Lady Jean Read online

  Freida pulled a face and hissed through her perfect teeth. ‘She’s spent a fortune staying there, all this time. That rotten little toad.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not his fault. He’s only under orders. They’ve recommended a home, in Kent. Mr Alder gave me a brochure.’ Jean went to offer it to Freida, picking it up from the coffee-table.

  Freida merely stared at it and shuddered. ‘You can’t, Jean. You mustn’t even consider it. Not for Doo Lally. She’d pine away within a month. You know how she feels.’

  ‘It sounds terribly grand. En suite everything, resident doctors on twenty-four-hour call, indoor swimming-pool. Just like a hotel, really. Lovely gardens.’

  ‘It would still be a home, for goodness’ sake,’ Freida almost snapped. ‘Really, she could come to live with me if you feel you can’t have her here. You know I adore the old parrot. She’s a rare treasure.’

  Jean stood up and moved towards the door leading into the kitchen. She was grinning.

  ‘I’ve just decided,’ she said softly. Aunt Dizzy shall come here. I’ll work it all out. I should have had her living here years ago.’ Jean left the room and made her way into the kitchen.

  As she was removing plastic wrap from the plates of sandwiches, Freida called, ‘You know, sweetness, she told me once that the only enjoyable sex she ever engaged in was with other women. She seduced a parlour maid one afternoon while the gentlemen of the house were playing cricket only a few feet away.’

  Jean did not reply. She was quietly downing a tumbler of gin.

  THREE

  When Jean is away from the house and the Fallen Nun is also absent, the rooms and the hallways appear to grow darker and even more shadowed than usual. The house sits waiting for its mistress to return, like a devoted dog. Alert and listening and a little stressed, the walls seem to diminish, to shrink inwards as if seeking something that is missing. There is a kind of sadness in the morning-room and in the kitchen, and the air elsewhere is thick with what might well be melancholy. Dust hovers like a presence. There is the occasional sound of foundations settling or a soft crackling as if the unused electricity in the walls is chattering to itself. Christopher has noticed this. He has not said anything for fear of being thought even more queer than he already thinks he is.

  In the past the house was filled with laughter, though not all the time. There was silence too, but the silence was fleeting. There were tantrums from children, juvenile screaming, adult chatter and much music. Family garden parties were held on the lawn during summer days. Along with casual games of croquet and badminton and no-rules cricket, Jean might be seen, a child – or two – beside her, dressed in pastel summer finery, on her knees weeding or planting or simply admiring the beds of flowers that are now gone and have never been replaced. The family would gather on the lawn every Sunday during the summer or in the Green Room when the weather changed. Charades would be ritually played after sumptuous lunches of beef and Yorkshire pudding and perfectly roasted potatoes with Brussels sprouts. Opened wine and fruit juice bottles sat empty on every surface. There were birthday parties, the occasional wake. Impressive guests came who had appeared on television or were in the theatre. There was love. There was momentary hate and triumph; there were mood swings and arguments and hope.

  Now, the house is, more often than not, a forlorn though dignified place, like a seaside boarding-house in perpetual winter. Where once lived, long before the first Barries appeared, an architect with an artificial leg, a failed Irish female poet, two elderly gentlemen who created local scandal by regularly walking along the high street hand in hand, there now exists an air of desolation. There were families, in the mid eighteenth century, with servants and daily helps and sexual frigidity. An elderly woman during the Second World War lived not unhappily in the garden shed for a time after her own house near by was bombed. The garden shed is long gone. Children born in the house on Acacia Road are gone, have lived their lives elsewhere and died. The house has seen so many within its walls. In a sense, they are still there. Christopher Harcourt is convinced of this. The house is not peaceful in its present age, for it has never before been so quiescent. On days and nights when rain falls, it is not only the Fallen Nun’s rooms on the uppermost floor that seep with damp. Downstairs, excessive condensation trickles slowly down the windows and the walls, as if the house is weeping.

  It was early Friday morning. Jean, having had a bath, the first of several she indulged in every day, was examining the boxes of records in the front reception room. It would be a suitable place in which to set up a small bedsitting-room for Aunt Dizzy. It was a large plain room with tall windows and a high corniced ceiling. There was an ornate, aged vanity unit in one corner. Being at the front of the house, the room would be quiet. Jean smiled thinly at the thought. The entire house was quiet.

  She was brooding over Freida’s use of ‘Devil’s Dyke’. It was typical of Freida to keep on using the place-name as an expression, which amused her cynical mind, when Jean’s parents were dead. It was a reminder, something other people created which induced hurt. Freida had promised to refrain from using the expression several times. The memory it brought Jean caused pain after dark. Nights like the one just gone. There were three empty bottles of Tanqueray in the kitchen, sitting in a row on the floor as if waiting to be part of a game of skittles. Christopher would see to them. He would say nothing. He had stared at her rather oddly when he’d arrived earlier. His eyes were slightly puffed as if he had been crying. She did not make any comment about them. He was out in the garden cutting the grass, using the old hand mower that had belonged to Jean’s grandfather. Jean refused to buy a petrol-driven mower, as Christopher had once suggested. Its sound would antagonize.

  Jean had sipped gin and wandered the rooms of the house for most of the night, trying to avoid her personal ghosts. The gin made her weep at first, and recollection was edged and focused like newly sharpened knives until the alcohol, trickling through her system, took control. Memory faded then, until there was nothing to be afraid of. Some nights she would gaily sing or loudly play her own music and laugh at it or play others’ music and be overcome with envy. She listened to Nina Simone quite often. For years, in her youth, she believed she was in love with Nina Simone. Jean’s solo drinking parties had become a pattern, and they became something to look forward to because into the drunken state euphoria would eventually appear. She did not grow maudlin or depressed, as people who drank alone are generally said to become. Jean would dance as well as sing. She would laugh and cry out before falling asleep, and in the morning, when she awoke, the house would seem perfectly at ease with her. A perfect place to be in, just as it had been, before.

  Just after ten thirty the doorbell rang. Jean had moved the boxes of records in the reception room, lining them up against one wall. She had vacuumed the floor. The boxes were ready to be moved out and sent off into storage.

  Aunt Dizzy stood on the steps, purple straw hat askew and face flushed. She had brought two suitcases with her and a gigantic bunch of iris blooms and a bottle of gin, the latter items threatening to fall from her precarious grasp.

  ‘I was about to leave to come and collect you, Auntie!’ Jean exclaimed.

  ‘Am I late? Is Freida here yet? The taxi driver was drunk. I can’t go on coming here in taxis, Jean. One of the drivers will kidnap me one day and then where will we be? It’s all too much for an old white lady.’

  Aunt Dizzy’s lips were turned down at the corners. There were beads of perspiration amongst the carefully bleached hairs of her upper lip. She appeared close to tears. As cheerfully as she could, Jean relieved her of the flowers and the unwrapped gin, ushering her inside. On the street the taxi driver began to press his horn. Realizing that Aunt Dizzy wouldn’t have offered the man a tip, Jean attended to that before carrying the suitcases into the hall. The driver did indeed appear to be drunk. He had smiled and bared his teeth at her in an obscene kissing gesture as she walked towards the cab. In thin-lipped fury she threw a pound coi
n through the opened side window and glared at the man until he drove off.

  Aunt Dizzy had collapsed into an armchair in the morning-room. She was powdering her face. Now back in control and looking none the worse for anything, she said cheerfully, ‘There’s a young man in your garden, Jean. He’s particularly ugly. I think he’s up to no good. He hasn’t seen me.’

  ‘It’s Christopher. You remember. Christopher Harcourt. He comes to help out on Fridays. You and he like each other.’

  ‘Do we?’

  Aunt Dizzy had spilt face powder down the front of her suit jacket. When not dressed in fake Victorian splendour, she sometimes favoured matching pleated skirts and jackets and long necklaces of real pearls. She had had her wig cut short and blue-rinsed. It looked stiff with hairspray. Aunt Dizzy was totally bald.

  ‘You should never wear trousers, Jean,’ she said, looking up. ‘Your bottom doesn’t suit them now you’re well into your fifties.’

  ‘Cup of tea, Auntie?’

  ‘Vodka would be valium, but tea will cover the tideline,’ Aunt Dizzy recited. It was one of numerous stock phrases that she repeated over and over again. Jean knew all of them off by heart. As she turned to leave the room Aunt Dizzy was peering out the french windows.

  ‘Who did you say that lad is?’ she asked.

  ‘Christopher. Christopher Harcourt.’

  ‘He’s revoltingly tall, isn’t he? How old did you say he was?’

  ‘He’s seventeen, Auntie,’ Jean called back over her shoulder as she entered the kitchen, about to put the iris blooms into water. ‘You’ll remember him in a moment. You just rest.’

  ‘Well, he’s bloody ugly,’ Jean heard her mutter. Aunt Dizzy had taken up swearing after reading an article in a magazine that convinced her it would help with stress and memory loss. She had fallen asleep when Jean returned with tea and biscuits on a tray. Her head resting against the right wing of the armchair, while Jean had been out of the room she had reapplied bright lipstick. Her mouth was opening and closing as she gently snored. The carmine of her lips contrasted oddly with her yellowed teeth. She had recently had new dentures tinted to look as if they were all her own in case, she had explained at the time, someone tried to steal them from her hotel room during the night. Most of the staff were foreign.

  Christopher was preparing a light lunch in the kitchen when the telephone rang. Jean had eventually helped Aunt Dizzy upstairs to one of the guest rooms, where she was now snoring happily beneath an eiderdown quilt, stockings removed, teeth and wig removed and face shining from a moisturizing soap wash. She had acted utterly exhausted, as if she had not slept the night before. Jean was about to find out that this was true.

  ‘Mr Alder!’ Jean responded cheerfully when she answered the call and heard his voice, just as if she was genuinely pleased to hear from him.

  ‘Has your aunt arrived safely, Miss Barrie?’

  ‘Why, yes, she has, but she’s fast asleep. I’m afraid I wouldn’t like to disturb her. Is there anything I can do for you, Mr Alder? May I pass on a message?’

  In the ensuing brief silence Jean could hear background voices, whispering.

  ‘We were wondering,’ Mr Alder went on almost breathlessly but coldly into the receiver, ‘when someone would be along to collect everything else.’ There was a distinct note of sarcasm in his voice.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. Have I missed something?’

  There was more whispering then a clunking sound which lasted several seconds.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Mr Alder said. ‘I was led to believe that everything had been prearranged. Your aunt appears to have moved out of her own accord. My foyer is, shall we say, overburdened with numerous suitcases and boxes. I assumed that a carrier would have been along by now, to collect.’

  ‘You never cease to surprise me, Mr Alder. I know nothing about Auntie … about my aunt, Miss Barrie, moving out today. It’s all rather sudden, isn’t it? I thought we had agreed to -’

  ‘Your aunt apparently decided herself to leave this morning. Or, rather, yesterday evening. She spent the entire night – or indeed most of it – inveigling my staff into packing and bringing down everything she owns, which now sits about cluttering up the entrance to my hotel. Unfortunately I was not here at all last night and I have only just returned. Would you please arrange immediate collection or I shall be forced to take steps.’

  ‘Steps, Mr Alder?’ Jean asked in a cold, steady voice. ‘Is that to be taken as a threat?’

  Christopher had wandered out into the hall. He was standing staring at her. It was a second or two before she realized that the snuffling sound was his crying. Tears poured down his face in a salty torrent. He was clutching the breadknife in one hand. His lips looked even larger and wider than ever. His eyes were bloodshot and now badly swollen.

  ‘I am not threatening you, Miss Barrie,’ Mr Alder went on. ‘I do apologize. You obviously knew nothing of this latest development. I am an honourable man. I am sorry if I caused alarm. I shall immediately arrange delivery of your aunt’s possessions, for this afternoon. It will not be a problem. She has paid her bill, I am just informed, in full and said her goodbyes. To all, except to me.’

  Christopher had let the breadknife drop to the floor. He drew his hands up to cover his face. His shoulders heaved in what appeared to be absolute grief. Through the fashionable, horizontal rips in the knees of his jeans was revealed such white flesh that Jean found herself staring at it as she tried to listen to Mr Alder’s stutterings and apologies. He kept pausing and then repeating himself, just as he had done during his brief visit. Someone in the background was speaking urgently as if explaining things to him. His voice changed from coldness to agitation.

  ‘… and I was not in full possession of the facts, I fear. I shall write to you immediately with a full explanation and an apology,’ he was saying, when Jean’s concentration diverted itself back to the telephone. Christopher had turned away and re-entered the kitchen, where she could hear him weeping uncontrollably.

  ‘There’s no need to write and apologize, nor explain, Mr Alder, but thank you,’ Jean managed to say. ‘I know my aunt can be difficult. Are you sure you can manage to have all her things sent today? There’s no urgency at this end.’

  ‘No trouble at all. I do need clearance, you understand. And may I add that indeed it was a pleasure to have had your aunt stay with us here these past few years. She has been particularly generous to my staff.’

  There was more muffled whispering.

  ‘And Miss Greco wishes to pass on her gratitude to your aunt for all her English lessons.’

  The man appeared to be wanting to waffle on for ever. Jean managed to gush her own false gratitude and, interrupting him as he started off again, said goodbye.

  Jean quickly replaced the receiver. She hurried down the hall and into the kitchen. The room was empty. The door leading out into the garden was open.

  She found Christopher kneeling at Henry the Third’s grave, which he had been clearing of weeds a foot high and undergrowth of several years. He was still weeping. Tendrils of mucus dangled from his weak chin. When he realized she was beside him he turned away and wiped a pale hand across his face. Jean fumbled in her trouser pocket and handed him a handkerchief.

  ‘Whatever is the matter?’ she asked, once he had loudly blown his nose and wiped his chin. Christopher glanced up and immediately began to cry again, his mouth opening so wide that Jean formed the incongruous thought that if two large cooking apples were to be inserted into it Christopher would be none the wiser. He was solely concentrated on his grief.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he managed to gasp. Then he grew perfectly still, staring down at Henry the Third’s grave. Carefully he reached out to smooth the earth there with his long, thin and quite delicate fingers.

  ‘I’d like to help,’ Jean offered. ‘Has someone died? Is your mother ill?’

  After a moment Christopher gave a slight shudder, sniffed loudly and said in a small voice, �
��It’s my uncle. Uncle Fergus.’

  ‘Oh dear. Has he died? Is he ill?’

  Jean suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to laugh. She bit her tongue, mentally slapping her wrist. Freida, she thought. Freida would have laughed. Jean could not for the life of her recall whether Christopher had ever mentioned an uncle. She was still rather fazed by Mr Alder’s telephone call. Christopher was shaking his head. He began to look almost angry. He suddenly scrambled to his feet and moved off down the garden, standing with his back to her, shoulders hunched. His fists, at his sides, were clenched.

  ‘Well, if I can help in any way, Christopher. If you need to talk to someone … I’ll be in the kitchen.’

  Jean turned away. When she was half-way up the garden she heard him say, ‘She caught us’, and turned back.

  Christopher was facing her. His face looked calmer, but now his hands twisted together in front of him as if he was in the act of washing them under a tap. ‘She caught us, he repeated, whispering the words but an urgency to communicate in the tone. He stepped towards her. For a moment Jean was terrified he was about to rush forward and throw his arms about her. His eyes were all size and desperation.

  ‘My Uncle. Uncle Fergus. Mother …’ He stopped and just stood there, head lowered. ‘She’s thrown me out. She put all my things into plastic bags and made me give her back my keys and everything’s up at the tube station being looked after.’

  ‘I’ll make tea,’ Jean said. As Christopher’s face again began to crumple she stepped back down the garden and took one of his hands. He was trembling. ‘It’ll be all right, come on. Don’t cry any more. Aunt Dizzy’s here. She’ll cheer you up. She’ll have remembered who you are by the time she wakes up.’