Death in Summer

5

‘Well, good days, bad days,’ the nurse at St. Bee’s reports on the telephone, no tiredness in her tone, no hint of the tedium of having again to say what she has said so often before. There is a cheerfulness even, and Mrs. Iveson recalls the slapdash features of the woman’s face in which, as if to establish some kind of order, eyebrows are plucked and lips given a well-defined outline. She recalls the starched white uniform, the rinsed hair beneath the starched white cap, the watch pinned to a flattened bosom. When it was agreed that she should move to Quincunx House she rang St. Bee’s and explained to this same nurse about the change there was to be in her life and what had brought it about. ‘Oh, my God!’ the woman exclaimed then, her shock faltering into distress, sympathy offered when she recovered.

‘You’re settling in, Mrs. Iveson?’ she says now, three weeks after the arrangement was agreed, a fortnight after Thaddeus’s rendezvous with Mrs. Ferry.

Later today.’ A telephone number is given, repeated in St. Bee’s.

‘It’s marvellous ofyou, Mrs. Iveson. It’s simply marvellous.’

‘Not really.’

‘Indeed it is. Not that I don’t envy you, an infant that age. Day to day, there’s something new.’

‘I suppose there is.’

It isn’t true, but of course it doesn’t matter. Chat there has to be. Well, at least she has her grandchild, they would have commented at St. Bee’s when news of the death was earlier passed on. ‘And to think he doesn’t know!’ would have been said, as so often it must be in this home. Georgina was called after him, he being a George, but he doesn’t know that either.

‘A joy at that age, I always say, not that it takes an iota away from the gesture you’re making, Mrs. Iveson. We’re all full of admiration, we really are.’

She isn’t young, they would have said; it’s not as though she’s young. Moving right in like that, not faltering or going to pieces, turning her back on what she knows, not that change isn’t the best tonic when there’s been what there has been. And of course it’s natural, a daughter’s baby.

‘Never hesitate to call us up, dear. Don’t ever think it’s a nuisance, ringing up. In circumstances like this, I always say it’s good to talk.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I have the details, dear. Thanks ever so.’

Both receivers are replaced in the same moment. Who says lightning doesn’t strike twice? would have been said in St. Bee’s over cups of tea, the subject kept alive to ease the monotony of the day. No more’n a vegetable in tweeds, and now all this, the kiddy needing a mother’s hand, fortunate the father’s in agreement, unusual that.

I can’t say I’m not nervous about this upheaval, Mrs. Iveson last night finished a letter to her longtime friend in Sussex, and perhaps this is not at all what Letitia would want. Well, if it doesn’t work it doesn’t. We can only try.

She has let her flat to people called Redinger from Oregon, who say they like a good address. She chose them because something about their manner suggested to her that they would be careful tenants. Their tenancy is for four months only, since that is the period of their stay in England; and when it finishes the agency will come up with other people, whom she can also personally vet if she wishes to continue to let the flat. She could less inconveniently have left it empty, visiting it herself from time to time to see that all was well. But the advice she has received is that empty property, these days, attracts burglary: the Redingers and any successors they may have would be caretakers as much as tenants. With that in mind, and against the wishes of the agency she employed, she has asked for only a modest rent.

Often during the days that passed while all this was so swiftly arranged, Mrs. Iveson has experienced the doubts she expressed in her letter to her friend, but on each occasion has successfully wrangled with her misgivings. Within the tenancy agreement there is also a clause, specifically at the Redingers’ request, that allows one month’s notice on either side, should there be a change of circumstances. This is a comfort.

It is particularly so when Mrs. Iveson looks through what remains in cupboards and drawers on the morning of her departure, as she unlocks and locks again the built-in wardrobe that contains the clothes she isn’t taking with her. Everything is in order in the kitchen, the refrigerator empty, the electric kettle unplugged. The News comes unobtrusively from her Roberts radio, the sound turned down. Earthquakes in Russia, riots in Hong Kong, a body on a river path in Wales, carnage in Croatia. And five hundred pounds to be paid as compensation to a canary breeder who declares himself devastated after a single measure of seed swelled to ten times its bulk in his prize bird’s stomach, destroying all chance of success at the Culross and Kincardine Cage-birds Festival.

‘You’ve never known unhappiness, darling,’ her own voice echoes, sounding harsh although she did not intend it to. In marriage she had not known unhappiness herself, and simply feared for her daughter in uncharted territory. That on an April afternoon there should have been an encounter on a train was a chance as cruel as life uselessly passing in a twilight room. You can’t help loving someone, Letitia said, returning at her usual time from the music library less than two months later, not taking her coat off yet or putting down her handbag. And that was that.

Standing on a chair, Mrs. Iveson reads the electric meter. Kneeling down, she reads the gas one. She notes both figures and leaves the piece of paper on the kitchen table, asking the Redingers to check them. On the radio a programme about people who collect things begins, a woman in Pontefract with an assortment of dental plates, a man with light switches, another with beer-bottle tops. She turns the voices off, realizing that she should have done so before reading the meters but deciding that a minute of the radio won’t make much difference to the figure she has recorded.

She closes her kitchen door and sits down to wait by the window of her sitting-room. She gazes into the street below, where a smartly dressed tart is exercising her Pekinese. Not long ago she was taken for such a woman herself as she let herselfin at the downstairs door. A man with a moustache in a teddybear coat raised his hat. ‘Colette?’ he smiled. ‘I phoned.’ This trade, in daytime, is a new thing in the neighbourhood.

The woman and the dog pass round the corner and then Thaddeus’s car appears, his old blue car to which apparently he is attached. Letitia found that touching, as she did his attachment to his house and to his garden. A sentimental man, she said. The worst that could happen next was that unhappiness would come. Beyond imagination was what actually occurred.

The car is parked. Returning quickly, the woman with the Pekinese smiles. Thaddeus shakes his head. ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ Mrs. Iveson vexedly upbraids herself. She blows her nose and crosses from the window to a looking-glass. She tidies her hair again and then is ready.

‘Small mercies,’ Maidment commented when it was decided that a nanny was not to be added to the household, and Zenobia unhesitatingly agreed. A sense of satisfaction — almost of celebration — has since prevailed.

For, old or young, such women have been a bane. Nanny Tub, remembered without pleasure in a house in Somerset, belonged to a regime that lingered from the past, an imperious termagant, disdainful and cantankerous as of right. Her replacement, when finally a replacement was considered necessary, complained that she’d been given catfood in a shepherd’s pie. Another wouldn’t touch meat in any form and had to have Oriental vegetable dishes prepared for her. A third took garlic in quantity for her health, its odour trailing behind her from room to room.

‘We have to see, of course,’ Maidment concludes, caution in his tone, ‘how madam deploys herself.’

A racing paper, folded in two, lies between the couple on the scrubbed-oak surface of a table that is as strong as a butcher’s block and as steady. It is all that remains of the kitchen as once it was: the black-leaded double range has gone, as have the ham hooks from the ceiling, the row of bells, the stone flags from the floor. It is a modern kitchen now. Working surfaces are pale moulded laminate, wall cupboards finished to match; deep-freeze and refrigerator, cooking hob and oven, dishwasher, tumble-drier and washing-machine are unified through shape and colour and design of detail. But the oak table still retains its slab of white marble set in the timber at one end, for many generations an aid to bread- and pastry-making.

‘I foresee no troubled waters.’ Zenobia rises from the table as she speaks, gathering up the cups from which mid-morning tea has been drunk, the brown kitchen teapot, jug, sugar bowl, and a plate with only the crumbs of a cake left on it. She stacks these dishes on a tray and carries the tray to a draining-board, where she separates them: milk and sugar kept to one side, the teapot rinsed beneath a running tap, everything else placed in a washing-up basin in the sink.

‘Death is a trouble in itself,’ Maidment remarks, which is a repetition voiced regularly since the tragedy, for when Maidment discovers a phrase he considers apt he is generous in his use of it. ‘The good go quietly from us,’ he quoted on the day of the funeral, the observation overheard in another house on a similar occasion.

‘Life must go on,’ Zenobia retorts through the rattle of dishes.

‘I grant you that, dear. It’s not grief’s function to obstruct it.’

Shocked and sympathetic, the letters coming to the house have been read by Maidment, the daily stack of answers taken by him from the table in the hall to the postbox. ‘I cannot help myself,’ Zenobia apologized often during that time, weeping as she did her work. The will that was read left the couple a nest-egg substantial enough to allow eventual retirement without restriction. On that score, too, Zenobia’s tears have been shed.

‘I’m heating your milk, dear,’ she addresses the baby, in her care this morning, while Mrs. Iveson is fetched.

Sleepily occupying the pram that is her blue-and-white and most familiar world, incapable as yet of articulating more than private sounds, Georgina does not respond.

‘Never a hope they’ll get on,’ Maidment pursues his reasoning, ‘and of course were never meant to.’

‘They’ve put our young friend here before their differences. You can’t but admire that. There’s been a side brought out in both of them.’

‘I wouldn’t go a bundle on admiration. I wouldn’t put money on a side brought out.’ Maidment draws in air, his lean nostrils tight for a moment in a way that is particular to him. He releases them while glancing at a line of print, noting that It’s the Business, K. Bray up, is favoured if the going doesn’t turn heavy, which is unlikely. Major Mack gives Rolling Cloud, P. J. Murphy’s Guaranteed Good ‘Un is Politically Correct. He favours The Rib himself.

‘One minute and it’ll be ready, dear.’ Zenobia smiles with this annunciation, hoping that Mrs. Iveson’s advent will not deprive her entirely of the baby’s company. She tests the milk and returns it to the bottle-heater, considering it not yet warm enough. The survivors share the burden of a child: that’s what there is; the rest is wait and see. She does not press her conjecture of a moment ago, but deliberates instead. He has his ways, he has his right to an opinion. Servitude has made him what he is and has — though differently — made her. All that, Zenobia accepts, and expects no more of their calling. Childless themselves — as so often and so naturally their predecessors in this kitchen have been — they are a couple who hang on in whatever households they can find. They are out of their time, which was a time when servitude had a place reserved for it, part of what there was. Their lives are cramped as much by this as by the exigencies of domestic duty, yet on neither count do they complain. They have chosen this; they have sensed the stirrings of vocation in serving the remnants of nobility or the newly rich. They have found a place in the great houses that are now the property of popular entertainers, that are now hotels and schools and residential business centres. They have visited on their Sundays off places of local interest in the many counties of their employment, this in particular being Zenobia’s relaxation: Lydford Gorge and Mount Grace Priory, cathedrals and gardens, the narrowest street, the oldest tower clock. As they are presently settled so they hope they may remain, not moving on until age gets the better of them.

‘And it may not,’ Zenobia answers her own reflection, testing the temperature of the milk, squirting a drop on to her wrist. ‘We trust in Providence.’

In The Rib more like, Maidment’s thought is: O’Brien the trainer, The Rib will take some beating. Maidment has never been on a racecourse: what he knows, all he experiences of the turf, is at second-hand, but second-hand is enough. Epsom and Newmarket, the Gold Cup, the Guineas, the sticks, the flat: it is enough that they are there, that sports pages and television bring them to him. Rising from his chair, folding the newspaper away, he softly hums a melody he danced to as a boy, and prepares to go about his morning tasks, vacuuming and airing and dusting, setting things to rights. He tolerates old clocks and narrow streets, he does his best in gardens and in stately rooms that do not interest him. Other people’s lives, how they are lived and what they are, offer what the vagaries of the turf do: mystery and the pleasure of speculation.

Zenobia hears the humming of her husband’s tune continue in the kitchen passage and abruptly cease when he passes through the door to the hall. As he is unmoved by what she most enjoys, so she is not drawn to the excitements of the racetrack; and mystery for her is the mystery of the Trinity. Every night and morning she prays on her knees by her bedside; on Sundays her husband waits in their small red Subaru with the News of the World, while she attends whatever church they pass on their way to a place of interest. Disagreement between them no longer becomes argument, resentment does not thrive. Give-and-take patterns the Maidments’ middle age; they go their ways and yet remain together.

‘Oh, it is better so,’ Zenobia comments, offering the opinion to her employer’s child.

In the small room that opens out of the bedroom in which Thaddeus Davenant was born are the personal possessions he has kept by him, and photographs and papers. For the five years of his sojourn in this house Maidment has repeatedly examined them, expertly poking about in drawers and in the pigeon-holes of a writing desk, anywhere that is unsecured. Box-files are marked Insurance, Receipts, Bank Statements, Accounts. In a flat tin that once contained mint sweets there are keys that have never been thrown away, old fountain-pens, old watches, a yo-yo, an empty notebook, cufflinks separated from their match, tie-pins, dice, marbles. A shallow drawer is full of half-used seed packets. A silver hip-flask bears the initials P. de S. D., and at the wheel of a sports car is a genial man whom Maidment has long ago recognized as the initials’ source. He it was who attempted to resurrect the family’s past by manufacturing soap instead of the tallow that for generations had made its fortune, travelling the countries of Europe in search of orders. Pasted into an album now, he’s there among trams and motor-cars in Vienna, and again in Amsterdam. He skates with a tall, beautiful girl on a frozen lake, is with her among the wild flowers of a hillside. Maidment knows her well: Hitler’s war came, Eva Paczkowska was brought from Poland to England in the nick of time. Still beautiful, she stands smiling by the summer-house. Still beautiful, she’s on the front-door steps, holding a child by the hand. But beside her the genial man she married is cadaverous now.

Maidment has searched but has never found snapshots of that child growing up. The camera seemed to have been put away. Only among the gowned ranks of schoolboys, framed on the room’s dark wallpaper, is there a face he recognizes, reticent and private at that time.

Some tidying has taken place, he notices this morning. The wastepaper basket is full, papers that have accumulated since the death are no longer in a bunch beneath the bronze horseman on the windowsill. Cheque-book stubs indicate payments made that were not possible a week or so ago, before a simple probate was completed. Correspondence from solicitors has been relegated to a relevant file, letters of condolence ticked when they’ve been answered. The hiatus is over, the debris of death disposed of. The woman who asked for money has been visited, faith kept with a wife’s last wish.

On the landing Maidment arranges towels and sheets in the hot cupboard, placing those not yet aired closer to the cistern. In the bedroom that is to be Mrs. Iveson’s he raises a window sash in order to expel a wasp, satisfies himself that the bulbs of the bedside lamps do not need to be replaced, extracts from the welcoming flowers a sweet-pea whose stem has failed to reach the water in the vase. ‘The Rib, four thirty,’ he keeps his voice low to instruct on the landing telephone. Palm cupped around the mouthpiece, he gives the racecourse details and makes his wager.

Outside, a car door bangs, there’s Rosie’s bark. Not hurrying, for Maidment never does, he makes his way downstairs, to carry up Mrs. Iveson’s suitcases.

The canal doesn’t have any barges on it and only a sludge where there should be water. She discovered the towpath that runs by it the night she stayed late at the door in the wall and there wasn’t a bus to the railway station. No one is about when she passes the broken petrol pump and the shop and the public house.

Seven times in all she has phoned in the weeks that have passed, five times replaced the receiver when it wasn’t his voice. Twice she has put down flowers for him to find, but this afternoon she hurries by the graveyard, not going in to see if he has put fresh flowers down himself. This afternoon she’s anxious to get to the door quickly.

She opens it cautiously, an inch or two, when she arrives, even though she has made friends with the dog. She can hear a movement in the undergrowth, not far from where she is. In a moment, paws scratch and the dog’s nose is pressed through the crack. She can see its tail wagging and she reaches in and pats its head. It goes away then, as it did the other time.

‘They called it the October house,’ she hears after another long wait, his voice reaching her easily.

Sixteen-sided, the summer-house was built to catch the autumn sun, he is telling the old grandmother, who’s dressed all in white. It was positioned with that in mind, he says, its windows angled for that purpose. The dog is with them, panting in the warmth.

‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ the grandmother says, and Pettie can tell that this is what she has been dreading, that this old woman has come to take her place.

‘The Victorians experimented more than people know.’

Some of what is said next is lost, but then they’re nearer and he’s talking about the trees, pointing at them. He refers to the grass of the lawns, saying he remembers a time when it was two feet high. Nettles grew through the heather-beds on the slopes, he says, and thistles in the rose-beds. The grandmother says something about a diary that went on and on, year after year, and he says oh yes, Amelia Davenant’s journal, before his time.

‘Letitia talked about it,’ she says.

‘Letitia liked it.’

It seems it’s history now, this diary, written during some woman’s sleepless nights, yonks ago — entries about a chimney being swept and milk going sour and marmalade made, an Indian selling carpets at the door. A punnet of raspberries, picked and left down somewhere, could not be found. A cousin got engaged. The well didn’t fill, a duchess was murdered in some foreign place. He’s making conversation with all that; doing his best, you can tell from his voice. He doesn’t want what has happened. He doesn’t want this old woman in his house.

‘At parties they used to dance outside. Waltzes lit from the downstairs windows and the front door. Music in the hall.’

‘Yes. Letitia said.’

Some gardener or other came back from the trenches in a shocking state. ‘He showed his wound to the children. Here, among his vegetable-beds. Among them was my father.’

Hinchley the gardener was called. His scar stretched from wrist to elbow because while an enemy soldier was inflicting it he was shot and fell forward, bringing this Hinchley to the ground with the bayonet trapped in his arm. After he’d shown the children his wound Hinchley always had a smoke apparently, a small, charred pipe for which he pared tobacco from a plug.

‘Stories hang about old family houses like ghosts.’ It was his mother who told him all that about the gardener; his father didn’t tell stories much.

‘Letitia kept a diary when she was little,’ the grandmother gets her say in.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘It’s interesting about the summer-house.’

You can tell she isn’t interested in the least, even though she has said she is twice. She has wangled her way into the house, pulling the wool over his eyes with her talk. He was referring to that other diary and she has to bring Letitia into it, harping on the name when he’s trying to forget it in his grieving.

She’s on about a shoe now, a heel coming off when Letitia was little and Letitia not minding when she had to walk in her bare feet on a street. There’s something about how Letitia went in for music, how she always had music going apparently, how she couldn’t be without it. He makes some comment on that, but his voice is too low to carry.

‘Well, I must go and see if my charge has woken up,’ the old woman says.

Dismally, Pettie watches while he pats the dog’s big brown head, the way he’s always doing. A blackened tennis-ball falls by his feet, a paw prods his trousers. There’s foam on the dog’s tongue and when the ball is thrown it’s carried back again and dropped at his feet.

‘Thaddeus.’ She says his name, louder than a whisper. Each day going by and the old woman still not here, she thought there was a chance. Just by looking at the old woman you can see it: anything goes wrong she’ll be all over the place.

The ball is pushed against his shoe when he takes no notice. The dog’s fond of him, standing back and barking now. Letitia’d never want it, an inadequate tending Georgina Belle. Grandmother or not, well longer than thirty years it would be since she tended a baby.

She says his name again. She wants to push the door wide open and go to him. She wants to tell him she knows he’s hurting, to tell him she put the flowers there. She wants to tell him what Letitia would, that the baby isn’t properly minded, that the baby isn’t safe.

She watches while he smiles down at the dog. He throws the ball again, skittering it over the grass, and her longing is more than she can bear. She closes her eyes and his voice whispers between his caresses, saying he knows too well the old woman shouldn’t be here. His fingertips are light on her skin, and on her lips when he whispers that it is their secret, that they have always had a secret, since the first day she phoned him up, that everything in the end will be all right. His arms hold her to him. He whispers that a thing like this can happen. He calls her his princess.