Guilty Thing Surprised (2 page)

Elizabeth went down and closed the gates. She got into the Lotus, driving first to Queens Waterford to discuss with Lady Larkin-Smith the arrangements for the country club dance, next to Pomfret to receive from Mrs Rogers the proceeds from the Cancer Relief collection, lastly to the hairdresser’s in Kingsmarkham. She kept the windows of the car wide open, the top down, and her primrose pale hair streamed out behind her as she drove, like the thistledown hair of a young girl.

At half-past one Mrs Cantrip served luncheon in the dining room. Katje’s status gave her the right to eat
en famille
, but in the absence of Quentin Nightingale she said little. The woman and the girl ate their asparagus, their ham and their blackberry shortcake, in a silence which Elizabeth occasionally broke to comment with pleasure on the food. When they had finished Katje said she would have preferred chipolata pudding.

‘You must teach Mrs Cantrip to make it.’

‘Perhaps I am teaching her this afternoon,’ said Katje, who had difficulties with her present tense.

‘What a good idea!’

‘When you are tasting it perhaps you never wish blackberries again.’ Katje poked about in her mouth, retrieving seeds from between her teeth.

‘We shall have to see. I’m going up for my rest now. If anyone calls or telephones, remember, I’m not to be disturbed.’

‘I am remembering,’ said Katje.

‘Were you thinking of going out tonight?’

‘I meet a boy in Kingsmarkham and maybe we go to the movies.’

‘Cinema or pictures, Katje,’ said Elizabeth gently. ‘You must only say movies when you’re in the United States. You can take one of the cars if you like but I’d rather you didn’t take the Lotus. Your mother wouldn’t like to think of you driving a fast sports car.’

‘I am taking the Mini, please?’

‘That’s right.’

Katje cleared the table and put the crockery in the dishwasher with the glass and the plates from Denys Villiers’ luncheon tray. ‘Now I am teaching you to make chipolata pudding,’ she announced to Mrs Cantrip, who had been taking ten minutes off with a cup of tea and the
Daily Sketch.

‘And what might that be when it’s at home? You know Madam never has no sausages in this house.’

‘Is not sausages. Is cream and jelly and fruit. We have cream, yes? We have eggs? Come on now, Mrs Cantrip, dear.’

‘There’s no peace for the wicked and that’s a fact,’ said Mrs Cantrip, heaving herself out of her rocking chair. ‘Though what’s wrong with a good English dessert I never shall know. Mr. Villiers ate up every scrap of his. Mind you, with all that book-writing he gets a hearty appetite.’

Katje fetched eggs and cream from the refrigerator. ‘Often I am asking myself,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘why he is not working in his own home. When he has a wife too, is odd, very funny.’

‘And might I ask what it’s got to do with you, Catcher? The fact is Mr Villiers has always worked up there. It must be fourteen or fifteen years since Mr Nightingale had the Old House done up for Mr Villiers to work in. It’s quiet, see? And Mr Nightingale’s got a very soft spot for Mr Villiers.’

‘A soft spot?’

‘I don’t know, these foreigners! I mean he likes him, he’s fond of him. I reckon he’s proud of having an author in the family. Switch the beater on, then.’

Tipping the cream into a bowl, Katje said, ‘Mrs Nightingale is not liking him
at all.
Every day in the holidays he is working up there and never, not once, Mrs Nightingale is going to see him. Is funny not to like her own brother.’

‘Maybe he’s not easy to like,’ said Mrs Cantrip. ‘You can depend on it, if there’s a quarrel—and I’m not saying there is, mind—it’s not Madam’s fault. He’s got a very funny manner with him, has Mr Villiers. A nasty temper, like sarcastic. Between you and me, Catcher, I wouldn’t be too happy if I had a boy at the school where he teaches. Now switch that thing off or the cream’ll all be turned to butter.’

Elizabeth didn’t appear for tea.

The sky was cloudless, like a Mediterranean sky, and the sun, at five, as hot as ever. Out in the grounds Will Palmer lit a bonfire down by the gate which led on to the Kingsmarkham road, fouling the warm, scented air with acrid smoke. He fed it with grass mowings and helped it occasionally with a drop of paraffin. Sweating and grumbling, Sean pushed the motor over the terraced lawns.

Mrs Cantrip laid the dining table and left a cold dinner on the trolley. Fair weather or foul, she always
wore a hat when she went outside. She put it on now and went home to her cottage at the other end of the village.

In the Old House Denys Villiers typed three more sentences on Wordsworth and the emergence of nature as artistic inspiration, and then he too went home. He drove slowly and cautiously to his bungalow in Clusterwell, to be followed half an hour later by Katje Dorn, revving up the Mini and making it roar and squeal its way through the villages to Kingsmarkham.

Elizabeth lay on her bed with witch-hazel pads on her eyes, conserving her beauty. When she heard the Jaguar come in she began to dress for dinner.

She wore a pale green caftan with crystal embroidery at the neck and wrists.

‘How’s my beautiful wife?’

‘I’m fine, darling. Had a good day?’

‘Not so bad. London’s like a hothouse. Can I get you a drink?’

‘Just a small tomato juice,’ said Elizabeth. Quentin poured it for her and for himself a double whisky. ‘Thank you, darling. It
is
hot, isn’t it?’

‘Not so hot as in London.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Not nearly so hot,’ said Quentin firmly. He smiled; she smiled. Silence fell.

Quentin broke it. ‘Katje not about?’

‘She’s taken the Mini into Kingsmarkham, darling.’

‘All on our own then, are we? No one coming in for cocktails?’

‘Not tonight. As you say, we’re all on our own.’

Quentin sighed and smiled. ‘Makes a pleasant change, really,’ he said, ‘to be on our own.’

Elizabeth made no reply. This time the silence was
intense and of longer duration. Quentin stood by the window and looked at the garden.

‘We may as well have dinner,’ said Elizabeth at last.

In the dining room he opened a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé. Elizabeth took only one glass.

‘Turning cooler at last,’ said Quentin during the vichyssoise. ‘I suppose the nights will soon be drawing in.’

‘I suppose they will.’

‘Yes, no matter how hot it is at this time of the year you always feel that faint nip in the air.’

Elizabeth ate her cold chicken in silence.

‘But it’s been a good summer on the whole,’ Quentin said desperately.

‘On the whole.’

Presently they returned to the drawing room.

‘What time is it?’ asked Quentin from the french windows.

‘Just on eight.’

‘Really? I should have said it was much later.’ He went out on to the terrace to look at his chrysanthemums. Elizabeth looked at
Queen
magazine, turning the pages indifferently. Quentin came back and sat looking at her. Then he said, ‘I wonder if Denys and Georgina will look in?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘I think I’ll give Denys a ring and see if they’ll come over for a hand of bridge. What do you think?’

‘If you’d like it, darling.’

‘No, no, it’s up to you.’

‘I really don’t mind one way or the other, darling.’

‘Well, I’ll just give him a ring, then,’ said Quentin, expelling pent-up breath in a long sigh.

The Villiers arrived and they played bridge till ten.

‘We mustn’t be too late, Georgina,’ said Villiers,
looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got a couple of hours’ work to put in at the school library before I go to bed.’

‘What, again?’ said Georgina.

‘I told you earlier, I’ve got a reference to look up.’

His wife gave him a mutinous glare.

‘Denys is dedicated to his work,’ said Quentin, the peacemaker. He smiled kindly at Georgina as the women left the room. ‘Talking of dedications,’ he said to his brother-in-law, ‘will you write in the book for me?’

Using a broken old ballpoint, Denys Villiers wrote on the flyleaf:

The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction …

Quentin read it and a faint flush of pleasure coloured his cheeks. He laid his hand on Villiers’ shoulder. ‘Now write your name,’ he said.

So Villiers wrote beneath the quotation:
Your brother, Denys Villiers.

‘It’s not like you to be inaccurate. It ought to be “brother-in-law”.’

‘There’s no need,’ said Villiers sharply, shaking off the hand, ‘for too much bloody accuracy.’

The women came back, Georgina fastening her large handbag.

‘Thanks very much for letting me have this, Elizabeth,’ said Georgina. ‘It’s awfully good of you.’

‘You’re more than welcome, my dear. I shall never use it again.’ And Elizabeth kissed her affectionately.

‘When you’ve finished billing and cooing,’ said Denys Villiers unpleasantly, ‘perhaps we can get a move on.’

*  *  *

‘I think I’ll go straight to bed,’ said Quentin. ‘I can’t wait to start the new book. Are you going to sit up a bit longer?’

‘It’s such a fine evening,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I may have a walk in the grounds before I go to bed.’

‘Wrap up warm, darling. I’ll say good night, then.’

‘Good night, darling.’

Elizabeth fetched herself a coat, a soft lightweight thing of deep green angora. In the moonlight it was the same colour as the cypresses that grew in the Italian garden. Late blooming roses, pink, apricot, lemon, all looked white tonight. She walked across the turf between the rosebeds, hexagonal, semicircular, rhomboid, then by the paved path between yew hedges to a door in the red brick wall. The smoke from Will’s fire rose in a thin grey column.

Elizabeth unlocked the gate and let herself out on to the grass verge which, overhung by the Manor beeches, separated the wall from the Pomfret Road. As car headlights flared, flowed past, she stepped back for a moment into the shadows of the garden. Katje in the Mini, coming home from Kingsmarkham. Once more the road was empty, lighted only by the moon. Elizabeth closed the gate behind her, crossed the road and began to walk away from it by a sandy path that led into Cheriton Forest.

When she was out of sight of the road she sat down on a log, waiting. Presently she lit a cigarette, the third of the five she would smoke that day.

The Nightingales slept in separate bedrooms on the first floor of Myfleet Manor and at the front of the house. Quentin undressed and got into bed quickly. He switched on his bedlamp and opened
Wordsworth in Love.

First, as was his custom with Villiers’ books, he studied with pride and pleasure the publisher’s eulogy of the author and his works, and scrutinised his brother-in-law’s portrait on the back of the jacket. Next he looked at all the illustrations in turn, the photographed paintings of Wordsworth, of his sister Dorothy, and of the ‘mazy Forth’ as seen from Stirling Castle. Then, finally, he began to read.

Quentin read like a scholar, religiously looking up every bibliographical reference and reading each footnote. He had just come to the poet’s meeting with his French sweetheart when he hear footsteps on the stairs. Elizabeth in from her walk? But no …

The footsteps went on, up and up, until they sounded faintly above his head. Not Elizabeth, then, but Katje who slept on the top floor.

It was eleven-thirty and growing chilly. He had said earlier that there was a nip in the air. Elizabeth would be cold out there in the garden. The sashes in his own windows and the casements up above rattled as the wind rose. Quentin laid aside his book, got up and looked out of the window.

The moon had disappeared behind a bank of cloud. He put on his dressing gown, opened the bedroom door and stood for a moment in perplexity before making for the stairs.

2

I
t was Detective Inspector Michael Burden’s day off. He lay in bed till nine. Then he got up, bathed, and began on the task to which he intended to devote this free day, painting the outside of his bungalow.

A great wind, offshoot of a Caribbean hurricane the Americans called Caroline, had arisen during the night. Burden needed to use no ladders; the eaves of his bungalow were too near the ground for that, but today he didn’t even fancy ascending the steps. Certainly he wasn’t going to allow his eleven-year-old son John, home for the school holidays and an enthusiastic helper, to go up them.