I’ve given you nowt, have I?’ For some reason this seemed to touch his conscience and he added magnanimously, ‘Listen, have a glass of beer on your way out, tell Ruby I say it’s on the house.’
‘Thank you, but the one was enough. I noticed, incidentally, you no longer serve Lomas’s?’
‘No! I had the bloody stuff taken out right after the funeral,’ snarled Huby. ‘Can you find your own way? Good night, then.’
After the door closed behind Goodenough, Huby sat in silence for several minutes staring sightlessly into the fireplace. He was roused by his wife saying, ‘Phone, John!’
He went through the bar to the pay-phone in the entrance passage. It was a continuous complaint of Jane’s that they didn’t have a phone of their own, but the more she complained, the more Huby was confirmed in his economic policy.
‘Old Mill,’ he grunted into the receiver. ‘Huby speaking.’
He listened for a while and a slow grin spread across his face.
‘I were just thinking about you, Mrs Windibanks,’ he said finally. ‘Fancy that, eh? You’re at the Howard Arms, you say. Well, it’s a bit hard for me to get away from the pub tonight … you’ll come out? Grand, that’ll be grand. Always glad to have a chat with a relative, that’s me.’
He put the phone down and laughed out loud. But his amusement died as he tried to refill his pipe and discovered the cracked bowl.
‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘What rotten bugger’s done that?’
‘Good morning, Lexie.’
‘Good morning, Miss Keech.’
Pascoe, as the nearest thing in mid-Yorkshire to a sociological detective, might have read much into this exchange. Miss Keech’s connection with the Hubys had started as a fourteen-year-old in 1930 when she had been taken on at Troy House as a nurserymaid. By the time young Alexander left for boarding-school some eight years later, she was fully in charge of not only the nursery but most of the household management. Came the war, and young, fit unmarried women were called upon to do more for their country than look after the houses of the rich and, despite Mrs Huby’s indignant protests, Miss Keech was sucked into the outside world. Contact was lost, though it was known through her local connections that she had risen to the dizzy heights of being a WRAC driver with two stripes. Then in 1946 she returned to Troy House to convey her sorrow at the sad news of Alexander’s loss and there she had stayed ever since, first as housekeeper, gradually as companion, eventually as nurse.
Mrs Gwendoline Huby called her Keech. Alexander Huby had called her Keechie. John Huby generally called her nothing to her face and ‘that cold calculating cow’ to her back. It irked him greatly to hear old Windypants using her surname as to the manner born, and even more to hear her poncy son drawling out Keechie as if he’d got a silver spoon stuck in his gob!
To the Old Mill girls, she was always Miss Keech, which was right and proper, for children should be polite to adults, however undeserving; but Huby did nothing to discourage their private conviction, fostered by the more imaginative and better-read Lexie, that this dark-clad figure was really the Wicked Witch of the West.
‘Notice the Beurre Hardy, Lexie. In all the years I have been at Troy House, I do not believe I have seen a more bountiful crop.’
Lexie duly noted the pear tree. She did not resent Miss Keech’s gubernatorial manner, nor was she offended (as her father claimed to be) by such a pedantic style and affected accent in one of such humble origins. But she hadn’t liked Miss Keech from her earliest memories of her, and had been consistent in this dislike as in most things.
The feeling, she suspected, was mutual. Only once had it come near to open declaration. On visiting Sundays, the two girls were normally allowed to escape after tea and play in the garden with Hob, the donkey, and the two goats. On wet days, they would descend into the capacious cellar which was used for storage of old furniture and other junk. Well lit and relatively dry, it provided a marvellous playroom for the children. At one end of it was a small oaken door with a Norman arch which looked as if it should have been in a fairytale castle, and Lexie invented various enthralling tales of what lay beyond for her wide-eyed sister. Then one day as she finished one of her stories, she became aware of Miss Keech standing at the head of the cellar stairs.
‘Is Lexie right, Miss Keech?’ piped up Jane. ‘Is there really a magic garden through that door?’
‘Oh no, Jane,’ said Keech in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘That’s where we keep the old bodies of everyone who’s died here.’
The effect had been devastating. Jane had fled from the cellar and refused ever to go down there again. On wet Sundays thereafter they had found themselves constrained to sit in the dull drab drawing-room looking at dull drab books. Miss Keech had told Jane not to be silly, but Lexie had detected the edge of malicious satisfaction there and knew it was directed at her. She had boldly demanded the key to the oaken door from Miss Keech, ready to explode her own fairytales in the cause of revealing Miss Keech’s lie. The woman had produced it without hesitation, saying, ‘Of course you may look inside, Lexie. But you must go by yourself. I have no time for such childishness.’
Again the malice. She had known full well that a small girl of eight, no matter how self-possessed, was not impervious to such imaginative fears.
But Lexie had descended alone. Terror had weakened her skinny legs, but something stronger than terror had urged her on. There was no way she could articulate it, but it had something to do with a sense of what was right.
The door had swung open without even a creak to reveal a small inner cellar lined with wine racks, empty since Sam Huby’s death. His widow admitted a little sweet sherry in the drawing-room but had no need of wine. As for Lomas’s beers on which her fortune rested, she had tasted a light ale once at the age of twenty, and never repeated the disagreeable experience.
Lexie had gone to fetch Jane to show her the truth of the matter, but the words of an adult are stronger than the word of a sister, and Jane had only collapsed in tearful refusal while Miss Keech looked on in silent triumph, knowing she had ruined the cellar for them for ever.
All that had been ages ago, but it had stamped a seal on their relationship. Only once had Lexie had cause to waver in her judgement and that was three years ago when Great Aunt Gwen had had her first stroke. The degree of Miss Keech’s distress had amazed everyone. ‘Must know she’s been left out of the will!’ John Huby had posited mockingly. But the woman’s concern and agitation and unsparing attendance on her sick employer had impressed most observers deeply, causing even Lexie to admit a slight modification of her judgement.
‘Is Mr Lomas, Rod, ready?’ she now asked.
‘Just completing his breakfast. Have you time for a cup of coffee? Do step inside in any case.’
It was Lexie’s first visit to Troy House since the funeral meats. Externally, the square, grey Victorian building was little changed. The well-kept garden with its gloomy shrubberies still had the goats on long tethers at the foot of the lawn while Hob the donkey grazed nearby, indifferent and free.
Inside, however, there were signs of change, subtle but significant.
