Poison Flowers (26 page)

‘Marcus Aurelius, how that takes me back! We had a master at school who was a devotee and used to chalk up one of his precepts on the blackboard each week for us to learn. I don't know that it did me much good.'

‘I was struck, though,' said Willow, ‘by how sensible his ideas were.'

‘As far as I can remember he was a great one for swallowing his emotions and presenting a calm front to the horrors of the world,' said Caroline from the other side of the table.

‘That's right,' said Ben. ‘That was what our English master so greatly admired. We all tried to do it too – an earnest class of grammar-school Stoics. Well I'm glad that you had something else good to read in place of one of my novels, but I hope you'll let me give you a copy of the latest.' He got up then to remove the snail plates and Willow wondered whether she would have found his book as instructive as she had found the emperor's
Meditations.

After the snail shells had been taken away Willow asked Mark where he had trained and, learning that it was not at Dowting's, she deliberately abandoned her investigation and settled down to enjoy herself, which she did until he reverted to his earlier form.

Willow was talking to Sarah across the table when she heard Caroline say something about the iniquities of consultants paid by the National Health Service skimping their duties in favour of their private patients and huge fees. As she spoke Mark slammed his glass down on the scrubbed pine table so hard that a wave of purple wine washed over the edge of the glass and dripped down its stem.

‘That's bloody offensive nonsense,' he said, ‘and it just shows how ignorant you are, despite your airs and your wretched arrogance.' Willow was astonished at his passion and at his rudeness. She looked across the table at his wife, who merely rolled her eyes upwards and shrugged. Caroline looked stunned and rather sick, and it was Ben Jonson who spoke, in a voice that was still soft and gentle and yet utterly implacable.

‘May I remind you that you are a guest here?' he said. Without waiting for an answer, he went on: ‘Since Caroline is here I shan't tell you exactly what I think of you, your character and your behaviour, but I think it would be better if you left.'

‘No, Ben, really no,' said Caroline, white-faced. ‘It's not important.'

‘Yes it is,' said Ben. He dropped his napkin on the table and pushed back his chair. ‘Tothill?'

‘This is a joke, I take it,' said Mark, looking as surprised by Ben's softly spoken onslaught as Willow felt.

‘No joke,' said Ben. ‘I think it would be better if you were to leave.'

‘Ben, please,' whispered Caroline, but her plea was half-drowned in Sarah's saying:

‘Come on, Mark.' She got up, asked Ben for her coat and then waited in the hall for her husband, who eventually left without saying another word. His face was clenched and Willow saw that he was shaking with anger. She felt extraordinarily embarrassed by the whole scene and had no idea what to say or do. To refer to the scene would merely prolong Caroline's distress, but it seemed impossible to ignore it.

‘What a frightful chap!' said Richard cheerfully. ‘Could I have some more wine, Caroline?' He held out his glass, and Willow admired his technique. Caroline started but then pulled herself together and reached for the wine bottle. By the time Ben came back, oddly looking both triumphant and ashamed, the other three were calmly talking about the prospects for Eastern European prosperity.

The rest of the evening passed pleasantly enough and Willow became more and more convinced that Caroline and Ben had a fair chance of making each other happy, even if he was rather more protective than he needed to be. When Willow eventually got up to leave, Richard offered her a lift home and she accepted. As they were saying goodbye to Caroline in the narrow hall, Ben suddenly remembered that he wanted to give Willow a copy of his book and ran lightly up the stairs to fetch it.

Watching him, she thought that he had done himself an injustice in denigrating his athletic prowess. He seemed to move with considerable springiness. He was back within a few minutes and held out a glossily jacketed book.

Willow took it, thanked him and then raised her eyes to his as she said:

‘Would you sign it for me?'

He laughed, found a fountain pen and scribbled a message on the title page. When she was sitting in the passenger seat of Richard's car as he drove down towards Kensington High Street, she looked to see what Ben had written:

‘Cressida: From one novelist to another, with best wishes, Ben Jonson.'

‘What did you think of him?' asked Richard, watching Willow out of the corner of his eye as she put the book in her capacious handbag.

‘Intelligent, gentle, sensible about most things,' she said. ‘Unlike that boorish doctor, whom I loathed. I think Caroline's chosen quite well.'

‘No money, though,' said Richard, ‘and not a lot of background either.'

Willow turned to look out of the car windows at the damp streets, trying to think of a way of answering him that would not sound rude.

‘Really Richard, you are absurdly hidebound. There are more important things in a husband than either money or public school education,' she said eventually.

‘Good Lord! Are there really?' asked Richard, and Willow was disturbed to discover that she could not be quite certain whether or not he was joking. She was silent for the rest of the journey, thinking about Caroline and Ben and their shared talent for dealing with strong emotions and defusing them before they could explode.

When Richard drew up outside her flat, she was preparing to thank him for coming so far out of his way when he started to speak.

‘Willow,' he said quietly, ‘are you really looking into poor Simon Titchmell's death?'

‘Not precisely,' she said, ‘but it has a bearing on what I'm trying to discover. Why?'

‘Well,' he began and then fell silent, picking at some loose skin near his right thumbnail. ‘Caroline is by way of being a friend of mine, and she's had a hell of a lot to put up with one way and another. I'm a bit bothered about her and about whether I ought not to have warned her about you,' he finished in a rush. Willow was fair enough to take his objection calmly.

‘I don't think you need worry, Richard,' she said. ‘Caroline is quite safe from me.' At that moment she believed what she said.

Richard turned towards her and in the light of a streetlamp she saw his face slackening into a real smile. He leaned forwards and kissed her cheek.

‘Thanks, Willow,' he said and put an arm across her to open her door. ‘Shall I see you soon?'

‘Oh, I hope so,' she said. ‘I'll let you know when it's all over and I can tell you all about it.'

Richard grinned and switched on the ignition.

Willow fell asleep almost as soon as she got into her bed that night. As usual, Mrs Rusham had made the bed up with clean sheets. Sliding between the cold, crisp smoothness of the two layers of fine linen, Willow thought of the unironed polyester bedding she used in Clapham and blessed the day she had invented Cressida Woodruffe. She supposed that Ben Jonson and probably Michael Rodenhurst, too, would put down her unlikely love of luxury to the emotional and material austerity of her childhood. It was true, she acknowledged to herself, that her scholarly parents would have disapproved profoundly of the way she lived in Belgravia, but she would go no further than that.

Smiling a little and letting her mind drift, Willow lost consciousness, only to wake four hours later with the most appalling pain under her front ribs. Thinking for a moment that it must be a bad attack of wind, she turned over to lie on her front, hoping that the pain would subside. It was only a few minutes before she realised that it was not going to and that it was not wind either. Flinging aside the linen-covered duvet she ran to the bathroom and reached it only just in time to be terribly, digustingly sick down the lavatory.

When the retching spasms had eventually stopped, Willow knelt for a moment longer, her elbows propped on the mahogany seat, trying to find the strength to get up. At last she did so, pulled the chain and staggered over to the basin to wash out her mouth and wipe the sweat off her face. Staring at her reflection in the mirror, she saw that her skin was the colour and texture of mashed turnips, that there were immense mushroom-coloured bags under her sunken eyes and that she looked about a hundred years old. She thought that she knew what had happened to her and turned to walk to the telephone.

Before she could reach it she was sick again. Recognising some hardly chewed snails amid the vomit, she tried to tell herself that there must have been something wrong with the snails or even that all the garlic butter in which they had been cooked was responsible for her unusual indigestion. But she did not believe herself. She could not remember ever having been so sick, even in childhood. She tried to get up, but saliva spurted into her mouth and her throat burned and she was sick again. The paroxysm exhausted her. Sinking back on to the floor, her last conscious thought was: ‘I need help.'

Coming painfully back to consciousness nearly two hours later, she was sick again, bringing up nothing but thin, bitter-tasting fluid; she was in worse pain than ever; and she felt desperately, frighteningly weak. Taking a towel with her just in case she was overtaken again, she crawled in pain to the telephone on the wall at the other end of the bath.

Her mind felt woolly and stupid. It was almost impossible for her to remember the telephone number, but at last she did, and punched the relevant keys. She noticed that something had happened to her vision: it was hard to focus on the buttons of the telephone and green-black spots danced before her eyes. Putting out a hand to see whether she could focus on it, she noticed that it was covered with a nettle-like rash. In sudden terror, Willow waited for Tom's comforting voice.

It did not come. All she heard was the formally-spoken message on his answering machine. Gasping, ‘It's Willow. I need help,' she had to turn towards the bath to be sick yet again.

Sweating, with involuntary tears seeping out of her eyes, she picked up the telephone again, dialled 999 and managed to ask for an ambulance.

Dimly through the pains, confusion and fear, Willow heard bells ringing and a knocking at the door, and dragged herself there to open it. Somehow the ambulance men must have persuaded one of the other tenants to open the street door. Willow just looked at them.

‘There now, love. You'll be all right now,' said one in the most fatherly tones she had ever heard. Her own father had never risked softening her character with endearments. The ambulance man shook out a bright red blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders. Willow tried to tell him what had happened but as soon as she opened her mouth the gasping spasms began again. There was nothing left in her stomach to bring up, but it was a while before she could stop retching. The ambulance man held her against him with one hand and wiped her forehead with the other, murmuring comfort to her. When she was quiet again he told her that his colleague had gone to fetch a stretcher.

A few minutes later, Willow was securely strapped on to the stretcher, one of the ambulance men had found her handbag and keys, locked the front door of her flat and laid the bag beside her. They carried her down the stairs between them. She knew that she ought to ask which hospital they would take her to, but she could not summon up the energy. They were in charge and for once she was content to have no part in her eventual fate.

As they were pushing her stretcher into the back of the ambulance, there was a shout from across the road.

‘Wait!' A man came running and the senior ambulance man said:

‘Yes, sir?'

‘She telephoned me. What's happened?'

‘Are you a relative, sir?' asked the ambulance man. Tom Worth took his police identification out of his pocket and was admitted to the ambulance. Sitting down, he took Willow's clammy hands between his own and asked her what had happened.

‘I've been sick and sick and sick,' she said, slurring her words. ‘I think they've poisoned me.' She shut her eyes and her head lolled away from him. Tom and the ambulance man looked at each other.

‘Willow, wake up!' said Tom, forgetting or ignoring the fact that she was supposed to be Cressida Woodruffe in that part of London. ‘Who? What have you eaten?'

‘“Eels and eel broth, mother”,' she sang half under her breath. Tom shook her, despite the ambulance man's restraining hand on his sleeve.

‘Wake up, Willow! What have you eaten? Where have you been?'

She opened her eyes and he saw that her pupils were widely dilated and sucked in a deep breath. Taking out his handkerchief, he wiped her sweaty face and brushed the long dark-red hair back from her forehead.

‘Willow, tell me,' he insisted. ‘Where have you been and what have you eaten?' Something in his voice got through to her fading consciousness and she recognised his dark eyes. Struggling with the nightmare thoughts in her mind, she tried to tell him what was making her so afraid.

‘Snails,' she said. ‘Snails at Titchmell's. The book says snails can live for weeks on belladonna. Can they …?' Before she could finish her question she starring retching again. When the spasm was over she seemed not to remember what they had been talking about and lay with her eyes closed, breathing deeply, and holding her hands across her stomach.

Through the only half-sentient receiver that was her mind, Willow was vaguely aware of being hoisted and wheeled and carried and transferred to a bed. Someone pulled open her eyes and shone bright lights into them, felt her pulse, put a cold stethoscope to her chest and pushed and pulled and dug their fingers into her skin. She heard voices and every so often one would make sense even to her:

‘I shouldn't have thought that was possible,' said one strange, deep voice. Then came Tom's, reassuringly familiar: