The Judgement of Strangers. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ tail flew through the open doors into the library and settled on the edge of the metal rubbish bin. Lorries ground their way down the main road. The heat was oppressive.

      Audrey snorted, making a sound like steam squirting from a valve, relieving the pressure of her invisible boiler. She turned and dropped the novels she was carrying on to the trolley for returned books.

      ‘I’ve got a headache,’ she said. ‘Not that any of you need concern yourselves about it. I shall go home and rest.’

      Mrs Finch and Vanessa began to speak at once.

      ‘My mother always said that a cold flannel and a darkened room …’ began Mrs Finch.

      Vanessa said, ‘I’m so sorry. Is there anything we …?’

      Both women stopped talking in mid-sentence because Audrey clearly wasn’t listening, and had no intention of listening. She walked very quickly out of the library. I noticed that her dress was stained with sweat under the armpits. In a moment, the doorway was empty. I stared through it at the green beyond, at the main road, the tower of the church and the oaks of Roth Park. I heard the faint but unmistakable sound of a wolf whistle. I wondered if one of the youths were baiting Audrey as she scurried round the green to the sanctuary of Tudor Cottage.

      ‘That’ll be one shilling, Mrs Byfield.’ Mrs Finch held out her hand for the reservation card. ‘Five pence. We’ll do our best, of course, but I can’t guarantee anything. The stock editor decides which books we buy. He may not think this is suitable.’

      Vanessa smiled at Mrs Finch and gallantly resisted the temptation to reply. A moment later, she and I walked back along the south side of the green towards the Vicarage.

      ‘Is Audrey often like that?’ she asked.

      ‘She gets very involved with the fete.’ I felt I had to explain Audrey to Vanessa, even to apologize for her. ‘It’s the high point of the year for her.’

      ‘I wonder why.’ Vanessa glanced up at me. ‘Tell me, is she normally so irritable?’

      I felt uncomfortable. ‘She did seem a little tetchy.’

      ‘I wonder how old she is. Getting on for fifty? Do you think she might be going through the menopause?’

      ‘I suppose it’s possible. Why?’

      ‘It would explain a great deal.’

      ‘Yes.’ I was in fact unclear what the change of life could mean for a woman. I put on speed, as if trying to walk away from this faintly unsavoury topic. ‘But was she really acting so unusually? She did say she had a headache.’

      ‘David.’ Vanessa put a hand on my arm, forcing me to stop and look at her. ‘You’ve known Audrey for so long that I don’t think you realize how odd she is.’

      ‘Surely not.’

      We moved on to the main road. We waited for a gap in the traffic.

      ‘I’d better look in on her this evening,’ I said. ‘See how she is.’

      ‘I wouldn’t. Fuel to feed the flame.’

      ‘Flame? Don’t be silly.’

      In silence, we crossed the road and went into the drive of the Vicarage.

      ‘It’s not that I want to see her this evening,’ I went on, wondering if Vanessa might conceivably be jealous. ‘People like Audrey are part of my job.’

      Vanessa thrust her key into the lock of the front door. ‘You sometimes sound such a prig.’

      I stared at her. This was the nearest we had ever come to a quarrel. It was the first time that either of us had spoken critically to the other.

      Vanessa pushed open the door. The telephone was ringing in the study. When I picked up the receiver, the news I heard pushed both Audrey’s problems and my squabble with Vanessa into the background.

       12

      When I was a child I had a jigsaw with nearly a thousand pieces, intricately shaped. Some of them had been cut into the shapes of objects which were entirely unrelated to the subject of the picture.

      I remember a cocktail glass lying on its side in the blue of the sky, and a stork standing upside down in the foliage of an oak tree. A rifle with a telescopic sight was concealed in a door. Not that I knew that it was a door at the outset, or that the stork was in an oak tree. The point about the jigsaw was that a picture had not been supplied with it. Only by assembling the pieces could one discover what the subject was. Since much of the picture consisted of sky, trees, grass and road, it was not until a relatively late stage in the assembly that you realized that the jigsaw showed a Pickwickian stagecoach drawing up outside a country inn with a thatched roof.

      The analogy may seem laboured, but something very similar happened in Roth during 1970. One by one, the pieces dropped into place. My marriage to Vanessa, for example. The History of Roth. The preparations for the fete. The sudden departure of the Bramleys from Roth Park. Peter Hudson’s preferment. Lord Peter’s inability to stay away from the Vicarage. Lady Youlgreave’s belated interest in her husband’s relations. Vanessa’s long-standing interest in the poetry of Francis Youlgreave.

      All these and more. Slowly the picture – or rather its components – came together. And one of the pieces was my godson Michael.

      The telephone call on that August afternoon was from Henry Appleyard. He had been offered the chance of a lucrative four-week lecture tour in the United States, filling in for a speaker who had cancelled at the last moment.

      ‘I’m flying out the day after tomorrow, from Heathrow,’ he said. ‘I wondered if I could look in for lunch?’

      ‘Of course you can. When’s your flight?’

      ‘In the evening.’

      ‘Are all of you coming?’

      ‘Just me, I’m afraid.’

      The organizers had offered to pay his wife’s travel expenses as well, I gathered, but she had to stay to look after Michael.

      ‘Can’t you leave him with someone?’

      ‘It’s such short notice. His schoolfriends are all on holiday, too.’

      ‘He could stay with us. If he wouldn’t find us too dull.’

      ‘It’s too much of an imposition.’

      ‘Why? He’s my godson. But would he be lonely?’

      ‘I wouldn’t worry about that. He’s quite a self-contained boy.’

      ‘Rosemary will be home in a few days, so at least he’d have someone nearer his own age. And our doctor has a boy of eleven.’

      ‘It still seems too much to ask.’

      ‘Why don’t I have a word with Vanessa and СКАЧАТЬ