Deadheads

'I bet you don't remember half of what's been said since we got under these sheets,' laughed Dalziel. 'What stopped you from selling up in the end?'

'I recall telling you that,' said Penny. 'You're not only a nosey sod, you're an absent-minded one too.'

'Oh aye. The poor bugger died. Accident, was it?' said Dalziel, whose last telephone conversation with Pascoe had given him full details of the death.

'In a way. He got poisoned, something he ate,' said Penny. 'Some insecticide hadn't got washed off, or something.'

'And didn't you get anyone else interested in buying?' asked Dalziel.

'No. I sort of lost heart, I suppose,' she said. 'I took it off the market. It struck me that perhaps I really ought to consider Patrick's feelings a bit more. I mean, the house was just a white elephant to me, but clearly not to him.'

She spoke almost defiantly.

'So what did you do!' asked Dalziel, though he knew full well.

'I had a talk with him. I told him that we'd stay on at Rosemont for the time being, but as soon as he reached his majority, I was off back to London and he could make his own mind up whether he wanted, or indeed could afford, Rosemont. I was thinking of twenty-one when I said it, but the age of majority was lowered not long after to eighteen, and Patrick seemed determined that should be the decision date. It came. He wanted to stay on by himself, he said. I said, If that's what you want.'

Dalziel whistled and said, 'You must've thought a lot, or very little, of the lad to let him get stuck with a bloody great house like that when he was still only eighteen and not properly earning!'

'Oh yes, I know it seems odd,' said Penny. 'But Patrick . . . well, you've got to meet him to know what I mean. When he wants something, he just sits quietly there till he gets it. He always did, from a baby. Things weren't quite as bad as they seem, mind. Aunt Flo had left me pretty well heeled. After I'd had Rosemont valued and added that to all the other assets, then divided by two, Patrick got a few thousand on top of the house and I got enough to buy the lease on this place and keep me comfortable, at least until they invented inflation. I'll probably start spending capital in the end. I made it quite clear to Patrick that this deal ended his expectations from me. In fact, whatever little there's left when I go will go to my grandchildren when they're twenty-one. But I can't see it being very much!'

'Well, you can't take it with you,' said Dalziel. 'You said he changed his name, your lad.'

'No I didn't!' said Penny, sitting upright. 'What the hell is this, Andy Dalziel?'

'What's what?' asked Dalziel, looking puzzled. 'You said before that your lad's name was Aldermann now. I can hear you saying it.'

He spoke with such authority that the woman's doubts were momentarily assuaged, but he guessed that he had gone as far as he dared without finally convincing her that his motives for the evening were interrogative rather than romantic.

Besides the sight of those still splendidly firm breasts pendant above his reclining head was enough to blunt even the sharp spur of constabulary duty.

He reached up and drew her down towards him.

'This Greek god fellow,' he said. 'What did he try his hand at after the bull?'

PART FOUR

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary I will dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain . . .

KEATS: Ode to Psyche

 

1

 

HAPPINESS

(Hybrid tea. Brilliant crimson blooms on long sturdy stems, perfect for developing under cover.)

Daphne Aldermann rose early on Saturday morning with a feeling that this was a day of important decision.

Since her talk with Ellie she had seemed to spend every waking moment analysing the state of her marriage. Oddly, all previous attempts at self-understanding now appeared vague, ineffectual, and delusory, as if her education, her upbringing, and her whole genetic inheritance had been aimed at misting her view of reality. In a way, it was true. The surface was far from all, but a well-ordered surface certainly compensated for a lot. Beneath it she had not felt particularly unhappy, or wildly neglected, or desperately unfulfilled. And the knowledge that she lived a life which must make many people envious had helped to make her believe that most of its suspected inadequacies were to be traced to her own shallowness. Now something had changed, or at least come to fruition. Perhaps Ellie Pascoe's openness, her frank discontents, her admitted sense of ambiguity in relation to her own marital role, and her saving humour when she seemed to be getting too near to that awful earnest greyness which the left wear as proudly as the right do their blacks and browns, had encouraged the reaction, but it hadn't caused it. She had merely been living through a sort of extended adolescence and at last she'd grown up.

Diana was spending the morning with a friend. Daphne was assiduous in making sure that Rosemont's isolation didn't mean her daughter's too, and she'd driven the little girl to the friend's house shortly after nine. Patrick had rung briefly the previous evening to say he'd be home mid-morning. He had sounded strange, highly charged with some emotion unidentifiable at the end of a very crackly line. The police had also rung and she'd arranged for them to come at midday.

Now she sat and drank a coffee and waited for her husband to return.

When he did, there was going to be open speaking. How open, she was not sure. She had not inherited her High Anglican father's love of confession, but she believed herself willing to reveal the truth of her brief relationship with Dick Elgood if that seemed necessary to shock Patrick into a retaliatory openness. The time for mysteries was past. Patrick had to admit her into his mind if they were to have a future together.