Death in Summer

4

Six days go by and then Thaddeus does what he feels he has to, having put it off, but now wanting to get it over. He has been given a time and a place, four o’clock in the Tea Cosy. He brings with him fifty pounds in notes.

The teashop is in the town where Mrs. Ferry was once the receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel. The Beech Trees has gone, and with it Mrs. Ferry’s onetime husband, whom she would settle for now. She lives alone, in a room above a confectioner’s. The Tea Cosy is in a busier street, five minutes away.

‘Bad Hat!’ Mrs. Ferry exclaims from where she sits when Thaddeus enters, lowering his head beneath the beam with a sign on it to warn him. Bad Hat! her Valentine message ran seventeen years ago, among others in a local paper. But good for his ever-loving Dot!

She has ordered tea, and a plate of cakes, which she was always partial to and used to say she shouldn’t be. She bulges out of a spotted yellow dress, a hat reminiscent of a turban hiding much of her henna hair, her lipstick a splash of crimson. Coloured beads lollop over double chins and reach an artificially deepened cleavage, exposed between mammoth breasts. There is no sign in this spectacle of the ill-health so regularly touched upon in Mrs. Ferry’s letters. Only her weight would seem to be a subject for a consulting room.

‘Hullo,’ Thaddeus greets his afternoon woman of long ago, recalling her underclothes on the back of a chair, the curtains pulled over. ‘Hullo, Dot.’

‘Well, dear, you haven’t changed. He’ll have put on a year or two, I said, but truth to tell you hardly have.’

He smiles, wiping away with his fingers the lipstick she has left on his cheek, which would have been his mouth if she’d had her way. She pours his tea, remarking that, after all, it wasn’t yesterday. She speaks in a hurried gabble, doing her best to be lighthearted. She offers Thaddeus the plate of cakes.

‘I have to explain,’ he interrupts when there’s a chance.

But she hurries on, as if fearful of what might be said. ‘We’ve had good times, dear. Don’t think I didn’t appreciate that. I lie alone in my little place, watching the light come at the curtains, and I think how good the times were. I haven’t been well, you know.’

‘You said. I’m sorry.’

‘I wouldn’t have asked another living soul. I lie there remembering our times and I think there’s no one I can ask except my old Bad Hat.’

He wishes she wouldn’t call him that, but of course it is her right and once he didn’t mind. Thad dear, her letters have begun: that, also, he didn’t mind.

‘I’ve come over because of something that has happened. I didn’t send anything before-’

‘Shh now, dear.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He lowers his voice. ‘I didn’t send anything before because strictly speaking the money’s my wife’s. I didn’t feel I could.’ He pauses until her cup is raised, and hurries on while she sips her tea, spreading another red smudge on the china surface. ‘But then my wife came across one of your letters.’

‘Oh, my God!’ Careless herself now, Mrs. Ferry causes people to look their way. ‘Oh, my dear God!’

Thaddeus doesn’t give the details of how the letter came to light. ‘It upset her that you were in need. When she read about it she wanted you to have something.’

‘I don’t believe I follow this, dear.’

Thaddeus does not intend to disclose the fact of his widowhood, feeling that in the circumstances it would not be sensible to do so. He has respected Letitia’s wishes, he’ll send whatever is demanded in the future, but the consequences of divulging that he is again on his own are very much to be avoided.

‘My wife simply wanted to help you. She read your letter and was upset.’

‘I’m to blame for a commotion!’ is Mrs. Ferry’s response, declared in the same noisy manner.

‘No, no, of course you’re not.’

She shakes her head. A shock, she says; she nearly fainted. Her eyes seem smaller than they were a moment ago. Her mouth remains slightly open when she has finished speaking, the tip of her pink tongue revealed.

‘I wanted to explain, Dot. I’m very sorry you got a shock.’

‘I never meant harm, dear.’ Though stated more quietly, a degree of Mrs. Ferry’s natural perkiness has returned. ‘No one wants that. You believe me, dear, no harm was meant?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Another fact is, there was nothing any time I wrote to you that was an indiscretion. We have had our indiscretions, not that I regret them, not a single one. But nothing was written by me that could have offended a wife, for I said to myself I must not do that. I wrote when I was at my lowest. The first time I was at my lowest, the next time not so bad but still not able for things. I’m ailing through and through, to tell you the honest truth. Now that you’ve been kind enough to come over I can say that.’

She lives like this, Thaddeus finds himself reflecting. She writes men begging letters without threats, needling their guilt, sniffing out money. God knows how many overnight commercial travellers have benefited in the past at the Beech Trees. God knows how often the handwriting that slopes in all directions succeeds in eliciting assistance, with muttered oaths.

‘I have no money of my own, Dot.’

‘You never had, love.’

‘I think I tried to explain when you wrote the first time that it felt wrong to give you my wife’s money, but I don’t think I succeeded.’

‘Isn’t it strange how things pan out? I was well set up, married to a prosperous man, you hadn’t a bean. I didn’t want presents, it never mattered.’

She unlocked the door of Room Twenty when the chambermaids had gone home. He went up the back staircase and waited for her, and sometimes — if it was easy — she came with two drinks on a tray, gin and Martini. He used to smoke in those days, but she never let him in Room Twenty because the smell of cigarettes would be a give-away when the evening maid came on. She didn’t want talk in the hotel. She was particular about that.

‘I wouldn’t have written unless I was down.’

‘I know. I understand that.’

‘Do you, Thad? Do you really? Do you know what it is to be down?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And short when you’re getting on a bit? You weren’t much more than a boy when you were selling your garden produce. Oh, how I remember that!’

He filled the van with what he grew or picked from the fruit trees, and set off in the early morning. He supplied Fruit ‘n’ Flowers on the way and then the Beech Trees, and she was in and out of the kitchen. A grey A30 the van was, second-hand and hardly big enough.

‘I was always surprised, you know, you didn’t have ajob.’

‘It was a job of a kind.’

‘Oh, heavens, yes. Anyone could see you worked. I often wish we could turn the clock back, Thad. She’s younger, is she?’

‘A few years.’

‘I must have guessed it. You wouldn’t have written that.’

‘No, I don’t think I did.’

‘You only wrote back to me the once, dear.’

‘All I could have kept on saying was that the money wasn’t really mine to give away.’

‘Money, money! What a curse it is! Extraordinary, a wife not minding though. You have to say extraordinary, Thad?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Well, there you go, as they say these days.’

‘Yes.’

‘I hate them, really, these new expressions.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m all right, you know. Except for being short I’m all right. I take pills. I’ve got a few things wrong inside, you know, but there you are. Worse at the moment is the heat. You relish the heat, Thad?’

‘Yes, actually I do.’

‘You’re weather-beaten. It suits you. I wonder if he’ll be weather-beaten? I said. He’s an outside man, I said, stands to reason it’ll show. D’you know what I’d like? I’d like to show you my little place.’

‘Oh, look, I don’t think-’

‘Old times’ sake, Thad. Five minutes for old times’ sake. I’d love to show you.’ And Mrs. Ferry whispers, grimacing to make a joke of her reservation: ‘I wouldn’t want anything handed over here, dear.’

The bill comes swiftly. He pays it and stands up. She gathers together her belongings.

‘You haven’t lost your looks, Thad.’ She lowers her voice again for that, working a dimple, the way she used to. ‘A dear, dear friend,’ she whispers to a couple who nod to her as they go by, who examine Thaddeus with curiosity. ‘Oh, darling, I’ve mislaid a glove!’ she cries, and people at the nearby tables stand up to poke about on the floor for a lace glove, of sentimental value. ‘Oh, I’m so fussed today!’ Mrs. Ferry apologizes when it’s discovered in the pocket of her skirt, and the Tea Cosy settles down again.

Two pounds and fourpence arrive in change. Thaddeus reaches for the coins and leaves a tip. With a plastic butcher’s bag, the Daily Telegraph and the Radio Times, her lace gloves in place, a large velvet handbag held tightly, Mrs. Ferry is ready now, and on the street outside she takes his arm.

‘That’s never your car, dear!’ she exclaims, eyeing Thaddeus’s battered old Saab and Rosie in it. ‘Well, I never!’

‘Are you far? Is it worth driving?’

‘A minute’s walk. You have a dog, dear.’

‘Yes.’

‘Remember the Sealyham at the hotel?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘H died, of course. We buried him at the back. Remember Oscar? The daytime porter?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘He went a fortnight later, poor old Oscar.’

She opens a door beside a shop window full of jars of sweets, Rolo and Kit-Kat and Mars bars advertised, Easter eggs reduced. The hall they pass through to reach uncarpeted stairs is stacked with cartons of similar confectionery, and strewn with junk mail. People listen in the Tea Cosy, Mrs. Ferry explains, they listen and they watch, he probably noticed. In the room she lives in she pours out gin, not offering it first. Both glasses have lipstick on them.

‘I haven’t changed my tipple.’ Mrs. Ferry winks, adding the Martini. There should be lemon, she apologizes, there should be ice. But lemons are a price these days, and ice she can never manage, the fridge she has. A fluffy teddybear, in blue with one eye gone, is on the bed.

‘Cheers, dear.’

‘I must be careful. I have to drive.’

‘Poor Oscar went in the hall. He carried in a couple’s bags, the next thing was we were loosening the poor chap’s collar. “I’ll sit down just a minute,” he said. Well, truth to tell, that was the end.’

Thaddeus nods, remembering Oscar, old even in 1979, burly and genial. He always suspected that Oscar knew.

‘Your mother wasn’t long gone in our day, dear. You used to mention your mother the odd time.’

‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’

‘Oh, definitely. On the strange side, I considered, but of course I never said. One’s nervous, young. A foreign lady, wasn’t she?’

‘My mother was Polish.’

‘Romantic, it sounded. Not that you’d ever say much.’

He never had; he never did. His childhood in that thread-bare past is one of shame: his unwanted presence, his garden friendship with the ghosts of pets, footsteps that passed by when he lay awake, whispers on the stairs.

‘Close you were, dear. Oh, very close.’

‘I suppose I was.’

He takes two twenty-pound notes and a ten from his wallet and places them on a bamboo table. He can see her counting them from a distance. He tells her how much is there.

‘Butter side up you’ve landed, dear. I haven’t done so well myself. What’s she like?’

‘I don’t really want to talk about Letitia.’

‘I know, dear, I know. I always thought you’d end up with a smasher, I bet she’s that. An eye for the ladies, Chef used to say when you hawked your produce in the Trees.’

He smiles, but it isn’t enough. He knows what Mrs. Ferry is thinking because it’s there in her eyes. It was there in the teashop, it was there when she embraced him: she was his fancy woman, and now he’s gone stuffy on her. ‘He can be so blooming stuffy,’ she used to say, referring to her husband. ’He gets my goat sometimes.’

‘Palpitations is what I suffer mainly,’ she’s saying now. ‘A warning, they give it as, and then there’s the digestive thing. I’ve had more barium meals than a cat’s had mice, and still it’s a bewilderment to the medics.’

‘I’m sorry, Dot.’

‘You were romantic yourself, you know, left alone in your big old house. I’d think of you, and long to be there with you. Oh, others did too, I don’t delude myself. What was she called, that girl you had before you and I had our naughtiness? Beatrice? Beryl?’

‘Bertranda.’

‘Funny, that, I always thought. You’re still seeing Bertranda, dear?’

‘I haven’t seen Bertranda since 1977.’

‘Well, there you go. Not that I ever knew the girl, but everything’s of interest as you get older. You find that, Thad?’

‘Not really.’

‘You spent a night at the Trees. When his Cheltenham uncle died. Remember that? You had to skulk about, Twenty not being en suite.’

Thaddeus doesn’t want to remember, but images and sounds occur: the narrow corridor, shoes outside the doors, the lavatory with the cracked window-pane, someone having a bath, a radio on in a room he passed.

‘You parked the van two streets away.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘That same chef’s in the Royal now. We still keep up.’

‘I must be going, Dot.’

‘Oh, love, you’ve only just come.’She stands with a bottle in each hand. Old times’ sake, she says again. Old times, old flames. A laugh comes moistly, a giggle that rises from some depth within her. The flesh of her chins and of her propped-up breasts wobbles, then settles again. ‘Remember that first afternoon, eh? My, you were keen that first afternoon!’

That was long ago, Thaddeus says, then realizes this sounds dismissive. Friendships belong to their time: he corrects his remark in an effort to mend matters. But the effort is wasted because Mrs. Ferry still isn’t listening.

‘Not that I wasn’t keen myself, dear. I’m not saying that for a minute. Bucketing down it was. That gutter leaking above the window, drip, drip, drip. I told him afterwards — the gutter above Number Twenty, and he said he’d get Oscar up a ladder.’

‘I really must go now.’

‘I treated him badly, Thad.’ Idly she caresses the blue teddybear, prodding at the empty eye. ‘He worshipped me and I threw it back at him.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t.’

‘Poor little man, he wore that cravat to give himself a presence, like he tried for with the moustache. Everything for me, he said, and I threw it back. I lie awake sometimes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘He married again, of course. Happy as a sandboy.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘Not for me it isn’t, dear. Not for an erring lady. D’you. ever think of that, Thad? The error of our ways?’

Thaddeus smiles. He confesses that he often dwells on the error of his ways. He comments on the room they’re in, saying it’s charming.

‘It’s what I can afford, dear.’ She carries his eyes with hers around the room’s contents — the big refrigerator in a corner, the screen that half obscures a sink, the tattered curtains, the television on a shelf, her shopping thrown on to the bed. The evening sun shows up the dust on surfaces. ‘The lav’s a flight up. She charges for a bath, fifty p on the gas. Oh well, there you are! I soldier on.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘You bring that Bertranda to your house, Thad?’

‘No, I never did.’

‘You can’t not bring a wife, though. You let her in, eh?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I’d dearly love to know what she’s like. A wife that’d pay good money to an erring lady is never usual, Thad.’

‘Look -’

‘I understand, dear. Silly to be curious.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’d never bother you, Thad. I’d never be a leech.’

She pours more gin and tries to fill his glass as well, but he puts his hand over the top of it. Her husband’s in Lytham St. Annes, she says, the brass buttons of his blazer still smart, although of course the blazer would be a different one these days, but she can see him in it and she often does, navy blue as ever it was, pen and propelling pencil in the inside pocket, the neat knot of his Paisley tie.

‘How well I knew him, Thad!’

‘Yes.’

‘Not for me the past’s been buried. Not long ago or any time, unfortunately.’

Tears run through the powder on her face, thin rivulets wreaking minor havoc. She promised herself she wouldn’t, she cries with shrill determination. She swore before he came that not a single tear would fall. ‘Bad Hat,’ she murmurs, trying for a smile, forcing out a laugh instead.

‘My own Bad Hat.’

‘I hope it’ll be a help.’ He nods towards the bamboo table, the notes still where he placed them.

‘I have my pride, dear.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘She’s a — what’s her name, Thad?’

‘Letitia.’

‘That’s lovely, dear. A younger wife, no more than a girl, is she? And kiddies too?’

‘I have a daughter.’

‘I’m truly glad for you. A Sagittarian, Letitia is?’

‘A what?’

‘I thought you said a Sagittarian. When’s Letitia’s birthday, dear?’

‘May.’

‘More like a Gemini, I’d say. And what’s the little daughter called, dear?’

‘Georgina.’

‘Five? Six?’

‘Georgina’ll be six months in a few weeks.’

‘Capricorn, I shouldn’t wonder. And you’re Aquarius yourself, as I remember.’

‘I must go, Dot.’

‘Remember, I’d say you were always going? A shadow flitting?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

He touches a cheek with his lips and feels it damp. A hand grasps one of his, her body presses, thighs and knees, mouth searching, and suddenly her tongue. The rim of the glass she still holds is sharp on his stomach, its contents spilling into his shirt.

‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry!’

She fusses with a handkerchief, dabbing him with it. He can’t go yet, she insists, and disappears behind the screen. She runs a tap and squirts out washing-up liquid. It doesn’t matter, Thaddeus protests, but she says it does, wiping him with a soapy cloth.

‘Whatever’ll she say? Whatever’ll she think you’ve been up to, dear?’

‘It’s all right. Please don’t worry.’

‘Be honest with me, Thad: she didn’t think harassment when she read the letter?’

‘Harassment?’

‘It’s what they call it these days. Privacy invaded when all there’s been is a few letters. You tell her no harm meant. You tell her that?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Forgive me for all this kerfuffle, dear.’

‘Of course I do.’

‘You won’t forget old Dot?’

‘Of course I won’t.’

He looks back from the door before he goes. The wet cloth is on the bed beside her, she has poured herself another drink. She hugs her teddybear, trying to smile again. She raises her glass to him.

‘I loved you all over again this afternoon, Thad.’

He smiles away this protestation, shaking his head. In the past she wasn’t a drunk. She held the aces, as she used to say; she could have had anyone. Brash and shiny, irresistible on a barstool, or suddenly in the kitchen when he delivered what the chef she still keeps up with had ordered, there was an extraordinary excitement about her until she threw him over for an insurance salesman. ‘Why can’t you love a girl?’ she demanded, accusation in her tone, and he was taken aback.

‘Goodbye, Dot.’

She waves a hand, then turns her face away, seeming overcome. He doesn’t know why, just for a moment, he wants to tell her he has been widowed, that the wife she is jealous of died because she was concerned about chickens in a wooden box, that no arrogance or self-regard was smacked down by so absurd a death, only gentle modesty. In that same moment there is an urge that almost has its way: to connect past and present, to confess he could not love a girl because that is how he is, to throw in that he loves his child, a circumstance that still bewilders him. But nothing more is said.

Within minutes she’ll be asleep, he guesses as he descends the narrow stairway. Thrown down on her bed, the smell of gin cloying on her breath, she’ll drift through inebriated slumber and wake when her bed-sitting room is shadowy with twilight. A friend is what she needs, a friend from the present, not the past, some man to interest her in his hobbies, old coins or mill-wheels or choral singing. A man because she is a man’s woman. A man to whom she might give what she has always wasted, her generous muddle of devotion and respect.

Beside Thaddeus in the car, Rosie’s eyes are closed, her jaw propped on the edge of the passenger seat. He reaches out and runs the back of his fingers through her soft mane. She’s company in a car, she likes being with him. ‘Look!’ Letitia exclaimed the day she brought her back, and he thought to himself this flea-infested, mangy animal will be a nuisance and an expense. Better to have left the creature to find her own way out of her misery, he wanted to say, but instead said nothing.

With only a line of pylons breaking his horizon, he drives as slowly as he always does. He bought his snub-nosed Saab for a few hundred pounds when the big end went in the grey van Mrs. Ferry remembers. ‘That jalopy’ll go on for ever,’ the man who sold it to him promised; eighty-seven thousand four hundred, the odometer registers now. Before the grey van there was his father’s Aston Martin, which dated back to 1931, which of all his father’s possessions his mother was most adamant they should not sell. ‘We keep your father always. We see him in his things. We go to your father’s church.’ And every Sunday they did, walking there even when it rained. Twice a year Father Rzadiewicz drove her to Mass and afterwards played cards with her in the conservatory or the drawing-room she’d allowed to become tawdry, the old priest wearing his black mittens even in summer. The Aston Martin gave up on the road one day and had to be towed away, the repair that was necessary too expensive even to contemplate.

He was not able to love the bursar’s daughter when he was still fifteen, although above all else he wanted to. He tried to say he did on all their walks, and in the trunk loft, his blazer flung down on dusty floorboards, sunlight from a roof window warming her expectant face, her brown hair soft in his fingers. ‘Why can’t you love a girl?’ So very crossly that was demanded in Room Twenty, and elsewhere also. Disappointed in the end, would Letitia, too, have protested that passion wasn’t enough in return for so much more?

Held up behind a lorry loaded with steel girders, an impatient sports car flashes its headlights. The lorry driver takes no notice, neither hurrying nor drawing in, and the lights are flashed again. Thaddeus turns off the main road, into the lanes.

Approaching the gateless pillars at the entrance to his house, he glimpses for an instant a flash of something white and blue — a child, it seems like, hurrying on a little used right-of-way through the fields. Even in the distance there is a familiar look about the figure, but Thaddeus does not pause to wonder why that is.

The car arrives, and then he’s there. She didn’t know that he was out somewhere. All the time on her journey she imagined him in the sunshine in his garden, and she wonders now where he has been. It could not have been the grave, for she’d have seen the car parked as she passed. Has he gone from shelf to shelf in a supermarket, having to because he has no wife to do it for him now? The dog is with him in the garden, and when he walks back to the house the dog remains.

She edges the door in the wall open, distrustful of the dog, but it doesn’t come. An hour passes, and then the woman dressed in black appears. She picks something that grows close to the ground, a bunch of greenery she goes away with. Soon after that the dog comes to the door and Pettie pushes it closed. She opens it gingerly; the dog just looks at her, wagging its tail. She takes a chance, patting its head, and then it bounds off.

Yesterday, twice, she put the receiver down immediately when it was that woman who answered. But an hour or so later his voice said, ‘Hullo,’ and when she walked away from the phone box she could feel such happiness as she never knew before. On the street two women stared at her and she stared back and laughed, wanting to tell them, wanting to say his name to them.

Trees protect her from the windows, a leafy barrier through which, after another wait, she watches the gaunt man light up a cigarette, far away in the yard. She noticed the green door in the arch of the high brick wall when he allowed her and the other girls to walk in the garden while they were waiting for the interviews. The two who kept together didn’t speak, one and then the other going off when her moment came to ring the doorbell. She being the last, she waited longest and, passing the door in the wall for the second time, she opened it and saw leading from it the path through the fields.

The green paint has blistered and faded on the door. There is an iron casing within the archway that spreads two hinges in a pattern like the outline of a leaf on to the door itself. He has opened and closed this door. How many times? The metal latch is strong, moves easily, its tongue shaped for the thumb that operates it. How often has he touched it? How often does he still? She bends down to caress it with her lips. Her eyes are closed, a cheek pressed hard against the worn green paint.

Dusk comes, the last of the light pale in the sky. Reluctantly Pettie goes away, lingering to look back at the tall chimneys of the house, their brick arranged in decoration that can’t be distinguished now, darkly silhouetted against the sky. On either side of the way through the fields she picks flowers she doesn’t know the names of, and picks more from the verges of the lane. In the graveyard she finds a jam-pot on a neglected grave and fills it with water from a tap by the side of the church. Her flowers are colourful in the gloom, beside the withering blooms on the mound of fresh clay. She leaves them there for him to find, to comfort him in his grieving.