One Foot in the Grave (14 page)

8

A
lmost summer,” said Jenny over his shoulder.

“Don't you believe it. Springs are getting later and later.”

“Look, those are going to be crocuses, aren't they?”

She stopped the chair so that he could inspect a few dark-green spikes poking through the winter-withered turf.

“Yes,” he said, “but they'll be looking just the same in six weeks' time.”

“You're hopeless. I want it to be summer. You and I are going to win the mixed doubles.”

“Who is there to beat?”

“Nobody, yet. They use the old tennis court as a croquet lawn. Colonel McQueen is the expert; he teaches all the new nurses to play. Makes sure we swing the mallet right; you know, lot of standing around with his hands over yours, adjusting your grip.”

She laughed with mockery but without bitterness. The morning was deceptively soft and bright, but cold enough to make sitting still in the wheelchair uncomfortable, despite gloves and scarf and overcoat.

“I'd like to walk for a bit,” he said.

“Sure? I'm not certain you should be up, even, let alone out and tramping around.”

“I'm all right.”

She stopped the chair, helped him to his feet, put his stick into his right hand and drew his left over her shoulder.

“What are you smiling at?” she said.

The answer was McQueen, cunning old goat. But though the relationship seemed to have reestablished itself uninjured, he wasn't going to risk stepping even that close to forbidden ground. He felt wide awake—had done, since soon after breakfast—and it was noticeable that when he had stood from the wheelchair the customary darkness barely brushed its wing across his consciousness.

“Let's go and look at the scene of the crime,” he said.

“Oh! You can't get up the tower—they've put a new lock on it.”

“Never mind.”

With Jenny pushing the empty chair, they moved slowly, slantwise along the path across the shallow slope of lawn that spread down from the front of the house to the ha-ha. The downs, hummocked and shadowed, looked only half the distance away that they did on other days. Flycatchers rode its own swell of green in placid ugliness.

“You're quite right, its being like a ship,” he said. “I thought of that when I was going out in the storm. Deck bucketing about, you know.”

“You didn't!” she said. “That's extraordinary!”

“Ur?”

“Oh … just you thinking about it at a time like that, I suppose.”

He had felt an instant of withdrawal where his arm ran across her back, but she relaxed almost at once. He couldn't detect any sense of wariness or reluctance as they neared the colonnade.

“What are you looking for?” she said. “Scraps of thread's the usual thing, isn't it, or bits of tobacco ash?”

“The police will have found all those. They're the experts. It's a nuisance, sometimes, the stuff you find. I mean, look at these ramblers—any of you coming along here in one of your cloaks might catch a bit on a thorn. Look there. And there.”

“Why do you think they'd be wearing a cloak?”

“You misunderstand me. I wasn't talking about that night in particular. You're wearing a cloak now.”

“They'd look like a bat, wouldn't they? He'd be watching from above—Countess Dracula, going to her tower.”

“If that's what happened.”

She glanced at him, a little surprised, and looked away. It was as though her dancing partner had put a foot out of step. He was morally certain now that she had come out on the night of the storm, and almost as sure that she had been to the tower. What's more, she was aware of these certainties, tending only to overestimate­ their strength and detail. He looked down at her small hand on the white rail of the chair.

“What size shoes do you take?” he said.

She laughed.

“I don't, or at least they don't make them. If they did they'd be three and a half Cs, so I have to get them made—my feet are almost square, like a boxer pup's. Sometimes I think that the factory didn't quite finish making me. Look.”

She held up her other hand to show him its square, muscular palm and its extraordinarily short fingers.

“I know,” he said. “This must about be where I fell over. I crawled the rest of the way. I wonder if it was me broke that clematis.”

“Look, it's growing,” she said, pointing at the juicy leaf buds in the axils of the wizened foot of stem.

“They start very early. I wonder how much he could actually see from up there. …”

He turned at the tower door and faced along the colonnade. It was a continuation of the terrace that ran the whole length of the house, which meant that the tower was set a little forward from the line of the building. A marksman up there would be in a classic enfilade position.

“Which is Mr. Wilson's window, do you know?” he said.

“He's got the corner room, that one there. One window looks this way and the other one out front. He always likes these curtains drawn before it's dark; in fact, since George died he's left them shut all day.”

Her tone implied that these were facts he needed to know. He stood pondering, conscious of her support and the layer of extra warmth where the hem of her cloak had half wrapped itself round his trouser leg. Countess Dracula.
“I wish I knew why Mr. X needed a bodyguard.”
That was after the shooting. Had Tosca told her, or had she worked it out? And when? Suppose she'd known before the shooting, surely she'd have mentioned it during her endless speculations on Wilson's role. The knowledge hadn't been dangerous then. And if she hadn't known, that must mean she could not have planned Tosca's death. She'd need to know about the gun. A previous visit? Several? No. Last evening's outburst surely meant that Tosca had made an attempt to cross her off his list, and failed. It could even seem to mean that he'd failed because she'd shot him; to judge from her reaction to Pibble's question, she was capable of that. He considered her last visit on the evening of the murder, with her hair glistening from its wash and her presence humming with life and energy—even that could be accounted for as an exhilaration of triumph over the dragon—but it was a single event, out of context.

During the last few days before that, when Pibble's own plan had been complete and he'd only needed to wait for a night of storm, he had become almost painfully sensitive to her fluctuations of mood and had perceived nothing. She'd had a distinct low a month or so before, but had emerged from it and was normal, neither exhilarated nor depressed. If she had killed Tosca, it had been on impulse.

And that meant she hadn't killed him. The McQueen principle held firm. Something had definitely been planned to happen in the tower, by somebody other than Tosca. Perhaps the shooting had been only an accident, or byproduct, but the element of calculation hung around, like the aftersmell of cigars. Experience could smell it, and experience did not rely on hunches. The killer had taken thought, done sums … and the sums had gone wrong.

One of those steep South London streets, familiar from childhood. Stained glass in porch windows; stuccoed walls;
raw-red tiles, golden privet hedges round minute front patches. Reek of vomit strong, even on pavement. In the dark hall passage appalling. Almost glowing in that stench and gloom, a freak of beauty, a woman. Dead man in front parlor, face down in vomit. Classic Victorian poisoning, sixty years late. Everything there
—
husband a brute, lover a herbalist, and the woman, pale and statuesque, with the classic oval face and the crazed calm of misty-gray eyes. Solicitor arrives with letter from husband, voicing his suspicions. Arrests. Charges. Only mystery apparent smallness of dose to cause all that agony; but then evidence that dead man ultra-sensitive to hyoscine. Trial. Black cap. Sentence. What fluke decreed that a Mr. Bill Dudgeon, junk dealer, should pick out from a crate of unreadable books, unbid-for in the sale, the
Sermons of the Rev. W. W. Dudgeon
and, looking to see if the holy author was any relation, discover blank pages, filled with the dead man's secret diary? All planned to punish wife with sentence of attempted murder. Every clue planted. Dose calculated to the microscruple, except that the dead man's doctor had never told him about his sensitivity. And they'd hanged the lovers the morning Mr. Dudgeon came into the station with his find. All at the height of the first anti-hanging campaign, too. But the desk sergeant, a passionate pro-roper, had found a kindred spirit in Mr. Dudgeon, convinced him of the damage his find would do to the cause, so Mr. Dudgeon had taken it home and put it in his stove.

“I don't think she ever realized what was happening to her,” Pibble murmured aloud. “I hope not.”

“So do I,” said Jenny.

He turned to stare at her, and she nodded as if to show she'd meant what she said.

“I've got to go in now,” she said. “Or I'll be late with Lady Treadgold's massage. Anyway, I'm getting cold, and so are you. Hop into the wheelie, Jimmy, and I'll run you back.”

“All right.”

Snared by the apparent well-being, the phantasmal euphoria he had felt after breakfast, Pibble had booked himself for lunch in the dining room. Rather wishing he hadn't, he waited in the coffee room, vaguely looking through the property advertisements—each an instant fantasy life—in an old copy of
Country Life,
and thinking without any real purpose about Wilson, the retired dragon, who moved as though his heart were the frailest of fine glass and was yet determined that his life should be prolonged into the prosecutions of his old acquaintances. Even if he was dead, they would remember him in their cells. Pibble found this longing alien; he himself wanted no sort of immortality. A year and a half ago, when he was starting on the downward slither, he had absentmindedly taken a train from central London to the wrong home, not the room in Hackney but the undulating road in the southeast suburbs where he had lived for over thirty years, until Mary died. He had only recognized what he was doing when he turned the last corner and saw that his rose garden was gone, obliterated, the whole triangle chopped off to make room for a new roundabout. Standing there, blinking at the alteration, he had been mostly amazed that he felt no pang. The roses had been his pleasure, his satisfaction. Mary had admired them and approved of them out of her natural competitiveness—her James grew better blooms than anyone for a mile around—but Pibble never felt any of that. The roses existed for him and he for them, and if he was gone it was better that they should vanish too. He did not want even the ghost of a rose. And so with everything else, no shreds, no aftereffects, no grave or headstone. If as he went he could have sucked away with him the memories a few remaining friends might have of him, he would have done so. That applied to Jenny too.

Was that true? For instance, half an hour ago he had felt a strong urge to try and tell her about the Balham poisoner going, in her daze of beauty, innocent to the gallows. He was aware without thinking about it that this wish was partly defensive, an attempt to explain what he had been talking about, and so in a way undo Jenny's last remark, and thus not have to add it as an extra element into the by now tedious puzzle. But at the same time he acknowledged a sense of daily increasing solidity in himself, obviously connected with improving health but not the same thing. And this growing confidence in his own existence seemed in turn to be connected to the shocking energy of certain memories—things not thought of for many, many years—which nowadays would spring at him out of the apparent oblivion where they had been lying all the while in ambush. It was as though memory itself was trying to assert his existence. He had seen these sights, done these things. In a sense he was them. And if he was going, after all, to live, then so were they.

The door of the coffee room opened, and Pibble began to cringe a little. He had chosen the stuffy little nook because it was seldom used before meals, so he had hoped to enjoy an hour or so of unbraced privacy without having to struggle up to his own room. He glanced up to see what thickness of armor he was going to have to put on. Mrs. Fowles, Flycatchers' general secretary, came in first, then held the door, beaming shortsightedly at the room and making a well-there-it-is gesture with her pudgy and bangle-rattling arm. The woman who stood just inside the door—Mrs. Fowles was evidently showing a newcomer round—was a striking contrast, slim, short, dressed all in heavy black, severely smart, probably in her sixties. She held a black cane in one hand, but not in a manner that suggested she was used to needing it. Her skin had the slight transparency of recent illness. She nodded at the room, accepting it as adequate but unenthralling. As Mrs. Fowles turned to go, the newcomer's gaze met Pibble's.

Without realizing it, he had been staring. Perhaps the unconscious mind had a given signal that something out of the ordinary had happened, but now, before he could look decorously aside, recognition flashed from the woman's eyes. Her gaze swept past him, unfaltering. With another nod she turned and followed Mrs. Fowles out. The door closed.

Memory, of course, refused its task. It was like a Russian farmworker, hopelessly incompetent on the collective, allowing the crops to rot in the barns and the tractors to rust amid weed-riddled­ fields, but capable of raising record crops on his own small patch. Pibble was perfectly certain that he and the woman had met at some time, but equally unable to raise the faintest flicker of a notion where or when. Under his effort to recall her, the whole of his memory apparatus began to sulk. At one point, in an effort to restimulate it, he returned to the Balham poisoning but found that even there both outline and detail had become shadowy. In the end he took refuge in the notorious inattention of the old and returned to doddering through
Country Life
until the soft throb of the gong announced lunch.