how quickly one became used to servants again. Or rather to not noticing all the little things they did for you.
‘Rebecca? I found something else in the barn.’
The maid stopped, her hand on the door handle and her face anxious.
‘Nothing to worry about. Something on the ledge with the skulls, right at the end in the corner. An old cigar box. Do you know anything about it?’
‘It was Mrs Serridge’s — Miss Penhow’s, I mean. I remember Robbie showing it to me.’
Lydia blinked. ‘She smoked cigars?’
Rebecca’s face creased into a grin. ‘Oh no, madam. It must have been Mr Serridge’s once, I suppose. She used it for her diary. She was always writing in it.’
‘Why on earth did she keep it there?’
‘Maybe so it wasn’t obvious if Mr Serridge went looking for it. I caught him looking through her writing desk once when she was having a bath.’
‘It can’t have been very big.’
‘It wasn’t. Just a little green book with hard covers.’
That explained the pencil. Lydia said, ‘Do you know what happened to it?’
‘Not seen hide nor hair of it since I left the farm. He’ll have got his hands on it after she went, if she didn’t take it with her.’
Lydia nodded to Rebecca to open the door. As they crossed the landing and went downstairs, normality re- asserted itself, and the maid, one step behind Lydia, kept her head modestly lowered and her hands clasped round the coat. The distance between them seemed ridiculous, given the nature of the conversation they had just had in the bedroom.
In the hall, Lydia turned to Rebecca and said in a low voice, partly because things had changed between them and partly because she wanted to show that she had no desire for them to return to their old formal footing, ‘You’ll have to find another Golgotha, I suppose.’
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 leant 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 towards the east now. She lingered at the window, warming her fingers on the cup. A heavy bird fluttered past and glided towards 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 grey 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
