Читать книгу The Antique Dealer’s Daughter - Lorna Gray - Страница 8

The first to come in was a woman in her mid-thirties, who matched Matthew Croft in being rather taller than the norm for her sex. She stopped on the threshold, took in the oddity of a scene where the old man was sitting in his armchair surrounded by his stepson, a friend and a stranger. Then she stepped in and moved Danny aside from his place before his stepfather’s chair with a murmur and a familiar touch to his wrist.

She was the sort of woman who might have posed for any of the propaganda photographs that had proliferated during the war; the sort where capable women in crisply tailored uniforms were caught in the last dramatic moment before setting off on a mad uncharted flight across England in order to deliver a new aircraft to its crew. Now she was asking Danny Hannis to explain how the old man could pass from being well and unharmed at her house a few hours ago, to this. I gathered she was a Mrs Abbey, who lived a short distance away. She was not only an older and decidedly more self-assured woman than I; she was also braver. Her hands went straight to the wound on Mr Winstone’s head.

The other woman had a less practical reaction. She was a motherly sort of person of about fifty. She wasn’t overweight, but comfortable with very fair hair of that sort that barely shows grey set in tight curls around her head, and she was clearly Danny’s mother and Mr Winstone’s wife. It was the combination of Mrs Winstone’s concern and Mrs Abbey’s uninterrupted bossiness that led me to realise that Matthew Croft hadn’t actually been practising that time-worn method of instilling calm by organising any stray womenfolk into running errands in another room. Just me.

It must be said that I didn’t really mind. This part of my discovery wasn’t what mattered here. Because I must admit that, to an extent, I’d understood why he should have thought that Mr Winstone’s distress hadn’t wanted a stranger’s invasive fussing. It hadn’t slipped my notice that there was something intensely personal about the old man’s confusion and the care that had been given here. And I would have gone easily when I’d realised what he wanted. He needn’t have thought I would have stayed to argue the point like some fearsome busybody or, worse, some frightened young thing needing to be shielded from the dread of walking home.

What did matter, though, was that when I saw his easy acceptance of Mrs Winstone’s right to ask any questions she chose, it served to make me very aware of the difference in his friend’s behaviour to Mrs Abbey.

I’d thought Danny Hannis had been preoccupied but reasonably pleasant before. I didn’t believe he had cared about me, beyond that effort of establishing my value as a witness to a distressing scene. Now I was unobtrusively watching him from my place in the kitchen doorway. Mrs Abbey had placed him against the wall beside his mother and I became acutely aware that while he was answering some of his mother’s agitated questions, the ones that weren’t answered by his friend at least, his attention was all for the other woman. Perhaps it was the unforgiving light – there was no electricity in this village to beat back the coming dusk – but I thought he was watching her and wearing that shuttered expression a man gets when he is uncomfortable but constrained enough by convention to keep from expressing the feeling out loud.

I wouldn’t say that his expression conveyed dislike. His mouth seemed able to form a smile readily enough when Mrs Abbey directed some comment at him. I might have worried that his unease lay in a wish to keep her from hearing the details of what had befallen Mr Winstone, except that he seemed to be making no effort to prevent his mother from thoroughly dissecting the lot.

Mrs Abbey was teasing some of the crusted hair aside to permit a clearer view. She was the sort who demonstrated the unbending practicality of one who was very much in the habit of getting on with things because no one else would be doing them for her. I thought she bore the shadow of what might have been wartime widowhood in the lines about her mouth and the neat order of her clothes. Presently, though, Danny Hannis and I both could see that the woman’s decisiveness meant she was probing vigorously at Mr Winstone’s head when she might just as well have left it alone.

Revulsion, both from her actions and the man’s strange powerlessness, made me lurch into saying to Matthew Croft, ‘Did you want me to clean up Mr Winstone? That is why you asked me to fetch hot water, isn’t it?’

Matthew Croft was standing very near me in the gloomy space between Mr Winstone’s shoulder and the sideboard that was set against the kitchen wall. He turned his head as I added haplessly, ‘I worked behind a chemist’s counter for six years; that must be a training of sorts for this kind of thing, mustn’t it?’

Heaven knows what I was thinking, saying that. It was purely a product of unease. Or an impulse to interfere since this other man had sent me scurrying for the hot water in the first place, or be helpful, or something. I regretted my offer just as soon as my gaze returned to the mess Mrs Abbey was uncovering on Mr Winstone’s head because it was, in fact, my idea of a nightmare to begin dabbing that crusted hair.

Luckily, Matthew Croft was seemingly oblivious to the way Danny might have thanked him for seizing this chance to diminish Mrs Abbey’s control of this room. He was also consistent in his effort to manage the stresses that had been working on me, as I now understood he had been doing all along.

I found myself being relieved of the steaming basin and then returning to the kitchen on a fruitless hunt for antiseptic. It was a charade, for him and for me, because he had no real idea of there being any antiseptic and I went straight to the sink in this rustic back room and used the curiosity of peering through the window above it as an opportunity to undertake an equally fruitless search for the house that sheltered the distant telephone.

I perceived a high garden wall, the stunted church tower and perhaps the roof of a distant barn and that was all. I pretended that I was looking out as a means of soothing away the intense strangeness that was coming in waves from those people behind me. It was also a way of escaping the vision of untrained hands running over a head stained with all that drying blood. In truth, I believe I was really bracing myself, all the while, for the news that Mrs Abbey had been sent in after me.

I’d thought she would be. If Danny had really wanted to exclude her, he might have taken this chance to ask her to help the stranger find whatever it was that Matthew Croft wanted. I found my hands were gripping the smooth stone rim of the sink in readiness for the turn to meet her. But I didn’t need to. Because in that room behind me, I knew that she had taken the basin straight out of Matthew Croft’s hands and now she was dabbing at a clot on Mr Winstone’s head with that neglected cloth.

In this room, the homeliness of a ringing telephone made me think of doing what I ought to have done in the first place. I reset the kettle on the hot plate and boiled it to make Mr Winstone a strong cup of sugary tea.

I had barely made it when I was called back into that cramped room again by the clear mention of, ‘Miss Sutton.’

It was Danny giving my name to his mother. Mrs Winstone had finished bewailing the time she had wasted languishing in the clutches of the girl who set her hair and instead was wondering who had found her husband. And Danny was now requiring me to repeat my pathetically unsatisfying description of male with dark hair and a pale jacket and it made this crowded house suffocating because the description didn’t inspire recognition in anyone and I didn’t know why Danny should suddenly have thought to include me. It wasn’t enough to imagine that he had simply wanted the witness to speak for herself.

Danny took the teacup from me and left me stranded while Mrs Winstone beamed at me. She did it in that shattering way people have of being utterly admiring of acts of kindness that are only ever foisted upon a person by circumstance. Somehow that sort of appreciation always jars for me. I didn’t want gratitude for an act that any civilised person would have done. And I didn’t want to have my own small intervention swelled into the status of a noble deed when I thought there were already quite enough tensions in this room without pretending that the incident hadn’t simply been a normal every-day blunder. Particularly when the utterly dismayed perpetrator of it had quite clearly cared enough afterwards to bring Mr Winstone home.

I must have spoken at least part of that thought out loud. Presumably the less defensive part. Mrs Winstone turned to her son. ‘This didn’t happen here? Mrs Abbey, did this happen at your house? Did this happen at Eddington?’

All eyes turned to Mrs Abbey. It happened with a suddenness that would have made my face burn crimson. I thought the lady displayed creditable poise when she only paused in her ministrations to say with sympathetic understanding, ‘Bertie visited us today, but I’m afraid I can safely promise that he wasn’t in my little yard when I stepped out to run my errand to the shop about twenty minutes after he left. I wish he had been. I can only say, Mrs Winstone, just how relieved I am that I encountered you and extracted you from your hairdresser’s house – otherwise it might have been another hour yet before you’d come home to find the old man like this.’

Mrs Abbey wasn’t congratulating herself on her timely intervention. She really did care, I think, about the delay. But as she finished I saw her gaze flick curiously over Mr Winstone’s head because Matthew Croft spoke almost immediately with a clearer question of his own for the old man. ‘Were you at Eddington to repair the pump?’

The question was so abrupt that it came out like undisguised suspicion, though I didn’t think he meant it like that. It was simply that he wasn’t bound as Danny was to this woman and he wanted to know if this explained the reference Mr Winstone had made to fiddling about with something to do with water.

‘Of course I wasn’t working on the pump.’ At last Mr Winstone spoke and his voice was as battered as his head. Five people were suddenly united in thought as we watched a veined and arthritic hand lift to sweep a shocked teardrop from the corner of his eye. A faint rattle of grit scattered to the floor. ‘That’s the boy’s job. Why aren’t you listening? Mrs Abbey only needed me to take a look at something in the house as I was passing by.’ He rounded on his stepson. ‘And I was only asked to help because you weren’t there. I told you this earlier. You know she always has something that needs doing. It was afterwards that I stopped at the turbine house. Now I’ve got to get on. Mrs Abbey here is adamant that she’s going to take me to the doctors and I’ve got plenty to do first. It’s bad enough that you …’

The old man’s voice tailed off into a jumbled agitation about his wife’s supper. He gave the impression she was very particular about meal times. I saw the blankness ripple across Danny’s face as he realised that his stepfather had at last recalled the site of his incident. I also saw the bemusement that followed as his mother slipped into real shock and began engaging everyone in a needlessly circular discussion of alternative meal choices if they were going to be late back from the doctors. And it was then that I realised that Danny did mean to use me to manage Mrs Abbey after all.

Mrs Abbey had suggested that the old man should see the doctor. Now Danny was intending to use my presence to save himself from having to tell this woman that he and his friend had already planned to use the car for precisely this purpose, and she wouldn’t be coming along.

I could tell he was about to suggest that she should walk me home. It made me wonder what kind of hold this woman had over such a man that he was contorting himself into peculiar strategies just so that he could avoid offending her. Because clearly he had no concern whatsoever about what should happen if he irritated me. It made me wonder if this uneasy tiptoeing was someone’s unhappy idea of love. And whose.

And still Mrs Abbey’s long fingers were lingering over that crust of blood in Mr Winstone’s hair.

She really was making the wound bleed again. Just a little, but all the same this was ridiculous. I was standing by the immaculate little sideboard and it struck me that the gloriously open front door was just there. It was barely three yards or more away if I slid along the mantelpiece behind Mr Winstone’s chair. I didn’t care what use Danny Hannis thought I might be. I didn’t know any of these people and I wasn’t obliged to bolster the numbers of bystanders so that Mrs Abbey could be grouped with me and with all due politeness barred from trespassing upon their visit to the doctor. And it certainly wasn’t for me to stage-manage this scene so that the particular bystander in question wouldn’t know it was Danny’s choice to cut her out of their plans.

I turned my head and abruptly discovered that Matthew Croft’s eyes had followed me as I passed him. I was beyond the barrier of the armchair now and it was hard to make out his features in this dark and busy room. I was near the small window that looked out over the garden and I didn’t think he was having the same difficulty reading mine. I didn’t like to think what he might be seeing there. He was trying to ease his way around the chair after me. He was moving quite swiftly. He meant to speak to me. I thought he meant to stop me from going. He was probably intending to assume responsibility for directing my movements again, as though someone needed to manage my shock for me after this distress. He was going to insist that I had some company, and for the sake of his friend he would probably decree that it should be Mrs Abbey. Only that woman was scolding her patient loudly. Her voice swamped all else; deliberately, I think.

She’d just been promising again that soon she would finish dabbing at his head when she told Mr Winstone clearly, ‘Don’t dramatise, Bertie. I know what you’re hinting at and I really don’t think this could possibly mean we’re set for a return to all that awfulness we had at the beginning of the year.’

She made Matthew Croft freeze in his pursuit of me. His head turned. She had the attention of the whole room when she added, ‘It’s such nonsense when we know full well this fellow today was one of those squatters from the camp. Who else could it have been? Dirty people. I always thought it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Unless you’re going to tell us he had a limp?’

I thought she meant that last part as a joke. I saw a corner of her mouth twitch as she dropped that bloody rag back into its bowl with a soggy slap. I saw her hold up her dirtied hands, looking for somewhere to wipe them. She swiftly stepped through to the tiny kitchen to claim a towel while nobody moved. Then she stepped back into the room again and gave a shake of her head at the foolishness of it.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘The only connection this has to that sorry business is the charge that might be laid at the squire’s door because he went away and allowed those rough vagrants to settle here unchecked. If only the old fool would come home where he belonged, he’d do something about that dirty camp and we wouldn’t need to be haunted by anyone, dead or living. Although, of course …’ There was a furtive pause while she scrubbed her hands a little more before she added on a secretive whisper, as if none of us were listening, ‘between you and me I can’t imagine how he can come back when certain neighbours will persist in reminding him of his loss.’

It was an exceedingly odd statement. But my surprise was nothing to everyone else’s reaction. They weren’t surprised; they were dumbstruck. It left Matthew Croft stranded in the middle of the room and she had even silenced Mrs Winstone. But it was Danny’s reaction now that shocked. The gloom in this house was consuming everyone, but I could still see Danny. I could identify him from the intensity of concentration that passed from him to that woman.

Danny’s stillness now had an entirely different quality from the awkwardness that had prevented him from halting her dominion over his father’s treatment. His expression also swept away the fantasy I had been harbouring that there was a secret between them and it was love. The expression on his face was blank like that of a person facing a sudden resurgence of defensiveness that ran deep; deeper even than Mr Winstone’s wound.

This was because Danny could tell as well as I that the odd turn of Mrs Abbey’s speech had the taste of revenge on someone, but it wasn’t meant to rebuke Danny for his manoeuvrings over taking Mr Winstone to the doctor. I thought this was directed at Matthew Croft for his rudeness in dissecting Mr Winstone’s visit to her house, although, to do Mrs Abbey credit, I didn’t think she had meant her remarks to have this impact. This wasn’t within her control. Something very nasty began to build in the damp corner beyond the fireplace and it grew bolder when Mrs Abbey straightened.

She was flushing and trying to act as if she hadn’t said a thing. She knew she’d made a mistake. She attempted to make amends by urging Mr Winstone onto his feet and then there was a sudden rush of life back into this room as stronger hands than hers lunged to keep the old man from falling. There was a scuff as the armchair was moved aside and then a decisive lurch of men across the room towards me and the door.

I was outside before I knew it. They were driving me along from behind. After all that anticipation, the fresher air of a dusky August sky was no relief at all. The shadows chased me out. These people were disturbing me far more than any brief distress of finding an old man on his path and I thought I had remembered now what old business Mrs Abbey had stumbled into talking about. My cousin had mentioned something like this in her letters.

The squire was an old army man and my cousin called him Colonel, presumably because my cousin didn’t owe him the same deference he got from those who deemed him lord and master. Her letter had mentioned the tragedy of a son’s death in some sort of incident in the winter. She’d implied that the loss had shattered the entire community, and I’d witnessed proof myself now of its wounds. But having said so much, my cousin’s letter had declined to convey the rest, in part due to her preoccupation at that time with her own mother’s death and also to supposedly preserve tact and to save misunderstandings later. And also, I’d thought, to irritate my curiosity in that infuriating way people have when they have something they wish they could talk about but don’t want to be the gossip who tells you.

As it was, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to find out the rest quite like this. There was an additional hint within my cousin’s letters that a local man had been caught up in the mess and I thought I had some idea now of who that local man might be.

Mrs Abbey began to rapidly retract her judgement of the old squire’s neglect of his estate. It was too late though. It was horrible but it was as if Mrs Abbey had accidentally summoned the dead son, poor man, and it was his shade, or at least the shadow of his end, that crept after us from the house.

Now she was bustling ahead and chattering about her wretched squatters instead. And all the while I thought the strangest thing of all was that no one simply swept it all away with the obvious retort that Mr Winstone hadn’t been hinting anything at all. The poor man could barely recall meeting me on his path; he certainly wasn’t giving graphic accounts of the terrors that had walked him home and connecting them to any old business that could affect people like this.

Mr Winstone was scuttling along behind her, between his helpers. He wasn’t terribly steady on his feet. It was only after they had made it through the gate and past me to move on towards the car that Danny said something rather dry that made the ugliness that had been working its tentacles after them along the path sharply turn on its heel and climb out over the garden wall. He said that he was glad that someone was on hand to give such a well-founded explanation of how his stepfather’s injury today had stemmed from that scene in March, because this was the first mention he’d heard of that tragedy for almost six months. His dry humour was for his friend’s sake. I knew it was because it drew that man’s attention from the immediate task of preventing the invalid from pitching headfirst into the side of the car. I saw Matthew Croft right the old man and then turn his head to give a surprisingly warm grin. And then I was only left with the puzzling realisation that while I had been watching and worrying over the reasons why a man like Danny Hannis might find himself unable to risk offending Mrs Abbey, I really should have been noticing that she didn’t like his friend at all.

She was, however, perfectly, convincingly repentant. She knew she’d made a crass mistake and if she didn’t, she certainly found out when it cost her the right to accompany Mr Winstone on his trip to consult the doctor. I felt almost sorry for her when she joined me just as the men were depositing their charge in the passenger seat. She had been roundly excluded from the crush as Mrs Winstone organised herself into the back seat. Danny was folding himself in beside his mother without so much as a glance for the neglected neighbour. It became all the more humbling when the small dog clambered in after them. The only person who didn’t go was the wavy-haired youth Freddy, who was hovering by the bumper in that helpful way people have when they desperately want to be useful but have no idea what to do. I thought he was waiting for orders and it belatedly occurred to me that Matthew Croft had been intending to offer the boy as my companion when he’d been trying to organise my walk home.

I didn’t mean to give Matthew Croft time to remember. I was a few yards away, at the limit of the pockmarked garden wall, and I would have left there and then except that Mrs Abbey had her hand on my arm as she told me earnestly, ‘You’ve been badly shaken by your brush with this fellow, haven’t you?’

She was speaking as though nothing else mattered beyond Mr Winstone’s injury. Perhaps nothing else did. They all knew each other, these people, and the slip about a man’s death must have been made by others before. I played for the same indifference while carefully dodging away from that clutching hand of hers. After all, it had last been seen grasping a bloody rag.

I remarked lightly, ‘Shaken by that man? No.’

She looked disbelieving. ‘You kept dithering in and out of the room all the time that we were talking.’

I conceded the point with a faintly worn smile. Rightly or wrongly, I soon took advantage of a disturbance within the car to make my getaway from all of them. That telephone was ringing again – that blessed reminder of noisy things that belonged in the companionable bustle of my familiar city life – and I went to it like it was a lifeline.