The Thin Woman (12 page)

“Aunt Sybil,” I cried, “what are you doing wandering around outside in the middle of the night?”

She looked momentarily taken aback, patting her badly permed grey hair with a fluttering hand. “Oh, Giselle, it’s you,” she said as though there had been some doubt.

She allowed me to help her off with her damp black coat and watched as I folded it over a chair. “A girl of your age should sleep the night through. We old people are different. I catnap. When I can’t get back to sleep, I go outside and walk about.”

“You have to be careful,” I said. “We don’t want you catching pneumonia.”

“Now, Giselle, don’t fuss. I simply felt the need for a little air. Besides, I wanted to walk down and look at the cottage, but then I realized Jonas was still there.”

She sat down and I poured her a cup of tea. As she drank I noticed that the skin on her hands was dry and cracked like a crumbling autumn leaf. “Aunt Sybil, you don’t have to go. This is your home. Ben and I are the intruders.”

“That’s very kind, Giselle.” Absently she hummed a snatch from the Merlin Grantham funeral theme before focussing her vague pale eyes on me. “But dear Merlin’s wishes are mine always. His leaving you the house is no reflection upon his feelings for me. He felt this place would become too much for me. Time for me to take life easy and sit down with my knitting. Whatever he said in the will, Merlin always appreciated my efforts.”

I tried not to let my eyes wander around the towering disorder. Aunt Sybil leaned back in her chair, her worn hands clasped over her rumpled, spotted dress. She was renouncing
her role as lady of the manor and handing over the keys to the new generation.

“Well,” I said, anxious to conceal my relief, “we will expect to see you here often for lunch or tea and we will come down to visit you.”

“Merlin would expect that,” she returned, “but let us wait until we are both settled. Speaking of settling down, will you and Mr. Hamlet be married soon?”

“Not for a while.” I rattled the teacups together and picked them up. “Ben feels we should wait until the end of the six months. We want our lives in order so we can enjoy the wedding.”

“I see.” Aunt Sybil nodded. What she thought she saw was a fortune hunter about to keep me dangling until he could be sure our marriage would prove a sound financial investment. “You do realize, don’t you,” she warned, “that people will talk with the two of you living here together? Even though Merlin and I are, were cousins I, too, got those winks and nudges from the villagers. Oh dearie, yes, but I never let them bother me. Why? Because I can proudly say that in all our years together your uncle never made an improper suggestion. Behave like a lady, Giselle, and you will always be quite safe with men.”

Now I knew where I had gone wrong.

“Remember, dear, if you must lie down—except to sleep, that is—do it with a good book. The one I’m reading now is a sweet story about a girl who is kidnapped from a nunnery by a pirate with a one-legged parrot. Remind me to lend it to you some time. Of course I must say I prefer William Shakespeare for something a a little deeper, but …”

The next morning I came downstairs to find Ben on the telephone. From his furtive “Goodbye” and speedy replacement of the receiver I sadly concluded he must have been talking to the other fiancée, but somehow I would make him forget her. On the road back to London I talked with him about Aunt Sybil.

“That woman frightens me; fifty years in that house and I
may end up just like her, an elderly wallflower still wondering what the knight in shining armour might do if he ever got off his horse.” Unwrapping a bar of chocolate, I took a sneaky bite while Ben kept his eyes on the road.

“Why don’t you worry about something real for a change, like how you are going to fare on your lose-some win-some diet. Tell me, why are your cheeks bulging like a hamster? Do I have to keep after you every minute?”

“Sorry.” I swallowed. “But I wonder how you would react if you had to lose four and a half stone, translated, that is sixty-three pounds, and six months into sixty-three goes …”

“About two and a half pounds a week. Here, give me the rest of that chocolate. Ruin my chances of this inheritance and I will personally turn you over to the relations and watch them tear you limb from limb.”

“You terrify me. But what is adventure without the thrust of danger?” I folded the chocolate paper and placed it in the ashtray.

“Something I can live without.”

What disturbed me about returning to Queen Alexandra Place was how little I had to leave behind and how little I had to collect.

“Are you taking the monster with you?” asked Jill. Tobias had just taken a yank out of her stockinged leg, so she was not feeling kindly towards him. “If so, I may decide not to visit you after all, Ellie darling.”

“Oh, Jill, you must come.” I blinked back a tear but she would not have seen it anyway, because her own eyes had misted over. “But leave my furry baby behind,” I continued bracingly, “you must be joking. He is off to mouse heaven. Rodents multiply in every closet. We are both going to work our tails off.”

And the prophecy was fulfilled. On arriving back at Merlin’s Court we found Aunt Sybil had departed for Cliffside, leaving a record number of dirty dishes in the sink and her bedroom
stacked with torn boxes, broken hangers, and newspapers dating back to the beginning of the century. What we needed was a giant bonfire set sufficiently back from the house so we did not all go up in smoke.

Manlike, Ben had already deposited his typewriter on the dining room table, and sat reaming paper between the rollers, surrounded by items he had casually moved to the floor, a chipped willow pattern soup tureen, a bobbled red velour cloth, several dusty egg cartons, magazines, candlesticks, and a bust of Churchill with half his cigar knocked off.

I leaned up against the door-frame and chirrupped sweetly, “Putting together a few items for the church bazaar?”

“What?” Ben rubbed a finger across his brow.

“Trying to place me? I am the other half of the ‘Double Your Money’ team—not the whole operation. Will you stop feeding that machine its breakfast, or do I have to knock your chair over?”

“What do you want from me!” Ben squinted, closed one eye, and carefully adjusted his margins. “I thought you’d be impressed by my self-discipline. Not half an hour in the house and here I am flexing my fingers ready to start on my puritan tale. You will be pleased to know I took your advice. My hero is a woman—a nun, at that—Sister Marie Grace, an American who infiltrates the C.I.A., cleverly disguised as a disco dancer. What do you think?”

“I think Sister What’s-her-face can go to hell and you can hand over your car keys so I can go into the village and get in provisions for the siege. Meanwhile you can put on a pinny and start shovelling dirt. If I don’t look out you will be placing your boots outside your bedroom door for cleaning.”

“You didn’t tell me you drove,” said Ben, pleasantly interested.

“I also feed myself, take baths alone …”

“Message received and understood. The keys are hanging on a nail just inside the stable door; bring me back a loaf of malt bread, will you?”

I made the notation on my list.

“You’d better get away from that typewriter,” I said, heading out the door. “It is programmed to explode in thirty seconds.”

The stables were at the side of the house, separated from it by a courtyard overlooking the moat and a pseudo-Norman arch. Shrugging on a short woollen jacket, I picked up my bag, slung the strap over my shoulder and, wrapping my arms around myself for warmth, made the short dash across the slick, moss-covered flagstones. Pushing open the iron-studded door, my eyes took a moment to grow accustomed to the gloom. After only once cracking my head on a slanted beam and putting my hand through something soft and spongy (which proved to be a gigantic cobweb), I located the car keys and was leaving when something moved in one of the far corners.

A bat? But bats don’t speak, unless you count the kind who transpose themselves into vampires for the express purpose of sucking the life blood out of defenceless maidens. This one was addressing me. I backed towards the door. The voice definitely had a sepulchral ring.

“Who be there?”

“And who be ye?” Swinging the door open behind me, I let in a shaft of watery sunlight. I could see his face, the grizzled hair, the bristly scrubbing-brush moustache. Not an unusual face. Hundreds of tramps hiding in barns all over the country probably looked very much like him—anonymous. “Jonas Phipps! Does everyone in this dreadful house walk on air? I never know who will pop up and terrify me next.”

“Nay, don’t say I scared ye, mistress. Were t’other way round. I were just coming down for airing when I heard this fair awful squeal, like pig having its innards carved open.”

“That t’were, were—was me. I cracked my head on a beam.” Reaching out I touched the book he had half hidden under his arm.

“I see you’ve been busy, Mr. Phipps. May I see?”

“Naw, t’is just a trifling yarn, ’bout giddy young thing
what gets put in’t family way by some ne’er-do-well feller an’ from then on t’is all downhill for poor lass.”

“Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”
I tilted my head and spelt out the title. “Cheerful little tale. If all the laughs are keeping you away from your polishing cloth I can tell you the ending is wonderful. She gets hanged.”

Jonas grunted. “Might have known t’would have happy ending. Was hoping she’d get married instead. Come to speak of wedding bells on’t peal, don’t doubt you and master’ll be taking a walk down churchyard soon?”

Here we went again. I explained patiently to Jonas that while the family was in mourning a wedding would be unseemly. He shook his head. “No call for fuss an’ show. Me ma and da went out in their workaday clothes day they was churched, but t’were legal, in them days. Decent living counted for summat then. Mr. Merlin would want ye wed, I’ll tell ye that straight.”

So he would have—the sadistic old devil.

Ben’s car went like a leopard that suddenly finds its cage door open. I pressed my foot on the accelerator, honked twice on the horn to speed up Jonas’s dawdling approach to the house, and zoomed down the driveway past Aunt Sybil’s cottage, through the drooping iron gates and onto the cliff road. The looping turns took some negotiating but I was exhilarated, like a schoolgirl experiencing the first day of holiday freedom. Luckily I met no other cars, and although I passed a bus stop, no lumbering vehicle approached me with a load of holiday-makers. Moving over, whilst polite, might have meant parachuting over the cliff edge. When spring finally graced us with its presence, this view would be magnificent, but now the sea was sluggish and swollen, slapping out at the jutting rocks like a petulant grey-faced crone.

Contemplating nature, I took a turn a little sharply, swerved to avoid a telephone kiosk, put my foot down to steady the car with the brake, felt it start and buckle like
an angry carthorse, and was thrown forward with a painful jolt against the steering column. The road lunged forward ready to hurl me into the sea. Grinding the wheel between my fingers, I held on for dear life and closed my eyes. I cannot say that the sum total of my past experience flashed before me, but I heard Vanessa’s voice: The words were the ones she had spoken after Uncle Merlin’s will was read, “By fair means or foul.”

My eyes flew open. Let Vanessa have the house, the money, I’d even throw in Ben as a special bonus offer, if the car would stop shuddering towards the cliff edge. Taking my foot off the brake, I let the car slide at roller-coaster speed until I met a relatively flat strip of road, yanked on the emergency brake, and slammed the car in a wild flourish into the right-hand bank.

What I needed was a comforting slice of chocolate cake.

For ten minutes I sat taking deep breaths, explaining carefully to my jumping limbs that we were safe and still hanging together, everything properly attached and nothing badly bruised or broken. After this pep talk I felt strong enough to climb out and inspect the damage to Ben’s pride and joy. Not that it mattered. Even if the car had survived without a scratch nothing would induce me to return to the driver’s wheel, and let the leopard loose again.

Down on all fours, inspecting the paintwork, I heard plodding footsteps and realized I was not alone.

“I say, having a spot of bother?”

Of course not, I thought, I just chose this isolated place to do my morning exercises.

Around a curve in the road came a sporting-type woman about forty, wearing a bright yellow cardigan, wheeling a bicycle.

“Sorry, did I startle you?” she boomed. “This certainly is not the place for surprises, one nervous shudder and over the side one would go, ha-ha!”

The people a girl meets on a quiet drive in the country.

CHAPTER
Eight

“Not to worry!” rasped my new acquaintance. “I’ll have this blighter off before you can sing the first verse of ‘God Save the Queen.’ How’s the spare?”

So much for murder plots. True to form I was the victim of something much more mundane, a blown tyre. Miss Jolly Hockey Sticks hummed blithely as she worked, ginger hair tucked uncompromisingly behind her ears and trouser legs riding up to snow an expanse of purple and yellow argyle socks. With fingers deft and quick, she had the defective wheel on the ground within minutes and was moving the spare into place.