Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die. She had the damson plums to put in jars and her much sought-after ginger liqueur to bottle for the winter; the account of her distinguished father’s war history to finish before mid-August as a key contribution to the Vicar’s Citizens of Nether Twombly, Volume 2. Then there was Benjie’s middle school to sort. Next Saturday’s bake sale for the Dogs Trust. And most urgent of all, Ellis’s Roman hoard to find—without a single clue to indicate where she might have stashed it that dire night she’d gotten furious at him and done her damnedest to allay her ire with that bottle of fine Laphroaig 25-Year Islay Single Malt he kept cagily tucked up in one of his rubber Wellies, thinking his dear wife wouldn’t notice it there. And then, after the bottle and her wonky knees gave out . . . well, what? There was the rub, as Shakespeare said. She couldn’t go to her grave in good conscience and mercifully shriven of her sins knowing the lion’s share of the family fortune was missing, and Ellis’s curse for that lay awfully on her head. It was to go to Benjie, their dear grandson, after all—and it was surely finding out about her rash actions while in her cups that had precipitated her choleric husband’s fatal stroke two months ago. So it was all on her.
Though she’d become You Blasted Fool to Ellis at the end, his wife was always and forever Mrs. Morrison to the village, having before her heart began to fail feistily coached decades of schoolgirls in hockey—girls now mothers and grand-, bankers and beauticians, owners of farm stands and Costa outlets, one even the parish mayor. She was Mum, Nana, and Aunty Mag to her family, and Margaret to her friends, though both were thinner on the ground these days. Just a few months before Ellis’s untimely end, their only daughter, Robin, Benjie’s mother, had been killed in a car crash on her way to conduct an audit in Leicestershire, and his ne’ere-do-well father had bunked off shortly after. Ellis’s sister Lena had succumbed to her cancer just before Christmas. It had been a bad year all around. Those less deserving of misfortune had all beat her to the grave, while she was the one due to go. (“Coo, coo, ca-choo, Mrs. Morrison, Jesus loves you more than you will know”—the theme song from The Graduate popped back into her head, her most unfortunate brother-in-law having perverted it to be all about her, when it came out . . . and forever after, though he had of course been subdued this year, with Lena gone.)
___
When Margaret was not looking for the blasted hoard, upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber—why had the words to “Goosey Goosey Gander” come back to her after seventy long years?—when she sought distraction if not absolute absolution, she spent long hours teaching Benjie to cook. If he was going to end up poor as a church mouse because of her, and it seemed he was, he’d do well to have skills of the practical sort to be going on with. There was that Michelin 2-star in Twombly-on-the-Hill where he would surely be able to make a reasonable wage—and meet viable partners too, when he had come of age, whether of male or female persuasion, given how the world wagged now. The Vicar had reproached her with his ice blue eyes when she’d once gone on about finding “a nice lady” for him. It seemed that Teddy Baxter was the one he had in mind, a voice like velvet and his recipe for salted fudge brownies like mortal sin.
So Benjie helped ladle the hot packed plums into sterilized jars, after experimenting (not successfully) with the cherry pitter, and ending up cramming a good too many into his eager young mouth instead. One batch, Margaret decided, she would spice (adding a cup of brandy, which she spotted while checking behind bottles for the vanished hoard), and her obliging helper solemnly divvied up cloves and orange zest for each jar and fished cinnamon sticks out of the hot syrup as he’d done minnows from the village pond when he was six.
Next he wanted to make ice cream, one of those easy recipes he’d heard about somewhere with cream and salt and a vanilla bean, that they could mix with caramel, chocolate, and crumbled shortbread biscuits. Margaret agreed that might not be too bad. (She’d checked the cupboards, up and down, though the step stool left her more than a little out of breath. She’d checked the freezer and the fridge. She’d found nothing, and she could hear Ellis’s waspish diatribe annoyingly nettling her head—as well as the words of that maddening 60s song repeating over and over again.
Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes
Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes
It’s a little secret, just the [Morrisons’] affair
Most of all, you’ve got to hide it from the kids
After the ice-cream was judged a success she brought out much-stained recipes for shepherd’s pie, trifle, spaghetti bolognese with streaky bacon, English pea salad, pear and rocket salad, and classic roast chicken with stuffing—though her famous healthy appetite was going too. Benjie was precise with his measurements, having inherited his mother’s skill with all things mathematical, and bit his lower lip while chopping and mincing—scared of the knife somewhat, but gamely soldiering on.
___
Meanwhile, she checked the obvious places obsessively, despite the pain in all her limbs and how hard she found it to walk, to stoop, to climb: the cookie jar, her Aunt Tildy’s sewing sachel under the bed. The toilet tank, where bags of heroin were by tradition stashed in the detective shows. The length of the woodpile, hefting out log by log and then replacing them. She asked her friend Sally (transformed into “Salamandra the Seer” with dusky purple velvet drapery at village fêtes) for a séance—figuring Ellis could but know by now, from his lofty vantage point there seated next to God. She let Sally partially in on the secret, but led her to believe Ellis had hidden the trove himself and then keeled over before he could reveal its hiding place.
“Just like him,” she huffed.
They lit candles and held hands at the little mango wood table with its mandala design Sally had snatched up at a car boot sale somewhere, but though one of the candles flickered madly at one point, and her cat Tinkerbell gave them an awful fright springing up out of nowhere into Margaret’s unguarded lap, claws out, the spirit world contributed nothing. Sally cajoled and even threatened for a good half an hour, but could get nothing out of Ellis’s intractable spirit.
“You know he never did like me; he says his lips are sealed.”
So they gave up and spent the rest of the evening contemplatively eating ice-cream with an Amaretto float (brought home by Sally at Easter from Mantua after seeing the Chamber of the Giants and the Relic of the Holy Blood), and they agreed that the next day Margaret would look into renting one of those detectorist things, to use when Benjie was away at camp the coming week.
___
She and Benjie spent Friday making cakes for Saturday’s bake sale—one-bowl chocolate cake, lemon drizzle cake, Devonshire apple cake, and Fifteens, from Northern Ireland. Or, rather, Benjie worked through her recipes, sneaking glacé cherries and asking her every so often for advice, while Margaret sat at the small table in the breakfast nook with a chipped Royal Albert cup of Darjeeling, and let it get stone cold while she typed up the final pages of her father’s military exploits in North Africa—his regiment deemed instrumental in the Second Battle at El Alamein, helping defend the Persian oil fields and the Suez Canal. Transcribing his notes about the heat, the dust, the noise of guns around the railway halt in the foreign and unimaginable desert, she found herself fading away, the way the ink had on the notebook pages, feeling less and less here in this undistinguished village in another century, carrying on with little enough bravery in her worn out, inglorious old body. With no glory for sure, since this was the least she could do—the most, really, she’d ever done—for Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Neville Pangbourne, her father as was, in his final few months, and also back when she’d defied him and insisted on marrying Ellis. She felt it overwhelming her, the great sweep of the past, roaring down over her and everyone she’d ever known in a voracious rush.
“Nana?” Benjie had looked up from his mixing bowl at the long silence of the typewriter, to see the blankness of her face, blanched as the cake flour, and started around the counter to her with evident concern.
“I’m all right, lad,” she said, catching her ragged breath. “Just let me finish this.”
To counter that sighting of oblivion she dialed the Vicar on her old rotary phone (the last one in the county, she’d been told), and asked—begged, actually, most unlike her—if he might persuade Teddy Baxter to donate a pan or two of his ungodly brownies for the morrow, if the sultry young baritone hadn’t already volunteered.
The sale went well; she promised more Fifteens with sticky cherries and chopped hazelnuts to the Bissinger twins, thinking she could manage to make some later in the week.
“Thank you, Mrs. Morrison,” they chimed in unison, as kindly Lizzy Bissinger nudged them.
Sunday was for exhaustion and the Meditation of John Donne’s she read each week, there on the cushioned steamer chair under the apple tree.
“PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he
knows not it tolls for him.”
That was all right, she wasn’t that way ill, but she skipped over the line in the last paragraph again, as she had every Sunday since that night of shame.
“If a man carry treasure in bullion or in a wedge of gold, and have none
coined into current moneys, his treasure will not defray him as he travels.”
___
On Monday at the crack of dawn Benjie was off to camp, quietly seething with excitement for the courses he had signed up for: one week of engineering robots, to be followed by another of caving and rock-climbing.
The metal detector brought up nothing, though she walked and walked around the grounds, tired to death (not yet!), disheartened by the absolute absence of sound, the mute, ungiving earth and unrevealing undergrowth. Nothing at all under the roses. In the veggie patch. Around the linden tree in whose bark she, Margaret—more amorous than Ellis, even then—had carved their initials and a lopsided heart after they’d moved their scant belongings in, and their bright dreams of the future.
Fighting the weakness that began to overcome her through and through, she sealed two bottles of ginger liqueur (one for the wake, one for Sally to put away for the winter), finalized arrangements for Benjie’s school and future with his Uncle Theodore in Crowborough. By Friday everything was done but that single enormous thing. And there was no way she could see to do that now. She sat over her chipped teacup, the kitchen vast, disconsolate, and chilled despite the summer heat outside. The only creature stirring in the house, somewhere ’twixt hall and sitting room, prowling with malicious intent, was Ellis’s grumbly ghost, who’d slipped in sometime after Benjie left and was becoming more and more annoying every day. He seemed to have materialized at Sally’s bidding after all. Peevish and discontent even beyond the end.
“You and your leaky valve,” he poked his filmy head inside the door to jeer at her. It had been “dicky heart” last time he trotted past. He seemed to have his oldest slippers on, slopping along, but they were filmy too, as if woven of spider webs—all but his criticism indistinct.
It was too much for her, all of the shame and blame for what she’d done, and her anguish at not having been able to repair it. In a deep fug she couldn’t chide herself out of, she dialed the Vicar. A last—and humbling—resort, but she felt in terrible need of absolution, and a man of the cloth (even cheap gabardine of the sort Reverend Bill seemed to prefer under his holy garb) was the only real candidate for that—unsympathetic and censorious though this one had proven.
In fact he was even less comfort than she might have hoped, having (she’d learn from Sally later, on the phone) been rebuffed just the day before by Teddy Baxter—a fatal blow to his proud heart. He sat the whole while on the bedside chair casting that ice blue look at her that had the north wind and the frigid waters of the East Siberian Sea in it. She felt entirely disheartened when he left, having been advised without one jot or tittle of kindness, to “come clean, and pray to God, I beg you, Mrs. Morrison.”
___
Benjie came home from camp bursting with excitement.
“I met a girl,” he said, unable to contain himself beyond the entryway. “She’s ace!”
His grandmother felt a rush of emotion, happy for the life just starting out for him as hers faded away, but feeling an immense sorrow come drowning out the rest, a surge of dirty flood water sweeping the possibilities away. She’d cheated her dead daughter’s son out of the assured future he was meant to have, and the knowledge engulfed her—undoing both of them.
“That’s lovely, pet,” she murmured, floundering, her words now futile too. “She’s pretty, then?”
Scornful, Benjie glowered at her ferociously. “She’s a whiz with the robots, all right? We hung out all the time.”
Then, relenting, noticing how colorless and frail his Nana was,
“I need to learn how to make a tagine. Can you teach me? I asked Farah over for dinner this weekend. She’s Moroccan—that’s really cool.”
Margaret, struggling to stay afloat in these new seas, hadn’t an inkling what went into a tagine, but when he’d looked it up on the computer and come home from Tesco with bags of ingredients she gave advice from the sofa, and, as the magic worked, found herself drawing strength from the exotic, tonic smell of the spices, not anything the house had known before. He’d read them out to her: turmeric, cumin, coriander, saffron—having decided on an “easy-peasy” tagine with just chicken thighs, green olives, and raisins.
She declined to join the youngsters at the dining table, set with antiquated plates and silver that had been her mother’s wedding ware, and from the sofa listened to the new friends chattering away in the next room, while she half slept, half dreamed in a spill of shared light, not hungry for the food Benjie had cooked so dauntlessly, but hungry in her heart, somehow, if in a dull and muzzy way, knowing the end was coming soon. That she’d accomplished what she could, and that wasn’t enough.
As soon as his Farah had left, calling a soft “good night and thank you, Mrs. Morrison” into the darkened room, Margaret called Benjie in, asking hoarsely for some of the mint tea he’d brewed to go with the girl’s bowl of rice pudding—which had smelled, she told herself, like clemency, heart balm.
“I’ve got something to tell you, love,” she started, then faltered again.
He gazed at her over his homely silver spectacles, round and benign and owlish in the half-dark. And she could put it off no longer, her awful confession, in spite of the great hurt it would do. The hurt she’d been trying so hard to wish away. She fought for breath, for strength to get through it.
“Your Grampa Ellis put aside an awful lot of Roman coins, darling, which he found when he was digging the foundation for that silly folly—‘Temple of Diana,’ if you please—he had his heart set on, back when. You know, the one that fell to pieces before long—he wasn’t much of a builder, though he was good at balsamwood airplanes—that’s been only a ruin as long as you’ve been alive.” Young Benjie and his mates had loved to play at being Indiana Jones or Laura Croft there, or sometimes the valiant survivors of the fall of Camelot.
He stiffened noticeably, his round eyes behind strong corrective lenses flashing as they caught the light. She started to go on, pleading for understanding and mercy, when he interrupted, sounding defensive, indignant.
“I know, Nana—okay? I’ve got them all safe, still.”
“You what?” Margaret stared at him in turn, bewildered by his words.
“I’ve got them tucked away in my school bag—’all nice and snug,’ like you told me that night.” He reached out to touch her shoulder, in a painfully adult gesture.
“I . . . did, did I?” She felt a kind of rushing in her ears, the earth shifting and giving way, like sand dunes she’d climbed on the Sefton Coast one year when she was small, terrified by the falling out from under her of what had once been safely underfoot.
“Don’t you remember giving them to me?” her grandson asked from far away. “Saying you trusted me, and no one else, and making me swear not to say a word to anyone?”
She shifted from the dunes, the child she’d been, falling, sand in her mouth and nose and eyes, to the more recent night she was so furiously drunk, and likely falling too, given the bruises she’d discovered on her knees—understanding, finally, that she’d after all done a sensible thing. Despite herself. The cagey, canny Mrs. Morrison, even when in her cups. Imagine that they’d both been keeping mum since then—Benjie as well as his forgetful gran, determined not to disappoint her.
She tasted the faint kiss of spearmint on her lips, was aware of the otherworldly afterglow of warm spices haunting the half-lit room, the voices that had soothed and charmed; gold, silver, bronze . . . the glimmer in the crumbling earth of the ransom that might buy back her soul; the notes of gold, saffron, and honey sounding from the tolling bell.