days. She poured more wine with her back to Alec's picture, and wedged herself and her bare feet in the small rocking chair. She took off Alec's wedding ring and put it in her pocket. The mark of the broader, tighter ring which she had tugged off and thrown away after Rex left her was still visible under the knuckle. Holding that finger tightly with the other hand, she heard herself moan, and was overtaken by an avalanche of pain and loss.

If we'd had a child … if we'd had a child. The wine released the fruitless grieving that should have been used up long ago, but seemed to have an unending well-spring. If we'd had babies, I wouldn't have been able to work full time to support Rex while he made his way. ‘He'll always be grateful to me …' I saw us in middle age, him telling people, ‘Marigold made me what I am.' After Rex finally agreed to let Marigold stop the pill, month after month of disappointment followed. ‘Just as well,' Rex had said. ‘No time. We're free. I'm going places. Nothing can stop me. Why fret, Mari? Aren't I enough for you?'

Hunched in the chair, she could feel it now, from years ago, the vaguely full feeling, her breasts, those inadequate breasts, actually, visibly swelling, though still smaller than other women's. Not visible to Rex, and she wasn't going to tell him yet. She hugged the foetus to her, more precious as a secret. At about three months, she would go to the doctor, and then tell Rex.

At two and a half months, Rex told her that he was going to live with Tessa.

Oh, God, must I go through all the pain and agony again after all these years? You shouldn't have tanked yourself up with wine. Better get a whisky, Marigold, if you're going to crouch down here like a maggot, with that child upstairs – her child – Rex's child – and wallow.

With the whisky came a storm of weeping as she relived the ghastly scene with William and Dorothy in the rain, the nightmare drive back to London, the car crash, the ache of the seat-belt that did not ease when the pressure was released. Her agonizing sobs were almost like the convulsions that had racked her as she lay on the polished floor in the pink house, because she hadn't had the strength to climb on to the sofa. That night she had lived her own death, and when the tearing pains came and split her apart in a torrent of blood, she was living, or dying, through the death of her baby as well.

She did not tell Rex. He and Tessa never knew. Nobody knew. The few friends who were still in touch did not know why Marigold had been kept a whole week in the hospital after her so-called D and C. They did not know, because they did not see her, that she was not quite sane for half a year.

When it was the calendar time for her to give birth to Rex's baby, she took a tiny little boy from a pram outside a wool shop, and wandered vaguely off with him. No one knew. The grandmother ran after her. The baby was returned without fuss. The mother did not report it. The grandmother, red-faced, started up a bit of a commotion about, ‘She might have killed him!', but the mother, who felt sorry for Marigold, shut her up.

Because she was grateful to the woman, Marigold saw the psychiatrist once again at the hospital where she had been taken after the miscarriage; but she did not tell him about the baby outside the wool shop, and he told her she was a strong, sensible woman who did not need him any more.

She had saved up enough of his pills to kill herself. But, because she was still not sane, she made the crazy mistake of ringing Rex to accuse Tessa of her death, after she took the pills, as she was passing out. Waking to the voice of the Welsh nurse scolding, ‘You're a very silly girl, you might have died,'
she was desperately disappointed and furious with herself and everyone else.

But if she had not made that wild mistake, Tessa would have gone free. Marigold would have lost the exquisite chance to become the avenging angel.

Very late in the night, about three o'clock, Jo went upstairs. When she turned out the light at the top of the stairs, she heard Rob cry out – a wail like a baby. He must be asleep. He cried out again, and then shouted loudly, as if he was sitting up, ‘Mummy!'

‘Mummy!' he cried again when Jo stood in the doorway. She turned on the light. He was standing up in bed, blinking and tottering.

‘Lie down, Rob. It's not morning yet.'

‘No!' He stepped off the bed and came to her, shivering, bony, and she took him to her room and into the bed with her.

He fell asleep again at once. Jo, who had survived the onslaught of Marigold tonight and was once more Jo, observed him sleeping. She tried to hate him, because of Tessa, but could not be bothered. Winning him over was easier, and more effective.

‘You know what?' He woke her. He had been out early, humming tunelessly over his puny projects in the stream. ‘I know how to make your bridge into a drawbridge. With a rope through the fork of that tree, we could lift it up from indoors.'

‘Hooray.' Jo grabbed him for a quick hug, because he was alive and glowing and had all the pains of life ahead of him. ‘You and I will live here in this castle and repel invaders.'

‘For ever and ever?'

‘Don't you want to go home?'

‘I want to make a drawbridge.'

‘Mummy will want you home,' Jo said. ‘Mummy and Chris. Will Chris be at your home for ever and ever, do you think?'

Rob shrugged, bolting down cornflakes to get back outside. He could not give attention to anything beyond the present moment. So it was safe to say, ‘You must miss being alone with Mummy now that Chris is always there.'

Rob was only half listening. He might not remember, but she dropped the thought into the pool of his consciousness, for luck.

Jo said later, ‘Better go up and find your shoes and bring your bag down.'

‘I'll come and stay with you again.'

‘Have you had a good time?' Jo asked.

‘Uh-huh.'

‘So have I. I'm glad Chris made your mother leave you and go to Paris.'

Risky, but Charlotte was barking at the sound of a car in the lane, and Rob rushed out to scream at his grandmother, ‘The drawbridge is up!'

Rob's visit was one more jewel in the crown of Jo the treasure. Her night of rage and remembered agony was a rare indulgence. She knew what her job was. Patiently and devotedly, she would continue to insinuate herself into the life of The Sanctuary.

Looking for the old porcelain pie-funnel for Jo to make her famous apple and bilberry pie as one of her contributions to the forthcoming Festival weekend, Dorothy opened cupboard doors below the long pantry counter.

‘Look at all this stuff! I keep meaning to go through it, and there's never time. Incomplete early-morning tea-sets, soup cups with one handle missing, Geraldine's hot-chocolate set – look at the crack in this jug!'

‘What a shame. It's eighteenth-century Derby, isn't it?'

Dorothy looked at Jo curiously. ‘You know about china?'

‘Well …' Jo had never talked about the museum job. She
was not supposed to be that class or quality of person. ‘Alec's father taught me a bit. I loved that man. In the school holidays when I wasn't working' – it was all right for Jo to have been a teacher, like Marigold – ‘I spent a lot of time with him at the antique shop.'

‘You'll have to manage with an egg-cup instead of the pie-funnel,' Dottie said, ‘unless it's in the dumb waiter.' She opened the small door in the wall above the old food-warming chests outside the pantry. ‘Some of the stuff got put in here after the shaft was closed up.'

‘Rob told me –' Jo began.

‘I know.' Dorothy put some china oddments back in a shoe box and shut the dumb waiter door on them.

‘Why is he afraid of it?'

‘He and Annabel used to hide on the bottom shelf in there when they were smaller, until Dennis told Rob it would go down with him in it and never come up.'

‘What are you going to do with those dear little Adderley flower baskets?' Jo asked, ‘and the chocolate set?'

‘Same as people before me did. Shut the door on them.'

‘Perhaps I could –'

‘Good God,' Dorothy said, smiling to cover her obvious irritation, ‘is there nothing you can't do?'

‘I'm sorry. Alec's father again.' Jo had acquired some ability to mend china at the museum. Like restoring books, it was one of what Rex used to call her ‘useless skills'.

It was almost a month since poor old Mary Trout died in the fire. Although the family's distress had been considerable (which had gratified Jo) and they still talked about her often with nostalgia and regret, she had after all been a very old lady, ready to die, and the fatal fire was falling into place as one of the happenings of this summer.

Since Jo's merciful act of euthanasia, she had been making herself useful in other ways: being invaluable not only in the tea-room but increasingly in and around the house. It was time for another drama.

Dottie had snatched a couple of hours from the Festival preparations to finish the library doors with Jo. It was a cold, windy morning, but they had to have a window open.

Considerate Josephine noticed the gooseflesh on Dottie's bare arms, and said, ‘I'll run up and get your sweatshirt for you. You're up a ladder and I'm not.'

Jo came back, looking puzzled. ‘What's that strange smell?' She left open the door that led to the hall.

‘Paint, what else?'

‘No, it's on the first floor.'

Dottie came down from the step-ladder and went through to the foot of the stairs, then up the first flight. She came back. ‘There's nothing. What sort of smell?'

‘Like – it was sort of exotic. Like a very pungent, rotting flower scent.' Jo picked up her brush and turned away, fortunately. Dottie could not trust herself to go back up the ladder. Although she had put on her sweatshirt, she felt colder than before, and unusually shaky.

‘I couldn't smell anything,' she told William when he came home, ‘but the way Jo described it, it was like the – the scent of decaying lilies.'

William was not used to seeing his wife nervous, biting her lip, her cool blue eyes behind the rimless glasses troubled and uncertain. She had been watching for his car, and took him straight out to the terrace to talk.

‘How could Jo have imagined that, Will?'

‘You're sure she's never heard the story?'

‘Ruth doesn't know about it. Nobody knows outside our
immediate family, and none of you have ever told anyone. Your sister Harriet did say something to Keith ages ago, as a sort of bad joke against your mother, but he says he didn't tell Jo. After I shut him up that night the Sterns were here – remember? – he got the message.'

‘You trust him?' William thought Dottie was making rather heavy weather of this, but he took it seriously, because she was not a woman to be upset over nothing.

‘A hundred per cent. Keith is very responsible now that he's well again.'

‘Jo must have smelled something from the garden,' William said comfortably. ‘Our bedroom windows are open.' He looked up. ‘Don't worry, Dottie.'

Normally, you did not notice how small she was, because she carried herself so well, but when she was upset, she seemed smaller and less substantial. William put his arm round her and tried to make the right noises. They leaned on the balustrade above the dahlias and watched the long shadows of the last visitors moving slowly across the lawn towards the cypress walk.

‘Anyway.' Dottie stood upright and was more solid again. ‘I don't believe it ever really happened. I was only a silly young woman then, excited by being in love with you. I must have imagined smelling the dead lilies, or Sylvia did, because she was still psychologically tied to her mother.'