Closed at Dusk (19 page)

‘It's fun.' Dottie moved William away. ‘No one will know who she is. Even Ralph doesn't know. He's going round asking, “Where's my wife?” I'll make him go and have his fortune told.'

Clumsy and excluded or not, William was glad to see her so amused. ‘You're feeling all right now, aren't you?' He looked in her face.

‘Yes, Will.'

‘Good girl.' William squeezed her arm through the silky
Chinese coat. ‘Look at the crowds already. Listen to that lovely brassy music coming across the water. Hullo, John. Evening, Mrs Wright. Yes, isn't it? Oh, I'm glad you came, Warren. And your grandfather too – all the family – great. Look at those children, Dottie. Look at them running to the bridge as the coloured lights come on. How happy everybody is! This is going to be the best festival ever.'

As dusk fell, the tents and booths were lit up, and patches of the garden and the more spectacular trees and bushes were flooded with white light. Frank Pargeter arrived with Faye. He had wanted to come earlier and make his supper from the barbecues and ice-cream stalls, but Faye had got good liver out of the butcher today, so they had liver and bacon at home before they drove to The Sanctuary.

There was a huge crowd, hundreds of people. ‘At five pounds a head,' Faye said, ‘they're doing all right for themselves.'

‘It's in aid of the RSPCA, you know that. Always been for animals, this place.' If Frank could have told the Taylors about ‘his' nightingales, he might have got a donation for the Society for the Protection of Birds.

‘I hope I shan't lose you in the crowd,' Faye grumbled. She often grumbled at the start of an outing, then had quite a good time. ‘Better give me the keys of the car.'

‘And let you drive off home without me?'

‘Some of us have to get up early and go to work on Sundays.' Faye was doing overtime at the hospital, to pay for a conservatory.

Frank kept the keys, and they stayed together until Faye found friends and wandered off with them to try for prizes along the line of stalls, hoopla, roll-a-penny, coconut shies, bowling for the pig. Frank had two kinds of ice-cream, watched the jugglers and the Morris dancers, and joined the crowd
singing along to old music hall tunes round the funny little bandstand at the shallow end of the lake. Where would the pintail ducks be hiding?

He met a friend in the beer tent and they went out together to look at the games and displays. At the bottle stall, they won a miniature of
crème de menthe
and a bottle of cough syrup. ‘More or less the same thing,' said Frank. The cheery
Frau
in the Austrian dress behind the stall was the friendly woman from the tea-room who was such a good listener that Frank had run out of pretences about arboreal studies, and told her about birdwatching.

‘How are the birds?' she asked.

‘All right, I suppose,' Frank said vaguely. His friend was a birdwatcher too, and must not guess that he came to The Sanctuary often, and why.

Keith and Gregory, a friend from Cambridge, had spent most of the afternoon practising their guitar accompaniment with the singers Lee Foster had brought. Keith had not expected to enjoy anything else about the Festival, because he didn't like crowds of people hell-bent on mindless amusement; but when Lee asked him to show her around, he found himself getting excited, laughing immoderately at the jokes Lee made and at her American delight at so much Englishness erupting in one place under the cloudless night sky.

Because he was with her, and because he was keyed up about playing his guitar out on the lake, he felt hectic and feverish. He knew that syndrome. When you were low, you were prostrate, barely ticking over. When you were high everything was going at full tilt. He and Lee had a hot dog and drank ginger beer rather than alcohol because of Keith's illness. She was marvellous, quick and amused and perceptive, revelling in life. How could she put up with slow, old, quiet Matthew,
who was at least fifteen years older? Keith was about fifteen years younger. Why didn't women look in that direction? They went with older men so they could always seem young, but if they would go with younger men, they would become young.

‘
There
you are!' Matthew came out of the shadows with Nina. Lee spread her arms and put them round him with a delight that sent Keith's spirits plummeting.

On the floodlit lake, in the decorated boat behind the singers, he drooped over his guitar like a jilted lover, shivering in the warm evening, and trickled his stupid little soul out into the music. The love songs were sad enough for his mood. The woman's pure soaring voice and the man's sobbing tenor entreated each other to stay, to love for ever, to return to Sorrento, to remember, remember …

The voices carried clearly over the water as the illuminated boats drifted down the lake, the light-trimmed oars of the rowers flashing and dipping like phosphorescence. The noises of the crowd were stilled. Only a dog barked from time to time, far away in the house. Nina, who had been helping Jo and Ruth on the bakery stall, sat with Jo on the bank, absorbing the music through her hair, apparently enthralled by the emotional beauty of the scene. But when Jo said, ‘Lee was clever to get hold of these lovely singers,' Nina pulled up a tuft of grass and said moodily, ‘I was afraid she'd want to sing herself.'

‘Is she good enough?'

‘No,' Nina said with some bitterness, ‘but she thinks she is.'

Jo, never one to miss an opportunity, asked softly, ‘Did your mother come to The Sanctuary often?'

‘Yes. She loved it.'

‘You think about her a lot?'

‘Of course.'

‘It's been a rotten two years for you, hasn't it? It must be hard for you, Nina. It always, is, when someone's been through so much with their father, and then he …' Between work on the stalls, Jo had been darting about among the crowds like a bandit working the Venetian back alleyways. She had been bought a beer by one of the gardeners and had knocked back a few glasses of wine, so she almost continued, ‘And then he lets someone else come pushing in,' but she did not need to.

Nina was looking at her in hopeful surprise. ‘Thanks,' she said. ‘Everybody adores Lee – and she's OK, I suppose – but I'm glad someone seems to understand.'

When the singing was over, people began to gather on the house side of the lake to watch the fireworks. Many of them crowded on to the terrace in front of the house. Tessa and Chris were making their way up there with Rob, so that he could stand on the balustrade and clutch an urn, when Tessa saw her little dog running about anxiously among the strange legs, looking for her

‘Charlotte!' Rob shrieked.

‘I forgot about the cat flap. Here,
Char
-lotte! Here, little dog, here I am!'

At first Charlotte could not see where Tessa's voice came from. She darted back and forth, her ears flapping out sideways, panicking.

‘
Char
-lotte!'

‘Here she is!' Chris bent to grab her just as the first fireworks went up with a swoosh and a machine-gun clatter; the little dog dropped her tail and bolted down the terrace steps and off into the darkness.

‘Sorry,' Chris said.

‘She'll come back.'

‘Of course, she always does.' Chris put an arm round Tessa
and she put an arm round Rob, tense and quivering on the balustrade, letting out screams shriller than any of the other children as each new coloured explosion of stars showered into the sky and fell in fizzling, diminishing flares into the lake.

The crowds left. Floodlights were turned off. Rodney and Dennis unplugged the strings of bulbs on the wooden bridge and went down to the lake to check that the boats were securely moored, then brought the batteries on shore.

Rob and Annabel had passed out and been carried to bed. Tessa and Chris, Nina, Keith and Gregory, William and Dorothy, Angela (Sir Ralph was on the phone to New York), Ruth and her husband, Jo, John and Polly Dix were all out with torches, searching to find Charlotte. The bigger dogs were running loose, but Charlotte had never had anything much to do with them. It was Tessa's call and whistle that would bring her out.

‘
Char
-lotte!
Char
-lotte!'

‘Let's give up for now, pet.' Chris was willing to search all night if that would help, but he knew that Tessa was exhausted. ‘You know she'll come back by morning.'

‘But supposing …' They had been over and over all that: caught by a branch through her collar, stuck in rabbit wire, broken a leg, trapped somehow.

‘You'd hear her barking. She must have run a good way off, into fields or woods where she can't hear your voice. But she knows the way back.'

The others were returning to the house, telling Tessa those same things, which she knew, but only with her brain. The inner door to the boot room was left open, so that Charlotte, who was smaller than the largest black and white Tom, could come home the way she had got out, through the cat flap.

After everyone had gone to bed, Tessa, still in her Mexican
skirt, pulled a sweater over the low-necked blouse and went outside again and lay down under a rug on one of the long chairs on the terrace.

The perfect evening had chilled. The breeze off the lake was cold on her face as she stared out into the night beyond the wide terrace steps up which Charlotte would hop slowly, bedraggled and complaining, to find her. She dozed and woke and tried to stay awake. After dawn, with long shadows already travelling the wet grass, and the birds riotous, Tessa woke to a weight beside her feet.

‘Charlotte!'

Her little boy was sitting on the rug, shivering in his pyjamas.

‘Oh, darling Rob—'

His face dropped down and his mouth fell open in a square howl when he saw her begin to cry.

William, coming wearily downstairs to make tea, opened the dining-room curtains and saw the forlorn pair out there. He brought them in, made tea and put out cereal for Rob. Tessa took a mug up to wake Christopher, so that they could start searching again.

When William took the tray up to Dorothy, she sat up in her neat pyjamas and asked, ‘Did the dog come back?'

William shook his head.

A short while later, someone knocked on the door. ‘I hate to bother you.' It was Angela. ‘But I've been so worried about the little dog. Any news?'

‘Afraid not.'

‘Oh, dear. I'll get dressed right away and start looking again.'

‘I'll make you some breakfast first.' Dorothy got up and took clothes out of the walk-in cupboard.

William noticed that she went in and out of that cupboard rather quickly now. She had removed the big square mirror from the wall in there and hung it in the bedroom.

‘Kind of Angela,' she said, dressing nimbly. ‘She's really nice.'

‘You and she are quite friendly, aren't you?' William said from the bathroom doorway.

‘Good policy.' Dorothy gave a short, rather hard and un-Dottie-like laugh. ‘If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It's all right, Will. Don't look at me like a child caught stealing. I do know you've been seeing her in London.'

Only as a friend … to talk about her son … William discarded the whitewash and just said, ‘How?'

‘She told me.'

‘
She
told you?' William came into the bedroom. ‘Why?'

‘I suppose she knew I wouldn't mind.'

‘Don't you?'

‘No.' Dottie gave him a smile that was tolerant, but patronizing. ‘Does nobody any harm to have a little bit of a fling at this age.'

William was dressed in clean clothes, shaved, bathed, teeth cleaned, but he felt totally wrung out and dilapidated, as if it were the end of a devastating day. By knowing the very little there was to know about him and Angela, and not minding, Dorothy had mercilessly diffused the situation. The glamour and adventure were gone.

‘“Young again and quite insane …”' Dottie went towards the door. ‘Good for you to feel boyish, dear. It fits into your Peter Pan syndrome.'

They used to laugh about that, when Dottie was first studying psychology; she would come home with new clinical diagnoses and fit them on to William. But this was not a joke.

‘That's not like you, Dottie.' She was never spiteful to him. ‘What's got into you?'

He tried to stop her going out, but she said, ‘Don't bother me. I'm so upset about poor Tessa's dog, I hardly know what I'm saying.'

Tessa was demented. She had to leave by midday to prepare for an early meeting in London tomorrow.

She rang up dozens of local people and went to the police station and drove about with Chris, putting up desperate little notices about Charlotte.

‘Someone will find her. She's such a pretty dog, someone must have taken her in.'

Tessa could not react to, or even hear, the standard reassurances. Every time the phone rang, she snatched it up breathlessly, but it was always friends saying how wonderful the Festival had been.

‘Thank God she's got that nice chap,' William said to Angela, after Chris had finally driven Tessa and Rob protectively away. ‘He's the best she's had. But now, she'd rather have the dog.'

Angela had met William crossing the lawn, as he came back from saying a sad goodbye to Tessa at the garage.

‘This is silly and I don't like to say it. I did bring the picture of my tortoiseshell cats for Bastet, but now –'

‘Let's put it up.' William turned her towards the temple. ‘There's always another animal. Life goes on. And for you and me, without each other, I suppose.' Angela said nothing. William added, ‘Since Dottie knows.'

‘Is that why she's been so nice to me?'

They went up the grass mound and into the small round temple.

‘She said you'd told her.'

‘Will – I didn't. Why on earth would I?'

‘To make a fool of me?' William stood between two of the slender white pillars, looking out at the wreckage of the Festival
on the lawns, while Angela was paying her respects to the aloof cat goddess on her pedestal, and sticking up her cat picture.