‘Warwick Jones,’ the face above the cravat was saying. ‘Practically indestructible, in need of pepping up.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Somewhat weakened constitution, you
see, once the Japs had finished with me.’ He coughed to indicate that no answer was necessary.
‘Warwick’s liver is a battlefield,’ Bunny said, importantly. ‘He won’t mind me saying. And you?’
James had been saved from having to return the confidence and mention his bowels by the sudden reminder they had at that moment given him of their presence. Whether it was the food or the conversation that had caused them to reconsider their strategy of refusing to budge for an average of four days at a time, however much James besieged them with fig and senna extract, they had clearly resolved after forty-eight hours at the Sulis to abandon that tactic and go for complete evacuation. He had left the dining room very quickly.
* * *
W
ITHOUT REALISING
that he had been asleep, James now awoke with a few seconds’ disorientated puzzlement about why there should be giant birds wearing glasses in his bedroom. He was still under the gazebo at the top of the garden. Stretching, he felt grateful for the sleep even though it had brought unpleasantly vivid dreams. His stomach still groaned painfully but he supposed, reviewing his mood and trying once more to ignore the birds, which at least had returned to their normal size and were back up in the trees, that he had felt worse before he came here. Picking up the Coleridge again, he leafed through it. How sweet, typical and nuts of Tom to stick this and other volumes of poetry in his luggage. You’re not to read fiction, he had said. You get too involved, you know you do. I know you can’t empty your mind, so at least fill it with poetry. The book had fallen open at
Kubla Khan
, the only
Coleridge that James until that afternoon had ever read, apart from the
Ancient Mariner
.
In consequence of a slight indisposition an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which the Author fell asleep in his chair at the moment he was reading. The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than two to three hundred lines. Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him
.
James smiled to himself as his eyes skated through the poem, trying to picture the gardens bright, the incense-bearing trees and sunny spots of greenery that had danced through Coleridge’s brain during that prosaic-sounding afternoon nap. When Sara arrived he must ask if she could get hold of some
Anodyne
for him. He could do with a little milk of paradise, he reflected, as his stomach rumbled agreement.
A
NDREW DECIDED IN
the end to submit with grace to the suggestion that he see Joyce back to Medlar Cottage, remembering Sara’s own grace at being deserted for babysitting the night before. The three of them were standing in the entrance lobby of the police station. Sara was still holding her mobile phone. It was not usual, he had suggested mildly, for a chief inspector to drive witnesses around.
‘Well no, but you
know
Joyce, don’t you. She’d be happier. Sorry … only you see James has left this message. He’s in the Sulis and he’s practically demanding I go and see him. I’ve got to go, I really have. You will see Joyce home, won’t you? Joyce, he’ll get you back in time for your rest. Be nice to each other. I really must go.’
Distracted, she had gone, leaving Andrew looking at Joyce and wondering if he could find it in himself to think of her as some kind of irresponsible child or animal, something unlovable with hideous habits and redeeming qualities so deeply buried that one simply had to trust that they were there. Sara had brought her to Manvers Street Police Station to make her statement about the events in the Snake and Ladder on the previous Saturday. Joyce had repeated
her story loftily although with perfect consistency to Bridger, altering nothing except perhaps the height of her contempt for the entire process. She continued to claim that the doors of the cupboard in the pub corridor had been closed. Somehow, on her way back from the lavatory the woman had just fallen out on top of her.
Eight days of daily baths, a good bed, Sara’s careful cooking and no booze had restored in Joyce not just some physical condition but also a disproportionate
amourpropre
. It was extraordinary, Andrew had observed to himself, that such a scrag end of womanhood, barely five feet tall, could survey a roomful of police officers as if from a height. She managed to make you feel that she was inspecting you from a balcony.
But he would submit with grace. Grace in the immediate circumstances was appropriate, Andrew reminded himself as he smiled at Joyce, because later on he had every intention of getting Sara away from Medlar Cottage for a night. Ordinarily he might, despite the wary liking he had developed for James, have slightly resented Sara’s rushing off so full of concern for somebody else, especially since this now meant breaking up his afternoon with a drive out to St Catherine’s Valley to deposit Joyce. But he would submit with—had he thought grace? It was more like delirious joy, because he was already planning the evening.
‘Right, then, your ladyship,’ he said, determined not to be discouraged by Joyce’s unsmiling eyes, ‘your carriage awaits. Shall we?’ He opened the heavy glass door of the police station with a facetious flourish, making a face to the desk sergeant behind the glass partition as Joyce scuttled under his raised arm into the sunshine outside.
They sat for a long time in a traffic queue in Walcot Street. Joyce and Andrew watched inexpressively without speaking as people went by, up and down the pavement next to the flea market, crossing the road in front of the stopped car with pedestrians’ smiles, betraying their pleasure in having a practical advantage, as well as moral superiority, over mugs stuck in cars. Most were carrying, or displaying on stalls, the kinds of things that Walcot Street sold: pots, pictures and frames (sometimes together), bags and rolls of curtains and clothes, hangings, candlesticks, urns, fireplaces and objects that fell into no category except that of things to buy for a bit more than they were worth, put somewhere, look at for a bit and then go off. And it seemed that everything traded in Walcot Street, if not actually antique or second-hand, had been duffed up and rubbed down in order to look so. The people too, many of whom were young, had apparently been duffed up and rubbed down with the result that they also looked if not older then slightly thumbed. They were wearing clothes that were either so huge or so tiny that their bodies were swamped or barely covered. That, together with a soft look of benign puzzlement on their faces created the lovable impression that the dear things hadn’t quite got the hang of finding the right sizes. Hair of varying styles and colours was on the whole odd or impractical, if not absent. Andrew smiled. Natalie would be among this lot in a few years’ time. He made a mental note not to shout when she got her first navel piercing.
Joyce sniffed and rearranged her thin lips over her teeth, a signal that Andrew now recognised. She was going to speak. ‘Well, it would appear that not quite
all
of your famous Georgian Bath is famous for its elegance,’ she said,
looking out. ‘Just what are these people trying to achieve, going about like
that
?’
It was the kind of critical yet impersonal remark, delivered with that self-satisfied, superior, Scottish nasality that had in just over a week brought Andrew close to reviewing his position on handguns.
He sighed with open exasperation. ‘I expect most of the people here are either students or traders. Perhaps they’re achieving having a good time being themselves, being nice, ordinary people. I think you would find,’ he said, trying not to hiss, ‘that most of them manage to
achieve
keeping jobs and homes and relationships of their own.’
There was a crusty silence. Joyce said, ‘You’re not fond of me, are you? I can tell, you know.’
It was the most direct thing Andrew had heard her say, but he was not going to give her the satisfaction of a straight answer. The car ahead was moving now. As he put his car into gear and followed, Andrew said, ‘Why do you drink?’
She did not reply, and began to rummage pointlessly in her handbag. As far as she was concerned nothing had been said.
‘You opened that cupboard, didn’t you? Not on the way
to
the Ladies’, because you hadn’t been in yet to check that there was nobody in there. On the way out. You checked the Ladies’ was empty and then opened the cupboard because you thought there might be something to drink in there, didn’t you?’ Andrew’s voice was quiet but not gentle. He edged the car forward.
‘That’s your theory.’ Joyce sounded so offended that Andrew knew he was right and, perversely, knew also that because they both now realised it, there was nothing else
to be said. Warning her off the booze again would be a waste of breath. The silence which followed became permanent, and by the time they had reached the cause of the hold-up, some nonsensical roadworks where a traffic island was being prettied up with fake cobbles, Andrew had lapsed back into his own thoughts. He didn’t care where Joyce’s mental travels had taken her to.
Because once he had got Sara out of the house this evening he was hoping that he might succeed in getting her to stay with him at the flat for a night. If Joyce was happy to rest alone at Medlar Cottage for an afternoon, couldn’t she also be left to feed herself and put herself to bed? He was irritated not just by how little she ate of the food Sara prepared for her, but by her habit of repeating that she ate ‘like a bird’. Sara had now forbidden him from mouthing
and drinks like a fish
over her head, but he now considered sourly that it would be an easy matter for one evening to leave a dropper of milk and a couple of worms for her in the fridge. He and Sara could buy some food and a bottle of wine and have the evening, a long, balmy one, to themselves. He would cook. The cooker in the flat worked, or parts of it did, albeit with an accompanying alarming smell (perhaps a salad would do, though). Really, the place wasn’t that bad. All right, it was still an unloved, chilly box that he was supposed to be doing something about, but they could sit outside (ignoring the traffic noise) until late, and then he could make it better with candles. Yes, all right, he admitted it, the place was a dump next to Medlar Cottage, which he missed. Mostly he missed, since Joyce’s arrival, not being able to make love in every room of the house. The absence of Joyce was the only thing his flat had going for it, at least until he got
round to doing something about it (he would, he would) but he would make much to Sara of that undeniable attraction.
For Joyce had the knack of infiltrating an atmosphere so strongly with her own hangdog authority (she was even doing it now, in his car) that even empty rooms in Medlar Cottage seemed now not so much unoccupied by her as vacated only seconds before. And he was finding that she cramped his style not only as a lover but as a musician. How could he play the cello with her in the house, when he could imagine so easily what her tight-lipped, dismissive comments on his musical abilities would be? Thinking of it, he could practically hear the berating scratch of her consonants crackling in the air from room to room. And if he was being over-fanciful, which was what Sara said, then no flight of imagination was required to notice and silently object to Sara’s confiscation of all alcohol in the house. He thought, with quiet savagery towards the silent Joyce beside him, of the empty wine rack and the empty shelf in the fridge to which he now mentally added other distasteful, daily reminders of her occupancy: the smell of Complan in the kitchen, pink, ragged lipstick prints on the edges of tea cups, used tissues down the sides of armchairs and that handbag, which stank of face powder, on the stairs. Not to mention the dog.
He coughed and tried unsuccessfully to pull his mind back round to work. Bridger had taken Joyce’s statement with gloom, and though it pained Andrew to do so, he had sympathised with him. Had there been grounds to suspect her guilty of the murder, conviction would not have been difficult, for a drink-deprived alcoholic eventually grows confessional about most things. But the time of Mrs
Takahashi’s death seemed to rule Joyce out. He supposed he disliked Joyce so much that he could almost wish she had killed her. He certainly wished he could blame her for the mess he had made of things on Sunday with Mr Takahashi, or Professor Takahashi as he was supposed to say, but not even his powers of self-justification would rise to that. Joyce was merely contributing generously to the sum of things not going very well.
* * *
S
ARA GREETED
James in the gazebo overlooking the garden with concern that was mixed with gratitude for his thoughtfulness in arranging for his needs to be met by others. After more than a week of caring for Joyce and the strain of pretending to Andrew that doing so was not easy but Basically Absolutely Fine, she was not merely exhausted but more aware than was comfortable of her constitutional inability to nurse someone like Joyce with any degree of true grace. It was also constitutionally compulsory for this awareness to leave Sara feeling guilty and inadequate.
The Sulis seemed, on the face of it, to be doing a splendid job. James was stretched out on a recliner in the shade of the rose-covered gazebo. He was alone, the climb up here through the terraced garden behind the house presumably proving too much for other patients. He was wearing a white dressing gown with ‘Sulis’ embroidered in loopy writing on the front, and a thin blanket lightly covered his legs and feet. The
Guardian
, some books and a jug of some fresh-looking cold drink sat on a small table next to him. But despite it he looked almost as unhappy as he did unwell.
‘Fine bloody friend you are,’ James growled. ‘What kept you?’