Quartet in Autumn (21 page)

Norman ascended the stairs. He came into a room that might have been her bedroom. It had shabby, rose-flowered wallpaper and a faded patterned carpet. There was a table by the bed, and on it some books, an anthology of poetry, which surprised him, and a collection of pamphlets, the sort of thing you got in the library, giving details of services available for the retired and elderly. There was an old, rather dirty white candle wick cover over the bed and the sheets and pillows were still on it, just as they had been. This was the bed where she had slept, where she had dreamed, and where she had reached the point of death, though she hadn't actually died in it. Edwin and Father G. had found her downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table.

Norman advanced to the dressing table, with its swinging mirror, which stood in the window. So she had wanted a good light to see her face in, a cruelly revealing light, showing every line? Yet Marcia hadn't been one to look much at herself in the glass, he suspected. She hadn't seemed to care much about her appearance at the best of times, even with the dyed hair. At the end, Sister had said something about her lovely white hair, so perhaps the dye had grown out by then and somebody had cut off the dark ends. She had looked quite beautiful, Sister said, so calm and peaceful, but no doubt they always said that to the relatives, they must have to do quite a lot of what he thought of as soft-soaping in hospitals — Marcia looking beautiful — that would be the day! Yet, now that he knew that she had left him the house, he was prepared to believe that she might have been almost beautiful
.

There was a chest of drawers, presumably containing her clothes and her bits and pieces. He didn't particularly want to see those but he was drawn by curiosity. Tentatively, as if he were violating the sanctity of her secret office drawer, he opened one of the drawers. To his surprise, it was full of plastic bags of various sizes, all neatly folded and classified by size and type. There was something almost admirable about the arrangement, unexpected and yet just the sort of thing he could imagine Marcia doing.

He closed the drawer and stood in the middle of the room, wondering what to do. Surely he couldn't be expected to cope with all her mess, it was a woman's job. Letty ought to be here, sorting out the things, deciding what to do with the clothes. Perhaps he should get in touch with her, that was the obvious thing, unless the distant cousin could be approached; perhaps as a relative she had a prior claim. She had been too upset to attend the funeral but a few perks, like clothes and the odd stick of furniture, might work wonders on her sensibility.

Thinking about this, Norman moved into another room and stood looking out of a side window. From here he had a view of well-maintained and painted houses and neat gardens, the residences of his future neighbours, should he decide to live in the house himself.

'There's a man looking out of the window,' said Priscilla. 'He's in Miss Ivory's house. Do you suppose it's all right?'

'Perhaps we ought to investigate,' said Janice. She and Priscilla were sitting on the patio, drinking coffee. It was a marvellously sunny October day, a real Indian summer. Janice had been going to visit one of her cases in a nearby street, but the old person had been taken off for a drive by one of the enthusiastic amateur do-gooders from the church — annoying, the way social-services wires sometimes got crossed, though it meant that she had an unexpectedly free morning. So she had dropped in on Priscilla for a welcome cup of coffee and a gossip. Not exactly gossip, more to speculate on what might happen to Miss Ivory's house, what sort of neighbours Nigel and Priscilla might be getting.

'It looks like one of those men who were at the funeral,' Priscilla said 'You know, the men who worked in that office place.'

What would he be doing in the house?' Janice asked. 'He never came to see Miss Ivory when she was alive.' Her tone reflected some of the indignation she felt at the idea that Miss Ivory might have had friends who were perfectly capable of visiting her but never did. Yet wasn't it her job, her justification, her
raison d'être,
the loneliness of people like Miss Ivory? You couldn't have it all ways, as her husband sometimes reminded her. If the friends and relatives did their stuff, Janice might well be out of a job.

'Why don't we go over and see,' said Priscilla boldly. We can always say we noticed somebody in the house and wondered if it was all right. After all, we don't know him from Adam, do we?'

That social worker and her friend, the woman who lives next door, Norman thought, as he saw them coming to the house. What do
they
want?

'Yes?' he barked in a brusque, unpromising way, as he opened the front door an unfriendly crack.

Such
an odd little man, thought Priscilla, preparing to assume her coolest social manner, but Janice got in first.

'I'm Janice Brabner,' she said, 'and I used to look after Miss Ivory.' Rather a pointless thing to say, she realized, as it might appear that she hadn't been all that successful. 'We saw somebody at an upstairs window,' she went on quickly.

'Yes, me,' said Norman. 'It's my house now. Miss Ivory left it to me in her will.'

Norman was prepared for the gasp of unflattering astonishment that met his announcement. It seemed as if they hardly believed him. The one called 'Priscilla' was a tall blonde, wearing velvet trousers, and the other (I'm Janice Brabner, he mimicked to himself) was shorter and squatter, a real bossy social-worker type. She was the first one to speak, after he had dropped his bombshell.

'Are you sure?' she said.

'Sure? Of course I'm sure!' Norman retorted indignantly
.

'Oh, that is nice,' said Priscilla. She was not so stupid as to imagine that gushing social insincerity would get her anywhere with Norman, but it had occurred to her that if this person was going to be their new neighbour it would be just as well to get on to good terms with him. All the same she very much hoped that he wasn't going to be. What she really wanted was a young couple of about the same age as herself and Nigel, perhaps with children, so that they could do mutual baby-sitting when she and Nigel decided to start a family. The sort of people one could ask to dinner, which this odd little man, and whatever friends he might have, hardly seemed to be.

But Janice, with no stake in the future, could afford to be blunter. 'Are you going to live here?' she asked, straight out.

'I haven't made up my mind,' Norman said. 'I might decide to live here, and again I might not.'

At this stage the two women moved away, leaving Norman feeling that he had got the better of them
.
He did not go into the house again but began to explore that garden - 'explore' was the word, he decided, when you almost had to hack your way through the undergrowth. There was a garden shed, the kind of thing that might come in useful, and he saw himself arranging his tools and his 'gear' there. Perhaps Marcia had a lawn mower, a fork, a spade and a hoe, though it didn't look as if she had made much use of them lately. He pushed open the door of the shed. There were certainly some tools in one corner, but most of the space was taken up with rows of milk bottles stacked on shelves; there must have been over a hundred of them.

At this point Norman felt he couldn't cope any more. The small-scale stuffiness of his bedsitter seemed suddenly very cosy and attractively safe, so he decided to go back to it, 'home' as it still was. All the same, he was now a house owner and it was up to him to decide what to do with the property, whether to live in it himself or to sell it, and houses in that street were fetching a tidy sum judging by the others he had seen there. The fact that the decision rested with him, that he had the power to influence the lives of people like Priscilla and her husband, gave him a quite new, hitherto unexperienced sensation — a good feeling, like a dog with two tails, as people sometimes put it — and he walked to the bus stop with his head held high.

That same evening, on the other side of the common, Edwin returned from the office, wondering what sort of a day Norman had spent in what he still thought of as 'Marcia's house'. In other circumstances he might have strolled over there but tonight, being the 18th of October and St Luke's day, he was hoping to find an evening Mass somewhere. The lunchtime churches had yielded nothing, a sad contrast to the days when Father Thames, and later Father Bode, had attracted a crowd of office workers. Edwin also thought regretfully of another church where he had often gone in the past, which would have provided a splendid service, but that church was no more. A scandal in the early fifties — Edwin remembered it well — had put an end to the splendid services, the congregation had fallen away and in the end the church had been closed as redundant. An office block now stood on the spot where the air had once been filled with incense. It was a sad story, but the upshot of it was that there would be no St Luke's day evening Mass
there.
Luke, the beloved physician. You would have thought that the church opposite the hospital where Marcia had died would be filled with devout consultants — surgeons and physicians — housemen and nurses, on this day, but not a bit of it. The St Luke's there was the kind of church that had only the bare mimimum of Sunday services and nothing on weekdays. Now that he came to think of it, Edwin had grave suspicions that Mr Strong, Marcia's surgeon, was not any kind of churchgoer. Something he had said, some disparaging remark he had made about the chaplain
...
Still, that didn't solve the problem of the St Luke's day service and eventually the idea had to be given up.

Then it occurred to Edwin that he might give Letty a ring. At the funeral he had got the impression that she was a bit lonely, even living with Mrs Pope. After all, though it had been a good idea for her to go there as a lodger, was the company of a woman in her eighties quite enough for Letty? With this idea in his mind, he went to the telephone and dialled the number, but it was engaged. He decided to leave it for today and try again tomorrow or whenever he happened to remember it. After all, there was no hurry.

Twenty three

L
ETTY
HAD
AN
old-fashioned respect for the clergy which seemed outmoded in the seventies, when it was continually being brought home to her that in many ways they were just like other men, or even more so. The emphasis on humanity, in which we all share, had been the burden of a sermon she had recently heard at Mrs Pope's church, as if the preacher were preparing his congregation for some particularly outrageous piece of behaviour. In his case it had been no more than the removal of some of the pews at the back of the church to provide a space where the younger children could be accommodated during the service, but of course it had been greeted with indignant opposition by some.

'He is determined to ride roughshod over us,' Mrs Pope declared.

Letty, shocked by the violence of Mrs Pope's concept, had been about to say a word in the vicar's favour, when the telephone rang. Had it been a moment earlier (or later) it would have been Edwin, prompted by a friendly gesture towards Letty's supposed loneliness, but as it happened it was Marjorie, 'that friend of yours who's going to marry that clergyman', as Mrs Pope sometimes put it. But now, it appeared, Marjorie was not going to marry him. What Letty gathered from the incoherent outburst was that for some reason — it was a bad line, and she could not gather exactly what the reason was — the engagement had been broken off.

'Beth Doughty,' Marjorie wailed. 'And I had no idea.. .'

For a moment Letty couldn't remember who Beth Doughty was, then it came back to her. The warden of Holmhurst, the home for retired gentlefolk, that was Beth Doughty — the efficient woman with the rigid hairstyle, who poured such generous gins, who knew the kind of food David Lydell liked and remembered his passion for Orvieto. There was something shocking in the idea of two women competing for the love of a clergyman with the lure of food and wine, but the whole pattern slotted into place. Humanity in which we all share
...

When the telephone was at last laid down, the main point that emerged was that Letty must go to Marjorie as soon as possible. Not, of course, this evening — there was no suitable train — but first thing tomorrow morning.

'Well.. ,' Letty turned to the expectant Mrs Pope. 'That was my friend. He has broken off the engagement,' she said. It seems there's another woman — the warden of an old people's home.'

It sounded very bad, put like that, and the involvement, however indirectly, of 'old people' seemed particularly distressing.

'Really
...' Mrs Pope could think of nothing to say that would adequately express her feelings. Compared with this, the removal of a few pews from the back of her own church was as nothing. 'You will want to go to her, of course,' she added, not without a touch of envy.

'Yes, first thing in the morning,' said Letty. She felt curiously elated, a feeling she tried to suppress but it would not go away. She began to plan what sort of clothes she would take for this unexpected visit to Marjorie. The weather had been very warm for October, but she must remember that it was always colder in the country.

'His gastric trouble, and then there was his mother being over ninety, and in a way
...'
Marjorie hesitated, 'the age difference. He was some years younger than I am, of course.'

Letty murmured sympathetically, for she had known all these things and now that Marjorie was explaining what had happened, how he had seemed reluctant to fix the date of the wedding — it had already been put off once because of his mother's health — it seemed remarkable to consider that he had ever agreed to get married at all. And how had Beth Doughty managed it, for surely that needed to be explained? The other factors would still apply, and it wasn't as if she was much younger than Marjorie.

Marjorie didn't seem to know the answer to this or she was too upset to discuss the matter further. Letty began to wonder whether Beth Doughty might not also be rejected in her turn, whether no woman would succeed in bringing David Lydell to the point of marriage, but she did not say anything of this.