We are left with no explanation and no sign of one, she writes the news to Sussex. Why any of it happened is the mystery we must live with, for I do not believe they will find the girl. If that boy had not gone to the place when he did Georgina would not be alive. That that was what the girl intended we must live with, too.
She does not think, she adds, that she can remain at Quincunx House. She shall, of course, until a new arrangement is made, but in the end the arrangement she suggested herself has been shown to be a failure. Thaddeus, though, does not accept my view and is adamant it were better I stayed. I press him — not that I want to go, but feel I should — and still he does not see it. So it is left. Stubbornness is a quality I have not noticed in him before.
The only flowers Thaddeus has ever sent Mrs. Ferry he sends on the day the letter that tells of this unresolved consequence is posted. Having forgotten about the funeral, he remembers the night before it is to take place and telephones first thing, relieved to find he is not too late. Cut flowers, not a wreath, he stipulates, bright colours, the brightest mixed together. When the time comes for the woman he was once attracted by to lie briefly in the crematorium chapel he thinks of her. ‘A generous spirit,’ he does not know the clergyman’s description is, but guesses that a favourite tune is played and that the chef who was at the Beech Trees is there. A few others are present too, her onetime husband arriving five minutes late, delayed by traffic on his journey down from Lytham St. Annes, his second wife waiting in the car, feeling that to be proper in the circumstances.
The week that brought Mrs. Ferry’s death and the ordeal of Georgina’s abduction comes to an end, and on the Sunday that finishes it Mrs. Iveson agrees to think further about her decision, and next morning agrees to stay. The days settle back into ordinariness then, as the summer heatwave continues. From Sussex come commiserations and exclamations of outrage in a shaky hand. Terrible things happen, it is declared; that is life today, enlightened times or not. A postscript adds that the cataract operation, twice postponed, is to take place at last, next month. And news goes back to Sussex of Georgina’s teething.
In time, the first green specks of Thaddeus’s winter parsley appear. Murder in Mock Street is taken from the drawing-room shelves, and then The Corpse on the Fourteenth Green. ‘My!’ Zenobia marvels on a weekend outing to Scarrow Hill, for the giant is taller than in her dream, and shocking in a way she failed to anticipate. Maidment wins with Cappoquin Boy. No change is reported from St. Bee’s.
Of course, we live in fear, Mrs. Iveson brings herself to confess, that again we are watched, that even now she comes by night to the garden, that again she will hurt us. I see her face, staring at me from where she stood that day, the sunlight glinting on her glasses.
But no one comes to the garden in the way Mrs. Iveson dreads, either by night or by day. Instead there are the first late-August signs of autumn there, a softness in the fading colours.
15
A man exercises greyhounds on the towpath where horses once drew the narrow boats of the canal. The muddy sediment that separates the two banks is dankly shadowed, its surface active with autumn insects. The greyhounds are obedient, running on and turning when they’re whistled back, one jet black, the other speckled.
The walk from the town has taken Albert forty-seven minutes, the time checked on his Zenith because he likes to check the passing of time. He has paused quite often to watch the greyhounds racing on the towpath opposite; now, he turns to the right, leaving them behind when he sees the spire of the church in the distance, and houses clustered nearer. A few minutes later the notice he has been told about says the petrol pump is out of order. Then there is the shop, and the public house next door to it. ‘That name’s all over the graveyard,’ she said, and there it is: Davenant on upright and horizontal stones. ‘Thaddeus Davenant,’ she said, but there’s no one answering to that, Johns and Williams and Percivals mostly, all sorts when it comes to the women. No stone yet marks the newest grave; she said that, too.
He leaves the graveyard, and on the lane a tractor comes slowly towards him and he stands in against the hedge to let it pass. The driver waves his thanks, an old man in a cap, his glance passing inquisitively over Albert’s clothing — the red and blue uniform he has coveted for so long, found for him when he was accepted into the ranks.
It’s quiet in the lane once the tractor noise has faded, no aeroplanes to look up at, no one about. The edges of the leaves are withering; there are a few white flowers, a few pink and yellow, in among the brambles. The sky is grey and dull, all sunshine gone, but Albert doesn’t mind: there are the flowers, even though they’re past their best. ‘Immortal, Invisible’ is the hymn that is in his mind. He has never walked in the country before.
There’s a wood behind a fence of barbed wire. Some sort of path through fields he was told about, but he doesn’t look for it. A breeze is getting up, rippling through a crop and in the high grass of a meadow. Merle said she came from the country, a big house by a river, brown horses grazing, like in the picture above Mr. Hoates’s desk. Don’t ever throw down sweet papers in a country field, Miss Rapp ruled. Because the country was our heritage.
Drops of rain begin, heavy drops that spread damp patches on Albert’s jacket and are cold on his forehead and his cheeks. Cows move slowly in a field, all going together, maybe for shelter. The gateless pillars that have been described are straight ahead. The drops have become a downfall, puddles already filling, the surface of the lane awash.
On the drive, the parched laurels drip and glisten; water streams into gratings; Albert’s shoes are soaked. He blinks the rain out of his eyes, he turns up the collar of his jacket. It is the first time rain has fallen on his uniform. Who’d ever have thought that it could rain?
‘A look of an egg about the face,’ Maidment reports. ‘With eyes that do not express a lot, if anything at all. Drenched from head to foot. I wonder he didn’t shelter.’ He leaves the best till last. ‘Togged out by the Salvation Army.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’m telling you what’s there.’
‘You know when the Salvation Army was mentioned.’
This has struck Maidment too. A Salvation Army barracks, or whatever the term is. The name of the street was given, but he has forgotten.
‘He say what he wanted?’
‘A word. He said he wanted a word. He called me sir.’
‘It’ll be that boy’
Weeks have passed since their outing to Scarrow Hill. On subsequent Sundays there have been visits to Notham Manor and the Dolls’ Museum at Hindesleigh, to Tattermarle Castle and a steam-engine display in a field. On each occasion Zenobia has attended church en route while Maidment read the News of the World in the Subaru. ‘No, I want to forget about it,’ Zenobia has firmly laid down when attempts have been made by her husband to embark on fresh speculation about the abduction. She doesn’t at all like the advent of this boy.
‘Come for another handout.’ And Maidment pronounces fiscal gain to be the universal language of the age, cure for all ills, salver of all conscience.
‘You’ll need to take in tea,’ Zenobia interrupts this flow, lifting a cherry cake from a tin. ‘You have tobacco on your breath,’ she points out also. ‘Take Listerine, I would.’
‘You ever get the planes going over?’ Albert asks. ‘Alitalia? Icelandic? Air Canada with the leaf? Air India, you get?’
Nothing much in the way of plane traffic, they say, the man saying it first. ‘Mrs. Iveson,’ she said when he came into the room and he wondered how she was spelling that, but didn’t ask. ‘Mr. Davenant,’ she said, and he didn’t say he knew.