‘Yes, I’m writing a book.’
‘Don’t get him on his book,’ said Paul grimly. He was plunging the wine bottles by their necks into the bath of ice.
‘It’s just a little local history,’ said David deprecatingly, making a swatting motion with his hand. ‘A mere nothing.’
‘Go on then, ask him what it’s about,’ said Paul. ‘Go on, be quick.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Since you ask,’ said David, ‘it’s about a murder.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘A murder that was never solved.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Eleventh of March 1883 — beware the Ides of March, eh? A woman killed, brutally, with an axe, while her small son looked on, and no one ever able to say who did it, or why.’ He paused again. His blue eyes were very wide open. ‘Annie Askey. A harmless woman killed with an axe one night as she sat sewing at her kitchen table.’
‘Where did it happen?’ I asked.
‘Right here,’ he said brightly. ‘In this house! The man of the family, Martin Askey, sold it to our great-grandfather. I think it’s still the same table, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it’s bloody not,’ said Paul crossly.
‘For an area with such a low population density, Doniford and its surrounds can lay claim to a remarkable catalogue of the most gruesome murders,’ said David. ‘This is by no means an untypical example.’
‘He didn’t sell it,’ said Paul. ‘He exchanged it for a fishing rod. They were pissed at the pub one night and he swapped the house for a fishing rod. Personally I always thought that was suspicious, don’t you think? I think the rum bugger killed her himself.’
‘Why on earth would he have done that?’ said David. ‘What possible motivation could he have had to kill his own wife?’
‘He probably couldn’t stand the bloody sight of her.’
‘He’s the prime suspect, Uncle David,’ said Adam. ‘The family are always the prime suspects.’
‘You wouldn’t kill your wife in front of your own son,’ said David reproachfully.
‘I imagine he couldn’t help himself,’ said Paul.
‘You make it sound as if there were no principle of honour between men and women,’ said David, his moustache quivering. ‘No integrity! No sacred bond! Don’t listen to these relativists,’ he said to me, distressed. ‘My own theory is that it was a vendetta of some sort, against Martin Askey himself. Perhaps he’d mistreated one of his labourers. That’s the theory I advance in my book, incidentally. That the quasi-feudal way of life in a farming community such as this provoked high levels of violence. It’s quite an unconventional theory in its way — people tend to idealise life in the highly systematised societies of the past. They prefer the passion motive. But I believe human beings are quite capable of suppressing their passions. It’s power they can’t resist!’
‘Do you know what happened to the boy?’ I asked.
David put his face close to mine. His eyes bulged out from their sockets. I could see the numberless, coarse filaments of his moustache.
‘He never spoke again,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘He grew up mute — silenced by what he had seen. Hence unable to bring the perpetrator to justice!’
Presently Paul sent us inside to fetch the glasses. In the kitchen the women were sitting at the table. The dark-haired woman was frantically chopping cucumber and flinging it into a large glass bowl. Her big, bony hands were white with stress around the knuckles. The girl, Caris, was drawing ringlets of ivy from a pile in front of her and twining them around glass jars with candles in. Next to her sat the other woman, who was turned sideways in her chair and was examining the girl’s profile raptly, occasionally lifting a hand to tuck strands of hair behind her ear. I saw that Caris was both irritated by the attention and transfixed by the warmth of it.
‘Mum, could you pass me the scissors?’ she said.
‘What’s that, darling?’
Caris leaned over to get the scissors herself, thus causing her mother to remove her hand. When Caris returned to her chair, her mother presently resumed caressing her hair.
‘Do you like them?’ said Caris. She held up one of the little jars and smiled.
‘They’re sweet,’ said her mother vaguely. She turned her face away. I noticed her withdrawing her hand. ‘Vivian, how are we going to feed all these children? I suppose at least half of them will be anorexics, but still, one salad and a few things on crackers is on the frugal side, don’t you think?’
‘There’s meat,’ said Vivian severely, who was making the table shake with her chopping.
‘There’s meat,’ repeated Caris’s mother generally, as though to an invisible audience. ‘What meat is there?’
‘Paul’s doing it outside. I think it’s sausages.’
‘The sausages are vegetarian,’ said Caris.
‘The sausages are ethical,’ said Caris’s mother. ‘Vivian, do you hear that? They may not be edible but at least the sausages are ethical.’
It had taken me time to get used to the older women’s faces, rather as eyes take time to adjust to darkness, but now I could see that Caris’s mother was very good-looking. She was slim and slight, with daintily rounded limbs like the limbs of a child. She had streaked dark-blonde hair cut in a messy, youthful style, and a wide, laughing mouth. A gorge of brown, freckled breastbone, roped by jewellery, was disclosed by her close-fitting dark blue shirt. She drummed her long, rounded, coral-plated fingernails on the tabletop. Her little face was spiteful and merry.
‘Paul offered her a suckling pig but she didn’t want it,’ said Vivian. ‘He did offer it, though. The thing was that she didn’t want it.’
‘I’ll say she didn’t. Poor little pigling. Ethical sausages much nicer.’
‘The problem is that it’s impossible to please everybody,’ said Vivian. ‘You offer to throw a party and then you find that people start wanting different things.’
‘I don’t want different things,’ said Caris. ‘I want it to be just like all the other parties.’
‘Where are the glasses?’ said Adam.
‘I want it to be like the parties you had when we were little,’ said Caris.
‘Those were not vegetarian parties, darling,’ said her mother. ‘They weren’t vegetarian, were they, Vivian? They were distinctly unprincipled.’
‘I remember you used to stay up all night,’ said Caris. ‘And when I got up in the morning and came out you were all still there.’
‘Yes, it was a bit much, I suppose,’ said Vivian. ‘I remember the men used to go off to bed while we had to do the washing up and make breakfast for the children. It was a bit much, really, when you think about it.’
‘We need the glasses,’ said Adam.
Caris rose from her chair. ‘I’m going upstairs to get dressed,’ she said.
‘Shall I come?’ her mother called after her. ‘We can beautify ourselves together like little Cinderellas for the ball. Darling, shall I come?’
Silence emanated from the stairwell.
We took the glasses outside, where Paul was putting tables on a sloping stretch of lawn in the wind. We pegged white sheets over the tops. Then we carried out wooden benches, one after the other. I didn’t know where they had got so many benches, but the ease with which they produced them suggested that this was a well-worked routine. We arranged the glasses in rows under a green and white striped canopy that flapped crazily in the wind. The lawn and the hill were bright in the sun. People began to arrive. The two women came out.
‘I thought that was your mother,’ I said to Adam.
‘Vivian?’
‘The dark-haired one.’
Vivian was wearing a complicated selection of draperies that I imagined did not show her to her best advantage, but rather emphasised the dispirited quality of her physiognomy. The draperies were white. From a certain angle they looked like a series of bandages that had come loose. Adam’s mother was standing next to her in her tight-fitting blue silk ensemble and shoes with very high heels. She was looking about with the bright, abrupt movements of a bird. She looked contrastingly compact: her containment in her small, firm body was strangely threatening, as though she might at any moment explode.