on a piece of lead shot. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get off.’ He tried to close the door but I hung on to it. ‘Damn it, Roberta, let go! You’d like to warm the South Downs at my expense, I know.’
‘The heating isn’t on.’
He ran down the steps to prevent the rain from spoiling his shining brogues and spotting the nap of his suit. I wondered if he was going to meet Ruby. It was a favourite trick of Brough’s to let out the clutch just as my father was stepping into the car, which caused it to jerk forward and him to fall on to the back seat with a yelp of protest. I could see from the grim satisfaction on Brough’s face as he drove away that, though frequently played, this little joke was by no means stale.
‘I’m really worried about Mother,’ I said that evening.
My father, Oliver and I were sitting in the dining room, eating tapioca pudding. My father had removed three of the four bulbs belonging to the brass chandelier. The remaining bulb, high above our heads, only deepened the shadows cast by the giant sideboard and the enormous pseudo-Tudor court cupboard. More useful was a measure of dusty light which sneaked past the rhododendrons that crowded, like inquisitive passers-by, round the dining-room windows.
‘Jam, please.’ My father snapped his fingers in Oliver’s direction.
‘It’s a magnificent colour.’ Oliver stirred the jam and allowed a spoonful to plop back into the pot from a considerable height. Not surprisingly, he missed. ‘Exactly the colour of a ruby, isn’t it? Ruby.’ He repeated the action with the same result.
‘When you’ve finished smearing food over the table, perhaps you’ll be good enough to let me have it,’ barked my father. I felt like barking too. I had spent nearly an hour that morning polishing the beastly thing which seemed to expand as I laboured to the size of a tennis court.
‘OK. No need to get waxy.’ Oliver sent the jam-pot sliding across the couple of yards that separated them, leaving a long scratch.
‘I am not waxy, as you call it.’
‘I read a delicious book this afternoon.’ Oliver rolled his eyes and pursed his lips, assuming the camp mannerisms he knew annoyed my father. ‘Such lovely poetry. It’s called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Such an interesting word, isn’t it? Arabic, I suppose. The Ruby-at.’
My father paused in the act of shovelling down his tapioca to regard Oliver suspiciously. ‘If I didn’t know you’d been after every scrubby little tart in the neighbourhood I’d be worried that you were queer.’ He flung down his spoon, tossed his napkin to one side and stood up. ‘I’ll have my coffee in the library.’ He walked off without bothering to shut the door, as though he were a rich milord with an extensive retinue.
‘He’s so stupid he never sees the point of anything.’ Oliver was cross that his barbs had failed to lodge in our father’s conscience.
‘What do you think about Mother? She ought to be getting better by now. She looks at me sometimes in a way that’s quite disconcerting. Huge, staring eyes. And she seems rather muddled.’
‘Muddled?’
‘This morning she complained that the toast smelt of electricity.’
‘Women are never any good at science,’ said Oliver with a complacency I felt was misplaced considering he had failed Physics O level twice. ‘I refuse to believe Father and I have genes in common. I’m really the descendant of an itinerant minstrel and a gypsy princess who carelessly laid their baby beneath a blackberry bush. While they were canoodling among crow-flowers and long-purples an officious person discovered me and carried me off to Worping Cottage Hospital.’
I gave up trying to interest him in my own preoccupations. ‘Help me with the supper things, will you?’
Oliver groaned. ‘You’re a slave-driver, you know, Bobbie. Men don’t like to be bullied. You’ll never get a husband if you go on like this.’
‘I don’t want one if it means I’ve got to wash up every night for two.’
‘I’ve just had the most brilliant idea for my novel,’ he pleaded. ‘If I don’t write it down at once I might forget it.’
‘Make a quick note.’
‘That won’t do. Its brilliance is in the expression, not the naked fact. It’s a question of atmosphere and mood. It’s already beginning to fade as we speak. I must hurry or it will be gone for ever.’
I hesitated. Had Dorothy Wordsworth insisted that William put down his pen to help her sow the peas? I doubted it.
‘Go on, then.’ I gathered up the napkins to be washed.
‘You’re a dear darling, Bobbie. Will you get me some more paper tomorrow?’
‘All right. But couldn’t you write a bit smaller and on every line? It’s getting rather expensive—’ I was speaking to an empty room.
‘Do you think my mother’s getting a little … confused?’ I asked Mrs Treadgold the next morning as we washed up the breakfast things together.
‘How do you mean, dear?’
‘Not making sense. It might be delayed shock from the fall, perhaps. Have you noticed her saying things that don’t quite add up?’
‘Can’t say I have. Drat, there goes another.’ She put down the cup she had been drying between hands like grappling-hooks and extracted the handle from the tea towel. I went to get the china glue from the drawer. ‘The doctor says my arthuritis isn’t going to get any better. He says I’ll be a wheelchair case before much longer. But I’ll still come in and do what I can, Roberta, don’t you fear. Dolly Treadgold’s never let anyone down yet. And, God willing, she never will.’ She gave a shake of her head, her expression grim. ‘Perhaps that idle good-for-nothing, Brough, could make a few of them wooden ramps to get my wheelchair over the steps. We could tie a feather duster to one wrist’ – she waved what looked like an enviably flexible joint – ‘and a wet cloth to the other.’
‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ I murmured absently.
Mrs Treadgold’s musculature was massive and she could have tossed the caber for the Highlands and Islands. She thought nothing of running up two flights with our ancient vacuum cleaner, which I struggled to lift out of the cupboard. On several occasions she had single-handedly pushed the Wolseley down the drive, with me in it, when it failed to start. I had long ceased to be alarmed when she described spasms, fevers, faints and racking torments that would long ago have carried off anyone less determined to pitch in, rally round, hold the fort and keep the flag flying.
‘What’s your ma been saying then?’
‘Well, she told me the toast smelt of electricity.’ I pulled a face expressive of something between amusement and alarm as I confessed this.
Mrs Treadgold slapped her hands against her aproned thighs, leaving damp palm prints. ‘That’s a funny thing! I was thinking the very same myself yesterday. Well, we can’t both be wrong. You’d better have that toaster seen to.’
I abandoned the conversation.
On Saturday it rained without ceasing. This was doubly annoying because the rest of the country was having something close to a heatwave and the newspapers were full of alarming stories about people being swept out to sea on lilos, dogs being suffocated in cars and the population being laid waste by the injurious effects of sunburn and heatstroke. I was standing in the hall, staring through the window at the dripping laurels and wondering whether I had time to make a treacle tart for supper or whether it would have to be baked bananas again when the telephone rang. I picked it up at once. Nearly two weeks had gone by