She phoned Drew soon after Donny had left, and explained the situation. ‘I’ve no idea how much time he’s got, or what he can afford. I only just met him this afternoon. But I thought you could maybe send a leaflet or something, and he could contact you,’ she said carefully.
‘But … will he want to be brought down here, away from where he lives?’
It had been over two months since she had heard his voice, but it was as if they’d been speaking every day. Dimly she noted that she had established an almost instant friendship with Drew, much as she had with Donny. It made her feel slightly complacent, the way she could simply take up the threads again, despite not having seen or spoken to Drew for so long. Preliminaries had been minimal – she could hear everything she needed to know in his easy response to her initial words.
‘What about the Broad Campden field? Is that going ahead?’
He sighed loudly. ‘Extremely slowly. Your man would have to live the best part of another year at this rate to stand any chance of a grave there. But at least it’s still under discussion, and I’ve completed a large mountain of paperwork for the planning committee.’
‘Oh. Well, I should think he might manage that. He’s still walking, and feeding himself. I don’t know what his prognosis is. I don’t even know what the matter is, except it looks like Parkinson’s.’
‘Poor chap. And you’ve only just met him, did you say?’
She gave a self-deprecating snort. ‘I know. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? But we just seemed to hit it off from the first moment. He had no intention of settling for small talk. Just plunged in with the serious stuff.’
‘He’s lucky.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, to find you. Nobody but you would have let him talk about his own grave after five minutes’ acquaintance.’
‘Rubbish. You would. And your Maggs person.’
‘That’s different. It’s our job.’
‘He wanted to talk about it. He asked if I could give him some help with his funeral, a minute before he left, and I told him what you did, in a fairly general sort of way. So where do we go from here?’
‘As it happens, I’m coming up on Tuesday, to see the legal people. I might be able to drop in and talk it over with him. Where are you?’
‘Cranham. It’s on the western edge of the Cotswolds, down a maze of little roads. Have you got a map? But let me check with him first and call you back. It’ll be this time tomorrow, I expect. He comes every afternoon, so we could easily fix something up for Tuesday.’
‘OK. I can probably find it. If this is to be the first customer in the new cemetery, it’s worth getting a bit lost.’
‘Good,’ she said vaguely, thinking it would be nice to see him again.
‘Thanks, Thea,’ he said warmly. ‘I appreciate you thinking of me.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ she said.
She took Hepzie around the village at five, when the drizzle finally gave up and a late sun emerged to brighten the evening. It shone warmly on the damp hedgerows and verges, creating a steamy humidity that felt quite foreign. She had no real feel for Cranham yet. The only resident she had met was poor old Donny. She passed quiet stone houses with flower-filled gardens and no signs of life. It was no different from many other Cotswold villages she had experienced in that respect. A few cars passed by, containing the first of the trickle of people coming home from a day out – some probably even worked on a Sunday. Once back, they seemed to disappear out of sight, regardless of the weather. Long summer evenings were no more effective at tempting them onto their front lawns than a November downpour would have been. Occasional voices floated from back gardens, where privacy was guaranteed by walls and fences and hedges.
But there were a few people in the woods when Thea and Hepzie turned off the road and passed the unusual community playground which the locals had evidently established for their children. This, she remembered, was the last weekend of the half-term holiday. School would begin again the next day, with whatever small snatches of freedom modern children enjoyed curtailed for another six or seven weeks. There were two girls sitting on top of a sturdy climbing frame, talking intensely, heads close together. A man with a large grey poodle approached her. He wore a blue Breton cap with a wide brim over his face, and a lilac-coloured shirt. He had shapely, fleshy lips, reminiscent of the figures in many a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The only gay in the village, flashed through Thea’s mind, and she gave him a warm smile, prompted largely by inner amusement at the inevitable reference. He smiled back, and stopped walking.
‘Nice little spaniel,’ he observed. The poodle was ignoring Hepzie completely, its sharp nose averted.
‘Thanks.’
They watched the dogs in silence for a moment, pausing before the inevitably continued conversation. The balance had been tipped the moment the man halted and spoke. And yet there remained the traditional British reluctance to engage with a stranger.
‘Haven’t seen you around before,’ he said.
‘No. I’m house-sitting for Harriet Young, at Hollywell.’ She waved towards the Manor.
‘Are you indeed? Well done you. Fabulous house, of course. Full of good things. I like good things. And hasn’t she got some kind of reptile in the cellar?’
Thea smiled again at the image of a massive iguana lurking in the shadows that the words evoked. ‘A few, yes. Only little ones.’
‘And you’ll have to suffer the miserable Donny Davis as well, I imagine?’
‘He drops in. I don’t find him at all miserable. I rather like him.’ She sounded stiff, even to her own ears.
‘People do, at first. He’ll soon drive you crazy with his self-pity.’ He raised his eyes to the sky. ‘Please let me die,’ he quoted, in Donny’s quavering tones. He looked hard at Thea then. ‘Why doesn’t he just find the guts to put an end to his misery, and do us all a favour, if he’s so adamant that he won’t let a doctor look at him?’
Thea was shocked. ‘He enjoys life too much, I suppose. It’s not so easy to just kill yourself because it might be convenient to your family. And I imagine he’s within his rights to stay away from doctors and hospitals after the dreadful time he had with his daughter.’
‘If you ask me, it’s a sign of dementia. And you’re wrong about dying – it’s as easy as pie. It’s staying alive that’s difficult.’ He gave her a straight look. ‘I should know.’
The man was in his late thirties, she estimated. Probably quite affluent and apparently in good health. He obviously had no idea what he was talking about, despite his claim. Her mouth felt full of arguments, jumbled assertions about fear of death, and essential human ambivalence, and a burning need to leave some sort of trace behind.
‘Oh,’ she challenged. ‘Why’s that, then?’
‘As it happens, I’m a doctor myself. Cardiovascular surgery, to be exact.’
Thea gulped back her astonishment. ‘Fancy that,’ she managed. ‘I would never have guessed. But I stick to my point. I still don’t think you understand about Donny. You probably have to be old and ill to have any hope of getting inside his head.’
He held her gaze. ‘But you’re neither, and you seem to be claiming some special insight.’
She quailed for a moment at his refusal to give way. ‘At least I’ve been listening to him,’ she blustered.
The man shrugged elaborately. ‘Well, I don’t mind telling you I head for the hills if I see him coming my way. Jasper and I know a few nooks and crannies in these woods, if we need to make an escape.’
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ she flashed, determined not to be intimidated by him. ‘Donny’s not very fast on his feet, after all. I wouldn’t think there’s much risk of him catching you.’
‘Ooh—’ even before he finished his remark, she had found herself registering this outrageous parody of Kenneth Williams ‘—listen to you! Here for five minutes and already knows all about it, am I right? Well, Madam House-sitter, you’ll learn. Come back to me in a week and tell me I was right. You will, you know. My name’s Philippe, by the way. What’s yours?’
She told him, but neglected to introduce her dog, as she normally would. This Philippe was quite frivolous enough for both of them, and if that made her seem stiff by comparison, then so be it.
‘Have fun, then, Thea Osborne,’ he said, and continued on his way.
She released the spaniel from the lead and wandered slowly along the woodland paths, one eye on the plumy white tail that bobbed amongst the holly and brambles beneath the big beech trees. Cranham was still quite unknown to her after a busy twenty-four hours. Part of her hoped to keep it that way, staying quietly at Hollywell Manor, making coffee for Donny and catching whatever sunshine there might be on offer. A year earlier she had been at Temple Guiting in a blazing hot spell, with Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis. Now a new Philip – she would have been happy to bet that was his original name before he Frenchified it – had crossed her path, albeit highly unlikely to find himself in anything like the same kind of relationship to her as Hollis had been. Now firmly in the past, she preferred not to think about him and the perverse way she had treated him. Since then, men had been in short supply in her life.
Except for Drew Slocombe, of course. And Drew didn’t really count.
The evening wound down slowly, still light at half past nine, albeit cloudy. The gecko eggs slumbered peacefully, their heedless parents marginally more active when Thea went to inspect them. She caught the quick movement of one, at the top of its tank, just before it froze halfway behind a large palmate leaf, the clever camouflage unsuccessful once she had seen it move. Where did geckoes come from, she wondered. How long did they live? She had blurry memories of reading about them sitting above windows inside houses in hot climes, waiting for flies to come their way. A sort of tropical version of Dickens’ cricket on the hearth; something people regarded as benign, even rather auspicious. But quite how it evolved from there to a British craze for owning them as pets was obscure. As far as she could see, they were singularly unrewarding.
She thought about Donny, bracketing him with the geckoes as another element of her responsibilities. Would he appreciate her introducing him to Drew, forcing him to confront the reality of his own grave? She acknowledged that the poodle-owning Philippe had already sown a few seeds of doubt, despite her indignation at his attitude. But she clung to the idea that arranging a meeting between Drew and Donny would be an interesting experiment for both men – even possibly therapeutic for Donny if Drew could manage to be as sensitive and understanding as she believed him to be. If the old man backed off, muttering that he really wasn’t quite ready for anything so concrete, then he might relax into enjoying the summer and forgetting about his bleak future.
Except he had already seemed pretty relaxed. Thea’s first impression of him as a man who relished life felt rock solid. She would never have charged him with self-pity, despite the terrible story about his daughter, and his own limitations, and Philippe’s unfeeling accusations. With difficulty she recalled what Harriet had told her. There was a lady friend called Edwina. Why hadn’t she, or the daughter, not helped to settle the matter of his funeral already? Did they refuse to discuss anything to do with death and dying, as many people did? Were they relentlessly, mindlessly, jolly when all the poor man wanted was to clarify the arrangements for something that was sure to happen eventually? Did they laugh it all away and change the subject? What did they think about the living will and its implication that Donny would wish to die at home, with their full cooperation? Had he perhaps gone so far as to appeal to them for assistance in committing suicide, when he felt the time had come, only to meet with frozen faces and a determined change of subject?
The questions came and went, the answers all pending further contact with the man himself. Thea found them absorbing, in a way she had not felt absorbed for some time past. Death had touched her many times in the last three years, until it seemed it was following her around, stalking her like a persistent admirer. Repeatedly she had promised herself that it would not happen again, only to be foiled. And now, here it was again in a different guise, intriguing in a new way. A man who both did and did not want to die, who did and did not want to live. It felt like being shown a window onto something rare and vital, where she might be able to contribute, thanks to her ability to face up to more reality than most people could.
She went to bed, eagerly looking forward to her next encounter with the sick old man.