One Across, Two Down Page 10

  Alone in the house the morning after the funeral, he took the notes out of his pocket and looked at them. They smelt strongly of violet cachous. Compared to what was coming to him, they were a drop in the ocean. The smell slightly disquieted him and he knew the wisest thing would be to burn them but he couldn’t bring himself actually to destroy money. No harm could come of keeping them for a week or so. He went upstairs and from the bedroom bookcase took out the crossword annual of 1954. Then he distributed Ethel’s money evenly among its pages before replacing it in the bookcase.

  At this moment, he thought, looking at the old metal alarm clock, Vera would be at the solicitor’s. He had almost made up his mind to enter into partnership with Harry Pilbeam but it would be nicer if he could go to the Lockkeeper’s Arms next Wednesday a rich man instead of just an heir apparent.

  “Your mother’s will is quite straightforward, Mrs. Manning,” said Mr. Finbow. “I don’t understand what you mean about a condition.”

  Vera didn’t know how to put it. It sounded so strange.

  She floundered. “My mother … er, my mother said she’d altered her will—well, way back in March. She said her money would only come to me if— Oh, dear, it does sound so awful —if she died of a stroke and not of anything else.”

  Mr. Finbow’s eyebrows went up at that as Vera had known they would. “There was nothing like that. Mrs. Kinaway made her will on March fourteenth and, as far as I know, that was the only will she had ever made.”

  “Oh, I see. She must have been—well, joking, I suppose. She really led us to believe … It was rather awful.”

  “Such a condition would have been most irregular, Mrs. Manning, and hardly legally binding.” What must he think of her? Vera wondered. That Maud had gone in terror of her life while she lived with her only daughter? It was cruel of Maud to have exposed her to such embarrassment.

  “Anyway, I have the will here,” said Mr. Finbow. He opened a drawer in his cabinet and withdrew an envelope. “All the late Mrs. Kinaway’s estate passes unconditionally to you as her sole heir. Indeed, there was no real need for her to have made a will under the circumstances, except that it avoids intestacy problems, probate and so on. Had you predeceased her, the estate was to have been divided equally between Mrs. Louisa Bliss, her sister, and a Miss Ethel Carpenter. The property amounts to—let me see—approximately twenty-two thousand pounds, at present mostly invested in stock.”

  “When can I …?”

  “Quite soon, Mrs. Manning. In a week or two. If you wish the stock to be sold, I will personally hand you a cheque. Of course, should you require any cash at present, a hundred or two can easily be made available to you.”

  “No, thank you,” said Vera.

  “A week or two?” said Stanley thoughtfully when she got home. “Just what I thought, all plain sailing.” He smiled wryly to himself when he thought how Maud had fooled them, or half-fooled them, over that condition. Not that it mattered. Taken all in all, things were working out beautifully.

  12

  The van was a green one, plain on one side and painted with a wreath of roses on the other. Stanley parked it at the kerb, the plain side towards Mrs. Paterson’s house, and tossing the bouquets of flowers on to the van floor so that they wouldn’t be visible through the window, knocked at the front door.

  As soon as Mrs. Paterson opened the door, he saw the trunk behind her in the hall.

  “Oh, Mr. Smith, I’d just about given you up.”

  “Couldn’t make it before,” said Stanley.

  “Would you like my son-in-law to give you a hand with it?”

  And see the flowers he was supposed to be delivering?

  “I’ll manage,” said Stanley. The heavy weights he had to carry these days! He’d rupture himself at this rate.

  “Here, why don’t you put it on my grandson’s push-chair and wheel it out.”

  To Stanley’s relief she didn’t come down the path with him as he trundled the wobbly trunk out to the van. Nor did she seem sufficiently curious about him as to ask his address or keep the door open after he had started the van.

  He drove the van down the narrow cobbled lane that led from the old village into Croughton High Street and parked it half on the pavement and half in the street. Then, making sure no one was watching him, he clambered into the back of the van and contemplated Ethel Carpenter’s trunk.

  It was made of wood and painted black. Stanley thought it must be very old, probably the “box” Ethel had taken with her from situation to situation when she was in service. Of course, it would be locked. He wasn’t at all anxious to dispose of it without making himself aware of its contents, so he got a hammer and a wrench out of the van’s tool kit and got to work on the lock.

  After about ten minutes straining and hammering the lock finally gave. Stanley lifted the lid and looked inside. On top of the winter clothes was a cardboard box made to contain writing paper. It still contained writing paper only this paper had been written on. His eyes narrowing, Stanley read the letters Maud had written to her best friend. As he had suspected, they were full of derogatory allusions to himself. Fine thing if they fell into the wrong hands. The best thing would be to burn them. Stanley rolled them up and stuffed them in his pocket.

  There didn’t seem much else of any interest apart from a wedding photograph of himself and Vera and one of George Kinaway. Someone had written on the back of it. This and your ring, all I have of you. Stanley put it in his pocket with the letters and then he looked to see if any of the clothes were marked with Ethel’s name. They weren’t, but rummaging among camphor-smelling wool, his hand encountered something hard and cold.

  The bottom of the trunk contained several small parcels wrapped in tissue paper. The cold thing his hand had touched was the elbow of a china figurine protruding from the paper. He unwrapped it and saw a shepherdess with a crook and a black lamb. Tearing off paper excitedly, he brought to light next a carriage clock, a pot pourri bowl and a silver cream jug. With a thoughtful backward glance at the vacant shop, Stanley wrapped all these things in the Daily Telegraph.

  The canal banks were shored up with walls of yellow brick beneath which the duller yellow water flowed sluggishly. A couple of barges waited at the lock gates and a woman was walking a corgi along the towpath. Two children were at play in the garden of the lockkeeper’s house and Stanley quickly realised he had no opportunity of disposing of the trunk at present.

  He drove back to the shop and gave a fictitious order to the florist to have a bouquet of spring flowers made up for delivery to the other side of Croughton at 10 P.M. The florist grumbled a good deal but cheered up when Stanley said he would take the flowers himself. Stanley didn’t want any bills sent out to people who didn’t exist and he decided reluctantly to pay for the order himself with what remained of his dole money.

  While he had his tea he left the van parked outside the house with the trunk still in it but he brought the newspaper parcel indoors. He hid Ethel Carpenter’s treasures in the back of his wardrobe and burnt the letters and the photograph in the bedroom fire grate.

  It had been raining intermittently all day but now the rain fell heavily, drumming against the windows. Vera drew the curtains, put the light on and fetched writing paper and envelopes. Then she sat down and stared helplessly at the paper. What a fool she was! All day long she’d been thinking about this holiday of hers without ever considering how to set about finding an hotel in Brayminster. How did you find out about hotels, anyway? Vera had never stayed in one.

  This, she reflected miserably, was something everyone knew about, everyone but her. Her life had been hard but it had also been sheltered and now she realised that, though forty-two years old, she couldn’t begin to do any of the things other people seemed to take in their stride. Suppose I had to book a restaurant for a dinner or buy theatre tickets or make a plane reservation or buy a car, she thought. I wouldn’t know how to set about it. I’m like a child.

  Other people had guidebooks an
d holiday brochures. You wrote to the address or rang them up. Vera knew she would never have the courage to telephone an hotel. Oh, it was all hopeless, she was too tired and too old to learn now.

  Unless … of course! Why hadn’t she thought of it before? She knew one boarding-house in Bray, Mrs. Horton’s in Seaview Crescent.

  It was more than twenty years since she had last stayed there. Mrs. Horton had seemed old to her then but probably she had really been younger than Vera was now. That meant she’d be under sixty. Certainly James wouldn’t still be living with his aunt, so she needn’t be afraid of running into him, of seeing his face fall at the sight of the change in her. But James would have moved far away….

  More at ease than she had been all day, Vera began to write her letter.

  The rain had driven much of the traffic off the roads but Stanley drove on doggedly, the wheels of the van sending fountains spraying over the pavements. He kept to a snail’s pace, though, for the windscreen wipers were inadequate to deal with the torrents that poured down the glass and he could hardly see.

  A deluge, he thought, that’s what it is. A nice word for a crossword puzzle. How would you set about making up a clue for it? “A pull in the river causes this flood?” Not bad that. “Lug in Dee,” he said aloud, as if explaining to some novice. Now that would be a job he’d really like, setting crosswords, and maybe, after the business had got going and he had ample time on his hands, he would be able to get himself such a job, for money talked and influenced and opened doors. With money you could do anything.

  This was just the weather he would have ordered if he’d had any choice in the matter. You’d think the end of the world was coming the way everybody was shut up indoors. He drove slowly up the approach road to the lock and saw that the windows in the lockkeeper’s house were curtained. The rain, though savage enough close to, had the appearance in the distance of a thick swirling mist.

  No silly old bags giving their dogs an airing tonight. Two empty barges were moored this side of the lock, their hulls rapidly filling with water. The canal had already begun to rise. Its yellow frothing waters seemed to reach up and meet the rain which crashed on to it like a quivering sheet of steel.

  Stanley had never seen the canal quite like this before. Usually, at any rate by day, it was busy with barges and kids fishing and the eternal procession of dog walkers. And although it wound among fields of a sort, litter-covered waste ground really, dotted about with sick-looking trees, it was a hideous mockery of what a water-way should be. Instead of woods and unspoilt countryside, all you could see were the slummy backs of two or three converging suburbs, half-built factories and tumbled warehouses.

  But tonight the rain obscured all this. No houses were discernible in clear silhouette, only lights visible in clusters and separated from each other by the black unlit masses of factory buildings. And suddenly, because of the rain and the sparse scattered lights, the whole place took on an almost rural aspect so that Stanley was again reminded strongly of his old home where, as you walked along the river bank by night, a mist rose thickly from the water and the villages could be seen as knots of light gleaming between the shallow folded hills.

  A faint nostalgia took hold of him, a nostalgia that was mixed with irritation as he drove very slowly along the towpath, wincing each time his tyres sank into ruts filled with muddy water.

  When he was well out of sight of the lockkeeper’s house, he switched off his own feeble sidelights and drove on for a few yards in darkness, very conscious of the canal—briefly and foolishly he had thought of it for a moment as the river —lapping and gurgling to the left of him. Now if it had been his river, there’d be a bend here where you had to turn sharply to the left. When you got along a few yards the hills divided and you could see the village lights winking over there. Well, this wasn’t the Stour but Croughton canal and now was no time for fantasies of that sort. A fine thing if he and the van went into the water with Ethel’s trunk.

  When he had reversed it almost to the brink, he opened the van’s rear doors. Cursing the blinding rain, he clambered over the driver’s seat and began to shove the trunk from behind. It slid slowly along the rubber mat. Stanley grabbed the bouquet of flowers and tossed them on to the passenger seat. Another final heave … He pushed, bracing his feet against the dashboard.

  Suddenly the trunk shot out, bounced once on the canal wall and fell into the water with a tremendous splash. Kneeling between the open doors, Stanley started back on to his heels but the water broke against him in a huge wave, drenching him from head to foot. He swore luridly.

  Great eddies wheeled away across the canal. Too wet now to bother with a raincoat, Stanley crouched on the parapet of the wall and looked down into the depths. Then, rolling up his soaked sleeves, he thrust his arm into the water. But he couldn’t touch the top of the trunk, although he reached down as far as he could without actually toppling in. Right, he thought, getting up, another job jobbed.

  After she had sent the letter Vera thought she had been rather silly. Twenty years were a long time and Mrs. Horton would have moved away. But in the middle of the week a letter arrived with the Brayminster postmark. When she had allowed herself to hope at all, Vera had looked forward to a long chatty letter full of reminiscences and news, but Mrs. Horton wrote formally, simply saying she would be pleased to see Mrs. Manning and would reserve a nice room for her with a view of the sea.

  The price quoted was well within Vera’s means. She would have her holiday money and the small bonus the dry-cleaners gave their manageresses in the summer. Nor was there any need to worry about Stanley who had settled down quite marvellously in his new job and would have his own wages to live on while she was away.

  “You won’t be here to collect the cheque from Finbow and Craig,” he grumbled when she told him her holiday was fixed.

  “Mr. Finbow said a week or two, dear, and two weeks will only just be up when I get back.” She smiled lovingly at him, remembering the beautiful and totally unexpected gift of flowers he had brought her that wet night when he had had to work late. If only he was coming with her …

  “I’ll drive you to the station in the morning if you like.”

  “That’s sweet of you, dear.”

  “The week after you come back I’ll have my own car.”

  “Whatever you like, Stan, and I’ll have an automatic washer, I think, and a fridge.”

  “There’s no need to go mad,” said Stanley coldly and he pencilled in the word which completed his crossword, “onyx.” “Only a pound left out and with ten to come it’s turned to stone.”

  “I only hope you’ll be all right on your own.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Stanley.

  13

  Alone in the house, Stanley took stock of his life, congratulating himself on his excellent management. Nothing had gone wrong. Maud was safely buried and the heathers were beginning to flourish on her grave. Perhaps in a few months’ time he’d have a garage built just on that spot. He’d need somewhere to keep his Jaguar. Ethel Carpenter was a handful of grey ashes, or rather an urnful, the mere powdery contents of a casket now reposing on the lounge mantelpiece between the wedding photograph and the nude statuette. Her trunk and clothes were at the bottom of the canal, the objets d’art which he had retrieved stowed in his wardrobe and waiting to be sold over the counter as soon as he and Pilbeam had opened their shop.

  He had met Pilbeam as arranged and they had celebrated their new partnership in the Lockkeeper’s Arms. Pilbeam had been less affable when Stanley had admitted his capital was at present tied up but Stanley thought he had been able to allay his doubts. Once Vera had returned and Finbow come up with the loot, a matter of ten days or so, he would be able to show Pilbeam concrete proof of his affluence.

  Yes, things had gone admirably.

  Stanley went down to the old village, told the florist that the job didn’t suit him, after all, and, turning a deaf ear to the reproaches and indeed abuse which ensued, collected
his week’s money. He walked across the green and smoked a cigarette, sitting on the steps of the war memorial and gazed in the direction of the shop which would soon be his. His vivid imagination presented it to him not as it now was but as it would be when Gothic gilt lettering ornamented the blank space above the window, when the door was a mullioned affair with a chased brass knob, the window was full of apparently authentic collector’s pieces and the interior thronged with customers all desperate to part with their money.

  Life was glorious.

  He went into the Lockkeeper’s off-licence and bought himself a half-bottle of whisky and six cans of beer. Then, armed with the materials for a liquid lunch, he returned home where he settled himself on the dining room sofa, a spot for four years sacrosanct and reserved to Maud.

  Stanley poured himself a tumbler of whisky and raised it at the framed photograph of her mother Vera had hung on the wall. “Absent friends!” he said. He smiled and switched on the television for “Sports Round-up,” recalling how in the past he had almost always had to miss it because the noise disturbed Maud’s afternoon rest.

  Vera only had one case and she meant to go from the station to Mrs. Horton’s by bus. The bus came and it was a single-decker green one, not very different from the buses she and James used to travel in down to the sea. They hadn’t changed the sea-front at all. There was the old bandstand, the pretty little pier, there the cliffs where thrift grew and the orange daisies with the long Latin name Vera could never remember.

  She couldn’t see a single amusement arcade or fish and chip shop but the old stall selling rock and candy floss was still there and she saw a child go up to it with a bucket and spade, a fair-haired child who might have been herself all those many years ago.

  Vera got off at the bottom of Seaview Crescent, feeling she must be in a dream. It wasn’t possible that progress and the current mad craze for pulling things down and putting new things up had passed Brayminster by. It wasn’t possible but it had happened. It was a Saturday afternoon in summer on the South Coast and there was no canned music, no screaming mobs, no coach parties and no strings of exhausted donkeys carrying screaming children along the sands. Vera listened to the quiet. In the copper beech tree, which still stood in the garden of the big house on the corner, a bird was singing. She was at the seaside in the South of England in spring and the only sound was a singing bird.