West Sussex
Monday, 21st June
Dear Julia,
There is something rather odd, if I may say so, about the tone of your letter — almost as if you thought I’d been doing something wrong. All I’ve done is buy some shares and sell them again — are you going through one of your Socialist phases? If so, do write and tell Ariadne — she’ll be so pleased.
But I’m very glad, of course, that you don’t think I have to pay the beastly young man three thousand pounds. I’ve made an appointment to see him this afternoon, to explain about the shares belonging partly to Maurice and Griselda, and they’re both coming round to supper afterwards to hear what he says. We all think you’ve been most helpful, and we’re planning to take you to lunch at the best restaurant in West Sussex next time you’re down here.
So I hope you won’t think it too ungrateful of me to say that if you don’t mind I’d much rather not ask Ricky where he got his information from about the shares. The thing is, you see, that I’m not at all pleased with Ricky at the moment, and I don’t want to do anything to make him think that I’ve stopped not being pleased.
You may say, I suppose, that it’s unreasonable of me to be not pleased with him. I know he was only advising us as a friend, in exchange for a few drinks, and perhaps one couldn’t expect it all to be confidential in the same way as if one got advice from a solicitor or someone like that. Well, Julia, I don’t care what you say, I still don’t think it’s right for him to go babbling about our affairs to all and sundry.
When I say all and sundry, I mean Isabella del Comino, as she calls herself, though I doubt if that’s the name on her birth certificate, or on her marriage certificate, if she has such a thing. Which I dare say she has — men can be complete idiots sometimes.
So far as I know, you’ve never met Isabella. If you have, it certainly wasn’t at my house. She lives at the Old Rectory, on the other side of the churchyard, which she bought two or three years ago from rather good friends of mine. They didn’t find it an easy house to sell — it’s one of those rambling Victorian places that cost a fortune to heat and maintain properly. The Church Commissioners very sensibly sold it a long time ago, and kept the little house opposite as the Vicarage. And though it’s quite a handsome building in its way, I always feel there’s something rather cold and forbidding about it — an estate agent would say that there’s a fine view of the church, but one can’t help thinking of it as a view of the graveyard.
My friends had made all kinds of improvements to it. They’d turned the ground-floor rooms at the back into one long drawing room, with French windows all the way along opening into a big conservatory, and a colour scheme of honeys and apricots. And from there one went into the garden — oh, Julia, it’s a shame if you never saw the garden. Griselda had laid it out in an Elizabethan sort of style, using a design in an old book Maurice had given her, and gone to endless trouble to get the right plants for it. I found some antique statues and urns and things, and we all felt we’d made it into something rather special. Griselda looked after it practically as if it were her own — she has quite a good view of it from the roof of her potting shed, so she could always see when something needed doing.
My friends sold the house without ever actually meeting the purchaser. I suppose she must have come down and looked over it before she bought it, but no one seemed to have seen her. Even after she’d bought it, she didn’t move in straightaway, and there were signs that she was having a good deal of building work done — plumbers’ and electricians’ vans outside the house, and sounds of hammering and drilling. So everyone was beginning to be rather curious about her.
And then, one morning when I was sitting in the antique shop, Griselda came running in, as white as a sheet, and said there were men at the Rectory levelling the garden.
I could hardly believe it at first, but of course I went back with her to see what was happening, and it was true, they were — just taking a bulldozer across it, destroying everything.
I managed to discourage her from climbing over the wall and lying down in front of the bulldozer — Griselda can be rather physical sometimes — and called out to the man in charge to ask him what he thought they were doing. His answer wasn’t at all polite, but I explained to him that we simply didn’t want him to get into trouble for destroying plants which might turn out to be valuable. Anyway, I offered him thirty pounds for the ones that were left and he ended by agreeing to fifty, on the understanding that we’d have to remove them that day.
So we spent the day frantically digging up plants in the Rectory garden and running back with them to Griselda’s potting shed. Fortunately, it was one of the days when Mrs. Tyrrell comes to clean for me, so there were three of us to do it, and by midnight we’d rescued pretty well everything that we minded most about — all the rose trees, and the plants from the physic garden. We shared them out between the three of us and gave some to Maurice. At fifty pounds they were really rather a bargain — some of them were quite valuable — but of course it didn’t make up for the garden being destroyed.
The next day they flattened it completely, and began to put up something that involved concrete posts and a lot of wire mesh. We couldn’t work out what it was — Griselda said it looked like a cage.
Two or three weeks later there were signs of someone being in occupation, though no one had actually seen her arrive — not even Maurice, whose study looks straight out onto the front drive of the Rectory. But there were lights on in the evening, and the postman said he’d started to deliver letters there.
We’re very informal down here in Haver — we don’t go in for visiting cards and so forth — but when someone new moves in we usually put a note through the door, introducing ourselves and inviting them to ring us if they need help with anything. So I wrote a short letter along those lines — no, Julia, it was
When I say that she was fat, I don’t so much mean that she was of enormous size but that she gave the impression of being made of fat, all the way through, with no underlying framework of bone or muscle — which, of course, isn’t actually possible. She had a rather ugly, squashed button sort of nose — I suppose when she was young people would have called it retrousse—and very small black eyes, like currants in a suet pudding. She was wearing a long black velvet caftan, of the kind one can buy cheaply in Tangier or expensively in Knightsbridge — it might have been rather elegant, if it hadn’t shown so many signs of her being a rather careless eater.
“Good morning, Mrs. Sheldon, how nice of you to call,” she said. “Won’t you come in and have a glass of sherry?”
That looks, when one writes it down, like quite a normal and pleasant thing to say, but it didn’t sound like that. There was something gloating, almost sinister, about the way she said it — as if my name were a secret she’d been very clever to find out and could use against me in some way.
I accepted, naturally, and she led me through to the conservatory. As we went in, she said, “I hope you don’t mind birds?”
Well, as it happens, I do rather. When they’re flying about in the open air, I don’t mind them at all, but in a confined space with them I get an absurd sense of panic, like you with spiders. I know it’s completely irrational, but that doesn’t stop me feeling it.
But of course I said, “Not in the least,” and followed her into the drawing room.
She had had it entirely redecorated, no doubt at great expense. The walls were covered with a heavily embossed wallpaper — black. The ceiling and woodwork had been repainted — black. There were thick black velvet curtains, and the floor was tiled in black marble. Poor woman, I suppose she’d expected it to look very dramatic, but of course, with nothing there to provide contrast, the effect was simply dreary.
I saw at once that Griselda had been perfectly right about the cage. The conservatory and the area beyond it had been turned into an aviary, now occupied by a flock of ravens — I don’t know how many exactly, but there must have been at least a dozen. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the French windows had been closed, with the ravens safely on the far side — but they were open, and the horrible creatures were flapping and hopping about the drawing room as if they owned the place. The worst of it was, though, that when they weren’t moving they were more or less invisible against the black background — I thought that at any moment I might accidentally brush against one. I began, I’m afraid, to feel rather sick, and almost to wish I hadn’t come.
She poured me a tumblerful of sherry — such an excessive amount that I couldn’t think of it as generous, but more as a device to make me stay longer than I might have chosen — and invited me to sit down. Which I did, with considerable caution, on one of three chaises longues — I need hardly say, upholstered in black — which provided the seating accommodation.
The room was quite sparsely furnished — I couldn’t tell whether from choice, or because she hadn’t finished
