Authors: Celia Fremlin
“Piggy
is
paying me, actually,” she now explained—just as if the thing was any of Cynthia’s business. “She’s more practical than you’d imagine. She phoned the Student Accommodation Board straight away, and next thing I knew they were here
measuring the bathroom. Apparently it has to be some number of cubic feet or other before students can use it; but anyway, it is, and they told me what I should charge her, and I am. And she’s paying it,” Imogen finished, as if this were some kind of a trump-card.
“
Paying
it? Then you’ll
never
get rid of her. Ever!” cried Cynthia, in altruistic horror: and once again Imogen felt like saying, Look who’s talking.
*
It was true, though. Piggy was a tenant now, and virtually
immovable
. So, for all practical purposes, was Cynthia. Imogen looked thoughtfully at the trap which had so quietly closed over her, and wondered, as many another landlady has done, how exactly she got into it.
A landlady. On top of being a widow, a stepmother, and a mother-in-law—a
landlady.
The lot.
T
HAT AFTERNOON, SHE
decided to take Vernon and Timmie for a walk, along the river, right away from the town to the meadows where, in May, the cowslips would be growing. Of late, she had found in herself a craving to go outside the house, to make acquaintance again with the outdoors as if it was a long neglected friend; to feel the cold air against her skin, to raise her face to the weak winter sun.
It was as if she was owed some sun; repayment for those golden autumn days after Ivor’s death which she had spent indoors, hiding away from the light, while beyond the windows the loveliest October in living memory blazed and waned.
Lost sunshine. Wasted glory. The arrears can never really be made up. Even at the time, when she could not bear even to look out through a sunlit window, something inside her had raged against the waste and the wickedness of it, and had demanded vengeance. The sun! The sun!
That was one reason for the walk this afternoon. The other was to score off Dot. Well, not score off her exactly, but sort of get one up on her in the half-hearted battle the two of them seemed to have been waging of late. Dot had been silent and sullen at lunch, and had refused to eat any potatoes. Not (Imogen was well aware) for the sake of her figure, but for the sake of showing her stepmother that there’d been no point in cooking them in the first place. That way, the lateness of lunch would become all Imogen’s fault. And serve her right. Piggy was her fault too, why couldn’t she have put her foot down in the first place? There was no privacy anywhere, not even half way up the stairs.
Herbert, of course, would never be able to read all this into his wife’s refusal of a helping of potatoes, but then he wasn’t
meant to. The message was for Imogen. It was a message that couldn’t be voiced out loud just now, because Dot was supposed to be quarrelling with Herbert, and no sensible wife fights on two fronts at the same meal.
Imogen replied to the unspoken message equally deviously, by offering to take the boys out for the afternoon; thus putting Dot into the position of having either to abandon her sulks and display reasonable gratitude, or else of continuing her sulks and
foregoing
an afternoon without her children.
Every man has his price, and the same is true of mothers. The prospect of getting rid of their children for even an hour or two during the school holidays is like the offer of gin to an alcoholic: capitulation is certain. And so, by half past two, Dot was reclining blissfully by the fire in the sitting-room, and Imogen and the boys were off and away into the moist winter sunshine.
Already the best of the day was over, and down by the river the mist was beginning to rise. The sun shone through it like a great coppery ball, and at the river’s edge the water was very black and still among the rushes. The opposite bank, with its boathouses and sloping gardens, was already almost invisible in the gathering mist.
The children for some reason were wildly excited by the outing, familiar though the route must have been to them from summer picnics and walks. They raced along the bank, yelling back and forth to each other through the mist, dabbling with sticks in the black water, and bashing at the dead, whispering winter reeds that rustled under the blows.
“Granny, can you see me?”
“Granny, was that a curlew?”
“Don’t be silly, there aren’t curlews in winter, are there, Granny? He’s silly, isn’t he, Granny?”
Eee-eeh! … Oooo—ooh! Bang. Thump. Squeals of embattled laughter, and Wellingtoned feet thudding away into the fog. Be careful, Imogen called out once or twice, but perfunctorily because of course they were being careful, as children usually are. And anyway, the water was only a foot or so deep here by the
bank, it would be a nuisance, not a disaster. Imogen had a sudden, invigorating sense of knowing which was which as she’d never known it before. It was like discovering in oneself a new and unsuspected talent.
*
Naturally, she’d realised that the cowslips wouldn’t be out in January, but it was a strange feeling, all the same. While the boys raced flailing into the thickening whiteness, their Wellingtons crackling on the rough, tussocky grass already stiffening with frost, Imogen stood quite still at the edge of the meadow, remembering.
*
A summer afternoon—lots and lots of summer afternoons, actually, but by now all rolled into one and indistinguishable; and evenings, too—the long, lingering June evenings—and Ivor’s voice urging them—herself, that is, and whatever distinguished visitor was with them—to shush! Listen!
A cuckoo, was it? A nightingale? Some such nostalgic bird, anyway, rarely heard in these technological days; and Ivor priding himself on its existence as if he had preserved it with his own hands—created it, indeed, all by himself, in the morning of the world. You should come here at midnight, he’d say … at dawn … at mid-summer … and you’d hear this and this, I’d show you that and that. Nowhere else in England … only in the last week of June…. It was like God showing you round the Garden of Eden.
And the cowslips. The visitors—especially the American visitors—would be told of the custom which still flourished in Ivor’s student days—thirty—forty years ago. How they would come down here in punts, on Mayday, at sunrise, and the girls would pick cowslips and make them into cowslip balls. Cowslip balls; and punting slowly back along the river in the growing light, the ripples around the pole first black and silver, and then reddening with the coming of the morning.
Typical of Ivor to have been young at such a time, and to have
escaped into adulthood in the nick of time, just when it all ended, never to return.
Cowslips. Cuckoos. Summer noonday. Imogen could believe in none of it. She shivered, and glancing up from the dry, feathery winter grass, she became aware, with quite a little shock, that the mist was thickening, the pale disc of the sun was quite gone. Evening was upon them.
“Vernon! Timmie!” she called; and her voice sounded muffled and strange, bleating weakly into the fog.
They heard it, though, and came ambling into her field of vision, slower now, and growing quarrelsome, their whiny voices like seagulls. They were tired, she’d kept them out too long. She should have set off for home with them long ago.
“I’m cold, Granny, my hands are cold,” complained Vernon, dangling a pair of sodden gloves for her inspection:
“I told you so—messing about in the water all the way here,” Imogen snapped back—quite unjustly, for she hadn’t told them any such thing; playing with the water had looked like a nice, thoroughly enjoyable game while the sun was still shining and no one was tired.
Altogether, it was a dispirited little party that began to straggle back along the river path by which they had set out so cheerily a couple of hours ago.
“Come
on,
both of you. It’s getting dark.”
“Granny, my foot hurts….”
“Granny,
wait
for me….”
The children whined, Imogen nagged, and the white mist gathered thicker and damper all about them: and presently, through the dull squelch of Wellingtons and the weak twitter of childish bickering, Imogen became aware of another sound: footsteps following behind them on the river path. The owner of the footsteps was still invisible through the fog, but he (or possibly she) was gaining on them.
Imogen’s first feeling was one of relief. A stranger, a small happening, has a magical effect on squabbling children—not to mention irritable adults. “Nasty evening,” the newcomer would
say as he drew level: or, “Fog’s coming down, isn’t it?” and, “Yes, isn’t it?” she’d answer, in a friendly, pleasant voice. By the time the stranger had overtaken them and disappeared into the mist ahead, everyone would be feeling better. “Who was that?” the boys would say, having to stop quarrelling to say it: and “Why?” one of them would doubtless add as soon as she had given her necessarily vague answer.
She slowed her steps a little, the sooner to bring the therapeutic little encounter into being.
The voice, when it came, was, as she had expected, a masculine one; the first words, though, took her completely by surprise.
“Good afternoon, Mrs Barnicott,” it said, and a slight,
ill-kempt
figure loomed out of the mist and drew level. “You remember me, I expect … I’m sure you do. I’m Teri….”
He was, too. Hair a little flatter, face pale and
unhealthy-looking
in the drained light. Myrtle’s pinky-orangey lighting had been kinder. The voice was recognisable, too, but only just, for all the shyness and diffidence had gone out of it. It was a harshly confident voice now, laced with contempt, and with a sort of secret triumph. Imogen felt Vernon’s hand stealing into hers.
“Oh, hullo, Terr—Teri,” she replied, trying to put the spelling of the tiresome word into her voice, as he himself so wearyingly did. “And what brings
you
here?” she added, trying to sound light and casual still in spite of the uneasiness growing inside her. Something in his voice, his sly cockiness, constituted a threat of some kind.
By now, the whole party had come to a standstill. With her free hand, she reached out for Timmie. Hand in hand, the little threesome faced the stranger, already in battle order though as yet no battle had been declared.
For several seconds Teri did not answer, but it was plain that the delay betokened no uncertainty or hesitation on his part. Rather he seemed to be savouring his hidden triumph, seeking to enjoy to the full these moments of secret anticipation.
“I’ve been following you,” he said at last, with a sort of smug
superiority. “All the way along by the river. I saw you start out. You didn’t know, did you?”
Yes I did, Imogen longed to say, just to deprive him of at least this nugget of self-congratulation: but it would be foolish to provoke the man before knowing what weapons he had hidden there behind his flat, wary eyes, or beneath his dirty sweater. Especially must she go carefully with the little boys here, clinging to her in utter confidence. They knew that something was wrong—she could feel it in the clutch of their hands and by the way they weren’t fidgeting—but they knew too—being only seven and eight—that Granny was all-powerful, and that it would all end in getting home comfortably for tea by the fire. With crumpets, perhaps, and chocolate biscuits. They waited: and Imogen waited: and for long seconds Teri waited. You could see that he was making the most of a moment for which he had waited for a long, long time, perhaps all his life: the moment of power.
“I’ve got proof, Mrs Barnicott,” he said at last, and almost reluctantly—unwilling, perhaps, to lose for ever these anticipatory moments, to exchange them for the mere fulfilment of his dream. “I have actual proof now, you know, I hadn’t when I telephoned you, though I knew I’d get it in the end. And now I have. From the hotel, Mrs Barnicott. The Hotel Magnifique. Does that ring any bells? Does it, Mrs Barnicott?”
*
The Hotel Magnifique. The hotel where Ivor would have been staying that night if he hadn’t gone off and died instead, without even cancelling his booking. Gone off in his car, in the middle of the night, without a word to anybody. Intending, presumably, to drive home through the night. It was in a homeward direction, more or less, that the car had hurtled slantwise off the motorway, across the grass verge, and smashed into an ancient oak. The Talking Oak, the Sacred Oak of Dodona, whose leaves were said to be softly talking all summer long for those that had ears to hear. Had Ivor heard them, in those last seconds of his life?
He’d have liked that.
“I
heard
them—the first man to hear them in more than two thousand years!”—already the flamboyant, after-dinner anecdote would have been taking shape in his brain just as darkness smashed into it for ever.
“It’s no good acting dumb, Mrs B.,” Teri upbraided her—and Imogen realised that she must have been staring vacantly, not answering his question, for several seconds—“It’s no good playing silly-fools with me. You know the Hotel Magnifique all right, oh yes you do. Should do, shouldn’t you, seeing you were there the night your husband died? They saw you. The reception clerk saw you, and so did one of the waiters. You were at the reception desk just before midnight, phoning up to the Prof.’s room. It’s no good denying it, because they
saw
you. I’ve talked to both of them, I have proof….”
Such a farrago of untruth restored Imogen’s power of speech. Lies so blatantly unfounded, so easily refuted, were surely no threat to anybody?
“Don’t be silly,” she said, “How could they have seen me? I wasn’t there. Everyone knows I wasn’t. I was at home, two hundred miles away. I told you—”
“Sure you did! Like you told everybody. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? And don’t think I don’t sympathise with you, Mrs B., I’d have done the same myself in your position. Like, I mean, no one wants to be run-in for murder, do they? And don’t worry, Mrs B., no one will be—not if you act like a sensible woman and listen to me. I haven’t told the police yet, what I know, and I won’t do, if you’ll just do a couple of small things for me. One’s to do with money, I’m afraid—” he pronounced the word “money” with a certain distaste, as one who has been brought up in such aristocratic circles that money is just not mentioned: “Not an
awful
lot of money, Mrs B., and anyway, you’re a rich woman now, aren’t you, widow of the famous Prof. and all that bit. Rich enough, anyway….”
“You’re crazy!” Imogen interrupted. She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it all. “Why
on
earth
should I give you money
when there’s not the slightest shadow of truth in any of it? I mean
really
…” She gave a little laugh.
Teri scowled.
“So it’s funny, is it? Funny ha-ha? O.K., so it’s funny. But I don’t think, Mrs B., that you’ve quite got the hang of where we’re at: what my idea is, kind of thing. This idea of mine, I’ve had it for a long time, actually; how maybe a person could lay hands on quite a bit of money simply by finding out about some crime the police don’t know about, and then making a bargain with the criminal not to give him away if he’ll …”