The Witches by Peter Curtis

Author:Peter Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

14

MRS MOTT-TYLER’S LARGE, BEAUTIFUL HOUSE WAS called Barnhurst and stood in what, until comparatively, recent times, had been a lonely country lane; now it was joined to the town’s suburbs by a road full of new houses and bungalows, and there were some in occupation, some being built, on its countryward side. A large garden and several ornamental trees ensured its privacy, however.

The straitened circumstances to which the Almoner had alluded, and of which Mrs Mott-Tyler frequently complained, were, Miss Mayfield thought, merely a matter of comparison. Mrs Mott-Tyler lived very comfortably indeed. She had, at the time of Miss Mayfield’s entry to the household, three guests: two old ladies, who never left their bed sitting-rooms, and a retired General, very arthritic but determinedly mobile. The old ladies were waited upon and cared for by a woman in young middle age who had once been a nurse and with whom Mrs Mott-Tyler was upon what Miss Mayfield described to herself as scornfully intimate terms; the General had his own man, a shrivelled, shuffling little fellow called Washbrook, who saw to all his master’s needs with a surly efficiency and spent the rest of his time evading any attempt to press him into other service. A feud of almost comic proportions was waged between him and Miss Ellison, the nurse, for whom he had once refused to bring back a packet of cigarettes.

‘Let him wait,’ she said darkly. ‘One day he’ll come to me with a cut or a scratch or a snivel, and he’ll get short shrift.’

Both Mrs Mott-Tyler and Miss Ellison made an obvious effort to be kind to Miss Mayfield. It was obvious because neither of them was sympathetic by nature or imaginative enough to understand her problem. Much of Mrs Mott-Tyler’s youth had been spent in India; she had shot the three tigers whose skins lay in the hall; she spoke nostalgically of hunting in Leicestershire, of ski-ing in Davos. She had carried into her fifties a good deal of a hard blonde beauty, an excellent constitution and much of the slangy dash of the twenties. Within ten minutes of making her acquaintance Miss Mayfield knew that she would have nothing but scorn for self-pity, and that had she been afflicted with loss of memory, she would have made a joke of it – ‘So what the hell. I hope I’ve forgotten my debts.’ But she had a certain charm, and she exerted herself to make Miss Mayfield feel welcome. On some rare occasions when there was no one else to do it, she would wait upon her herself, in a casual, slapdash way which always made Miss Mayfield feel both flattered and apologetic.

‘I was supposed to be coming to help you,’ she protested once.

‘I don’t know what Hal was thinking about when he said that. Doing the flowers, I suppose. I happen to like doing my own flowers.’

‘And you do them much better than I ever could. But I could do errands – when I’ve found my way round the shops.

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