“Can’t take credit for that. My father created and cared for it. Almost to the last day of his life.”
“Ah, yes.” He remembered hearing that the house had belonged to her parents. “Did they bequeath any advice on horticultural matters? I could do with a few tips.”
“Start with clean healthy soil. Feed it properly. Plant only top quality stuff. And if ugly or poisonous things turn up, yank them out and burn them.”
“Not a bad recipe for life when you come to think of it.”
Sarah gave him a sharp, interested look. How bright her eyes were! Unflecked, shining, brilliant blue. Gray was still surreptitiously studying her severe, elegant profile when they arrived at Bay Tree Cottage.
Sarah dragged the unhinged gate to one side.
“Could I come in for a minute?”
“What for?”
“Oh.” Though he had spoken on impulse and half anticipated a refusal, Gray found himself already standing on the path. “Just a talk.”
“No.”
“I’d like to get to know you.”
“Why?”
“Because ...” Gray felt rather at a loss. Most women would not ask that question. They would know why. And yet he could see she was being neither faux naif nor coy.
“Don’t you ever fill conversations out, Sarah?” He stepped back on to the verge. Lifted the gate into its previous position. “Qualify, elaborate, make excuses, crack jokes? Hand out recipes?”
“Not really. What’s the point?”
“I hate unanswerable questions.”
“And I feel they’re the only sort worth asking.” She smiled then but to herself, shutting him out. “So you see we shall never get on.”
“I could change. I’m a flexible man.”
“Goodbye, Gray.”
He loved the way she spoke his name. A slight slurring of the R. Not an impediment, and certainly not a lisp; more a rough gliding over. It was irresistible.
He called out, “Would you like me to mend this?”
“Certainly not. Took years to get it to that state. Anyway,” she turned on the step and stared amusedly back at him, “if I want it mending I can mend it myself.”
All that had taken place nearly three months ago. He had not given up. He had run into her “by accident on purpose” a few times and fallen into yet more amiable conversation. Once, out walking his dog, he had let the leash slip and had to rescue the animal from Sarah’s vegetable patch. Unfortunately he chose a Wednesday for this ingenuous ploy, which turned out to be her working day. He had appeared a couple of times with some flowers or fruit from his own garden. The offerings had been graciously accepted, with thanks, and the door shut firmly in his face.
He asked one or two people discreet questions about her then, afraid she might get to hear about this, stopped. In any case he discovered very little. Her parents had only bought the house when they retired. It wasn’t as if she had grown up in the village. In fact, people seemed to know hardly any more about her than he did himself.
If she had appeared actively to resent his attentions then naturally he would have ceased to make them. But in a dry, detached manner she seemed prepared to put up with it all. Gray’s guess was that she regarded him as some sort of mild divertissement.
But then, six weeks ago, everything had changed. He had brought along a small tray of seedlings, hellebores which she appeared not to have. She took the tray, smiled and asked him in. He stayed about half an hour. Her manner, Gray had to admit, was rather perfunctory. Still, he was over the threshold. That was the main thing.
On that occasion and on most of the ones that followed they spoke mainly of mundane matters. Gray, who had a mercurial temperament at the best of times, quickly became downcast. He told himself these were early days but couldn’t help feeling that he was merely marking time. He tried to get her to talk about herself or her work but without success. Once, greatly daring, he asked if she had been married. A flinty reticence descended. Eventually she admitted to having lived with someone once for a year or two but preferred being on her own.
She would never go anywhere with him. In spite of his dire financial state, Gray had asked her out for dinner. And, when this offer was refused, to a movie or the theatre with much the same result. Once or twice they had been for a drink at the Goat and Whistle but mainly they just sat talking in the garden.
This present Saturday morning they were discussing—who wasn’t?—the Hollingsworths. Gray was sitting on a rather battered sofa sipping a small cup of bitter Javanese coffee. Sarah was looking at her watch.
“My theory,” said Gray, “for what it’s worth, is that she has hied her to a nunnery.”
“Simone?”
“Having finally realised how meretricious are the sybaritic luxuries of this sinful world.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“Have you been in their sitting room?”
“Yes.”
“The perfect setting for a poule du luxe, wouldn’t you say?”
“What makes you think I’d know?” Sarah shook her watch and held it to her ear.
“I can just see Mrs. H, gold-sandalled feet on a fluffy pink footstool, Malibu plus ice and a little parasol on her onyx side table eating chocolate truffles, varnishing her toenails and reading Jackie Collins.”
“She wasn’t that dextrous on my course.”
“A sugared almond on legs.”
“What were you doing at Nightingales anyway?” Sarah came over, collected his cup and saucer, stacked it on top of her own and took them to the kitchen. “Delivering the ass’s milk?”
“We were friends, him and me. Well, sort of.”
“I knew you were business partners.” Standing in the doorway she gave him a strange look. Interested, curious but without a trace of sympathy. “It was on the—”
“Front page of the Causton Echo.”
“That’s right.”
“I trusted him.” Gray shrugged. “The more fool me. When money comes through the door, friendship, it seems, buggers off through the window.”
“Did you really beat him up?”
“Yes.”
“And you lost everything?”
“Not quite. I haven’t lost my negative equity—around fifty at the last reckoning. Or my debts. Or my dog—she’s still hanging round. So let’s look on the bright side.”
“You’re taking it better than I would.”
“I’m suing the bastard for all he’s got. That’s how I’m taking it.”
Sarah put on some music, “Di,’ cor mio” from Alcina, and started to peel a damp muslin cloth away from a mass of clay on a marble slab. A narrow elongated male head with a long nose and a thin-lipped, down-turned mouth emerged. It was eyeless and appeared mutilated to Gray even though he knew the piece was in the process not of being destroyed but created.
Gray picked up his jacket and prepared to leave as he always did when he sensed his time was up. He was determined not to push his luck. As it was, he had a very strong feeling that the minute he was off the premises she forgot his very existence.
He turned at the door. Bending closely over the table, Sarah pressed her thumb hard into the clay, moved it slightly, took her hands away.
Suddenly, although it was merely an empty socket, intelligence sprang into being, informing the face. Giving it life. And Gray wondered how, with one simple movement, such a thing could be.
As this conversation took place, something else was happening which, though not directly connected with the Hollingsworth mystery, nevertheless prompted a response that drew the attention of a slightly wider world to Simone’s disappearance.
Ostlers, the village store (Prop: Nigel Boast) was situated in the main street of Fawcett Green. This ran, like the bar on a capital T, across the top end of St. Chad’s Lane. A note on the door informed children that their presence was welcome one at a time.