made out Miss Davis circling round from the other side. She was holding a tall stemmed glass filled with layers of different-coloured liquids – tawny, green, red, blue and yellow-topped by a miniature umbrella.
‘You’ll get fucking murdered, if you don’t watch out,’ she said.
Ignoring her, Rosemary looked at Anderson.
‘We were discussing a book.’
‘A book?’ Anderson replied.
He raised his eyebrows and then frowned, sipping his drink.
‘I dimly recall that among the amenities available to residents under the former regime was a selection of trashy whodunnits and mawkish romances such as might be expected to appeal to persons of low taste and declining faculties, but they’ve long since gone the way of everything else round here that isn’t nailed down. Might I therefore ask to which book you allude, Miss Travis?’
Rosemary waved airily.
‘Oh, one Dorothy read years ago, during a wet weekend in Wales. She was just describing the plot to me.’
Miss Davis lifted the paper umbrella from her drink.
Her lips englobed the maraschino cherry impaled on the stick below.
‘Liar,’ she said.
‘Now, now,’ murmured Anderson. ‘Don’t let’s spoil the party.’
He took a gulp of whisky.
‘Nevertheless,’ he continued, ‘given that Mrs Davenport cannot always be relied upon to recall with any accuracy what she had for breakfast, it does at first sight seem hard to believe that she should be waxing lyrical, still less logical, about some shilling shocker she once read in Rhyl.’
‘Pwllheli,’ Dorothy put in.
‘Bless you, dear!’ murmured Rosemary.
Miss Davis sucked at the upper layer of her cocktail.
‘Lying bitch,’ she said.
Anderson fixed Rosemary and Dorothy with a penetrating stare.
‘I put it to you, ladies, that so far from discussing a whodunnit, you were in fact concocting one.’
‘Well?’ said Rosemary. ‘And what of it?’
Anderson glanced at Miss Davis.
‘Did you hear that, Letty?’
‘I did, William. I did indeed.’
‘Miss Travis wishes to know what of it.’
‘Impertinent cunt. Do you want me to take steps?’
‘Not at present, I think. After all, we must make due allowance for the situation in which the two ladies find themselves. Parting is such sweet sorrow, and so on. Partir, c’est mourir un peu-or, in Mrs Davenport’s case, a lot. Let us therefore endeavour to rise above petty considerations and address her question.’
He turned back to Rosemary and Dorothy.
‘I realise that time can hang pretty heavy round here, especially so, paradoxically enough, for those with very little left. Nor has it escaped my attention that your favourite way of passing it has been to work up elaborate scenarios of imaginary mayhem featuring those who have left us feet first as the victims, the dwindling band of survivors as the suspects, and your good selves as the intrepid sleuths. Hitherto I have had no particular reason to take exception to this, but the case is now altered. If an outsider were to witness an exchange such as the one which Letty and I just overheard, the resulting disruption to the life of our little community would be quite intolerable. I must therefore ask you, Mrs Davenport, to put these tall tales of dark deeds at Eventide Lodge very firmly out of your mind.’
He turned to the other residents.
‘I should explain that from tomorrow dear Dorothy will be with us no more. Despite my objections, to say nothing of her own stated preferences, the powers that be have decreed that she is to be transferred to hospital, there to undergo a course of treatment which according to Dr Morel is not only hideously painful and degrading but completely pointless when the carcinomata are, in his memorable phrase, “sprouting like fungi on a dead tree”.’
‘Stop!’ cried Rosemary, getting to her feet. ‘I won’t have you talking like that! I won’t stand for it!’
With a howl of fury, Miss Davis flung her glass at Rosemary. It shattered against the wall a few inches away. Miss Davis advanced, screaming obscenities, her spittle flying into Rosemary’s face.
‘Easy, Letty!’ warned Anderson, grasping her arm.
‘Let’s leave Mrs Davenport with fond memories of the old place, eh?’
Miss Davis’s body went limp. She breathed in and out deeply several times.
‘Of course, William,’ she said eventually. ‘Whatever you say.’
Ignoring Rosemary and Dorothy, she flounced out of the room, singing merrily.
‘And that’s why I mean what I say when I sing, O bugger the flowers that bloom in the spring. Tra-la-lala-la- ha! Tra-la-lala-la-haaaaaaa!!!!!’ Bugger the flowers of spring!’
Anderson inspected the rainbow of liqueurs splashed across the wall.
‘Drambuie, Green Chartreuse, Cherry Brandy, Blue Curagao, Advocaat,’ he murmured, shaking his head sadly. ‘Poor Letitia! She suffers so greatly.’
He glanced pointedly at Rosemary.
‘One more outburst like that from you, Miss Travis, and you’ll be spending the rest of the week in bed with Mr Channing.’
He drained the rest of the whisky from his glass.
‘Life is one thing, ladies, and art quite another. Far from being a story which alternately excites and consoles, life is an endless slurry of computer print-out, a pie chart of statistical trends in which you, I fear, have been allotted the slimmest of slices. Always remember, however, that even that might be taken from you.’
Favouring them both with a smile, he walked out.
CHAPTER 5
The light outside seemed to have faded completely, yet when the fluorescent ceiling strip suddenly died the darkness turned out to be hollow. There was still an afterglow of radiance, too faint to compete with the synthetic glare but enough, once their eyes had widened to take it in, for Rosemary and Dorothy to make out, if not everything, then quite as much as they had any real need or wish to see.
“That’s better,’ murmured Dorothy.
The bed springs squeaked as she snuggled down.
‘Much,’ Rosemary replied from her chair by the window.
Each was aware of the other as a vague, benevolent presence in the dimness, barely visible but very definitely there. The electricity on the first floor was switched off at nine thirty every night, except when Anderson and his sister were too drunk to remember, but this abrupt transition had never felt so welcome before.
Dorothy’s room was ugly enough in itself, its proportions mutilated by the partition, the original features badly dilapidated and the new ones scruffily utilitarian, but tonight its charmlessness was intensified almost unbearably by their shared, unspoken knowledge that it would never again be Dorothy’s room. This was the last time they would sit there in the darkness, adding yet more strands and complications to the murderous web of intrigue they had woven around themselves. Next day the room would be locked, like those of the residents who had died.
Under the pitiless glare of the neon light these facts had been impossible to evade or ignore, but the darkness arrived as a balm, waiving the imperatives of space and time. In that dimensionless obscurity there was only here and now, an endless present and everything within reach.
‘Aren’t you going to drink your cocoa?’ Rosemary suggested gently.
‘Not yet.’
