The Sibyl in Her Grave Read online

  The party was intended to celebrate the recent refurbishment of his flat in Grafton Street. His guests had been called upon to admire in particular the oak-panelled cupboards and bookcases, Jacobean in style, which concealed the collection of filing cabinets, computers, printers, fax machines and other impedimenta nowadays considered indispensable to the pursuit of learning. The craftsman responsible for designing and building them, a young man by the name of Terry Carver, had naturally been the guest of honour.

  Congratulating Terry Carver on his achievement, Ragwort had been inspired to ask whether he might be interested in carrying out a similar scheme of refurbishment at 62 New Square.

  “So Terry came round to Lincoln’s Inn,” said Selena, “and measured things and took photographs and so on and seemed rather excited at the idea—he said he was thinking Inigo Jones.”

  “Inigo Jones?” I said. “Isn’t that rather early for New Square?”

  This comment, however, being thought unconstructive, I hastily withdrew it.

  “And in due course he sent us some drawings, showing how we could have as many showers and computer terminals as we liked and at the same time look like a set of Chambers where Lord Nottingham’s just invented the Rule against Perpetuities. We showed them to Basil and the others, and they were even more impressed than we’d hoped.”

  “Absolutely knocked sideways,” said Cantrip. “And couldn’t wait to get started.”

  “So they did us the great honour,” said Ragwort, looking at the ceiling, “of entrusting us with the organisation of the project.”

  “Well, yes,” said Selena. “Because it was clear, of course, that someone was going to have to do a good deal of work to make it all happen, and whatever anyone says about the senior members of our Chambers, no one’s ever said they were stupid. So we’ve had a rather exhausting few months, drawing up specifications and getting permission from the Inn and inviting tenders and so on. But we’ve finally got it all sorted out, and the builders are starting work at the end of next month.”

  “My dear Selena,” I said, “you sound as if you thought that once the builders arrive your troubles will be over. That is not the universal experience.”

  “Well, there’ll obviously be a certain amount of noise and mess while they’re actually there. But they’ve promised to finish by the end of the Long Vacation, so it shouldn’t be too disruptive.”

  She leant back and drank her wine, with the serene contentment of a young woman who has agreed on a satisfactory estimate and a convenient timetable, and has never had builders in before.

  “It sounds,” I said, “as if this young man Terry Carver were very much the lynch pin of your enterprise. Are you sure he’s reliable?”

  “He does have one or two little failings,” said Selena.

  “His tendency, for example, to flutter his eyelashes in a way that distracts Julia from her Finance Act. And of course his habit of falling on one’s clients from the top of ladders. What one has to remember is that he’s good at making bookcases.”

  “According to Benjamin,” said Ragwort, “he is not only one of the finest craftsmen in London but extremely dependable.”

  Knowing that Benjamin, in the matter of eyelashes, is almost as susceptible as Julia, I feared that his judgment might not be entirely objective; but I felt that this too might be thought an unconstructive comment.

  Julia joined us soon afterwards, with apologies for her lateness. She had received another letter from her aunt, evidently posted on the way to a further interview with the young man from the Revenue: she had been trying to telephone to learn the outcome, but had found Mrs. Sheldon’s number constantly engaged.

  “I don’t suppose,” said Selena, “that her letter happens to say anything about those shares?”

  “A certain amount,” said Julia. “Would you like me to read it to you over lunch?”

  “Well …” said Selena, looking doubtfully in my direction. She has the curious notion that no one but a fellow member of the Bar can be trusted with a confidence.

  I explained to her, as I have already to my readers, that by the purest chance the identity of her client was no longer a secret from me. She gave me a rather sideways look; but with various admonitions unnecessary to repeat she resigned herself to relying on my discretion.

  24 High Street

  Parsons Haver

  West Sussex

  Monday, 21st June

  Dear Julia,

  There is something rather odd, if I may say so, about the tone of your letter—almost as if you thought I’d been doing something wrong. All I’ve done is buy some shares and sell them again—are you going through one of your Socialist phases? If so, do write and tell Ariadne—she’ll be so pleased.

  But I’m very glad, of course, that you don’t think I have to pay the beastly young man three thousand pounds. I’ve made an appointment to see him this afternoon, to explain about the shares belonging partly to Maurice and Griselda, and they’re both coming round to supper afterwards to hear what he says. We all think you’ve been most helpful, and we’re planning to take you to lunch at the best restaurant in West Sussex next time you’re down here.

  So I hope you won’t think it too ungrateful of me to say that if you don’t mind I’d much rather not ask Ricky where he got his information from about the shares. The thing is, you see, that I’m not at all pleased with Ricky at the moment, and I don’t want to do anything to make him think that I’ve stopped not being pleased.

  You may say, I suppose, that it’s unreasonable of me to be not pleased with him. I know he was only advising us as a friend, in exchange for a few drinks, and perhaps one couldn’t expect it all to be confidential in the same way as if one got advice from a solicitor or someone like that. Well, Julia, I don’t care what you say, I still don’t think it’s right for him to go babbling about our affairs to all and sundry.

  When I say all and sundry, I mean Isabella del Comino, as she calls herself, though I doubt if that’s the name on her birth certificate, or on her marriage certificate, if she has such a thing. Which I dare say she has—men can be complete idiots sometimes.

  So far as I know, you’ve never met Isabella. If you have, it certainly wasn’t at my house. She lives at the Old Rectory, on the other side of the churchyard, which she bought two or three years ago from rather good friends of mine. They didn’t find it an easy house to sell—it’s one of those rambling Victorian places that cost a fortune to heat and maintain properly. The Church Commissioners very sensibly sold it a long time ago, and kept the little house opposite as the Vicarage. And though it’s quite a handsome building in its way, I always feel there’s something rather cold and forbidding about it—an estate agent would say that there’s a fine view of the church, but one can’t help thinking of it as a view of the graveyard.

  My friends had made all kinds of improvements to it. They’d turned the ground-floor rooms at the back into one long drawing room, with French windows all the way along opening into a big conservatory, and a colour scheme of honeys and apricots. And from there one went into the garden—oh, Julia, it’s a shame if you never saw the garden. Griselda had laid it out in an Elizabethan sort of style, using a design in an old book Maurice had given her, and gone to endless trouble to get the right plants for it. I found some antique statues and urns and things, and we all felt we’d made it into something rather special. Griselda looked after it practically as if it were her own—she has quite a good view of it from the roof of her potting shed, so she could always see when something needed doing.

  My friends sold the house without ever actually meeting the purchaser. I suppose she must have come down and looked over it before she bought it, but no one seemed to have seen her. Even after she’d bought it, she didn’t move in straightaway, and there were signs that she was having a good deal of building work done—plumbers’ and electricians’ vans outside the house, and sounds of hammering and drilling. So everyone was beginning to be rather curious about her.
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br />   And then, one morning when I was sitting in the antique shop, Griselda came running in, as white as a sheet, and said there were men at the Rectory levelling the garden.

  I could hardly believe it at first, but of course I went back with her to see what was happening, and it was true, they were—just taking a bulldozer across it, destroying everything.

  I managed to discourage her from climbing over the wall and lying down in front of the bulldozer—Griselda can be rather physical sometimes—and called out to the man in charge to ask him what he thought they were doing. His answer wasn’t at all polite, but I explained to him that we simply didn’t want him to get into trouble for destroying plants which might turn out to be valuable. Anyway, I offered him thirty pounds for the ones that were left and he ended by agreeing to fifty, on the understanding that we’d have to remove them that day.

  So we spent the day frantically digging up plants in the Rectory garden and running back with them to Griselda’s potting shed. Fortunately, it was one of the days when Mrs. Tyrrell comes to clean for me, so there were three of us to do it, and by midnight we’d rescued pretty well everything that we minded most about—all the rose trees, and the plants from the physic garden. We shared them out between the three of us and gave some to Maurice. At fifty pounds they were really rather a bargain—some of them were quite valuable—but of course it didn’t make up for the garden being destroyed.

  The next day they flattened it completely, and began to put up something that involved concrete posts and a lot of wire mesh. We couldn’t work out what it was—Griselda said it looked like a cage.

  Two or three weeks later there were signs of someone being in occupation, though no one had actually seen her arrive—not even Maurice, whose study looks straight out onto the front drive of the Rectory. But there were lights on in the evening, and the postman said he’d started to deliver letters there.

  We’re very informal down here in Haver—we don’t go in for visiting cards and so forth—but when someone new moves in we usually put a note through the door, introducing ourselves and inviting them to ring us if they need help with anything. So I wrote a short letter along those lines—no, Julia, it was not mere curiosity—and walked across to the Rectory to deliver it. And just as I was putting it in the letter box, the door suddenly opened and I found myself facing a fat, pale woman with fat, black ringlets.

  When I say that she was fat, I don’t so much mean that she was of enormous size but that she gave the impression of being made of fat, all the way through, with no underlying framework of bone or muscle—which, of course, isn’t actually possible. She had a rather ugly, squashed button sort of nose—I suppose when she was young people would have called it retroussé—and very small black eyes, like currants in a suet pudding. She was wearing a long black velvet caftan, of the kind one can buy cheaply in Tangier or expensively in Knightsbridge—it might have been rather elegant, if it hadn’t shown so many signs of her being a rather careless eater.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Sheldon, how nice of you to call,” she said. “Won’t you come in and have a glass of sherry?”

  That looks, when one writes it down, like quite a normal and pleasant thing to say, but it didn’t sound like that. There was something gloating, almost sinister, about the way she said it—as if my name were a secret she’d been very clever to find out and could use against me in some way.

  I accepted, naturally, and she led me through to the conservatory. As we went in, she said, “I hope you don’t mind birds?”

  Well, as it happens, I do rather. When they’re flying about in the open air, I don’t mind them at all, but in a confined space with them I get an absurd sense of panic, like you with spiders. I know it’s completely irrational, but that doesn’t stop me feeling it.

  But of course I said, “Not in the least,” and followed her into the drawing room.

  She had had it entirely redecorated, no doubt at great expense. The walls were covered with a heavily embossed wallpaper—black. The ceiling and woodwork had been repainted—black. There were thick black velvet curtains, and the floor was tiled in black marble. Poor woman, I suppose she’d expected it to look very dramatic, but of course, with nothing there to provide contrast, the effect was simply dreary.

  I saw at once that Griselda had been perfectly right about the cage. The conservatory and the area beyond it had been turned into an aviary, now occupied by a flock of ravens—I don’t know how many exactly, but there must have been at least a dozen. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the French windows had been closed, with the ravens safely on the far side—but they were open, and the horrible creatures were flapping and hopping about the drawing room as if they owned the place. The worst of it was, though, that when they weren’t moving they were more or less invisible against the black background—I thought that at any moment I might accidentally brush against one. I began, I’m afraid, to feel rather sick, and almost to wish I hadn’t come.

  She poured me a tumblerful of sherry—such an excessive amount that I couldn’t think of it as generous, but more as a device to make me stay longer than I might have chosen—and invited me to sit down. Which I did, with considerable caution, on one of three chaises longues—I need hardly say, upholstered in black—which provided the seating accommodation.

  The room was quite sparsely furnished—I couldn’t tell whether from choice, or because she hadn’t finished unpacking. There were no pictures or ornaments or books. Or, rather, just one book—it looked like one of those old family Bibles, so big you can hardly lift them. Isabella seemed to regard it as an object of interest, or even veneration—she’d put it on its own in a display cabinet at the far end of the room from where we were sitting. I resisted the temptation to ask for a closer look at it—the rest of that end of the room was in deep shadow, which I suspected of harbouring still more of the beastly ravens.

  She asked me what I thought of her colour scheme. I said that it was interesting.

  “Ah,” she said, “I didn’t think it would be quite to your taste.” She said it with a smile which suggested that her taste was bold and adventurous, while mine was timidly conventional.

  “Black’s such a difficult colour,” I said, “if one isn’t an experienced designer.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, “I know you’re the village expert on design.”

  “That’s a far too flattering description,” I said. “I haven’t worked seriously as a designer since I lived in Paris.”

  Our conversation might have been more memorable if my attention hadn’t been distracted all the time by the flappings and cawings of the birds. Not much more memorable, though, because Isabella is one of those tiresome people who enjoy being mysterious about themselves. Trying to show a polite degree of interest in her, I asked if she had any special reason for choosing Parsons Haver for her retirement—she seemed of the sort of age to have recently retired, though from what profession one wouldn’t have cared to speculate.

  “Oh,” she said, “I haven’t exactly retired.” And she gave a wouldn’t-you-like-to-know little smile, as if knowing her occupation were my dearest wish and I would beg her to tell me.

  In case you happen to be tormented by curiosity on the subject, I found out later that the profession from which she had “not exactly retired” was what I would call fortune-telling, but I gather is nowadays called psychic counselling. On this occasion, though, I didn’t ask her any more questions about herself but simply invited her to ask me anything she’d like to know about shops and buses and so forth. I did also mention that if she wanted anyone to clean for her, I could thoroughly recommend Mrs. Tyrrell—Mrs. Tyrrell is a single mother, and I thought she might be pleased to do a few extra hours.

  “Oh no, thank you,” she said. “Women of that class are such gossips, aren’t they?” Women of that class indeed—some people are enough to turn anyone Socialist. “Anyway, I have my niece to do that sort of thing.”

  “Oh really?” I said, rather surprised to hear that
there was another member of the household, and wondering where she was. “How nice for you to have such a devoted niece. I’m afraid mine’s far too busy with her practice at the Bar to come and do my housework for me.”

  “Oh yes, I’d heard you had a clever niece,” said Isabella. “Daphne’s not clever. She isn’t really my niece, she’s my cousin’s daughter. Still, her mother was more like a sister to me than my damn sister’s ever been, so when she died I had to take over Daphne.” She talked as if the girl were a servant—not that anyone has servants nowadays and even when they did no well-bred person would have talked about them like that—as if she were some kind of object which Isabella owned.

  I said that, whatever the relationship, I looked forward to meeting her.

  “Oh, you can see her now, if you like,” said Isabella, and shouted “Daphne, come here,” like a man calling a dog. A man one wouldn’t much like, to a dog he enjoyed ill-treating.

  There was a noise of something breaking in the kitchen, and a girl came in—an awkward, skinny little thing, all knees and elbows, somewhere in her early twenties. Not, I have to say, at all a pretty girl—lank brown hair, a poor complexion, a rather receding chin and overprominent front teeth. She had quite large brown eyes, which should have been her best feature, but very listless and watery looking—do always remember, Julia, that the expression “bright with unshed tears” is a most misleading one. Still, I’ve seen women with fewer natural advantages persuade half London that they were irresistible—a little makeup and a little animation can do wonders.

  “Daphne,” said Isabella, “this is Mrs. Sheldon, who’s kindly come to see how we’re getting on—say ‘How do you do’ to her.”

  The poor girl obediently stammered the words out and then stood jiggling about from one foot to the other, pushing down her skirt with the palms of her hands as if she were hoping to make it cover her knees. It was certainly far too short—I mean, the sort of length one should only wear if one has very nice legs and is wearing pretty underwear—and looked like something she had had in her teens and grown out of. As her hands were moist and not very clean, all she achieved was to make the skirt even grubbier than it already was.