The Judgement of Strangers. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ in twice a day during the week, and an agency nurse covered the weekends. But they were unable to do much more than look after Lady Youlgreave herself.

      The hall was T-shaped, with the stairs at the rear. I led the way into the right-hand arm of the T. I tapped on a door at the end of the corridor.

      ‘Come in, David.’ The voice was high-pitched like a child’s.

      The room had once been a dining room. When I had first come to Roth, Lady Youlgreave had asked me to dinner, and we had eaten by candlelight, facing each other across the huge mahogany table. Then as now, most of the furniture was Victorian, and designed for a larger room. We had eaten food which came out of tins and we drank a bottle of claret which should have been opened five years earlier.

      For an instant, I saw the room afresh, as if through Vanessa’s eyes. I noticed the thick grey cobwebs around the cornices, a bird’s nest among the ashes in the grate, and the dust on every horizontal surface. Time had drained most of the colour and substance from the Turkish carpet, leaving a ghostly presence on the floor. The walls were crowded with oil paintings, none of them particularly old and most of them worth less than their heavy gilt frames. The exception was the Sargent over the fireplace: it showed a large, red-faced man in tweeds, Lady Youlgreave’s father-in-law, standing beside the Rowan with his large red house in the background and a springer spaniel at his feet.

      Our hostess was sitting in an easy chair beside the window. This was where she usually passed her days. She spent her nights in the room next door, which had once been her husband’s study; she no longer used the upstairs. She had a blanket draped over her lap and a side table beside the chair. A Zimmer frame stood within arm’s reach. There were books on the side table, and also a lined pad on a clipboard. On a low stool within reach of the chair was a metal box with its lid open.

      For a moment, Lady Youlgreave stared at us as we hesitated in the doorway. It was as though she had forgotten what we were doing here. The dogs were still barking behind us, but with less conviction than before.

      ‘Shut the door and take off your coats,’ she said. ‘Put them down. Doesn’t matter where.’

      Lady Youlgreave had been a small woman to begin with, and now old age had made her even smaller. Dark eyes peered up at us from deep sockets. She was wearing a dress of some stiff material with a high collar; the dress was too large for her now, and her head poked out of the folds of the collar like a tortoise’s from its shell.

      ‘Well,’ she said. ‘This is a surprise.’

      ‘I’d like to introduce Vanessa Forde, my fiancée. Vanessa, this is Lady Youlgreave.’

      ‘How do you do. Pull up one of those chairs and sit down where I can see you.’

      I arranged two of the dining chairs for Vanessa and myself. The three of us sat in a little semi-circle in front of the window. Vanessa was nearest the box, and I noticed her glancing into its open mouth.

      Lady Youlgreave studied Vanessa with unabashed curiosity. ‘So. If you ask me, David’s luckier than he deserves.’

      Vanessa smiled and politely shook her head.

      ‘My cleaning woman tells me you’re a publisher.’

      ‘Yes – by accident really.’

      ‘I dare say you’ll be giving it up when you marry.’

      ‘No.’ Vanessa glanced at me. ‘It’s my job. In any case, the income will be important.’

      Lady Youlgreave squeezed her lips together. Then she relaxed them and said, ‘In my day, a husband supported a wife.’

      ‘I suppose I’ve grown used to supporting myself.’

      ‘And a wife supported her husband in other ways. Made a home for him.’ Unexpectedly, she laughed, a bubbling hiss from the back of her throat. ‘And in the case of a vicar’s wife, she usually ran the parish as well. You’ll have plenty to do here without going out to work.’

      ‘It’s up to Vanessa, of course,’ I said. ‘By the way, how are you feeling?’

      ‘Awful. That damned doctor keeps giving me new medicines, but all they do is bung me up and give me bad dreams.’ She waved a brown, twisted hand at the box on the stool. ‘I dreamt about that last night. I dreamt I found a dead bird inside. A goose. Told the girl I wanted it roasted for lunch. Then I saw it was crawling with maggots.’ There was another laugh. ‘That’ll teach me to go rummaging through the past.’

      ‘Is that what you’ve been doing?’ Vanessa asked. ‘In there?’

      ‘I have to do something. I never realized you can be tired and in pain and bored – all at the same time. The girl told me that the Oliphant woman had written a history of Roth. So I made her buy me a copy. Not as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ She glared at me. ‘I suppose you had a hand in it.’

      ‘Vanessa and I edited it, yes, and Vanessa saw it through the press.’

      ‘Thought so. Anyway, it made me curious. I knew there was a lot of rubbish up in the attic. Papers, and so on. George had them put up there when we moved from the other house. Said he was going to write the family history. God knows why. Literature wasn’t his line at all. Didn’t know one end of a pen from another. Anyway, he never had the opportunity. So all the rubbish just stayed up there.’

      Vanessa leant forwards. ‘Do you think you might write something yourself?’

      Lady Youlgreave held up her right hand. ‘With fingers like this?’ She let the hand drop on her lap. ‘Besides, what does it matter? It’s all over with. They’re all dead and buried. Who cares what they did or why they did it?’

      She stared out of the window at the bird table. I wondered if the morphine were affecting her mind. James Vintner had told me that he had increased the dose recently. Like the house and the dogs, their owner was sliding into decay.

      I said, ‘Vanessa’s read quite a lot of Francis Youlgreave’s verse.’

      ‘I’ve got a copy of The Four Last Things,’ Vanessa said. ‘The one with “The Judgement of Strangers” in it.’

      Lady Youlgreave stared at her for a moment. ‘There were two other collections, The Tongues of Angels and Last Poems. He published Last Poems when he was still up at Oxford. Silly man. So pretentious.’ Her eyes moved to me. ‘Pass me that book,’ she demanded. ‘The black one on the corner of the table.’

      I handed her a quarto-sized hardback notebook. The seconds ticked by while she opened it and tried to find the page she wanted. Vanessa and I looked at each other. Inside the notebook I saw yellowing paper, unlined and flecked with damp, covered with erratic lines of handwriting in brown ink.

      ‘There,’ Lady Youlgreave said at last, placing the open notebook on her side table and turning it so it was the right way up for Vanessa and me. ‘Read that.’

      The handwriting was a mass of blots and corrections. Two lines leapt out at me, however, because they were the only ones which had no alterations or blemishes:

      Then darkness descended; and whispers defiled

      The judgement of stranger, and widow, and child.

      ‘Is СКАЧАТЬ