Peter Robinson - In A Dry Season

But in this, as in most of my first impressions about Gloria, I was quite wrong. This freshness in her appearance was simply one of her many remarkable qualities. She could spend the day hay-making, threshing, pea-pulling, milking, snagging turnips, yet always appear fresh and alive, with energy to spare, as if, unlike the rest of us mere mortals, she had some sort of invisible shield around her through which the hard diurnal toil couldn’t penetrate.

On first impressions, I have to confess that I did not like Gloria Stringer; she struck me as being vain, common, shallow and selfish. Not to mention beautiful, of course. That hurt, especially.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, but right in the middle of our conversation, Michael Stanhope had to walk in.

Michael Stanhope was something of a character around the village, to put it mildly. A reasonably successful artist, somewhere, I’d guess, in his early fifties, he affected a rakish appearance and seemed deliberately to go out of his way to offend people.

That day, he was wearing a rumpled white linen suit over a grubby lavender shirt and a crooked yellow bow tie. He also wore his ubiquitous broad-brimmed hat and carried a cane with a snake-head handle. As usual, he looked quite dissipated. His eyes were bloodshot, he had at least three days’ stubble on his face, and he emanated a sort of general fug of stale smoke and alcohol.

A lot of people didn’t like Michael Stanhope because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought and he spoke out against the war. I quite liked him, in a way, though I didn’t agree with his views. Half the time he only said what he did to annoy people, like complaining that he couldn’t get canvas for his paintings because the army was using it all. That wasn’t true at all.

But he would have to walk in right then.

“Good morning, my cherub,” he said, as he always did, though I felt far from cherubic. “I trust you have my usual?”

“Er, sorry, Mr. Stanhope,” I stammered. “We’re all out.”

“All out? Come, come now, girl, that can’t be.” He grinned and looked over at Gloria mischievously. Then he winked at her.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stanhope.”

“I’ll bet if you looked in the usual place,” he said, leaning forward and rapping on the counter with his cane, “you would find them.”

I knew when I was beaten. Mortified, blushing to the roots of my being, I reached under the counter and brought out the two packets of Piccadilly I had put aside for him, the way I always did whenever we were lucky enough to get some in.

“That’ll be one and eight, please,” I said.

“Outrageous,” Mr. Stanhope complained as he dug out the coins, “the way this government is taxing us to death to make war. Don’t you think so, my cherub?”

I muttered something noncommittal.

All the while Gloria had been watching our little display with growing fascination. When I glanced at her guiltily as I handed over the cigarettes to Mr. Stanhope, she smiled at me and shrugged.

Mr. Stanhope must have caught the gesture. He was always quick to sense any new nuance or current in the atmosphere. He fed on that sort of thing.

“Ah, I see ,” he said, turning his gaze fully toward Gloria and admiring her figure quite openly. “Do I take it that you were inquiring after cigarettes yourself, my dear?”

Gloria nodded. “As a matter of fact, I was.”

“Well,” said Mr. Stanhope, putting the brass snakehead of his cane to his chin as he reflected, “I’ll tell you what. As I very much approve of women smoking, perhaps we can come to some sort of arrangement. I have but one stipulation.”

“Oh,” said Gloria, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes. “And what might that be?”

“That you smoke in the street every now and then.”

Gloria stared at him for a moment, then she started to laugh. “That won’t be a problem,” she said. “I can assure you.”

And he handed her one of the packets.

I was flabbergasted. There were ten cigarettes in each packet and they weren’t cheap or easy to get.

Instead of protesting that she couldn’t possibly accept them but thanking him for his generosity anyway, as I would have done, Gloria simply took the packet and said, “Why, thank you very much, Mr…?”

He beamed at her. “Stanhope. Michael Stanhope. At your service. And it’s my pleasure. Believe me, my dear, it’s a rare treat indeed to meet a woman as comely as thyself around these parts.” Then he moved a step closer and scrutinized her, quite rudely, I thought, rather like a farmer looking over a horse he was about to buy.

Gloria stood her ground.

When Mr. Stanhope had finished, he turned to go, but before the door shut behind him he cast a quick glance over his shoulder at Gloria. “You know, you really must visit my studio, my dear. See my etchings, as it were.” And with that he was gone, chuckling as he went.

In the silence that followed, Gloria and I stared at one another for a moment, then we both burst out giggling. When we had managed to control ourselves, I told her I was sorry for deceiving her over the cigarettes, but she waved the apology aside. “You have your regulars to attend to,” she said. “And these are difficult times.”

“I must apologize for Mr. Stanhope, too,” I said. “I’m afraid he can be quite rude.”

“Nonsense,” she said, with that little pixie-ish grin of hers. “I rather liked him. And he did give me these.”

She opened the packet and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head; I didn’t smoke then. She put one in the corner of her mouth and lit it with a small silver lighter she took from her uniform pocket. “Just as well,” she said. “I can see these will have to last me a while.”

“I can put some aside for you in future,” I said. “I mean, I can try. Depending on how many we can get, of course.”

“Would you? Oh, yes, please! That would be wonderful. Now if I might just have a look at that copy of Picture Goer over there, the one with Vivien Leigh on the cover. I do so admire Vivien Leigh, don’t you? She’s so beautiful. Have you seen Gone With the Wind ? I saw it in the West End before I went on my month’s training. Absolutely-”

But before I could get the magazine for her or tell her that Gone With the Wind hadn’t reached this far north yet, Matthew dashed in.

Gloria turned at the sound of the bell, eyebrows raised in curiosity. When he saw her, my brother stopped in his tracks and fell into her eyes so deeply you could hear the splash.

The first thing Banks did when he got back to the cottage that night was check the answering machine. Nothing. Damn it. He wanted to put things right after his miserable cock-up on the phone earlier that day, but he still had no access to Brian’s number in Wimbledon. He didn’t even know Andrew’s last name. He could find out – after all, he was supposed to be a detective – but it would take time, and he could only do it during office hours. Sandra might know, of course, but the last thing he wanted to do was talk to her.

Banks poured himself a whiskey, turned off the bright overhead light and switched on the reading lamp by his armchair. He picked up the book he had been reading over the past week, an anthology of twentieth-century poetry, but he couldn’t concentrate. The blue walls distracted him, and the smell of paint in the deep silence of the countryside made him feel lonely and restless. He turned on the radio. Someone was playing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

Banks glanced around the room. The walls did look good; they harmonized well with the ceiling, which he had painted the color of ripe Brie. Maybe they were just a little too cold, he thought, though he needed all the air-conditioning he could get in this weather. He could always repaint them orange or red in winter, when the ice and snow came, and that would give the illusion of warmth.