Frank and Faye were both at home when William Taylor came to their house.
He sat on the edge of the chair by the electric fire and would not accept tea or coffee or anything to drink. Frank and Faye sat on the sofa and looked at him expectantly. Faye had on last winter’s slippers, but she wasn’t the kind of woman to mind that.
‘Nice of you to let me come,’ Mr Taylor said affably, but not at ease. ‘I just wondered – well, I suppose you couldn’t give us any clues about anyone at the Festival who might have drowned my daughter’s dog? Did you see anything at all? It could have been done when the floodlights were turned out and everyone was watching the fireworks.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Frank said, ‘I really am, Mr Taylor. I can’t help you.’
‘There’s another mystery too.’ William Taylor frowned and looked at his hands, folding and rubbing them. ‘The – er, the statue of the cat in the little white temple. It was broken, probably some time on Sunday. I wondered if you happened to see anyone in there?’
Frank shook his head. ‘I showed my friend the temple, but only from a distance, because it was late.’
‘I see.’ William cleared his throat. ‘Well …’ He stood up. ‘I don’t want to keep you if you’re busy. I just thought …’
Embarrassed, he got himself out of the door and drove away.
‘Faye.’ Frank shut the front door and stood with his back against it. ‘They think I did it. The dog, and now the cat statue. My God, they think it was me. Me who loves that place, who kept their nightingales safe, found their dog …’
‘Ungrateful buggers.’ Faye snapped her fingers in front of Frank’s eyes, because he was staring into space. ‘Don’t look so shattered, Frank. Be angry. “Let the anger out,” they’re always telling old Mr Cassidy, and he comes scuttling down the hall like a crab and bangs his stick on my desk. I move my chair back. “Go it!” I say.’
‘I can’t.’ Frank shook his head and went through to sit in the chair where William Taylor had sat. ‘I’m just badly hurt, that’s all.’
‘Don’t do them that favour,’ Faye said. ‘Don’t let them hurt you. I know their sort.’
‘No – no, you don’t. They’re good people. They love animals and flowers and all living things. That’s what hurts. I like them.’
‘Not now, you don’t.’ Faye folded her arms and looked down at him from her height.
‘Yes, now. You think I’m daft – well, that’s not news. Faye, I sort of – I love that family.’
‘I know you do.’ She smiled broadly, and he saw all the folds of her chins from below. ‘I do think you’re daft, but I understand.’
‘No one else would.’
‘Who cares? It’s you and me, Frank. We know each other. We let each other be.’
When William went into the library to see how Jo was getting on with the books, he found her with a syringe, injecting wallpaper glue under a leather corner. Her glossy black hair swung forward into two crescents that nearly met across her face as she bent over the books.
‘You are clever.’ He watched her put a square of paper and cardboard over the corner and clamp it with a big clip.
‘I found a book with drawings of the manor farm as it used to look before your ancestor rebuilt it into this noble pile.’
‘There are stacks of papers put away somewhere,’ William said, ‘and the architect’s drawings for the rebuilding. I always thought I might do something with them, if I ever retire. There’s no proper history of this place, and there should be.’
‘Why don’t you get someone to start doing some of the research?’ Jo put the glued book aside and examined the covers of another, fingering it lightly and with care.
‘You want the job?’ William liked to tease her about always volunteering for extra work.
‘If you think I could do it.’
‘I mean, I’d pay you, of course.’
‘That isn’t why I offered.’
‘Don’t get defensive.’ William was not sure of Jo’s financial situation. She owned her cottage, and her husband must have left her some money, or she would have found a full-time job, better paid than the tea-room. ‘We could work something out.’
‘I’d like that. Perhaps before you start looking out the papers, you could tell me some of the things you know about The Sanctuary’s history, when you’ve got time.’
‘Good idea. This room, for instance.’ He looked at his watch, and sat down on the arm of one of the dark red leather chairs. ‘When Desmond Cobb rebuilt the Elizabethan house in the eighteenth century, he had this room extended over some of the outbuildings, where the tea-room is now.’
‘Was it always a library?’
‘More or less. It was a billiard room too, before the last war, but when the Air Force was billeted here, they wrecked the table. It’s had its ups and downs.’
‘Your mother died in here, didn’t she?’ Jo looked up at him from under the symmetrically shaped brows and thick dark lashes.
‘Yes, she did, actually.’
Troutie had telephoned him at the Bath office. ‘On the lib’ry floor, Billie. She’d pulled down a whole lot of those boxes and piles of papers, as if she’d been trying to get up. Oh, I hate to tell you.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Doctor Higgs and I got her on her bed. Bit of a job because Miss Sylvia was stiff, see, from laying there dead so long.’
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Who’s with her?’
‘Me, of course. And my Ruth’s here.’
They were drinking soup out of cracked mugs in the cluttered clearing that was William’s mother’s living space at the kitchen end of the library, and beginning to shift the nearer outcrops of furniture and old newspapers and clothes and empty tin cans and dirty dog and cat dishes and rolled-up rugs which had accumulated round Sylvia all through the house as she moved from room to room in these last years.
They had laid her on the deplorable mattress which she had brought down here from the servants’ corridor. Her thin face was contorted and bruised, as if she had fought her way out of life into death, her stiff grey hair sticking out on the hard yellowed pillow.
William had sunk down on the floor in a storm of weeping that took him completely by surprise.
His sister Harriet came with Matthew and they stayed in a hotel because there was no habitable bedroom in the house. ‘No one ever quite gets over losing their mother, because they never get used to being nobody’s child any more,’ Harriet had said. ‘It will be easier for us, though, since she was never really a proper mother.’
That makes it worse!’ William had cried, as loud as he could cry in the lounge of the Wheatsheaf, with three people watching television in the corner.
‘How?’
He could not explain the black void – had never been able to describe to anyone, even Dottie, the vain relentless search for what you can never find.
Jo’s November project was to get closer to William, and thus soften him up for the maximum pain.
Tessa’s death was not worked out in detail. Jo was not yet ready to replace the luxury of bizarre, blood-curdling fantasies with a workmanlike plan. There were many tempting possibilities, easier to come by than your run-of-the-mill whodunnit murder, because Marigold, having achieved her ultimate revenge, would not really care whether she was caught or not. But however it was brought about, the mortification of having been conned into a trusting friendship with a black-haired woman with frosted streaks who did not exist would sharpen the agony of William’s loss to the last excruciating edge.
The history of The Sanctuary was a lovely ploy. William loved to talk about this place. He told Jo things he remembered from his childhood, and things his grandparents and Mary Trout had told him from the past. Not things his mother had told him. They did not seem to have been close, and from what Jo had picked up in her magpie fashion, she had been a strange, solitary woman.
‘She had a very hard life,’ William told Jo, as they went through the churchyard gate to look at gravestones and memorial tablets. ‘Her mother, Geraldine, was a strong-minded woman who always got her own way. She married Walter and Beatrice’s eldest son, and they carried on the work of making a haven for animals and birds. Their only son was killed on the Somme.’
William showed Jo the ornate memorial plaque in the church:
LIONEL WALTER COBB. 1895–1916.
O youths to come shall drink air warm and bright,
Shall hear the bird cry in the sunny wood,
All my Young England fell today in fight:
That bird, that wood, was ransomed by our blood!
‘Sylvia was all they had left. It wasn’t enough. She was about fourteen, shy, not pretty, bullied by her mother, who discouraged affection between her and her father. Troutie told me. She was sixteen then, a servant girl in her first job. Sit down a minute, and I’ll tell you what else Troutie told me.’
They moved a couple of embroidered kneelers and sat in a front pew of the chilly little church.
‘When Sylvia was about nineteen she fell passionately in love with a man called Jock, who was only alive because he’d been in railways during the war, instead of the Army. That made him “unsuitable”, you see: the railways, and being alive. My mother couldn’t marry him. He couldn’t even come to the house – though he did secretly. He used to sneak in by the library window, over the roof of the harness room.’
William sat loosely on the narrow pew, hands between knees, looking rather wistfully at the bare altar and the small gilt eagle on the lectern. Jo watched his profile, listening with the right expression, if he should turn to her.
‘Sylvia wasn’t capable of defying her parents, but gradually, with the encouragement of Troutie, who was married herself by now, she began to plan how she would go off with Jock. But while she was still getting up her nerve to tell him, Jock got sick of being ostracized, and disappeared.’
‘Oh, – poor Sylvia!’ Jo cried, she hoped not too theatrically. ‘What a tragedy.’
‘It scarred her.’ William closed his lips and thought for a moment. Then he turned to Jo with a brighter face. ‘Ten years later, she married Eric Taylor, my father: older, unexciting, a solicitor for the land agents which later grew into my firm, Taylor and Birch.’
They went outside and he showed her his mother’s grave: ‘Wife of Eric and mother of William, Matthew and Harriet.’ Nearby were Beatrice Cobb and Walter, removed from his first resting place in the mausoleum opposite Beatrice’s bedroom window; the Reverend Hardcastle had been placed at a discreet distance.
‘Are you going to put your mother’s story into the history of The Sanctuary?’ Jo asked.
‘Not like that.’ William laughed. His face was smiling and boyish again, after being serious in church. ‘It’s so sad, and for my mother’s sake, it shouldn’t be forgotten. So I told it to you because you’re a good friend to this family, and you’re interested.’
‘I am all of that.’ Jo bent to pull a thistle growing roughly above the navel of poor frustrated Sylvia, who seemed to have been one of the dimmer wits of this dynasty.
William went back to the garden, Jo to the village shop to get cough syrup and aspirin for Dorothy, who had gone off to work late with a sore throat, and might not get to the chemist. She was not quite so on top of things these days: less crisply efficient, occasionally forgetful.
The criminal who finally confesses to the cunningly sympathetic police-woman does himself a favour, as well as the police. He may regret the confession in the light of future events, but the unburdening itself felt good. Marigold was gaining from William’s family stories, but he also liked telling them to understanding, concerned Jo.
Marigold had now been dear invaluable Jo, ‘good friend to this family,’ for almost six months, and occasionally, when Jo was most pleased with herself, Marigold butted in with irritated revulsion. Stop being this sickening, Jo! At first she had been able to snap out of it in an instant, and laugh at her performance and applaud it. Now she could not always do that. She would come home to Bramble Bank and not be able to stop being Jo, busy bee to the Taylors, by appointment. Ringing the house to remind Dorothy about Folly’s steroid pill, sending a birthday card to Rob, dipping into the thick pile of papers and letters to make a show of extracting a few notes for William’s history.
Remember me? Marigold could not always get back in. There had been times when she had decided: That’s it. I can’t stand this woman Jo any longer. I’ve got to abandon this charade and go away. But step by step, Jo led Marigold towards her goal: Flusher, Troutie, Geraldine’s lilies, Charlotte, the statue of Bastet. It couldn’t stop, until the end.
So Marigold had to let Jo go on, sucking up to William.
‘Ever explored the cellars?’ William asked. Jo shook her head. ‘According to Troutie, a lot of the life of The Sanctuary happened down there, when she was a kitchen drudge.’
‘Including the parlour-maid hanging herself in the game room?’
‘Troutie found her. In her cap and apron – makes it worse, doesn’t it? Come on, I’m going down to get some wine. I’ll give you a quick tour.’
In the basement, he opened the doors of the stone-cold rooms, which had been the kitchen, scullery, game room, larders and servants’ hall.
‘When we were children, Matthew and I used to come down here to scare ourselves. These cellars had bad memories for Troutie. She told us to stay away, so of course we came. I saw a ghost here once.’
‘I thought there were no ghosts at The Sanctuary.’
‘No, honest. Right here in the kitchen. Through that high window the sun came swirling down in a wide beam of dust.’ His eyes followed the memory down from the grimy half window under the vaulted brick ceiling. ‘I saw something. Tall. White. Too tall. Thought I saw it, I suppose; it must have been the floating light, but I was petrified.’ He could feel again the helpless terror, the shock that obliterated reason.
‘What did you do?’
‘Screamed and ran.’
‘Who to?’
‘My mother.’
Jo stood with her hands in the pockets of her plaid trousers, leaning against a stone shelf, waiting.
William turned round to her and said bitterly, ‘I should have gone to Troutie.’
He took a step towards Jo, then stood back with his arms folded, and dropped his chin.
‘Mother was busy. She was putting up camp beds. It was wartime, you know, and we were going to have evacuees. I was terrified – sick with terror. In fact, I was sick, on the floor. She stood and looked at it and then looked at me. She didn’t know how to cope with it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Cleaned up the sick, like she told me. No, Jo.’ He lifted his head to see her reaction, afraid he had told too much. ‘Don’t misjudge. She couldn’t cope. She could never cope with emotions, or people needing things from her. But it wasn’t her fault. Her mother had shredded her confidence, kept her at home because she was the only one left, but always as a second best.’
Jo stood against the shelf, taking this in uncritically, but he said defensively, ‘I suppose it wasn’t Geraldine’s fault either. She’d lost her beloved son. She was a tyrant, but she cherished this place. She tried to follow the ideals of Beatrice and Walter, and she needed Sylvia to help her.’
‘She ruined her chance of love,’ Jo said sadly.
‘And do you know something? My mother never told me anything about that, ever. That’s how badly she was crippled.’
‘So she took it out on you.’
‘No, it wasn’t that.’ William felt tormented. The loyal excuses came out with more difficulty, and were strangled by the truth. ‘But she had nothing to give. Nothing, nothing, Jo, do you hear?’ He was shouting, but nobody could hear through these dense underground walls. ‘I never had a mother. I tried, I looked for every way to make her love me, but she had gone inside herself long ago, and there was no one there for me.’
Jo had come across the room to him, and when she put her arms round him, it felt natural, and so warm and protective that – oh, God, don’t cry, you clown – ‘I – sorry, Jo. I –’
‘It’s all right. Hush, it’s all right. I know, I know …’
He did not take in what she said. It was just the murmuring and the safety, and he was the little boy Billie, with Troutie giving him what his mother never could, only Jo was supple and clean, not squashy and pungent like Troutie. But there was nothing sexual about the embrace of those strong arms, and the high firm breasts. It was so maternal that when she dropped her arms and he stepped back, it was not hastily, but slowly and naturally, and she said, ‘All right now, Will?’ and he said, ‘Thanks.’
Help! What was happening? The avenging demon had turned into a mother – and it was not an act. It wasn’t Jo in that cobwebbed basement kitchen. It had been Marigold, reaching out to the child William with her empty arms. Save us. Jo was losing her grip. Better do something rotten quickly.
The Richardsons were away inspecting a new grandchild, and Jo was feeding their cats. In the bungalow, she automatically had a snoop round. Mrs Richardson’s pillowcase of fabric scraps for her interminable cot quilt, which two grandchildren had already outgrown before it was finished, gave her an idea.
While the cats were feeding with voracious delicacy she picked through the multicoloured scraps and found a piece of rather coarse oatmeal linen, part of something like an old-fashioned child’s smock.
She took it back to her cottage and cut it into a square, which she carefully hemmed with tiny stitches, as if it might be a man’s handkerchief sewn by a woman long ago. In one corner, she embroidered the name ‘Jock’, then she tore the handkerchief convincingly into three frayed pieces, so as not to look too perfect. Two of the pieces she put on her fire. The third, with part of the name on it, she dirtied up a bit and took to The Sanctuary.
‘Have you got a moment?’ Jo asked William when he came home and found her putting a steak and kidney pie together for weekend guests.
She took him to the end door of the library and stopped in the space between the outer and inner door.
‘Did you know about this?’ She put her hand on a painted wood panel.
‘About what?’
She edged a blunt kitchen knife into a crack in the wood, and prised open a tiny door. ‘It’s like a little hiding hole.’ She turned her bright-painted beam on him. ‘I just discovered it.’
‘I didn’t look.’
She was discreet. You had to give her that. William put his hand into the shallow space. Nothing there but a scrap of cloth. He brought it out and smoothed it. ‘My God.’ He showed it to Jo. ‘My mother must have put this in there.’
‘Is that the name of her – the man she loved?’
‘Looks like it. Jock. She must have hidden it here after he’d gone, because this was the room where they met secretly.’
‘That’s romantic.’ Jo looked at him mistily through those extravagant black eyelashes.
‘Her favourite room.’ William shut the little door and put the piece of cloth into his pocket. ‘When she died here …’ He had wanted to tell Jo this since he had confided in her in the underground kitchen. ‘I found myself distraught. It didn’t matter any more that she hadn’t been the mother I wanted. For the first time, I was able to see her life from her point of view, and I was so desperately sorry for her.’
Curious. He had often talked to Dottie about Sylvia, whom she had diagnosed long ago as the ‘not-good-enough mother’, responsible for William’s ‘Peter Pan syndrome’; but he had never before talked to anyone outside the family, except Ruth, who knew a lot, since she had grown up with them.
Ruth had always been his good friend and confidante, but he did not see much of her these days. She had the baby at home, and its idiotic mother, of course, but – oh, Lord, he hadn’t thought of this – might she feel that Jo was edging her out?
William went through the water meadows in search of her. The back door of Ruth’s house was open, so he went in, as he always did. The draining-board was piled with dishes. Someone was playing loud music in the sitting-room. Ruth’s husband George was sitting by the window with his bad leg up, reading the paper.
Ruth was sorting and folding a mountain of clothes in a laundry basket.
‘Want some tea?’
She did not move towards the kettle, so he said, ‘No, thanks,’ and started to help her fold.
‘Not like that.’ She took the blue jeans from him. ‘They’re not pyjamas, Will.’
‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ he said. ‘Everything all right?’
‘Of course.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling, where the baby was crying in a particularly nasty way, and someone was clumping about. ‘This place is like market day, that’s all. I did give Dorothy a couple of mornings last week. Does she want me to come up at the weekend? Is that why you came?’
‘I came to see you, silly. But if you could spare a bit of time, we’ve got three couples coming tomorrow, and I know Dottie would like some help in the kitchen.’
‘Where’s Jo then?’
‘Well – she’s already done some of the food, I think. She’ll come back if she’s needed, but I thought it would be nice to have you.’
‘I’m very busy, Will.’
She had never said that before. Bringing up her children, helping with her grandmother, looking after George – she had never been too busy to come to The Sanctuary.
‘Only because you want to do everything here yourself,’ George put in from behind the paper. ‘We can do a lot of this stuff. You go on up and give Dorothy a hand.’
‘They don’t need me and Jo.’
‘Ruth.’ William snatched baby garments away and held her hands. ‘I want you.’
‘Perhaps another time.’ She picked up the baby clothes.
George said, ‘Ruth,’ mildly, but as if they’d talked about this before.
William said lamely, ‘Well … come up soon. I want to show you something.’
‘I might, if I get time.’ She did not ask what he had to show her, so he did not tell her about the poignant discovery of the relic of Jock.
Ruth was changing. What was wrong? In the old days, if she had felt edged out by Jo, she would have said so.
Too much was changing. He still had the uncertain feeling that the house was in some ways subtly distancing itself. Instead of being part of them, it was watching them, waiting for something. How could he heal the unease? Filling it with people helped, and the weekend went well, although perhaps not quite as easily as usual. The guests left saying they had had a marvellous time, but William did not think they had; or was he putting himself in their places, allotting to them his own inexplicably dissatisfied feeling?
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked Dottie, when they were alone.
‘Don’t always ask me what’s wrong, Will. What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t know. I just feel – everything feels, somehow, not quite right.’
‘They all thought it was wonderful. They’re coming back in a couple of weeks.’
‘Oh, it was. It’s just not … the same.’
‘Still in love?’ Dottie asked rather sharply.
‘With you, of course.’
‘Don’t be childish. Are you still fretting for Angela Stern? Is that what’s wrong?’
‘Angela and I aren’t going to see each other any more.’
‘I don’t mind either way. It doesn’t matter.’
Clever Dottie. That attitude might have sent some men haring up to London. With William, it ensured that he would not.
William continued to be vaguely uneasy, and Dottie a little abrupt and scratchy. One evening she swore that she had smelled the death lilies again.
‘It’s your imagination.’ William went up to the bedroom with her. ‘You’ve got it on the brain.’ He moved all over the room. ‘There’s not a trace.’
‘Then I’m going mad.’
She slept in another room. In the morning she agreed that perhaps she had imagined it. A few days later, she made quite a bad mistake in the clinic, misdiagnosing the cause of a child’s hyperactivity, and came home nervous, and upset with herself.
‘You’ve been working too hard.’ William tried to reassure her. ‘You deserve a break.’
‘I deserve nothing. I don’t even deserve my job, if I make such a hash of it.’
About the middle of November, the lowering sun would strike through the pillars of the temple to flood the cat-goddess, who had symbolized to the Egyptians solar warmth and light.
This year, it struck the empty pedestal.
‘Poor Bastet,’ Dorothy said. ‘I do miss her. I used to think she caught the last warmth of the sun, and held it until the next spring. Do you think I could ask Chris to make us another goddess?’
‘Wouldn’t be the same.’
Dorothy said quickly, ‘You didn’t like the hare he made?’ putting criticism into William’s mouth. ‘You don’t think he’s any good.’
‘He couldn’t get the same elegance.’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘Dottie.’ William grabbed her arm. ‘You’re arguing for the sake of arguing.’
‘What? Yes, so I am. How awful.’
She smiled, and he kissed the smile. ‘Forget the cat.’
‘I can’t.’
‘All right, in the New Year we’ll take a trip. Get Christmas over, then we’ll go to wherever you like – Florence, Siena. I’ll find you another cat.’
‘Shall we? It would be good to get away.’
Good to get away. That had never been a reason for going anywhere. Usually the best part of a trip abroad was coming home.
Dorothy and Jo were painting the library frieze, so that the room could be used at Christmas. When Tessa brought Rob for the weekend she found them both up on ladders.
‘That looks like fun,’ Tessa called up. ‘Can I help?’
‘Takes skill.’ Her mother came down the ladder to embrace them both, while Jo, painting the plaster ferns and swags with an aching arm, fantasized what might happen to a ladder, so that Tessa would fall off and break her neck.
Tessa was going to Norwich with her boss. ‘I’ll try and get down on Sunday night,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, Rob will have to miss school, and I’ll come as soon as I can on Monday. Have you got appointments, Mum? I’ll have to get a train back to London to pick up the car.’
‘Look, Tessa.’ Jo was still at the top of her ladder. ‘I’m going to London on Monday.’ It was hair and eyebrow and eyelash time. ‘I could bring Rob up to your house, and save you the drive. If you trust me.’
‘Trust you? Heavens, you’re a better driver than I am, and certainly better than Chris. He day-dreams. Would you really? I wouldn’t want it to be a nuisance. Rob talks all the time in the car, when he’s not being sick.’
‘You can talk as much as you want,’ Jo called down to Rob, ‘and we’ll stop at the service station and get choc ices.’
‘Freez-O-Pops.’ Rob stood at the bottom of the ladder, foreshortened to a dwarf needing a haircut. ‘Can I climb up? Why not? You come down then, Jo. I want you to see the goats.’
Jo came down and pulled a sweater over her painting overalls. Dorothy was showing Rob and Tessa the tiny secret cupboard between the doors. Rob would not put his hand in there. He backed away with his shoulders hunched. Tessa and her mother were mystified at his fear, so Jo felt pretty sure that he had not told anyone about Charlotte and the dumb waiter.
He did not seem to hold that against her. He went happily out with her to the small paddock, where they put out hay for the donkey and the goats, which was one of Jo’s jobs on these winter afternoons. The pale cream billy goat with flecks of emerald in his eye did not pick up his own hay. He let the donkey take an overflowing jawful, and then pulled swags of it out of the donkey’s mouth.
Rob was delirious. He had not seen the goat do that, so Jo said, ‘I taught him,’ and Rob shrieked with joy and clung round her waist and tried to pull her to the ground. She let him, and they rolled about in the cold wet grass, then jumped up to climb the gate and race to the house round the back paths and the walled garden, for cocoa and marshmallows.
William and Dorothy had people to dinner, so Rob stayed with Jo in the kitchen, until his grandmother took him up to bed in the room next to hers.
‘I’m sorry, Jo.’ She came down. ‘He won’t settle till you go up. Don’t stay long. It’s late.’
Jo could have stayed all night with the little boy. He was a very up-and-down child, but for some reason, he was being blissfully easy. Because his mother wasn’t here? While Jo sang to him one of the funny repetitive songs from her teaching days, he lay wide-eyed, the sheet under his chin, mouth closed over the outsize teeth, soft and rosy.
Jo had always known that her baby would have been a boy, if the callous treachery of Tessa and Rex had not torn him bloodily from her too soon.
It was weeks since she had thought about her boy. Perhaps because William’s anguish had revived her defeated maternal longings, she felt a powerful love for this skinny little boy in the bed who clutched her hand and said, ‘Another! Another! Sing the fried-potato song.’
He did chatter all the way to London. He told feeble jokes from school, and they sang and played games. Jo was sorry when they turned into Brackett Road and found a parking space near the top of the hill. But going through the gate of number 47 and walking up the path and ringing the bell by the yellow door was breathtaking. At last Marigold was going inside the house where Tessa lived, was going to violate it with her presence and penetrate its charming secrets.
I love your house. Can I see the kitchen? Can I see upstairs?
Go ahead. Forgive the mess (it would be casually immaculate).
On the doorstep, Rob held Jo’s hand and asked, ‘Are you going to stay with us?’
‘No, darling.’
‘I want you to stay!’ He looked up at her anxiously, but when the door opened, he dropped Jo’s hand and rushed at Tessa and clung: ‘Mummy Mummy where you been I missed you Mummy hullo my Mummy!’
‘Thanks so much, Jo.’ Crouching, Tessa smiled up over his agitated, butting head. Her hair was a fall of amber light. ‘Come in and have some coffee.’
‘No thanks.’ Marigold could not go into the house. Although she had been longing to make its intimacies hers, she could hardly take in the details of the red-carpeted hall, the pictures and green plants, Chris’s soft brown hat on a peg, the steep curve of the white stair rail.
Tessa’s face, and her soft enfolding body and caressing hands incited Marigold to such a blinding agony of rage and envy that she could not move forward, could only say something about an appointment and back away, shut the door, stumble down the steps and out of the gate, away from the house where Tessa still had everything.
Gasping sobs without tears took away her breath as she struggled up the hill and fell into the safety of her car. If Tessa had looked out of the window, she would have seen that she did not drive away at once, and might have come out to see why, and found her with her arms on the wheel and her head down, fighting pain.
Gradually, her breathing slowed, her heart stopped pounding, the instrument of torture that clamped her head eased its grip. She drove away through the narrow streets where the parked cars of people like Tessa cared nothing for the passing cars of outsiders like Marigold.
Waiting at a red light, she was calm again, and in charge of herself. Her brain floated in a flat clear light of controlled intelligence. She knew now what she was going to do.
Death was not the purest revenge. Tessa must suffer, as Marigold had suffered. Nothing else would do.
It was not Tessa who must be killed. It was her child.