The Judgement of Strangers Read online

  ‘Where were you living before?’

  ‘We had a flat just off the King’s Road.’ Joanna watched me locking the door. ‘It’s so quiet here.’

  I turned to face her, and for the first time I noticed her eyes. I was standing quite close to her, in the archway dividing the porch from the churchyard. For an instant her eyes reminded me of sunlit seawater trapped in a rock pool. They were not large but their colour was unusual: a mottled greeny-brown, their vividness accentuated by small pupils, and by a black rim which separated the irises from the whites. She was smaller than Vanessa, the top of her head barely above my shoulders.

  ‘I must get back,’ she said.

  ‘You must have a lot to do.’

  She looked up at me, her eyes startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s always a busy time, isn’t it? Moving into a new home.’

  ‘Oh – that. Yes. Well, goodbye.’

  She darted away from me towards the small gate in the west wall of the churchyard, which led directly into the grounds of Roth Park. I watched her go. What an awkward child, I thought – except she wasn’t a child at all: she was probably well into her twenties.

  I walked slowly home. All evening, the memory of Joanna Clifford stuck on the back of my mind like a burr on the back of my jacket.

  At Vanessa’s suggestion, we tried to make Rosemary’s first meal at home something of a celebration: we ate Coronation Chicken and drank a bottle of white Burgundy. Michael had half a glass of wine and became sufficiently relaxed to tell us an interminable joke involving an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman.

  Part way through the meal, Vanessa said, ‘You’ll never guess who phoned me today.’

  Michael and I looked expectantly at her. Rosemary stared at her plate.

  ‘Lady Youlgreave’s cleaner. Mrs Potter, isn’t it? She phoned the office this morning. Lady Youlgreave wants me to go and see her.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘To talk about Francis Youlgreave. She said something about wanting to get the family papers catalogued. And she wondered if I was serious about wanting to publish a biography of Great-Uncle Francis.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Oh yes. As long as there really is new material. That notebook she showed us looked promising. If I could find the time, I wouldn’t mind writing it myself.’

  ‘Who would want to read about him?’ Rosemary said. ‘Most people have never heard of him.’ She stared challengingly around the table. ‘It’s not as if he was a real poet, after all.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ Michael said.

  We all looked at him, and he blushed.

  ‘What have you heard?’ Vanessa asked.

  ‘He was mad. He preached a sermon about how there should be women priests. And he used to cut up animals and things.’

  ‘You are well informed,’ Vanessa said. ‘How did you learn all that?’

  ‘Dad told me. There was something in the paper about the Methodists having women ministers, and Dad said it would soon be the Church of England’s turn. And Mum laughed, and said it was just like Francis Youlgreave said it should be. So I asked who Francis Youlgreave was.’

  ‘He used to cut up animals?’ Rosemary said. ‘I never knew that. Did he do it here?’

  ‘Mainly in Rosington,’ I said abruptly. ‘He was a very sick man. He had delusions. This business about women priests was one of them. Another was some sort of mumbo jumbo about blood sacrifices.’

  ‘Plenty of classical precedents,’ Vanessa said. ‘And Old Testament ones, too, for that matter.’

  ‘Why?’ Michael said. ‘What were blood sacrifices for?’

  ‘In those days, people thought the gods liked them – they were sort of presents to the gods, I suppose.’ I did not want to get too involved in this subject. ‘The idea was that if the gods liked your present, they’d be nice to you.’

  ‘Or they’d be nasty to your enemies,’ Rosemary added. ‘Which came to much the same thing.’

  ‘But that was the Old Testament,’ Michael said. ‘Francis Youlgreave was quite modern.’

  ‘He was mentally ill,’ I said. ‘He was –’

  ‘Mad,’ Rosemary interrupted. ‘Or maybe a genius. “Great wits are sure to madness near alli’d”,’ she added smugly. ‘Dryden. Absalom and Achitophel.’

  There was a stunned silence. And into that silence came the ringing of the telephone.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Vanessa to me. ‘I wish they’d leave you alone. Just for an evening.’

  I pushed back my chair and went into the study. Perhaps the wine had loosened Vanessa’s tongue, as it had Michael’s. I picked up the phone.

  It was Audrey Oliphant and she stumbled over her words as though someone were shaking her as she was speaking. Lord Peter still had not come home and someone had thrown a stone through the window of her office at Tudor Cottage.

  15

  The next morning there was a postcard from Peter and June Hudson. They were looking at ruins in Crete, eating olives, and swimming every day. ‘Rosington,’ Peter wrote, ‘seems very far away. See you on the 9th September.’ That was the date for me to meet my new spiritual director, an Anglican monk who lived in Ascot. (‘Absolutely ruthless,’ Peter had told me on the telephone. ‘Just what you need.’)

  Vanessa had arranged to see Lady Youlgreave in the morning. I asked if she would mind my coming with her.

  ‘Why do you want to see her?’

  ‘No particular reason. I like to pop in from time to time, and I thought it would be nice if we could do it together.’

  Vanessa said nothing. I caught a sudden glimpse of the darkness that lay beneath the friendly harmony between us. Perhaps Peter had been right: I had taken advantage of her vulnerability. Need and love are so curiously and inextricably entwined.

  When we reached the Old Manor House, there was a Harrods van parked outside the front door. Lady Youlgreave never shopped at Malik’s Minimarket. She had everything she needed, from lavatory paper to sherry, sent down by weekly delivery from Harrods. If Doris wasn’t there, the driver let himself in with the key hidden near the back door.

  Today the front door stood open. Beauty and Beast barked at us, but more half-heartedly than usual, perhaps because the man from Harrods had already exhausted them. Before I could ring the bell, Doris, Charlene’s mother, came into the hall with the delivery man. She was a small woman with a gentle face and an overweight body encased in a shiny, pale-blue nylon overall. She came to the Old Manor House twice a day, morning and evening, trying to care for an obstinate old woman who should have been in a nursing home and a decaying house the size of a small hotel.

  ‘Hello, Vicar. Mrs Byfield. Wasn’t expecting you both.’

  ‘It’s not inconvenient?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no. The more the merrier. Could you find your own way? I’m up to my ears this morning. It’d be wonderful if you could keep her occupied for a while.’

  The dogs were quiet now. Beast even wagged her tail as we passed her. Vanessa and I went along the corridor to the dining room. Lady Youlgreave was in her usual chair, her head bowed over an old letter. She seemed to have aged by as many years in the few weeks since I had last seen her.

  ‘Ah, David.’ She gave the impression she’d last seen me five minutes earlier. ‘And who’s this?’

  ‘Vanessa Byfield,’ Vanessa said. ‘Do you remember? You asked Doris to ring me at work yesterday, to talk about Francis Youlgreave.’

  Lady Youlgreave’s fingers plucked at the blanket over her legs. ‘Silly man. Thought he’d raised the dead. Thought he talked to them, and they talked to him.’

  ‘Who did he talk to?’ I asked.

  She gave no sign that she had heard me. ‘Sometimes they told him to write his poems, like the angels did. One of them made him preach that sermon, the one about the women priests. Then afterwards they hounded him out of his job – not the dead, of course, the living; though they’re all dead now. So’s he. He came back here to die.’
r />   ‘Here?’ Vanessa said. ‘In this house?’

  Lady Youlgreave shook her head. ‘No. Roth Park. He had the room at the top of the tower.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Jumped out of his window. Thought he could fly.’ The old woman’s hand gestured feebly towards the black metal box beside her chair. ‘There’s something in there about it. The last entry in his journal. An angel had come for him and was going to carry him up to God.’ Her mouth twisted into a grin. ‘In a manner of speaking, I suppose that’s exactly what happened.’

  ‘But he went down rather than up,’ Vanessa said.

  Lady Youlgreave stared at her. Then she grasped the joke and cackled. I pulled up the chairs we had used last time. Vanessa and I sat down. The medicine bottle was still on the mantelpiece. Outside the window two blackbirds were pecking at something on the bird table. The front door slammed and the blackbirds flew away. The delivery man’s shoes crunched across the gravel. A moment later, the Harrods van pulled into the main road.

  Vanessa leaned forward. ‘Do you still want me to look at his papers?’

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘If you like, I could catalogue them for you, and then you could decide what you’d like done with them. If there’s enough material for a biography, I’m sure we could find a suitable author.’

  Lady Youlgreave snorted. ‘How my father-in-law would have hated it. A book about Uncle Francis.’ She threw a glance at the Sargent over the fireplace. ‘Such a conventional man. He wouldn’t have minded if Francis had been a bishop. But a mad poet – that was quite different.’

  ‘So you’d like me to go ahead?’

  The old woman stared at the bird table. ‘If you like.’

  Vanessa moistened her lips. ‘There’s no time like the present.’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sure David wouldn’t mind bringing the car round. We could take the box away now.’

  ‘Oh no.’ Lady Youlgreave huddled more deeply into her chair, as if trying to retract into herself. ‘The papers must stay here. Everything must stay here. I may want to look at them. You must read them here. In this room. Where I can see you.’

  There was a silence. Outside, the blackbirds had returned to the bird table; one of them pecked and the other gave off a thread of melody.

  I said, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t find that rather a disturbance? You could let Vanessa take away just one or two things at a time. I’m sure she’d take the greatest care of them and she could tell you exactly what she finds in them, too.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Vanessa sat back, smiling, but her hands were knotted together on her lap. ‘That’s the best way to do it, isn’t it?’

  There was a look of yearning on my wife’s face, a look that was almost sexual in its intensity.

  ‘If you want to read them, you must do it here.’

  The wizened face settled into a barely human mask. Nothing moved in the hot, stuffy room with its smell of old age. It was as if all three of us were holding our breath. Even the blackbird was silent. The bird table was empty.

  ‘I’m tired now. David, I want you to give me my medicine. It’s on the mantelpiece, with a spoon.’

  Lady Youlgreave agreed to let Vanessa begin looking through the papers on Saturday morning; and Vanessa had to be content with that. We left soon afterwards – Vanessa to go to her office in Richmond, and I to carry on with my work.

  ‘I suppose she wants the company,’ Vanessa said as we walked back to the Vicarage. ‘But it’s going to be very inconvenient.’

  In the afternoon, Lord Peter turned up. He appeared on the windowsill of the Vicarage sitting room. I was not at home at the time. Rosemary was, however, and she phoned Audrey with the good news. Audrey came over at once with the cat basket. Lord Peter, who had been lured into the sitting room with the help of a saucer of cream, protested violently when Audrey put him in his cat basket. He left two parallel scratches on her left forearm.

  I knew about the scratches because Audrey showed them to me. They were in some way meritorious – a sign of Lord Peter’s intrepid personality, perhaps, or of Audrey’s willingness to suffer torments, if necessary, for the wellbeing of her pet.

  The incident had an unexpected consequence. Audrey was fulsomely grateful to Rosemary. To hear Audrey speak, you would think Rosemary had saved Lord Peter, at considerable personal cost, from a terrible fate. She asked Rosemary to tea the following afternoon, ostensibly to see how well Lord Peter had recovered from his trying experience. To my surprise, Rosemary accepted. She appeared to enjoy the experience. A few days later, she went over to Tudor Cottage again for coffee.

  I was pleased. In the past, Rosemary had considered Audrey as an irritation. But now a sort of friendship seemed to be developing between the two of them. Vanessa said they would be company for each other; she thought Rosemary was trying to develop emotional independence from me, on the whole a healthy sign. Vanessa had a weakness for amateur psychology.

  Gradually, the four of us at the Vicarage fell into a routine. Vanessa went into the office every day, but somehow managed to find time to buy the ingredients for and to prepare our evening meal. Rosemary and I usually organized something at lunchtime – sandwiches, perhaps, or soup.

  Rosemary retreated to her bedroom for hours at a time, where she worked and listened to music that jarred on me. After the summer she was going back to school for one more term to sit the Oxford entrance exam. In the evenings we sometimes talked about her reading, and I helped her with her Latin. I enjoyed these sessions – intellectually our minds worked in a remarkably similar way.

  ‘I wish you could coach me for Oxford,’ she said on one occasion when we were alone in the sitting room. ‘I’m sure I’d do much better than at school.’

  ‘I wish I could, too.’

  ‘I wish –’ she began.

  Then the door opened, and Michael and Vanessa came in.

  ‘He did do something here,’ Michael announced.

  Bewildered, I looked at him. ‘Who did?’

  ‘Francis Youlgreave.’

  ‘I was just telling Michael,’ Vanessa explained. ‘Lady Youlgreave showed me a letter.’

  ‘It was a cat.’ Like many small boys, Michael took an uncomplicated pleasure in past bloodshed. ‘He cut it up. But they didn’t put him in prison for it. I suppose it was just an animal, so it didn’t matter too much.’

  ‘The family hushed it up,’ Vanessa said. ‘It was just before he died. It happened in Carter’s Meadow, wherever that is. I imagine it’s covered with houses by now.’

  ‘Carter’s Meadow?’ Rosemary stood and began to gather up her books. ‘No, it’s still there. It’s a field on the other side of Roth Park.’

  ‘We came to see if you wanted to play cards,’ Vanessa said.

  Rosemary raised her eyebrows. ‘Cards? I’m afraid I haven’t got time for things like that.’

  She went upstairs to her room. Vanessa, Michael and I played Hearts.

  Later, in our bedroom, I whispered to Vanessa during one of our nightly conferences, ‘Was it wise to tell Michael about the cat?’

  ‘Meat and drink to him. Small boys like that sort of thing.’ She looked at me. ‘He’s having a surprisingly good time here, isn’t he?’

  ‘Thanks to Brian Vintner. A friend of his own age makes all the difference.’

  ‘And he’s much more relaxed with us than he was.’

  ‘But not with Rosemary. And she’s not very pleasant to him. Do you think I should have a word with her?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Rosemary’s having an awful time. I don’t think you realize. She’s had you to herself all these years, and now I’ve come along and pinched you. Added to that, she’s worried about her exams. And on top of everything else, we’ve got Michael in the house. It’s obvious you’re fond of him, and he’s fond of you. So he gets treated as the baby of the family, and we can’t even spoil Rosemary.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sen
se –’

  ‘It’s not a matter of logic,’ Vanessa hissed. ‘We’re talking about people. You expect everyone to be too rational.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Mind what? You expecting others to be rational?’

  ‘All these people in the house. The lack of privacy.’

  Vanessa stared at me. She was sitting up in bed, with her auburn hair brushed down on to the shoulders of her cotton nightdress. She looked very attractive.

  ‘Me?’ she said at last. ‘At present, I’m just trying to keep the peace, and trying to survive.’

  I wanted her to expand on this, but she wouldn’t. Instead, she said she was tired and turned out her light.

  During this time I kept out of Audrey’s way as much as possible. I had no wish to be drawn into the arrangements for the fete. Besides, I told myself, I was so busy that I had to be careful how I used my time.

  To my relief, her feud with the adolescents of the council estate seemed to have died a natural death. No prosecutions resulted from the raid on the bus shelter; the police let the youths off with a caution. Audrey had the broken glass in her window replaced and assumed a martyred expression whenever the incident was mentioned.

  All this was a lull. But the storm – or rather the series of storms – was about to break over our heads. The lull ended on Thursday the 13th August, the day of Vanessa’s party.

  It was Vanessa’s party in the sense that it was her idea. She felt that it would be polite to welcome the Cliffords to Roth, and to return the hospitality they had given me the previous week. It would also be a way of signalling our gratitude for the loan of the paddock. We invited Audrey, so we could discuss the practicalities of the fete with them, and several other parishioners, including the Vintners. James and Mary were involved in the fete, and Brian would be company for Michael.

  We asked Rosemary if there was anyone she would like to invite, but she said that there wasn’t. I remember her coiling a strand of blonde hair around her finger and saying, ‘But I don’t know anyone in Roth.’

  Vanessa had another reason for wanting to get to know the Cliffords: ‘I’ll want to have a good look over the house at some point,’ she told me as we were going to bed on Wednesday night. ‘There are lots of references to it in the Youlgreave papers. And to the grounds. I’d especially like to see Francis’s room in the tower.’