Bury Him Darkly Page 16

  She shook her head, pouting. ‘It’s not her voice.’

  ‘But it’s her face?’

  ‘You’ll have to speak louder, dear.’

  ‘I said — but it’s her face?’

  ‘Oh yes, the face. Mostly. I suppose. Here — you can do it better than me — get me that picture. The one there by the clock. That’s the one. Bring it over here and I’ll show you. And the one next to it, while you’re at it.’

  I moved as slowly as I could without attracting her suspicions, giving myself time. She didn’t seem to have much patience. My eyes ran along the row of framed photos, very old and sepia in soft focus, to the left, with the women in old-fashioned gowns, and on to colour prints, un-posed, as they got closer to the clock. Appropriate — history racing onwards, up to that minute. Or rather, it would have been up to that minute if the clock had been going. Behind it — and I almost reached for it to wind it for her, until I stopped myself — there was a wad of letters.

  Her eyes were keener than I’d anticipated. Perhaps she needed help only close to. She said, noticing my hovering hand, ‘No. Not those.’

  When I turned back with the two photo frames, she seemed to realize her voice had been too sharp. She pouted in apology. ‘I don’t want to see them again.’ Yet she’d kept them. ‘Begging letters. Not that I mind sending money, but I hate being written to just for the money. Is that very silly of me?’ she added pitifully, as though I was some sort of monitor, to pass judgement.

  ‘Very sensible,’ I said, handing her the pictures, slipping in behind her chair at her shoulder to get a good look.

  ‘That’s her,’ she told me, stabbing a finger. ‘Tonia.’

  Two young girls stood side by side, the background a distant and unfocused Waterford House. One had her arm round the other’s shoulders, the shorter one had hers round her sister’s waist. It had to be Bella and Tonia, at — what age? — eighteen and sixteen, perhaps. A slimmer Bella, but I was able to recognize her at once, at that time more relaxed, and certainly happier. The smile, perhaps, was only for the camera, but there was a gaiety about her, a devil-may-care expression, a lift of the head that wasn’t at that time imperious. And the other…

  ‘That’s Tonia,’ repeated Flora, stabbing a finger. ‘You can see her as a dancer. You don’t dance, dear? No? Ah well, we can’t have everything, can we! The chin’s the same.’ She glanced up at me. ‘But your forehead’s wider. And the hair… what’ve you got there? It’s all springy. You want to have something done about that, Sylvia. Sylvia? No, it was… now don’t tell me… Phyllis.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured, not wanting to stop her.

  ‘Lovely girl. Lovely. You’ve got her eyes. They went away, you know. Silly creatures. Just ‘cause Rowley had left. Their father, that was. Well, he would, wouldn’t he! Stands to sense. All those nasty people after him.’ She giggled. ‘Oh, he was a scream, was Rowley. You’d have laughed. Took their money every week, and then it came up. Took mine too. Oh yes, I gave him a pound a week, or tried to, but he always slipped it under the clock, the devil. And then it came up. I listened on the radio. I remember clapping my hands. Such fun! Only he hadn’t sent in the coupon. Crafty devil. But they were all after his blood — and me laughing myself silly. You’d have laughed. Oh, you would.’

  ‘Why would I have laughed, Flora?’

  ‘Greed!’ she cried. ‘What’d I have done with all that money, anyway? I never expected anything, but the rest of ‘em — oh, they were livid. Livid! So Rowley went away, and the girls thought he wasn’t ever coming back, and they went away. No need for that, there wasn’t. Left me here, all on me own. They only had to walk across the fields, you know. There’s a little bridge over the brook. But they went. Not so much as a goodbye. You tell Bella she’d better come and see me. Tell her I’ve forgiven her. She’ll come.’

  ‘Forgiven her...’

  ‘And this picture here… that’s Dulcie, their mother. My Dulcie. Now — there was a beauty for you, if there ever was one. Don’t you think?’

  She handed it up to me.

  Dulcie was the May Queen. It was a professional shot, so that the whole composition was perfectly balanced, Dulcie high on a throne, crowned, glowing, and absolutely splendid. Beautiful, yes. But it wasn’t Bella’s wild and passionate beauty. This was a softness and a roundness, a calm smile of confidence, and about her an aura of blatant sexuality. I couldn’t have pointed to any positive detail of it, but it was there in every line of her, subdued by her May Queen dress, virginal, and thus, in the setting, sexually provocative, because she was surrounded by a group of six male acolytes, each gazing at her from a different angle, and though the photographer had no doubt appealed for smiles he could not have expected such blatantly lustful ones. They centred on her like searchlights in the pall of a bleak chastity, and blunting on what was in fact an ethereal virginity, raised there, alone and unassailable.

  ‘That’s my Dulcie,’ she was saying, all soft and gentle pride, no sadness yet because for her this lovely daughter of hers was still clothed in flesh.

  ‘The others,’ she said negligently, ‘were her six attendants. Self-appointed. They fought everybody else off. Whittled it down to six in the end, when they got tired of fighting. She had scores! Oh, you wouldn’t believe! Everywhere she went, they were after her.’

  ‘But didn’t get her,’ I whispered.

  But she’d misled me as to her deafness. ‘I taught her to be a good girl,’ she told me, slightly misunderstanding, severe.

  ‘Rowley Fields got her,’ I said, making it sound a little better.

  ‘Yes. That’s him there.’ She prodded a finger. Rowley Fields was one of those on the outer edges. He was thinner and taller than I’d expected. I couldn’t think where I’d got the idea of smallness. But Bella had said he used to prance — hadn’t she? He had a thin, sharp face and glowing eyes, and was the only one not smiling. His was a glorious and disarming grin. Of the six, he was the only one who was clearly enjoying himself.

  ‘Great big fool,’ she said, ‘Rowley was. He should’ve tanned her hide a bit. I told him that.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘And that...’ She prodded the arthritic finger again. ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Which him?’

  ‘Him down below. Mr Kemp,’ she explained, emphasis on the ‘Mister’. ‘Tudor, I call him. It annoys him.’

  ‘Probably. But why would Dulcie —’

  ‘A handsome devil, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Who? You mean Tudor?’ To me, he didn’t look all that handsome. There was a seriousness about him, even at that age, as though the weight of responsibility was already resting heavily on his shoulders. A square and positive jaw, the eyes even then hidden and remote.

  ‘It was what she needed,’ Flora was saying.

  ‘Dulcie?’

  ‘Yes. A good trouncing. That’d teach her.’

  ‘You perhaps thought that Tudor would —’

  But she wouldn’t allow me to finish. ‘But Tudor was always so thoughtful. Understanding, you know. Too big for his boots, even then, and he’d only have been twenty-five or so. Old-fashioned, like his dad. There’s a word… courtly, that’s it. Serious and slow and too patient.’

  He wasn’t patient now, though. His voice floated up. ‘You all right, Flora?’

  Flora dismissed him with a gesture. ‘Tell him to go on home,’ she said impatiently. ‘The air’s getting chill and it always settles on his chest.’

  I went to the window and thrust it wide. ‘She suggests that you go home, Mr Kemp.’

  And Flora shouted, ‘You’ll be getting your wheezes, Tudor, and it’ll be no good coming to me for sympathy. Somebody else can rub your chest.’

  He said a rude word, which I didn’t pass on to her. I turned back, half closing the window again.

  ‘She needed a firm hand,’ Flora was explaining. ‘And this one’s the one for that. Was. I don’t know what happened to him. Edith tells lies.’

  I leaned clo
se. She was indicating a handsome face with a strong mouth and demanding eyes. There was a calm confidence about him and a possessiveness in his expression.

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked.

  ‘Always dithering and dathering, our Dulcie was. Couldn’t decide anything any time. You think she’s settled on something… and pff! It’s gone, and it’s something else she wants.’ She was speaking as though Dulcie were alive and well, sitting downstairs and reading a book. ‘There’s a word for her sort.’

  There was indeed, a hyphened one. I didn’t think she meant that.

  ‘Something to do with sticking a needle in you,’ she mused.

  ‘Who is he?’ I didn’t want to get involved with her needle.

  ‘Was, dear, was. As far as I know. That’s Joey Payne. He was the one our Dulcie went away with. Poor, dear Rowley, his heart was broken. I know it. He was never the same after.’ ‘Went away with?’ I was desperately trying to keep control of the situation.

  ‘Not vaccination,’ she mused to herself.

  I sighed. ‘Vacillating. That’s what you meant about Dulcie.’ ‘That’s it.’ She threw back her head with delight. ‘That’s the very word that Arnold used.’

  Oh Lord, I thought. ‘You said Dulcie went away with Joey Payne,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Left the little uns.’

  Payne? Wasn’t that the woman in the fish and chip shop?

  ‘Dulcie went away with him?’ I persisted.

  She nodded. ‘Left the little uns,’ she repeated, ‘and Bella was only four, little Tonia two. I told Rowley, he oughta have had me over at his place, to look after ‘em. But no. Talk to a brick wall you might as well.’

  ‘Perhaps he loved them,’ I suggested. ‘Didn’t want to share them.’ But she didn’t reply.

  My back was aching, leaning over her shoulder. I straightened, leaving her sitting and staring down at her Dulcie and the six acolytes, and prowled the room. As Kemp had warned, she was tying my brain in knots. Yet you couldn’t say it was senility. She was clear enough with her memories. All she couldn’t do was organize them. And yet — if Dulcie and Joey had gone away…

  ‘You said Dulcie went away with Joey?’ I asked.

  ‘Joey Payne, yes.’ But her head was down and she was smiling, lost in a reverie of the day of the May Queen.

  ‘And you never heard from either of them again?’

  She said nothing, then abruptly raised her head. ‘And you’ll know this one.’

  I had to go and look at it, if only from politeness. Her finger was indicating a more serious face than the others, the smile a token for the camera. But there was something familiar about that long chin and the wide brow.

  ‘That’s Arnold. Now… I’d have said she was falling for Arnie. There was a time when she never spoke about anybody else. Arnie this and Arnie that. But she was too late for that. No good mooning over a lost lover.’

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘When she’s married, he’s lost her. Stands to reason.’

  Not with Dulcie it didn’t. ‘She was mooning, as you call it, over Arnie? Arnie who?’ Then it snapped in. That was a very young Arnold Connaught.

  ‘Connaught, silly. He never married, you know.’

  ‘Never married...’

  ‘I think it did something to him, when she went away with Joey Payne.’

  Mooning over Arnold Connaught, then she went away with Joey Payne? This Dulcie had been playing a dangerous game. Not only the teasing and the vaccination, as Flora called it, but the playing of one man against the other. And this delicate procedure had not ended with her marriage. But perhaps, for Dulcie, marriage had been an annoying intrusion.

  ‘But with Joey it was the grand passion. You know, dear. More important than anything else. Filled her mind and her body — and she couldn’t rest.’ Flora nodded wisely. She knew.

  ‘A pity, then, she had married Rowley Fields,’ I suggested, a little tartly because I was losing sympathy with this tricky and thoroughly self-centred May Queen. Perhaps that was what all the adulation had done for her. She had thought she could pick the fruit for ever, long after they had fallen from the bough.

  ‘Oh,’ said Flora. ‘That was me. My doing. Put my foot down.’ She tapped my arm in emphasis; I was to note this inflexibility of hers. ‘She was pregnant, you see. So I got on to Rowley and Rowley’s people, and we fixed it up. Rowley wasn’t doing any objecting, that I can remember.’

  ‘Nor Dulcie?’

  ‘She spent all her time floating around in a dream.’

  ‘Dreaming about Joey?’

  ‘Stupid thing.’ I had to believe she meant Dulcie, not me.

  ‘Then how,’ I asked, ‘did you know it was Rowley’s child?’ We were talking here about Bella, I had to remind myself.

  ‘A girl knows.’

  A girl like Dulcie! Who could have been raped by Tudor Kemp, violently and passionately seduced by Joey Payne, and had been mooning so helplessly about Connaught’s charms that she wouldn’t have realized what Rowley Fields was doing with her! Or not.

  ‘But you said,’ I persisted, ‘that Joey was everything to her. Passionately —’

  ‘Oh, this wasn’t physical, I’m sure. Romantic love. He wouldn’t have touched her. And she...’ Her voice failed her as she dreamed about the beauty of it.

  Wouldn’t let him? Some passion that must have been! Jane Austen would have loved to dissect it.

  ‘And they went away together?’

  ‘These others,’ she said, prodding the photo vigorously, ‘are nothing. You should see what they married, in the end. Plain girls. Ugly girls. Now ... isn’t that strange?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  She thrust her glasses up her nose so that she could get a good look at me. ‘You haven’t been listening,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘Oh, but I have.’

  ‘She was beautiful. You can see that here.’

  ‘Yes. Beautiful, Flora. I couldn’t agree more.’ I couldn’t tell her what had probably turned them off Dulcie. ‘But as the lads grow older they look for something… well, something deeper, hidden underneath.’

  ‘Then they looked with their eyes shut. Those two wives are right tartars, I can tell you. But my Dulcie ... ‘

  ‘Went away with Joey Payne, for passion and eternal happiness.’

  ‘That’s just what she said.’ Flora nodded.

  ‘Dulcie discussed it with you?’ I was trying to ignore the calls from below in the yard. We were getting to what I was after.

  ‘Of course she did. Who would she come to but her mother?’

  ‘And you helped her to pack?’

  She took that seriously. ‘No!’ She pouted, nodding to herself, trying to persuade herself she approved. ‘She said — a clean break. She was taking nothing from that house — from Rowley. Nothing that was his.’

  Which, I was beginning to believe, would have left her free to take the two girls. But perhaps that wouldn’t have suited Joey, if his love for her had been passionate but platonic. If there could be such a thing. I just didn’t believe it. Flora was living in a dream world of her own romancing.

  ‘And Joey?’ I asked. ‘What did he take?’

  ‘How would I know that?’

  ‘From your friend Edith Payne. His mother. You’d have heard it all.’

  ‘We don’t speak,’ she said distantly — and yet she’d mentioned their speaking recently.

  ‘Your friend —’

  ‘Not since then.’

  ‘You had a disagreement?’

  ‘You could call it that. She was unpleasant.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘She called my Dulcie a rotten, conniving bitch.’

  ‘How very unfeeling of her!’ I stared across at the window. ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I went over to it, flung it wide again. ‘Will you please wait!’ I shouted furiously. Then I slammed it shut completely — let Kemp worry.

  But the break had been at the wrong moment. Flora sat with a tiny handkerchief in her h
and, holding it to her nose and sniffing, with her tears dripping on to the May Queen. I went over and put a hand to her shoulder, but she wouldn’t lift her head. I went down on my knees, trying to look up into her eyes, and reached across a finger to lift her hair away from them.

  ‘Dulcie’s never written to you, has she, Flora?’ I asked gently.

  There was a minimal shake of her head.

  ‘Not one letter?’

  ‘No,’ she mumbled. Then, more clearly, ‘It’s him, I reckon. Joey stopping her from writing. I never did like him. Big-head, that’s what he was. I hated him.’

  ‘Oh, Flora!’

  I got to my feet and reached for the two photo frames, quietly returning them to their previous positions. My hands were within inches of that bundle of envelopes. Airmail envelopes! My fingers itched. Perhaps Flora had fibbed a little, as she’d been fibbing to herself all these years, and these were from Dulcie. Begging letters, she had called them. Begging for forgiveness from her mother, perhaps. But I couldn’t touch them. I would hate myself, and there’d been more than enough hatred flying around here, as it was. Love and passion… and consequently hatred.

  I bent over her and whispered, ‘I’ll ask Bella to come and see you. I’ll tell her you’ve forgiven her.’

  An eye, red now, peeped at me from beneath the cataract of hair. ‘Bella shouted at me,’ she whispered.

  ‘She didn’t understand you, perhaps,’ I suggested softly.

  Her lips twitched. ‘People don’t. They’re not very bright. Most of ‘em.’

  I kissed her on the cheek and went down into the yard, stared at the two men, then turned and walked away. Quick footsteps followed me, and a hand clawed at my arm. I whirled round, to face Kemp’s angry eyes.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ I said, holding my anger in check. ‘I walked away because I wanted you clear of the cottage. I could just lose my temper, Mr Kemp, and start screaming at you.’

  ‘At me?’ asked Kemp blankly.

  ‘At you, and the whole damned tribe round here. That woman in there, Flora, is waiting for Dulcie to come home. She thinks she’s alive, but the odds are she’s dead. It’s likely the female skeleton is hers.’

  ‘You’ve told her that?’ His voice was not in control.