An Affair to Remember (18 page)

“Now then, love, what’s the gen on all this? No one’s told me anything. All I’ve had to date is a message from Sel Woodhead on the answering machine saying, come to Suffolk pronto; something big was brewing. And having known our Sel long enough to be sure he wouldn’t get me down here if there wasn’t, he’s too damn mean, and quite fancying another look at
la belle
Clarrie, I came. You?”

“All I know is it’s to do with the secretary, she’s been taken over or something. You must have noticed there’s something odd about her?”

“I have. That’s how I got wet; she pushed me under the shower, told me to press the wrong button, then, when I got a soaking, laughed in my face.”

“Well, there you are then.” Philippa, seated now at the dressing table, massages the slightly sagging skin under her chin. “Sel seems to think this Roman piece who’s taken her over isn’t very nice. And then there’s some ex-army type who keeps digging things up.”

“Did you know she’s Marcus Travers’s daughter?”

“No, I didn’t, I suppose that could explain things. But surely Marcus is gay? Could be bi, I suppose, but –”

“Look, love, let’s not go down that road, we haven’t time – drinkies in the sun room seven thirty, remember? Just tell me, have you or have you not got any gen? As I’m sure you know, it’s essential when dealing with Sel Woodhead to have some sort of prior knowledge of his plans. Come on, darling, give.”

Philippa gets up from the dressing table and sits beside him on the bed. “Promise we share everything?”

“Scout’s honour.”

“Well, from what I can gather…”

Half an hour later, Ron looks at his watch. “Time to go,” he says, swinging himself off Pippa’s bed, and wandering over to the window. “Can I borrow your dressing gown, I can’t go back to my room like this – I might meet the Spaniard.”

“I suppose you can, although if anyone sees you…”

But Ron isn’t listening. He’s looking out at the valley, his eyes narrowed against the evening sun. “My God, what a place. There must have been settlements here since the beginning of time – you can feel it.”

“I know.” Philippa gets off the bed, stands beside him.

“I’d move away from the window, love, if you care for your reputation, that is; there’s a woman in the garden looking up at us.”

“I can’t see anyone.”

“Down there, by that bush, in a blue dress; she seems to be pointing at something, for heaven’s sake keep your head down, she –”

“Ron,” Pippa’s voice is the tiniest bit shaky, “Ron, there isn’t anyone there…”

*

“Well, dear, and what do you make of our guests?” Sel and Beatrice are in his office drinking tea, tying up, as Sel likes to put it, loose ends. Clarrie’s not down yet – she’s sent a message via Juan that she’s suffering from a migraine and mustn’t be disturbed. Philippa and Ron are still in their rooms.

“I find it hard to think at all.” Beatrice is herself again after the run-in with Ron in the bathroom, but nevertheless somewhat distracted. “If what Granny Boggs said is true, it won’t be long before I’m carted off to the nearest institution.”

“Don’t be ridiculous dear,” Sel lays an avuncular hand on her shoulder, she shrugs it off, “you know things are different now – you’re thinking of the sister?”

“And Great Aunt Ali.”

He makes a clucking noise, halfway between sympathy and disbelief. Truth to tell, though not easily defeated, Sel is beginning to run out of ideas. Getting up from his office chair he crosses over to the window in an effort to clear his head. The yard is empty apart from a rook balanced precariously on the handle of a wheelbarrow left out by Josh Bogg, who appears to be looking at him. Bloody birds! He’s aware of a feeling he hasn’t experienced in a very long time – probably not since he ran away from home at the age of sixteen – he who is always in control, no matter what, is somehow losing control and that simply cannot be allowed to happen. To be beaten by the likes of Granny Bogg and a pack of ghosts is wholly unacceptable.

He turns away from the window, faces the scowling Beatrice. “Now listen to me, dear,” he says in what he hopes is a calm, but firm voice, “you simply must pull yourself together; if you don’t you will make yourself ill and how will that help matters? You have nothing, I repeat nothing, in common with Granny Bogg’s sister or her great aunt Ali, except that possibly all three of you have been visited in some way by this tiresome and extremely stupid girl, Octavia. And if Granny Bogg is to be relied upon, and she actually existed, she deserves everything that came to her.”

“Nothing did, though, did it?” Beatrice interrupts angrily; her voice, on the edge of hysteria, echoes round the little room causing the tea cups to rattle. “She married the man she wanted, and lived happily ever after. It’s the people who followed who’ve been made to suffer for what she did. And –”

“Nonsense!” Sel tries to inject a note of sternness into his voice. “You simply must calm down. As I’ve already said, we know nothing of Octavia’s end, nor indeed whether she existed at all, and even the legend admits she didn’t actually order her son’s murder…” His voice trails away as he becomes uneasily aware that Beatrice has picked up the Victorian paper weight he keeps on his desk and is quite possibly about to throw it.

She does. With a cry of, “It is you who is talking nonsense, old man,” she takes aim at the mirror on the wall opposite.

“Cripes!” In moments of abnormal stress – and now is certainly such a moment– Sel sometimes finds himself resorting to the vernacular of his youth. Time to think fast, and looking at Beatrice/Tavey as she stands before him, bosom heaving, eyes hard and scornful, he can feel the adrenalin at last beginning to run. Scattering shards of broken mirror, he rises to his feet and, adopting what he hopes is a sufficiently arrogant and patrician pose, adjusting an imaginary toga, he addresses the contemptuous young woman before him in a stentorian roar even he didn’t know he was capable of: “Get you to your chamber, girl, before I have you whipped.”

After a pause when everything seems to hang in the balance, amazed, he realises his ploy has worked. Tavey departs; Beatrice returns, and promptly collapses in a heap on the floor. “Oh Sel,” she wails, “I’ve broken your lovely mirror.”

“Never mind that, dear.” A little out of breath, but relieved, although they’re not out of the woods yet, he kneels down beside her, gently strokes her forehead. “One feels that bed is the best place for you now, dear, don’t you? Hopefully the doctor won’t be too long. Do you think you can manage the stairs?”

Beatrice’s green eyes are misty and sad, her lashes wet with tears. “Oh Sel,” she moans, burying her head in his chest, “why me, why does it always have to be me…?”

*

Half an hour later, Beatrice, heavily sedated following a brief visit from Dr Hardcastle – he had to dash back for Surgery – asleep upstairs, and Clarrie, claiming migraine, not down yet; Ron, Philippa and Sel are seated in the sun room having their pre-dinner drinks. The shadows are lengthening in the garden and every now and again Ron finds himself checking whether or not there’s anyone out there. Currently no one is. Only a rook peers down at them from the top of the monkey puzzle tree. He tries to get a grip on himself; takes another sip of one of Sel’s extremely powerful ‘specials’.

“We’re going to have to tread damned carefully over all this,” he says, hoping he sounds sufficiently authoritative. What had the lady in blue wanted? Why had she chosen him?

“Has this man, Mallory, been contacted yet?” Philippa asks. “He seems to hold the key. I thought the doctor was a bit out of his depth, and anyway we don’t want the girl to be hospitalised – at least not yet.” The two men murmur agreement – or she supposes that’s what it is – but offer no follow-up, and it occurs to her with something of a shock that neither are quite their usual selves: firing, as it were, at half cock, or was she mixing her metaphors? OK then, it looks as if things are up to her. Not too upset by this – to be in charge, she has always felt, is her destined role in life – she finishes her drink and gets to her feet.

“Look, I’m going upstairs to have a word with Clarrie; it’s no good, migraine or no migraine, she simply must be told of the latest developments. I’m quite sure her input could be of value.”

“I need to pop upstairs too,” Ron says quickly. But does he? Why? Think. He just knows he has to get out of this room, away from the others, be on his own for a minute. “I shan’t be long.” They nod in surprise, but before they can say anything, Ron has put down his unfinished drink on the table in the window and hurried from the room.

Pippa turns to Sel, a note of desperation beginning to creep into her voice. “Sel, the phone – there is some urgency, you know.”

Sel, who’s been looking rather vacantly at the wall opposite, gets slowly to his feet. “Of course, dear, of course. Sorry to seem a little distrait, but I too seem to have a bit of a headache, a most unusual occurrence. And I have tried Mallory twice already. The first time got his girl, who didn’t seem to know when either of her employers would be back or where they were, and the second no reply at all.”

Pippa looks at him rather helplessly. “I still think you should try again.”

Up in his bedroom Ron drags a chair over to the window and settles down to watch. What for,he’s no idea, only that it is essential that he does. Currently, he notes, not a lot’s happening. The rook, who’s left the monkey puzzle tree and perched on what looks like the remains of a sundial, appears to be scanning the house with all the diligence of an FBI agent on surveillance duty. Seemingly finding nothing of interest, after a minute or two he gives up and flaps lazily away towards the barn. Somewhere a cow is calling for her calf. Is that the sound of distant church bells or perhaps only the goat herd bringing in his flock from the fields? A pleasant scent of wood smoke mixed with honey is drifting over from the bath house through the open window, making him feel sleepy. He must remember to tell Petronius, he…

*

Clarrie, lying on her bed, her face in the pillow, stirs in her sleep, opens her eyes. The bloody rooks have started up again, and their raucous cries have even managed to penetrate her earplugs. Why had she chosen this particular room for her bedroom, she must have been mad. It faced on to the courtyard, the only bedroom to do so, and what with the cacophony from the rooks and the noise of Josh Bogg’s tractor starting up, not to mention his chain saw, it was quite impossible to snatch a moment’s peace. But then she must have been insane to have persuaded Sel to buy the damned house in the first place.

It had looked so lovely, though, that day far back in the winter when she and Sel had seen it for the first time: the trees bare, a hint of snow in the air. She had squeezed Sel’s hand: “We must buy it, love, it’s wonderful and will be such a challenge.” He’d agreed, and they’d wandered hand in hand into the great barn; looked up in awe at the king post and hammer beams. The noise the rooks made then had seemed rather romantic, but now? Had they all become bewitched? Even Sel, who under all the nonsense was the most down to earth, commonsensical person she had ever known.

Sitting up, she removes the earplugs and looks at her watch. God, she’d slept for hours! Must have been that wine Juan brought her with her lunch. She’d had two glasses; not a good thing in the middle of the day, but she’d felt she needed them. She’d fallen asleep trying to think what to do about Jack Fulton. Should she tell him she was pregnant, or just leave it? He’d find out sooner or later anyway, and would no doubt be happy to let sleeping dogs lie. So long as news of Sel’s vasectomy didn’t leak out. The last thing she remembered thinking before she had drifted into oblivion was wishing Sel hadn’t had the chop after all; that he was the father of her child. It wasn’t as if they didn’t make love occasionally, indeed they’d done so the day they first saw Brown End – in the barn, on a pile of hay. Sel had, so he claimed afterwards, surprised himself at the force and genuine passion of their love-making and she had known that in some way that what had happened was important. Now, sitting up in bed thinking about it, she wanted to cry. Then remembered they had guests. What with one thing and another she’d forgotten all about them.

Like it or not, it was time to pull herself together; she was after all Daddy’s daughter. What did Miss Hickman used to say – “No English gentlewoman, my dears, abandons herself to despair. It is her task in life, and indeed it is this quality that sets her apart, to give an example to others. Where they follow, she must lead.” Old fashioned stuff of course, one might even laugh at it, but then St Ethelbert’s had been an old fashioned school; nevertheless, like many of Miss Hickman’s maxims, it held a grain of truth in it

They must be here by now, Sel’s so-called ‘experts’. Ron Head she’d never met; seen him now and again on TV of course and he seemed a pleasant enough guy, if a trifle over pleased with himself, but Philippa she’d known (and disliked) for years. As humble research assistants – Pippa with a second class degree in Sociology under her belt, Clarrie herself one in English – they’d started at the BBC at the same time. She even remembered them lunching together in the canteen that first day.

“In future,” Pippa had said, pushing her tray away with an air of arrogant disdain Clarrie could not but admire, “I’m bringing my own food, I can’t face this muck.” This arrogant attitude appeared to have helped her on her way, and one husband and five years later, she was already someone to be reckoned with in their world. In fifteen she had managed to transform herself into some kind of national guru. As Agony Aunt
par excellence
and entrepreneur to the spirit world, she dispensed pre-packaged platitudes on demand to a gullible and voracious public. And if that wasn’t enough, she was also the author of several books on such diverse subjects as gardening, making love and cats. What Sel imagined was going to be her contribution to the set-up at Brown End, Clarrie had no idea.

She was soon to find out. Barely had she dragged herself out of bed and sat down at her dressing table, there came a knock on the door, accompanied by that oh-so-familiar voice: “Clarrie, darling, it’s me, Pippa. Are you feeling too bloody, or can one have a word? I’m afraid there’s a bit of a crisis brewing, and one badly needs your input.”