The Murder Room (9 page)

He followed her into the porch, helped her off with the raincoat and waited while she sat on the narrow bench, tugged off her Wellington boots and put on her house slippers. Then he followed her down the narrow hall and into the sitting-room.

Switching on the fire, she said, “Your trousers look rather damp. Better sit here and dry off. I won't be long with the coffee.”

He waited, resting his head against the high back of the chair and stretching out his legs to the heat. He had overestimated his strength and the walk had been too long. And now his tiredness was almost pleasurable. This room was one of the few, apart from his own office, where he could sit totally without strain. And how pleasant she had made it. It was unostentatiously comfortable without being cluttered, over-prettified or self-consciously feminine. The fireplace was the original Victorian with a blue Delft–tiled surround and an ornamental iron hood. The leather chair in which he rested, with its high-buttoned back and comfortable armrests, was just right for his height. Opposite was a similar but smaller chair in which Tally usually sat. The alcoves on each side of the fireplace had been fitted with shelves holding her books on history and London. He knew that the city was her passion. He knew from previous conversations that she also liked biography and autobiography but the few novels were all leather-bound copies of the classics. In the middle of the room was a small circular table with two high-backed Windsor chairs. There, he knew, was where she usually ate. He had glimpsed through the half-open door on the right of the hall a square wooden table with four upright chairs in what was obviously the dining-room. He wondered how often that room was used. He had never met a stranger in her cottage and it seemed to him that her life was contained within the four walls of this sitting-room. The south window had a wide sill and on it was her collection of African violets, pale and deep purple and white.

The coffee and biscuits arrived and he got up with some effort and moved across to take the tray from her. Smelling the comforting aroma, he was surprised to find himself so thirsty.

When together, he usually spoke of whatever came into his mind. He suspected that only cruelty and stupidity shocked her, as they did him. There was nothing he felt he couldn't say. Sometimes his conversation seemed a soliloquy, but one in which her responses were always welcome and often surprising. Now he asked, “Does it depress you, cleaning and dusting the Murder Room, those dead eyes in dead photographs, the dead faces?”

She said, “I suppose I've got used to them. I don't mean I think of them as friends. That would be silly. But they are part of the museum. When I first came I used to imagine what their victims suffered, or what they themselves suffered, but they don't depress me. It's all over for them, isn't it? They did what they did, they paid for it and they've gone. They aren't suffering now. There's so much to grieve over in our world that it would be pointless to grieve over ancient wrongs. But I sometimes wonder where they've all gone—not just the murderers and their victims, but all the people photographed in the museum. Do you wonder about that?”

“No, I don't wonder. That's because I know. We die like animals and from much the same causes and, except for the lucky few, in much the same pain.”

“And that's the end?”

“Yes. It's a relief, isn't it?”

She said, “So what we do, how we act, doesn't matter except in this life?”

“Where else could it matter, Tally? I find it difficult enough to behave with reasonable decency here and now without agonizing to acquire celestial brownie points for some fabled hereafter.”

She took his cup to refill it. She said, “I suppose it's all that Sunday school attendance and church twice every Sunday. My generation still half-believes we might be called to account.”

“So we may, but the tribunal will be here in the Crown Court with the judge wearing a wig. And with a modicum of intelligence most of us can usually avoid it. But what did you envisage, a big account book with debit and credit columns and the Recording Angel noting it all down?”

He spoke gently, but then he always did to Tally Clutton. She smiled. “Something like that. When I was about eight I thought the book was like the very large red account book which my uncle had for his business. It had
Accounts
written on the cover in black and the pages had red margins.”

He said, “Well, belief had its social uses. We haven't exactly found an effective substitute. Now we construct our own morality. ‘What I want is right and I'm entitled to have it.' The older generation may still be encumbered by some folk memory of Judeo-Christian guilt, but that will be gone by the next generation.”

“I'm glad I shan't be here to live through it.”

She was not, he knew, naÏve, but now she was smiling, her face untroubled. Whatever her private morality, if it went no further than kindness and common sense—and why the hell should it?—what else did she or anyone else need?

She said, “I suppose a museum is a celebration of death. Dead people's lives, the objects they made, the things they thought important, their clothes, their houses, their daily comforts, their art.”

“No. A museum is about life. It's about the individual life, how it was lived. It's about the corporate life of the times, men and women organizing their societies. It's about the continuing life of the species
Homo sapiens.
No one with any human curiosity can dislike a museum.”

She said softly, “I love it, but then I think I live in the past. Not my own past, that's very unexciting and ordinary—but the past of all the people who have been Londoners before me. I never walk there alone, no one can.”

He thought, Even walking across the Heath is different for each of us. He noticed the changing trees, the sky, enjoyed the softness of turf under his feet. She imagined the Tudor washerwomen taking advantage of the clear springs, hanging their clothes over the gorse bushes to dry, the coaches and carts lumbering up from the stews of the city at the time of the plague and the great fire to take refuge in London's high village, Dick Turpin waiting on his horse in the shelter of the trees.

And now she was rising to take the tray into the kitchen. He got up and lifted it from her hands. Her face looking into his was, for the first time, troubled.

She said, “Will you be at the meeting on Wednesday, the one when the future of the museum will be decided?”

“No, Tally, I shan't be there. I'm not a trustee. There are only three trustees, the Dupaynes. None of us has been told anything. It's all rumour.”

“But can it really be closed?”

“It will be if Neville Dupayne has his way.”

“But why? He doesn't work here. He's hardly ever in the museum except occasionally on a Friday when he collects his car. He isn't interested, so why should he care?”

“Because he hates what he sees as our national obsession with the past. He's too involved with the problems of the present. The museum is a convenient focus for that hatred. His father founded it, spent a fortune on it, it bears his family name. He wants to get shot of more than the museum.”

“Can he?”

“Oh yes, if he won't sign the new lease, the museum will close. But I shouldn't worry. Caroline Dupayne is a very strong-minded woman. I doubt whether Neville will be able to stand up to her. All that he's required to do is to sign a piece of paper.”

The idiocy of the words struck him as soon as he had spoken them. When had signing one's name been unimportant? People had been condemned or reprieved through the signing of a name. A signature could disinherit or confer a fortune. A signature written or withheld could make the difference between life and death. But that was unlikely to be true of Neville Dupayne's signature on the new lease. Carrying the tray into the kitchen, he was glad to turn away from the sight of her troubled face. He had never seen Tally looking like that before. The enormity of what faced her suddenly struck him. This cottage, that sitting-room, was as important to her as his book was to him. And she was over sixty. Admittedly that didn't count as old today, but it wasn't an age for seeking a new job and a new home. There were plenty of vacancies; reliable housekeepers had never been easy to find. But this job and this place were perfect for her.

He was visited by an uncomfortable pity and then by a moment of physical weakness so sudden that he had to put down the tray quickly on the table and rest for a moment. And with it came the wish that there was something he could do, some magnificent gift which he could lay at her feet which would make everything right. He toyed for a moment with the ridiculous thought that he might make her the beneficiary of his will. But he knew that such an act of eccentric liberality was beyond him—he could hardly call it generosity since by then he would no longer have need of money. He had always spent up to his income and the capital remaining was family money left in his will, carefully drawn up by the family solicitor some fifteen years ago, to his three nephews. It was odd that he who cared so little what his nephews thought of him, and only rarely saw them, should be concerned for their good opinion after death. He had lived his life comfortably and mostly in safety. What if he could find the strength to do one last eccentric, magnificent thing which would make a difference to someone else?

Then he heard her voice. “Are you all right, Mr. Calder-Hale?”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm perfectly all right, Tally. Thank you for the coffee. And don't worry about Wednesday. I have a feeling it will be all right.”

8

It was now eleven-thirty. As usual, Tally had cleaned the museum before it opened in the morning and now, unless she was wanted, she had no duties except to make a final check with Muriel Godby before it closed at five o'clock. But there was work to do in the cottage and she had spent longer than usual with Mr. Calder-Hale. Ryan, the boy who helped with the heavy cleaning and in the garden, would arrive with his sandwiches at one o'clock.

Since the first bite of the colder autumn days Tally had suggested to Ryan that he should eat his lunch in the cottage. During the summer she would see him resting with his back against one of the trees, the open bag at his side. But as the days grew colder he had taken to eating in the shed where he kept the lawn-mower, sitting on an upturned crate. It seemed to her wrong that his comfort should be so disregarded, but she had made her offer tentatively, not wishing to impose an obligation or to make it difficult for him to refuse. But he had accepted with alacrity and from that morning onwards he would arrive promptly at one o'clock with his paper bag and his can of Coca-Cola.

She had no wish to eat with him—that would have seemed an invasion of her own essential privacy—so she had taken to having her light lunch at twelve o'clock so that everything was cleared and out of sight by the time he arrived. If she had made soup she would leave some for him, particularly if the day were cold, and he seemed to welcome it. Afterwards, taught by her, he would make coffee for them both—real coffee, not granules out of a jar—and would bring it in to her. He never stayed longer than an hour and she had become used to hearing his feet on the path every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, his working days. She had never regretted that first invitation but was always half guiltily relieved on Tuesdays and Thursdays that the morning was entirely her own.

As she had gently asked him on the first day, he removed his working boots in the porch, hung up his jacket and went on stockinged feet into the bathroom to wash before joining her. He brought with him the scent of earth and grass and a faint masculine smell which she liked. She was amazed how clean he always seemed, how fragile. His hands looked as delicately boned as a girl's, strangely discordant with the brown muscled arms.

His face was round, firm-cheeked, the skin faintly pink and looking soft as suede. His large brown eyes were wide-spaced, the upper lids heavy, above a retroussé nose and a cleft chin. His hair was cut very short, showing the shape of the rounded head. Tally saw it as a baby face which the years had enlarged, but without any imprint of adult experience. Only his eyes belied this apparent untouched innocence. He could raise the lids and gaze at the world with a wide-eyed and disarming insouciance, or disconcertingly dart a sudden glance, both sly and knowledgeable. This dichotomy mirrored what he knew; odd snippets of sophistication which he picked up as he might fragments of litter from the drive, combined with an astonishing ignorance of wide areas of knowledge which her generation acquired before they left school.

She had found him by placing a card on the vacant jobs board of a local newsagent. Mrs. Faraday, the volunteer responsible for the garden, had pointed out that the sweeping up of leaves and some of the heavier pruning of shrubs and young trees had become too much for her. It was she who had suggested the card rather than an approach to the local job centre. Tally had given the telephone number of the cottage and had made no mention of the museum. When Ryan phoned, she had interviewed him with Mrs. Faraday and they had been inclined to take him on for a month's trial. Before he left she had asked for a reference.

“Is there anyone, Ryan, someone you have worked for, who could write and recommend you?”

“I work for the Major. I clean his silver and do odd jobs about the flat. I'll ask him.”

He had given no further information, but a letter had arrived from an address in Maida Vale within two days:

Dear Madam. Ryan Archer tells me you are thinking of offering him the job of handyman/gardener's boy. He is not particularly handy but has done some household chores for me satisfactorily and shows willingness to learn if interested. I have no experience of his gardening ability, if any, but I doubt whether he can distinguish a pansy from a petunia. His timekeeping is erratic but when he arrives he is capable of hard work under supervision. In my experience people are either honest or dishonest and either way there is nothing to be done about it. The boy is honest.