Seeing is Believing (2 page)

‘Did you have trouble with drink and drugs at that school of yours?’ Avril asked.

‘A bit. Not much. Not nearly as much as there'd have been at an urban school.’

‘I hope our Juliet isn't that way inclined. She seems so perfectly right for the part.’

‘I think she's a pretty sober young thing, even if she's got a boyfriend.’

As it happened, the boyfriend was Romeo. There had been a faction in our dramatic society who had wanted Peter Loxley to be Romeo, but it was Fred Dyer who in the end had been given the part. Peter was Mercutio, while Avril was Lady Capulet. There were people in the society who felt uneasy about Fred. We really knew so little about him. He had simply appeared some months ago in the company of Sharon Sawyer, our Juliet, and made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was living with her.

They lived in the ground-floor flat of a house that had once been a vicarage, but which was much too large for the modest needs of our present vicar and had been converted into flats. Sharon worked in the library in Otterswell, our nearest small town and was a quiet, pretty girl who knew her Shakespeare so well that she had hardly needed to study her part. Nobody knew quite what Fred Dyer did, except that he would mend electric light fittings that had gone wrong, and paint doors and window-frames, and look after your garden if you were lucky, and wash your car. There was a story that he was a poet, though I was certain that he had never said so himself. Either Sharon had spread it, or someone had guessed it because there had to be some explanation of what he was really doing in a place like Raneswood. It did not seem improbable that a penniless poet should spend his spare time as an odd-job man and there was something pleasantly romantic about the idea. He had a black leather jacket and jeans, which was convenient, as it was how we had decided the young Montagues and Capulets should be dressed.

Avril stood up and began packing up her dressmaking tools, while I removed my blue nurse's dress and started scrambling into my slacks and sweater. Her dogs recognized this correctly as a sign that she was going home and
got to their feet too, stretching, yawning, wagging their tails to show their satisfaction, and began wandering about the room, seeming all at once to fill it almost completely. It was not a large room, though usually I did not think of it as small, but when three big dogs took it into their heads to explore it yet again after having done so on arriving, it seemed to shrink in size. The house was really a cottage, but it was Georgian and the ceiling was fairly high, the fireplace elegant, the doorway not the kind which forces anyone entering to stoop if they do not want to risk giving their heads a knock, but for the moment it seemed to be all damp noses and lolling tongues, and into the midst of this came Malcolm, having apparently decided that he had spent enough of the morning on his autobiography.

‘Ah, Avril,’ he said, ‘at work as usual. You aren't just leaving, are you? Have some sherry.’

‘That'd be nice,’ she said. ‘Mrs Henderson always looks shocked if she sees me drinking alone at home. I always wait till she leaves before I help myself.’

Mrs Henderson was the Loxleys’ daily help, a little angular woman of extreme efficiency, who came to them from nine to twelve six days a week, and the reason why Avril would have had to drink alone if she had returned now was that Peter not only went daily to London, but sometimes remained for several days at a time in a small flat that they had in Fulham. I thought that that was where he was staying at the moment.

Malcolm went to the corner cupboard where we kept our drinks and brought out sherry and glasses. He is a tall, spare man, taller, in fact, than he looks now, because he has acquired a slight, elderly stoop. His hair is grey, but still thick and stands up in a bristling way above a high forehead. His eyes are a cool, clear blue. His chin is square and firm and his mouth wide. His face in general is a kindly one, though it can become remarkably stern if his mood happens to be disapproving. The change in it can still sometimes take me by surprise. He was to be Friar
Lawrence in our production, so he was the one member of the cast who was going to be clothed in something taken from the store of fancy dress that belonged to the society.

‘You'll be at Hugh's this evening, I expect,’ he said as he brought Avril her sherry. ‘Will Peter be there?’

Hugh Maskell was an acquaintance of ours in the village who was directing our production, and who had asked us over for drinks that evening.

‘If he gets home in time,’ Avril answered. ‘He thought he would; but it depends on the traffic, doesn't it? It sometimes takes two hours to get here from London, specially on a Friday evening.’

The dogs had investigated Malcolm, had decided that he had a right to be there and had settled down again, though rather reluctantly, more or less where they had been before.

‘How are you dressing Juliet?’ Malcolm asked, as he poured out drinks for me and himself and settled down on the sofa under the window. ‘I hope not in jeans or a mini-skirt.’

‘Definitely not in jeans,’ Avril said, ‘but the questionof the mini-skirt isn't quite decided. I rather like the idea myself. After all, the girl's got very good legs.’

‘No,’ Malcolm said positively. ‘The mini-skirt's only a whim of the moment, and the fact is, according to my observation, it's permissible these days to wear skirts of any length you choose. It's not like it used to be a little while ago. I can remember when Frances gave away two perfectly good dresses to Oxfam simply because the hemline was in the wrong place. A year or two later, she'd have been glad to have them back, because the hem had moved again. But now that simply doesn't arise. So why not put Juliet into something long and graceful? She'll look far more charming in it.’

Frances, by the way, is my name.

‘Of course we'll think about it,’ Avril said. ‘I expect
there'll be a good deal more discussion of such things on Saturday evening than we've had already. You'll be there, of course.’

Saturday evening was to be our first rehearsal in the village hall. Most of us would be reading our parts, and arguing a great deal, getting in each other's way and wasting time. But it was a phase that had to be gone through.

‘Will you be back from London, Avril?’ I asked, then explained to Malcolm, ‘Avril's going to London to have lunch with her cousin, Lynne Denison.’

‘Oh yes, I'll come straight back after lunch,’ Avril said. ‘And of course, Peter'll be there.’

‘Our problem is that we're expecting a guest for the weekend,’ Malcolm said. ‘We're going into Otterswell to meet him this afternoon. And we'll either have to bring him to the rehearsal, which might bore him, or leave him to himself for the evening.’

‘Is he the kind of person who'd be bored by the rehearsal?’ Avril asked. ‘I should have thought it might be quite entertaining.’

‘I think so too,’ I said. ‘After all, he's had quite a lot to do with amateur dramatics himself in the last few years. I think he'll enjoy it.’

But I was wrong. He did not enjoy it because it did not take place.

Something happened on Saturday that put an end to our production of
Romeo and Juliet
. So perhaps it was as well that it was to have been a modern dress production, because at least our society had so far spent hardly anything on the clothes. The material for my nurse's uniform was the only thing that had been bought with our rather scanty funds.

The guest whom Malcolm and I were expecting that afternoon was Brian Hewlett, now headmaster of Granborough. He had been to stay with us several times before during the school holidays. At the moment, we
were in the middle of the spring holidays and we were hoping the fine weather that we were having would last over his visit, because he and Malcolm enjoyed going on long walks together over the Downs. I usually let them go without me, because generally Brian's wife Judy came with him, and she and I enjoyed each other's company. She was ten years younger than I was but that had never been a barrier. He was coming alone this time because she was on a visit to a member of her family whom she felt obliged to see from time to time, but whom she preferred not to inflict on Brian. Over the years, I had heard a good deal about her family, all of whom thought of Granborough as nothing but a deplorably eccentric institution and Brian as more than a little mad.

We were to meet him at three-forty-five in Otterswell. It was at about a quarter-past three that we went out to the garage and brought out the Rover. It was looking spruce, because Fred Dyer had recently washed it. As we went towards it, I saw him at work in the Loxleys’ garden. He noticed us and gave us a wave. He was a tall young man, bony but muscular, with wide shoulders and long arms, and a small, well-shaped head set on a long neck with a pronounced Adam's apple. His hair was a deep, burnished red and his eyes were a greenish grey. In his gangling way he was striking to look at, if not exactly handsome, and although up to a point he was friendly, it was sometimes difficult to feel sure that he knew to whom he was talking. He seemed to look through you rather than at you, and to want to make sure that you realized that he liked to keep himself to himself. We had all been a little surprised when he had agreed to take the part of Romeo, indeed to have anything to do with our dramatic society. His girlfriend, Sharon, we supposed, must have been responsible for it. He was mowing the Loxleys’ grass when we came out of the house.

While Malcolm was backing the car out of the garage,
I went across our own lawn and called out, ‘Hello, Fred, when are you going to give us some time?’

He switched off the mower and came towards me. A low beech hedge divided the Loxleys’ garden from ours and we could easily talk across it. Both gardens had several apple trees in them, and flowerbeds which at that time were making a brave show of tulips. The daffodils were over and so was the forsythia, and the rhododendrons were not yet in bloom. Our garden was a little the more ambitious, because Malcolm spent a good deal of time at work in it, so we were not quite as dependent on Fred as the Loxleys were. Our two houses stood close together, with only the hedge between them and paths going round to the back of each house. Our house was white, with dark beams and square sash windows, but the Loxleys’ was a good deal bigger. I found its mellowed red brick and tall windows very attractive.

‘I'll come over on Monday, if that's all right,’ Fred answered. ‘I'm busy over the weekend.’

He had a puzzling voice. Usually with the English, the moment they open their mouths you can place them socially, but Fred's accent eluded me. I thought there had probably been a public school at some time in his life, but if so, he had done his best to eliminate any trace of it. His busyness, I thought, was probably simply that he wanted to spend the weekend with Sharon.

‘Monday's fine,’ I said. ‘Morning or afternoon?’

‘I could come around ten.’ As usual, he was not speaking directly to me, but seemed to be focusing on something beyond me, and I wondered if that was how he looked even at Sharon, because there was something a little chilling about it. ‘Or shall I come earlier?’

‘No, ten's all right, if that's what suits you.’ I am not good at getting up myself, and was quite glad that he would not need attention earlier. Not that he needed much attention. He would arrive with his own tools in his van, which he would park at our gate, as it was parked
now at the Loxleys’, and get to work with what he considered needed doing, without consulting Malcolm or me. Then, at about eleven o'clock, I would take him out a cup of tea, and we would have a brief chat, mostly about all the mistakes that we had made in our garden before he had come to our rescue and a little bit about the character of Romeo, then at twelve o'clock Malcolm would make out a substantial cheque to him, and he would drive off in his van. If he charged everyone he worked for as much as he charged us, he must have taken a comfortable income home to Sharon.

Malcolm by now had the car in the lane and I went to join him while Fred returned to the mowing-machine. The lane went down a fairly steep hill to the main road that ran through the village. There were three other houses along the lane, one of them belonging to Hugh Maskell to which we were going for drinks that evening, one to two elderly unmarried sisters, and one to a young couple called Askew with two small children. Hugh had been a highly successful surgeon before his retirement. He was sixty, which perhaps had been early to put an end to his career, but he claimed that he did not trust his hands any longer. Besides directing our performance of
Romeo and Juliet
, he was taking the part of Capulet.

The afternoon was fine, with a light breeze blowing and small puffs of cloud chasing each other across the clear blue sky. The hawthorn hedges were green and the beech trees were coming into leaf. It was only seven miles from Raneswood to Otterswell, along a twisting road that ran through two or three more villages. Brian was coming from Edgewater by train, which in fact had meant his going to London first and changing there, because Judy had taken their car when she went off to visit her family in Cheshire. We arrived at the station in Otterswell in plenty of time to meet the three-forty-five, and were waiting for Brian as arranged, at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the platform when the train came in.

Brian was among the first people who came down the stairs. He clapped a hand on Malcolm's shoulder and gave me a kiss. He was a small man, very neatly built, with a light, springing walk which seemed to make him move faster than anyone else around him. His hair was thick and grey and generally untidy; his face was narrow and long, with a pointed chin, a sharply jutting nose, a wide mouth, and large, very bright brown eyes. His fine, arched eyebrows were still black, in spite of his grey hair. He had never been handsome, yet he was a man whom one noticed in a crowd, mostly, I used to think, because he had so much vitality. He was carrying one suitcase which Malcolm tried to take from him but to which he clung, refusing to be helped with it. He seemed to think that our meeting was an occasion for chuckling rather than for speech, at least until we were in the Rover and on the way back to Raneswood.