Closed at Dusk by Monica Dickens Page B

The Sinktuary sink into rack and ruin around her.
    â€˜Tell me some more about the war,’ Josephine coaxed, ‘when you had all those evacuees to look after.’
    â€˜My mother never liked them,’ Agnes said, ‘because they had things in their heads and did their jobs on the floor if you weren’t looking.’
    â€˜Little devils.’ Troutie smiled, for she had liked the childrenreally, soft as she was, and ruined by feudalism to believe that whatever went on at The Sinktuary was all right. ‘Put ’em all into the library. When the parents took the kiddies away, we had all those airmen.’
    â€˜How
nice
,’ said Josephine brightly, as if she were talking to a lunatic or a baby.
    â€˜It wasn’t.’ Troutie chuckled herself into one of those coughs that made Agnes think about giving up smoking, but if you gave up everything, you might as well be dead. ‘Never really got that room cleared out, we didn’t, after scrubbing, scrubbing. Buckets of suds …’ She had housework on the brain.
    â€˜I heard in the village –’ Mrs Josephine had been smarming around those gasbags in the shop and post office, you could be sure – ‘that the poor house never really recovered from all that, until Mr and Mrs William took over.’
    â€˜What? What do they say?’ Troutie opened her leaky eyes wider than usual.
    â€˜Well, that Sylvia Taylor became – a bit of a hermit?’
    â€˜Bit of what?’
    â€˜Closed up most of the house.’
    â€˜When? I always took care of it, and she’d say …’
    â€˜Say what?’
    â€˜Eh?’
    Josephine was sharp enough to see that she was faking deafness, and Troutie was sharp enough to see that Josephine was prying into what was none of her business. Score: nil-nil.
    Jo was getting up to leave the old lady when there were voices outside the room, and William and Matthew Taylor came in with an attractive American woman.
    â€˜Hullo, Jo.’ William seemed pleased to see Jo in there. ‘Glad you’ve made friends with Mrs Trout. She’s my best friend, aren’t you, Troutie dear?’
    After introducing the American, he and his brother were all over the old lady; Troutie this and that, and, ‘Do you remember such and such?’ While the American woman talked to the mouldy budgerigar and examined the hundreds of knick-knacks and family pictures, the old lady flirted a bit with her ‘Billie’. William and Matthew were like overgrown little boys, back in the nursery with Nanny – the kind of Englishmen who want spotted dick and lumpy custard all their lives.
    When Tessa was a child, Troutie must have been about sixty, and still a powerful force at The Sanctuary. With William probably spoiling his daughter and Dorothy being enlightened, this was the kind of security in which Tessa had grown up to see the world as hers for the taking.
    Jo said goodbye politely, but Marigold within was working herself up through bitterness towards anger. Tessa had always had everything. Why did she have to have Rex too? Tessa was a creation of her ancestry and upbringing. Marigold was self-made, in every sense of the word. With her father never there and her mother managing the hotel and always tired and irritable, Marigold was expected to grow up early: ‘Don’t be a cry-baby, be your age, use your head, don’t whine, you’ll be all right, you’re a big girl now’.
    She had never been all right. She always felt like a little girl, guiltily, since she knew that was wrong. Rex was the first grown-up who loved the little girl in her. How could she help crashing her whole defenceless being full tilt into his world?
    Nannies … Daddies … Teddies … Billie … Jo saw Ruth’s car in the car park, and turned off behind the stables, past the little paddock with the donkey and goats, and along the rhododendron hedge to the gardens. She was