The Fever Tree and Other Stories Read online

  She crawled to the door to let James in, a grotesque figure in red corduroy trousers and green jumper, her witch’s face framed in a woolly fuzz of grey hair, and behind her, picking his way delicately, Palmerston with tail erect.

  ‘You can tell that girl she can come up here tonight if she likes. She’d better bring her illegitimate child with her, I don’t suppose your mother wants him.’

  Aunt Julie’s bark was worse than her bite. Perhaps, indeed, she had no real bite. When James next went to Sindon Lodge some three weeks later Mirabel was settled in as if she had lived there all her life, Oliver was on the hearthrug where he had usurped Palmerston’s place and Aunt Julie was wearing Mirabel’s Christmas present.

  She hardly spoke to James while her great-niece was in the room. She lay back in her armchair with her eyes closed and though the young woman’s clothes she wore gave to her appearance a kind of bizarre mockery of youth, you could see now that she was very old. Recent upheavals had aged her. Her face looked as if it were made of screwed-up brown paper. But when Mirabel went away – was compelled to leave them by Oliver’s insistent demands for his tea – Aunt Julie seemed to revive. She opened her eyes and said to James in her sharpest and most offhand tone: ‘This is the last time you’ll come here, I daresay.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I’ve made my will, that’s why, and you’re not in it.’

  She cocked a distorted thumb in the direction of the door. ‘I’ve left the house and the furniture and all I’ve got to her. And a bit to someone else we both know.’

  ‘Who?’ said James.

  ‘Never you mind. It’s not you and it’s none of your business.’ A curious look came into Aunt Julie’s eyes. ‘What I’ve done is leave my money to two people I can’t stand and who don’t like me. You think that’s silly, don’t you? They’ve both sucked up to me and danced attendance on me and told a lot of lies about caring for me. Well, I’m tired, I’m sick of it. They can have what they want and I’ll never again have to see that look on their faces.’

  ‘What look?’

  ‘A kind of greedy pleading. The kind of look no one ought to have unless she’s starving. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? You’re as clever as they come but you don’t know what life is, not yet you don’t. How could you?’

  The old woman closed her eyes and there was silence in which the topmost log crumpled and sank into the heart of the fire with a rush of sparks, and Palmerston strode out from where he had taken refuge from Oliver, rubbed himself against James’s legs and settled down in the red glow to wash himself. Suddenly Aunt Julie spoke.

  ‘I didn’t want you corrupted, can you understand that? I didn’t want to spoil the only one who means more than a row of pins to me. But I don’t know . . . If I wasn’t too old to stand the fuss there’d be I’d go back on what I’ve done and leave the house to you. Or your mother, she’s a nice woman.’

  ‘She’s got a house.’

  ‘Houses can be sold, you silly boy. You don’t suppose Madam Mirabel will live here, do you?’ Mirabel must have heard that, James thought, as the door opened and the tea trolley appeared, but there was no warning Aunt Julie or catching her eye. ‘I could make another will yet, I could bring myself to it. They say it’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind.’

  Mirabel looked cross and there was very little chance of conversation after that as Oliver, when he was being fed or bathed or played with, dominated everything. He was a big child with reddish hair, not in the least like Mirabel but resembling, presumably, the mean and heartless Francis. He was now ten months old and walking, ‘into everything’, as James’s mother put it, and it was obvious that he tired Aunt Julie whose expression became quite distressed when screams followed Mirabel’s refusal to give him chocolate cake. Oliver’s face and hands were wiped clean and he was put on the floor where he tried to eat pieces of coal out of the scuttle and, when prevented, set about tormenting the cat. James got up to go and Aunt Julie clutched his hand as he passed her, whispering with a meaning look that virtue was its own reward.

  It was not long before he discovered who the ‘someone else we both know’ was. Aunt Julie wrote a letter to James’s parents in which she told them she was leaving a sum of money to Rosamund in her will. Elizabeth Fyfield said she thought there was something very unpleasant about this letter and that it seemed to imply Rosamund had gone to Sindon Lodge with ‘great expectations’ in mind. She was upset by it but Rosamund was jubilant. Aunt Julie had not said what the sum was but Rosamund was sure it must be thousands and thousands of pounds – half a million was the highest figure she mentioned – and with her birthday money (she was eleven on 1 March) she bought herself a book of photographs of London architecture, mostly of streets in Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge, so that she could decide which one to have her flat in.

  ‘I think we made a great mistake in telling her,’ said James’s father.

  For Rosamund had taken to paying weekly visits to Sindon Lodge. She seldom went without some small gift for Aunt Julie, a bunch of snowdrops, a lop-sided pot she had made at school, a packet of peppermints.

  ‘Wills can be changed, you know,’ said James.

  ‘That’s not why I go. Don’t you dare say that! I go because I love her. You’re just jealous of me and you haven’t been for weeks and weeks.’

  It was true. He saw that Rosamund had indeed been corrupted and he, put to the test, had failed it. Yet it was not entirely disillusionment or pique which kept him from Sindon Lodge but rather a feeling that it must be wrong to manipulate people in this way. He had sometimes heard his father use the expression ‘playing God’ and now he understood what it meant. Aunt Julie had played God with him and with Rosamund and with Mirabel too. Probably she was still doing it, hinting at will-changing each time Mirabel displeased her. So he would go there to defy this manipulating, not to be a puppet moved by her strings, he would go on the following day on his way home from school.

  But although he went as he had promised himself he would, to show her his visits were disinterested and that he could stick to his word, he never saw her alive again. The doctor’s car was outside when he turned in at the gate. Mirabel let him in after he had rung the bell three times, a harassed, pale Mirabel with Oliver fretful in her arms. Aunt Julie had had one of her gastric attacks, a terrible attack which had gone on all night. Mirabel had not known what to do and Aunt Julie had refused to let her call an ambulance, she wouldn’t go into hospital. The doctor had come first thing and had come back later and was with her now.

  She had had to scrub out the room and actually burn the sheets, Mirabel said darkly. The mess had been frightful, worse than James could possibly imagine, but she couldn’t have let the doctor see her like that. Mirabel said she hoped the worst was over but she didn’t look very hopeful, she looked unhappy. James went no further inside than the hall. He said to tell Aunt Julie he had been, please not to forget to tell her, and Mirabel said she wouldn’t forget. He walked away slowly. Spring was in the air and the neat, symmetrical front garden of Sindon Lodge was full of daffodils, their bent heads bouncing in the breeze. At the gate he met Palmerston coming in with the corpse of a field-mouse dangling from his mouth. Without dropping his booty, Palmerston rubbed himself against James’s legs and James stroked him, feeling rather depressed.

  Two days later Aunt Julie had another attack and it killed her. Or the stroke which she had afterwards killed her, the doctor said. The cause of death on the certificate was ‘food poisoning and cerebral haemorrhage’, according to Mrs Hodges who had been Aunt Julie’s cleaner and who met James’s mother in the village. Apparently on death certificates the doctor has to put down the main cause and the contributory cause, which was another piece of information for James to add to his increasing store.

  James’s parents went to the funeral and of course Mirabel went too. James did not want to go and it never crossed his mind that he would be allowed to on a school day, but Rosamund
cried when they stopped her. She wanted to have her red and white coat dyed black and to carry a small bouquet of violets. The provisions of the will were made known during the following days, though there was no dramatic will-reading after the funeral as there is in books.

  Sindon Lodge was to go to Mirabel and so was all Aunt Julie’s money with the exception of Rosamund’s ‘bit’, and bit, relatively speaking, it turned out to be. Five hundred pounds. Rosamund cried (and said she was crying because she missed Aunt Julie) and then she sulked, but when the will was proved and she actually got the money, when she was shown the cheque and it was paid into her Post Office Savings account, she cheered up and became quite sensible. She even confided to James, without tears or flounces, that it would have been a terrible responsibility to have half a million and she would always have been worried that people were only being nice to her for the sake of the money.

  James got Palmerston. It was set out in the will, the cat described and mentioned by name, and bequeathed ‘if the animal should survive me, to James Alexander Fyfield, of Ewes Hall Farm, Great Sindon, he being the only person I know I can trust . . .’

  ‘What an awful thing to say,’ said Mirabel. ‘Imagine, literally to have a thing like that written down. I’m sure James is welcome to it. I should certainly have had it destroyed, you can’t have a cat about the place with a baby.’

  Palmerston had lived so long at Sindon Lodge that he was always going back there, though he kept instinctively out of Mirabel’s way. For Mirabel, contrary to what Aunt Julie had predicted, did not sell the house. Nor did she make any of those changes the village had speculated about when it knew she was not going to sell. Sindon Lodge was not painted white with a blue front door or recarpeted or its kitchen fitted out with the latest gadgets. Mirabel did nothing ostentatious, made no splash and bought herself nothing but a small and modest car. For a while it seemed as if she were lying low, keeping herself to herself, mourning in fact, and James’s mother said perhaps they had all misjudged her and she had really loved Aunt Julie after all.

  Things began to change with the appearance on the scene of Gilbert Coleridge. Where Mirabel had met him no one seemed to know, but one day his big yellow Volvo estate car was seen outside Sindon Lodge, on the next Mirabel was seen in the passenger seat of that car, and within hours it was all over the village that she had a man friend.

  ‘He sounds a nice, suitable sort of person,’ said James’s mother, whose bush telegraph system was always sound. ‘Two or three years older than she and never had a wife – well, you never know these days, do you? – and already a partner in his firm. It would be just the thing for Oliver. He needs a man about the house.’

  ‘Let’s hope she has the sense to marry this one,’ said James’s father.

  But on the whole, apart from this, the Fyfield family had lost interest in Mirabel. It had been galling for them that Mirabel, having got what she wanted with their help, first the entrée to Sindon Lodge and then the possession of it, had lost interest in them. She was not to be met with in the village because she scarcely walked anywhere if she could help it, and although Rosamund called several times, Mirabel was either not at home or else far too busy to ask anyone in. James overheard his mother saying that it was almost as if Mirabel felt she had said too much while she stayed with them, had shown too openly her desires, and now these were gratified, wanted as little as possible to do with those who had listened to her confidences. But it suited the Fyfields equally, for the arrival of Mirabel was always followed by trouble and by demands.

  The summer was hotter and dryer than the previous one had been, and the soft fruit harvest was exceptionally good. But this year there was no Aunt Julie to cast a cynical eye over baskets of raspberries. And Jimson’s Weed, datura, the thornapple, did not show itself in the Fyfields’ garden or, apparently, in any part of Great Sindon. A ‘casual’, as the wild plant book described it, it had gone in its mysterious way to ground or else wandered to some distant place away over the meadows.

  Had it appeared, it would have exercised no fascination over James. He had his thirteenth birthday in June and he felt immeasurably, not just a year, older than he had done the previous summer. For one thing, he was about six inches taller, he had ‘shot up’ as his mother said, and sometimes the sight in a mirror of this new towering being could almost alarm him. He looked back with incredulous wonder on the child he had been, the child who had boiled noxious fruits and leaves in a pot, who had kept white mice in a cage and caterpillars in a box. He had entered his teens and was a child no more.

  Perhaps it was his height that led directly to the drama – ‘the absolutely worst day of my life’, Rosamund called it – or it might have been Mrs Hodge’s operation or even the fact, that, for once in a way, the Women’s Institute met on a Tuesday rather than a Wednesday. It might have been any of those factors, though most of all it happened because Mirabel was inevitably and unchangingly Mirabel.

  The inhabitants of Ewes Hall Farm knew very little about her life since they hardly ever saw her. It came as a surprise to Elizabeth Fyfield to learn how much time Mrs Hodges had been spending sitting in with Oliver or minding him in her own home. It was Mrs Hodges’s daughter who told her, at the same time as she told her that her mother would be three weeks in hospital having her hysterectomy and another goodness knows how many convalescing. Mirabel would have to look elsewhere for a baby-sitter.

  She looked, as they might have known she would, to the Fyfields.

  Presenting herself on their doorstep with Oliver on one arm and a heavy shopping basket on the other, she greeted James’s mother with a winsome, nervous smile. It might have been last year all over again, except that Oliver was a little boy now and no longer a baby. James, home for the long summer holidays, heard her sigh with despair and break into a long apology for having ‘neglected’ them for so long. The fact was she was engaged to be married. Did Elizabeth know that?

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy, Mirabel.’

  ‘Gilbert will make a marvellous father,’ said Mirabel. ‘When I compare him with that stupid, immature oaf, that Francis, it just makes me – oh, well, that’s all water under the bridge now. Anyway, Elizabeth dear, what I came to ask you was, do you think James or Rosamund would do some baby-sitting for me? I’d pay them the going rate, I’d pay them what I pay Mrs Hodges. Only it’s so awful for me never being able to go out with my fiancé, and actually tomorrow I’m supposed to be meeting his parents for the first time. Well, I can’t take a baby of Oliver’s age to a dinner party, can I?’

  ‘Rosamund’s out of the question,’ said James’s mother, and she didn’t say it very warmly. ‘She’s only eleven. I couldn’t possibly let her have sole charge of Oliver.’

  ‘But James would be all right, wouldn’t he? James has got so tall, he looks almost a grown man. And James is terribly mature, anyway.’

  His mother didn’t answer that. She gave one of those sighs of hers that would have effectively prevented James asking further favours. It had no effect on Mirabel.

  ‘Just this once. After tomorrow I’ll stay at home like a good little mum and in a month Mrs Hodges will be back. Just from seven till – well, eleven would be the absolute latest.’

  ‘I’ll sit with Oliver,’ said James’s mother.

  Mirabel’s guarantee came to nothing, however, for far from staying home with Oliver, she turned up at Ewes Hall Farm three days later, this time to leave him with them while she went shopping with Gilbert’s mother. She was gone for four hours. Oliver made himself sick from eating toffees he found in Rosamund’s room and he had uprooted six houseplants and stripped off their leaves before James caught him at it.

  Next time, James’s mother said she would put her foot down. She had already promised to sit with Oliver on the coming Saturday night. That she would do and that must be the end of it. And this resolve was strengthened by Mirabel’s failure to return home until half-past one on the Sunday morning. She would have told Mirabel so in no unce
rtain terms, Elizabeth Fyfield told her family at breakfast, but Gilbert Coleridge had been there and she had not wanted to embarrass Mirabel in front of him.

  On the Tuesday, the day to which the Women’s Institute meeting had been put forward, the fine weather broke with a storm which gave place by the afternoon to steady rain. James was spending the day turning out the glory-hole. He had been told to do it often enough and he had meant to do it, but who would be indoors in a stuffy bedroom when the sun is shining and the temperature in the eighties? That Tuesday was a very suitable sort of day for disposing of books one had outgrown, tanks and cages and jars that were no longer inhabited, for throwing away collections that had become just boxfuls of rubbish, for making a clean sweep on the path to adulthood.