Bitter Herbs Page 11

  Richard laughed.

  ‘And I always thought you were tough enough to withstand anything.’

  ‘I’ve always been able to deal with bullying and contempt,’ said Willow, ‘but she used reasoned admiration and I’ve discovered I’m a sucker for that. What about you?’

  ‘Oh, give me reasoned admiration any time.’

  ‘Idiot! You know I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I know.’ Richard was still snuffling with laughter. Then his voice changed as he went on: ‘I’m fine really. Little Emma and I have discovered we don’t share quite as much as we once thought we did. The whole situation is marginally bleak. We’ll both survive it, I suppose.’

  I see, thought Willow, remembering the way Richard had succumbed to young Emma Gnatche’s longstanding heroworship. So that’s why you’re ringing me. Aloud she said:

  ‘Poor old you. Well I’m delighted to help you get over it, although I’m not too keen on the idea of a violent film.’

  ‘Nor you are. Silly of me. It was Em who liked them; I’ve never understood why. What would you like to do?’

  ‘Perhaps just dine and catch up?’ she suggested before remembering the gaps in her knowledge of what might have happened to Gloria Grainger. ‘Oh, no. What I’d really like most of all is to meet a barrister. D’you know any well?’

  ‘Not again!’ Richard sighed theatrically. ‘Willow, you are the worst exploiter I’ve ever come across. Here am I, longing to retrieve our old friendship, and you just want me to get at some information for you. Wretch!’

  ‘But you do know a barrister, don’t you? You must. They’re just your sort of people.’

  ‘I have come across one or two, mainly at the commercial bar. What do you want one for?’

  ‘Libel.’

  Richard roared with laughter again.

  ‘You’re not telling me that you’re being sued over one of your romans de concierge, are you?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Willow sounded careful of her dignity. ‘But I do want to find out about it.’

  ‘There’s a chap called Sebastian Borden I know a bit; he prosecuted a libel case last year, even though it’s not his speciality. Would he do?’

  ‘He sounds fine.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll fix something – probably a drink at El Vino’s – with him and ring you back. You will dine with me afterwards, won’t you?’

  ‘I’d love to, Richard,’ said Willow, adding: ‘I’ve missed you during your Emma months.’

  ‘Me, too. It’s curious isn’t it?’ He sounded sad and Willow felt the first concern for Emma stirring in her.

  ‘Is she all right? Ought I to get in touch?’

  There was a pause before Richard said slowly:

  ‘I think I’d leave it to her if I were you. She precipitated the parting, if that’s what you’d call it, and she seemed to be rather afraid you’d be angry with her for “letting me down”. I was probably always too old for her.’

  ‘Dear oh dear. Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work, Richard.’

  ‘Not half as sorry as I am,’ he said. ‘I really … oh, you know.’

  ‘You really cared about her?’ she said, feeling all her real affection for Tom surging through her. ‘I know you did.’

  ‘Still, chin up and all that. I’ll ring you when I’ve spoken to Sebastian. Good night, Willow.’

  She replaced the receiver, wishing she knew whether Tom still had any feelings left for her. The old days of living in deliberate detachment from other people had been so very much easier, she thought. Then she had often been angry, but never hurt.

  It came to Willow as she stood with her hand on the telephone that what Tom was doing was really hurting her. Panic-stricken by the admission and completely unable to think of any way of dealing with it, Willow left the telephone and picked up a handful of the paperbacks her publishers had sent round. Work could probably protect her better than anything else.

  She concentrated hard on Gloria’s books, noticing that they were all quite thin and that the covers were very dated. Each one showed a misty water-colour of a slender blonde with indistinguishable features posed against some romantic landscape. In some she was wearing a ball dress; in others beach clothes or occasionally a professional-looking suit; but in all of them there was a storm behind her, or a jagged mountain or endless butter-yellow sand dunes.

  Willow flicked through the pile, deciding that they could contain no more than seventy thousand words each, perhaps half the length of her own novels. She chose three to read and lay full length on one of the down-filled sofas with Buttercups for the Bridesmaids in her hands. An hour and a half later she had finished it, her face creased into an expression of mild distaste. Skimming through The Juice of the Pomegranate and Fortunes of Flora, she began to share some of Posy Hacket’s dislike of the books.

  Superficially they were almost charming – if sentimental and not very well written – accounts of the tribulations of good, innocent girls. Each heroine fell in love with a wild or cruel man, whose essential sweetness was revealed only because of her gentleness and devotion.

  All of them were astonishingly or delicately beautiful with straight little noses and lustrous eyes and at some stage in the story they all had smiles of frank openness, whatever that was. They all, Willow also noticed, wore something made of iridescent silk. In one book it was merely a scarf, in another an evening dress, but in the third it was the heroine’s hair ‘long and black, gleaming like iridescent silk’.

  Willow smiled at each repetition, knowing how easy it was to fall into the trap of over-using a particular, if unimportant, phrase in book after book (her own was ‘long, thin thighs’), but she was irritated that all the heroines longed for marriage as a reward for their sufferings and always achieved it on the last page, as though it marked the end of their real lives.

  As she thought about the basic plot, she did remember a little more about the original version. In Beauty and the Beast, she thought, the heroine saved not only the beast but also her father from the results of his own fecklessness. It was as though the first story-teller as well as Gloria believed that women’s greatest achievement – their destiny even – was to submerge their own selves in order to rescue damaged or damaging men.

  ‘Bloody Hell!’ she said loudly, dropping the last of the books on the floor. She told herself that it was absurd to connect Gloria’s bizarre philosopy with her own doubts about Tom and what his brooding anger might mean.

  Silently reprimanding herself for mixing work and emotion, Willow picked up the books again and concentrated hard on passages that had, particularly struck her. Beneath the clichés and the formulaic romance, there seemed to be a subtext of salacity and suggested violence, which went some way to explaining Posy’s exaggerated horror of the novels.

  When she had finished reading, Willow puffed up the cushions behind her head, thinking about the woman who had written them and whether the fantasy of taming harshly cruel men with pure adoration was her own, which she had merely been unable to put into practice, or whether it had started with an adult memory of nursery renderings of the fairy tale. Willow also re-read Posy’s article.

  ‘Why?’ Willow asked herself aloud, wishing even more strongly than before that she had been able to talk to Gloria at least once to ask the questions that kept nagging at her. ‘Why did she want women to be so submissive? How much of what she wrote was from her unconscious and how much deliberate?’

  When Willow eventually stopped trying to put herself into the mind of the dead woman, she went into her bedroom, relieved that she would be able to swing her legs across the entire width of the big bed without having to worry about kicking Tom. Later she arranged herself with maximum comfort and let almost random

  thoughts swim in and out of her consciousness until she slept.

  The next morning she woke slowly with a smile on her lips, still half occupied with her dream of lying on velvet grass in the hot shade of the large beech with her legs dangling in the mill pond
outside her house. As sharpness returned to her mind, she laughed. The grass in her garden was rough and thistly. It would be years before it could match the softness of her dream.

  Lazily, comfortably, she got herself out of bed, bathed and put on a black knitted dress she had bought from a young designer whose clothes seemed cut for comfort as much as elegance. When she was ready she pulled open the thickly lined chintz curtains in her bedroom and saw that the street outside was covered in snow. The road already had brown tracks along it where the early delivery lorries and the commuters’cars had been driven, but the pavements were still pristine.

  An elderly woman bundled into a heavy fur coat stumbled across Willow’s view, pulling a small, hairy brown dog behind her. It stopped to investigate something at the foot of a parking meter and the woman rounded on it and shouted something. The words did not reach Willow, but the sharpness did. The dog persisted in its sniffing for a moment and then allowed her to pull it away.

  Why did the woman snap? Willow asked herself, still trying to imagine what it had been like to be Gloria, who had treated her niece at least in much the same way. The woman in the street might be cold or afraid of slipping in the snow; she might be in pain from her legs or her back; but it seemed to Willow to be more likely that she lived alone and had become accustomed to expressing every minor irritation, secure in the knowledge that the lapdog would not retaliate, just as none of Gloria’s household had ever retaliated.

  Had anyone in her seventy-two years come close enough to her to make her question her tyrannical behaviour? Did it creep up on her as she grew richer or had she always cared nothing for the feelings of people around her? Did she realise how horrible they thought her or did she consider herself to be like the sweet, yielding, gentle heroines of her books? Or had she perhaps expected to be saved and rescued by the sweet understanding of someone else? Was she hoping that the young women who worked for her might play the part of the dutiful daughter, seeing through her harshness to the vulnerability within?

  Brushing her short hair once more, Willow ignored a faint, subterranean sense of something wrong and went to see what Mrs Rusham had produced for breakfast.

  ‘What an original idea!’ she said as Mrs Rusham put a plate of angels on horseback in front of her.

  ‘I know you would never eat stewed prunes,’ said the housekeeper, ‘but I felt that you needed them. The bacon ought to make them palatable. Your letters are there.’

  She left without waiting for a comment, which was lucky because Willow was torn between amusement and outrage that her housekeeper thought her costive. The uncomfortable idea that Mrs Rusham might dislike her as much as Marilyn had loathed her aunt returned for an instant until Willow began to eat. The soft prunes, impregnated with the salty fat from the bacon, tasted wonderful and reminded Willow that Mrs Rusham could hardly do her job so well if she hated it or felt exploited.

  After breakfast Willow set to work to sort out her thoughts. The two parts of her quest were becoming inextricably muddled. For the memoir she needed to talk to someone about the childhood from which Gloria had so effectively removed herself. But for her investigation into the death, Willow needed to know much more. There was one new and potentially useful source of information for both parts of the quest.

  She rang Ann Slinter and asked for Gerald Plimpton’s telephone number. Ann gave it to her at once, but she also said:

  ‘Do be tactful, won’t you? Gerald knows what I think of Gloria’s ghastly books and her behaviour but he still cherishes some kind thoughts about her himself. She was always nicer to men than to women.’

  ‘I’ll be all charm and sympathy,’ Willow promised. ‘Thanks, Ann.’

  Gerald Plimpton sounded much less fragile than Ann had suggested and immediately agreed to see Willow and tell her all she wanted to know about Gloria Grainger’s early success, for the memoir.

  ‘Why not lunch with me at the Garrick today?’ he said.

  Despite her promise to be charming, Willow could not quite bring herself to accept the invitation, but she was reluctant to antagonise him by explaining her distaste for a club that had so resoundingly refused to admit women members.

  ‘That’s sweet of you,’ she said girlishly, ‘but couldn’t I give you lunch in the flat? My housekeeper is a really good cook and it’s both warm and comfortable here.’

  ‘So’s the Garrick,’ he said, ‘but I’d be delighted to accept. Thank you.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Willow gave him her address, adding: ‘We’ll expect you at about one then.’

  Knowing that nothing broke the icy composure of her housekeeper, whatever her private feelings might be, Willow was not troubled by the thought of imposing a guest on her at such short notice. Wandering through to the impeccable white kitchen, Willow told her about him.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mrs Rusham. ‘And what kind of food would you like?’

  ‘Goodness, I’m sure you’re better at deciding than I. He invited me to his club, so he probably likes things like oxtail and treacle tart.’

  Another minute smile cracked the seriousness of the housekeeper’s face as she nodded.

  ‘There’s no time for oxtail, but I could easily prepare a mixed grill followed by apple meringue. With some split almonds sprinkled on the meringue as it cooks it becomes a little less obviously a nursery pudding. Potted shrimps to start might be suitable.’

  ‘Mrs Rusham, what would I do without you? It sounds perfect.’

  ‘Thank you. I had better go to the butcher straight away unless you need me for anything else immediately?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Willow smiled, aware of something very like affection for the dour, efficient woman, who had never yet divulged her Christian name. ‘I’ll deal with the telephone and any deliveries.’

  In fact there were no interruptions, and Willow had plenty of time to read all her notes before meeting Gloria’s executor.

  Chapter Eight

  Gerald Plimpton arrived politely ten minutes late, dressed in a dark-grey suit that managed to express formality without giving any suggestion of an office. His hair was pale grey and the slackening skin of his face and neck betrayed his age, but his carriage was upright and his voice firm. His tie was dark and noncomittal, which made Willow, who had half expected to see the salmon-and-cucumber stripes of the Garrick tie, think that he might have understood her reluctance to eat there. It was a while before she realised that he was probably wearing it in recognition of Gloria’s death.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Plimpton?’ she said as Mrs Rusham brought him into the drawing room. ‘Can I offer you some sherry? Or would you rather have something else?’

  ‘Sherry sounds delightful. Thank you.’ She poured him a glass of an almencista sherry she particularly liked, but, aware that she was going to need all the tact and dissimulation she could muster, chose mineral water for herself.

  ‘I spoke to Ann Slinter after you telephoned me,’ he said as they sat down on opposite sofas, ‘and she told me something of your difficulty.’

  Willow raised her eyebrows and smiled enquiringly.

  ‘In finding people to speak kindly of Gloria Grainger,’ he explained.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Willow. ‘So far I have managed only to talk to people who were frightened of her or had some reason for active dislike.’

  ‘So few people really knew her,’ he said sadly, reawakening some of Willow’s sense of identification with Gloria.

  As she smiled at him, he added: ‘This is wonderful sherry.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it. It’s one of which I am particularly fond.’

  ‘How strange and charming to find a woman of your age interested in something as unfashionable as sherry.’

  ‘I’ve never been enormously interested in fashion except when I need it for a character in one of my books. May I ask you quite frankly what you thought of Gloria’s novels?’

  Gerald Plimpton crossed his long legs.

  ‘I don’t see why not. They could never have bee
n my chosen reading matter, but they were skilfully directed at a particular market and highly successful in their day. That the market has changed I understand well enough, but I do not believe that writers like Gloria deserve all the opprobrium that is flung at them by feminists these days.’

  ‘Or by journalists like Posy Hacket?’ suggested Willow.

  ‘Indeed.’ His still-goodlooking, faintly familiar, face was as wintry as the weather outside. ‘I thought her piece in the Readers’Quarterly very unkind indeed and it hurt Gloria badly. I’m not sure that I have ever heard her as upset as the day she read it. She telephoned me at once.’

  ‘Was it you who suggested that she should sue?’

  ‘Good heavens no! The idea of writers suing each other fills me with horror. It gives such a very bad example, besides wasting an inordinate amount of time and money. Any unnecessary involvement with lawyers is to be avoided in my view.’

  There was so much distaste in his face that Willow wanted to ask about his own experiences of the legal profession, but before she could give rein to her curiosity, she saw Mrs Rusham at the drawing room door. Willow nodded to her and then turned back to her guest.

  ‘Shall we lunch? It seems to be ready.’

  She led the way into her small green-and-white dining room, where Mrs Rusham had clearly been busy. The table was newly polished and there was a low silver bowl of Christmas roses that Willow had not seen before.

  ‘What a charming room!’ said Gerald Plimpton as he sat down and shook out his napkin. ‘It’s a pity that you and Gloria never met. You obviously share her interest in English furniture.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. There are some lovely pieces in her house. I was impressed by them. But you were telling me about her reaction to the libel case. Why do you think she was so upset by the article?’

  ‘Wouldn’t anyone have been?’ asked Plimpton. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Angry perhaps, as I was when the same journalist savaged me, but I don’t think I’d have been emotionally upset. It was presumably the suggestion that she was inciting violence to women that troubled Gloria so much.’