Bothersome Number of Corpses

1

Hearing her name down the telephone line twitched me away into the past as swiftly as the hook in the cheek of a trout will pluck it out of water into air and leave it gasping. Fleur Lipscott, sweet little Fleur. Husband, children, decades of humdrum adult life were quite gone and there I was again in that first golden summer at Pereford where for ten long lazy weeks the sun rose over the hills, smiled down upon us all day and then sank with a sigh into the warm sea each evening. We paddled and bathed at the little cove, drifted around the lake in a little boat, meandered the cloistered Somerset lanes behind a slow, clopping pony of gentle nature in a cart full of cushions. I could smell the lavender scent of the linen cushion-slips still.

There were three sweet golden Lipscott girls – Pearl, Aurora and little Fleur – each with a silky mass of flaxen curls and a pink rose in each cheek, and had Pereford been a house full of men or of mirrors I might have resented my straight black hair and sallow complexion, being just old enough at eighteen to know that flax and roses were better currency in the business for which we girls had been trained. But ‘the Major’ as his wife and daughters always called him (with inverted commas and capital letter clearly pronounced) had died when Fleur was a baby; and Mamma-dearest (with no inverted commas at all; the endearment was unselfconscious), Batty Aunt Lilah (often addressed just like that, in full) and the three girls themselves lived with a kind of gentle delight in their home and each other, which spread over all their friends. It was most effective at stopping such churlish feelings as envy taking hold, and was not even half as annoying as it sounds.

The Major had spent a great deal of time at his Highland lodge, even when alive, and so was not much missed when he died. His death was one of glory at Spion Kop, on that fatal night of pass the parcel, gamely taking command for half an hour or so after the last available colonel perished before handing on to the next major in line; but from the easy circumstances of his widow and orphans, tucked up in that cosy old house of theirs with loyal servants all around, one would have thought he had expired at eighty after six months’ advice from good lawyers about his arrangements. Of course, none of this occurred to me that summer, not at eighteen; it was my husband Hugh – much later, when George at the club had regaled him with news of Aurora’s engagement – who spent a bitter evening mulling over the settlements of these three girls and lamenting that not even Fleur was young enough ever to make a lucrative wife for one of our sons.

‘Oh Hugh, for goodness’ sake!’ I said at last. ‘The boys are two and one. They’re babies!’

‘And she’s fourteen,’ said Hugh, misunderstanding completely. ‘I know. By the time Donald is twenty-one she’ll be thirty-three. It would cause comment. No, I’m afraid I can’t see my way clear, Dandy. You shall just have to put it out of your mind.’

‘I give up,’ I said. ‘I really do.’

‘Although if this Aurora one is your sort of age, they obviously don’t marry young.’

For a moment, I almost wished that I had taken Nanny’s gentle hints about how nice it would be for Mother to have nursery tea with the boys now they were sitting up in high chairs and using spoons since, although they were noisy and messy as dining companions go, they had not yet developed a capacity for active rudeness. I glared at Hugh and consoled myself with a sip of wine and a mouthful of devilled mushroom (Nanny would never admit either of these treats to her nursery, I knew).

He had, however, made a point worth making. Aurora, newly betrothed to Drew Forrester, was twenty-nine, and even Pearl had held out much longer than I should have dared, only succumbing at almost twenty-five, and what with their dowries and their beauty, the world at large was puzzled by the delay. I was not, knowing that had I lived in that house with Mamma-dearest and Batty Aunt Lilah I should have been in no hurry to leave it either.

For it was a house without horsehair, without porridge, a house where carbolic soap was unknown and dinner gongs went unstruck. At Pereford, we slept on featherbeds and breakfasted on peaches. The maids scooped great handfuls of pink salts into our bathwater and dinner was heralded with a carillon upon a little glockenspiel of the sweetest tone.

Furthermore, Mamma-dearest’s greatest delight was to lie in a hammock strung between two plum trees and spin tales for her girls, never forgetting me, and so a good part of what I remembered of Pereford was not Pereford at all but pictures from my mind’s eye of her girlhood in Haryana where her hammock was hung from banyan trees and her linen was scented with patchouli mint; pictures of the endless fairy tale she wove of our delightful futures, of heroic suitors and the balls at which they would sweep us up in their arms and tell of their love, and all with the dappled sunlight winking through the leaves of the plum tree and the hammock strings creaking like the rigging of a clipper as she rocked to and fro.

I was only ever there in the summertime, starting with that first summer on the way home from Paris where I had met Pearl and made friends with her. In winter it might have been different, I suppose, but I doubt it, for the fireplaces – filled with flowers in July – were enormous and the white muslin curtains which billowed at the open windows, wafting the scent of roses into the rooms, were hung from mahogany curtain rods as thick as telegraph poles which hinted at a high measure of velvety sumptuousness in the colder months of the year. Then, in an attic where we went to play hide-and-seek (humouring Fleur, although we were much too old for it), there was the clincher: great squashy bales of calico – the sumptuous curtains stitched up tight for the summer against the moth – stacked on top of log-piles of rolled Turkey carpets and, all around, a veritable souk of coal scuttles, log baskets and peat barrels.

‘Heavens, what a lot you’ve got,’ I said to Pearl.

‘One for each fireplace,’ she said, and began counting: ‘The outside hall, the inside hall, the upstairs landing. The far end of the drawing room, the near end of the drawing room. This little one is for Mamma-dear’s bathroom and isn’t it lovely. She always has cherry logs in there and the time it took her to teach the fire boy to tell the difference!’

‘You have a boy just for that?’ I could not help boggling, having been brought up in a house where the maids set the fires in the morning and one held off and held off lighting them since to ring for more coal was such extravagance that we often found ourselves going to bed just to avoid it, cursing that reckless moment at seven o’clock when we had thought we were cold, which we now knew was nothing compared to the shivering that set in at eleven when the embers were growing grey.

‘Mahmout,’ Pearl said. ‘Dearest Mamma-darling brought him home with her. He was the son of her ayah and she says he’s the perfect fire boy because he’s always trying to get Pereford as warm as Haryana.’

‘He’ll set the place alight or die trying,’ said Batty Aunt Lilah, who was playing with us, or at any rate was pattering around in nearby rooms while we played, not ever getting quite to grips with the rules.

‘I haven’t noticed him about,’ I said, feeling sure that an Indian in a white loincloth (for thus I had imagined him) would have stuck out enough to be noticed in Somerset.

‘Oh, no, he’s not here now,’ Aurora said. ‘He’s on his summer holidays. Mamma-dearest sends him to London every year where he has some family connections. She says he’d go into a decline if he didn’t get to speak Hindustani and eat spices for a while.’

Mrs Lipscott, it will be understood, was never likely to suffer from ‘the servant problem’. My own mother did not even allow her daughter to go to London every year, never mind her servant boys.

‘He sits in the palm house at Kew,’ said Lilah. ‘Warming his bones.’ Then she let herself fall backwards onto one of the stitched-up calico bundles of winter curtains, landing with a pouf! and lying there staring up at the joists of the ceiling.

‘You’ll have to find a better hiding place than that, Batty Aunt,’ said Aurora. ‘I can hear Fleur coming already.’

‘Throw a sheet over me and if she looks my way I’ll freeze,’ said Lilah. Then the rest of us huddled behind the enormous log boxes, breathing in quietly the scent of cherry wood and that of the resinous green pine branches used for kindling.

‘Once upon a time,’ Fleur said, opening the attic door and coming inside, ‘there was a beautiful little girl named Flower or Flora or Fleur. And she lived in a fairy castle with her two beautiful sisters, Aurora or Sunrise or Dawn and Pearl…’ The three of us held our breaths, trying not to giggle. Fleur’s Fairy Tales were held in high regard in the Lipscott family, even against the general background of delighted appreciation of absolutely anything, and they were the reason we all hid together (lest one of us miss something).

‘… Pearl,’ Fleur said again, ‘or Grit or Dirty Oyster.’ At this Batty Aunt Lilah snorted and Fleur lifted the sheet and pounced on her.

‘You forgot all about me, you little brigand,’ Lilah said, tickling Fleur. ‘What about the beautiful aunt?’

‘There isn’t an aunt,’ Fleur said. ‘But help me look for the others and I might add you in.’

‘And what about that other girl?’ said Lilah. She always referred to me this way.

‘Oh, she’s in it,’ said Fleur. She was unbuckling the straps of a wicker hamper to look inside. ‘She’s the dark queen. Dandy or… Actually, she can’t be called Dandy if she’s a dark queen.’

Crouched there behind my log basket I could only agree: Pearl, Fleur and Aurora seemed the most elegant, graceful names imaginable to me (until years later when Hugh cut through my enthralment by saying it sounded as though their parents did not have full use of their tongues and wanted to make life easy).

The thought of Hugh now cut just as decisively through my reverie and I returned, blinking, to the present, with the telephone chattering in my hand.

‘So on three counts, Dandy,’ Pearl was saying as I put the telephone to my ear again, ‘you are an angel sent from heaven for me. Well, four, if we’re to count how much I adore you and always have and always shall.’

‘And the other three?’ I asked. Either the Lipscott Delight had increased in intensity in the two decades since that summer or my nature had soured, because what had enchanted me then was pretty sickening now.

‘Well, first, of course, Fleur always loved you like a sister.’

‘Hm,’ I said. This might well have been true but Fleur Lipscott had two real sisters whom she presumably loved like sisters too, and I could not see why I should be at the head of the queue.

‘And then there’s the fact that you’re up there. Right on the spot.’

‘I am?’ I said. ‘Where is she?’

‘Scotland,’ said Pearl with all the complacency of one who has seldom been there and has no conception of the vast empty stretches of it nor the scarcity and inadequacy of the roads. She, no doubt, thought of Scotland as a dark blur outside a sleeper carriage, which revealed itself to be a grouse moor in the morning.

‘Whereabouts in “Scotland”?’ I asked her.

‘Place called Portpatrick,’ Pearl supplied. ‘Or was it St Patrick? It sounded wonderful, that I do know.’

‘Hm,’ I said again. With a name like that it had to be somewhere round the western edges and getting to it might be nasty.

‘So I rang up Daisy Esslemont and she said your name straight away.’

‘No doubt,’ I replied. ‘Despite the fact that Daisy is “up here” too and she and Fleur know one another rather well, don’t they?’ I was sure they did and, although I could not quite reach the memory, something about it troubled me; no more than a whisper of unease like a strand of hair on one’s face that one can blow away with a breath, but still it was there.

‘And she told me your marvellous news. You are brave and clever and wonderful and-’

‘What news?’ I asked, cutting in. One of my sons’ most revolting habits (from a very strong field) was the making of sick-noises in response to uncalled-for sentiment but I felt a quick tug just then towards making some of my own.

‘Gilver and Osborne!’ said Pearl. ‘A detective agency! I could hardly believe my ears. I always thought of you as such a placid soul. So unconcerned and untroubled by life’s slings and brickbats.’

‘Arrows,’ I said. ‘And you make me sound positively bovine.’

‘Exactly!’ said Pearl. ‘Now, if any of us were going to be a detective, I’d have thought Aurora was the one. So foxy and quick and such a spark of intelligence.’

At this, I took the earpiece away from my head and stared at it. Aurora Lipscott had spent that entire Pereford summer wearing daisy chains in her hair and was famous in the family for her inability to swim underwater, being so plump that even with Pearl and me pushing her down and little Fleur actually sitting on top of her she would bob to the surface in seconds like a doughnut in hot oil. Foxy was not a word one would ever have used of the girl. Of course, I had not seen much of the woman she had become, but I would have bet my own money that nothing much had changed and it was the Lipscott Delight that was behind her sister’s testimonial.

‘Intelligent or not,’ I said, but provoked no murmur, ‘I have somehow managed to carve out a place for myself in the field, it’s true.’

‘And with a very dashing business partner too,’ Pearl went on. ‘“Leonine and glowing”, Daisy said. “Roseate, aflame”.’

‘She never did, you big fibber,’ I said.

‘She did!’ said Pearl. ‘“A red-haired young man who worships the ground you walk upon”. I’m quoting her directly.’

I rolled my eyes at Bunty, who was lying stretched on the hearthrug of my sitting room and staring at me with wrinkled brow. Dalmatians are not known for their foxiness either and at thirteen years old she was past new tricks, so I had abandoned hope that she would ever understand telephones and stop assuming that each time I started talking in a room where she and I were alone I must be addressing her. It induced great guilt in me that I must appear to be speaking to her in such an un-doggy monotone and using not a one of her favourite words.

‘We get along very well as colleagues,’ I said to Pearl, squashing any notions of adoration. Bunty groaned and resettled herself facing away from me, just one ear still cocked my way.

‘And it’s marvellous of darling Hugh to embrace his horizons expanding into such lightness and…’ Here Pearl lost hold of the metaphor and let it float away. ‘Daisy said he and the young golden god are true friends, that the three of you together are-’

‘No, Pearl, she didn’t,’ I said. ‘Hugh and Alec get along perfectly nicely. And Hugh is quite happy about my detecting because I’ve made a lot of money at it. I keep a fair bit of this place going these days.’

‘Oh Dandy,’ Pearl said. ‘You poor thing. You never used to let such dull thoughts darken your heart.’

Now this was beyond cheek, because when Pearl had ‘finally married at almost twenty-five’ it was to a man many years older than her who spoke of nothing but golf and the gold standard, but was as rich as a sheik from refrigerated shipping.

‘Well, nothing darkens the heart like the dull thought of selling up and moving to a bungalow, so I’ll just struggle on,’ I said. ‘Am I to understand then that you’re telling me about Fleur in my professional capacity?’

‘Sort of,’ said Pearl. ‘Not exactly. Yes and no. I mean, a detective is practically legal. I’m appealing to you as a… wise woman.’ I forbore from telling her that I had a flat rate, never mind whether she wanted wisdom or the law. ‘It’s just that something’s wrong with Fleur and I’m terribly worried about her. She’s made such gargantuan strides – Amazonian really – since that dreadful time but now, from her letters, I find myself wondering if some sort of the old trouble might not be rearing its head again.’

‘What time?’ I said. ‘What trouble?’

‘Ah, well,’ said Pearl. ‘Much better to lift our eyes to the hills and look forward to a better future.’ I said nothing. ‘But I suppose, to give you an idea… Fleur did have a rather unsettled patch, at the end of the war and just after.’

That was it! The hook twitched in my cheek once more and I was gone. Not so far this time; only to 1918 and Daisy and Silas’s first Armistice Ball, which was repeated year after year on its anniversary (and which started my detecting career, in a roundabout sort of way). Fleur, Pearl and Aurora were all there, of course, Aurora sitting out the dances in a loose-fitting gown. Even at that her mother-in-law sniped the evening away about the scandal of her appearing at all in her condition, until at last Pearl and I took pity and made up a bridge four with both of them. Pearl was more than happy not to be on the floor since a life of refrigerated shipping (she had found) makes for a wonderful provider but a poor dancing partner. Hugh of course was delighted at my taking myself away. He bowed, looked at his pocket watch and headed off towards the billiards room like a dog who smelled a bone.

And so, because I was at a card table with her sisters, I saw quite a bit of Fleur that night. Otherwise I should not have had more than a glimpse: a glittering figure dancing like a dervish; a tinkling laugh on the terrace after supper when we all trooped out to watch fireworks (an ill-advised form of celebration, which left more than one young officer white and sweating). I might not even have recognised her in the crowd. For the sweet girl of my remembered perfect summer was grown up now, her straggling ringlets coiled flat against her head, her freckles gone or at least hidden by face powder of a deathly white, like chalk dust, and as well as these inevitable if unfortunate badges of womanhood – such were the fashions of the time – changes had been wrought in Fleur that might have seen me pass her on the street without blinking.

‘She got in with a bad lot,’ Pearl was saying down the telephone line. ‘Too wild for a girl like Fleur, and whenever they were all together she became just like them.’

Only that was not quite the whole story, because that night, Armistice night, Fleur was at a party in the house of a family friend and she had come with her sisters and their husbands, yet she was the wildest thing in the room, a sparkling little tornado of kisses and giggles, sweeping up a tail of enchanted men around her as she spun. I noticed, however, that quite a few of them made the effort to break away, shaking their heads and laughing, ignoring the piping voice that pleaded with them to come back. In fact, I witnessed two getting free of her pull at once and saw the look they shared, of amusement and scorn. It made me hurt for her, with her ringlets, sitting on her sister’s broad back in the shallow salt water of the cove.

And when she visited our table as the rubber wore its weary path to the final tally (Aurora’s mother-in-law, Mrs Forrester, was the very worst kind of bridge player, both impetuous and deadly slow), as well as hanging over her sisters, wrapping her arms around their necks and swapping the endless Lipscott endearments, she also offered up a series of sharp little digs about the house and the other guests which I had to work at not countering with digs of my own.

Aurora and Pearl only tittered.

‘Now really, Floribunda,’ Pearl said. ‘Play prettily with the other children or Nanny will take you home.’

‘But honestly, Oysie,’ Fleur was saying (this nickname had stuck, as one of the many), ‘what a place. It’s like a barracks. Not right for a party at all.’

‘It’s a tower house,’ I said. Fleur turned dreamily towards me, blinking as though the movement of her head had made her dizzy. ‘A fort, rather than a barracks, actually.’

‘Although,’ she said, ‘come to think of it, I’ve been to some marvellous parties in barracks and at least tonight I won’t have to depart over the wall.’

Mrs Forrester was a woman mixed together from a bloodline reaching back to the time of the Danish kings along with a good shovelful of the Yorkshire soil where the family had always been planted, which mixture had produced a character of pure flint. She froze with a card halfway to the table.

‘She’s teasing, Fenella,’ Aurora said calmly and wagged her finger at Fleur. ‘Straight to bed with no supper unless you stop being naughty.’

‘I don’t want any supper,’ said Fleur. ‘Have you seen it? Great slices of ham as though we were ploughmen! I’m going to dance again.’ She dropped a kiss on all four of our heads and ran on light tiptoes out of the card room with the floating chiffon panels of her party frock streaming out behind her.

‘Doesn’t she look adorable?’ Pearl said, gazing after her.

‘Truly like a little flower,’ said Aurora. ‘That frock makes her look as though she’s dressed in petals.’

‘Three spades,’ said Mrs Forrester, but they were too busy gazing.

‘Mamma-dearest and the Major must have seen her whole pretty life ahead of her the day she was born to have given her that name,’ said Pearl.

‘And yours, Pearl darling,’ said Aurora. ‘You are the pearl of us all.’

‘And you were the dawn of us all, my angel,’ said Pearl. ‘What does Fenella mean, Fenella?’

‘It means my grandmother’s name was Fenella and she had her own fortune to leave as she chose,’ said Mrs Forrester, making me laugh even though I am not sure she meant to be funny.

I laughed again now, remembering.

‘Dandy?’ said Pearl down the line.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do go on. I was just thinking about Mrs Forrester on Armistice night.’

‘I must have forgotten,’ said Pearl. ‘So, dearest darlingest Dandiest, will you help?’

‘I will,’ I said, interrupting the endearments firmly. ‘Of course I will. But you’ll have to tell me a lot more about what’s wrong. Love or money? It’s usually one of the two.’

‘Not this time,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s remorse. Black engulfing guilt. I thought Fleur had put it quite out of her mind but, as I say, from her letters I think it’s taken hold of her again.’

‘Guilt over what?’

‘Nothing!’ said Pearl. ‘How could little Floramundi have anything to be guilty of? And besides, she’s done everything she can to live a different life, a glorious, selfless, saintly life.’

‘You make it sound as though she’d taken the veil,’ I said. Pearl said nothing. ‘She hasn’t, has she?’ I was not entirely joking now. ‘She’s not in a convent? Pearl?’

‘Not quite,’ said Pearl. ‘She’s in a school.’

‘What do you mean? Studying to join a convent?’

‘No, I mean, she’s teaching in a girls’ school. A boarding school. In Portpatrick, in Scotland.’ Now, I was speechless. Sweet little Fleur, pretty and rich, had become a schoolmistress? ‘St Columba’s College for Young Ladies,’ said Pearl miserably. ‘And it’s worse than it sounds. It’s run according to a nasty German theory of education – the Foible Method, or something – and the girls all go on to universities and oh… poor little Fleur.’

‘It does sound pretty ghastly,’ I agreed. ‘And so you want me to winkle her out of there? Persuade her to resign? I’m not sure I could-’

‘No!’ said Pearl. ‘She’s been there eight years and for all that time she’s been almost happy. I want you to find out what’s gone wrong with her now. I want you to stop her running away even from St Columba’s. If we lose her completely again we’ll all die of grief. Mamma-dearest, Sunny and me.’

‘There, there,’ I said. ‘Pearl, please. Of course I will, darling. Only why don’t you and Aurora hop on a train and-’

‘Banished,’ said Pearl. ‘Forbidden the house. Kept at the gates. “Miss Lipscott is not at home to callers.”’

‘Miss Lipscott,’ I echoed. Of course I should have realised that a schoolmistress could not be a married woman, but to think of that faerie-child, that glittering chiffoned girl, still Miss Lipscott at thirty gave me a pang. Add the fact of her fortune, I thought to myself, and the news would kill Hugh.