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‘That seems to have healed all right although obviously I can’t say for certain without an X-ray.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I must run.’
‘What ought I to—’
‘They’ll put her on medication straight away and you should see a rapid improvement.’
‘Really? Oh, this is so kind of you. I can’t tell you how grateful—’
‘You’ve got my number. Ring my secretary if you’re worried about anything.’
He glared at the front door impeding his progress. I flung it open before he resorted to battering it down and called to his departing back, ‘Thank you so much for coming …’
He jumped into his car and shot away. I opened the door of the morning room, expecting to have a book hurled at my head. My mother was lying back on her pillows, staring out of the window. She was a bad colour and, despite the jars of cream I rubbed in morning, noon and night, her skin was dry and flaky. Slowly she turned her head to look at me.
‘I wish you’d wash my hair, Roberta.’
‘Oh, certainly. With pleasure.’ I had been trying for weeks to persuade her to let me but she had always said she was too tired. ‘What did you think of Mr Newmarch?’
‘It’s exhausting to be pulled around.’ Her gooseberry eyes were reproachful. It may have been my imagination but they seemed brighter already, such is the power of a good doctor who can inspire confidence. ‘However, it was a relief to have a gentleman to consult. The working classes have such coarse responses. They don’t understand how one feels.’
‘He seems to think he knows what’s wrong.’
‘He was quite intelligent, I thought.’
‘I couldn’t tell. He didn’t waste many words on me. He’s amazingly bossy.’
‘Bossy, would you say? I’d call him … masterful.’
As I bent to rearrange the bedclothes my attention was caught by the jacket of the book on the bedside table and I was immediately struck by the resemblance of Mr Frederick Newmarch to Lord Lucifer Twynge.
The following afternoon as I was boiling sugar and water for a crème caramel Oliver put a tousled head round the kitchen door.
‘Telephone for you.’
‘Damn! I can’t leave this. Ask them to ring back—No, wait a minute, it might be Jazzy. I’d better speak to her.’
‘It’s a bloke.’
I hesitated. Possibly it was Mr Newmarch, telephoning to know the result of the tests, in which case it would be ungrateful to put him to the trouble of calling back. ‘Will you come and watch this like a hawk and take it off the heat the minute it goes brown?’
Oliver shambled across the kitchen, yawning. Even as I handed him the wooden spoon I made a mental note that his dressing-gown could do with a wash.
‘Hello?’
‘Roberta.’
It did not occur to me to pretend I did not recognize Burgo’s voice. An odd sensation, something like pins and needles, spread to my extremities. ‘Oh, hello! I must tell you, he was wonderful! It was so good of you to remember.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Newmarch. He came to see my mother yesterday and sent someone to do a blood test. They telephoned me with the results today. Usually one waits a week only to find they’ve lost them. I’m astonished at the power of the Word. She’s suffering from hypothyroidism. Apparently there’s something called thyroxin which will make her better. I’m picking some pills up from the surgery this evening.’
‘Good. He’s a strange man. A cross between Rudolf Rassendyll and Alice’s white rabbit. I bet he wakes regularly during the night just to see what time it is.’
‘I don’t know how you can speak so disrespectfully. To me he’s the eighth wonder of the world and I’m ready to subscribe to a bust in marble. Who’s Rudolf Rassendyll?’
‘Don’t you remember The Prisoner of Zenda? He was the gallant hero.’
‘Oh yes. But it was kind of you to send him.’
‘It’s nice to be the recipient of so much gratitude, but that’s not why I rang. I’ve been touring the North since I last saw you, making speeches and playing bingo with our senior citizens. I got back to London last night. I want to see you.’
‘Well …’ I tried to hang on to my determination to finish the affair before it had properly begun but from the moment I heard his voice the conviction had begun to weaken. ‘I don’t know. It would be lovely to see you but—’
‘Come on, then. I’m in the call-box down the road. I’ll find a suitable bush by the gate at the bottom of your drive and try to make myself invisible.’
My blood began to seethe as violently as the caramel. ‘You’re in Cutham Down?’
‘Didn’t I just say so?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘Hurry up.’
There was a buzzing sound. He had put down the receiver. I tore off my apron, dragged my fingers through my hair in front of the hall mirror and let myself out of the front door. I ran through the wood, which was quicker than following the curves of the drive, and then slowed as I drew near the gate. It would not do to arrive actually panting. I looked around but could see no one. For a moment I wondered if it might have been a cruel joke. Then a hand grabbed my arm and drew me into a stout laurel.
‘You nearly made me scr—’ The rest of what I had to say was lost as he kissed me long and hard.
‘That’s better,’ he said as he let go at last. ‘I’ve been longing for that. Not only that, of course.’ He looked at my face. ‘Just as I remembered it. Come here.’ He held me tightly against him and then began to kiss me again, more gently. ‘Oh dear! I was afraid it wouldn’t be enough. Cold shower urgently required.’ Obediently, the rain, which had held off for the last hour, began to fall and at once became a downpour, buffeting the leaves and releasing the scent of earth and mildew. ‘But I told myself it would be better than nothing.’ He kissed the top of my head as drops trickled down my face and tried to shelter me beneath his coat. ‘And it is. We’ve got ten minutes before I have to drive back to London. This afternoon’s meeting was cancelled so I seized the moment and leaped on a train. Simon’s parked discreetly up the road. He’s driving me straight back to town so I can be in the House by eight.’
‘You don’t mean you came all the way here just to … just to …?’
‘Just to kiss you? Yes. Even my impatient ardour is deterred by the thought of making love in this benighted wood. Besides, there isn’t time. Tell me, my love … are you my love?’
He looked at me intently.
I was, at that moment, incapable of lying. ‘Yes. For good or ill, and I suppose it must be for ill.’
‘Don’t!’ He held me tightly. ‘I won’t let anything hurt you. Trust me.’
So I did.
‘I admit the man has talent,’ said Kit. ‘Despite my natural antipathy, I have to hand it to him. He knew you’d need a romantic gesture rather than a postcard and a box of chocolates.’
‘You needn’t tell me I was a gullible fool,’ I said. ‘I know it.’
‘I didn’t mean that. The thing is, you were already in love with him. He just had to break down your resistance. So there you were. At the beginning of an incandescent love affair. The die was cast.’
‘Yes. Before then we were just playing. Although it was heady with romance, everything that occurred before that declaration in the laurels meant comparatively little. Afterwards it seemed to me that everything important – that is to say, my ideas about myself and other people, my presumptions about the future – was substantially changed. And pain was ever present, heightening the pleasure, a sort of fixative of experience.’
‘You mean you felt guilty?’
‘I’m ashamed to admit that for some time, several weeks, I didn’t feel guilty at all. Anna seemed a hardly real figure in Burgo’s life. He rarely mentioned her name. She seemed to have nothing at all to do with me. I assumed they had some sort of understanding. That’s if I thought about her at all. At first I was so overwhelmed by feelings of … well, let’s call it infatuation, that nothing else mattered. The pain came from excessive excitement. An overdose of adrenaline. Because we couldn’t see each other often, the affair had to be carried on in my head. I must have been impossibly vague and unreachable. I drifted through the days that followed, cooking, cleaning, carrying trays in a dream, waiting for him to call, imagining what it would be like to see him again. Every minute of every hour I thought about him. When I got back to the house I found a ruined saucepan and a kitchen full of smoke. Oliver had left the bath running. He’d been so busy trying to mop up the bathroom floor with anything he could lay his hands on, including every clean towel in the linen cupboard and quite a few of the hated napkins I’d just ironed, he’d forgotten about the caramel. I didn’t feel so much as a flicker of annoyance. America and Russia could have gone to war, Africa and India have starved, Sussex might have been submerged by a tidal wave and I wouldn’t have given a damn. I only thought about Burgo. You see, I had never been in love before.’
‘And once you’d had a taste of it, it went straight to your head like wine-cup.’
‘I must be a sadly repressed sort of person.’
‘I think you’re perfectly adorable.’
I peered through the streaming window at banks of trees hanging over the road. Now the lower slopes of the mountains were clothed with green and looked more friendly, like parts of Italy. ‘We must be near Kilmuree.’
‘Four miles. I hope you brought an umbrella.’
‘It never occurred to me. I was so desperate to get out of the house without the press spotting me that I’ve probably brought all the wrong things.’
‘How did you manage it?’
‘A friend helped me. Oddly enough, she came to interview me for a newspaper.’
‘That sounds intriguing. You’ve just got time to tell me.’
FOURTEEN (#ulink_aa2fddc3-8062-50c7-9266-aefa29744da3)
Three days after Burgo’s and my love affair became carrion for the nation to peck over for the juiciest bits, I was standing in the kitchen measuring spoons of Bengers into a pan of warm milk for my mother. She had given up eating proper food, complaining that everything made her feel sick, and existed on invalidish things like Slippery Elm and eggnog with brandy. And of course sweets by the bagful. I suppose she was trying to sweeten a life that had become sour. The current craving was for coffee fondants.
‘Just a minute,’ said Kit. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt when you’ve just got going but I thought your mother had been restored to health months ago by the great Frederick Newmarch.’
‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten I hadn’t told you about all that. The pills cured her hypothyroidism remarkably quickly. Her skin improved, her hair grew back, her voice lightened. Physically she looked better than I’d seen her for a long time. I planned to go back to London in September. Sarah said I could have my old room and my boss had agreed to have me back. And Burgo and I would be able to see more of each other, though we’d managed to meet most weeks in Sussex and occasionally I’d been able to get up to London for half a day. Of course, it was never enough. And that, I suppose, fanned the flames of passion.’ I paused, wincing inwardly at this cold analysis of our love. But I had to try to detach myself. ‘Anyway, I was telling you about my mother. Though she’d stopped grumbling about aches and pains, she refused to get dressed and wouldn’t leave her room. And she wouldn’t give up that beastly commode, though I knew she was capable of walking to the lavatory.
‘Burgo got Frederick Newmarch to call again and he said that there was nothing wrong with her as far as he could see but he thought she was seriously depressed. He advised a complete change, perhaps a holiday abroad. My father wouldn’t take her. He only likes visiting war graves or battlefields: not the thing for lifting depression. So I went to the local travel agent for brochures about cheap places to go in France, my heart absolutely in my boots because I didn’t want to be away from Burgo. Then my mother put paid to all that by deciding to get out of bed and go upstairs.
‘It was the first time for nearly five months that she’d been outside her own room. It was a crazy thing to do. I was on my way to the Fisherman’s Reel – the little pub where Burgo and I used to meet – my father was in London and Mrs Treadgold, who was supposed to be looking after her, was in the kitchen, listening to The Archers. Oliver was still in bed. Was it a coincidence that my mother chose one of the few moments when there was no one around to see or hear her? Anyway she managed, despite being as weak as water after lying so long in bed, to drag herself up to the top of the stairs and then fell down the entire flight, breaking an arm and a leg.’
‘You think she did it deliberately?’
‘I don’t know. There was no reason for her to go upstairs. I was afraid that she’d meant to kill herself. I felt I hadn’t been nearly nice enough. Of course the entire process began all over again. Two weeks in hospital, National Health this time, and heavens, did she complain! Then home, encased in plaster, to be looked after. She seemed to cheer up a bit then. If it hadn’t been for Burgo it would have been me who was suicidal.
‘I embarked on a new policy of calm endurance and tried even harder to please. I was so sorry for her. My father was cold to her, unsympathetic, whereas I was loved by this marvellous man … Anyway, the fractures mended, though it took ages. Another four months. By January she was more or less better. Just when I was thinking it might be possible to go back to London, she upset a pot of tea all over herself. She was burned from her neck to her waist. Back to hospital. Luckily, though the scalded area was large, it wasn’t deep. She was home after a week. But the burn didn’t heal. I think she picked off the new skin during the night.’
‘Oh dear, you poor girl. Was it because she didn’t want you to go away?’
‘If I’d believed that it might have been easier in many ways. I’d have felt needed. No, she’s always preferred Oliver. Though when he stopped being a gentle confiding little boy she withdrew from him too. I was always too independent and bossy. I know I am. I love making something good out of something hopeless. Once I grew old enough to be effective what affection she had for me waned almost completely. And now I was trying to make her well when she didn’t want to be. What’s more she saw all my attempts to make the house and garden more attractive as criticism. We were both to be pitied in the circumstances. I think she just enjoys lying in bed, being waited on, reading escapist novels and eating sweets, not having to go out into a world that holds no pleasure for her. I was simply a means to an end. All she needs is a more or less willing slave.’
‘So you stayed.’
‘I was afraid if I left she’d do something worse to herself. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen in the future. That she might become bored with being an invalid. Or that Burgo might force the issue by deciding to divorce his wife so he could marry me. Yes, I suppose that’s what I hoped. That he would take matters out of my hands and into his own. I was becoming increasingly dependent on him. He had become my happiness, my salvation. But, of course, that didn’t happen. The Conservative Party stormed into power under the leadership of Margot Holland; she selected him to be her youngest minister and his face was splashed all over the newspapers. Someone saw the opportunity to make some cash. It sounds awfully squalid, doesn’t it?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, nothing that was associated with you could be squalid.’
‘That’s the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’
‘I mean it. Don’t cry, Bobbie. You don’t want to mess up your face when you’re about to meet these new people. Tell me about the journalist who found you this Irish job.’
‘What a knight errant you are!’ I sniffed. ‘Fancy a man understanding the importance of mascara. All right, where was I? I remember, mixing Bengers for my mother with tears running down my face. Eating coffee fondants.’
‘Go on.’
I wondered as I stirred and chewed and wept if I could outdo my mother in misery now. I might as well join the library myself and put in a regular order on my own behalf at the sweet shop.
Since the arrival of droves of reporters we had locked all the external doors and closed the shutters of the downstairs rooms. Brough had removed the pull from the bell and we had unplugged the telephone. My father complained bitterly about being compelled to live under a pall of darkness and was absent from breakfast until after dinner. Fortunately the morning room was always so gloomy and my mother’s concentration on the written word so complete that she hardly noticed. Oliver was asleep during most of the day anyway so it made no difference to him. The only person who was actually having a good time as a result of my persecution by the Fourth Estate was Brough. He had never ceased to regret the end of the Second World War and was now in his element. He patrolled the grounds night and day with his shotgun, an expression of manic ferocity animating his usually sullen features.
Entombed in a dismal silence that was broken only by foolhardy reporters hammering on the windows and doors and rattling the letterbox until routed by Brough, I thought I might well be going mad. My sole outlook on the world was through one of the kitchen windows which opened on to the woodshed, coal bunker and dustbin area. It seemed safe to leave this window unshuttered.
The coffee fondant was actually rather disgusting but I found my hand reaching automatically towards the bag for another when someone sprang up in front of me on the other side of the window. I yelled with shock and was about to turn and run when something familiar about her made me pause.
‘Bobbie! It’s me! Harriet Byng!’ said the girl, putting her face close to the glass.
I undid the bolts of the back door. ‘Quick! Come in!’
Harriet squealed as she saw Brough advancing, squinting down the barrel of his gun, his eyes inflamed with killer fury. After I had persuaded him to go and have a cup of tea and a biscuit to calm himself, I closed and rebolted the door and then examined my unexpected visitor.
I had met Harriet Byng at the wedding of her elder sister. Ophelia and I had been friends for some years. We had never been particularly close but we moved in the same circles in London and we liked the same kind of things. Ophelia was beautiful with huge blue eyes and silvery-blonde hair and had exquisite taste. I found her particular brand of hedonism and extreme single-mindedness intriguing. She could be entertaining or appallingly difficult but she was never dull. Other people complained that Ophelia was selfish and heartless but they had been proved wrong when she had succumbed to the charms of a good-looking but comparatively poor police inspector. I had been asked to the wedding a month ago and there met Harriet, one of Ophelia’s three younger sisters. Harriet and I had had a long and interesting conversation about – among other things – the ideal lunatic asylum, the novels of Louise de Vilmorin and our favourite things to eat.
Harriet was quite unlike Ophelia, in looks as well as character. Her hair was long and straight and a rich dark brown. Her eyes were dark too and bright with intelligence. Her skin was pale and it was fascinating to watch the colour in her face come and go for Harriet was shy and blushed like a child. I thought her beauty bewitching, of a different order from anyone else’s. Her ingenuous sweetness was not the least of her attractions and I was amused to observe that a tall, distinguished-looking older man had her under his eye most of the time. This turned out to be Rupert Wolvespurges, the artistic director of the English Opera House, and Harriet confided that they were in love.
‘Oh, Bobbie!’ Harriet hugged me tightly. ‘How are you, you poor dear thing?’
These were the first words of sympathy that had been addressed to me since the scandalized world had been apprised of my affair with Burgo and they reduced me to a storm of sobbing. Harriet steered me to a chair and put on the kettle, then sat down next to me, holding my hand in hers until I had got over the worst.
‘Gosh, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a hanky? Mine are all upstairs.’
Harriet hadn’t so I used the drying-up cloth which was anyway a more suitable size for the deluge that had been provoked by the sound of a friendly voice.
‘It’s all too silly,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why I’m being such a baby.’
‘I do,’ said Harriet. ‘It’s really terrifying having those people harrying you, like hounds after a poor darling fox. You get the feeling they’re going to rip you to pieces if they catch you. And they make up the most ridiculous stories about you and suddenly you find yourself wondering if they might be true. You get frightened that any minute you’re going to go raving mad. After a while, though, you get used to it.’ I remembered then that Harriet’s father had only the year before been arrested for murder – wrongly, as it turned out. But for weeks stories and photographs of Harriet’s remarkably handsome and interesting family had filled the gossip columns and one could scarcely pick up a magazine or newspaper without seeing one or all of their faces as they went into the fishmonger’s or came out of a cinema. ‘Honestly, though it’s hard to believe, the reporters doorstepped us for so long that we actually got quite friendly with them. Some of them are perfectly nice people. It just takes a bit of getting used to.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. I’ve got to pull myself together. I haven’t been sleeping and … It must have been so much worse for you with your father in prison.’
‘That was truly awful.’ Harriet shook her head as she thought about it, as though to rid herself of the memory. ‘But, darling Bobbie, never mind the press for a minute. You can keep them outside and in the end they’ll get fed up and it’ll be yesterday’s news. But what about you? Have you been able to see him?’
‘No. If you mean Burgo.’
She squeezed my hand. ‘You love him terribly?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘And will he … is he going to leave his wife?’
