Death in Summer (3 page)

But given to romantic speculation, Letitia sometimes wondered if their child would be taken from the house a bride: waiting for the response to his advertisement, Thaddeus remembers that. He wonders, himself, about the brides of the past, not knowing that when the cherry trees rose hardly six feet above the earth the first bride drove with her father to the country church of St Nicholas and experienced a moment of doubt on the way to the altar, where Nevil James Limewell waited to make her his wife. There were more than a hundred guests at Quincunx House that day, with extra servants hired. The photographs taken found their way long afterwards into a collector’s accumulation of such material, these nameless people of the past given an incidental place in the history of photography. The foxterriers of the household ran among the bridesmaids and the wedding guests, and were made to beg for crumbs of cake. In the bedroom that had always been hers, while changing into the clothes she had chosen for her wedding journey, the bride experienced her second moment of doubt. Yet for months, she told herself – almost a year – she had longed for the proposal and had not hesitated when it came. She was to live in Shropshire and would be happy: this latter anticipation she spoke aloud.
Sweet visage, linger with me
, a cousin who was in love with her wrote, secretly
that same evening, in the room that is now the Maidments’ sitting-room.

It rained in the twilight of the first wedding day, when everything was being set to rights again and spirits were deflated after the celebration. ‘We took Annie Talbot in,’ Augusta Davenant reminded her husband, having held back the necessity for this conversation while all the preparations were under way. ‘We gave her a home. Then this.’ A parlourmaid had run off in the early hours two days ago, taking her clothes and her belongings with her. She did so at the instigation of a local groom, Robert Bantwell, who later deserted her. ‘How fortunate we were with the weather!’ Augusta’s husband responded, seeking a distraction from prolonged talk of the servant’s flight. Vexation between the two developed and for a while there were recriminations. Then children knelt in dressing-gowns to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a drawing-room tradition of that time.

Three generations later – in the same month that the central cherry tree was cut down when its growth began to spoil the garden – a picture was painted on the nursery floor and is still there now. The rooks that began to nest in the oaks when the house was built have had their generations too, and rooks still claim their branches, building high or low depending on their predictions for the months to come. In the present and the past chaffinches have flown into the drawing-room; once a rabbit came, through the open french windows. Bees have stung in the kitchen and the bedrooms, wasps have nested in chimneys, flies have struggled on flypapers, spiders have experienced the destruction of their cobwebs, workmen have scrawled their names on the bare
plaster of walls. There have been thirty-one births and nineteen deaths in the house, swathed infants carried for christening to the church of St Nicholas, the dead conveyed for burial by black-plumed horses, and motor-hearses later.

By the time Thaddeus was first conscious of his surroundings the days of the Davenants’ enterprise and prosperity were over. Mismanagement in a single generation had initiated decline and the aftermath of war did not permit recovery. And Thaddeus witnessed in another way the effects of that same war: in his fathers failure to recover from the distress of his experiences in battle. A tattered grandeur was a shadowy backdrop to the scenes of love that were the houses only drama now: his father fondly cosseted, his Polish mother, once Eva Paczkowska, adored. Servantless, the two existed only for one another, for ever comforting and consoling, his father with silences that were all devotion, his mother with Polish endearments Thaddeus didn’t understand. No dog was kept, no cat. No people came to the house except, once in a while, Father Rzadiewicz to play cards. The talk was of Poland then, Thaddeus unnoticed in the room, a card game forgotten for a while. In the garden that his mother said had once been magical he played alone, among the overgrown shrubs and shattered cold-frames, pretending sometimes that the ghosts of the pets’ graveyard were there: Peko and Jet and Rory, Mickey and Felix and Dash, Peggotty and Polonius. ‘I didn’t like my dream,’ he whispered to his mother, coming downstairs in the white nightdress she had made him. Building a house of cards, using all the pack, which he could do, his father did not turn round to hear. His mother said there was nothing to be frightened of in a dream and he felt cowardly, creeping
back to bed. Tadzio his mother called him, his father Thaddeus. The obscure apostle, Father Rzadiewicz said.

*

On a summer afternoon of another dying century four nannies pass between the gateless pillars of Quincunx House and walk to their interviews on a drive darkened by high laurels and hydrangeas not yet in bloom. Maidments greeting of each is that she might like to stroll in the garden until the time of her appointment arrives: all have come on the one convenient train. Shyly they do what has been suggested, two of the girls keeping together, having made friends on the journey, the third in the drawing-room five minutes early, the fourth on her own.

‘No good, I’m afraid,’ Thaddeus’s verdict is when the last one has been shown the nursery and now awaits her fate in the hall.

Mrs Iveson agrees, and adds after a pause: ‘What I am wondering is if I myself should be made use of.’

Something about the way she says it alerts Thaddeus to a threat that has not occurred to him: that Mrs Iveson should come to Quincunx House.

‘I couldn’t ask you.’ The panic he experiences is kept out of his response. ‘No, no, I couldn’t.’

‘I am available.’

A grandmother would be more than a substitute for an unsatisfactory nanny. Her tone implies that; it is not said. There is a sacrifice involved, and she would make it: that’s not said, either.

‘Of course, it’s naturally up to you, Thaddeus.’

The girl still waiting in the hall was the least satisfactory of the applicants. Her single, badly typed reference did
not ring true. The questions Mrs Iveson asked weren’t confidently answered; there’d been a whiff of cigarettes. A girl they rejected earlier had more to recommend her, and Thaddeus now wishes they had settled for her.

‘I don’t in any way wish to impose myself, Thaddeus.’

‘No, no. I know that.’

His pale eyes rake her face and see there what they always see: distrust of him that has become indifference. On a warm afternoon she is dressed with summery distinction in a linen dress, two shades of grey. Her suede shoes, smartly casual, match the lighter one. She has a way with clothes.

‘It’s the least I can offer.’

A dead daughter’s due: Thaddeus senses that behind those words. He told her of the tragedy on the telephone, warning her that the news was very bad and would be a shock. He told her before he told anyone else, she being who she was. The hall door was still open, the two policemen only a minute gone, one grim and silent, the one who’d done the talking with a black moustache. A vase of delphiniums was in the hall, where Letitia had arranged it an hour before there was the conversation about Mrs Ferry. According to the driver of the car, she’d been distracted, looking behind her at the wooden box on her carrier as if fearing it would become dislodged, concerned for its contents. Coming round the corner, the car hadn’t been going fast: a farmhand seeing to a flock of ewes reported that. ‘No, there’s no doubt,’ Thaddeus said, and stood by the phone when he put the receiver down, not knowing where to go or what to do. Then Maidment, in shirtsleeves with red sleeve-bands on them, came into the hall and Thaddeus told him next. The telephone rang and a man’s voice began about the six
pullets that had been collected an hour ago, something about their care, which he’d forgotten to say earlier. Afterwards, he took them back, and insisted on returning Letitia’s cheque. The driver of the car was exonerated from any possible blame.

‘You would give up your flat?’

‘Some arrangement could be made. I don’t know what.’

In the night Mrs Iveson resolved that if the girls who came weren’t right she would make her offer. She lay awake for hours, wondering if all grandmothers felt as she did, if in similar circumstances they experienced, irresistibly, the urge to have some place in a grandchild’s life. Letitia’s compassion hadn’t always been easy to tolerate, yet in the night it felt like cruelty that others had benefited from it and her baby would not. Twice – while Mrs Iveson sighed inwardly with impatience–Letitia had paid an old alcoholic’s fare back to County Mayo. And there was Kevin with his unnecessary stick, and the one who said he was a cardinal and gave a name, and Miss Cartwell invited into the flat one hot Saturday morning, bringing with her a stench of such pungency that scented sprays and the windows wide open did not succeed in sweetening the air. ‘But what can you expect,’ Letitia had asked with irritating reason, ‘since she has been sleeping in those clothes for more than fifteen years?’ Miss Cartwell still daily passes by, on her way to the St Vincent de Paul place. The one who believes himself to be a cardinal began an awful wailing when he was told Letitia was no longer alive, and later asked for a photograph.

The urge that made her give to the dispossessed would have nourished Letitia’s motherhood. Steadfast in her loyalty to her husband, she would have brought her child
up to respect a father simply because that was what he was.
Bereavement drags the truth out
, Mrs Iveson wrote ten days ago to a longtime friend in Sussex.
Letitia’s innocence seems just a little remarkable now, and I wonder if the good are always innocent
.

‘We could advertise again,’ Thaddeus suggests. ‘Sooner or later a perfectly suitable girl could easily walk in.’

‘I rather doubt it.’

Across the room – he standing by the open french windows, she by the fire-place – Mrs Iveson’s glance fails to match the composure of her tone. It is the glance of a mother who for a long time will not cease to mourn; it is at odds with the summer coolness of her clothes, the necklace of pearls and unobtrusive earrings. Businesslike, her statements pack away emotion, leaving it only in her eyes. She has never thought to leave her flat, but once upon a time she thought Letitia would never leave it either. And Letitia did so permanently; she does not intend that.

Yet even after she made her resolution in the night Mrs Iveson hesitated all over again. No one can predict what living at close quarters with a man who has married your daughter for her money will be like. There’s an elusiveness about Thaddeus that defies prediction, that did so when first he came into their lives, a stranger on a train on a Saturday afternoon, when they were returning from another visit to Bath. He talked more easily on that occasion than she has ever known since, saying he had been to see an elderly relative whom he hardly knew, who was unwell, and in what seemed an artless way confessing he had expectations from that direction. They listened to revelations about this ailing relative on his father’s side, and about the house he
had years ago inherited and how he made his living. They told him, when he asked, about themselves.

The landscape still changes for Mrs Iveson on that journey, the backs of houses coming when there is a town, then bright green hills again. It was April then, their first leaves decorating ash and beech. He always went on journeys of more than a certain length by train, the man who talked to them divulged, not trusting an aged car; not that, in fact, he travelled much. His voice was educated, pleasant to listen to; the encounter passed the time. But though he appeared to be quite open, she knew he wasn’t. Long afterwards, when the friendship with Letitia had begun, she did not ever quite say that he was shoddy goods. Letitia said it for her, actually using the expression that had been withheld. ‘You think so, don’t you?’ And unconvincingly Mrs Iveson denied it.

‘Having seen these girls today, I can assure you I would be happier with this.’ She would be seventy when she returned to her flat, Georgina no longer in need of her care. But it should not be beyond her to pick up whatever threads remained. ‘You understand, Thaddeus?’

‘Yes, I do.’

Thaddeus looks out, over lawns and flower-beds, at the summer-house in the distance, at the little orchard of plum trees behind it, the birch trees beyond. He might still say no. He might insist, not just suggest, that they should try with another advertisement. Or he might somehow wriggle out of what appears to have already come about. He would have, with Letitia; he would have managed something. But it is his mother-in-law who speaks next.

‘Well, we cannot keep this last one waiting. In fairness, we must send her on her way.’

While speaking, she moves towards the door, taking from beneath a candlestick on the mantelpiece the last of the ten-pound notes Thaddeus earlier placed there to ensure that the girls who came weren’t out of pocket after their journey. Letitia’s money, Mrs Iveson can’t help thinking, and wants to ask, as often she has wanted to in the weeks that have passed, ‘Why did you let her cycle about the lanes?’ But in fairness such a question cannot be put and she does not do so.

‘Say I’m sorry,’ Thaddeus requests, watching her leave the room, her back held so straight that she might only yesterday have had her last deportment lesson. His own mother did not hold herself so well when she aged. Wrapped in her damson-coloured dressing-gown, shabby at the edges, she was restless sometimes in this room, happier when she walked about the garden with the husband she lived her life for. In winter they sat and watched the rain or played chess by the fire, their two bent heads reflected in the looking-glass that stretches the length of the mantelpiece. Reflected still are the spines of books on old teak shelves,
The Essays of Elia and Eliana Lamb
embossed and tooled, F. L. Hall’s
History of the Indian Empire
, the Reverend W. R. Trace’s
Portrait of a Clergyman, being Anecdotes and Reminiscences
, Daudier’s
Fly Fishing, Great Scenes from the Courts, A Century of Horror Tales
. All of Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë is there, all of George Eliot and the Waverley novels, Sir Percy Keane’s
Diary of an Edwardian Hell-Raiser
, all of Thackeray and Dickens. The romantic works of Mrs Audrey Stone and Marietta Kay Templeton are there in
their cheaper editions, and
Murder in Mock Street
and
The Mystery of the Milestone
and
The Casebook of Philippe Plurot
.