Why Aren't They Screaming? (4 page)

Loretta followed the two women up the stairs and found herself on a spacious landing. A sash window looked out on to the road; at the back of the house its double gave on to the back garden. As she faced the front of the house the wall to her left was completely taken up with bookshelves; that to her right was dominated by a large abstract painting.

‘Come and admire my view,' Clara instructed, leading the way to the window overlooking the garden.

Loretta obeyed, unprepared for the sight that met her eyes. It was, she thought, as though she had been transported back several decades. A grassy terrace ended in a low stone wall, beyond which fell away a lawn starred with wild flowers. Towards the bottom of the lawn, slightly to the right, was a disused circular pond, its cracked stone base suggesting it had weathered innumerable dry summers. To one side a magnolia dripped its heavy blossom over the pond's edge.
All that was needed to complete the scene was a group of women in trailing white dresses. The lawn ended in another stone wall, this one of much more rough-hewn appearance, beyond which a row of outbuildings struggled to survive an onslaught of weeds and brambles. On the far side of the outbuildings, a thick green wood stretched up the other side of the valley.

‘Isn't it wonder–' Clara's voice, loud as it was, was lost in the noise of another plane passing overhead. ‘Bloody machines,' she snapped as the noise died away. They're not supposed to fly at weekends. This way.'

She turned abruptly and led Loretta down the long corridor stretching to the right at the front of the house.

‘Spare room,' she said, indicating a door half-way down. ‘I'm going to put Peggy in there.' She opened a door at the very end of the corridor and went in. This is where I work,' she said, a note of pride in her voice.

It was a delightful room. There were no fewer than three sets of windows, one at each side of the black marble fireplace and a bay window with white wooden shutters on the wall facing the door. The walls were painted off-white and were covered with sketches of cats, many of them the originals of Clara's books. It took Loretta a moment to realize there was also a live cat in the room, a sinuous grey creature stretched out on a
chaise-longue
upholstered in faded yellow velvet. This animal suddenly sat up, let out a conversational wail, and padded over to Clara, who picked him up. He immediately clambered up on to her shoulders, draped himself elegantly across the back of her neck, and began to purr.

‘This is Bertie,' said Clara, reaching up to stroke the cat's head. ‘I suppose you haven't seen the cottage yet?'

She moved across the room to the bay window, lifting the heavy metal bar to open the shutters. They folded neatly back on themselves and Loretta caught her first glimpse of Keeper's Cottage.

It was much closer to Baldwin's than she had imagined – Loretta realized she had pictured the cottage in some far corner of Clara's garden. It was separated from Baldwin's by a privet hedge which stood about five feet tall, a small path leading from a gap in the hedge to its front door. The high
stone wall which hid Clara's garden from the road actually joined the cottage at its far end, and there were double wooden doors in it to allow direct access to the cottage. As Bridget had warned, Keeper's Cottage was very small; it was also beautiful, with the mauve blossom of a long-established wistaria obscuring most of its front elevation. There were two doors, one in the main building, a second in the two-storey extension to the right. Upstairs a modern window, set into the roof, provided the cottage with both light and privacy. The only discordant note in this charming rustic scene was a large and unmistakably American car parked between the privet hedge and the front door, next to the wooden gates that led to the main road.

‘Wayne's?' Loretta turned to Clara.

‘Of course. Imo, if I take this end of the table, can you do the backwards bit?'

Imo, who had been piling various pieces of paper on a desk in the corner, grasped the far end of the table as her mother took the other, the cat still balanced precariously on her shoulders. Loretta's offer of help was firmly refused, and she trailed down the corridor in their wake feeling rather useless.

‘Bathroom's through there,' called Clara, indicating a door towards the back of the house. ‘You go off and get ready. Come down for drinks at eight.'

Loretta accepted her dismissal, observing that Clara seemed accustomed to having her orders obeyed. Returning to the study she sat down gingerly on the
chaise-longue
which the cat had recently vacated. This, she presumed, was where she was to sleep tonight; it felt unexpectedly sturdy for so delicate a piece of furniture. Looking round the room she noticed a chest of dark wood against a wall. She went over and lifted the lid, discovering sheets, blankets and a worn patchwork quilt. She glanced at her watch and decided there was time for a bath before supper, then remembered that her luggage, including her soap bag, was still in the car.

She returned to the landing and descended the stairs. The long table was now in the hall, laid with a white tablecloth and place mats for eight. Towards each end stood huge branching candelabra, precariously filled with candles of
assorted length and design – straight-sided, twisted, even a couple of red ones with paper holly leaves left over from Christmas. Each place was set with a quantity of large, old-fashioned silver, much in need of polishing. The overall effect was rather pleasing, like a stage set artfully designed to suggest careless grandeur.

Loretta turned sideways to slide past the table and put her head round the kitchen door. The grey cat was now on the floor, she noticed, leaning with closed eyes against the lower oven door of the Aga.

‘I'm just going to get my things from the car,' she said. ‘Is there a short cut across the garden?'

Clara tossed a heap of chopped vegetables into the saucepan and came to the door.

‘You go out of the conservatory, across the terrace and on to the lawn,' she said. There's a gate in the trees that brings you out into the lane just above the lay-by. Leave your car there for tonight and you can put it outside the cottage when Wayne leaves. I'll be delighted to see the back of that wretched Pan-Am.'

‘
Trans
-Am,' Imo called from the kitchen, her tone suggesting this was not the first time Clara had made the mistake.

‘Oh, Loretta, don't feel you
have
to dress for dinner.' Clara's voice followed Loretta as she stepped into the conservatory. She paused for a moment, wondering how to interpret this remark. It hadn't occurred to her to change, but the way Clara had spoken suggested that it might be the usual practice at Baldwin's. It was just as well, Loretta thought, that she'd brought a couple of dresses with her.

Just under an hour later, as Loretta was outlining her eyes with a kohl pencil, the sky suddenly darkened. Through the windows Clara's garden abruptly drained of colour, the multitude of greens turning to tones of grey as the sky filled with rain. When it came, the first fork of lightning briefly restored a washed-out colour, as though someone had let off a giant flashgun. Loretta drew back into the room, disturbed not so much by the lightning as by a sense of unaccustomed closeness to the elements; she had a heightened awareness of
her surroundings which was lacking in London, as though some sort of protective film had temporarily dissolved. Feeling a momentary yearning for the familiarity of her flat, she tried to dispel her unease by switching on the red-shaded table lamp which stood on Clara's desk. It cast a deep, warm glow across the room and she relaxed in spite of the lightning which again disfigured the sky.

She had already unpacked some of her clothes; she took down a drop-waisted dress of black and white silk from its hanger on the back of the door and slipped it over her head. Crossing to the mantelpiece, she took a pair of jet earrings from her jewellery box and fixed them in her ears. She wasn't looking too bad, she thought, examining her reflection critically in the mirror; her bobbed blonde hair would soon need cutting, but there was a bit of colour in her cheeks and her eyes were less sunken than they had been for weeks. She applied a touch of lipstick, stood back, and decided that she'd do. It wasn't that she minded being thirty-two, she thought, crossing the room to close the shutters; what bothered her was feeling a good ten years older, as she had since the start of her illness. Well, perhaps things were looking up at last. She closed the curtains to either side of the fireplace, had a last look round the room, and went downstairs.

‘Good timing,' said Imo, who was crossing the hall from the kitchen. This way for drinks.'

She led the way into a room to the left of the back door which turned out to be the drawing room. A large square bay looked out on to the back garden, and an assortment of comfortably shabby chairs and a sofa were grouped before an unlit grate. There were pictures everywhere, most of them Victorian portraits and landscapes; a couple looked like copies – surely not originals, Loretta thought – of lesser-known Pre-Raphaelites.

‘Who are you?'

There were three people already in the room, and the voice came from one of them, a woman sitting to one side of the fireplace in an attitude of complete relaxation: her legs, encased in elderly corduroy trousers with splashes of mud round the ankles, were stretched out before her as she lounged in her chair. An old bottle-green jumper completed her
ensemble,
and her gaze was directed unwaveringly at Loretta in spite of the fact that she was engaged in relighting an obviously troublesome pipe. Loretta swallowed, suddenly self-conscious, and was relieved to be rescued by Imo.

‘Loretta's our new tenant,' the girl said. ‘She's moving into the cottage.'

‘Makes a change,' the woman said, smiling widely. ‘You're an improvement on the dreadful Wayne. Isn't she, darling?' This remark was directed at a man seated on a high-backed chair on the other side of the fireplace. He was of small, stocky build, and had a mass of dark, curly hair. Before he could speak she went on, ‘I'm Ellie Barker, and this is my husband, Here Parker.'

She beamed at Loretta, who was beginning to realize that the woman's manner was simply direct, rather than hostile as she had at first thought.

‘Don't worry about getting them mixed up,' said Imo, who had taken a seat in the bay where she was half-obscured by a full-length velvet curtain. ‘Everyone does. Clara says they should toss a coin and choose one or the other, but they won't. It's very confusing.'

‘No, it isn't,' objected Ellie. ‘You've known me all your life, Imogen, and I've always been Ellie Barker. I don't believe in this nonsense of women having to change their names when they get married.'

‘Neither do I,' said Here firmly, revealing a strong New England accent. ‘But I did say to Ellie, the day she proposed to me, this name business is not going to be easy. Why don't we combine them, I said, and call ourselves the Barker-Parkers? See, I even offered to put hers first. But would she? Oh no.'

‘Course not, darling,' Ellie said indignantly. ‘It makes us sound like chinless wonders out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.'

‘Lovely, when you've spent forty-eight years of your life as Hercules Parker, it don't seem important what people think.'

‘I, on the other hand, am plain Gilbert Brown,' said the third person in the room, rising to his feet and extending a hand courteously to Loretta.

He was tall, Loretta noticed, though his height was slightly disguised by what appeared to be an habitual stoop. His age,
she thought, could be anything between sixty and seventy.

‘Like you,' he went on, ‘I am one of Clara's tenants.' He relinquished her hand and sat down. Though pensioner might be more accurate in my case. I've lived in one of Clara's cottages in the village for fourteen years, on and off. A very good landlady she is, too.'

He had a slow, pedantic way of speaking, Loretta noticed, nonplussed by this strange gathering. The thought uppermost in her mind, in fact, was that she had misread Clara's remark about dressing for dinner; Here and Ellie had obviously come as they were – Loretta wondered if they were farmers, and had been engaged in one of the innumerable messy tasks of which, she assumed, farmers were fond – and Gilbert was wearing an old pullover under his shabby sports jacket. Nor did it seem likely that the woman from the peace camp had arrived at the house with a trunkful of evening clothes among her luggage. Her only hope was Robert, and he hadn't struck her as a man with a great interest in his appearance.

To cover her sense of being out of place, Loretta took a seat near Here and inquired how long he'd lived in England. Ten years, he told her, dispelling her vision of him as a farmer with the information that he was a freelance journalist specializing in financial affairs. His contact with the soil, she discovered, was limited to an allotment in the village where he was experimenting with various kinds of marrow that he hadn't been able to get since moving from the States. ‘Butternut squash,' he sighed, reminiscing about the soup his mother used to make.

‘He's not boring you with his marrows?' Ellie demanded, smiling broadly. ‘Darling, you'll never get squash to grow over here, the climate's wrong. You ought to write to the manager of Sainsbury's, I've told you.'

At that moment, the door opened and Clara swept into the room. Loretta was at once glad she'd taken trouble with her appearance; her hostess was resplendent in a full-length caftan in a brilliant green and yellow material. It was much admired, until Clara whirled round and propelled into their midst the slight figure who had been standing behind her.

‘Everybody, this is Peggy,' she announced, a hand on the
girl's shoulder. ‘She got a nasty bang on the head last night, so I'm keeping an eye on her. How
is
your head?'