Deception on His Mind (61 page)

As it was, she shouted, “Mary Ellis! Mary Ellis! You're wanted in the library and you're wanted now!” She planted her three-pronged stick between her legs and struggled to her feet.

The effort made her sweat like a suckling pig. Although it didn't seem possible, she found that she rose too quickly, despite the time it took her: Dizziness blew against her like a gust of wind. “Whoops,” she said. But she laughed as well. She had plenty to be dizzy about, hadn't she? She was dizzy with excitement, dizzy with possibility, dizzy with success, dizzy with joy. Damn it all, she had a
right
to be dizzy.

“Mary Ellis! Blast you, girl! Can't you hear me calling?”

The clatter of shoe soles told her that the girl was finally coming. She arrived in the library red-faced and breathless, saying, “Jesus God, Mrs. Shaw. You gave me that much of a fright. Are you all right?”

“Of course I'm all right,” Agatha snapped. “Where were you? Why don't you come when I call? What am I paying you for if I have to stand here and screech like one of the weird sisters whenever I need you?”

Mary came to her side. “You wanted the drawing room furniture switched round today, Mrs. Shaw. Don't you remember? You didn't like the piano next to the fireplace and you said the sofas were fading cause they're too near the windows. You even wanted the pictures—”

“All right. All
right.”
Agatha attempted to shake Mary's clammy hand from her arm. “Don't squish me like that, girl. I'm not an invalid. I can walk on my own, and you very well know it.”

Mary loosened her grip, saying, “Yes, ma'am,” and waiting for further instructions.

Agatha eyed her. She wondered once again what on earth she was thinking of, keeping such a pathetic creature in her employ. Aside from her lack of intellectual gifts, which rendered her useless for entertaining conversation, Mary Ellis was in the worst physical condition of anyone Agatha had ever known. Who else would be sweating, out of breath, and red in the face simply because of moving a piano and a few other paltry sticks of furniture?

“What are you good for, Mary, if you don't come at once when you're called?” Agatha demanded.

Mary dropped her gaze. “I did hear you, ma'am. But I was on the ladder, wasn't I. I had that portrait of your granddad ready to move, and I couldn't put it down very easy.”

Agatha knew the picture she was talking about. Above the fireplace, nearly life-size, in an ancient gilt frame … At the thought of the girl successfully heaving that painting round the drawing room, Agatha eyed Mary Ellis with something akin to respect. It was, however, an emotion from which she quickly recovered.

Agatha
harrumphed.
“Your obligation to this household is first and foremost me,” she told the girl. “See to it that you remember from now on.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Mary's voice was glum.

“Now, don't sulk, girl. I appreciate your moving the furniture about. But let's just keep things in their proper perspective. Now, give me your arm. I mean to go to the tennis court.”

“The tennis court?” Mary asked incredulously. “What d'you want with the tennis court, Mrs. Shaw?”

“I mean to see what condition it's in. I mean to start playing again.”

“But you can't—” Mary gulped the rest of her sentence back when Agatha cast a sharp look in her direction.

“I can't play?” Agatha said. “Rubbish. I can do anything. If I can get on the phone and win every necessary vote on the town council without their even seeing the plans …” Agatha chuckled. “I can damn well do anything.”

Mary Ellis didn't ask for clarification on the topic of the town council as her employer would have liked her to do. Agatha was hungry—indeed she was ravenous—to tell someone of her triumph. Theo was the person she'd have liked to crow to, but these days Theo wasn't ever to be found where he was supposed to be, so she hadn't bothered to try him at the pier. She hoped her hint had been broad enough for someone even with Mary Ellis's limited mental powers to take and run with conversationally. But that was not to be. Mary stood mute.

“Damn it, girl,” Agatha said. “Have you
got
a brain anywhere in your skull? Yes? No? Oh, bother with you anyway. Give me your arm. Help me outside.”

They tottered together out of the library and towards the front door. Having a captive audience, Agatha explained herself.

She was talking of the redevelopment plans for Balford-le-Nez, she told her companion. When Mary made sufficient guttural noise to indicate comprehension, Agatha continued. The ease with which she'd got Basil Treves in her corner on the previous day had suggested that she might do the same if she invested equal telephone time with the rest of the council.

“Save Akram Malik,” she said. “No point trying to get him in line. Besides”—and here again she chuckled—”I want old Akram to face a
fait accompli.”

“There's to be a fete?” Mary asked eagerly.

God, Agatha thought wearily. “Not a fete, you idiot thing,” she said. “A
fait.
A
fait accompli.
Don't you know what that means? Never mind.”

She didn't want a digression from the topic at hand. Treves had been the easiest of them all to get on board, she confided, what with the way he felt about the coloureds. She'd got him in her corner last night. But the others hadn't been as quick to haul themselves to her side. “Still, I managed them all in the end,” she said. “I mean all of them that I need for the vote. If I've learned nothing else from business in all these years, Mary, I've learned that no man—or woman—turns away from the idea of investing money if the investment costs him next to nothing but still allows him to accrue a benefit. And that's the promise of our plans, you see. The town council invests, the town improves, the beach-goers arrive, and everyone benefits.”

Silent, Mary appeared to be mentally chewing on Agatha's scheme. She said, “I've seen the plans. Those're them in the library on that artist stand.”

“And soon,” Agatha said, “you shall see those plans taking a concrete form. A leisure centre, a redeveloped High Street, renovated hotels, a reconstructed Marine Parade and Princes Esplanade. Just you wait, Mary Ellis. Balford-le-Nez is going to be the showplace of the coast.”

“I sort of like it like it is,” Mary said.

They were out of the front door and on the sweeping drive. The sun was baking it so thoroughly that Agatha could feel it. She looked down and realised that she wore her bedroom slippers rather than her walking shoes, and the heat from the pebbles on the ground was seeping through the thin soles. She squinted, unable to recall the last time she'd been out of the house. The light was almost unbearably bright.

“Like it's?” Agatha dragged on Mary Ellis's arm, leading her towards the rose garden to the north of the house. The lawn dipped in a gentle slope beyond the plants, and at the base of this slope the tennis court lay. It was a clay court that Lewis had constructed for her as a gift for her thirty-fifth birthday. Prior to her stroke, she'd played three times a week, never very well but always with a stubborn determination to win. “Have a bit of vision, girl. The town's gone to ruin. Shops are closing on the High Street, the restaurants are empty, hotels—such as they are, at this point—have more rooms to let than there are people on the street. If someone isn't willing to give Balford a transfusion, we'll be living inside a rotting corpse in another three years. There's
potential
in this town, Mary Ellis. All it takes is someone with the vision to see it.”

They worked their way into the rose garden. Agatha paused. She found that her breath was not coming easily—thanks to the bloody stroke, she fumed—and she used the excuse of examining the bushes to have a rest. Damn it all, when would she have her strength back?

“Blast it!” she snapped. “Why haven't these roses been sprayed? Just look at this, Mary. D'you see these leaves? Aphids are dining at
my
expense and no one's doing a bloody thing about it! Do I have to tell the damn gardener how to do his job? I want these plants sprayed, Mary Ellis. Today.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Mary Ellis said. “I'll phone Harry. It's not like him to overlook the roses, but his son had a burst appendix two weeks ago and I know it's worrying Harry cause they haven't been able to make him right.”

“He's going to have something more than a burst appendix to worry about if he lets the aphids ruin my roses.”

“His son's only ten years old, Mrs. Shaw, and they haven't been able to get all the muck out of his blood. He's had three operations, Harry said, and he's still all swelled up. They think—”

“Mary, do I look as if I wish to engage in a discussion of paediatric medicine? We all have personal problems. But we continue to meet our responsibilities in spite of those problems. If Harry can't do that, then he'll be sacked.”

Agatha turned from the roses. Her stick had become imbedded in the freshly turned earth at the edge of the flower bed. She attempted to free it, but found she lacked the strength.

“Damn and blast!” She jerked the handle and nearly lost her balance. Mary caught her by the arm. “Stop babying me! I don't need your coddling. Christ in heaven, when will this heat abate?”

“Mrs. Shaw, you're getting yourself in a state.” There was caution in Mary's voice, that eighteenth-century cringing tone of a servant who was afraid of being struck. Listening to it was worse than struggling with the miserable stick.

“I am not in a state,” Agatha said from between clenched teeth. She gave a final yank to the stick and freed it, but the effort robbed her of breath again.

She wasn't about to let something as basic as respiration defeat her, however. She gestured towards the lawn beyond the flowers and resolutely began to move forward once again.

“Don't you think you'd like a rest?” Mary asked. “You've gone a bit red in the face and—”

“What do you expect in this heat?” Agatha demanded. “And I don't need a rest. I mean to see my tennis court and I mean to see it now.”

But the going on the lawn was worse than the going in the flower bed, where at least there had been a pebble path to follow. Here the ground was uneven, and the sun-browned grass masked its irregularity. Agatha stumbled and righted, stumbled and righted. She yanked herself away from Mary and snarled when the girl said her name solicitously. Damn the garden to hell, she cursed silently. And how had she forgotten the very nature of her own lawn? Had movement been so easy before that she'd never noticed the land's pernicious anomalies?

“We c'n rest if you want,” Mary Ellis said. “I c'n fetch some water.”

Agatha lurched on. Her destination was in sight, no more than thirty yards away. It spread out like an umber blanket, with its net in place and its boundaries chalked freshly in anticipation of her next match. The court shimmered in the heat, and an illusion of light made it look as if steam were snaking up from it.

A trickle of perspiration worked its way from Agatha's forehead into her eye. Another followed. She found that her chest had grown quite tight and that her body felt as if a hot rubber shroud encased it. Every movement was a battle, while next to her Mary Ellis simply glided along like a feather in the wind. Blast her youth. Damn her health. Curse her blithe assumption that both youth and health gave her some sort of hegemony in their small household.

Agatha could sense the girl's unspoken superiority, could even read her thoughts:
pathetic old woman, broken-down cow.
Well, she would show her. She would stalk onto that tennis court and batter her opponent into fragments. She would serve her old serve of fire and wind. She would play the net and thunder returns down her victim's throat.

She would show Mary Ellis. She would show everyone. Agatha Shaw was not to be defeated. She'd bent the town council to her will. She'd breathed new life into Balford-le-Nez. She'd regained her strength and redesigned her life's purpose. And she would do the same to her contemptible body.

“Mrs. Shaw …” Mary's tone was chary. “Don't you think that a rest …? We can sit under that lime tree over there. I c'n get you a drink.”

“Rubbish!” Agatha found that she could only gasp the word. “I want …see …tennis.”

“Please, Mrs. Shaw. Your face's like a beetroot. I'm scared that—”

“Pish! Scared!” Agatha tried to laugh, but it came out like a cough. How was it that the tennis court seemed just as distant as it had done when they'd first set out? It seemed they'd been walking for ages—for miles—and their destination wavered mirage-like, no closer. How could this be? She was slogging forward, dragging her stick, dragging her leg, and she was feeling as if she were being pulled first backward then downward like a hundredweight sinking. “You're …holding me …back,” she gasped. “Damn …girl. Holding me, aren't you?”

“Mrs. Shaw, I'm not,” Mary said, and her voice was higher and sounded scared. “Mrs. Shaw, I don't have my hand anywheres on you. Please, won't you stop? I c'n fetch a chair. And I'll get a brolly to keep the sun off you.”

“Nonsense …” Weakly, Agatha waved her off. But she became aware that she'd ceased moving altogether. The landscape itself seemed to be moving instead. The tennis court receded into the distance and appeared to meld with the faraway Wade that lay in the shape of a green bucking horse beyond the Balford Channel.

Something told her that Mary Ellis was speaking, but she couldn't make out the words. She found that her head had begun to pound, that the dizziness she'd earlier felt upon rising in the library now swept against her like a current. And although she wanted to ask for help—or at least to say her companion's name—nothing emerged from her mouth but a groan. One arm and one leg became a drag upon her, numb anchors too heavy to heave along the ground.

She heard a shouting coming from somewhere.

The sun beat down fiercely.

The sky became white.

Lewis cried, “Aggie!”

Lawrence said, “Mum?”

Her vision tunneled to a pinprick before she fell.

T
REVOR RUDDOCK HAD
managed to fill the interview room with enough cigarette smoke to make Barbara's lighting up nearly unnecessary. When she joined him, it was through a grey pall that she saw him seated at the black metal table, and an array of extinguished cigarette ends speckled the floor by his chair. She'd given him an ashtray to use, but apparently he'd needed to make a statement that only floor-stubbed cigarettes and flakes of ash could assist him in making.