Death in Summer

12

In the dining-room the dinner table has been laid, but no food is eaten. Much later, in the drawing-room, not huddled now but straight-backed in an armchair, Mrs. Iveson can hardly see her son-in-law when he comes in because she has not turned on the lights. She watched him in the garden before darkness fell — among the birch trees and the plum trees, by the summer-house, pacing slowly around the lawns, stooping now and again to pull a weed out from a flower-bed. He says nothing when he comes in, and she wonders at first if he knows she’s there. Rosie is with him and settles down, pressed against her legs.

‘I’m sorry, Thaddeus.’

He stands still in the gloom. She senses the shaking of his head, but does not see it. Time seems not to be passing, even though the evening has darkened so, even though the clock in the hall has chimed the hours and half-hours.

‘I’m sorry.’

He still says nothing. In the hall the telephone rings and he goes to answer it. ‘Yes,’ she hears him say. ‘Yes.’ He listens and then says thank you, listens again and says good-night. She can tell it isn’t what it might have been.

‘Of course it wasn’t your fault,’ he says, returning. ‘Of course not.’

He doesn’t stay, and a few minutes later she hears his car drive away and wonders what he hopes for. ‘We’ve called her Georgina,’ Letitia told her father in St. Bee’s, and then repeated that, twice or three times. But it never impinged. The last time they visited St. Bee’s a shaft of sunlight kept catching the blue stripes of the tie that was always so very tidily knotted. Sharp as a card, the tip of a handkerchief protruded from the outside breast pocket and she thought of a figure in a shop window. How fortunate, she tells herself, he is tonight.

Thaddeus struggles against thought while flat suburbs spread about him. Ribbons of development are broken, then begin again; dormitory settlements give way to mouldering warehouses, waterworks stretch for half a mile. Bombsites have not been built on, used-car lots are fenced with high wire mesh. Streets are straight and short, Victorian brick.

A woman with a baby hurries on none of them, no abandoned bundle fills a darkened corner. ‘She asked that you be informed,’ the voice of the hospital sister interrupted his silent plea that the telephone call would bring some other news. ‘A merciful release, we can only say.’ And he thought yes, a merciful release, and hardly knew.

Again, as best he can, he veils the images that have recently brought him solace but are painful now: Georgina just born, Letitia’s smiling tiredness, his own hands reaching out; Georgina when he saw her last, sleeping in her nursery after lunch. Ahead of him, lit up and open, a public house is called the Old Edward, and for a moment he is tempted to enter it, to talk to its landlord or some woman across a grimy bar, to be someone else and have someone else’s thoughts. For an hour or so yet he could drink and in the end be drunk and know oblivion.

‘We’ll go, Tadzio’: his mother saying that comes back, as if from her limbo she seeks in this cruel time to make amends, to rescue from it the child she never knew a man, nor ever knew at all. Through Metz and Kaiserslautern and Berlin, her long white finger first traced their journey to the country he had invented from her scraps: ships and sails on a frozen sea, her remembered street lamps of brightly decorated metal, coal dug out with a spade. Eva Paczkowska she showed him, handwritten on a certificate he could not understand, and in a photograph she pointed at the house where she’d been born. At a café table she had looked up and for the first time saw his father, his fur hat on a table by a coffee percolator, his hands held back from the red-hot metal of a stove. ‘Tadzio, you were born that day.’ Born because of the love that began in the fug of a coffee house, because his father had come to her cold, dark country to sell soap.

‘Look, Tadzio!’ But it was still his father, not he, she pointed for — at St. Hyacinthus’ Church, at all the sights of Lazienki. ‘Palaces! Palaces!’ his father had exclaimed. ‘How many more, for heaven’s sake!’ The Blue, the Primate’s, the Archbishop’s, the Pac, the Raczyski, the Krasiski, the Palace upon the Water. ‘Kanapka,’ an old sandwich-seller offered, opening a sandwich to display its contents, which years ago she had done for his father too. There was the restaurant where his father first ate nalesniki, the florid waiter no more than sixteen then. ‘Oh, what happiness it was!’ And strangers in Eva Paczkowska’s city listened to the story of the Englishman who once came to Poland, who gave a Polish girl, in return for Poland’s gift to him, a quiet English house, cherry trees at each corner of a garden.

Thaddeus passes the Old Edward by. He tries to hear his mother saying a tailor sat cross-legged in that window, to hear her telling him that jajko is egg and kawa coffee, making him repeat Górale mieszkaja w górach. But the distraction does not hold. Still warm, the air is drily odorous, a smell of old dust and buildings. Litter has gathered in the gutters and neglected doorways. Street lights are dim, as if the neighbourhood deserves no better.

He has not come to this nowhere place with hope, but only to escape all that his house is now. Tonight it’s inconsequential that his beautiful mother used up her love in comforting an invalid of misfortune and of war. Or that his father sighed and only wished to be alone with her, his body shivering in a bout of pain.

Divers will go down. They’ll go down to the murk, to old prams and supermarket trolleys, wheels of bicycles, parts of cars, the rotting shells of boats. In their ugly wet-suits they’ll search the slime, fish streaking about them, dead flotsam disturbed. They’ll root among the weeds and clumps of rust. They’ll lay out rags of clothing on the riverbank and gaze at them, and nod.

Thaddeus calculates: his child has lived for a hundred and eighty-eight days.

A ladder was placed beneath the nursery window; in a matter of minutes the baby was gone. When he heard, Al Capone offered a reward, knowing how he’d feel himself, he said. Twenty-five thousand dollars Lindbergh earned for flying the Atlantic, common knowledge at the time.

‘I would ask you not to,’ Zenobia requests. ‘It doesn’t help.’

A riposte comes swiftly to her husband’s lips but is not issued. An hour ago, when he walked to the end of the drive, he saw the lights of two police cars parked a few yards away and there was chatter coming from a mobile phone. In the early morning, unless there has been a discovery in the night, the search will begin again with local help. Farm labourers will form a line to beat the undergrowth and walk the woods. They’ll rove the harvest fields.

‘First light,’ Maidment predicts.

Zenobia waits for the water in the electric kettle to boil, emptying away what she has heated the teapot with. She makes the tea, then slices a tomato. She thought of making toast, buttering it and cutting it into fingers, but decided on a sandwich instead. It’s hard to know what to prepare for someone at a quarter to twelve at night, someone who’s sick with worry.

‘She said she wanted nothing,’ Maidment reminds her, ‘and he’s not back yet.’ The Lindbergh ransom sum was twice as much as the twenty-five thousand, but they had it and they paid it, not knowing that their baby had already been murdered. An illiterate German immigrant the abductor was.

‘She can’t want nothing for ever. It could be I should sit with her.’

‘She has the dog, of course.’

An hour ago he heard Mrs. Iveson moving about. She went from the drawing-room to the conservatory and was settling down there with the dog when he went to ask her if she needed anything. He opened a window for her.

‘I’ll take the tray in. Look in yourself, why don’t you, before you go upstairs? If she wants company she’ll say so.’

‘I couldn’t go upstairs tonight.’

Maidment, who intends to retire in the usual way, refrains from arguing that rest offers strength, and takes his jacket from the back of a chair. Rhymer the name of the elderly butler who knew about the Lindberghs was, Rhymer who touched the port and suffered for it. The old man’s knotted features appear in Maidment’s recall, the addled look that had developed in the bloodshot eyes. Gout and worse affected him in his work and they found him early, passed away quietly in a lavatory the night before. The pantryman was next in line for the position.

‘Nothing can be done but wait.’ Picking up the tray, Maidment satisfies himself with the observation. The Lone Eagle they called Lindbergh after his Atlantic flight, Rhymer said. The German was a jobbing carpenter, trusted in people’s houses.

‘I couldn’t,’ Zenobia repeats, filling the kettle again for the kitchen tea. ‘I couldn’t lie there sleepless.’

‘I’ll chance it myself for a while.’ For all they know, it could have been on the News, but sometimes of course the police will keep quiet for reasons of their own. Maidment pauses at the door, about to mention the News, but decides against that also.

‘I brought you something, Mrs. Iveson,’ he says in the conservatory. He hesitates for a moment, since this is going against her wishes, neither tea nor food requested. Disturbed by his entry, the dog stands up and stretches.

‘That’s kind of you, Maidment.’

‘It’s just a little.’

‘Thank you.’

She’s always polite and civil. She’s distant, but that’s her way; getting to know her, you come to understand that. A different manner of shyness in mother and daughter; less than a week ago he remarked on that.

He clears a space for the tray and pulls the wicker table a little closer to her. She has been waiting for the telephone in the hall to ring: you can tell that from how she is.

‘All we can do,’ she says.

The Lindbergh family was never the same again, Rhymer said; you had money, you had trouble; they took it from you, they killed you for it. Servants to money, the well-to-do were: when it came down to it, everyone was a servant, Rhymer maintained, unaware that most of his utterances were taken with a pinch of salt.

‘I can’t believe it was just some woman walking by. Do you think it was, Maidment?’

‘It’s hard to know what to believe, Mrs. Iveson.’ The trouble with a woman who’d take a baby, she could be a mental case. Without a shadow of doubt, the man who climbed up to the Lindberghs’ window was what they’d call a nutter nowadays.

‘You never had children, Maidment?’

She surprises him, asking that, and the question coming so suddenly. There is an intimacy in the query, as if what has happened this afternoon has changed their relationship, as if formality no longer makes sense.

‘No, we never did.’

With encumbrances, they wouldn’t have held a position down. They’d have to have gone for a different kind of house right from the beginning. He explains this, passing the time for her because it’s what she wants. Her voice is empty, but she keeps the conversation going.

‘This was the work you chose? Both of you?’

‘We met through the work. When the times changed we went as a couple because couples were the thing then. Zenobia picked up the kitchen knowledge, although lady’s maid she’d have preferred, upstairs being what she knew. Beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘My daughter thought the world of you both.’

‘She was the soul of kindness, your daughter.’

‘I’ve let her down.’

‘She’d be the last to say that.’

The tray is as he has placed it. She hasn’t poured her tea. She stares at the prickles of a plant he considers unattractive. Ripening fast, the grapes hang all around her. It’s hard to imagine, she says, that anyone wouldn’t stop to think before causing such distress.

Greed takes care of that, Maidment refrains from stating. It was greed that possessed an illiterate foreigner when he hatched his plot, fear that caused him to commit his more terrible crime. When greed and fear get going, who stops to think?

‘I would pay anything,’ she says, and Maidment can think of no suitable rejoinder. He pours her tea for her, handing her cup and saucer. A sudden longing to have a cigarette stirs in him. The dog is restless, he says, and takes her with him to the darkened garden.

‘Still we’ve never been to Scarrow Hill,’ Zenobia hears herself remark, and then they’re there. In the picnic area she spreads out the lunch-time fare, bread and salad, meat-loaf she made herself. Exposed on spongy hillside turf, an outline of grey rock depicts a giant.

She wakes abruptly. Around her on the kitchen table is the brass she has collected from all over the house, and Duraglit and cloths. There’s the silver, too: the ornamental pheasants from the dining-room, sugar-casters, toast racks and cutlery, the silver eggs that came from Poland, the Polish crucifixes. An hour she has spent already with the Duraglit and Goddard’s; before that she rearranged the tins and bottles on the cold-room shelves, and washed the passage and the cold-room floor. It’s five to three now.

She blinks and rubs her eyes, dragging herself back to fuller consciousness. There was a nurse who killed babies. Four babies, maybe more. A woman pretended to be pregnant, preparing her neighbours and her husband for what she intended to do, but when she got the baby she neglected it and it died. Other babies were taken in order to be tortured and afterwards a woman sought forgiveness, pointing out the burial places.

‘You take it easy, madam,’ the police officer who did the talking sought to soothe her when her voice rose anxiously in answer to a question. Strong tea, he advised; and counsellors were available. But prayer is Zenobia’s way. As drowsiness is dispersed, she prays again.

‘A Mrs. Ferry died tonight.’

At the sound of Thaddeus’s voice, Rosie lumbers to her feet, yawning and stretching herself again. The window Maidment opened earlier is closed now. In the conservatory only a single table lamp is lit.

‘That was the telephone call?’

‘Yes.’

He watches her nodding: she isn’t interested. In the brief, unemphatic motion of her head there is the weariness of defeat, as if time, by simply passing, has drained her of everything but this fatigue. Standing until now, Thaddeus sits down in the second wicker chair. Rosie comes to him, to rest her chin on his knees. He strokes her head.

‘There’s been nothing since,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry I went away.’

‘You looked for her?’

He shakes his head. There was panic in his restlessness; he ran away from thought, but of course you can’t do that. Talk is a help: in the last few moments he has discovered that. Any words, it hardly matters what they are, and the effort of releasing them: had he gone into the Old Edward, he might have stayed for ages.

‘I have never been so afraid,’ she says.

‘Nor I, I think.’

Zenobia is with them, as suddenly and as silently as an apparition. She has heard their voices, she offers coffee, or tea again. She picks up the tray on which her sandwich has not been touched, tea poured out and left. Thaddeus says:

‘You should go to bed, Zenobia.’

‘I’m better up, I thought.’

When she has gone he says: ‘I feel I am being punished.’

There is no response, but even so he continues.

‘Mrs. Ferry was a woman I ill-used. I had a peculiar childhood.’ It left uneasiness behind, he says, and tells her about that. ‘I have never trusted people. You were right to be doubtful: the untrusting are untrustworthy.’

‘I was ungenerous. I rushed in foolishly, as if your marriage were somehow mine to order.’

‘Your lack of generosity is more kindly called perception.’

‘I don’t think I said at lunch-time that I have come to understand why Letitia loved you.’

‘I was the last of her lame ducks. There was a bargain of some kind in our marriage, in the giving and the taking. But gradually it got lost, as if all it had ever been was a means to an end. I would have given half my life then to have loved Letitia. Today it will begin, I used to think. In some random moment of the morning, or after tea, or when we’ve gone to bed. But it never did.’

‘All that does not belong now.’

‘It is something to say.’

‘Why do you not blame me?’

‘Blame does no good.’

Vaguely, she nods again, the same tired gesture ofacknowledgement, not up to conversation. Thaddeus turns off the lamp on the table, and the conservatory is more softly lit by the haze of early morning. He does not want this day, so gently coming. He does not want its minutes and its hours, its afternoon and its evening, its relentless happening.

‘A miracle it has seemed like,’ Mrs. Iveson hears him say, and is confused until he adds: ‘Loving Georgina.’

She dreamed of Scarrow Hill, Zenobia says, and Maidment remembers from his own sleep a raw-faced bookie in a jaunty hat, and polka dots and hoops and jockeys’ chat, Quick One at nines, K. McNamara up. There was, before or after that, her wedding-dress hanging on the wardrobe door, his carnation in a tumbler by the wash-basin. There was his own voice singing ‘Drink To Me Only’.

‘It was to say a woman died,’ Zenobia passes on. ‘That phone call that came earlier.’

‘What woman?’

She gives the name. Bleary, he feels he’s dreaming still. Not quite in the kitchen yet, but hovering in the doorway as he sometimes likes to, he averts his head to belch away a little air. Slowly he advances to the table and sits down.

‘What’s this then?’

‘I looked in at the conservatory to see if anything was needed.’

‘They’re there?’

‘And have been a long while.’

‘So Mrs. Ferry’s passed on her way?’

‘Dead was what I heard.’

‘Mrs. Ferry was the woman quarrelled over the afternoon of the accident.’

‘You said.’

Each time she passed through the hall, returning the brass and silver pieces to their places, Zenobia says she heard the voices continuing in the conservatory. It not being her place to listen, she didn’t do so. What she heard about the woman there’d been the quarrel over was said when she looked in to see if anything was needed.

‘I dropped off a second and had that dream about the Scarrow Man.’

‘I doubt my eyes closed,’ Maidment touchily retorts, annoyed because it seems he might have passed the hours more profitably. He woke up and saw the other bed empty. Someone took the baby, he remembered then.

‘Bloody hell!’ he loudly and with suddenness exclaims. ‘Jesus bloody hell!’

In astonishment, Zenobia looks across the table at him. He is not given to this. Coarseness and blasphemy have never been his way.

‘We should have drawn special attention to that girl and her ring,’ his explanation comes, his tone still cross. ‘Out of the way, that episode was.’

‘Oh, surely not.’

‘Out of the way from start to finish.’

‘Well, mention it when they come back. No call for rowdiness.’

‘I said at the time. High and low she took him, after a ring that never saw the light of day in this house. I said it to you where you’re sitting now.’

‘No call for violent language neither.’

‘A time like this, it’s normal to speak straight out.’

His continuing vexation infects Zenobia. She responds as, years ago, she occasionally did in their circumspect marriage.

‘Was it speaking straight out to mention your bones to that man? Ridiculous, that sounded.’

‘What bones? What’re you talking about?’

‘It’s meaningless when you say you’ll lay down your bones. If you should have spoken about the girl and her ring, why didn’t you instead of going on about your bones?’

Astonished in turn, Maidment goes quiet. He stares at the scrubbed surface of the table, the furrows in the grain. Nothing more is said.

At half past five, faint beads of dew on the morning cobwebs, Thaddeus crosses one lawn and then the other, Rosie trailing behind him. He gathers tools from the shed in the yard: pliers and a hammer with a claw, wire-cutters and spade. The day he made the pen for Letitia’s pullets — out of sight, behind the summer-house — it took all morning. Dismantling promises to be quicker.

It was Letitia who planted the geranium banks he passes now — clumps of Lohfelden and Ridsko and Mrs. Kendall Clark, Lily Lovell and Lissadell. She wanted to have a part of the garden hers and cleared spring weeds and cut down nettles and dug up docks. She made her own wild corner, and her calm presence seems fleetingly there again among the echium and poppies, a Bach cantata soft on her transistor. Surely it is enough that she has died. Thinking that, for a moment it all seems one to Thaddeus, too: the death and what so soon has followed it.

The thought still there, he patiently extracts the staples that attach the chicken-wire to the posts he drove into the grass, dropping the staples into one half of a plastic container that once held spring water. He rolls up each length of wire as it becomes free and levers the posts back and forth until they’re loose enough to pull up. Only one does not come easily and he has to use the spade.

There are four coils of chicken-wire when he has finished, and eight posts which can be used for something else. The door he made of chicken-wire on a frame may be useful also. He fills the holes left in the grass with soil, ramming it home with his heel.

White sweet-pea thrives not far from where he works. Herbs are separated by narrow brick-paved paths: tarragon and apple-mint and basil, sage and parsley and rosemary and thyme, chives in profusion. A twisted trunk of wistaria is as thick as a man’s thigh, its tendrils stretching for yards on either side of the archway in which, yesterday, the door was found open. It is another cloudless day.

The branches of the cherry tree that marks this corner stretch over the patch that was suitable for hens. Tidying up there, after two hours’ work, Thaddeus hears the distant crunch of car tyres and pauses in his search for the short lengths of binding wire he has used, lost somewhere in the grass. Voices carry to him. A police car has returned.