‘I had rather thought it was Cara who was feeling glum. Not going out for a walk on that last morning for instance, poor girl. Still, as you say, if they had quarrelled, I daresay neither one was thrilled to be thrown together in a tiny cottage in the middle of nowhere.’ I realized halfway through this that I was currently sitting in possibly an even smaller dwelling in the same remote spot, and too late I bit my lip. Mrs Marshall bridled but said nothing. I am sorry to say that what came out of my mouth next was not even reckless inquisitiveness so much as babbling, pure and simple.
‘I wonder what they had argued about, don’t you? I mean, they’re normally as close as close can be. Devoted sisters, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I couldn’t say, Miss Madam,’ said Mrs Marshall, predictably. But as it happened she was not merely being snooty, for she followed this with: ‘I had never met the family before.’
‘Oh really?’ I said, sensing safer ground. ‘You are new in the area, then?’
‘I am not, then,’ she said stoutly. ‘My grandfather was born in this house. It’s them that’s new. I took the job on to help them out this once, but a month ago, I wouldn’t have known them to pass in the street.’ My eyes strayed to the envelope on the table, thinking that under these circumstances I had been rather too generous with Daisy’s money. Mrs Marshall, most unfortunately, caught my look and all hope of amity between us was lost. I quitted her parlour and, imagining her removing my taint from her sofa with a stiff brush, I stamped back towards Borgue in a temper, cursing myself for my foolishness.
‘Stupid woman, stupid woman, stupid woman,’ I chanted, in time with my steps. I should be reliving that visit, that wasted chance, in my sleep.
‘That makes two of us then,’ said a voice, sounding only feet away from me. I jumped and wheeled around looking for the source. An ancient, crooked but sturdy old woman slowly unbent herself from where she had been stooping behind the wall which edged the lane to my left. She put her hands into the small of her back and stretched herself with a groan, before coming back to rest, not upright but gently curved forward like a feather. ‘Aye, the Dear knows why I’m crippling myself with this caper,’ she said, pointing to the ground at her feet with a knobbled and earthy finger. I peered over the wall at a vegetable patch, laid out between brick paths, in which stretched long rows of tiny green plants, looking like stitches in a brown blanket. ‘I’ve near kilt myself planting out they cabbages and now I’ll be out here every night with my candle trying to keep the snails off them, and then when I’ve been out in the snow to cut one and washed it and cooked it and laid it down, they’ll all turn their noses up anyway.’ She spoke with great weariness but her eyes were twinkly and she looked back at her poker-straight rows with pride. ‘And what have you done?’ she said. ‘Here, I hope you’ve not stepped in muck in they boots.’ She bent again and delving her hand into a bucket she began to sprinkle something around the neck of a tiny cabbage plant.
‘Oh goodness me, no,’ I said, thinking that I had no idea and deciding not to check, ‘I’ve upset and offended one of your neighbours, I’m afraid.’
The old woman’s head bobbed up instantly at this and I saw the twinkle in her eye intensify as though someone had turned the gas up to full. She stood straight again and wiped her hands, beaming.
‘Well now, Mrs Gilver madam, how did you manage to do that?’
She knew my name; this was more like it.
‘I say, I don’t suppose you’d like a hand with that?’ I said, stepping along to the gate and coming into the garden. ‘I could do with something to work off my bad temper and you look as though you need a rest.’
She held the bucket out towards me wordlessly, and eased herself back against the wall with her feet splayed. Crushed eggshells was what the bucket contained, and I took off my glove before grabbing a handful and crouching down amongst the cabbage seedlings to set about my inexplicable task.
‘I was charged with giving a little something to Mrs Marshall to say thanks for her trouble. From the Duffys, you know. And it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world to have a little chat about this and that, but the lady seems to think I was prying and – oh bother!’ A clump of eggshell, still with some of its contents clinging about it, dropped on to a seedling and bent it down. I flicked it away.
‘Och, you shouldn’t worry yourself about her, madam. She’s far too big for her boots. It’s no as if she was slaving for them. In and out in the morning as fast as you could blink she was, but even that was too much trouble.’
‘Well, it beats me why she should take the job if she had no taste for it,’ I said, glad to have someone with whom I could share my many thoughts on Mrs Marshall. The old woman rocked with laughter.
‘Aye well, her man, Sandy, he was in about the wee hoose painting and papering for them and when madam said did he know of any “domestic help” he just said his Aggie would do it and glad, never thinking a woman would grudge to work with the two good hands God gave her.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I imagine that would cause a little coolness.’
‘Well, Sandy was none too cool, I can tell you. Fit to be tied more like it. He’s near had enough of her airs and graces, for it’s not what he’s been used to.’ I wondered how she knew all this. Did the hot-tempered Sandy and the frosty Agnes have screaming matches in the garden? Did the sound carry this far?
‘No,’ she said again, ‘Sandy has never been used with seeing a woman too proud to turn her hand. Why, his mother still grows all her own vegetables, madam, and she’s over eighty, God love her old bones.’ She brought this out with great enjoyment and watched me closely to see if I was catching up with her.
‘I see,’ I said, with an inward whoop of delight that my gamble had paid off so lavishly and I was not grovelling around in the dirt for nothing. There is no greater source of scurrilous gossip than a mother-in-law with a grudge in her heart and if ‘Sandy’ had worked for the Duffys he might have well have told his mother something I would like to know. ‘Well, Mrs Marshall,’ I said, playing her at her own game, ‘if she felt that way, I suppose my dropping in with a tip was just about the last straw.’
‘I wish I’d been there to see it,’ she said. ‘Oh, but madam, to think here we are laughing and there that poor lassie is. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust is what we’re promised, but please God there’s not many of us bound for that kind of end.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Naw, not me. I didn’t know the family at all. They don’t belong here. They just bought that wee hoose to play in, I think. No that any folk round here would want they wooden hooses. Built as hidey-holes for Edinburgh and Glasgow folk and that’s all they’ve ever been. Mind you, they had theirs lovely. Sandy showed me what they were putting up and it must have been a palace. Shame to think all that new paint and paper and all they curtains gone just like that.’
I privately agreed with her, but thankfully said nothing because she clapped a hand to her mouth in horror.
‘Devil take my tongue,’ she said. ‘Listen to me going on about paint and paper when they’ve lost their bonny lassie. Oh dear God, it’s true what they say. It’s as well we don’t know what’s coming, or we’d none of us get out of our beds in the morning.’
‘Were you at the inquiry?’ I asked, knowing the answer, but making the most of Mrs Marshall, to whom I felt sure one could say anything.
‘I was not,’ she pronounced. ‘Although I heard you were, madam, and if you don’t mind an old woman speaking her mind, you should have known better. My own man, God rest his soul, was taken home ten years since and I would no more have gone to his funeral than I don’t know what. A graveside’s no place for a woman, and as for a courtroom! Aye, I know there’s plenty of those clackety pieces from Gatehouse went and now we’ll not say a word to them for all they’ll say is that Mrs Gilver was there so there can’t be harm in it. I don’t know!’