“Do they keep a big staff up there?” she asked.
“Five if you count the housekeeper. Like the old days,” Mrs. Jim said, “when I was in regular service. You don’t see much of them ways now, do you? Like I said to Jim: they’re selling the big houses when they can, for institutions and that. Not trying all out to buy them, like Mr. Markos.”
“Is Mr. Markos doing that?”
“He’d like to have Quintern,” said Mrs. Jim. “He come to ask if it was for sale when Mrs. Foster was at Greengages a year ago. He was that taken with it, you could see. I was helping spring-clean at the time.”
“Did Mrs. Foster know?”
“He never left ’is name. I told her a gentleman had called to enquire, of course. It give me quite a turn when I first seen him after he come to the Manor.”
“Did you tell Mrs. Foster it was he who’d called?”
“I wasn’t going out to Quintern Place at the time,” said Mrs. Jim shortly and Verity remembered that there had been a rift.
“It come up this evening in conversation. Mr. Alfredo, that’s the butler,” Mrs. Jim continued, “reckons Mr. Markos is still dead set on Quintern. He says he’s never known him not to get his way once he’s made up his mind to it. You’re suited with a gardener, then?”
Mrs. Jim had a habit of skipping without notice from one topic to another. Verity thought she detected a derogatory note but could not be sure. “He’s beginning on Friday,” she said. “Have you met him, Mrs. Jim?”
“Couldn’t miss ’im, could I?” she said, rubbing her arthritic knee. “Annie Black’s been taking him up and down the village like he was Exhibit A in the horse show.”
“He’ll be company for her.”
“He’s all of that,” she said cryptically.
Verity turned into the narrow lane where the Jobbins had their cottage. When they arrived no light shone in any of the windows. Jim and the kids all fast asleep, no doubt. Mrs. Jim was slower leaving the car than she had been in entering it and Verity sensed her weariness. “Have you got an early start?” she asked.
“Quintern at eight. It was very kind of you to bring me home, Miss Preston. Ta, anyway. I’ll say goodnight.”
That’s two of us going home to a dark house, Verity thought, as she turned the car.
But being used to living alone, she didn’t mind letting herself into Keys House and feeling for the light switch.
When she was in bed she turned over the events of the evening and a wave of exhaustion came upon her together with a nervous condition she thought of as “restless legs.” She realized that the encounter with Basil Schramm (as she supposed she should call him) had been more of an ordeal than she had acknowledged at the time. The past rushed upon her, almost with the injuriousness of her initial humiliation. She made herself relax, physically, muscle by muscle and then tried to think of nothing.
She did not think of nothing but she thought of thinking of nothing and almost, but not quite, lost the feeling of some kind of threat waiting offstage like the return of a baddie in one of the old moralities. And at last after sundry heart-stopping jerks she fell asleep.
Chapter 2: Greengages (I)
i
There were no two ways about it, Gardener was a good gardener. He paid much more attention to his employers’ quirks and fancies than McBride had ever done and he was a conscientious worker.
When he found his surname caused Verity some embarrassment, he laughed and said it wad be a’ the same to him if she calt him by his first name, which was Brrruce. Verity herself was no Scot but she couldn’t help thinking his dialect was laid on with a trowel. However, she availed herself of the offer and Bruce he became to all his employers. Praise of him rose high in Upper Quintern. The wee laddie he had found in the village was nearly six feet tall and not quite all there. One by one, as weeks and then months went by, Bruce’s employers yielded to the addition of the laddie with the exception of Mr. Markos’s head gardener, who was adamant against him.
Sybil Foster contined to rave about Bruce. Together they pored over nurserymen’s catalogues. At the end of his day’s work at Quintern he was given a pint of beer and Sybil often joined him in the staff sitting-room to talk over plans. When odd jobs were needed indoors he proved to be handy and willing.
“He’s such a comfort,” she said to Verity. “And, my dear, the energy of the man! He’s made up his mind I’m to have home-grown asparagus and has dug two enormous deep, deep graves, beyond the tennis court of all places, and is going to fill them up with all sorts of stuff — seaweed, if you can believe me. The maids have fallen for him in a big way, thank God.”
She alluded to her “outside help,” a girl from the village and Beryl, Mrs. Jim’s niece. Both, according to Sybil, doted on Bruce and she hinted that Beryl actually had designs. Mrs. Jim remained cryptic on the subject. Verity gathered that she thought Bruce “hated himself,” which meant that he was conceited.
Dr. Basil Schramm had vanished from Upper Quintern as if he had never appeared there and Verity, after a time, was almost, but not quite, able to get rid of him.
The decorators had at last finished their work at Mardling and Mr. Markos was believed to have gone abroad. Gideon, however, came down from London on most week-ends, often bringing a house-party with him. Mrs. Jim reported that Prunella Foster was a regular attendant at these parties. Under this heading Sybil displayed a curiously ambivalent attitude. She seemed, on the one hand, to preen herself on what appeared, in her daughter’s highly individual argot, to be a “grab.” On the other hand she continued to drop dark, incomprehensible hints about Gideon: all based, as far as Verity could make out, on an infallible instinct. Verity wondered if, after all, Sybil merely entertained some form of maternal jealousy: it was O.K for Prue to be all set about with ardent young men: but was it less gratifying if she took a fancy to one of them? Or was it, simply, that Sybil had set her sights on the undynamic Lord Swingletree for Prue?
“Of course, darling,” she confided on the telephone one day, “there’s lots of lovely lolly but you know me, that’s not everything, and one doesn’t know, does one, anything at all about the background. Crimpy hair and black eyes and large noses. Terribly good-looking, I grant you, like profiles on old pots, but what is one to think?” And sensing Verity’s reaction to this observation she added hurriedly: “I don’t mean what you mean, as you very well know.”
Verity said: “Is Prue serious, do you suppose?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Sybil irritably. “She whispers away about him. Just when I was so pleased about John Swingletree. Devoted, my dear. All I can say is it’s playing havoc with my health. Not a wink last night and I dread my back. She sees a lot of him in London. I prefer not to know what goes on there. I really can’t take much more, Verry. I’m going to Greengages.”
“When?” asked Verity, conscious of a jolt under her ribs.
“My dear, on Monday. I’m hoping your chum can do something for me.”
“I hope so, too.”
“What did you say? Your voice sounded funny.”
“I hope it’ll do the trick.”
“I wrote to him, personally, and he answered at once. A charming letter, so understanding and informal.”
“Good.”
When Sybil prevaricated she always spoke rapidly and pitched her voice above its natural register. She did so now and Verity would have taken long odds that she fingered the hair at the back of her head.
“Darling,” she gabbled,“ you couldn’t give me a boiled egg, could you? For lunch? Tomorrow?”
“Of course I could,” said Verity.
She was surprised, when Sybil arrived, to find that she really did look unwell. She was a bad colour and clearly had lost weight. But apart from that there was a look — how to define it? — a kind of blankness, of a mask almost. It was a momentary impression and Verity wondered if she had only imagined she saw it. She asked Sybil if she’d seen a doctor and was given a fretful account of a visit to the clinic in Great Quintern, the nearest town. An unknown practitioner, she said, had “rushed over her” with his stethoscope, “pumped up her arm” and turned her on to to a dim nurse for other indignities. Her impression had been one of complete professional detachment. “One might have been drafted, darling, into some yard, for all he cared. The deadliest of little men with a signet ring on the wrong finger. All right, I’m a snob,” said Sybil crossly and jabbed at her cutlet.