Element of Doubt, page 13
‘I mean completely well. Fully rigged, one might say,’ said the Matron who had a nautical turn of phrase.
‘No problems?’
‘Not since she stopped walking round the house at night. She frightened some of our residents. It was quite frightening – she was wearing her fur coat and even I – ’
‘Fur coat?’
‘A brownish black fur, it could have been well – anything in the dark.’
‘She has no fur coat. I got rid of it when she came here.’
There was a pause. Then the Matron said brightly, ‘Shall we go and look in her wardrobe? She’s downstairs at the moment, having her tea.’
Selene’s room, rigorously neat and ship-shape in accordance with the nursing-home standards, bore no visual signs of Selene. But there was a smell of mouldy books and beast in the air. Glenda sneezed.
‘Bless you,’ Matron said, and opened the wardrobe.
It was there, on a hanger, its fur bedraggled, matted and balled with mud. It looked sick, sick and tired.
Glenda’s stomach turned. ‘How did that get here?’
‘Strange.’ Matron touched it gingerly. ‘It feels quite wet. But she can’t have been out in the rain, the weather’s been too squally to let them in the grounds.’
‘Get rid of it.’
‘Rid of what?’
‘The coat!’
‘Really – Are you sure? Is it what she would want?’
‘It’s what I want. The thing’s unhygienic to say the least. It must be full of germs. Burn it.’
To Selene, Glenda was careful not to show surprise. ‘You got your coat back then.’
Selene said comfortably, ‘It’s never far away.’
‘You can’t keep it here!’
‘You know, dear, you’ve gone quite coffee-coloured, it makes you look foreign.’
‘What I’d like to know is how you got it back!’
‘It wouldn’t leave me. Did I tell you it saved my life? When I was attacked by two young men – mugged, they call it, don’t they? – my fur growled and scared them off.’
‘Auntie – ’
‘I had nothing worth stealing so they were saved from committing a worthless crime. It did them a good turn too, you see. I do think, if crime doesn’t pay there’s no excuse for it at all.’
Glenda knew she was beaten in the matter of the asking, that kind of innocence was indomitable. But in the matter of the coat she would not be defeated.
‘I’m relying on you,’ she told the Matron as she left. ‘I don’t want to see that garment again!’
She took an early train to town next day and shopped for a new winter coat for Selene. She wanted something soft and warm for an elderly lady, she told the salesgirl. Had she thought of beaver-lamb said the girl, and was startled when Glenda almost snarled a refusal.
She settled, after careful consideration, on a classic style in a lavender fleck, quite tenderly soft. Picturing it enveloping Selene in a pure and cosy cloud, she carried it away with a happy sense of righting a wrong.
It was not to last. She called at The Harbour on her way from the station to present Selene with her new coat. She couldn’t wait to see that little face peeking out of the lavender mist. The colour was so perfect for her. It’ll be a real pleasure to see her shrink into that, Glenda thought.
The winter afternoon was dissolving into dark when she turned the car into the drive of the nursing-home. Lights shone from the windows, from the viewing-room came a bluish glow where the senior cits. were watching TV. Selene wouldn’t be, television bored her. She would be watching with that private eye of hers.
Glenda’s own eye was drawn, after she had switched off her headlamps, to a disturbance in the shrubbery. A laurel bush rocked to and fro, although there was no wind. She peered – the disturbance spread to other bushes. She switched on her headlamps.
Caught in the glare, but not held, on hind legs, forepaws extended, was a sizeable animal. It had a whitish mask, triangular in shape, like a fox’s, and was moving with ponderous grace, dipping, swaying, turning, fur blackish and bristling in the beam of the car headlights.
‘Selene!’
Glenda’s cry sounded inhuman in her own ears. It was mostly rage, spinning off into fear. She ran to the bushes, ran into them, encountered no obstacle, nothing to stop her, until she found herself at the fence which bounded the garden. She swung round, beating at twigs, scratching her hands. ‘Selene!’
There was no one. Nothing. If there had been, it must have slipped like air through her fingers. Even Selene couldn’t do that. Glenda ran to the house, ready to scream at the first person she saw.
It was the Matron, as if she’d been waiting behind the door. ‘Oh, Mrs. Lacey, I’ve been watching for you!’
‘It would be better if you watched your patients – and your staff!’ cried Glenda. ‘Who was it left my great-aunt unattended?’
‘There was nothing we could do, nothing anyone could do – ’
‘Are you saying you can’t cope with one frail little old lady?’
‘Mrs. Lacey, I’ve been trying all day to get you on the phone – ’
‘She’s maybe a quarter crazy, but sweet-hearted – ’
‘I’m so very sorry to have to tell you – ’
‘You needn’t tell me. I just saw her.’
‘You saw her?’
Glenda cried, ‘Where is she?’
‘Upstairs, in her room – ’
‘Look, I saw her out there in the garden a minute ago, no way could she get back to her room without passing me!’
‘Mrs. Lacey, you couldn’t – ’ The Matron made as if to take Glenda’s hand, then clasped herself instead. ‘I had hoped to break it to you gently. Of course it’s a great shock, it is to us all, coming so suddenly. Your dear aunt passed away in her sleep, in the early hours of this morning.’
‘She – what?’
‘Died,’ said the Matron firmly, to avoid inexactitude. ‘We only realised when we couldn’t wake her for morning tea.’
‘Passed away?’ It was a term Glenda derided, but she knew that it was what Selene would do. What she had done. A claw closed over her heart. ‘She missed her morning tea?’
‘Mrs. Lacey, you couldn’t wish her a better ending. It isn’t given to all of us to slip our moorings so peacefully.’
‘What about the coat?’
‘The coat?’
‘That goddamned fur!’
The Matron stared wide-eyed at Glenda, her arms tightened about herself, she was seen to be taking a firmer grip. ‘The porter burned it.’
‘I saw her!’ Glenda told Bertram. ‘After she’d been dead for hours – ’
‘They do like you to take a look. Don’t let it upset you. She’s at rest, poor old sweet – ’
‘I saw her in the garden as I drove up!’
‘My dear girl – ’
‘It was Selene, she was wearing her fur coat – and dancing!’
Bertram, too, opened his eyes wide, but did not hug himself. He took refuge in reason. ‘Darling, it was evening, getting dark – ’
‘I had the headlamps on!’
‘The dusk plays tricks with your eyesight. Shadows,’ Bertram said sturdily, ‘do look furry. You’ve had a shock, but you know it wasn’t Great-Aunt you saw.’
Glenda turned to him, she had that inward gaze which he hoped she had lost. ‘If it wasn’t her, who was it? What was it? Fur coats don’t dance, do they?’
The Paradise Garden
She was glad to see that the gates were closed. Last week, thanks to a misprint in the official brochure, she had driven fifty miles only to find it was open day at Parsley Towers and the grounds teeming with people. A wasted journey.
‘Tell you what, Joan – ’ she often talked to herself, preferred it, she was sure of being understood – ‘the weather’s on your side. After three days of rain and a warm westerly you’ll be able to whistle them out.’
She backed the car into the service entrance, parked it well to one side so as not to cause obstruction and undue attention. It looked, it was meant to, as if someone had just pulled off the road.
There were clumps of sowthistle along the track, a sign of good soil. Dindle or milky dickles were the country names, she had often wondered why. No need to wonder how the plants got here. Each one can produce thousands of seeds to be carried on the wind. Weeds. Someone should dig them out.
The bag which she slung over her shoulder was to all intents – but not to all purposes – a handbag, cream plastic with a fancy snap top, and large, as befitted a woman with a tendency to middle-age. It had, in addition, a false bottom which could be let out to make of it a Gladstone bag, big enough to hold a week-end wardrobe.
Mandragor is one of the great gardens of the South. It has been landscaped to accompany the surrounding countryside, here an orderly assembly of fields, woods and moderate hills, pleasing to the eye and restful to the spirit. The garden exemplifies the control and refinement of Nature. It is designed with precision, shrubs are scrupulously trimmed to knife-edges, borders run ruler-straight from Pole to Pole, the flowerbeds are geometrically confined in lozenges, rectangles, polygons. There are no escapees from among the penstemons, bleeding hearts and Canterbury bells.
She came off the service road to see the garden stretching before her, blocks of carefully graded colour, symmetrical box hedges, tailored acers, pyramidal firs. She said, ‘You have to like this sort of thing.’ She did, she approved, she found patterns reassuring, there was a beginning and an end to patterns.
She had an hour or so in which to work, although she did not regard what she did as work, it was pleasure, and a lot of fun. ‘A little forethought pays,’ she said. The last time she was here, earlier in the summer, she had drifted with the crowds, noting and memorising. It was important to know where things were, how long it took to get to and from them, what cover to expect. More by lucky accident than endeavour, she had discovered that the gardeners at Mandragor were in the habit of going to the Rose and Crown for lunch on days when there were no visitors.
Her eye was drawn to a display of Canna lilies in a lead urn. However, they were overlooked, there was a clear view from the house across the cedar-shaded lawn. ‘Forget it, Joan, we’re not short of lilies.’
A border of Caucasian scabious gave her pause, and next to them pots of the crimson Barberton daisies. She had stooped to explore for side-shoots when she heard the words: ‘They come from South Africa, you know. There should be a colour-bar on plants.’
She straightened, turned, saw only a robin eyeing her from the hedge.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Granted.’
‘Where are you?’
‘You can’t see me, not any more. But all of us – English daisies, buttercups, bluebells, Travellers’ Joy, meadowsweet, forget-me-nots, willowherb, mallow – you name us, we were here. Once. And we’ll be back.’
‘Who’s that speaking?’ She sounded, absurdly, as if she was on the telephone.
The answer came: ‘This is Poppy, the wild red one. Papaver rhoeas in your botany books.’
She looked all round, near and far, as far as the woods bordering the estate. But the voice was coming from close at hand, from under her feet –
‘This used to be a wild garden, don’t you know. Me and the yellow toadflax and the blue borage were the glory of it.’
‘Are you trying to tell me I’m talking to a weed?’
‘You’re talking to a native, one of the original inhabitants. They came and dug us up. You know what it’s like being dragged out by your roots? Of course you don’t, you haven’t got roots. They chopped down the old orchard, razed our Paradise garden to the ground, brought in cartloads of gravel, put in litterbins and Japanese bridges and staked the place out with a set-square.’
‘Where are you?’
‘It’s no use you looking. We were here first and we’re buried here.’
‘I don’t believe this!’ She resisted the impulse to part the stems of the Canterbury bells.
‘You’ve gone a funny mushroom colour, you shouldn’t stoop, it’s bad for the heart.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my heart! I’ll thank you, whoever – whatever you are – to mind your own business.’
‘I’m a survivor, that’s what I am. I’ll still be here in two-thousand and ninety A.D. You won’t.’
Wishing to ignore that remark, and indeed all the remarks, she stooped to examine a clump of Rudbeckia.
‘What do you want with imports? They won’t grow for you, they can’t take our weather, they get club-root, rust and blackspot, ball-bud, yellow leaf.’
Something cold, a finger, was moving along her spine. She said sternly, ‘I think I may be credited with a sufficient knowledge of plants and their habitats.’
‘Tell you what, Joan, you go ahead, dig up as much as you like. Whatever you take will give us wild ones a chance. Our seeds are only waiting for room to come up. Mine can wait a hundred years. I bet you didn’t know that.’
‘I have no intention of plundering! This garden is a place of beauty and discipline in an undisciplined world. My social conscience would not allow me to detract from any part of it!’ She felt better when she had said that.
‘Go on, take the Beckia if you like a flower the colour of a hot flush. I warn you, she’ll die, she hates being shifted.’
‘I’m obliged for the information.’ She added, spitefully, that she would welcome any growing hints. In her ears was a noise like the singing in a seashell. She was glad to hear it. It was, it had to be, the source of all this nonsense. Given time, she would be able to explain it. But her time, now, was getting short.
She took out her trowel and separated a piece of the Rudbeckia. As she slipped it into a polythene bag she heard a movement. It was the robin fluttering in the hedge.
The Caucasian scabious and the Barberton daisies could both be lifted and over-wintered in her greenhouse. Working, as was her wont, with a care for the needs and capacity of her own garden, thankfully she felt her alarm subside. She filled her bag, sighing because there was still so much she would love to have. But it would be unwise to give way to greed.
She left the herbaceous borders and turned into an enclosed area which exited into the service road. Here were soldierly ranks of agapanthus and monkshood and a dense white edging of candytuft. Her heels echoed too loudly on the brick herringbone path. She walked on tiptoe. It was as she approached the exit, through a formal Doric arch, that she saw the plant which would be the jewel to crown her visit to Mandragor.
This was a shrub, penicillate in character, with brilliant yellow flowers and fleshy pink seed-pods hanging in pairs like lovebirds. She recognised it at once, the rare and exotic Pudica florata from Peru. It is difficult to rear, insists on soil of a special chalky and clayey consistency and cannot tolerate frost. But it is a showy plant, and entertaining. The unripe pods, when squeezed, can be made to explode with sharp reports.
No question, she had to have it. ‘Joan, this will make up for everything!’
Her small hand-tools would be useless for getting at the Pudica’s root-system. But she had a full-sized garden fork which was collapsible and capable of being secreted in the bottom of her bag.
She had it adjusted and operational in a moment. All she asked was a few moments more before the gardeners turned out of the Rose and Crown. The fork struck something unyielding. When she lifted it, lumps of chalk were impaled on the prongs. She knocked them off and poised the fork for another thrust.
‘Better not, Joan.’
She whirled round, but of course there was no one to be seen.
‘Go to hell.’
‘That’s not nice, I’m trying to help you.’ Resisting a more vulgar injunction, she drove the fork into the earth. ‘You dig that up and it’ll scream.’
‘If it does,’ she said through her teeth, ‘I’ll put it on the Esther Rantzen show.’
The fork gripped, she leaned on the handle and the Pudica shuddered. She thought she heard a squeak, like the cry of a mouse in a cat’s claws. Then the shrub came up, slowly and peacefully. It sank to the ground, lay submissive at her feet. She was pleased to see that it had a good root ball, but worried about the height of the bush. She hadn’t stopped to think how she would conceal it. She now saw that she couldn’t. She would have to risk carrying it openly to the car.
She shook the loose earth from the roots, kicked over the hole it had left. Dragging the Pudica, she turned at the stone arch and looked back.
‘You and your scream!’ she said.
No way could she get the Pudica into the boot of the car. She had to prop it against the back seat, a lanky passenger, with roots on the floor and yellow flowers brushing their pollen on the roof.
Emerging from the service road, she put on speed. When the Rose and Crown came in sight she dared to toy with the notion of going in for a drink. It would be rather fun, standing at the bar with the Mandragor gardeners while the Pudica sat in the carpark round the back.
She passed without seeing anyone. In the narrow lanes she drove sensibly, pulling in to allow other cars to pass. It would be foolish to invite even a minor scrape at this juncture.
Reaching the motorway was a victory. It was anonymous, nothing there to connect her with Mandragor. She had every right to be driving along with a few botanical specimens. In company with the motorists displaying stickers to the effect that there was a baby/child/dog on board, she felt a mischievous urge to add the declaration: Pudica on board. She chuckled. The way ahead being clear, she put her foot down and was enjoying a modest burst of speed when a police patrol-car shot by, signalling to her to stop.
As she had not even begun to exceed the speed limit, she drove on to the hard shoulder without a qualm. Winding down her window, she saw that the officer was young and personable.
