Читать книгу Untimely Death - Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark - Страница 5

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Having left her husband to walk home, Eleanor took the opportunity to carry out a plan which had long been in her mind. She would call on Hester Greenway.

Hester Greenway had been Eleanor’s best friend at school. She had not seen her for a long time, but they had kept in touch over the years. They remembered each other’s birthdays, and every Christmas brought from Hester not only a small hand-made gift in impeccable taste but a long, chatty letter. Frank had never met her, and it is regrettably to be recorded that he had taken a strong dislike to her, solely on the strength of her taste in Christmas presents and her epistolary style. For this reason, Eleanor had seen fit to say nothing to him of the arrangement by which she was now driving, not back to Sallowcombe, but to Minster Tracy.

Following the directions she had been given, Eleanor turned off the main road down a lane that led her into a deep valley. As she rounded a bend, she saw below her Tracy Church, embowered in trees, the inevitable stream purling past its west door. Hester’s father had been vicar of the parish, which after his death had been amalgamated with another, because its small and dwindling population could not support an incumbent of its own. Eleanor knew all this, and that Minster Tracy was reputed to be the second smallest church in England; but she had not expected anything quite so tiny or so lonely. The minute church was surrounded by a well-filled churchyard, but she could see no living habitation. Only when she had almost reached it did she notice a pair of stone pillars marking the entrance to a drive that led to a house of some substance set well back from the road. A little further on, the furious barking of a Sealyham terrier announced her arrival at Hester’s little house.

Eleanor had not been prepared for the Sealyham. Hester had not betrayed any interest in dogs during their schooldays, or in that never-to-be-forgotten fortnight in Florence which had been the highlight of their friendship. Herself not a dog-lover, she was perhaps unreasonably surprised to find that Hester had become one. She found that it was not the only respect in which her friend had changed. It was natural enough that she should have become countrified, and in the process have somewhat aged, but need her form be quite so tweedy, her face so weatherbeaten?

Oddly enough, Miss Greenway, though hospitable enough in her welcome, seemed to find cause for comment in the changes which the years had wrought in Eleanor.

“Good old Ellie!” she cried as she came to the door. “My word, but anyone can see with half an eye that you’re married! Let’s see, how long is it now? Ten years? Twelve? Who would have thought it? Down, Jeannie, down!” she went on to the Sealyham. “Go to your basket! Isn’t she a ripping little bitch? Three litters I’ve had from her, and do the pups sell! You’ve never embarked on a family, have you, Ellie? I dare say you’re right, but it seems rather a shame to have got the matronly figure with nothing to shew for it.”

Eleanor, who had not been called Ellie since she was in Upper Fifth, said in non-committal tones that she was very well and that Hester also looked well.

“I’m blooming, thanks. So I should be with all the fresh air and exercise I get. You’d be all the better for it, Ellie, and thinner, I shouldn’t wonder. Where’s your husband? Out with the hounds, I suppose?”

“No, Frank doesn’t hunt.”

“Doesn’t he? Why not?”

Eleanor drew breath to explain her views on hunting, but Hester gave her no opportunity to express them.

“I suppose he’s like me and can’t afford to,” she said. “I get the loan of a pony at the fag-end of the season sometimes, and what’s the good of that?”

Eleanor gave it up. Her old friend was hopelessly coarsened and depraved. She began to wish that she had not come. And then, quite unexpectedly, things took a turn for the better. Hester began to talk about the past, and soon convinced her that she had not lost all regard for the finer things of life. She remembered Florence with enthusiasm and accuracy, had been buying some quite expensive reproductions of Renaissance masters, and shamed Eleanor altogether by proving that she had kept up the study of Italian which she, Eleanor, had long neglected. And her interest in the fine arts was not confined to Italy.

“Come and have a look at the church,” she commanded. “There’s a very decent thirteenth-century font, and what I say is a leper’s squint, though the experts won’t admit it.”

Miss Greenway proved an excellent guide to the church, though Eleanor could well have dispensed with the anecdote about a vixen in the pulpit which she insisted on telling. But the second smallest church in England does not take very long to explore, and they were soon out in the sun again. As they walked through the churchyard Eleanor’s eye was caught by an imposingly ugly polished granite tombstone. It bore the name of Ephraim Gorman. Just beyond it, and scarcely less expensive, was the memorial stone of Samuel Gorman. A broken marble pillar, evidently of slightly earlier date, proved to mark the grave of Job Gorman and his wife Sarah.

“They all seem to be Gormans here,” she remarked. “They must be a very large family.”

“Very large and very quarrelsome,” Hester replied. “They intermarry all over the place, and go to law with one another at the drop of a hat. They all come back here to be buried, though. My father always used to say that a Gorman funeral was the most typical family gathering. The only completely comfortable member of the party was the deceased, because like all the others he wasn’t on speaking terms with anybody else, but he didn’t have to pretend that he was. Which reminds me, there’ll be another Gorman funeral here before long.”

“Has one of them died?”

“Not yet, so far as I know, but he can’t hold out much longer. Gilbert, my landlord, is about on his last legs, the doctor tells me. He lives at the Manor, the house you saw as you came down the hill. No children, so goodness knows who gets the place when he goes—I shouldn’t wonder if it meant another lawsuit.”

“Then the Mrs. Gorman at Sallowcombe, Mr. Joliffe’s daughter, married into this family? I suppose her husband is buried somewhere here?”

“What, Jack Gorman? Good Lord, no! He’s very much alive and kicking—too much so for some people’s tastes. He got a girl into trouble down at Brockenford only the other day. Oh, he’s quite a lad, is Jack.”

Hester’s attitude of approval towards the backslidings of a husband and father shocked Eleanor profoundly. They were unworthy of her old school friend, altogether unsuitable for a parson’s daughter. As they strolled back again to Hester’s cottage, she shut her ears to yet another regrettably earthy anecdote and came to a firm conclusion. She would not stay to tea.

Hester took the decision with calm. Possibly she was as disappointed in Eleanor as Eleanor with her, but for different reasons. She bade her goodbye affectionately, expressed the hope that they would meet again soon and added some directions for an interesting variant on the route back to Sallowcombe.

There followed an anticlimax. The car refused to start.

“What a bore!” Hester observed, after watching Eleanor’s struggles in silence for some time. “It looks as if you’ll have to stay to tea after all, Ellie. No good asking me to help. I don’t know the first thing about cars.”

“Where’s the nearest garage?” asked Eleanor.

“Jock Blackadder’s. It’s only five miles away, but he’s pretty sure to be out with the hounds. I’ll ring him up and make sure, though.”

She was away for a few minutes, during which Eleanor became more conscious than ever of the remoteness of Minster Tracy.

“No go,” Hester reported. “I’ve just remembered something, though. The odd-job man at the Manor will be coming in about now to give the pigs their afternoon feed. He’s a wizard with machinery. Let’s toddle up there and ask him to come down.”

Wearily Eleanor set off with her in search of the odd-job man, but they did not need to go so far. They were barely in sight of the Manor gateposts when a green tradesman’s van swung out of the drive, turned in their direction and stopped in response to their wavings. A familiar face looked down from the driver’s seat.

“Mr. Joliffe!” Eleanor exclaimed. “This is a bit of luck!”

Mr. Joliffe’s expression was usually serious. On this occasion it was positively melancholy.

“If you say so, Mrs. Pettigrew,” he remarked. “It’s certainly a chance my being here to-day. It’s not often I come this way.”

“Mrs. Pettigrew has broken down outside my front door,” Hester explained.

“I can’t give her a lift home, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Joliffe. “I’ve got to get back to the shop before closing time. Saturday is a busy time for us. But I’ll see if I can do anything to put the trouble right. I’ll give you a lift down.”

There was barely room for three in the front of the van, but they contrived to squeeze themselves in. Hester merrily proposed that she should sit in the back among the joints of meat, but Mr. Joliffe was conspicuously not amused at the suggestion.

“Have you been visiting the sick at the Manor?” Hester asked. “How did you find Gilbert?”

“Poorly,” said Mr. Joliffe with mournful satisfaction. “He’s not long for this world.”

“Jolly good of you to come all this way, with petrol the price it is,” Hester went on. She pinched Eleanor as she spoke, so that there could be no doubt that a joke was intended.

“Obviously it wouldn’t have been worth the petrol to make a special journey just to see how Gilbert Gorman was,” said Mr. Joliffe seriously. “But it so happened that the Staghunters Hotel rang up this afternoon to say they had three coach parties come in unexpected and would be out of meat for the weekend if I couldn’t give them a special delivery. I thought I might as well come this way and look in on the Grange while I was about it.”

“And do some courting of Louisa at the same time,” Hester suggested.

Eleanor felt acutely uncomfortable. Hester’s bucolic humour was even more painful than the pinches that punctuated it. But Mr. Joliffe seemed to have a skin that was quite impervious to her blunted shafts. He did not so much as change colour. Fortunately, before any further witticisms could be uttered, they had reached the car and to this Mr. Joliffe now turned his grave attention. In rather less than five minutes he diagnosed and cured the trouble, while the helpless females looked on in uncomprehending admiration.

“A choked jet,” he explained, wiping his pink, plump fingers on a piece of cotton waste. “You won’t have any more trouble.”

Eleanor was profuse in her thanks. “You are a genius, Mr. Joliffe,” she said.

Mr. Joliffe was as insensible to flattery as to raillery. “Just a hard-working man,” he said. “I reckon to save twenty pounds a year by doing my own running repairs. Good day, Miss Greenway. I shall see you this evening, I hope, Mrs. Pettigrew.”

He drove off, and the atmosphere felt lighter for the removal of his solid, overpowering presence. Jeannie, who had removed herself to the back premises at his approach, celebrated his departure by rushing out with a paroxysm of barking.

“That man always brings out the worst in me,” Hester observed. “He’s so worthy. I wish he would marry Louisa Gorman, though. She’s about the one woman I know who could keep him under. Goodbye, Ellie. Come again soon.”

Eleanor’s homeward route took her across Bolter’s Tussock. The westering sun was in her eyes as she came out on to the open moor at the top of the slope. Thus it was that only at the last moment did she put on her brakes in time to avoid a pale-faced mud-splashed man who tottered out into the road in front of her.

“Frank, darling!” she exclaimed. “What have you been up to now?”