It was only a joke. Last night Jo had stuffed the dented celluloid doll upside down into the thick porcelain bowl of The Flusher, patent 1882. Only a joke, but the results were far more violent than she had expected. The screams and pandemonium and shouting had been quite stimulating, with the censuring of Dennis to complete the satisfaction.
What’s next? Jo had no plans. She was here. That was enough for now. She would see what came up, as the chance of the doll had turned up – a better reward than the ten pounds Dorothy Taylor had pressed on her for baby-sitting.
Jo continued to look in on Mary Trout now and again, cultivating her image of being kind to old ladies, and hoping for titbits of inside information about the family.
One Monday afternoon, Agnes had gone to have her feet seen to and Ruth was at the lodge, fussing and clucking over her grandmother.
‘We were talking about old times,’ she said (as if the old Trout ever talked of anything else). She had pushed the old lady over to the back window, so that she could get the air without the breeze, and she brought up another chair for Jo to sit by her.
The old lady nodded and chuckled. She was evidently having a good day.
‘My mother’s late back.’ Ruth looked at the flowered china clock. ‘And I’ve got to get to the shops.’
It had worked before with the children. It worked now. ‘I’d be glad to stay here for a while,’ Jo said.
‘Oh, no, you can’t always be doing things for me.’
‘We do things for each other, Ruth. You’re always helping me – with the baking, and that time the fat man had a fit and I didn’t know what to do, and taking me to the fabric place for the curtain material. Besides, I like talking to your grandmother.’ She raised her voice.
Tessa stopped in at the lodge after leaving Rob with his grandparents. She was wearing a mouth-watering creamy suit that would have looked like death on Marigold, but looked fantastic on glowing, tanned Tessa.
One day, Marigold thought, I shall put my two capable hands round her neck and squeeze the babbling, cocksure life out of her … Would that be enough? If Tessa were dead, she would not suffer.
Tessa talked to Troutie about coming to The Sanctuary as a child; Troutie would show her the attic store-rooms and let her take old dresses and fancy hats downstairs to give a performance.
‘Always putting on a show, you was.’ Troutie had refused to talk to Jo, but she maundered and mumbled away to Tessa. ‘Lovely you was, in Lady Geraldine’s frock with the glittery beads. My golden girl, I called you.’
‘I called you Toutie.’ Tessa bent to kiss her. ‘I still love you best of anyone. Am I still your golden girl?’
Sickening stuff. Troutie put up a lizard’s hand and patted Tessa’s face. Pat, pat, mumble, mumble. Jo would have liked to throw a bucket of water over the pair of them.
When Tessa had pranced out, Jo tried to get Mary to drop the winsome-old-retainer front and remember some of the truth.
‘Rob showed me the cellars, Mrs Trout. So cold, even in July. How did you stand it, working down there? The fireplace in the servants’ hall is a joke, and that great old scullery – like an ice box.’
‘Near the kitchen range.’ The old lady chuckled, gasped and coughed. ‘Then you was too hot.’
‘I’ve seen all over the house, you know. It must have made a shocking lot of work for all of you, being so big and grand.’
‘Local jobs,’ Troutie said quite clearly and sharply. Her leathery hands fiddled with the musty stuff of her skirt.
Since she would not remember anything Jo said – she remembered nothing from less than twenty years ago – Jo risked the comment, ‘But what a waste of lives spent catering to a few rich people.’
‘This was my home.’ The rusty voice started strong, quavered, and was swamped by that waterlogged cough.
Jo made herself a cup of tea, which tasted slightly flawed, as if Agnes had poisoned the water. In the newspaper she found an advertisement for the kind of small unfinished dresser she wanted, to paint for her kitchen. Now that she knew she was going to stay for some time, for as long as it took, it was worth making improvements at Bramble Bank.
Agnes was in a bad mood when she came home and found Jo there instead of Ruth.
‘Poking your face in where you’re not wanted,’ was her theme. She walked aimlessly from the back room to the front, lighting cigarettes. When Jo hid the lighter in her own pocket, Agnes lit one cigarette from the last, leaving sourly smoking stubs in saucers. No wonder her mother’s chest was like a sewer.
Troutie was very deeply asleep. ‘You can go then, can’t you,’ Agnes said, as an order, not a suggestion.
‘I thought I – shall I just help you to put her to bed?’
‘She’s all right there for a bit. Leave me alone, can’t you? I’m tired.’
Sloshed, more like. Agnes had come home aggressive and unsteady, knocking into the door frame.
‘Perhaps you should take a nap too.’
‘Mind your own business.’
But Agnes did go upstairs, stumbling on the stair rods and banging her bedroom door savagely. Jo took the newspaper with the advertisement and left. Walking up the drive to where she had left her bicycle, she smouldered about the two of them. Agnes was vilely offensive. Troutie was vilely irritating, with her old pensioner boot-licking. Lady Geraldine. Miss Sylvia. Tessa – oh, always Tessa. My golden girl.
Chafing, too restless to go home, Jo turned off the road, down a lane to where the remains of an old burial barrow rose smoothly among grazing sheep. From the top you could see villages and farms, the lazily curling Lynn river, and the dark mass of The Sanctuary, with a glint of the lake through trees. Jo sat among the spirits of ancient Britons, arms braced and hands clenched on the turf.
She would return while Troutie slept, and tap at the window to frighten her – tap and duck down among the bushes. No one would see, because the old lady was not at her usual window by the drive. Reach up with a stick and bang on the window, and be gone before Agnes looked out.
Start a little fire outside the open window, make some smoke, so that Troutie would wake and think the house was on fire. ‘Agnes! Aggie!’ ‘What do you want?’ ‘Fire – oh, help!’ ‘Shut your noise.’
Jo rode back towards The Sanctuary, the plan shifting back and forth in her head. One moment, it looked perfect, the next, it looked silly. Give it up? Then she’d never know if it would have worked.
She left her bicycle in the courtyard and unlocked the tea-room. If anyone questioned her being here, she could be doing some extra jobs, good zealous Jo. She took the postcards and souvenir mugs and garden guides off the display table and put a bowl of soapy water on it. Then she went through the door in the wall and made her way behind the carriage house and hay barn to the back garden of the lodge cottage, where the casement window stood half open on to the neglected vegetable bed and fruit bushes.
She had brought the newspaper with her. She crouched down between the house and the bushes, crumpled up a couple of sheets, and lit them with Agnes’s cigarette lighter. They burned quite well, and caught some of the dry grass, which sparked and smouldered. There was not enough smoke. It diffused and spread before it reached the window. Jo crumpled two or three more pages together, lit them in her hand, and on an impulse that brought the same sense of release as hurling the accursed stone hare at the wall, she half stood up and threw the burning paper ball through the window. She pitched the cigarette lighter in after it, and fled.
Coming back to the tea-room, she found Rob, riding his old bicycle that was too small for him round the yard.
‘You promised.’ He put down his feet, and dragged them to a stop on the cobbles.
‘Promised what?’
‘To come and see where the horses were burned up in the foaling stable.’
Jo had not planned what she was going to do. She might find someone and ask whether they smelled smoke. She might not. She felt perfectly serene. It did not matter what she did, so she might as well go with Rob, to please him.
‘Get away from the range.’ Cook fussed and glared, brandishing a long two-pronged fork like the devil’s prodder.
‘Them carrots is done.’
Little Mary wanted to stay by the throbbing stove, not go back to the cold muddy sink water in the freezing scullery.
‘Useless child.’
Mrs Belcher yanked open the oven door on a blast of heat and roasting fumes that rushed out to sizzle Mary’s eyebrows and fill her throat with greasy smoke.
‘Told you to get away!’
Mary gasped and coughed, bent double, sank, and disappeared from the underground kitchen scene, which went heedlessly on without her.
‘The shed was here,’ Rob told Jo. ‘Look – you can see the black scorch marks on the wall. The mother horse was inside with her foal. They could still hear them kicking and screaming, but they couldn’t let them out. People still hear the screams, you know.’
He looked at Jo to see if she would swallow this. She wasn’t listening. She turned quickly and ran from him along the back of the carriage house. She was running towards where someone was screaming and shouting.
Rob fell into a black hole of panic, terrified, alone. He ran out on to the drive, screaming for his grandmother. People were running, someone shouted, ‘Fire!’
‘Granny!’
They were running down the drive, to where thick smoke was coming out of the lodge. His grandmother was there. She took his hand and tried to pull him indoors. He broke free and ran round the side of the house.
When the fire engine came flashing and wailing, Rob was standing in a wheelbarrow by the cypress tree, ringing the Closing Bell, ringing, ringing, with no one to stop him.