‘You take it easy, madam,’ the police officer who did the talking sought to soothe her when her voice rose anxiously in answer to a question. Strong tea, he advised; and counsellors were available. But prayer is Zenobia’s way. As drowsiness is dispersed, she prays again.
‘A Mrs. Ferry died tonight.’
At the sound of Thaddeus’s voice, Rosie lumbers to her feet, yawning and stretching herself again. The window Maidment opened earlier is closed now. In the conservatory only a single table lamp is lit.
‘That was the telephone call?’
‘Yes.’
He watches her nodding: she isn’t interested. In the brief, unemphatic motion of her head there is the weariness of defeat, as if time, by simply passing, has drained her of everything but this fatigue. Standing until now, Thaddeus sits down in the second wicker chair. Rosie comes to him, to rest her chin on his knees. He strokes her head.
‘There’s been nothing since,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry I went away.’
‘You looked for her?’
He shakes his head. There was panic in his restlessness; he ran away from thought, but of course you can’t do that. Talk is a help: in the last few moments he has discovered that. Any words, it hardly matters what they are, and the effort of releasing them: had he gone into the Old Edward, he might have stayed for ages.
‘I have never been so afraid,’ she says.
‘Nor I, I think.’
Zenobia is with them, as suddenly and as silently as an apparition. She has heard their voices, she offers coffee, or tea again. She picks up the tray on which her sandwich has not been touched, tea poured out and left. Thaddeus says:
‘You should go to bed, Zenobia.’
‘I’m better up, I thought.’
When she has gone he says: ‘I feel I am being punished.’
There is no response, but even so he continues.
‘Mrs. Ferry was a woman I ill-used. I had a peculiar childhood.’ It left uneasiness behind, he says, and tells her about that. ‘I have never trusted people. You were right to be doubtfuclass="underline" the untrusting are untrustworthy.’
‘I was ungenerous. I rushed in foolishly, as if your marriage were somehow mine to order.’
‘Your lack of generosity is more kindly called perception.’
‘I don’t think I said at lunch-time that I have come to understand why Letitia loved you.’
‘I was the last of her lame ducks. There was a bargain of some kind in our marriage, in the giving and the taking. But gradually it got lost, as if all it had ever been was a means to an end. I would have given half my life then to have loved Letitia. Today it will begin, I used to think. In some random moment of the morning, or after tea, or when we’ve gone to bed. But it never did.’
‘All that does not belong now.’
‘It is something to say.’
‘Why do you not blame me?’
‘Blame does no good.’
Vaguely, she nods again, the same tired gesture ofacknowledgement, not up to conversation. Thaddeus turns off the lamp on the table, and the conservatory is more softly lit by the haze of early morning. He does not want this day, so gently coming. He does not want its minutes and its hours, its afternoon and its evening, its relentless happening.
‘A miracle it has seemed like,’ Mrs. Iveson hears him say, and is confused until he adds: ‘Loving Georgina.’
She dreamed of Scarrow Hill, Zenobia says, and Maidment remembers from his own sleep a raw-faced bookie in a jaunty hat, and polka dots and hoops and jockeys’ chat, Quick One at nines, K. McNamara up. There was, before or after that, her wedding-dress hanging on the wardrobe door, his carnation in a tumbler by the wash-basin. There was his own voice singing ‘Drink To Me Only’.
‘It was to say a woman died,’ Zenobia passes on. ‘That phone call that came earlier.’
‘What woman?’
She gives the name. Bleary, he feels he’s dreaming still. Not quite in the kitchen yet, but hovering in the doorway as he sometimes likes to, he averts his head to belch away a little air. Slowly he advances to the table and sits down.
‘What’s this then?’
‘I looked in at the conservatory to see if anything was needed.’
‘They’re there?’
‘And have been a long while.’
‘So Mrs. Ferry’s passed on her way?’
‘Dead was what I heard.’
‘Mrs. Ferry was the woman quarrelled over the afternoon of the accident.’
‘You said.’
Each time she passed through the hall, returning the brass and silver pieces to their places, Zenobia says she heard the voices continuing in the conservatory. It not being her place to listen, she didn’t do so. What she heard about the woman there’d been the quarrel over was said when she looked in to see if anything was needed.
‘I dropped off a second and had that dream about the Scarrow Man.’
‘I doubt my eyes closed,’ Maidment touchily retorts, annoyed because it seems he might have passed the hours more profitably. He woke up and saw the other bed empty. Someone took the baby, he remembered then.
‘Bloody hell!’ he loudly and with suddenness exclaims. ‘Jesus bloody hell!’
In astonishment, Zenobia looks across the table at him. He is not given to this. Coarseness and blasphemy have never been his way.
‘We should have drawn special attention to that girl and her ring,’ his explanation comes, his tone still cross. ‘Out of the way, that episode was.’
‘Oh, surely not.’
‘Out of the way from start to finish.’
‘Well, mention it when they come back. No call for rowdiness.’
‘I said at the time. High and low she took him, after a ring that never saw the light of day in this house. I said it to you where you’re sitting now.’
‘No call for violent language neither.’
‘A time like this, it’s normal to speak straight out.’
His continuing vexation infects Zenobia. She responds as, years ago, she occasionally did in their circumspect marriage.
‘Was it speaking straight out to mention your bones to that man? Ridiculous, that sounded.’
‘What bones? What’re you talking about?’
‘It’s meaningless when you say you’ll lay down your bones. If you should have spoken about the girl and her ring, why didn’t you instead of going on about your bones?’
Astonished in turn, Maidment goes quiet. He stares at the scrubbed surface of the table, the furrows in the grain. Nothing more is said.
At half past five, faint beads of dew on the morning cobwebs, Thaddeus crosses one lawn and then the other, Rosie trailing behind him. He gathers tools from the shed in the yard: pliers and a hammer with a claw, wire-cutters and spade. The day he made the pen for Letitia’s pullets — out of sight, behind the summer-house — it took all morning. Dismantling promises to be quicker.
It was Letitia who planted the geranium banks he passes now — clumps of Lohfelden and Ridsko and Mrs. Kendall Clark, Lily Lovell and Lissadell. She wanted to have a part of the garden hers and cleared spring weeds and cut down nettles and dug up docks. She made her own wild corner, and her calm presence seems fleetingly there again among the echium and poppies, a Bach cantata soft on her transistor. Surely it is enough that she has died. Thinking that, for a moment it all seems one to Thaddeus, too: the death and what so soon has followed it.
The thought still there, he patiently extracts the staples that attach the chicken-wire to the posts he drove into the grass, dropping the staples into one half of a plastic container that once held spring water. He rolls up each length of wire as it becomes free and levers the posts back and forth until they’re loose enough to pull up. Only one does not come easily and he has to use the spade.
There are four coils of chicken-wire when he has finished, and eight posts which can be used for something else. The door he made of chicken-wire on a frame may be useful also. He fills the holes left in the grass with soil, ramming it home with his heel.