The Anderson Question Read online

  Bel Mooney

  The Anderson Question

  Contents

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  Part One

  A bird, hovering high above the Quantock hills, would not have been alarmed by the car’s progress. Very, very slowly, as if the driver were unsure of his route, or perhaps overanxious about the suspension, the blue Ford Escort turned off the narrow road and began its ascent, bumping over ruts in the track, and tussocks of coarse grass. There was a plateau about two hundred yards up from the empty road. In the centre an Ordnance Survey post surrounded by fluttering scraps of paper testified to the popularity of this as a picnic place. From this height you could see the Bristol Channel gleaming coldly in the distance; a dull silver sheen on the surface of sluggish water lit by shafts of light escaping from low cloud. It was mid-May, but a cold spring. There were no walkers in sight, because it was Monday afternoon; the gulls wheeling in the distance were the only things that moved, except for the crawling blue car.

  Reaching the plateau, an obvious place to stop, the car continued its slow uneven journey, turning slightly to the right and heading for a clump of bushes and low trees that were bent into uncomfortable ugly shapes by the strong winds off the coast. For a second it looked as if it might be stuck; it rocked and dipped as the driver increased the speed a fraction to skirt the trees. The ground grew rougher, and with increasing difficulty the driver swung the car round, then reversed so that its rear end was jammed into the heart of the thicket, the whole vehicle thus concealed from the plateau and the road below.

  There was silence. It was ten minutes before the driver’s door opened, and a man in a brown tweed suit got out. He reached into the back seat, and took out a small and battered leather case, with the deliberate air of a business man about to attend an important meeting. The briskness of his movements was strange, after the car’s hesitancy. He locked the door and pocketed the keys with something like a flourish, then stood still, looking around him and staring briefly up at the sky. A kestrel hovering above, the studied arabesques of the gulls nearer the coast, and a low, almost imperceptible background noise of rustling and twittering and dripping all around – this evidence of life seemed to please him, and he nodded, as if agreeing with an unseen companion. Then he strode off across the springy grass and heather with long and confident strides, not looking to right or left, heading for a place where the ground caved away into a hollow, but from where you could still glimpse the gleam of water in the distance. There, with no picnic, he sat down.

  Sheila Simmonds clicked her tongue and looked at her watch for what seemed like the fiftieth time, irritated by the nine pairs of eyes that were fixed on her in mute questioning. ‘He’s late,’ she said to no one in particular, and nobody responded, but Mrs Osmond’s baby began to beat its hands and cry upon her knee. A fat woman tutted and shook her head, ‘I can’t understand it, I really can’t. Not like him at all …’ The voice tailed off as she caught the receptionist’s eye, staring fiercely, and the woman leaned forward and buried her face in a tattered magazine from the pile on the low centre table. There was a sound in the room of pages being turned, punctuated by weak wails from the baby, and again Sheila Simmonds glanced at her watch and frowned.

  Jack Ainslie spread out his broad, calloused hands, crisscrossed with a tracery of darker brown lines where the soil of Winterstoke had worked its way into his skin. Dr Anderson’s garden, Mr Hartley’s wild half-acre, the Misses Ryans’ smooth lawn and rose beds, even the ancient churchyard – he knew them all, and took great pleasure in transplanting little cuttings from one to another, so that all the gardens he tended were linked by new growth in common. Jack read the weather, and watched what everybody did in the village, without saying very much at all, and knew that he was respected by the smallest child in the village school because he was rooted there, the last member of the oldest Winterstoke family. The only thing that confused him, keeping him awake at night with frantic questioning, was why Todd had come in the first place, only to be taken away again. He looked down at his hands and sighed, and the buried splinter throbbed within his thumb. ‘Well, all these years an’ I’ve never known him to be late, not ever,’ he said aloud at last. There was a murmur of agreement.

  Sheila compressed her lips, to hide the panic she felt in her chest, and she rearranged the case cards in front of her, as if by laying them out in a parody of solitaire she could reach a conclusion. Jack Ainslie needed no reply – he was a fool, she thought angrily, like most of them who came each morning or evening with their coughs and sore thumbs and aching backs and screaming children and requests for the pill. ‘Every night I sit here, and he takes too long with each of them, so that the rest get impatient because he’s running late, and then I have to rush back home to him moaning because the tea’s late, and going on about tractors and prices and the boys with their records so loud giving me a headache, or coming home too late. It’s no life. Everything’s too late,’ she thought, and stabbed at the appointments book with her ball-point pen.

  The phone rang, making her jump. ‘This’ll be him, probably a puncture,’ someone said.

  ‘No, Mrs Anderson, he’s not here yet, I don’t understand it.’ Eleanor Anderson’s tone was calm as always, a voice like dark pansies with a confidence and a precision of enunciation that always made the receptionist feel silly and uncouth.

  ‘Look, Sheila, he hasn’t been here at all. Could he have stayed late at an afternoon visit?’

  ‘No, Mrs Anderson, that’s the funny thing. There was only one call today, and he said to me at dinner time that it must be a record, that, for Winterstoke. Laughing about it, he was, and saying that the village must be getting healthier and didn’t need him any more. All he had to do was call on Mr Wainwright as usual, and I know he didn’t go there because Miss Wainwright rang and said the old man was playing up because the doctor hadn’t come, so I told her …’

  ‘All right, Sheila, all right. What time is it now?’

  ‘Half past six.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you ring the surgery in Newtonstowe and see if they can send someone over. Perhaps David’s car has broken down, although I must say I’d have thought he would have telephoned.’

  Sheila was conscious of everyone in the room listening, yet failed to keep the tremor from her voice. Eleanor Anderson’s voice betrayed no concern, and Sheila hated her. ‘Now keep calm, Sheila. We’ll find there’s a perfectly good explanation. I must go now, I’ve a meeting in Sealsham Holt.’

  At half past nine Eleanor drove past her own gate, noticing that the house was in darkness and the drive empty. She went on into the village. Winterstoke was like so many villages in that part of Somerset, constructed in a T-shape, with the narrow lane that led to the church running off the top. The High Street was long: a straggle of houses, and shops which supplied the basic necessities – all built in mellow ochre Ham Hill stone. The cottages in Stoke Terrace opened straight on to the pavement, and the door steps were well-scrubbed, as they had been for two hundred years. One of them had a sign saying ‘Surgery’ across one of the windows; it was in darkness now.

  At the end of the High Street, on the corner facing Church Lane, was The King’s Head, with its highly coloured portrait of Charles I flapping in the wind, a reminder of the loyalty shown by men of that area to the royalist cause. Sounds of conversation drifted from the pub; its coloured glass windows glowed. Just before she reached it, Eleanor signalled carefully (though there were no other cars on the road at that moment) and turned sharply left, through a pair of worn stone gate posts surmounted by crumbling spheres. She was conscious of a
n unfamiliar sensation in her chest and stomach, a fluttering disquiet which she refused to acknowledge. ‘Of course, everything is all right,’ she thought, ‘and he’ll be here drinking with Conrad as usual. I expect the car broke down and he had to walk a long way, and of course he knew I had to go to the meeting. He probably forgot his key too … Honestly, David.’ By the time her car crunched to a halt she had begun to talk herself into a state of controlled, and partially affectionate, indignation.

  She thought back over the day’s events. ‘Lastly, ladies, I want to propose a vote of thanks to Eleanor Anderson. We all know what a busy life she leads – it’s not easy being a doctor’s wife, as we are all well aware! – (she had nodded and smiled) and yet Mrs Anderson put in many hours of work to ensure the success of our grand Red Cross Easter pageant.’ They had all clapped; Eleanor had turned her head from side to side in a delicate movement of denial, and allowed one hand to drift into a gesture of modest rebuttal. Fifteen hundred pounds had been raised, people had come from miles around (mainly because Eleanor had managed to persuade a popular local television presenter to do the honours) and in the end the people in wheelchairs had not been too much in the way, although one of them had inadvertently been left out in the rain when everyone stampeded for cover.

  Eleanor sighed, remembering. That was the other side of her life – a constant anger with the heavens for raining on the innumerable events she organised, so that the symbol of her spring and summer was a dripping flag. Yet she was useful. She knew it. Twenty years ago, when they had moved from Ealing to Winterstoke because Eleanor had insisted that they must bring up their only child in the country, she had started to work for David as receptionist. But after five years she had given it up, unable to bear any longer the proximity of patients. He had warned her that she would be bored if she did nothing, not knowing that his wife would reach her apotheosis on countless committees, and make sure that standards at the village school would be maintained under her chairmanship of the Governors.

  It pleased Eleanor to think of this. Such usefulness was the antidote for growing older; often she lectured David on his lack of interest in what she called ‘extra-mural activities’. She told him that although he was certainly busy as a General Practitioner, he should do more, to give him … Here she could never finish her thought, conscious only of a hint of abstraction about her husband that annoyed her by calling all her activities into question.

  There was no blue car outside Conrad Hartley’s once-handsome house. The low Queen Anne building was in darkness, except for one square of light at an upstairs window. At the sound of her tyres a head appeared, then bobbed down again, and Eleanor sighed, knowing that she could not escape a conversation. She rang the bell, unnecessarily, and fidgeted with her bag as the faint shuffling sounds came nearer, until they paused just behind the massive front door, with its peeling dark green paint. ‘He shouldn’t live alone; he should go into a home. I must talk to David about it again,’ Eleanor thought.

  A chain rattled. There was more fumbling, and a wheezing cough, then the door opened. Eleanor was illuminated by the naked light bulb in the hall which showed Conrad Hartley’s appearance in merciless clarity: the greasy white hair falling in wisps around his pink face, and the spots of congealed food down the front of a dressing gown of great age and faded splendour. His round face was curiously unlined, giving him a strange, babylike quality; often when he spoke he would close his eyes to concentrate the more, and his expression would be beatific, like that of a prematurely aged quattrocento cherub.

  He looked surprised. ‘Eleanor, my dear. I’m not used to seeing you at this time of night, come in, come in.’ He coughed again, and a globule of spittle clung to the dry corner of his mouth, making Eleanor drop her gaze with the guilty distaste she always felt in the presence of her husband’s unlikely friend. Wanting to refuse, she entered the hall. ‘I’m sorry, Conrad, but I thought … I thought, David might be here.’

  ‘Oh? No, Eleanor, I haven’t seen him at all today.’ He blinked and shut the door with a dull thud, so that the swinging chain rattled. ‘Is something wrong?’

  She smelt his old man’s smell as he passed her, shuffling in the carpet slippers and leading the way across the flagged hall into the dark sitting room. As he fumbled for the light switch, Eleanor felt tears prick the back of her eyes, but she controlled them. ‘I simply don’t understand it, Conrad,’ she said helplessly, staring around. She hardly ever visited this house, and so each time it came as a fresh shock.

  Conrad Hartley was a genealogist who had taken early retirement from Bristol University and moved to Winterstoke with Alice, his wife, fifteen years his junior. Their only daughter had married an American, and regularly sent short, informative letters from Nebraska. Conrad and Alice had loved the dignified house, with its two staircases, and oddly shaped attics. Alice’s passion was gardening, and she had planned the square half-acre with care. ‘I thought she would long outlive me, and that the garden would give her something to do then,’ Conrad was in the habit of repeating, ‘but plans always go wrong, Deo volente.’ Nobody ever picked up the irony of his Latin.

  Alice Hartley had died of cancer the year before the Andersons moved to Winterstoke, and so for twenty-one years Conrad had lived alone in Winter House, watching the enormous garden choking itself with weeds, with no new growth, all plants long lost – until, once or twice a year, Jack Ainslie felt affronted by the wilderness and attacked it with one of his whining machines, without expecting payment.

  It was as if the interior of Winter House tried to emulate that wild garden. Conrad Hartley lived alone in a paradise of spiders, which spun their webs from one piece of china to the next, from tarnished silver photograph frame to Sèvres ashtray, so that all Conrad’s objects, the relics of his wife and their life together, were bound together by filmy threads, with a shroud upon each of dust.

  ‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ he said, ineffectually flapping a hand in the direction of the sofa, and causing a faintly musty current of air. The sitting room was lined with low book-shelves, dotted on the tops with bric-à-brac and magazines, and on some of them the volumes were crammed two deep, dust and damp dimming the gilding on tops and spines. Eleanor shivered.

  ‘It’s cold. I’m sorry, Eleanor, I’ll plug in the electric fire. You know I never live in here. My bedroom is so much cosier.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ She tried to inject efficiency into her voice, ‘Conrad … I’m a bit concerned. It’s David.’

  ‘He’s not home?’

  ‘He missed his surgery, Conrad. That’s something he would never…’

  ‘Of course not.’ The old man pulled a grubby handkerchief from the dressing-gown pocket, and mopped his nose. Eleanor was startled by a Siamese cat which jumped silently on to the arm of her chair and yowled, the sound plaintive and demanding.

  ‘Get down, Tansy, get down, old girl.’ He made little shooing motions with his hands, which the animal ignored, and smiled at it as if he had forgotten his companion.

  ‘What shall I do, Conrad?’

  He blinked watery eyes at her, astonished to see Eleanor Anderson’s mouth twitch at the corners. A long strand of steel-grey hair had escaped from her habitually perfect chignon; the more surprising because she never wore that home-made and harassed look of many country doctors’ wives. She looked down, avoiding his gaze, then abruptly rose and stalked about the room, stopping to pick up a piece of china from the shelf. She blew on it, then looked up apologetically, embarrassed by her own lack of manners.

  ‘I never have the chance to dust, Eleanor. Too much for me.’

  ‘That’s what David and I have been saying for years.’

  ‘It’s a failing, you know. Silly little things, but pretty.’

  ‘You can’t possibly cope with all this.’

  ‘David says that too? Oh.’ He looked at her obliquely, with a distinctly ironic twinkle in his eye, which she noticed.

  ‘I’m used to it now, Eleanor, too old to
change. Come on, Tansy, come on, there!’ He cradled the cat, scratching its ear, and the quiet room seemed to vibrate with its purr.

  ‘David always talks to you, Conrad. He tells you things, I know he does. So where could he have gone?’

  ‘But didn’t he tell you anything at all?’

  She looked at him suspiciously, ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing in particular, my dear. That he was visiting … er … friends?’

  She laughed briefly. ‘Really, Conrad! I can’t imagine who it is you have in mind. You know how anti-social David is these days. He says the only person he can talk to round here is you.’

  Conrad beamed, fondly. ‘And he is so much younger too. David is good at humouring a silly old man, and I’m very grateful for his time, Eleanor, very grateful indeed. And yet you know, like minds don’t depend upon age, and there are many ways in which we are alike, David and I, although of course, he might not agree with that. But we have our little jokes …’

  By now he was smiling openly, in that absent-minded way which might make a stranger think him mentally deficient.

  Eleanor felt forced to turn away to hide her irritation. ‘Oh, I’d better go. Maybe he’ll be home by now.’

  ‘I’m sure he will.’

  She could hear his nails scratching the cat’s neck. ‘Well, I’ll let you know, Conrad, if he’s ill … or something.’ He shook his head. ‘Twenty years, Eleanor, and I simply cannot imagine David going anywhere without telling you. Are you quite sure you haven’t forgotten?’

  She looked up sharply, sure she detected mockery in his voice. ‘Of course he didn’t tell me … And I never forget things. Goodnight, Conrad.’

  Her own hall was satisfying, after the chaos of Winter House, and for a comforting second Eleanor forgot her anxiety because of the contrast. She hung up her navy blue jacket, and placed her handbag exactly in the centre of the marble hall stand, pausing for a second to stare at her own reflection in the milky glass. Tall, thin-faced, with fewer lines than most women she knew of her age, Eleanor had reason to be pleased with what she saw. She nurtured her face each night with a variety of creams for cheeks, eyes and throat, as her mother had always advised – her good looks were Eleanor’s only real inheritance from the doctor’s wife who tolerated the sort of late-night calls and semi-social work that Eleanor detested. That was what being a Samaritan meant; Eleanor preferred to think of herself as the innkeeper who fulfilled his trust in seeing to the unfortunate traveller’s needs, knowing he would soon go on his way. People rarely knocked on her door. She encouraged them to telephone first.