Grant St., Maidenhead. I changed into ordinary clothes and went along there to find out.
The cleaner came to the door; middle-aged, in a flowered overall, with an inquisitive face. Mrs Pembroke was lying down with a headache, she said, and yes, perhaps she could go upstairs and ask her if her brother-in-law might take her out to lunch. Perhaps I would like to wait in the hall.
I waited, and presently Ursula came downstairs looking wan and wearing a coat and gloves.
‘Oh!’ she said faintly when she saw me. ‘I thought it was Ferdinand.’
I’d hoped she would. I said, ‘Where would you best like to go?’
‘Oh.’ She was irresolute. She looked back up the stairs and saw the cleaner watching interestedly from the landing. If she didn’t come out with me, she’d be stuck with explaining.
‘Come on,’ I said persuasively. ‘The car’s warm.’
It sounded a silly thing to say, but I suppose she listened to the intention, not the words. She continued across the hall and came with me out of the front door, closing it behind us.
‘Gervase won’t like this,’ she said.
‘Why should he know?’
‘She’ll find a way of telling him.’ She gestured back to the house, to the cleaner. ‘She likes to make trouble. It brightens up her life.’
‘Why do you keep her?’
She shrugged. ‘I hate housework. If I sack her, I’d have to do it. Gervase thinks she’s thorough, and he pays her. He said he wouldn’t pay anyone else.’
She spoke matter-of-factly, but I was startled by the picture of domestic tyranny. We got into the car and I drove out of the town and towards the village of Bray, and twice more on the way she said, ‘Gervase won’t like this.’ We stopped at a small roadside restaurant and she chose homemade soup and moussaka, several times looking over her shoulder as if her husband would materialise and pounce.
I ordered a carafe of red wine. Not for her, she protested, but when it came she drank it almost absentmindedly. She had removed the coat and gloves to reveal a well-worn grey skirt topped by a blue sweater with a cream shirt underneath. She wore a string of pearls. Her dark hair was held back at one side by a tortoiseshell slide, and there was no lipstick on her pale mouth. The sort of appearance, I supposed, that Gervase demanded.
When the soup came, she said, ‘Ferdinand phoned last night and told Gervase that Malcolm had made a new will, according to you.’
‘Yes, he made one,’ I agreed. ‘He showed it to me.’
‘Gervase didn’t tell me,’ she said. ‘He phoned Alicia and told her, and I listened. That’s what usually happens. He doesn’t tell me things, he tells his mother.’
‘How do you get on with Alicia?’ I asked.
She very carefully drank the soup already in her spoon. She spoke as if picking her way through a minefield.
‘My mother-in-law,’ she said intensely, ‘has caused more trouble than anyone since Eve. I can’t talk about her. Drink your soup.’
I had the impression that if she once started talking about Alicia, she would never stop. I wondered how to start her, but when I tentatively asked what she meant about trouble, she shook her head vehemently.
‘Not here,’ she said.
I left it. She talked about her children, which she could do without strain, looking almost animated, which saw us through to the moussaka.
‘What do you do on your trips to London?’ I asked casually.
She looked amazed, then said, ‘Oh yes, that wretched Mr West. Gervase was furious with him. Then Gervase was annoyed with me also, and wanted to know where I’d been. I’d been wandering around, that’s all.’ She ate her moussaka methodically. ‘Ferdinand told Gervase and Gervase told Alicia something about a tree stump. What was that all about?’
I explained about the cordite.
She nodded. ‘Gervase told Alicia he’d had a good laugh when old Fred was knocked flat.’
She seemed undisturbed by the thought of explosives. We finished the lunch, I paid the bill, and we set off on the short road back to Maidenhead. A little way along there, I stopped the car in a lay-by and switched off the engine.
She didn’t ask why we’d stopped. After a pause she said, ‘Alicia is ruining our marriage, I suppose you know that?’
I murmured an assent.
‘I’d known Gervase for only four months when we got married. 1 didn’t realise… She’s twisted him from birth, hasn’t she? With her awful lies and spite. She sets him against you all the time. Gervase says terrible