On a small round table, polished for him by Dadda, was a bust of Tace. The bust looked like bronze if you didn’t examine it too closely. In fact it was papier-mâché on which someone had done a skilful paint job. Stephen still remembered the delight he had felt when, wandering through Jackley market, he had come upon the bust on a junk stall. He could have sworn, though it sounded silly, that Tace’s eyes with their hooded, ironical gaze, had compelled him to approach, and Tace’s mobile lips had adjured him, ‘Buy me!’ Only £1.50, it was almost laughable. Although the room and the whole house was full of really good stuff made or renovated by Dadda, secretly he valued nothing more than this bust. Its features, high, intellectual forehead, straight nose, long upper lip and fine-cut mouth, were so absolutely his own that he wondered others didn’t remark on it.
He closed the door of his study and went across the landing to the bathroom. Lyn had had her bath and was in bed, her new cat, his birthday present, in a basket on the floor by her side.
‘Just till he gets used to us.’
‘Good Lord, darling, I don’t mind.’ Stephen had his bath in the mornings. He washed his hands and face and cleaned his teeth with the water pick he had bought with Dadda’s Christmas money. The time was after eleven and he was tired but he could never sleep without reading for a few minutes at least. Currently he was rereading Tace’s autobiography of which the author had completed only Book One, dying in the midst of describing his thirtieth year. He read for a quarter of an hour and Lyn read, and then Lyn put her book face downwards on the floor by the cat’s basket. Stephen put a leather marker with an engraving of Tower Foin on it in his book and switched out the bedlamp.
‘Good night, darling.’
‘Good night, Stephen,’ said Lyn. ‘Sleep well.’
A pathologist called Dr Paul Fleisch described how Marianne Price had died. He used a lot of abstruse terms like ‘cricoid’ but what it amounted to was that she had been strangled. The murderer had done it with his bare hands. Before this evidence Stephen had had to give his. He was the first witness at the inquest. Once he had begun he didn’t feel nervous, he spoke slowly and levelly, and once his part was over he began to enjoy the rest of the proceedings.
Ian Stringer, sitting with the dead girl’s parents, he recognized at once. At school he had been an ace rugby player and had become a big burly man. The inquest was adjourned and Stringer came up to Stephen outside the court.
‘I don’t know if you remember me. Byss Comprehensive. I think I was a year behind you.’
Stephen nodded and took Stringer’s outstretched hand.
‘It’s only — well, I thought I’d ask you — how she looked when — I mean they say some people who die like that, they look sort of, their faces …’
‘Good Lord, no, there was nothing like that. She looked as if she was asleep.’
Stringer didn’t believe him but he was grateful for the kindness. Together they walked along the High Street towards the Market Place where they parted, Stephen for Whalbys’, Stringer to return to Cartwright-Cageby’s where he was a foreman fitter. Dadda was out, doing something to a very ancient, very special ceiling in Jackley Manor with Tudor roses carved on its beams. Stephen worked on the armchairs till lunchtime. After he had had a sandwich in the Market Burger House, he loaded the van with small stuff to be returned and went out delivering. There was an early nineteenth-century firescreen to go back to a house in Trinity Street. Next to Trinity Church where Dadda and Mother had been married was the old people’s home called Sunningdale. Stephen parked the van and delivered the screen. The matron of Sunningdale was an easy-going woman who let visitors come pretty well when they pleased, this entailing no great inconvenience as few did please.
Helena Naulls was in the day room with the dozen or so other old women and the two old men. In the Three Towns, as elsewhere, the men died and the women lived on and on. A big colour television set was on and one or two were looking at it, at a programme designed for seven-year-olds, but most were just sitting. One woman was knitting, an old man was reading the Daily Mirror. Mrs Naulls was among those who just sat.
Seeing her there, Stephen had to remind himself — for nothing in her bearing hinted at it and no vestige of handsome looks remained — that she had once been the mistress of Alfred Osborn Tace. She was a scrawny flabby woman who had once been stout. Her face had become big and vacant, the eyes sluggishly furtive, the mouth vague. Her hair, snow white and abundant, had been lopped off in a ragged uneven way by the home’s hairdresser. Today — such muddles often happened — she was wearing a cardigan of matted grey wool belonging to a much smaller and slighter inmate, a long brown skirt, brown stockings that wrinkled round her still-narrow ankles, and blue check carpet slippers.
Once she had been pretty and lively with a twenty-three-inch waist. She had been second housemaid at Chesney Hall and Arthur Naulls had been under-gardener. They had had several children, of all of whom but the eldest Arthur was the father. Mrs Naulls was in Sunningdale because her son Stanley was a Hilderbridge councillor and had pulled strings. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been a chance for someone with such a large family, almost any of whom could have taken her in. The only one, in fact, who had offered had been Lyn. Stephen had vetoed that, though, before she had made her offer to anyone but him, and now he tended to tell people they couldn’t have his grandmother because it wouldn’t be fair on his wife. He had been brought up to call Mrs Naulls ‘Nanna’ but had had more luck with her than with Dadda when he wanted to change this mode of address.
‘How are you, Grandmother?’ he said. He had brought her a box of fruit jellies, the only passion she still had. She took them in unsteady hands stained with grave marks, and peered with suspicion at the manufacturer’s name. ‘How have you been getting on?’
‘Just the same.’
‘Anybody been to see you?’
Mrs Naulls shook her head. ‘Nobody ever comes to see me.’ She took the cellophane wrapping off the box. ‘Not a soul.’
‘Oh, Mrs Naulls, what an untruth!’ said the old woman in the next chair. She was the one who had been knitting. ‘Your son Leslie was here only yesterday.’
‘Haven’t got a son called Leslie, have I, Stanley?’ said Mrs Naulls, dropping cellophane on the floor.
‘Leonard. And I’m Stephen.’
‘Nurse’ll be after you,’ said the knitter. ‘You’re what they call a litter bug.’
Mrs Naulls ate a crimson jelly and then a green one. She didn’t offer the box. A bovine contentment came into her face as she chewed. Stephen had never been able to talk to her about her relationship with the great novelist. He had been over twenty before he had even found out about it but he hadn’t been old enough to dare ask his grandmother how it had been and how she had felt and what they had talked about. Now when he might dare it was too late. But still he searched for ways to bring the conversation round to Tace.
‘I expect you’ve been watching those “Bleakland” programmes, haven’t you, Grandmother?’
‘Pardon?’ she said, her mouth full.
‘On the television, Saturday nights.’
A woman who had been looking at the screen turned to him and said, ‘I saw one, round at my daughter’s. It was lovely. Lovely dresses.’
‘Why can’t you see it here?’
‘They get us to bed,’ said the knitter. ‘Eight they start getting us to bed.’
‘That’s a pity,’ Stephen persisted. ‘You’d have liked to watch that, Grandmother.’
‘How’s Rosemary, Keith?’ said Mrs Naulls.
‘If you mean Lyn, she’s fine. And I’m Stephen.’
He looked at her hopelessly. She had come to this, to a limp white heap who had forgotten the names of her nearest and dearest. Once he had tried to extract so much from her, and not just details of the Tace affair. She was the key to a past he needed to understand. Dadda’s temper, that he had inherited along with Dadda’s darkness and Dadda’s height, had got the better of him and he had attacked her, physically attacked her. But that was more than half his lifetime ago. He got up.