Rebecca looked at her and opened her mouth as if about to speak. Then her face changed as if a cloth had been wiped over it.
“Ah,” Mr. Gladwyn said, emerging from the drawing room. “There you are, Mrs. Langstone. Fully restored, I hope?”
Lydia turned to him and smiled. “Yes, thank you. Rebecca’s been looking after me very well.”
“Good, good. Now come and get warm, and Rebecca will bring us our tea.” He stood aside to allow her to enter the room. “What was that about Golgotha?”
“No-taffeta,” Lydia said swiftly as she passed him in the doorway. “I was asking her advice about how to clean a dress.”
Mrs. Alforde was sitting smoking by the fire. She said hello but hardly looked at Lydia. She looked tired and also older, as though she had lived too much time too quickly since lunch.
“Sorry I’ve kept you both waiting,” Lydia said.
“Not at all,” Mr. Gladwyn said earnestly. “Tea won’t be a jiffy now, I’m sure.”
“You’ve been in the wars, I gather,” Mrs. Alforde said, tapping ash into the fire.
“No lasting damage except to my gloves. How was Mrs. Narton?”
Mrs. Alforde looked away. “As well as could be expected.”
“I shall tell Cook to send her some soup,” Mr. Gladwyn announced. “Ah, here is tea.”
His ears had caught the rattle of the tea things in the hall. Rebecca shouldered open the door and wheeled in a trolley. It was a generous tea, with hot buttered crumpets, two sorts of cake and two sorts of sandwiches, as well as bread and butter. Mrs. Alforde poured and Mr. Gladwyn handed round the cups, the sandwiches and a little later the cake. At first there was not a great deal of conversation. Mrs. Alforde concentrated on eating, and so did Mr. Gladwyn. Lydia picked at a sandwich and drank two cups of tea.
By the time he had reached his third cup of tea, Mr. Gladwyn had time for his conversational duties as a host. “Yes, Golgotha,” he said. “A foolish mistake of mine-though I suppose it’s natural that a clergyman should hear Golgotha rather than taffeta. Curiously enough-” here he leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs “-it reminds me of rather a good story that went the rounds when I was up at Cambridge. There was a gallery in the university church, you know, which was where the heads of houses sat. And we undergraduates always called it Golgotha because it was the place of the skulls or heads.” He paused and beamed at them, preparing them for the climax. “And of course we young wags used to say that Golgotha was the place of empty skulls.”
He glanced from one face to another, clearly expecting a suitable response. Lydia managed a smile, and hoped that her expression implied that she was suppressing with difficulty an almost overwhelming desire to laugh immoderately.
Mrs. Alforde merely set down her cup on the table and reached for her cigarettes again. Lydia realized that she had not been listening to a word that Mr. Gladwyn was saying.
Neither of them spoke much on the drive back to London. Lydia was glad of this for several reasons, not least because it was dark and both Mrs. Alforde’s driving and her temper had become even more erratic. They reached Bleeding Heart Square a little after seven o’clock. Mrs. Alforde stopped the car outside the house.
“Would you like to come in for a drink?” Lydia asked, glancing up at the facade of the house, at the lighted windows on the first floor; the top-floor windows were dark. “It looks as if Father’s in.”
“No, no, thank you,” Mrs. Alforde said, too baldly for politeness. “I must get back to Gerry.”
Lydia was relieved, partly because she wasn’t sure what state either her father or the flat would be in, and of course finding something to drink might be difficult. She thanked Mrs. Alforde, who in turn thanked Lydia for keeping her company and hoped that she had not found Rawling too dreary. She murmured something about getting in touch soon and drove off rather quickly.
That night Lydia slept badly, skimming on the surface of unconsciousness, moving in and out of dreams which never made sense enough to be frightening but which left her profoundly uneasy. There was too much to think about. Sometimes she thought she heard dance music, and at other times a woman crying and the sound of Mr. Gladwyn’s measured voice as the mourners clustered around Narton’s open grave. And what had happened to Mrs. Alforde? She had seemed almost hostile on the way home. She badly needed to talk to Rory. If only he had been at home. And that in itself was a thought that made her restless because it took very little to imagine him with Fenella Kensley instead.
By half past five, she had given up trying to sleep. She lay in a huddle, to conserve warmth, while her mind roved among the events of yesterday. Everything has an explanation, she told herself, and somewhere in the world is the one that fits all this.
At half past six, cold and thirst drove her out of bed. It was still dark. She washed sketchily in cold water from the jug, dressed, put on the kettle and went into the sitting room. The curtains were still drawn from the previous evening. She pulled them aside because the room caught the best of the morning light when at last it came. She lit the gas fire and went back to make the tea.
When she returned, the room was warmer. The sky was very slightly lighter toward the east now. She lingered at the window, warming her fingers on the cup. A heavy bird fluttered past and glided toward the old pump on the corner by the Crozier. There were other birds there already, perching awkwardly on the pump handle and pecking at something. When the new arrival joined them, there was a great flurry of wings as though the newcomer were not a welcome guest.
Lydia huddled over the fire, drank her tea and smoked the first cigarette of the day. What on earth were the birds doing? She had never seen them there before. When she had finished the tea, she went back to the window. The birds were still outside by the pump.
She put on her coat and hat, went downstairs and opened the front door. As she approached the pump, the birds scrambled into the air. They were big, black crows and not in a hurry to leave. She glanced over her shoulder at the house behind her. All the windows except her own were still in darkness. But she thought she caught a movement at Mrs. Renton’s window on the right of the front door, the merest glimpse of gray smudge behind the glass, a possible face.
She drew nearer the pump. A rusty nail protruded from one of the supports of its dilapidated wooden canopy. Hanging from it was a long and slightly twisted metal meat skewer with a ring at one end. The skewer had been driven through a lump of matter the size of a misshapen tennis ball. Or an overripe orange from Covent Garden with Hitler’s picture on the label, or a russet from one of the old trees in the Monkshill orchard, or a very large egg from a bird or reptile.
The ring had been looped over the head of the nail, and tied to it was a brown luggage label. Lydia touched the label gently with her finger. There was only one word on it and, as the nausea rose in her throat, she knew what it would be before she made out the letters: Serridge.
20
YOU NOTICE that the entries near the end look different from those near the beginning. All the London ones are written in ink, as are the first few entries at Morthams Farm. And the very first ones are much more neatly written than those that come later. At the start, Philippa May Penhow is writing to impress an invisible posterity. Then she writes for herself, because she wants to. These last entries are in pencil and the handwriting wobbles all over the place. Those were the ones she wrote after she moved the diary from the house.
Finally, at the end, where in places the words are almost impossible to make out, she writes in a rapid, almost illegible scrawl because she has no one else to talk to, and she’s desperate.
Monday, 14 April 1930 Last night was a full moon & it kept me awake. Joseph didn’t come up. As the sun rose, I slept & did not wake till after nine o’clock. When I came downstairs Joseph had left the house. Rebecca said that he had told them to wait until I was down before clearing away the breakfast things. On the table was a bunch of daffodils in a vase, and on my plate a little envelope with my name on it in my darling’s hand. “My sweet love, forgive your little boysie for upsetting you. I tiptoed out of the house this morning so as not to wake you. Your loving Joey.” Oh how could I have doubted him? He came back for lunch with little Jacko at his heels & two dead rabbits. He had shot them himself this morning. Jacko was smelly and dirty after his morning’s fun, and I told him he could not come into the house until Amy had washed him under the tap in the scullery!