‘I’ve got your hat here.’
‘I hate that hat! It makes me look middle-aged.’
‘We haven’t seen all the bookshops,’ Ingrid said patiently. ‘That’s one reason we came, isn’t it? To see the bookshops.’
‘I am fed up with bookshops. Our house looks like a bookshop full of tiresome old tomes. It’s much more fun here, talking to Miss Darcy. I’ve thought of something.’ Suddenly Beatrice reached out for Antonia’s hand and held it tight. ‘You must say yes. Promise you will say yes.’
‘Yes to what?’ Antonia glanced round nervously to see if there were any witnesses to this spectacle. Her eyes met the gleeful gaze of one of her fellow crime writers, the floppy-haired Scot, whose edgy hard-drinking characters she had never been able to take to her heart.
‘Would you allow us to give you tea? It would give me such great pleasure,’ Beatrice Ardleigh said. ‘Honestly. We’ll have a proper conversation. There are hundreds of questions I want to ask you.’
‘Isn’t it going to be too much for you? Won’t you – get tired?’
‘Oh, rubbish. I am not as bad as you probably think. Watch -’ To Antonia’s utter astonishment, Beatrice rose to her feet, stepped away from the wheelchair and held up her hands. ‘Voila. I couldn’t walk for quite a bit, but I am fine now. I allow myself to be perambulated about in this horrid chair only because Ingrid fusses so. She thinks I might stumble and collapse and die, don’t you, my sweet?’
‘It used to amuse you,’ Ingrid said.
‘I suppose it did – everybody so kind and solicitous – elderly gentlemen offering their services – special public lavatories and so on – but no more. It’s a bore.’ Beatrice resumed her seat. ‘Please, say yes, Miss Darcy. Do let’s have tea together.’
Ingrid’s face looked like thunder. Ingrid was clearly not wild about the idea of entertaining to tea a detective story writer of dubious merit, but Beatrice had already started saying that they had discovered a wonderful old-world tea-place, just round the corner, where they served the best cream teas imaginable.
In the end Antonia accepted. Les bonnes exercised a morbid fascination over her. She was curious about them. If somebody had told her at that point that by agreeing to have tea with Beatrice Ardleigh and Ingrid Delmar, she was setting in motion a chain of events that would end in her husband’s bringing about a man’s death by merely leaving his tobacco pouch behind, she wouldn’t have believed it.
But that was what happened.
2
Death-watch
They talked about death of course, or rather he did; it was inevitable in the circumstances that he should talk about death. He quoted the Bible – A vile disease has beset me and I will never get up from the place where I lie. He dwelt on his impending end. He had no fear and, now that she had come, no regrets. (‘Thank you, thank you, dear Bee,’ he reiterated.) God hadn’t brought about a miraculous healing, God hadn’t shrivelled up the tumours, but He had granted him that one wish, that he should see her. Who was he to question God’s wisdom? God was good. Now he could die in peace.
Ralph Renshawe rambled on. He had made all the arrangements for his own funeral. He had interviewed the undertakers and ordered his coffin. (A plain one, made of unvarnished pine.) He had chosen the hymns and seen to the printing of the service sheets. (O Deus, ego amo te and suchlike.) He informed her what was going to happen to Ospreys. (The National Trust was going to take over, apparently.) Ospreys was in a state of disrepair – it was falling apart, but he didn’t think it mattered a hoot – not even if it were to sink into the ground like the House of Usher. (Only the other month a garden urn had been torn off its Coade stone pedestal and stolen. He wished the whole bloody place could be dismantled.)
He referred to his vast fortune in dismissive terms. (He couldn’t take it with him. And even if he could, money would be of little use to him where he was going.) He groaned and grumbled about his nephew Robin. (Morally bankrupt – a terrible disappointment.) Listening to readings from St Thomas a Kempis on tape had been a great comfort. (A man calling himself a saint must be so disciplined that he is able to control his thoughts from evil. It was not enough merely to smile blandly as some thought.) He kept asking what month it was. (Was it really November? Already?)
She was bored to tears but she let him talk. In fact she encouraged him. He was getting quite breathless now. He had started gasping. She liked that.
He talked about the awful things men did to those they professed to love, about guilt, redemption, atonement, about forgiveness and simple human kindness. He meant him and her of course.
‘Thank you, Bee. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being here,’ he whispered. His eyes shut. He had tired himself. He was fading fast, that was what the nurse had said. The chemotherapy had made him lose all his hair as well as his lashes and eyebrows. His face was smooth, epicene; it looked neither female nor male. It was the colour of parchment; distorted, swollen, barely human. He felt nauseous and faint all the time and he had constant ringing in his ears. She could hardly contain her satisfied smile.
The bloodless lips were moving once more. ‘I became a Catholic the very same day the test results came. I used to disapprove of everything they stood for. I mean the Catholic Church. I used to mock them. I used to say there was nothing to it but superstition, empty rituals, trickery and buggery. Yet, inexplicably, it was into a Catholic church that I stumbled that day – I fell to my knees and bowed my head low -’
A priest visited him every day at Ospreys. It was some-body who had been recommended by Ralph Renshawe’s nephew, the infamous Robin. The nurse had let that slip out and then had begged her anxiously not to tell Mr Renshawe. The nurse, it seemed, had a soft spot for Master Robin.
She had bumped into the priest at the front door. Father Lillie-Lysander, some such name. She didn’t think much of him. He was plump and sleek; he looked worldly, self-important, insincere. That had been her overwhelming impression. He had hardly glanced at her, either out of fear that her golden hair might lead him into temptation or because he wasn’t interested in women – probably the latter.
‘I cried. I couldn’t help myself. I thought I’d drown in tears. I wasn’t pitying myself,’ Ralph went on. ‘I was thinking of you, Bee. I didn’t care that I had only a short time to live. I honestly didn’t. I decided to write to you, to find you. I made up my mind I wouldn’t leave this world before I’d sought your forgiveness. I thought about that other unfortunate woman too – what was her name?’
‘Ingrid,’ she said after a pause. There was a strange expression on her face.
‘Ingrid? Dear Lord. Terrible thing to happen.’
‘Apocalyptic,’ she said.
‘I was to blame. All my fault. I wrecked your lives -’ He broke off. ‘It was such a warm night when it happened – the kind of night songs are written about. Starry, starry night,’ he sang out in a thin reedy voice. The next moment he started coughing.
‘Every so often I shut my eyes and recreate the episode in my mind. I rewind it, as though it were a film. I run it through again and again. Then I freeze the frame and look at it carefully. I examine every detail -’
She was interrupted by a scream coming from outside and she turned her head sharply towards the french windows. Rooks. Rooks were circling above the vast, over-grown garden. She could see the wishing well and parts of the old stone wall with its deep arched embrasures, crumbling into ruin. When the National Trust took over, all that would change, she imagined. Ospreys would be open for the public. Or maybe the National Trust was going to keep things as they were? Some people liked the idea of picturesque decay.
‘It was 4th May,’ he whispered. ‘That’s when it happened.’