Pictures of Perfection (23 page)

‘How soon the difference of temper in Children appears!’

Kee Scudamore had been sitting by the till when Digweed entered the Gallery.

‘You’re looking very pensive,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you found finance so enthralling.’

‘It’s money that makes the world go round,’ she said. ‘I should have thought last night’s meeting made that quite clear. This windfall Larry hinted at, have you any idea what it might be?’

‘I should have thought you were more likely to be his confidante than I,’ he answered, smiling.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked angrily.

‘Whoops. Sorry. You seem to be fond of his company, that was all I meant. Forgive me if I strayed into an impertinence.’

‘A misconception, certainly,’ she said rather bitterly. ‘I can assure you that it isn’t me he’s got his eyes on.’

‘Ah, you’ve noticed, then?’

‘Hasn’t everyone?’

‘Indeed. Has he said anything?’

‘Not in so many words, or rather, so far I’ve avoided hearing them.’

‘I see. Or rather I don’t. Why should he speak to you rather than Caddy herself? I know you are in some ways
in loco parentis
, but surely such old-fashioned notions hardly apply in this day and age, not even in clerical circles?’

‘Can’t say. You’ll need to ask Larry.’

‘Perhaps not,’ he said, regarding her thoughtfully. ‘Here’s that deed of his, by the way. Very interesting notion of yours, but as I forecast, far beyond the reach of my own rusty law. I faxed it off to a chum of mine who’s better equipped to pronounce on such things. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear. Of course, Larry might be well ahead of you in all this. Could be that this is what he was getting at last night.’

‘Yes. Perhaps.’ The idea seemed to please her. ‘I think I’ll take this back to him now and drop a hint.’

He said gently, ‘Kee, you will take care.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’m very fond of you, that’s all. Look, sometimes it seems better to plunge in, take risks, get your pain over. But pick your moment. You’ve got to carry on living afterwards, whatever happens.’

‘What on earth are you talking about, Edwin?’ she asked, very controlled.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Finance perhaps. Investment. That’s what makes the world go round, didn’t you say? Is Caddy above?’

‘Yes. You want to see her? You might tell her I’ll
be out for a while. Not that it makes the slightest difference!’

‘No. I don’t suppose it does,’ said Digweed.

He ran lightly up the stairs and went straight into the studio without knocking. Caddy was standing in front of her portrait of Wield, studying it critically.

‘Good Lord,’ said Digweed. ‘Is that who I think it is? Of course it is, there can’t be two like that!’

‘Hi, Edwin,’ she said. ‘There’s something missing.’

‘Indeed. And from your Crucifixion still, I see. Have you decided whose face is going to plug that gap?’

‘Whoever fits,’ she said vaguely. ‘Was there something special you wanted?’

‘Just to say, that cover business, it’s all finished now. All loose ends tied up. OK?’

‘If you say so,’ she said indifferently.

‘I do. Caddy, exactly what is it you’re trying to paint here?’

His gaze had moved from the oval blank above the shapely torso to the background. By a trick of compression, Scarletts had been relocated just below the school. Halavant, accompanied by Fop, from whose jaws dangled a scrap of bloodstained cloth, was looking towards the Green where the builder Phil Wallop, previously imaged standing triumphantly next to a cement mixer, had been over-painted to a pale shadow, but his check-trousered legs could now be seen bright and fresh, waving from the mixer’s mouth.

‘What I see,’ she said. ‘Or maybe time. The way one thing takes the place of another, but nothing ever really goes away. Not here anyway. But it’s not right either. It’s so easy to miss things, isn’t it?’

She was back in front of Wield’s portrait.

Digweed said encouragingly, ‘Honestly, it’s fine. Such a strange face. God, I’d not like to play poker with him!’

‘Yes, I think he’s a man who uses silences like you use words …’

She let the sentence hang, then began to laugh.

‘That’s it. Of course. Thank you, Edwin.’

‘For what?’ he asked. Then bewilderment turned to incredulity as he looked from her face to Wield’s and back again.

‘Caddy, if you’re saying what I think, well, that’s absurd …’

‘Of course, but isn’t everything? So that’s all right.’

She picked up her brush and palette and approached the painting. Her foot kicked over a half-f mug of cold coffee but she didn’t notice as she began to attack Wield’s eyes.

Digweed left. There was little point in staying. As he crossed the street he noticed the three policemen gathered outside the Post Office. Perhaps, he thought uncharitably, they’d caught Wylmot fiddling the postal orders.

He hurried into his shop and up the stairs into the computer room. Hardly had he entered when the bell on the shop door sounded.

‘Damn,’ he said, going out on to the landing and looking down the stairs.

‘’Morning,’ said Wield. ‘No, don’t come down. I’ll come up. I’ve got something for you.’

He mounted the steep stairs two at a time. On the landing he paused and sniffed. There was a pleasantly pungent, rather spicy smell in the air.

‘Not interrupting a meal, am I?’ he said.

‘As you’ve just seen me come in, and as it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning, it’s hardly likely,’ said Digweed with all his old acidity. Then, immediately relenting, he added in a friendlier tone, ‘It’s that tiny kitchen of mine. Cooking smells seem to hang around forever. Come in here.’

He led the way into the computer room and threw open a window.

‘There. Now we can smell the spring. Isn’t it a lovely day? Always is for the Reckoning, of course. Now, how can I help you?’

‘You can confirm that these are yours,’ said Wield, handing over the books.

‘Yes, indeed, these are they. Well done. Where did you find them?’

‘In Jason Toke’s bedroom,’ said Wield.

‘Ah yes. That poor boy. I’d begun to wonder … I’d seen him in here looking at
The Warrior
and other military books. The Thorburn too … but it was the Renoir catalogue that threw me. Where is it, by the way?’

‘Still in his possession, I’m afraid. It wasn’t for himself. He stole it to give to Caddy Scudamore.’

‘Of course. He’s besotted. The poor child.’

‘Him or her?’

‘Jason, of course. I think on closer acquaintance you’ll find it hardly a description which applies to Caddy. Look, Sergeant, I really don’t want to burden the lad with more trouble than his own mind creates for him. I shall not be pressing charges.’

Wield frowned and said, ‘You may not be doing him a favour. Court appearance could put these obsessions of his in striking distance of a psychiatrist.’

‘You think he needs treatment? For being in love and reckoning that Britain in the ’nineties is a dangerously uncivilized place to live? Tut, man. By those criteria, I suspect fifty per cent of the population are sick!’

‘Fifty per cent of the population aren’t obsessed with guns and survival techniques,’ said Wield. ‘But you must make your own mind up. I doubt if we tie him in with the Post Office job, Mr Wylmot will feel so generous.’

‘Jason and the Post Office? But that’s simply absurd!’ protested Digweed.

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Wield.

‘Well, I don’t know, it just seems so. I mean, you didn’t find anything at Intake Cottage to suggest a connection, did you?’

‘No,’ admitted Wield. ‘Same m.o., but. Any road, sir, no need to bother you with that. Oh, by the
way, thanks again for last night. The book, the bourbon, the thought. It were right kind. I really enjoyed it.’

‘Me too,’ said Digweed, offering, rather to Wield’s surprise, his hand. Mebbe this was how the middle classes acknowledged you weren’t a yob all the way through. His hand was cool and dry, his grip firm.

‘Sergeant …’

‘Yes?’

‘Perhaps I could call and collect my glasses later?’

‘Sorry, I forgot all about them. Yes, sure. Or I’ll bring them down here.’

He went out on to the landing. The spicy smell seemed stronger than ever. The door into the tiny kitchen was ajar, but the smell didn’t seem to emanate from there. And it was surely more herby than spicy.

Wield’s nose was twitching in a very odd direction, both olfactorily and metaphorically.

He said, ‘OK if I use your lav?’

And without waiting for an answer he went through the half-open door of the bathroom. He knew he was right straight away. This was the source of the herbal smell; more precisely, a tall wall cupboard.

He pulled its door open. It housed the hot water cylinder with a couple of shelves for airing clothes. He pushed aside a pile of underpants.

There it was, hard against the side of the hot
tank, the source of the tell-tale aroma, a small parcel bearing a Wimbledon address and almost certainly containing the slice of herb pudding Mrs Hogbin sent to her nephew every week. There was a packet addressed to a mail order firm, that would be Mrs Stacey’s cardigan. And two harder packets clearly containing books. And half a dozen envelopes.

Why should Digweed have turned burglar to retrieve his own books? Then one of the names on the book packets jumped up and hit him in the eye.

Ms Eleanor Pascoe.

He turned with the packages in his hands.

‘I think I’d better see if I can find some more bourbon,’ said Edwin Digweed.

‘I tell you everything, and it is unknown the Mysteries you conceal from me.’

Larry Lillingstone sat with his dusty records strewn all before him, but his inward eye was focused on the annals of his own pastorship, and the result was far from blissful.

‘Larry, one of these days I’m going to catch you doing something deeply embarrassing,’ said Kee from the open french window.

‘Kee, I’m sorry. I was miles away.’

‘Metaphysically, I presume?’

‘Physically too, soon. I don’t think it’ll be long before Enscombe and I part company.’

‘Good Lord. I think I’d better sit down.’

She came forward with her easy grace, slipped into a wheelback chair and regarded him expectantly.

‘I’ve asked to see the Bishop next week,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time I moved on.’

‘But you’ve only been here two minutes.’

‘I suppose in Enscombe terms that’s all that six months amounts to,’ he said. ‘But man proposes, God disposes. Kee, I was just going to have a coffee. Let me get you one.’

‘No, really, I’d rather …’ But Lillingstone was already out of the room. She heard his footsteps go down the flagged corridor into the kitchen, then emerge and run lightly up the stairs. Perhaps he really needed to go to the loo and some clerical modesty forbade him from saying so. But there was no distant flushing of water as the footsteps descended like a
Goon Show
sound effect, diminishing into the kitchen once more, and finally crescendoing back to the study.

‘Coffee,’ he said, handing her a mug. ‘Was there something special you wanted to see me about?’

‘No. Just to return this,’ she said, laying the Deed of Gift on the table. ‘But while I’m here … What you said last night at the meeting, about perhaps something coming up which could save the school, it didn’t have anything to do with the vicarage, did it?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked almost angrily.

‘Just that with the vicarage being up for sale …’

‘Oh, you don’t imagine you’ll get any money out of the Church Commissioners, do you?’ he mocked. ‘They’ve got the cost accountants in too.’

‘No, it wasn’t that, it was something quite different. But it will keep. As, apparently, will your ray of hope.’

She made to rise and he said abruptly, ‘It’s Caddy.’

‘I’m sorry? You mean Caddy is going to save the school? Or Caddy is your reason for leaving?’

He laughed a little wildly and said, ‘Both, perhaps. Or neither.’

She regarded him with irritation, herself with more. She didn’t want to talk about his feelings for Caddy, had consciously avoided his previous attempt to broach the subject. Left to himself he would probably make his play, get brushed off with that indifference which was more hurtful than dislike, be broken-hearted, then recover. But the idiot wanted an audience! It was Kee’s belief that there is no obstacle to intimacy greater than a shared secret. And she wanted to be intimate with this man. Upstairs, downstairs, indoors, outdoors, in sickness and in health intimate!

She ought to get out now.

He said, ‘Kee, I need to talk about Caddy …’

She fixed him with her wide candid gaze and said, ‘No need, Larry. I’ve seen Caddy drive enough men to irrational behaviour to recognize the symptoms.’

‘Men. Which men?’ he asked indignantly.

Time to bring him down from his romantic heights.

She said, ‘Justin Halavant, for instance.’

‘I’d have thought assaulting young women was far from irrational in his scheme of things,’ said the Vicar contemptuously.

‘Champagne, silk sheets and a light scatter of rose petals are more in his line than a quick bonk on a draughty staircase next to a roomful of people whose good opinion he values,’ said Kee.

Surprise made him consider this unexpected defence, and for the first time since he’d heard the story of Halavant’s repulse, Lillingstone felt a tendril of sympathy trail across his mind.

He brushed it aside and said heavily, ‘I love her.’

‘Oh,
love
,’ she said, smiling faintly. ‘Where does that leave us? For some reason you haven’t declared your passion (nice word that, both exact and euphemistic), perhaps because you have very reasonable doubts whether Caddy would make a satisfactory clerical helpmeet, or perhaps because you’ve got a mad first wife already locked up in the attic.’

She glanced up at the ceiling in mock suspicion, and down at Lillingstone in mock surprise as with perfect timing a floorboard creaked.

‘I love the way old houses join in conversations,’ she said, trying to lighten things.

‘We are talking about your sister,’ he said, unresponsively.

‘So we are.’ Time to take the plunge. ‘Larry, your comfort, if comfort there can be, must be that you’re right if you think Caddy wouldn’t make a satisfactory wife for a vicar. Nor for almost anyone. Nor incidentally a satisfactory live-in or live-out mistress, if your thoughts stray in that direction.’

‘You’re very blunt,’ he said coldly. ‘Frightened of losing a sister, or a meal ticket, I wonder?’

‘Oh dear, it’s bad enough for rudeness, is it?’
said Kee. ‘I only wish there were anything I could do which might be of comfort to you. All I can give is that coldest of advice, that you should exert yourself to forget her. I’m sorry.’

‘Exert myself?’ he cried, spiralling into melodrama in an effort to hide the true depth of his feelings. ‘How easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! But as I’ve told you, I shall probably be exerting myself out of Enscombe in the very near future. I hope that will satisfy you.’

‘No, I didn’t come here in search of any such satisfaction,’ she said, rising. ‘And to tell the truth, I’m not all that keen to hear you rabbiting on about your feelings for my sister. Thanks for the coffee, which incidentally was cold.’

‘Oh shit,’ said Lillingstone. ‘Kee, I’m sorry. I’m a pompous twerp, aren’t I? And that crack about a meal ticket was unforgivable. We all know how much Caddy relies on you to give her space to work. I’m sorry. Forgive me?’

‘Forgiving’s easy. It’s understanding that’s hard,’ she said. ‘You say that man proposes, God disposes. So why don’t you carry out your part of the arrangement? Go and see Caddy and propose to her – marriage, anything you will! That way at least you’ll get your pain over and I won’t find myself having to present my sister as some kind of monster.’

He shook his head and said helplessly, ‘I wish it was so easy.’

‘I can’t see how it can be any easier unless you do it by fax,’ she said.

‘The point is I can’t do it at all,’ he said. ‘The thing is, I’ve taken a vow of celibacy.’

He spoke with a rather defiant pride, deriving from his sense that while a pact with the Deity certainly demanded a modicum of reverential awe, it also had about it an inescapable whiff of absurdity.

Kee looked neither awestruck nor amused, merely puzzled.

‘Good Lord,’ she said. ‘Does this mean you’re a closet Catholic or something?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just an Anglican who may have bitten off more than he can chew.’

‘In that case, can’t you get out of it? The papers seem full of priests who’ve jilted the Pope in favour of a good woman.’

‘It’s probably easier when you’re taking on a whole system,’ said Lillingstone glumly.

‘Ah, I see. In your case it’s your own conscience you’re up against and that carries a lot more weight than a mere trifle like the authority of the Holy Catholic Church!’

‘Now hold on,’ he said, growing angry. ‘This is my faith we’re talking about …’

‘I don’t think so. I think it’s your ego,’ said Kee, angry in her turn. ‘Makes you feel good, does it? More perfect than the rest of us? But you can’t stop feeling randy, so you decide, if you can’t have Caddy, next best thing is a little heart to heart with
me. Vicarious sex, how apt! But I’m not into that game, Larry. What you need is another chap in a skirt on the other side of a grille.’

She made for the window. He went after her, saying, ‘Please, Kee, don’t go like this. I don’t know where I am, I need to talk …’

‘Then talk to your Leader up there!’ cried Kee, pointing satirically at the ceiling.

And once again with perfect timing there came a noise. But no creaking board this time. A distinct crash, as something fell and shattered, and a voice letting out an angry ‘Oh bug …’ hastily cut off.

‘There’s someone up there,’ said Kee. ‘All this talk of vows and celibacy, and you’ve got someone stowed away up in your bedroom!’

‘No, really, it’s not … it’s no one …’

‘No one? This I just have to see.’

Before he could stop her, she was past him, out of the room and racing up the stairs.

He followed, protesting, but there was no chance of catching her. By the time he reached the landing she was flinging open the bedroom door. And stopping dead in her tracks.

She didn’t know what she expected, she only knew this was far, far worse.