The Old Dog and the Doorstep Read online

This is to be my exam year. I am supposed to be Focusing. I am expected to Do Myself Justice, Do the Best I Can, Fulfil Expectations, Justify the School Fees, Pontifexest malum, Etcetera. And despite my wish to spite them – the teachers, parents, elderly relatives, random strangers Mother meets – I do in fact want to get down to it, or on with it, or at least get it over with, and in order to do that I need to study. What I do not need is a jerk sister, a houseful of strangers, and an on-going financial crisis that seems to have begun with great grandfather selling off land to neighbouring farmers, triggering a process of erosion that has continued through the past century, the boundaries moving closer and closer to the house, until the sheep have moved up past the gate, leapt the ha-ha and now are lodged within a stone's throw of the front door. This squeezing has popped out staff like pips until none remain. Mother is hiring-in for the weekend only. The crisis, exacerbated by the fecklessness of the Bastard, culminated this Easter with the selling of Starlight, my pony. It was either the pony, or school: like a fool I chose school, and then found I would have to live at home from September. Living in is pretty hellish of course, with the food, the showers and the dorms, but being a day-girl is worse. Not only the missed breakfasts, but the cold shoulders and the gloating sympathy of the likes of Annabelle Haugh-Frost and her cohort of sycophants. Friends become former friends, and you are stuck with the other day girls and the scholarships.

  The vultures were at me straight away when I went back to school without Starlight. The Haugh-Frost, who could not get enough of me last year, was the worst of them. Ever since she lost out to me and Starlight in the inter-house gymkhana, riding (or mostly not riding) her silly little half arab half donkey, she had been waiting for a chance to bring me down. She was circling, with her flock of screeching followers, before I had unpacked my bags; she strolled into the dorm picking hay off her fleece and perched on the end of my bed. “We're making up the livery list,” she croaked, “Will you be full livery this term, or half, or ..?”

  “Or none,” I said flatly, and carried on laying out my clothes.

  “I like your top,” she said, clawing at my clothes, “It's just like one I had last year. So you are keeping Sunshine at home are you? As you're going to be a day-girl soon anyhow.” Clearly she knew very well that Starlight had been sold. How? Apparently my dear little rat sister has a big mouth. Haugh-Frost junior is in her form.

  “She was too old and too small. Mother is looking for something more up to my standard,” I said through gritted teeth, knowing that an ugly red flush was spreading up my neck to my face. The lie only diverted her attention from one area of pain to another.

  “I had noticed you had grown recently. You are right: you need something stronger. Something broad-backed.”

  “Fat-ass,” squawked one of the hangers-on.

  I must remember to make the louse pay for that. At the time, I was just thankful that les putains did not know the whole story. As for Annabelle, the girl is ninety-percent horse herself. If she mentions Starlight again this term I swear I will whip her and ride her around the paddock.

  School has study rooms, and the library has broadband, and any junior mistakenly wandering into our jurisdiction is so thoroughly squished that she never makes the mistake again. At home, my sanctuary is polluted by whatever foul noise the donkey next door is listening to that week, and I am subject to continual invasions by a free-range child – sorties to take hostage clothes (dressing-up must feature heavily in the junior curriculum), or to moon about asking aimless questions like which way up do rainbows go? (I told her it depends on whether it is morning or evening; I swear she is waiting to catch one at midday, to see it flip, red from top to bottom) or what the difference is between an isthmus and a peninsula (look it up yourself, I dropped geography). At least even now I do not see the peril from the moment Mother drops us off until the moment she gallops over the horizon at the end of the day, several pieces of uniform astray, dark mane waving in the breeze, knees and elbows everywhere.

  At home, in our rural idyll, we have no broadband, which – and I have told mother – puts us officially in child poverty, and does the reputation of our nation no good at all in the former colonies. What school-trapped girls did for entertainment in the old days, with no phone, no internet, no boys to chat to, to bait, lead on and cut off, no music, I do not know. There is only so much fun to be had from tiddlywinks. As it is now, the girls at school have all that, and I do not, and so I shall be completely cut out of any conversation on Monday, and I will not know who is going with whom, who's in love, who's been dumped, what I should have been watching on TV.

  On second thoughts, I know what they did back then. They developed crushes on the gym mistress and ended up like tweedy Hettie.

  Another thing I do not need is Mother, at the moment, with her moods, with her weeping every time the Bastard phones, her noble silences and her manic energy in between. I have mentioned the food she has prepared so far, and we have witnessed the sad demise of the cake, but that is not the half of it. She has spent weeks in dungarees, her hair wrapped in some sort of rag, first scrubbing and white-washing the attic rooms, walls, ceilings, floors, beds and Marcus more than once; then acting as teasmaid, hod-carrier and carpenter's mate to the louts she hired to convert the stables for human habitation; then similar for the old crock she got in to put their work right.

  Even now, there are rough patches, sticking windows, and bowed floors (they will 'settle', she insists; I think they will float away, guests clinging on like Noahs in nightshirts, in the first serious rainstorm). The toad suggested calling them the 'Starlight Rooms'. You can see why I hate her.

  Fortunately, this frenzy of labour was completed before the end of summer, so we were spared the humiliation of being met at the school gates by a paint-spattered crazy woman. Meantime, after the pony incident, and my understandable loss of good humour, I kept well away. I was farmed out to various relatives, the Bastard being conveniently out of the country: great aunts, childless cousins and so on, where I was subjected to sympathy and great swilling pots of tea, and generally bothered and badgered for a week before being fobbed off onto the next one in line, contribution made, family loyalty served.

  Compared to that, getting through one weekend should not be so bad, I had thought. I had planned to keep my head down, swot for Home Ec. for which I would have an assessed practical on Monday, and above all keep away from my family. Want to make God laugh? Then tell him your plans. A notoriously sadistic gimp.

  Mother was in full manic mode when I went to break the news to her about the broken cake. She had, literally, made the beds. Assembled the beds, some-time after midnight (crashes had reverberated through my dreams); now she was just making them.

  “Hold that end,” she demanded, straddling a bed to spread the sheet over it. I stayed in the doorway, the better to make a quick escape.

  They looked good, the whitewashed rooms. I would not mind a room up here, I thought, if I could make two into one. There are six. The ones at the front are bright with sunshine in the mornings, each having its own round porthole to the sky. Heavy curtains would help. At least I would be away from the human whirlwind. But like everything else – the cooking, the manic energy, the stables dammit – they were not real rooms, not for real people. They were for the 'staff', for the weekend.

  Given the circumstances, I was understandably curt, perhaps even a little blunt, a touch insensitive with the news. The exchange was brief.

  “The cake you left perched precariously by the window … is out of the window.”

  Mother paused, gripping the sheet until her knuckles whitened to match the décor. “I have four more rooms to do,” she gritted, tucked under the edge of the sheet, grabbed a bushel of bedding and pushed past me out of the room. Well, excuse me.

  Different people have different ways of handling difficulties. The flea jumps away as if nothing had ever happened, and finds a new passion. I keep calm, and wait: perhaps not the most constructive approac
h, but I find that solutions often come along; either that or the problem passes its worry-by-date, or is superseded by a drama of a higher rank. As for Mother – it seems to depend on her mood. When she is manically set on some aim, as she was at that point, she sweeps aside the problem as though it were a plate of cake crumbs and gets on with what she was doing (which is what she had spent all summer doing, and which on consideration may not be so different after all to my approach); if she is in one of her watery moods, the slightest setback only produces further sniffling, tea-drinking and snot-mongering. She pulls herself out of it eventually, but there is a risk of meals being missed in the meantime: emergency tins of sausage-and-beans have to be mined from the backs of the cupboards to be microwaved.

  So, fortunately, she was too busy panicking to question me over the cake, and I was able to retreat to my room to prep, as I had planned, for the Home Ec. assessment. What I would have to do was: under supervision and in a limited time, prepare, cook and serve a dish to feed a family of four (how neat, how symmetrical), and in addition to present a portfolio summarising the nutritional content and calorific value of the meal. Jeezus. Did they want historical and social context too? Perhaps a wine-matching guide? In fact, the school had provided tables listing ingredients and their stats, so it would just be a bit of maths, and some waffle about fat. I would need to find out or make up the costs, and I was supposed to write out a detailed schedule, and discuss the equipment I would be using (bowl, saucepan, spoon, knife, nuclear accelerator, what do they think?). They recommend low-fat minced beef, semi-skimmed milk, reduced fat cheese, wholemeal pasta – none of which I had any intention of using. I am pretty sure an Italian husband would be spared jail if he killed his wife after she served up a low-fat lasagne. It would be a crime of passion (which, mind you, in the mediterranean covers a good deal of everyday life). The portfolio would have the low-fat, low-flavour calculations. The dish I would prepare, I was determined, would be spared that indignity.

  Which reminded me, I had forgotten to tell Mother we were out of milk. I knew what she would have said anyway: get it yourself. After the cake business, I preferred to lie low for a while, so I put on some music and looked through the recipe.

  One needs something bland and backgroundy for study. My preference in music is for pop. In particular, boy bands singing love songs. The music can be vanilla, so long as the boys are cute. My favourites at that time were Dublin Boyz. Only one was in fact Irish, and only one was gay, which is below average. After wondering for a while which of the other three I preferred (the delicate, soulful one, the chubby one, or the rough, unshaven one) and re-arranging their posters accordingly, and then wondering if the fourth one might not really be gay, or whether I could turn him because he was definitely the cutest and had rocks for abs, I hauled out the lasagne recipe from amongst my school junk and, while the boyz crooned to me, and in between day-dreaming about being swept away to a romantic Irish castle somewhere to the sound of pipes and fiddles, I read through it.

  Lasagne I had most certainly eaten before, but I had never cooked it. Miss Simpkins had recommended Italian food as simple and healthy. She had betrayed me, the frosty bitch. It looked pretty complicated. Most of the ingredients I had – or would have had, if mother had not scooped them up in her cooking whirlwind – but I needed a lot of milk, and apparently a bay leaf (yes, we had a bay tree, but which one was it?) and mace, whatever that is. Christ. So I would have to find Mother again and ask her about those things. Maybe give her a few minutes to calm down first.

  My room is dark, and very quiet when the tick is not next door. She, I and Mother are all in the west wing. Really, south-west. Mother's room is at the front, big and bright, with an en suite. Our rooms are at the back, and have no windows, though the passage behind has fine views across the garden and fields beyond and is ideal for sunsets but freezing in the morning. I lay back in the cool peace, turned up the volume and had a rest before I went to face Mother, waiting until the Boyz had finished proclaiming their love and promising me their hearts eternally, all four of them. Then I cut them off with the flick of a switch, and went downstairs, to find her in a froth in the kitchen, as it was about midday and her guests were due to arrive.

  “Where have you been Violet, beds are finished but I need to lay out the buffet what do you think the weather will do I think on the terrace so we can save the dining room for the evening here take these through the trestles are set up already,” with which she thrust a bundle of table-cloths upon me, “I have about two minutes to change get Kitty to help you take the food through,” and then she charged off upstairs. So I staggered along the passage and out onto the terrace, which is in the corner made by the house and the back of the stables, sunny at this time of day and year. Just as I had finished dragging the cloths onto the trestle tables, Kitty sauntered out from behind the maze and up the lawn.

  “I found the cat,” she said, picking a piece of moss off one of the tablecloths, “and I found it most uncooperative.”

  “Mother said we are to lay out the buffet,” I told her.

  “He's a cool customer. I have a feeling he knows more than he lets on. He could exonerate or incriminate either of the suspects.”

  “He could be a suspect himself,” I said defensively.

  “He is ruthless enough, certainly, and a trained killer, but he hasn't the strength. He cannot have done it,” declared detective Tickham, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “The cake was precarious,” I protested, and the tyke nodded sagely.

  “Was it? It must have been tempting. The victim teetering on the edge of a precipice, just waiting to be tipped over the edge. One can understand how the murderer, enraged as we have established by hunger and the need for tea, would succumb to the urge to wantonly destroy …”

  How I resisted thumping her, I do not know. Perhaps it was the thought that even as I pummelled her, she would be nodding and saying 'Ah, we have flushed out the killer …' Instead, I told her “Go and pick some sprigs of parsley, some without cake on.” I was thinking about presentation.

  “Okay,” she brightly said, and skipped away.

  “Vache,” I muttered.

  “Cochonne,” she called back. The more she learns, the less I like her.

  Six trips, two with the weasel winding herself around my feet, emptied the fridge. The trestle tables looked rather bare, even when we added crockery, cutlery and napkins.

  “It isn't enough, Kitty.”

  “Look in the new fridge,” she laughed.

  One advantage of rising at an anti-social hour is getting to know everything that is going on. I swear the dawn chorus is like her internet and TV – it tells her everything she needs to know. This is what she knew that day: in the kitchen is a door that opens onto a space under the back stairs, which normally contains all those things that only come out once a year (croquet hoops, boules, badminton racquets, ditto tennis, ping-pong paddles, skis, and the detritus or sediment of the midge's floods of enthusiasm: a miniature potter's wheel, an easel, a half-full stamp album, a fencing mask); there is also a hatch that opens into the cellar. All the junk had been cleared out and stuffed God-knows-where, and there in its place, steadily humming and shining new, was an enormous fridge.

  Kitty hauled open the door and indicated the groaning shelves, as proud as if she had prepared the food herself. There was a replica of everything we had already set out, as well as a plate of the sort of triangular sandwiches that no-one ever eats in real life, and two cherry pies, with golden lattice tops and blood-red viscid insides. I had thought the cherries atop the cake were an odd touch; obviously Mother had found she had a few left over, and bunged them on the cake. Always a detail too far.

  Even before the little viper stepped aside, I could see that the shelves inside the heavy silver door were stacked with milk.

  “It would be an odd sort of murder mystery if the detective were to be called in after the first death, only to become the second victim,” I said pointedly.
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br />   “It would be too unfair to leave the mystery in the hands of the bungling sidekick.”

  “Salop! Am I suspect or sidekick?”

  Thereupon, with a clatter of heals and a gust of floral perfume with the faintest of woody backgrounds, Mother burst into the kitchen. “Cars arriving, just over the cattle grid finish the buffet I'll send them around the outside to the terrace get the dog out of the way.” And she was gone, out into the atrium to fling open the front doors. The two of us followed her to peek around the door-frame, to watch her calmly float down the front steps, hair perfectly in place, pleats crisp, gloved, hatted, beautiful. My mother, the quick-change artist, the actress.

  “So glad to meet you …” and so on. We scuttled away, we mice, to empty the fridge and fill the trestle tables.

  The last piece of parsley was in place just as the first guests stepped tentatively around the end of the stables, craning their necks, afraid to be first, afraid to be invading some-one else's home. Their English reserve would not last long: before the end of the weekend they would be all over the house, and we would have to hang a 'private/staff' sign across the hallway to keep them away from our rooms.

  The first couple were beige – beige faces peeping from under beige hair; beige linen suit, beige twin-set; beige suede shoes, beige mules. This was their costume, it turned out. A retired Colonel and his wife, just returned from Rhodesia. The Colonel was clutching a pith helmet for added authenticity. Apparently they had based their get-up on an old movie they had watched from their beige sofa, in their beige house, on their beige and white TV.

  I stood, professional-looking, by the buffet table, but the boobless wonder leapt out at them as they stepped up onto the terrace. “Tabitha Tickham, detective,” she said brusquely, thrusting out an ink-smeared hand, which was limply accepted by the dazed Colonel.

  “Hello, dear,” said his wife, creasing up her face, which looked like an old handbag. “Look, Clive, the police are here already. We must have missed the beginning.” She winked and nudged her husband so hard that his loose cheeks swayed. “What is it?” she went on, getting into the spirit of the thing, “Has there been a gruesome murder?”

  “I am not with the regular police force, madam,” chirped Kitty, “but I am investigating a grave crime. Is this your husband?” She turned her bright eyes on the drooping man.

  “Introduce us, Clive,” prompted the woman, joggling him again.

  “Good-day, Miss …” he wheezed tentatively.

  “Detective Tickham,” the urchin corrected him.

  “Good-day, Detective,” he coughed, “I am Clive – Colonel Clive Rooting-Compound, retired, late of the third rifles, Rhodesia.”

  “Well done dear; now me … I am Mrs Colonel Clive Rooting-Compound, Beryl. Aw'flee pleased to meetcha. Do you think we ought to eat, Clive dear, or wait for the other guests?” said his wife, looking past Kitty at the tables.

  “I'd sooner start with a G and T,” muttered Clive, entering into his character with more enthusiasm now. “I say, House! Erm, Service! What-ho!”

  Just as I was about the step forward and offer him an elderflower cordial, the pest stepped firmly in front of Mrs Rooting-Compound again, and demanded “First, madam, for the record, could you account for your whereabouts between the hours of eight and ten ay-em? No-one I have spoken to so far has mentioned you by name, but I must rule you out of the investigation.” The Colonel looked a little flustered by this head-on attack, but his wife was cooperative, saying,

  “Well, I suppose we will be given some information – perhaps it is in our room – but I'm not sure …”

  “Could the landlady of the Kings Head perhaps vouch for your whereabouts? Would anyone have seen you in the village?”

  “Oh yes! I'm sure that's it. I'm sure she could,” fluttered Mrs Rooting-Compound, anxious to escape the fierce scrutiny of the Tickham gimlet eye. I hurried forward with jug and glass, and pacified the Colonel with a promise of something stronger later, just as another two pairs of guests rounded the corner, all with that same flinching, expectant neck-craning. Kitty released a shaken Colonel's wife from her gaze, and hurried to intercept the new arrivals; I guided Beryl to the tables, where she began to graze with bovine docility.

  Two women had arrived together, both in jeans and shirts and dragging suitcases. They introduced themselves – Ms Tisket and her friend Ms Tasket – and hastily retreated back to the stables to get into costume and into character, leaving the other couple at Detective Tickham's mercy. As she stalked them, Mother strolled coolly out onto the terrace from behind me and surveyed the tables.

  “Nice work we might need another jug of water and some ice-cubes what is Kitty doing try to keep her under control,” she breathed, and then stepped forward to guide the Colonel to a wicker chair, flashing her smile around the terrace.

  “She's not my daughter,” I muttered and, jug in hand, went to rescue Kitty's latest victims.

  They were a middle-aged couple, both smartly dressed and fighting over a stethoscope and a tiny hammer, the kind of knee-tapping hammer that doctors have in old 'comedy' movies. The woman grabbed Kitty's outstretched hand, saying “I'm Doctor Plain, this is my husband … Mr Cutter.”

  “Mr Cutter,” the husband said, taking advantage of her having one hand occupied to snatch the hammer, “Surgeon. And this is my wife – Doctor Plain.”

  “And can you account for your whereabouts between the hours of eight and ten this morning?” demanded Kitty.

  “Saving lives, my dear,” he suavely said, “just doing my job.” In fact, they – the Singhs – were both IT support workers. They were here to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary and pick over ten years' worth of irritations and un-settled scores. Ten years in the same job, in the same house, on the same sofa, same TV guide, same arguments. The nights must simply fly by chez Singh.

  “Mother, I need bay leaves and cloves.”

  “Later dear. Doctor, do come and meet Mrs Beryl Rooting-Compound. A glass of elderflower Mr Cutter?” The 'surgeon' had plainly been at the booze already, which had loosened his inhibitions and allowed him to get into character easily, to the further irritation of his wife.

  “Service!” came a cry from the wicker chair, and ice-cubes chinked in the Colonel's glass.

  “And what is mace?”

  “Use nutmeg if you can't find any I need you to go into the village and get some cakes from Mrs Baker, and cream, and more eggs and for goodness sake take your sister. Salmon mousse? Mrs Rooting-Compound, Salmon mousse, ham?” How was I expected to find mace, with no clue what it was? In any case, how could I find anything since she had turned the kitchen upside down that morning?

  Two odd figures appeared around the end of the stables: what appeared to be a man in a black suit, and a woman in a white dress like a tent. As they approached, I realised it was the two women, Ms Tisket and Ms Tasket, who had appeared briefly a few minutes ago – the dark-suited one had on a clerical dog-collar, while the other's wide lacy collar and red-painted cheeks identified her as a Choirboy.

  “Another glass, Colonel? Mother, when do the staff arrive?”

  “Before dinner we have tea to get through yet. Ah, Vicar! Who is your friend?”

  But the menace had got to them before Mother. The Vicar seemed quite comfortable in 'his' costume and shook her hand affably, but the Choirboy seemed a little lost in her gown, standing back and looking around with a detached air as if coolly studying the odd behaviour of the group. I have used that trick myself: she was feeling shy.

  “Tabitha dear, put the poor Vicar down,” Mother called, striding across the terrace, “Pleased to meet you Reverend Younglove. And who is your … friend? Oh dear, really? I am sorry, the names came as part of a package, do feel free to change it. Violet you should phone ahead to Mrs Baker she might be about to close Tabitha dear do fetch glasses for Master Roger and the Vicar and do not grill them.”

  “No-one is beneath suspicion or above contempt.”

  “Do w
e have a baking dish twenty by twenty centimetres I need some money for Mrs Baker,” I said breathlessly. Mother's manner was infectious.

  The Vicar dragged her Choirboy over to meet the Colonel and Beryl, who seemed unsure quite what to make of them, while the Cutter-Plains or Plain-Cutters squabbled over a piece of pie, the Kitty-witch attempted to examine the footprints the guests had left in the patch of mud at the corner of the stables, Marcus appeared from inside the house and flopped down in the shade beneath the tables, on the look-out for dropped scraps of food, and Mother began to wave me towards the rose garden.

  “We have just one more character to arrive, but she was a last-minute booking and may be late, so do eat, talk to one-another, don't be shy!” she instructed her guests, and “Mrs Baker will not mind I have no idea about baking dishes the dinner girls are supposed to be bringing what they need don't stand about get down to the village,” she hissed at me.

  “There's another guest? The stables are full,” I said.

  “She phoned last night to book she can stay in the house, there are two bedrooms empty still the staff will all fit in the attic now get going.”

  Clearly, she was not going to be of any help to me, so I did not waste my breath asking again about the ingredients I needed. Sometimes it is easier just to go along with whatever is going on.

  Chapter 3