Grave Mistake (2 page)

Sybil made an exasperated noise into the receiver.

“So he’s gardener-Gardener,” said Verity. “Does he hyphenate it?”

“Very funny.”

“Oh, come
on
, Syb!”

“All right, my dear, you may scoff. Wait till you see him.”

Verity saw him three evenings later. Mrs. Black’s cottage was a short distance along the lane from Keys House and she walked to it at six-thirty, by which time Mrs. Black had given her brother his tea. She was a mimbling little woman meekly supporting the prestige of recent widowhood. Perhaps with the object of entrenching herself in this state she spoke in a whimper.

Verity could hear television blaring in the back parlour and said she was sorry to interrupt. Mrs. Black, alluding to her brother as Mr. Gardener, said without conviction that she supposed it didn’t matter and she’d tell him he was wanted.

She left the room. Verity stood at the window and saw that the flower-beds had been recently dug over and wondered if it was Mr. Gardener’s doing.

He came in: a huge sandy man with a trim golden beard, wide mouth and blue eyes, set far apart, and slightly, not unattractively, strabismic. Altogether a personable figure. He contemplated Verity quizzically from aloft, his head thrown back and slightly to one side and his eyes half-closed.

“I didna just catch the name,” he said, “Ma-am.”

Verity told him her name and he said: Ou aye, and would she no’ tak’ a seat.

She said she wouldn’t keep him a moment and asked if he could give her one day’s gardening a week.

“That’ll be the residence a wee piece up the lane, I’m thinking. It’s a bonny garden you have there, ma-am. I’ve taken a keek at it through the entrance. It has what I call perrrsonality. Would it be all of an acre that you have there, now, and an orchard, foreby?”

“Yes. But most of it’s grass and that’s looked after by a contractor,” explained Verity and felt angrily that she was adopting an apologetic, almost a cringing, attitude.

“Ou aye,” said Mr. Gardener again. He beamed down upon her. “And I can see fine that it’s highly prized by its leddy-mistress.”

Verity mumbled self-consciously.

They got down to tin-tacks. Gardener’s baggage had arrived. He produced glowing references from, as Sybil had said, grand employers, and photographs of their quellingly superior grounds. He was accustomed, he said, to having at the verra least a young laddie working under him but realized that in coming to keep his sister company in her berrreavement, puir lassie, he would be obliged to dra’ in his horns a wee. Ou, aye.

They arrived at wages. No wonder, thought Verity, that Sybil had hurried over the topic: Mr. Gardener required almost twice the pay of Angus McBride. Verity told herself she ought to say she would let him know in the morning and was just about to do so when he mentioned that Friday was the only day he had left and in a panic she suddenly closed with him.

He said he would be glad to work for her. He said he sensed they would get along fine. The general impression was that he preferred to work at a derisive wage for somebody he fancied rather than for a pride of uncongenial millionaires and/or noblemen, however open-handed.

On that note they parted.

Verity walked up the lane through the scents and sounds of a spring evening. She told herself that she could afford Gardener, that clearly he was a highly experienced man and that she would have kicked herself all round her lovely garden if she’d funked employing him and fallen back on the grossly incompetent services of the only other jobbing gardener now available in the district.

But when she had gone in at her gate and walked between burgeoning lime trees up to her house, Verity, being an honest-minded creature, admitted to herself that she had taken a scunner on Mr. Gardener.

As soon as she opened her front door she heard the telephone ringing. It was Sybil, avid to know if Verity had secured his services. When she learnt that the deed had been done she adopted an irritatingly complacent air as if she herself had scored some kind of triumph.

Verity often wondered how it had come about that she and Sybil seemed to be such close friends. They had known each other all their lives, of course, and when they were small and had shared the same governess. But later on, when Verity was in London and Sybil, already a young widow, had married her well-heeled, short-lived stockbroker, they seldom met. It was after Sybil was again widowed, being left with Prunella and a highly unsatisfactory stepson from her first marriage, that they picked up the threads of their friendship. Really, they had little in common.

Their friendship, in fact, was a sort of hardy perennial, reappearing when it was least expected to do so.

The horticultural analogy occurred to Verity while Sybil gushed away about Gardener. He had started with her that very day, it transpired, and, my dear, the
difference
! And the
imagination
! And the
work
: the sheer
hard work
. She raved on. She really is a bit of an ass, is poor old Syb, Verity thought.

“And don’t you find his Scots
rather
beguiling?” Sybil was asking.

“Why doesn’t his sister do it?”

“Do what, dear?”

“Talk Scots?”

“Good Heavens, Verity, how should I know? Because she came south and married a man of Kent, I daresay. Black spoke broad Kentish.”

“So he did,” agreed Verity pacifically.

“I’ve got news for you.”

“Have you?”

“You’ll never guess. An invitation. From
Mardling Manor
, no less;” said Sybil in a put-on drawing-room-comedy voice.

“Really?”

“For dinner. Next Wednesday. He rang up this morning. Rather unconventional if one’s to stickle, I suppose, but that sort of tommy-rot’s as dead as the dodo in my book. And we
have
met. When he lent Mardling for that hospital fund-raising garden-party. Nobody went inside, of course. I’m told lashings of lolly have been poured out — redecorated, darling, from attic to cellar. You were there, weren’t you? At the garden-party?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I was sure you were. Rather intriguing, I thought, didn’t you?”

“I hardly spoke to him,” said Verity inaccurately.

“I hoped you’d been asked,” said Sybil much more inaccurately.

“Not I. I expect you’ll have gorgeous grub.”

“I don’t know that it’s a
party
.”

“Just you?”

“My dear. Surely not! But no. Prue’s come home. She’s met the son somewhere and so she’s been asked: to balance him, I suppose. Well,” said Sybil on a dashing note, “we shall see what we shall see.”

“Have a lovely time. How’s the arthritis?”

“Oh,
you
know. Pretty ghastly, but I’m learning to live with it. Nothing else to be done, is there? If it’s not that it’s my migraine.”

“I thought Dr. Field-Innis had given you something for the migraine.”

“Hopeless, my dear. If you ask me Field-Innis is getting beyond it.
And
he’s become very off-hand, I don’t mind telling you.”

Verity half-listened to the so-familiar plaints. Over the years Sybil had consulted a procession of general practitioners and in each instance enthusiasm had dwindled into discontent. It was only because there were none handy, Verity sometimes thought, that Syb had escaped falling into the hands of some plausible quack.

“—and I had considered,” she was saying, “taking myself off to Greengages for a fortnight. It does quite buck me up, that place.”

“Yes: why don’t you?”

“I think I’d like to just be
here
, though, while Mr. Gardener gets the place into shape.”

“One calls him ‘Mr. Gardener,’ then?”

“Verity, he
is
very superior. Anyway, I hate those old snobby distinctions. You don’t evidently.”

“I’ll call him the Duke of Plaza-Toro if he’ll get rid of my weeds.”

“I really must go,” Sybil suddenly decided as if Verity had been preventing her from doing so. “I can’t make up my mind about Greengages.”

Greengages was an astronomically expensive establishment: a hotel with a resident doctor and a sort of valetudinarian sideline where weight was reduced by the exaction of a deadly diet while appetites were stimulated by compulsory walks over a rather dreary countryside. If Sybil decided to go there, Verity would be expected to drive through twenty miles of dense traffic to take a luncheon of inflationary soup and a concoction of liver and tomatoes garnished with mushrooms to which she was uproariously allergic.

She had no sooner hung up her receiver than the telephone rang again.

“Damn,” said Verity, who hankered after her cold duck and salad and the telly.

A vibrant male voice asked if she were herself and on learning that she was, said it was Nikolas Markos speaking.

“Is this a bad time to ring you up?” Mr. Markos asked. “Are you telly-watching or thinking about your dinner, for instance?”

“Not quite yet.”

“But almost, I suspect. I’ll be quick. Would you like to dine here next Wednesday? I’ve been trying to get you all day. Say you will, like a kind creature. Will you?”

He spoke as if they were old friends and Verity, accustomed to this sort of approach in the theatre, responded.

“Yes,” she said. “I will. I’d like to. Thank you. What time?”

iii

Nobody in Upper Quintern knew much about Nikolas Markos. He was reputed to be fabulously rich, widowed and a financier. Oil was mentioned as the almost inescapable background. When Mardling Manor came on the market Mr. Markos had bought it and when Verity went to dine with him, had been in residence, off and on, for about four months.

Mardling was an ugly house. It had been built in mid-Victorian times on the site of a Jacobean mansion. It was large, pepper-potted and highly inconvenient: not a patch on Sybil Foster’s Quintern Place, which was exquisite. The best that could be said of Mardling was that, however hideous, it looked clumsily important both inside and out.

As Verity drove up she saw Sybil’s Mercedes parked alongside a number of other cars. The front door opened before she got to it and revealed that obsolete phenomenon, a manservant.

While she was being relieved of her coat she saw that even the ugliest of halls can be made beautiful by beautiful possessions. Mr. Markos had covered the greater part of the stupidly carved walls with smokey tapestries. These melted upward into an almost invisible gallery and relinquished the dominant position above an enormous fireplace to a picture. Such a picture! An imperious quattrocento man, life-size, ablaze in a scarlet cloak on a round-rumped charger. The rider pointed his sword at an immaculate little Tuscan town.

Verity was so struck with the picture that she was scarcely conscious that behind her a door had opened and closed.

“Ah!” said Nikolas Markos, “you like my arrogant equestrian? Or are you merely surprised by him?”

“Both,” said Verity.

His handshake was quick and perfunctory. He wore a green velvet coat. His hair was dark, short and curly at the back. His complexion was sallow and his eyes black. His mouth, under a slight moustache, seemed to contradict the almost too plushy ensemble: it was slim-lipped and, Verity thought, extremely firm.

“Is it an Uccello?” she asked, turning back to the picture.

“I like to think so, but it’s a borderline case. ‘School of’ is all the pundits will allow me.”

“It’s extraordinarily exciting.”

“Isn’t it, just? I’m glad you like it. And delighted, by the way, that you’ve come.”

Verity was overtaken by one of her moments of middle-aged shyness. “Oh. Good,” she mumbled.

“We’re nine for dinner: my son, Gideon, a Dr. Basil Schramm who’s yet to arrive, and you know all the rest: Mrs. Foster and her daughter, the Vicar (
she’s
indisposed) and Dr. and Mrs. Field-Innis. Come and join them.”

Verity’s recollection of the drawing-room at Mardling was of a great ungainly apartment, over-furnished and nearly always chilly. She found herself in a bird’s-egg blue and white room, sparkling with firelight and a welcoming elegance.

There, expansively on a sofa, was Sybil at her most feminine, and that was saying a great deal. Hair, face, pampered little hands, jewels, dress and, if you got close enough, scent — they all came together like the ingredients of some exotic pudding. She fluttered a minute handkerchief at Verity and pulled an arch grimace.

“This is Gideon,” said Mr. Markos.

He was even darker than his father and startlingly handsome. “My dear, an Adonis,” Sybil was to say of him and later was to add that there was “something” wrong and that she was never deceived, she sensed it at once, let Verity mark her words. When asked to explain herself she said it didn’t matter but she always
knew
. Verity thought that she knew, too. Sybil was hell-bent on her daughter Prunella encouraging the advances of a hereditary peer with the unlikely name of Swingletree and took an instant dislike to any attractive young man who hove into view.

Gideon looked about twenty, was poised and had nice manners. His black hair was not very long and was well kept. Like his father he wore a velvet coat. The only note of extravagance was in the frilled shirt and flowing tie. These lent a final touch to what might have been an unendurably romantic appearance but Gideon had enough natural manner to get away with them.

He had been talking to Prunella Foster, who was like her mother at the same age: ravishingly pretty and a great talker. Verity never knew what Prunella talked about as she always spoke in a whisper. She nodded a lot and gave mysterious little smiles and, because it was the fashion of the moment, seemed to be dressed in expensive rags partly composed of a patchwork quilt. Under this supposedly evening attire she wore a little pair of bucket boots.

Dr. Field-Innis was an old Upper Quintern hand. The younger son of a brigadier, he had taken to medicine instead of arms and had married a lady who sometimes won point-to-points and more often fell off.

The Vicar was called Walter Cloudsley, and ministered, a little sadly, to twenty parishioners in a very beautiful old church that had once housed three hundred.