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2 BLESSINGS

(Hybrid tea. Profusely bloomed, richly scented, strongly resistant to disease and weather.)

Patrick Aldermann stood in his rose-garden, savoured the rich bouquet of morning air and counted his Blessings.

There were more than a dozen of them. It was one of his favourite HTs, but there were many close rivals: Doris Tysterman, so elegantly shaped, glowing in rich tangerine; Wendy Cussons, wine-red and making the air drunk with perfume; Piccadilly, its gold and scarlet bi-colouring dazzling the gaze till it was glad to alight on the clear rich yellow of King’s Ransom.

In fact it was foolish to talk of favourites either of variety or type. The dog-roses threading through the high hedge which ran round his orchard filled him with almost as much delight as the dawn-red blooms of the huge Eos bush towering over the lesser shrubs which surrounded it. It was beginning to be past its best now as June advanced, but the gardens of Rosemont were geared to bring on new growth and colour at every season so there was little time for regret.

He strolled across a broad square of lawn which was the only part of the extensive garden which fell short of excellence. Here his son David, eleven now and in his first year at boarding-school, played football in winter and cricket in summer. Here his daughter Diana, bursting with a six-year-old’s energy, loved to splash in the paddling pool, burrow in the sand-pit and soar on the tall swing. There would be a time when these childish pleasures would be left behind and the lawn could be carefully brought back to an uncluttered velvet perfection. Something lost, something gained. Nature, properly viewed, ruled by her own laws of compensation. She was the great artist, though permitting man sometimes to be her artisan.

Now in his early thirties, Patrick Aldermann presented to the world a face unscarred by either the excoriant lavas of ambition or the slow leprosies of indulgence. It was a gentle, almost childish face, given colour from without by wind and weather rather than from within. His characteristic expression was a blank touched with just a hint of secret amusement. His deep brown eyes in repose were alert and watchful, but when his interest was aroused, they opened wide to project a beguiling degree of innocence, frankness and vulnerability.

They opened wide now as his daughter appeared on the terrace outside the french windows and shouted shrilly over the fifty yards that separated them, ‘Daddy! Mummy says we’re ready to go now or else I’ll be late and Miss Dillinger will be unpleased with me.’

Aldermann smiled. Miss Dillinger was Diana’s teacher at St Helena’s, a small private primary school which made much use in its advertising of the word exclusive. Miss Dillinger’s expression of displeasure, I am unpleased, had passed into local monied middle-class lore.

‘Tell Mummy I just want a word with Mr Caldicott, then we’ll be on our way.’

He’d seen the Caldicotts’ old green van bumping along the drive round the side of the house and coming to a halt beside the brick built garden store. His great-aunt, Florence, would have been not unpleased to learn that old Caldicott had been carried off some few years after herself by septicaemia brought on by first ignoring, then home-treating, a nasty scratch received during his gardening duties. But gangling Dick had taken over the business and, in partnership with the delinquent Brent, had dignified it with the title ‘Landscape Gardeners’, and Patrick Aldermann now paid more for the firm’s services two days a week than Aunt Flo had paid old Caldicott full time for a month. They did have greater overheads, of course, including a pair of occasional assistants, a tall youth in his mid-twenties who answered to Art and a miniature Caldicott, in his mid-teens and almost dwarfish of stature, who generally refused to answer to Pete. Aldermann’s wife, Daphne, able on occasion to turn a nice phrase, referred to them as Art longa and Peter brevis.

The gardeners had already got down to their essential preparations for work by the time Aldermann joined them. Art was heading up to the house to beg a kettle of water and cajole whatever was spare in the way of biscuits or cake out of Daphne or Diana; Brent was leaning against the van smoking a butt end; the dwarf Peter had vanished; and Dick, now a grizzled fifty-five-year-old, was studying which of the two keys he held would open the huge padlock which he opened every Tuesday and Wednesday of the year from March to November.

‘Mr Caldicott,’ said Aldermann. ‘A quick word. Someone went into my greenhouse yesterday and they left the inner door ajar. It’s essential that both doors are closed and that there’s never more than one open at a time.’

‘But there was only one left open, you said,’ replied Caldicott with a note of triumph.

‘Yes, but the other would have to be opened to get out, or, indeed, when I went in, so then they’d both be open, wouldn’t they?’ said Aldermann patiently. ‘In any case, there’s no need that I see for anyone to enter the greenhouse.’

Art returned from the house bearing water and a biscuit tin.

‘Mrs Aldermann says, will you be long?’ he said cheerfully.

Aldermann nodded an acknowledgment and made for the house. Behind him, Caldicott tried the wrong key.

Aldermann’s daughter and his wife were already sitting in the dusty green Cortina. Normally Daphne Aldermann drove her daughter to school in her own VW Polo, but two days earlier it had been scratched by vandals in a car park and had had to be taken in for a respray.

‘Sorry,’ said Aldermann, sliding into the driving seat. ‘I wanted a word with Caldicott.’

‘And I wanted to get to school in time to have a word with Miss Dillinger,’ said Daphne with a frown, but only a slight one. She was used to coming second to horticulture.

‘The postman’s been,’ she said. ‘There were some letters for you. I’ve put them in the glove compartment in case you have a quiet moment during the day.’

‘I’ll see if I can find one,’ he murmured and set the car in motion.

Daphne Aldermann gazed unseeingly over the extensive gardens of Rosemont as the Cortina moved down the gravelled drive. She was a good-looking woman in that rather toothy English middle-class way which lasts while firm young flesh and rangily athletic movement divert the eye from the basic equininity of the total bone structure. Four years younger than her husband, she still had some way to go. She had married young, announcing her engagement on her eighteenth birthday to the mild perturbation of her widowed father, a Church of England Archdeacon with fading episcopal ambitions. A wise man, he had not exerted his authority to break the engagement but merely applied his influence to stretching it out as long as possible in the hope that it would either prove equal to the strain, or snap. Instead, death had snapped at him, and his objections and presumably his ambitions had been laid to rest with him in the grave.

After a short but distressingly intense period of mourning, Daphne had embraced the comforts and supports of marriage. Her elderly relatives had not approved the haste. There had been talk and reproving glances and even some accusatory hints, though with that magnanimity for which upper-middle-class High Anglicans are justly renowned, a comfortable majority agreed that Daphne’s contribution to her father’s untimely death had been one of manslaughter by distraction rather than murder by design.

Happily Daphne, even in the guilt of grief, was clear-headed enough to feel conscientiously disconnected from the slab of rotten masonry which, falling from the tower of the sadly neglected early Perpendicular parish church he was inspecting with a view to launching a restoration appeal, had dispatched the Archdeacon. Now, twelve years and two children later, she too was aware she had many blessings to count, but close communion with her husband was not one of them. He wore around him an unyielding carapace of courtesy against which her anxieties beat in vain. Perhaps ‘carapace’ was the wrong image. It was more like an invisible but impenetrable time-capsule that he inhabited, which hovered in, but did not belong to, simple mortal linear chronology. He treated the future as if it were as certain as the past. It was odd that in the end such certainties should have driven her to the edge of panic. And over.

The leaky byways which formed their winding route from Rosemont were awash with morning sunshine, but clouds were waiting above the main trunk road and by the time they entered the stately outer suburb in which St Helena’s stood, the sky was black. Aldermann regarded it with the complacency of one whose application of systemic insecticide the previous evening would already have been absorbed into the capillaries of his roses.

Daphne said, ‘Oh bother.’

‘I can easily wait and drive you into the town centre,’ offered Aldermann, thinking she was referring to the weather.

‘Thanks, but don’t worry. I rather fancy the walk and I’m sure it’ll only be a shower. No, it was that lot I was oh-bothering about.’

Aldermann had already observed ‘that lot’ with some slight curiosity as he slowed down outside the large Victorian villa which had been converted into St Helena’s School. The ‘lot’ consisted of four women each carrying a hand-painted placard which read variously: WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE PAYING FOR? WHAT PRICE EQUALITY? PRIVATE SCHOOLS = PUBLIC SCANDALS and, at more length, ST HELENA FOUND THE TRUE CROSS, THE REST OF US ARE BEARING IT. Two of the women were carrying small children in papoose baskets.

Aldermann drove slowly along a row of child-delivering Volvos till he found a kerbside space.

‘Isn’t it illegal?’ wondered Aldermann as he parked. ‘Obstruction, perhaps?’

‘Evidently not. They don’t get in the way and they only speak if someone addresses them first. But it could upset the children.’

Aldermann looked at his daughter. She did not seem upset. Indeed she looked very impatient to be out of the car. She also looked very pretty in her blue skirt, blue blazer with cream piping, cream blouse, and little straw boater with the cream and blue ribbon.

‘As long as they don’t try to talk to them,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, dear.’

He kissed his wife and daughter and watched as they walked along the pavement together. As forecast, none of the picketing group made any movement more menacing than a slight uplifting of their placards. At the school gate, Daphne and Diana turned and waved.

Aldermann waved back and drove away, thinking that he was indeed a well-blessed man. Even the rain which was now beginning to fall quite heavily was exactly what the garden needed after nearly a fortnight of dry weather. He switched the windscreen-wipers on.

Daphne Aldermann coming out of St Helena’s fifteen minutes later did not feel quite so philosophical about the rain. Her talk with Miss Dillinger, albeit brief, had isolated her from potential lift-givers just long enough for the kerbside crowd of cars to have almost entirely disappeared.

Turning up the collar of her light cotton jacket, she put her head down into the rising wind and, hugging the shelter of the pavement trees, headed townwards. There was a car still parked about fifty yards ahead, a green Mini some five or six years old. A woman was leaning over the front seat putting a baby of about nine months into a baby seat at the rear. The woman was long-limbed, athletically slender, with short black hair and positive, clear-cut features which just stopped this side of wilfulness. There was something familiar about her and Daphne smiled hopefully as she completed her task and straightened up at her approach.

The woman regarded her with clear grey eyes and a half smile as the rain came lashing down.

‘You look as though you’d like a lift,’ she said.

‘Thanks awfully. That’s really most kind of you,’ said Daphne, making round to the passenger door with no further ado. But as she stooped to get in, her eye caught something on the rear seat under the baby. Upside down, the words St Helena jumped out at her. It was a protest placard.

‘It’s all right,’ said the woman behind the wheel. ‘No proselytizing. Just a lift. But it’s up to you.’

She started the engine. The wind wrapped damp fingers around Daphne’s trailing leg.

She pulled it in and shut the car door.

‘What a lovely little boy,’ she said brightly, nodding at the blue-clad baby who nodded back as the car accelerated over a bumpy patch of road.

‘No,’ said the driver.

‘No?’

‘Little, I’ll grant you. But not lovely. And not a boy. My daughter, Rose.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s a nice test of anti-stereotyping.’

‘Really? Well, I still think she’s lovely.’

The woman rolled her grey eyes briefly, but Daphne caught the contumely. It was not a safe way in which to treat an Archdeacon’s daughter.

‘And you,’ she resumed with increased brightness. ‘Are you Rose’s mother? Or her father?’

The woman looked at her in surprise, then threw back her head and laughed so fervently that the car did a little chicanery on the straight road, and Rose, stimulated by either the movement or the laughter, suddenly chortled merrily.

‘Mother,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Ellie. Ellie Pascoe.’

‘Daphne Aldermann,’ said Daphne. ‘How d’you do?’

‘How d’you do,’ said Ellie gravely. ‘You know, I came out so quick this morning that I didn’t have time for any breakfast. Do you fancy a coffee and a bacon buttie?’

‘Why not?’ said Daphne, determined to meet boldness with boldness.

‘Why not, indeed?’ said Ellie, and laughed again.