In the end, Mrs Osborne surrendered to Sue’s persuasions about moving some of the smaller furniture down, and followed Tone nimbly upstairs to indicate what was what. He had already manoeuvred a walnut chest of drawers to the top of the stairs, and he and Sue began to assess the logistics of getting it downstairs. Cleo could see the old lady looking at the chest nervously and couldn’t blame her. Neither Sue nor Tone were weaklings but the stairs were narrow and twisting, and the chest looked valuable.
‘If you took the drawers out it wouldn’t be as heavy,’ she ventured, pulling out one of the top ones as she spoke and carrying it over to rest it on the bed.
Mrs Osborne gave a little scream. ‘Oh goodness, they’re in such a mess, let me tidy them a bit first!’ She darted over to the one Cleo had pulled out. She hadn’t seemed to be the sort to be prudish about anyone seeing her winceyette nightdresses and thermal bloomers, and it turned out that wasn’t the reason she’d grabbed a woolly bedjacket and thrown it over the contents of the drawer – which weren’t undergarments, anyway, but table linen. Quick as a little sparrow, she still hadn’t been quite quick enough to conceal what Cleo had seen lying there.
A car drew up outside.
‘Oh, there’s Eleanor,’ Mrs Osborne said, with evident relief. ‘Just you leave everything, now. Eleanor and the boys will see to it.’
‘You’re sure?’ Sue asked.
‘Quite sure,’ Mrs Osborne said firmly.
They followed her downstairs, collected their belongings and Mrs Osborne was just writing out the cheque for their services and arranging for the next visit when Eleanor Robson walked in.
Her critical glance swept around the room. ‘Well,’ she announced grudgingly, after a moment or two, ‘you’ve made a start, I’ll say that.’ She glanced at her watch and saw that there was still five minutes to go, which Cleo supposed meant fifteen in real terms, and said pointedly, ‘Didn’t you have time to get the furniture downstairs, then?’
Sue began to explain, though Cleo was sure it wasn’t part of their job requirements to go lugging furniture around. Any offers to do so had been made out of the goodness of Sue’s heart, but Mrs Osborne cut her explanations short. ‘Eleanor,’ she began warningly, ‘it’s been a perfectly filthy job, they’ve worked wonders and I’m delighted with what they’ve done. The furniture will stay where it is, for now.’
Little Mrs Osborne, Cleo saw, could insert an edge of steel into her voice with the best of them when necessary. Her large, forbidding daughter, obviously having had experience of this before, shut up.
Cleo was rather glad to see her put down. She didn’t take to Mrs Robson at all.
She was tall, with a big bosom and her dark hair drawn back from her face into a low bun on her neck, her mouth set in an uncompromising line. You could imagine her swishing a cane in her hand. She looked like the sort who’d enjoy terrorising unwilling children. I’ll bet it’s maths she teaches, Cleo thought.
‘Let’s get off, then,’ Mrs Osborne said.
‘We can’t go, yet, Mother. The police are here, wanting a word with you.’
All eyes in the room followed her glance out of the window, where a couple of large, uniformed men were standing beside the police car that was parked on the muddy frontage of the cottage, next to the MO van, and Eleanor’s own car. ‘The
police
?’ Mrs Osborne’s voice rose to a squeak. ‘What do they want with me?’
‘It’s all right, don’t look so worried, Mother, they’re questioning everyone in the neighbourhood. It’s that woman who was drowned. They seem to think her body went into the water somewhere just below here.’
One of these days, thought Charles Wetherby, he was going to inform Mrs Atkins, in no uncertain terms, that he loathed the smell of the air freshener she insisted on spraying around the office, and forbid her to use it. But unpalatable though it was for him to admit this, she was one of the few people who intimidated him – he’d never even been able to bring himself to call her by her Christian name, Daphne, though everyone else around the office seemed to manage it. He would have found some reason to dismiss her before now, except that she was so damned efficient and besides, she’d been appointed by Conyngham, the school Secretary, who not only thought the sun shone out of her, but called her Daph, to which she made no objection. Her smooth blonde hair, her immaculate complexion and her gold-rimmed spectacles irritated him beyond belief, and he pretended not to know why. The truth, which he refused to admit, was that, while being perfectly polite, she would not grant him the deference he regarded as due to the Bursar of Lavenstock College.
She had put an African violet on top of the filing cabinet, and a neatly typed list of his most important obligations for the week on his desk, including reminders for his attendance at the Safety Policy Committee, and the Senior Administrative Staff meeting, which was starred. Starred. That meant he would have to make time to see Conyngham first, because the subject of the purchase of 16 Kelsey Road was bound to be paramount on the agenda. If that stubborn old woman continued to refuse to sell, it might be necessary for the school to consider the possibility of making the new entrance by demolishing only the two houses – 14 and 12 — which stood together. This was a less satisfactory proposition by a long chalk than the present proposal, to pull down the middle two, of which number 16 was one, and to utilise the end ones as the new porters’ lodges. Or even for some very necessary overspill accommodation. Discussing this would inevitably bring up the vexed question of admitting sixth-form girls into the school
as boarders. Not that Wetherby, as Bursar, would have any say one way or the other in either matter, but both situations would certainly pose him with more administrative problems.
He gazed into the mirror which faced the glass panel in his door. He’d had this strategically hung so that he could see what went on beyond the door without them being able to see him. One of the girls from the outer office had appeared with two mugs of coffee, and was handing one to Mrs Atkins, leaning against her desk to gossip as she drank her own, which meant that the switchboard had been left unmanned again. Infuriated, he pushed his chair back to go and remonstrate with her, then saw it was not Trish, in one of her eye-catching outfits, but Beverley. For some reason she was dressed up today, not wearing her usual ethnic garb. He subsided into his chair, thinking, not for the first time, that something would have to be done about her. He’d been a fool to play so near home, and not to have realised the extent of her gullibility.
He was a bad judge of women, he had to admit it. He was destined to pick the wrong kind, their physical attraction blinding him to flaws in their character, which only became evident too late. His wife, Hannah: pretty and aimless when he’d met her, but full of high spirits and with an endearing adoration for him. But she’d developed a knack of arguing with him too much, and then, when he’d finally succeeded in breaking her spirit, she was no longer any fun. It had been pretty much the same with other women. Angela Hunnicliffe, for instance. Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth Angela, with her mean, acquisitive ways, her transatlantic twang and her devious mind. He was glad to have seen the last of her – she
and
her husband – but when they’d departed for their native shore, they’d both left behind them a legacy of trouble. And now, Beverley Harriman. Who was a different proposition altogether.
Cleo wasn’t sorry to leave Wych Cottage when their stint was over. It still didn’t smell good, which was only to be expected after being under flood water. Mrs Osborne, in fact, said there were parts which never dried out completely. The idea of living with something like that gave Cleo the willies.
Sue was anxious to get home, so she drove fast all the way into
Lavenstock, concentrating on her driving. She only worked mornings for MO, and she said she had her own house to clean when she got back, to pick up her children from school and cook the evening meal. In addition, it appeared she was wallpapering the main bedroom and wanted to get it finished so that she and her husband could move back in that night. She made Cleo tired just thinking about it all, and even more certain that she’d been right only to sign up her services part time; she wondered how long they’d put up with her, anyway. She leaned back and closed her eyes.
‘Tired? You’ll soon get used to it – and you did OK,’ Sue remarked, but Cleo had the feeling that she was just being kind, and that she hadn’t really pulled her weight; yet the thought of getting the sack depressed her with a sense of failure.
‘The first fifteen years are the worst,’ Tone said from the back. ‘After that you get used to it.’
He had his sketch pad out and all the way back Cleo heard the pages rapidly turning over. Tone was beginning to interest her.
They reached the MO premises in record time, signed off and Sue hurried off home to her DIY decorating, cooking, minding her children, and the rest. Tone stood about on the pavement, looking as though he wanted to say something. Finally, he got out, ‘Could you do some lunch? There’s a good place round the corner.’
‘Cheap?’ Cleo asked, making sure he understood by this that she was going to pay her way. Her plans for the day hadn’t included lunching with anyone, never mind young Tone, but all that hard work had made her ravenous. Perhaps that was why she felt so low: her blood sugar needed a boost.
He nodded. ‘Good grub, too.’
‘OK, if you’ll let me look at what you’ve been drawing.’
‘Why do you want to do that?’ he asked in amazement. But eventually he agreed.
The caff to which he led her looked like a greasy spoon outside, but appearances were deceptive. It was as antiseptic as an old-fashioned hospital ward inside. It wasn’t much more than a counter with cooking facilities behind, and a few tables, but the plastic tablecloths were spotless and the sauce bottles weren’t sticky. A woman of roughly the same proportions as Sue, though
twenty years older, was serving behind the counter, otherwise the place was empty. ‘Hello, each,’ she greeted them. ‘Brought your girlfriend today, Tone?’
‘This is Cleo, Marge, she’s come to work with us. You go sit down, Cleo, I’ll get it. What do you fancy?’
‘Oh anything, as long as it’s food, I’m starving. Burger or something,’ she said absently.
While he was waiting at the counter and oniony smells came drifting over, making her mouth water, she flicked through the sketch pad he’d left with her. He was really, at least to Cleo’s thinking, really good. He must surely have had some sort of professional training. It was a true artist’s sketchbook – odd, quirky details of people, places, things. He seemed to have total recall, he’d remembered all sorts of surprising things about Wych Cottage: she flicked the pages over, seeing the little wooden carvings on the inglenook, the iron-barred bake-oven where someone had once been able to bake enough bread for an army. He’d drawn every detail of the heavy, wonderfully wrought iron latch on the low, crooked door, leading directly on to an almost vertical flight of damp stone steps into the low, stillflooded, unused cold-store at the side of the house, which someone had once dug out to six feet below ground, generations before freezers and fridges had been invented. You could still have used it for that purpose, Mrs Osborne had said, except that it never completely dried out, despite a big air space high up in the wall. There was also an apple-loft and what she called the cheese room, half-way up the staircase. It still smelled cheesy, or was that imagination?
There was a sketch of Cleo herself, which made her laugh, wondering what Daphne would think of it – on her knees, mopping the floor, with a harassed expression on her face and her bum in the air. And one of Mrs Osborne. Tone had done a funny drawing of her, sitting like the Queen Mum on the window seat with her fluffy white hair and her little feet in their high-heeled shoes drawn to one side.
Cleo stared thoughtfully at the sketch. Tone had exactly caught the determined chin, the sideways perch of her head, the closed smile. What would his reaction have been if he had seen, as she had, that gun tucked away amongst this dear old lady’s embroidered tablecloths?
Presently, he came back with two enormous burgers and two coffees. The burger smelled hot and savoury and she took a large, hungry bite. She chewed, more slowly and more suspiciously, swallowed hastily, then pushed it away. ‘Yuk. There’s something wrong with this. It’s disgusting. The meat tastes all mushy.’
‘That’s because it’s not meat. It’s a lentilburger, you said you didn’t mind what.’
Aaargh! She thought she might be sick. If she’d known it was lentils she was eating, OK. But chewing it, thinking it was meat … what sort of person was it, could do such a thing?
He said miserably, ‘I’m sorry, but you did say … I’ll get you something else.’
She was sort of getting used to his face now and she saw from its expression that she might have really hurt him. ‘No, it’s me that should be sorry – I did say anything. Tell you what, you come home with me and I’ll heat us some soup or something,’ she heard herself saying, and smiled at him to show she really meant it. It was nobody’s fault but her own, yet she somehow couldn’t fancy eating anything else, not for a while, at any rate.
One thing that could be said for him, he wasn’t the sort to take offence. ‘Right.’ He grabbed a fistful of paper napkins out of the holder on the table and wrapped both burgers up, not intending to let anything go to waste.
Marge raised her eyebrows at their hurried exit. ‘Anything wrong?’
‘No, just something we suddenly remembered.’
Tone told her as they walked home that he lived in one of the blocks of high-rise flats quite near her own road, an infill that faced some of the bigger houses. It was OK, he said, now that the rest of the family had left home and there was just him and his mum. Quieter, like. She gave him a swift glance, but didn’t ask him what that meant.
Later, after some soup, tooth-achingly sweet, vinegary and luridly coloured, which the label alleged was tomato, and of which no fewer than eight cans had been left in the cupboard by Angel Honeybun (which must have said something about her), Cleo said, ‘What are you doing working for MO with a talent
like yours, Tone? You could get a really interesting job if you wanted to.’
‘I’ve no qualifications.’
‘Who needs qualifications when you can draw like that?’
‘Everybody needs qualifications these days.’
‘Then why not get some? You could do, easily.’ Look who was talking, but it was different when it was someone else, wasn’t it?
‘Nah,’ he said dismissively, and something in the way he said it told her to leave the subject alone.
After Tone had demolished both, now cold, lentilburgers, when they were still sitting at the table in the kitchen, Cleo suggested they took their coffee mugs into the other room to sit more comfortably.
‘Wow!’ he exclaimed when they went in, staring around. ‘You have a thing about Art Deco?’
‘Not me. It’s just as my Aunt Phoebe left it.’
‘You can make whatever changes you want,’ Daphne had said, ‘but I’m afraid you’re stuck with the furniture …’
‘I don’t mind the furniture, Mum, but maybe a coat of paint on the walls?’
Throughout the house, Phoebe’s beige, textured wallpapers, with their indeterminate patterns, had now faded, so that the walls had taken on the colour and consistency of porridge. ‘I’m thinking of painting the walls,’ she told Tone now. ‘And that fireplace! It’s driving me mad. I keep trying to balance things on it but they slip off, because of its curve. I wondered about a shelf just above it. Dad got some ready-made ones with brackets from B & Q the other week.’
There was a stunned silence from Tone when she told him this. Then he said, reprovingly as a museum curator, ‘That’d be sacrilege. You don’t want to go ruining everything with things like that.’ He thought for a while. ‘I could do you some murals.’
‘Some
what
?’
‘Murals. No, hang on and listen – could be great.’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Deco stuff to go with the gear, you could choose what before we started.’ He saw her face. ‘OK,’ he went on, though obviously disappointed. ‘Sylvan scenes and all that, if you
really
want. Though I was thinking more on the lines of
trompe l’oeil,
you know? Deceive the eye, make the room seem bigger.’
‘I know what
trompe l’oeil
means. But no,’ she said firmly, ‘just paint. And what d’you mean, we?’
‘I’ll help you. Better still, do it for you. No sweat.’
‘Well …’ she began weakly. ‘That’s really nice of you, but, sorry. I couldn’t pay you.’
‘I wouldn’t want paying,’ he said stiffly. ‘Not for a mate.’
Oh dear, had she hurt him again? But no, ‘You just buy the paint,’ he said. ‘Though this paper’d be a bit dodgy to paint on. Needs stripping off before we start. I could begin straight away.’