‘You look tired.’
Dorothy saw Jo coming up to the pantry with baking tins at the end of the day.
‘I’m never tired.’ Jo always said that. ‘I hope it’s not my famous silver streaks. Do they make me look dreadfully old?’
Dottie never took bait. She said, ‘Don’t come in so early tomorrow. Have a lie in.’
‘I’ve got to go to the shops. I’m out of things like sugar and coffee.’
‘Rob and I are going shopping early. Tell me what you need and we’ll drop it off on our way home.’
At Bramble Bank, Rob was fascinated by the small stream and the little bridge that led into Jo’s front garden. The stream was quite meagre at this time of the year, and Rob stayed outside to plan a dam while his grandmother was in the house.
‘You have made it nice, Jo.’ The rooms were small but comfortable and not cluttered. ‘I came here once or twice to see the Thompsons. They had a retarded child.’
‘It had been done over before I came,’ Jo said. ‘I was lucky to find it.’
‘What brought you here, after your husband died?’
‘Oh … old associations. Birdwatching. Walking on the Downs with Alec.’ She looked away, as if her eyes were filling with tears.
‘Is this him?’ Dottie picked up the photograph of a young man with a small moustache, from a side table. Jo nodded without speaking. ‘He looks like a lovely man. Poor Jo. He died of cancer, didn’t he? Was he ill for a long time?’ Dottie sat down, so that Jo could talk if she wanted to. She waited, drinking her coffee. ‘Or don’t you want to talk about it?’
Jo shook her head. She took the picture and looked at it for a long time before putting it back. Her face was quite different without the smile. It hung from her wide cheekbones, instead of rising up to them.
Outside, Mr Richardson saw Dorothy over the fence. ‘Hullo, Dr Taylor.’
Dorothy remembered him. ‘How nice to be able to see your beautiful vegetable garden. It used to be such a jungle here.’
‘Done a lot of work, hasn’t she? Josephine’s a good neighbour.’
Rob had to be coaxed out of the stream, and did not want to get in the car with Dottie.
‘You come again any time,’ Jo told him.
‘Can I, Granny?’
‘If Jo doesn’t mind.’
‘I’d love it.’
‘Soon, may I?’
‘Of course.’ Jo moved to kiss him, but didn’t. Dorothy saw that she had discovered that if you bent to embrace Rob, he slithered away. Not rudely. He just suddenly wasn’t there.
It was sooner than either Jo or Rob expected. The next day, Dottie’s children’s home in Witney had a crisis. They had organized the annual combined meeting of Special Homes in the region. Their big prize, the well-known child-abuse psychiatrist who was to be the opening speaker, was stranded by an airport strike in Greece. No one else was free in August at the last minute. Only Dr Taylor could do the job. Dorothy was a clear, down-to-earth speaker, with enough wit to keep an audience’s attention, and enough knowledge and experience to tell them something new that they would not forget.
‘I’ve got to do it.’ She came into the tea-room soon after opening time when the only customers were a few who could not face the gardens without a stomach full of hot tea. ‘Will is in London, and Rob was running a little temperature last night. I don’t like to leave him with Keith. Ruth, could you possibly …?’
‘Of course I could.’ Ruth’s warm downy cheeks lifted in a beam of pleasure. ‘I always love to have him. Shall I take him home after work?’
‘Oh, thanks, you’re such a good friend, Ruth.’
‘Hang on a minute, no, I’m not. Blow it, I forgot George’s mother. It’s her birthday. We’ve got to go over there, and she doesn’t like small children. That’s her own bad luck, but Rob would hate it. Oh, dear, I don’t like to let you down.’
When Dorothy had gone out, Jo said to Ruth, ‘I’d love to have Rob. Do you think she’d let me? He liked Bramble Bank, and she did say he could come and visit. Would they think I was pushy, if I –’
‘You know they think the world of you, Jo, and I’d be ever so grateful, because then I wouldn’t feel so bad. Go on, run after her – if you really want to have him. He can play you up, you know, to see what he can get away with.’
Now that it could pass as Ruth’s idea, Jo made her offer to Dorothy, and was accepted.
‘You’ll understand that Rob is liable to be a bit insecure and demanding when his mother’s away,’ Dorothy explained. ‘There’s a continuing fear of abandonment, you see.’
‘Because of his father?’ Jo enjoyed asking.
‘As with all children of broken homes.’
Rob was delighted. ‘You said I could come soon, but I didn’t know it was as soon as this. You are quick for a grownup, aren’t you, Jo?’
He played in the stream outside with Charlotte, and came in for supper wet and sweltering and sat down at the table with filthy face and hands. It was a small round table that Jo had brought from London. In the pink corner house in Holland Park it had stood in the hall with its flaps down, and when she was Marigold Renshaw, she had imagined it going upstairs one day to be a nursery table. Now a child sat at this table at last. Jo gave Rob what he had asked for – Coca Cola and baked beans on toast – and did not tell him to go and wash his hands.
Rob hardly ate anything. He tried some ice-cream, then put his hot head in his hand and let tears fall from under his lank flop of front hair.
‘Not hungry, Rob?’ Jo sat opposite with a glass of wine, watching him.
‘I want my Mum.’
Oh, of course. Marigold took over in a flash from kindly baby-sitter Jo, and dull rage poured through her like molten lead, weighing her down in mind and body. Somebody knocks themselves out for you, and because the ice-cream is the wrong flavour, it’s, ‘I want my Mum.’
‘I daresay you do,’ she said quite nastily, but not nastily enough to be reported back to Dorothy.
‘When’s my Mum coming to fetch me?’
Damn that bloody Tessa, a selfish doting mother of the worst kind, spoiling and worshipping but giving up nothing, and getting away with it. If she beat the child black and blue, he would still ask, ‘Where’s my Mum?’
‘Soon.’ Jo put her elbow on the table and her chin into her hand, copying Rob’s position. ‘You don’t look like her, do you?’
The golden image of Tessa sickened her. You could be mine, damn you, child – mine, the way I’m disguised now, with your dark hair and beautiful silky dark eyebrows that Rex gave you. If you were mine and Rex’s, I would still possess him, through you.
‘I don’t know.’ Rob whined and snuffled, trailing saliva strings through his tombstone teeth.
It was past his bedtime, but he would not go upstairs with Jo. He threw himself on the floor and picked at a gap in the worn fringe of the rug. Marigold had not brought her best things here, being only poor struggling widow Josephine. Rob pulled a cushion off the sofa and put his head on it and sucked his thumb. Dorothy was right about the insecurity. It would be easy for Jo–Marigold to play on that, but the child must like and trust her. That was vitally important. The whole family were Marigold’s daggers against Tessa, but Rob was her ultimate weapon. In the end, she could do more harm by establishing his security with her.
Jo shook off the relentless weight of Marigold and said lightly, ‘What does your mother do when you’re a pest?’ He did not answer. ‘Does she whack you, or play a game with you?’
‘What game?’ Rob looked up.
‘Snap, drawing – what would you like?’
They played a game of snap, and then Jo put him to bed and read to him until his straight spiky lashes fluttered and closed, and his face, pressed sideways into the pillow, performed the nightly childhood metamorphosis, as sudden and swift as death, into the original unsullied innocence of the world.
Jo’s act when Dorothy was here had been good. If you can fool a psychologist, you can fool ’em all. Or, if you can’t fool a psychologist, you can’t fool anyone. Tears welling up … nice work, Jo. They were real, but not for non-existent Alec. There were plenty of genuine memories to summon them.
‘How do you like being a birdwatcher?’ she asked the photograph, putting it back on the shelf by its little cup of flowers.
When Dorothy had asked, ‘What brought you here?’ the man with the wild white hair who was always at The Sanctuary had popped into Jo’s mind. Just before closing, he had come into the tea-room and had confided in Jo the real reason why he prowled about these grounds, and the passion of his life. That gave her the idea of adding birdwatching to her reasons for coming to this area.
Jo poured herself another large glass of wine. ‘Have something to eat with it,’ Alec suggested mildly from his frame on the shelf.
‘Later. Don’t interfere.’
Presently, she went up the short stairs to look at the sleeping child. Charlotte, curled up on the blanket, lifted her lip in an ugly little snarl. Rob’s face was flushed, as if he had a touch of fever again. He had pushed down the bedclothes, and flung out his spindly arms. His narrow chest rose and fell rapidly, pushing out his rosy lips in rhythm. Above his collarless pyjama top, his frail neck throbbed like a bird’s breast.
Charlotte jumped off the bed and followed Jo downstairs, looking suspicious. When Jo let her out into the garden, she barked outside the door. When she came in, she sat inside the front door, lifting her ears at imaginary sounds, lying down with her nose pointing under the door, jumping up when a car went by, to whine and bark.
‘Shut up!’ The dog was on the lookout for Tessa too.
Jo took off the false bosoms and the jewellery and the bright cyclamen cotton trousers she had worn for Dorothy, and pulled on a colourless shift, half-way between a smock and a nightdress, from the old days. She poured more wine with her back to Alec’s picture, and wedged herself and her bare feet in the small rocking chair. She took off Alec’s wedding ring and put it in her pocket. The mark of the broader, tighter ring which she had tugged off and thrown away after Rex left her was still visible under the knuckle. Holding that finger tightly with the other hand, she heard herself moan, and was overtaken by an avalanche of pain and loss.
If we’d had a child … if we’d had a child. The wine released the fruitless grieving that should have been used up long ago, but seemed to have an unending well-spring. If we’d had babies, I wouldn’t have been able to work full time to support Rex while he made his way. ‘He’ll always be grateful to me …’ I saw us in middle age, him telling people, ‘Marigold made me what I am.’ After Rex finally agreed to let Marigold stop the pill, month after month of disappointment followed. ‘Just as well,’ Rex had said. ‘No time. We’re free. I’m going places. Nothing can stop me. Why fret, Mari? Aren’t I enough for you?’
Hunched in the chair, she could feel it now, from years ago, the vaguely full feeling, her breasts, those inadequate breasts, actually, visibly swelling, though still smaller than other women’s. Not visible to Rex, and she wasn’t going to tell him yet. She hugged the foetus to her, more precious as a secret. At about three months, she would go to the doctor, and then tell Rex.
At two and a half months, Rex told her that he was going to live with Tessa.
Oh, God, must I go through all the pain and agony again after all these years? You shouldn’t have tanked yourself up with wine. Better get a whisky, Marigold, if you’re going to crouch down here like a maggot, with that child upstairs – her child – Rex’s child – and wallow.
With the whisky came a storm of weeping as she relived the ghastly scene with William and Dorothy in the rain, the nightmare drive back to London, the car crash, the ache of the seat-belt that did not ease when the pressure was released. Her agonizing sobs were almost like the convulsions that had racked her as she lay on the polished floor in the pink house, because she hadn’t had the strength to climb on to the sofa. That night she had lived her own death, and when the tearing pains came and split her apart in a torrent of blood, she was living, or dying, through the death of her baby as well.
She did not tell Rex. He and Tessa never knew. Nobody knew. The few friends who were still in touch did not know why Marigold had been kept a whole week in the hospital after her so-called D and C. They did not know, because they did not see her, that she was not quite sane for half a year.
When it was the calendar time for her to give birth to Rex’s baby, she took a tiny little boy from a pram outside a wool shop, and wandered vaguely off with him. No one knew. The grandmother ran after her. The baby was returned without fuss. The mother did not report it. The grandmother, red-faced, started up a bit of a commotion about, ‘She might have killed him!’, but the mother, who felt sorry for Marigold, shut her up.
Because she was grateful to the woman, Marigold saw the psychiatrist once again at the hospital where she had been taken after the miscarriage; but she did not tell him about the baby outside the wool shop, and he told her she was a strong, sensible woman who did not need him any more.
She had saved up enough of his pills to kill herself. But, because she was still not sane, she made the crazy mistake of ringing Rex to accuse Tessa of her death, after she took the pills, as she was passing out. Waking to the voice of the Welsh nurse scolding, ‘You’re a very silly girl, you might have died,’ she was desperately disappointed and furious with herself and everyone else.
But if she had not made that wild mistake, Tessa would have gone free. Marigold would have lost the exquisite chance to become the avenging angel.
Very late in the night, about three o’clock, Jo went upstairs. When she turned out the light at the top of the stairs, she heard Rob cry out – a wail like a baby. He must be asleep. He cried out again, and then shouted loudly, as if he was sitting up, ‘Mummy!’
‘Mummy!’ he cried again when Jo stood in the doorway. She turned on the light. He was standing up in bed, blinking and tottering.
‘Lie down, Rob. It’s not morning yet.’
‘No!’ He stepped off the bed and came to her, shivering, bony, and she took him to her room and into the bed with her.
He fell asleep again at once. Jo, who had survived the onslaught of Marigold tonight and was once more Jo, observed him sleeping. She tried to hate him, because of Tessa, but could not be bothered. Winning him over was easier, and more effective.
‘You know what?’ He woke her. He had been out early, humming tunelessly over his puny projects in the stream. ‘I know how to make your bridge into a drawbridge. With a rope through the fork of that tree, we could lift it up from indoors.’
‘Hooray.’ Jo grabbed him for a quick hug, because he was alive and glowing and had all the pains of life ahead of him. ‘You and I will live here in this castle and repel invaders.’
‘For ever and ever?’
‘Don’t you want to go home?’
‘I want to make a drawbridge.’
‘Mummy will want you home,’ Jo said. ‘Mummy and Chris. Will Chris be at your home for ever and ever, do you think?’
Rob shrugged, bolting down cornflakes to get back outside. He could not give attention to anything beyond the present moment. So it was safe to say, ‘You must miss being alone with Mummy now that Chris is always there.’
Rob was only half listening. He might not remember, but she dropped the thought into the pool of his consciousness, for luck.
Jo said later, ‘Better go up and find your shoes and bring your bag down.’
‘I’ll come and stay with you again.’
‘Have you had a good time?’ Jo asked.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So have I. I’m glad Chris made your mother leave you and go to Paris.’
Risky, but Charlotte was barking at the sound of a car in the lane, and Rob rushed out to scream at his grandmother, ‘The drawbridge is up!’
Rob’s visit was one more jewel in the crown of Jo the treasure. Her night of rage and remembered agony was a rare indulgence. She knew what her job was. Patiently and devotedly, she would continue to insinuate herself into the life of The Sanctuary.
Looking for the old porcelain pie-funnel for Jo to make her famous apple and bilberry pie as one of her contributions to the forthcoming Festival weekend, Dorothy opened cupboard doors below the long pantry counter.
‘Look at all this stuff! I keep meaning to go through it, and there’s never time. Incomplete early-morning tea-sets, soup cups with one handle missing, Geraldine’s hot-chocolate set – look at the crack in this jug!’
‘What a shame. It’s eighteenth-century Derby, isn’t it?’
Dorothy looked at Jo curiously. ‘You know about china?’
‘Well …’ Jo had never talked about the museum job. She was not supposed to be that class or quality of person. ‘Alec’s father taught me a bit. I loved that man. In the school holidays when I wasn’t working’ – it was all right for Jo to have been a teacher, like Marigold – ‘I spent a lot of time with him at the antique shop.’
‘You’ll have to manage with an egg-cup instead of the pie-funnel,’ Dottie said, ‘unless it’s in the dumb waiter.’ She opened the small door in the wall above the old food-warming chests outside the pantry. ‘Some of the stuff got put in here after the shaft was closed up.’
‘Rob told me –’ Jo began.
‘I know.’ Dorothy put some china oddments back in a shoe box and shut the dumb waiter door on them.
‘Why is he afraid of it?’
‘He and Annabel used to hide on the bottom shelf in there when they were smaller, until Dennis told Rob it would go down with him in it and never come up.’
‘What are you going to do with those dear little Adderley flower baskets?’ Jo asked, ‘and the chocolate set?’
‘Same as people before me did. Shut the door on them.’
‘Perhaps I could –’
‘Good God,’ Dorothy said, smiling to cover her obvious irritation, ‘is there nothing you can’t do?’
‘I’m sorry. Alec’s father again.’ Jo had acquired some ability to mend china at the museum. Like restoring books, it was one of what Rex used to call her ‘useless skills’.
It was almost a month since poor old Mary Trout died in the fire. Although the family’s distress had been considerable (which had gratified Jo) and they still talked about her often with nostalgia and regret, she had after all been a very old lady, ready to die, and the fatal fire was falling into place as one of the happenings of this summer.
Since Jo’s merciful act of euthanasia, she had been making herself useful in other ways: being invaluable not only in the tea-room but increasingly in and around the house. It was time for another drama.
Dottie had snatched a couple of hours from the Festival preparations to finish the library doors with Jo. It was a cold, windy morning, but they had to have a window open.
Considerate Josephine noticed the gooseflesh on Dottie’s bare arms, and said, ‘I’ll run up and get your sweatshirt for you. You’re up a ladder and I’m not.’
Jo came back, looking puzzled. ‘What’s that strange smell?’ She left open the door that led to the hall.
‘Paint, what else?’
‘No, it’s on the first floor.’
Dottie came down from the step-ladder and went through to the foot of the stairs, then up the first flight. She came back. ‘There’s nothing. What sort of smell?’
‘Like – it was sort of exotic. Like a very pungent, rotting flower scent.’ Jo picked up her brush and turned away, fortunately. Dottie could not trust herself to go back up the ladder. Although she had put on her sweatshirt, she felt colder than before, and unusually shaky.
‘I couldn’t smell anything,’ she told William when he came home, ‘but the way Jo described it, it was like the – the scent of decaying lilies.’
William was not used to seeing his wife nervous, biting her lip, her cool blue eyes behind the rimless glasses troubled and uncertain. She had been watching for his car, and took him straight out to the terrace to talk.
‘How could Jo have imagined that, Will?’
‘You’re sure she’s never heard the story?’
‘Ruth doesn’t know about it. Nobody knows outside our immediate family, and none of you have ever told anyone. Your sister Harriet did say something to Keith ages ago, as a sort of bad joke against your mother, but he says he didn’t tell Jo. After I shut him up that night the Sterns were here – remember? – he got the message.’
‘You trust him?’ William thought Dottie was making rather heavy weather of this, but he took it seriously, because she was not a woman to be upset over nothing.
‘A hundred per cent. Keith is very responsible now that he’s well again.’
‘Jo must have smelled something from the garden,’ William said comfortably. ‘Our bedroom windows are open.’ He looked up. ‘Don’t worry, Dottie.’
Normally, you did not notice how small she was, because she carried herself so well, but when she was upset, she seemed smaller and less substantial. William put his arm round her and tried to make the right noises. They leaned on the balustrade above the dahlias and watched the long shadows of the last visitors moving slowly across the lawn towards the cypress walk.
‘Anyway.’ Dottie stood upright and was more solid again. ‘I don’t believe it ever really happened. I was only a silly young woman then, excited by being in love with you. I must have imagined smelling the dead lilies, or Sylvia did, because she was still psychologically tied to her mother.’
William wanted to agree, but she hated him to lie to her, so he said, ‘It did happen. Ages ago. You were about twenty-five and not silly at all. You had on that white dress with a sort of sailor collar, like a child, and you’d gone up to see where we were going to sleep. I’ll never forget you running down with your face quite white, and asking Sylvia, “What’s that smell?” and my mother yelling up the stairs, “What are you doing up there, Mother!” and backing down again, shaking her fist and muttering, although Geraldine had been dead for more than twenty-five years. It gave me the creeps. I’ll never forget it, and I know you haven’t.’
‘But I want to.’ Dottie spoke through the haunting, dismissive notes of the Closing Bell. ‘I want it not to have ever happened.’
Next day, Dorothy and William both left the house very early. Dorothy had arranged a lunch for some of the local people who were involved with the Festival, but she was late getting back from the clinic. The Dawsons, who were co-ordinating the food sales, the boat decorator and the man in charge of the fireworks display had already arrived. They had been given sherry and peanuts by Ruth, who was doing the lunch, so Dorothy took them into the dining-room as soon as she got home.
The Dawsons would have liked to linger, but Dorothy was in a hurry, so while they were finishing coffee, she went upstairs to get ready for her afternoon visits. The guests were in the front hall preparing to leave when Dorothy came downstairs.
‘What’s the matter, Dr Taylor?’ The fireworks impresario took a step towards her. ‘You don’t look well.’
‘Nothing’s the matter.’ Dorothy had a little difficulty focusing on him. Her voice sounded creaky to her, but no one must notice.
‘It’s this treacherous weather,’ Mrs Dawson said, as Dorothy stepped down into the hall and picked up her bag and briefcase from a side table. ‘Hot one day and cold the next. Does funny things to people.’
‘Not to me.’ Dorothy smiled and shook hands and thanked them for coming. She would not let herself look back upstairs. She did not need to breathe deeply to find out if the rotten, sickening smell had followed her. It was all through her, in her head and behind her eyes and in her mouth and nose, even her ears, and all the network of inner passages, like poison gas.
‘You really don’t look well.’ The fireworks man still watched her.
‘I’m fine. I’m preoccupied because I’m in a hurry, that’s all. Please excuse me.’
‘I don’t know how I got through the afternoon, Will. I had two difficult children who were sulking, and one who has regressed, and a father who had stayed home from work to blame me for his son’s brain damage. I was in a sort of daze, operating automatically. Poor people. I hope I wasn’t short with them.
‘I couldn’t wait to get back here. I longed for it, and dreaded it. But when I got home and rushed upstairs, the smell – the smell of Geraldine’s lilies – was … gone. Just a trace of it in the air. Can you smell it?’
William shook his head.
‘You don’t believe me.’ Dorothy sat down on the big comfortable bed and looked miserably up at him. ‘You know how Fool always follows me upstairs as if I were never going to come down again? When I went up after lunch, he didn’t come. When I came down, he was sitting in the hall with those small ginger eyes peering anxiously through his face hair and one paw raised. Do you think dogs really are psychic?’
‘I hope not. I’m sure this won’t happen again.’
‘It happened to Jo two days ago, and now to me. I can’t say it’s my imagination.’
‘Dear Dottie.’ William sat beside her and put their heads together. His hair was longer than hers. ‘Let it go. It can’t hurt us.’
‘But it can!’ Dorothy stood up and went to the window to look out, then turned to face him, very tense. ‘That’s the horrible thing. This house is safe and happy. Nothing goes wrong here. Nothing’s ever gone wrong. But now – don’t you feel it? It’s somehow not quite the same any more.’
‘It is the same,’ William insisted, because he, too, had felt the faint chill stirrings of the wind of change, ever since Troutie’s terrible death. ‘You know it is, because we make it the same.’
‘And I’m not prepared to give that up. That’s why I never talked about the first time with the lilies and your mother, and why I wanted to push it down and bury it below my consciousness. That’s why we mustn’t tell anyone about this now. All’s well, Will?’ Dorothy put her neat head on one side.
‘I suppose so.’ William was in a state of confusion and unease. ‘I’ve got to go outside for a while and think about this.’
‘Nothing negative,’ Dorothy ordered.
‘That’s not very realistic, for a professional.’ William felt one side of his mouth lift up into the wry smile that Angela accused him of practising in the mirror.
‘I’m not nearly as realistic as people think I am.’ Dottie suddenly burst into tears and put her hands over her face.