Kissing the Gunner's Daughter by Ruth Rendell
Authors: Ruth Rendell
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Women Sleuths, Police, England, Police Procedural, Large Type Books, Inspector (Fictitious character), Sussex (England), Sussex, Wexford
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confessed to himself, that it was better for its ironic and slightly malicious tone than a blander article would have been.
A journalist on the Kingsmarkham Courier would have adopted a sycophantic style when describing Davina Flory's reafforestation, her dendrology studies, her gardening and her collecting of rare specimen trees. Ms Carver treated the whole subject as if were slightly funny and an instance of mild hypocrisy. 'Planting' a wood, she implied, was a not quite accurate way of referring to an exercise others did for you while all you forked out was the money. Gardening might be a very pleasant way of passing the time if you were only obliged to do it when at a loose end and on fine days. Strong young men did the digging.
Davina Flory, she went on to say in much the same vein, had been a stupendously successful and acclaimed woman, but she hadn't exactly had to struggle, had she? Going to Oxford had %een an obvious step, given her intelligence lad with her father a professor and there Wdng no shortage of money. A great landscape Hardener she might be, but the acreage and the jjherewithal fell into her lap when she married mond Flory. Being widowed in the last ;es of the war had been sad but surely
99
mitigated by inheriting on her first husband's death an enormous country house and a huge fortune.
She was a little scathing too about the shortlived second marriage. However, when she came to the travels and the books, the uniqueness of Davina Flory's penetration of eastern Europe and her political and sociological investigations of it, this at the most difficult and dangerous of times, Win Carver had nothing but praise to offer. She wrote of the 'anthropological' books to which these travels had given rise. She harked back with a charming adulatory nostalgia to her own student days some twenty years before, and to her reading of Davina Flory's only two novels, The Hosts of Midian and A Private Man in Athens. Her appreciation she compared to Keats's feeling for Chapman's Homer, she even said she had been silenced 'upon a peak in Darien.'
Finally, but not briefly, she came to the first volume of the autobiography: The Youngest Wren of Nine. Wexford, who had supposed this title a quotation from Twelfth Night, was pleased to have his guess confirmed. A resume of Davina Flory's childhood and youth, as described in these memoirs, came next, a passing reference to her meeting with Harvey Copeland, and Ms Carver ended with a few words -- a very few -- about Miss Flory's daughter Naomi Jones who had a part-share in a Kingsmarkham craft gallery, and Miss Flory's granddaughter and namesake.
In the last lines of the article Win Carver
100
speculated as to the chances of a DBE in a future honours' list and judged them pretty high. A year or two only must pass, she implied, before Miss Flory became Dame Davina. Mostly (wrote Ms Carver) 'they, wait till you've passed your eightieth birthday so that you won't live too long.'
Davina Flory's life had not been sufficiently protracted. Death had come unnaturally to her and with the maximum violence. Wexford, who was still in the incident room, laid the newspapers aside and studied the printout Gerry Hinde had produced for him of the missing items of jewellery. There were not many, but what there were sounded valuable. Then he walked across the courtyard to the house.
* * *
The hall had been cleaned. It reeked of the kind of disinfectant that smells like a combination of lysol and lime juice. Brenda Harrison was rearranging ornaments which had been put back in the wrong places. Her prematurely lined face wore an expression of intense concentration, the cause no doubt of the lines. On the staircase, three stairs up, where the carpet, perhaps ineradicably stained, was covered in & sheet of canvas, sat the Blue Persian called
f^Queenie.
|M> "You'll be glad to hear Daisy is making a
|pood recovery," Wexford said.
She already knew. "One of the policemen told
101
me," she said
A journalist on the Kingsmarkham Courier would have adopted a sycophantic style when describing Davina Flory's reafforestation, her dendrology studies, her gardening and her collecting of rare specimen trees. Ms Carver treated the whole subject as if were slightly funny and an instance of mild hypocrisy. 'Planting' a wood, she implied, was a not quite accurate way of referring to an exercise others did for you while all you forked out was the money. Gardening might be a very pleasant way of passing the time if you were only obliged to do it when at a loose end and on fine days. Strong young men did the digging.
Davina Flory, she went on to say in much the same vein, had been a stupendously successful and acclaimed woman, but she hadn't exactly had to struggle, had she? Going to Oxford had %een an obvious step, given her intelligence lad with her father a professor and there Wdng no shortage of money. A great landscape Hardener she might be, but the acreage and the jjherewithal fell into her lap when she married mond Flory. Being widowed in the last ;es of the war had been sad but surely
99
mitigated by inheriting on her first husband's death an enormous country house and a huge fortune.
She was a little scathing too about the shortlived second marriage. However, when she came to the travels and the books, the uniqueness of Davina Flory's penetration of eastern Europe and her political and sociological investigations of it, this at the most difficult and dangerous of times, Win Carver had nothing but praise to offer. She wrote of the 'anthropological' books to which these travels had given rise. She harked back with a charming adulatory nostalgia to her own student days some twenty years before, and to her reading of Davina Flory's only two novels, The Hosts of Midian and A Private Man in Athens. Her appreciation she compared to Keats's feeling for Chapman's Homer, she even said she had been silenced 'upon a peak in Darien.'
Finally, but not briefly, she came to the first volume of the autobiography: The Youngest Wren of Nine. Wexford, who had supposed this title a quotation from Twelfth Night, was pleased to have his guess confirmed. A resume of Davina Flory's childhood and youth, as described in these memoirs, came next, a passing reference to her meeting with Harvey Copeland, and Ms Carver ended with a few words -- a very few -- about Miss Flory's daughter Naomi Jones who had a part-share in a Kingsmarkham craft gallery, and Miss Flory's granddaughter and namesake.
In the last lines of the article Win Carver
100
speculated as to the chances of a DBE in a future honours' list and judged them pretty high. A year or two only must pass, she implied, before Miss Flory became Dame Davina. Mostly (wrote Ms Carver) 'they, wait till you've passed your eightieth birthday so that you won't live too long.'
Davina Flory's life had not been sufficiently protracted. Death had come unnaturally to her and with the maximum violence. Wexford, who was still in the incident room, laid the newspapers aside and studied the printout Gerry Hinde had produced for him of the missing items of jewellery. There were not many, but what there were sounded valuable. Then he walked across the courtyard to the house.
* * *
The hall had been cleaned. It reeked of the kind of disinfectant that smells like a combination of lysol and lime juice. Brenda Harrison was rearranging ornaments which had been put back in the wrong places. Her prematurely lined face wore an expression of intense concentration, the cause no doubt of the lines. On the staircase, three stairs up, where the carpet, perhaps ineradicably stained, was covered in & sheet of canvas, sat the Blue Persian called
f^Queenie.
|M> "You'll be glad to hear Daisy is making a
|pood recovery," Wexford said.
She already knew. "One of the policemen told
101
me," she said
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