Ann hurried onto the landing, forcing a smile and some semblance of warmth into her voice. She leaned over the stairwell and called a greeting back. ‘Good morning, Hetty.’
Evadne Pleat, of Mulberry Cottage, The Green, had just concluded the most important business of her day, namely the loving care and maintenance of her six Pekinese dogs. Brushing, washing, clipping, feeding, worming and walking. Their temperatures had to be taken, their collars checked for cleanliness and comfort, their beautiful creamy fur closely investigated lest any foreign body should have dared to trespass.
Once this elaborate routine was over, Evadne had her breakfast (usually some porridge and an Arbroath Smokie) then placed a white Kashmir geranium in the kitchen window. This signalled that she was ‘at home’ and from then on her day was so crammed with incident she had hardly a moment to breathe. The reason for her popularity was simple. Evadne was a miraculously good listener.
It is rare to come across someone more interested in others than in themselves and the inhabitants of Ferne Basset were quick to appreciate Evadne’s remarkable qualities. She always seemed to have the time to give people her absolute attention. Her eyes never strayed towards the face of her pretty grandmother clock nor did its sweet chimes ever distract. Whatever the subject under discussion, she would always appear sympathetic. And totally discreet.
Inevitably people started to seek her out. The most comfortable chair in her cluttered little sitting room was always occupied by some troubled or excited soul getting it all off their chest while being sustained by shortbread tails and Earl Grey. Or, after 6 p.m., Noilly Prat and Epicure cheese footballs.
Evadne never gave advice, which, if they’d thought about it, would have surprised her visitors for they always left feeling comforted, occasionally going as far as to say they could now see their way clear. Sometimes they even regarded the people they had come to complain bitterly about in an entirely different light.
This day, of course, they talked about nothing but supposed events on the river bank. Lack of any solid evidence did not hold back a flood of almost Gothic extravagance. Not that there was anything to go on, she must understand. The vaguest of stories, my dear. Apparently no one actually heard anything. Even so - no smoke without fire. By the time Evadne’s lunch break arrived she was rather regretting that she had no writing talent for she had enough melodramatic narrative to keep a soap opera going for the next ten years.
At lunchtime she removed her geranium and called Piers, the oldest and most sensible of the Pekes, to her. Gave it a basket with a note and some money in an envelope and sent it round to Brian’s Emporium for her Times, some Winalot and a few iced fancies. She was out of tonic water too but felt it wasn’t right to expect a dog to struggle with heavy bottles.
When Piers came back with the wrong change (not for the first time), Evadne put the Yale down and started to prepare lunch. She sweated a couple of shallots and some chopped celery in unsalted butter, threw in a bay leaf, added fresh chicken stock and left the pan bubbling quietly. Then she poured out a small glass of elderflower wine and laid the table. Beautiful silver cutlery - a retirement present from the library staff at Swiss Cottage - a spray of hothouse mimosa, warm granary rolls.
As she stirred the soup and sipped her homemade pick-me-up, Evadne could not help her thoughts straying to the matter that had so concerned all her morning visitors. She wondered if anyone really had fallen into the water. And if they had, where were they now? Could they already have floated miles away? Or become caught up in weeds? Maybe they were stuck in the muddy river bed.
Evadne’s hand trembled as she found a packet of cardamoms and took down her mortar and pestle, and her heart swelled with pity for this perhaps mythical person. Drowning was the one thing Evadne was afraid of. Once at school, asked to read from Richard III, she had been given the scene describing the death of Clarence and had nearly choked on the horror of it. Suddenly feeling less adventurous, she replaced the cardamoms on the shelf and served up the soup straight.
She was sitting down to eat it - indeed the spoon was halfway to her lips - when she suddenly remembered something that had happened the previous night. She had been in her bedroom under the eaves and preparing to retire. Having changed into a long winceyette nightie and sponged her face with rainwater and Pears soap, as she had done since she was a child, Evadne said her prayers. As always she brought various names to God’s attention, even suggesting the odd course of action whilst allowing that, naturally, the final choice must be His. Then she climbed into bed.
Evadne always slept on her back, her hands crossed on her breast like an effigy in an old country church. She liked to think that, should her soul slip its moorings while she was unconscious, her remains would be discovered in a state of worshipful neatness. Invariably she fell straightaway into composed and dreamless sleep but last night, on the point of drifting off, she had been shocked into wakefulness by a strange cry, loud and rather fearful, almost a scream. At the time she had assumed it was a vixen or perhaps a small mammal caught in some predator’s grip. But now, sitting in a bright, sunlit kitchen and staring into her rapidly cooling soup, Evadne was not so sure.
She gave herself a shake and told herself firmly that, even if she had been mistaken and the cries turned out to be human, there could surely be no connection. Everyone said that whoever had fallen into the Misbourne had done so near Swan Myrren. And these sounds came from much nearer home. Even so ...
Evadne finished her soup quickly, placed the dishes in the sink and her geranium back in the window. When the knocker was almost immediately lifted, she hurried to open the door. For this was one of the rare occasions when Evadne needed human company almost as much as it needed her.
Round about four o’clock that same afternoon Louise Fainlight called to see Ann Lawrence. They had become casual friends in a rather hit-and-miss way for, apart from a love of gardening, they had little in common. Certainly, Louise was aware that, were she still living and working in London, they would have been ships that passed in the night hardly recognising, let alone acknowledging, each other’s existence.
But in a small village choice is limited and, finding someone at least halfway compatible, an effort is nearly always made. And it was true that both women had come to find each other intriguing. Neither could understand how the other could possibly live the way they did.
Ann admired and was slightly afraid of Louise’s glamour, her tough, ironical attitude to life in general and the joking, seemingly detached relationship she had with her brother. The younger woman’s willingness to fight her corner was a source of envy. Some of the situations she had had to deal with as an analyst in the stocks and shares department of a merchant bank where she had previously worked would have had Ann running to the nearest loo in terror.
For her part, Louise simply could not believe that a potentially extremely attractive woman of Ann’s age and intelligence could spend her time day after day, month after month, year after year doing nothing. Or at least what Louise regarded as nothing. Dreary preoccupations such as pottering in the greenhouse, chairing the WI, editing and printing the parish magazine, organising the church flower and cleaning rota. Unbelievable.
Curiosity as to why her friend came to be married to such a dry stick of a man was easily satisfied, for everyone in the village knew the story. Ann had lived with her father, Ferne Basset’s resident vicar and over fifty when she was born, until he died some twenty-two years later. His curate, Lionel Lawrence, a timid, pleasant man then in his forties, gradually took over the Reverend Byford’s clerical duties and also helped Ann to care for him in his old age.