Bitter Herbs Page 4

  Chapter Three

  Gloria Grainger’s house was enchanting, and Willow stood outside it breathless with envy. Built at the end of the seventeenth century of dark red bricks, it had double-height bays on either side of the front door and was set well back from the pavement behind perfect original iron railings. A grey-branched creeper of some kind, probably wisteria, was neatly pinned to the walls, and all the paintwork was gleaming and without chips or cracks of any kind. Well-proportioned, the house looked as though it consisted of one long or two short rooms on either side of a squarish hall or landing on each of the three floors above the basement.

  Willow rang the polished brass bell beside the front door and explained who she was into an intercom.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said a female voice, with a slight regional accent that Willow could not identify. A moment later the white-panelled door was opened. ‘Hello, I’m Marilyn Posselthwate. Won’t you come in?’

  She was a plump woman in her early twenties, who would probably have been pretty if she had carried herself better and managed to smile. Her short brown hair was glossy and her face looked as though it could be interesting, but she slouched, with her shoulders rounded and her heavy breasts drooping towards her waist. She looked both exhausted and nervous, but not at all sad.

  She let the front door shut with a bang. As Willow listened to the harsh noise echoing round the hall, it struck her that if she did not soon meet someone who could manage to feel saddened by Gloria Grainger’s death she might begin to believe that one of the novelist’s enemies had indeed whacked her over the head in fury.

  Dismissing the thought as unsuitably frivolous, Willow looked around her and was greatly impressed. She would happily have given houseroom to any of the paintings, rugs or chests that furnished the hall, and even Mrs Rusham would have admired the polish on the parquet floor.

  ‘What a lovely house!’

  ‘Yes, it is pleasant, isn’t it? Come into the drawing room.’

  Marilyn led the way into the room to the left of the front door, which was also perfectly arranged. An enormous amount of money had obviously been expended on it, but also a surprising austerity of taste. There were no frills, no lavishness of gilding or extravagance of colour. It did not look like the background of a traditional romantic novelist. Marilyn dropped into a chair, saying:

  ‘Sorry, I seem to have been on my feet all day. Please sit down and let’s see if I can help you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Willow chose a relatively upright wing chair and took a fat, black, leather-covered notebook from her briefcase. ‘First of all, do let me say how sorry I am that your aunt is dead. I never met her, but it must have been a blow to you to lose her.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marilyn, blinking as she crossed her legs and folded her hands on her knee, but giving no clue to her emotions.

  Willow saw that Marilyn’s tights were thick and, feeling the bitter cold of the exquisite room, wished her own were as warm.

  ‘As I explained on the telephone,’ she said, ‘your aunt’s publishers want me to write something about her and her work that they can publish as soon as possible. Since I never knew her I thought I should hear about her from someone who did. You seemed the ideal choice, but I am sorry to bother you when you’ve got so much on your plate, and on a Saturday too.’

  ‘That’s all right. Saturday has always been a working day for me here and I haven’t got that much more to do today. It’s quite nice to sit down.’

  ‘When my mother died there seemed to be an enormous number of things to be settled,’ said Willow, unscrewing the lid of her pen. ‘You must have got through them very fast if you’ve none left.’

  ‘Oh no. My aunt’s solicitor and her secretary will deal with all the formal things except for the funeral, which her executor will be organising.’ She rolled her eyes as though in exasperation and added: ‘The solicitor told me that her will just says that the executor has all the details of what she wanted, but he’s away just now, so nothing can be done until next week.’

  ‘Isn’t that going to cause rather a lot of difficulty?’

  ‘Apparently not, thank goodness. The undertakers who took away her body said that they can keep it for a week at least before it has to be buried and the executor’s due back on Monday.’

  Marilyn showed none of the horror that Willow immediately felt as she thought of the body slowly stiffening in some undertaker’s basement freezer. It was hard for her to repress a shudder.

  ‘Oh,’ she said uselessly as she tried to galvanise her mental faculties. ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked to ease herself into the interview.

  ‘Six years; not in the house, of course. She wouldn’t have had staff actually living here. But in a cottage at the bottom of the garden.’

  ‘But they told me you’re her niece,’ said Willow, surprised into a protest.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marilyn, smiling.

  Willow saw that between her parted lips Marilyn’s teeth were very close together and thought that she could deduce considerable anger.

  ‘But that didn’t alter the fact that I was “staff”,’ Marilyn went on. ‘She gave me the job when I badly needed somewhere to live and some way of earning that would allow me to stay near Sarah – my daughter – and made it quite clear that I wasn’t to presume on the relationship.’

  ‘But you must have been grateful to her, even so.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marilyn, but the bitterness in her voice made nonsense of her agreement. ‘But I have paid for what she gave me, several times over.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘My aunt extracted quantities of gratitude in very concrete forms. If that sounds ungenerous, then perhaps I have inherited at least that much from her.’

  Willow was silent for a moment, trying to think how to conceal the point of her next question.

  ‘You look shocked,’ said Marilyn quietly, ‘but if you’d known her you wouldn’t be.’ She paused, but then the bitterness seemed to burst out of her: ‘She had an enormous amount of money, as you can see from her house, but she paid me a pittance, and the cottage that I was so grateful to be allowed to live in is furnished with chipboard and plastic and it’s always cold. There’s no central heating and the electric fires cost a fortune to keep on and we’ve had to have them for Peter’s health. And I had to pay the fuel bills out of my mean wages.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll inherit all this now,’ suggested Willow, who surprisingly had found herself shocked. She had always believed that she put no value on family piety and was intrigued to find that she had been wrong. There was no time to examine her own feelings then, but she filed them away for some future occasion, along with a mental note to analyse her instinctive sympathy for Gloria Grainger.

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Marilyn, looking around the beautiful room with obvious resentment.

  ‘Had your aunt many relations then?’

  ‘No, very few. There’s my father, who’s her brother, but they never got on. He was furious when I told him what it was like living here and ever since he’s wanted me to take Sarah back to live with him in Reading, but there isn’t enough room there and he couldn’t look after her while I was out. I’d have to work. It’s not as though he could keep us on his pension and I don’t want you to think I think he ought. She’s my child and my responsibility.’

  Marilyn gasped suddenly, as though she had realised that she was babbling about her personal affairs to a complete stranger.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Willow quickly. ‘I must have seemed very impertinent. ‘It’s none of my business what your family arrangements are.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Marilyn, pulling a paper handkerchief out of her sleeve and blotting her upper lip. ‘It’s just that my aunt used to accuse me of believing that other people owed me a living because I had a child, and so I tend to rush in with explanations whenever the subject gets close to that.’ She smiled again, her teeth still gripped together.

  ‘You asked ab
out relations. Apart from Dad and me, there’s only a collection of quite distant cousins. I don’t think I’ve ever met any of them and I doubt if they’ll be inheriting anything; Aunt Ethel was quite … well, anyway, she’s probably left it all to a cat’s home.’

  ‘Aunt Ethel?’

  ‘Gloria Grainger. Ethel Posselthwate was not thought to be a suitable name for a novelist when she started writing.’

  ‘Haven’t you spoken to her solicitor?’ asked Willow with an apparently friendly smile as she wondered whether Marilyn’s lack of expectations could possibly be genuine. There was something about her mixture of defensiveness and resentment that made Willow feel active dislike and a certain, possibly unfair, mistrust. ‘I know she only died yesterday, but I think in your place I’d have done that at once.’

  Marilyn flushed and looked more convincing.

  ‘Actually I did, first thing after the doctor had got the undertakers round yesterday. They wanted to know all sorts of stuff about the funeral, which, like I said, I didn’t know. The solicitor didn’t either. You’d think she’d done it like this to get the maximum number of people involved in her death. Come to think of it, she probably did: she always liked a lot of attention.’

  ‘Didn’t the lawyer tell you anything about what you might inherit?’ asked Willow, hiding even more dislike. After all she was a complete stranger to Marilyn and interviewing her for a tribute to her dead aunt. It was both odd and ungenerous of Marilyn not even to have tried to say something pleasant about her, whatever their difficulties might have been.

  ‘Well, I did ask him, you see, even though I don’t think I should have done,’ said Marilyn in a silly voice. She smiled like a little girl bravely admitting that she had stolen a few sweets. Willow felt slightly nauseated, but she smiled back encouragingly.

  ‘In the end he said that I am mentioned in the will, but that he can’t give me any details yet as Aunt Ethel stipulated that all the beneficiaries should be told together after the funeral.’

  ‘She must have had quite a sense of drama then as well as all the rest,’ said Willow, scribbling a note as she remembered that she was collecting material for a memoir and not interviewing a suspect in a murder enquiry. Once again she teased herself with the absurd possibility that there might in fact have been a murder that needed investigation.

  ‘I suppose she did,’ said Marilyn, talking normally again. ‘Anyway, the solicitor said that I’m to go on running the house, which will be easy without her in it to cause … to need things all the time. He’ll pay the wages but he will speak to the bank about authorising my signature on small cheques for household expenses and things. But I don’t suppose any of this is what you need to know.’

  ‘No, it isn’t really, but it’s giving me an indication of your aunt’s character, which is what I wanted,’ said Willow, smiling. ‘Can you think of anything nice to say about her?’

  Marilyn thought for a long time and eventually managed to find something.

  ‘She could be charming, I suppose, although I didn’t often see it once I’d begun to work here. The charm’s how she got us all in the first place.’

  Willow was so surprised by the statement that she wrote it down verbatim, almost missing Marilyn’s explanation of what she had said.

  ‘She could make you feel that you alone of all the people surrounding her were worth something, but then disillusion would set in all too soon.’

  ‘Hers or yours?’

  ‘Both. During the honeymoon you’d tell her things: nothing necessarily awful, but things you’d be unhappy about everyone knowing and somehow she always managed to use them to torment you later.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ Willow was busily writing notes of her questions and Marilyn’s replies, but her fingers were cold and moved sluggishly.

  ‘Oh, confidences of one sort or another. For instance, I once told her that I wanted to write. Mad of me, but I actually thought she might help me. She was always throwing it back at me. If I’d done something wrong or annoyed her or failed one of her unbearably high standards, she’d use it to beat me with. “You know you’ll never have a hope of writing anything if your self-discipline is so lax”, or “people who want to write have to be able to sacrifice their immediate enjoyment for the greater good of their work”, and “my dear, you’re like any day-dreaming housemaid; you haven’t a hope”, and so on. And she’d always smile that sweet smile and soften her voice as she said it as though she was producing endearments.’

  ‘It sounds horrible,’ said Willow, confused by the thought of Gloria Grainger’s high standards. Nothing she had heard of the books suggested either discrimination or desire for quality. On the other hand what she had seen of the house was undoubtedly the result of both.

  ‘It was,’ said Marilyn. ‘There were times when I’d have done almost anything to shut her up.’ She gasped, coughed and recovered her poise. ‘I know it sounds awful to say all this now she’s dead, but she did get me down sometimes and there was nothing I could do about it. If she’d sacked me I’d never have found anywhere else for us all to live.’

  Willow recrossed her legs and thought longingly of both heat and tea. The perfect room was beginning to feel as though it was even colder than the icy street outside had been.

  ‘Us all?’ she said to prompt Marilyn.

  ‘Me, my daughter, who in Aunt Ethel’s charming phrase “has no father”, and Peter, a friend of mine who’s in a wheelchair and can’t work just now.’

  ‘Perhaps I could talk to them later,’ said Willow, making an unnecessary note just to see whether her fingers would still move. She thought of putting her gloves on again.

  ‘If you think it necessary,’ Marilyn sounded surprised. ‘But my daughter’s at school now and Peter is having physiotherapy at the local hospital at the moment.’

  ‘I see. Who else works – worked – here?’

  ‘There’s Mrs Guy, the cleaner, who comes every day. Aunt Ethel was good to her, which is weird. I’ve never understood it. Then there’s her secretary, Patty Smithe, but she’s been away ill for a couple of weeks. A friend of hers has been standing in for her, but of course since it’s Saturday, she’s not here now either. It’s only me she bullied into working for her on Saturdays.’

  The last sentence was spoken with real venom, which made all Willow’s sympathy focus on the dead woman once more.

  ‘Did your aunt pay the others as badly as she paid you?’ Willow recognised that Marilyn’s pleasure in shedding her resentment was encouraging her to answer the questions without even thinking about why they had been asked.

  ‘Not Mrs Guy. She got about fifty per cent more than the usual rate for cleaners round here. Patty was just as badly paid. Aunt Ethel said once that you get a much nicer class of girl if you pay badly. Presumably when it came to chars she didn’t care about their class.’

  ‘It does sound as though your aunt had some unattractive traits,’ said Willow.

  A real smile seemed to displace the unconvincing one that Marilyn had used at intervals during the interview.

  ‘She often said far worse things than that.’ The regional accent was growing stronger as Marilyn relaxed. ‘Her other great phrase whenever I tried to talk about money was from the Bible proverb. You know: “better a dinner of herbs” and all that. Well, they were pretty bitter herbs, I can tell you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Willow, feeling as though her toes were about to fall off, added: ‘Do you think we could have a little heat in here? It’s like an ice house.’

  ‘Is it? Yes, I suppose it is. She always kept the heating off unless she was planning to be in a room herself because of the furniture and I haven’t yet got enough courage up to break her rules. Isn’t that silly? Hang on a minute and I’ll do something about it.’

  Marilyn bent down to each of the four radiators in the room and turned their valves. She also went out for a few minutes and returned with a modern plastic blow-heater which she switched on and placed just in front of Willow’s fee
t.

  ‘Ah,’ said Willow in relief. ‘That’s wonderful. Thank you. I am going to have to write something favourable about your aunt. Do you think her secretary – Patty is it? – would speak kindly of her?’

  Marilyn laughed.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so. She’s been off with “flu” for nearly two weeks, but I suspect she had just had enough of Aunt Ethel’s temper. Do you know? On Patty’s last day here before she went sick, Aunt Ethel actually threw a pile of books at her.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Willow began to think that Gloria Grainger must have deliberately surrounded herself with weak people who were prepared to play victim to her tyrant. ‘What had the secretary done?’

  ‘Misread her shorthand and typed up a whole chapter that didn’t make sense because of it. And to cap it all she’d got the name of the main character wrong.’

  ‘But that’s not such a problem.’ Willow was warming up. ‘All she’d have to do is a search and replace and run the chapter off the printer again.’

  ‘My aunt,’ said Marilyn in a spiteful voice, ‘did not approve of word processors. She said they made secretaries lazy. Patty works on an old electric typewriter – so old it doesn’t even have a self-correcting ribbon. Though, to be fair, Aunt Ethel did sometimes use it herself. Susan said she’d been typing something late the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Well, not much point talking to Patty then,’ said Willow. ‘Who do you think might speak well of your aunt? Whom didn’t she bully?’

  After a moment’s thought, Marilyn said reluctantly: ‘I suspect Mrs Guy would say nice things. She seemed to really like Aunt Ethel. And Peter might, oddly enough.’

  ‘Who exactly is he?’

  ‘Peter Farrfield. My friend in the wheelchair. She used to summon him sometimes to have dinner with her and he usually made her laugh – which I don’t think I ever did in all the years I’ve been here. I used to have to cook for them and serve it and if I intervened in one of their conversations I’d always get it in the neck next day from my aunt. Peter was a guest, she’d say, and therefore none of my business.’