Without delay he resolved to visit the Fount of All Knowledge.
She was wrapping up a cucumber in newspaper for a customer with whom she was conversing breathlessly. Through a steady stream of clients like this one she gleaned her vital information. A round-faced woman with the general shape of the Willendorf Venus and the given name of Betty, she knew everything to know about everyone in town: even a good deal they didn’t know about themselves, he suspected. When Helen and he came to buy fresh vegetables from her and her husband’s shop, they invariably came away a little wiser about something of high import, locally. In the woman’s opinion, anyway. Which is why Helen had coined her nickname: ‘The Fount of All Knowledge’, and it had stuck. A private joke between Peter and his wife. A private look between them as she twirled a bag of tomatoes at the corners whilst dispensing the latest gossip. A private raised eyebrow. A private hand concealing a wry smile. It seemed so long ago, and only yesterday.
“Lovely morning.”
“Hello, Mr C. Yes it is.” She wiped the dry earth from her hands to her apron. “The sun’s done us proud. For February.”
“I should like one of these, please.”
The Fount of All Knowledge took the cabbage from his hands and popped it into a brown paper bag tugged from a butcher’s hook. The tiny stigma in the corner torn.
“Good to see you out, sir.” She looked down at her shuffling feet. “We know how it must be for you. Everyone’s been saying.”
“Bless you.”
“Everybody knows how much you loved each other. I’m sure that’s no comfort to you at all.” Her cheeks reddened appreciably. “Still…”
He held out a handful of coins—the new decimal currency, still a struggle—and allowed her to take the required amount. “I am comforted by the certainty that I will be united with her one day. Of that I have no doubt whatsoever.” He smiled. The woman nodded to herself, then rang up the money in a till secluded in the shadows under the awning. “Tell me, my dear. You may be able to help me. Do you by any chance know a woman by the name of Mrs Drinkwater? She has a boy named Carl.”
“Annie?”
“Possibly. She lives in a bungalow on Rayham Road.”
“That’s the one.” She picked up a broom and started brushing between the stalls. “Her brother had a hole in the heart. You know, like that footballer.”
Cushing nodded but had no idea what she was talking about.
“I wonder, do you know whether she still takes in ironing? I believe her circumstances may have changed recently. I don’t want to cause offence by enquiring unnecessarily. Someone tells me she has a new young chap in her life.”
The Fount of All Knowledge shook the box of potatoes. “For all the good it’ll do her.”
“Oh? You sound sceptical.”
“I wonder why.”
“I’ve heard nothing but good reports of him. Les, I think his name is. He’s excellent with the boy, apparently. Perhaps I’ve heard wrongly.”
“Not got a great track record, has he? Married before. Divorced.”
“We don’t condemn people for that, do we? Not these days.”
“I don’t condemn anybody for anything, me.” She took a large handful of carrots from a new customer. “I don’t repeat what’s told to me in confidence. I just wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw that building over there.”
This was exactly the kind of information he wanted. But he wanted more. “His first wife? Now, was that Valerie Rodgers, the hairdresser from The Boutique, by any chance?”
“No. Nice girl from Tankerton. Sue something. Blezard, as was. That’s it. Works in a tea shop in Canterbury. Pilgrims, I think it’s called.”
That was all he wanted to know, and the rest of the conversation consisted in a short discussion of who might take in his ironing. He weathered that particular storm until the Fount of All Knowledge ran out of intellectual steam, for which he was abundantly grateful. He touched the rim of his hat. Bless you. Goodbye. Which is when Mr Fount of All Knowledge appeared from the back of the shop holding aloft a pleat of garlic in two hands, eager to share the joke as if it were the first time he’d thought of it—which it most surely wasn’t.
“Garlic, Mr C?”
“Very droll, Mr H,” Peter Cushing said, as he always did. “Very droll.”
He ran for the bus fearing he’d miss it, and by the time he settled into a seat his lungs were on fire. The pain and breathlessness reminded him of Helen’s lungs as the vehicle pulled away from the bus station.
Sadly he realised that he had always kept working to provide for their future together. An old age together without financial worries that was not to be. It made him feel foolish, not that he could have known it would happen like this—never like this—but somehow feeling God, a force for good, unaccountably laughed at one’s futile plans. Still, the income he had provided from films was able to give Helen a few luxuries, as well as the all-important medical care and attention when her cough got worse and her breathing painful and difficult. He remembered the arrival of the oxygen mask and canister necessary to assist her lungs. Meanwhile he, as Frankenstein, effortlessly transplanted brains and brought back the dead.
Frankenstein always failed because his morality was flawed, because his drive to help humanity was misguided. But in reality doctors failed for much more mundane reasons. When they went to Dr Galewski, the pulmonary specialist, he’d said: “You have left it too late. You should have come to me ten years ago.” Frankenstein had never uttered a line so heartless.
He’d taken Helen to France, driving his spanking new blue Mark IX Jaguar to the thermal springs at Le Mont-Dore, spending hours on meditative walks in the hills while his wife rested. Encountering solitary goatherds as he grew a moustache for his next role. Telling her his silly adventures every evening. He remembered how, day by day, her laughter had grown stronger. How she was revitalized by the experience. The doctor from Poland had performed a minor miracle after all. Her cough had disappeared.
But the precious respite was to be hideously short-lived. Her throaty laughter cut short.
The Return of the Cybernauts in The Avengers; Corruption; The Blood Beast Terror…
All as her illness worsened.
They decided to sell Hillsleigh, their place in Kensington—Helen had said London “smelled of stale food and smoke”—and move permanently to their beloved holiday home by the sea. He remembered the pitiful sight of her sitting at the bottom of the stairs saying, “Can we go there, please?”
“Of course, my love. Of course.”
He had kissed her and held her in his arms. He’d always joked in interviews that they’d married for money: he had £15 and she had seventeen and ten. That came back to him now.