Birth Marks

by Sarah Dunant

  In the end I should have taken the offer of the lift to the airport. Time and transport meant more of her money and it took a while to gather up my belongings and get myself back to Charles de Gaulle. Waiting in my satellite gate while planes jumbo-danced into position on the runway I set my sights on a few French businessmen and engaged them in polite chatter. Eventually I brought the subject round to Belmont. In both cases I got the same story back: the miracle man who combined virtue with strength and had built up the national GNP as conscientiously as his own bank account. Consensus, or everyone wanting to believe in fairies? I was beginning to wonder at my own cynicism.

  We left in sunshine and touched down to London grey. Back home I hadn’t exactly been missed. Frank had called twice and my mother had left a message reminding me it was my father’s birthday yesterday. Great. Maybe Kate had added my name to their present. First things first. I put a call through to Heathrow airport. Always cross the t’s and dot the i’s, Hannah. You’d be surprised what you can find in the small print. It took longer than I thought. Private jets mean public handling agents. British Airways put me through to Air France who put me through to the Operation Centre and finally the Operations Duty Manager. He found it eventually. Saturday 18 January, an 8.40 p.m. touchdown. It was not exactly public information and no passenger list was available, but he could confirm that the pilot was Daniel Devieux. Not so much what I’d wanted to hear as what I’d expected. At least I’d checked.

  I sat at my desk and wondered what to do next. Outside it was threatening drizzle. I had this empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I recognized it as the one that always comes at the end of a job. Except was this really the end? Certainly I’d done what I’d been paid for—the gap in Carolyn Hamilton’s life had now been filled, and I had long since used up my advance filling it. If by any chance it wasn’t the whole truth, then the client would have to be the one to decide if it was worth the money to keep me digging. I made myself a large pot of black coffee, propped up the picture of Carolyn on the desk in front of me and settled down to write a story for Miss Patrick.

  Reports, the private eye’s version of school essays, or in this case a game of consequences: Carolyn met Jules on a winter afternoon in a French château. He said to her…She replied…they decided to go ahead anyway. The consequence was…and the world said…I finished at midnight. I had tried my best to make it more than just the words. But it wasn’t that easy. Somewhere over the last few weeks a seachange had taken place. The shiny-haired anonymity of Carolyn Hamilton had faded and, like a photograph developing under the wash of chemicals, another portrait had emerged. Except that when I tried to decipher this one I found myself looking at not one image, but two, superimposed under each other like a weird kind of double exposure. The first picture was simple enough. A young girl fed on dreams and other people’s expectations had had to wake up to the fact that even talent couldn’t protect you from bad luck, and so had begun the long fall from grace which led to Cherubim, an advert in a paper and from there, inexorably, to tragedy. I thought about Daniel’s words: ‘She always seemed a bit confused to me. Not really sure what she should be doing with her life. I don’t think she ever understood the implications of what she’d taken on.’ So, in trying to get herself out of one mess she had fallen into another, only whichever direction she turned this one had no way out. It was a tale to tickle the tearducts: life as a quicksand, with her own character supplying the fatal flaw. Except for one thing that kept niggling at me as I wrote. Had it all really been that inevitable? Had she really been that helpless? Of course it’s all too easy to make the dead victims. They fit the role so well. So she was young, and had been disappointed. So had we all. Did that really make her so damned? The second Carolyn was harder to define, but she was there all the same. This was the ‘bright, active girl with a sense of adventure’ who had charmed Mrs Sanger into writing her a glowing report; the girl who had had the intelligence and the determination to lead a successful double life for six months, fabricating one reality for Miss Patrick while living the other for herself. And lastly this was the girl who Eyelashes had had so much time for. I thought of his tart, witty style, and how his anger kept him going when his optimism ran out. He just didn’t seem like the kind of guy to hang around with one of life’s wimps. Maybe Carolyn hadn’t been such a loser after all. In which case the story I had written to Miss Patrick still didn’t have a satisfactory ending.

  I reread my report. Maybe I had made her a little too passive, a little too much used by life. Even though she had not played entirely straight with me, I had no wish to hurt Miss Patrick any more than she had already hurt herself. According to the rules, I should now call the solicitor and tell him it was ready. He would send someone to collect it and forward it to her. I would be paid any remaining fees by return of post. Case closed. Except if I were her I wouldn’t want it done like this. There would be questions I had to ask, people I would want described, feelings I might need to experience. If I didn’t owe it to her maybe I owed it to Carolyn. I decided to break the rules.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I suppose I could have called her to let her know I was coming, but she might have refused to see me. It was almost midday by the time I got there. Remembering how far the short walk to the cottage had been I took a taxi, on my expense account this time rather than hers. It dropped me at the head of the driveway. It was almost two months since I had last been here. It felt like two years. I had imagined Rose Cottage in spring bloom, earning its name with a mass of wild red roses crawling over the porch and tapping on the windowpanes, while inside she sat pouring out tea, that miraculously straight back putting the world to right. But spring comes late to the north. The roses were only just in bud, and when she opened the door it was clear that she too was still in winter. There was still the imperial posture and the soft parchment skin, but something was missing: something that was once sharp about the eyes had faded, and even her clothes looked less cared for, as if there was no one to dress for any more. She recognized me immediately and didn’t look pleased to see me.

  ‘Miss Patrick, I am sorry to disturb you like this. I understand that you probably don’t want to talk to me, but I have found out some things that I think you should hear in person. I hope that’s all right.’ She stared at me, then stepped aside to let me in.

  The parlour was colder than I remembered and the bone china stayed in the cupboards, waiting for a worthier guest. I sat down on the sofa, she opposite me, just like before. On the piano there was a space where a portrait of a young dancer had been. When it hurts too much maybe you just stop thinking about it. Especially when some of it was your own fault. I took the report out of my bag.

  ‘I’ve come to you rather than your solicitor because I think you should see this first, and because I thought you might want to talk about it or ask me some questions.’

  She looked at the folder. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s my report. As much as I have been able to find out about what happened to Carolyn from the time she left Cherubim in May up until the day of her death. I have discovered who the father of the child was, why she stopped writing to you and why she couldn’t tell you that she was pregnant.’

  I felt rather than heard the long sigh pass through her. She sat very still, except for the slightest fluttering of the hands. After a while, when it became clear she wasn’t going to move, I got up and laid the folder gently on to her lap. She stared down at it for a moment, then shook her head. ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I already know everything that I need to about what happened to her.’

  I took a breath. ‘No, Miss Patrick, I’m sorry, but you don’t.’

  She closed her eyes with a spasm of pain or maybe impatience. ‘Miss Wolfe, I don’t want to discuss this. Carolyn is dead. Your “report” will do nothing to change that. She was a talented young girl with a considerable future ahead of her and she threw it all away. I, of all people, do not need
to be reminded of these facts. I’m an old woman and I have other things to do with my life. I am sorry. You have obviously put yourself to a good deal of trouble and expense on my behalf. I appreciate what you think you were doing, but it was never what I wanted. I thought I had made that quite clear after her death. I told you then that our association was over and that there was nothing more you could do for me.’

  Sometimes I’m slow, I know that. Not everyone can be fast. But I usually get off the starting block before the race has ended. Usually. ‘Miss Patrick, I don’t understand. Are you telling me that you didn’t instruct your solicitor, Mr Greville, to employ me to find out what happened to her?’

  ‘No, Miss Wolfe, I most certainly did not. I have never heard of a Mr Greville. My solicitor’s name is Street, Edmund Street. He lives in Newcastle and, apart from a few questions about my guardianship, I have had no contact with him since the death.’

  It was a little like living one’s own personal earthquake, that physical shock as the earth opens up and your sense of balance crumbles into a wave of nausea. To counter the sickness I made a grab for something solid. I reran the solicitor’s speech in my head. ‘My client is, of course, deeply distressed by the loss. I think it’s fair to say that they feel themselves to be in some way responsible for what has happened…But there is still the need for her to know.’ ‘Her’ to know. Mr Greville, or whoever he was, had known exactly what I would read from his choice of the deliberate pronoun. It was my turn to be distraught. I had not only been deceived, I had also been used. But if it wasn’t Miss Patrick who was employing me, then who the fuck was it? And, more to the point, why?

  ‘You seem in some trouble, Miss Wolfe—is there anything I can do for you?’

  Oh, yes please. Pretend it was you, read my report anyway and let me go home to be a store detective again. Fat chance. I stood up and my legs didn’t feel quite right. ‘I…I need to use your phone…if that’s all right?’

  She showed me into the study. I stood staring at a wall and a dozen yellowing dance certificates from half a century ago, waiting for London Directory Inquiries to answer. Needless to say when I finally got through the girl couldn’t find any record of solicitors Stanhope and Peters anywhere in her London computer. It was all tiresomely obvious really. I had had a phone call from a man who gave me a name and a firm’s address. I went to a café in the city to meet him. I never saw his office, never talked to his secretary. In return for a couple of hundred quid advance I promised him utter confidentiality and that, should I need to get in touch either during or at the end of the job, I would use only the number he had given me. If not the oldest trick in the book then one that was distinctly greying at the temples. I could almost hear Frank laughing.

  Back in the drawing-room I stopped in the doorway. I had been away longer than I thought. She was sitting with the file open on her lap, the last page still in her hand. Her face was set. Her distress filled the room.

  ‘Miss Patrick?’ She did not look up. I wanted to say something to lessen her pain, but I didn’t know what. I had come to her because, despite her stubbornness, I had thought she wanted to know the truth; also because there were things in the story that might make her feel better, make her realize that Carolyn’s final secrecy had been a contract rather than a desire to deceive, and that in the end her beloved little dancer had wanted life as much as money, but had got in too deep to get out. But seeing her now I knew it was all cold comfort. When push came to shove Carolyn had not come home for help, had not even been able to pick up the phone to the woman who had brought her up for almost twenty years. She had been feeding her guardian lies for so long that when she really needed her she couldn’t tell her the truth. I thought back to all those dreary postcards full of performance dates and weather. They seemed so pathetic now. And so utterly make-believe. Especially for a woman as sharp as Augusta Patrick. It struck me then, standing there, looking down at her, that she had known all along that the fairytale had gone rotten. Long before she called the Cherubim company and spoke to the blowsy owner of a second-rate dancing school. And long before she called Frank. But would it really have made any difference if she had told me the truth at the beginning. Probably not. By then the story already had too many knots to be easily unravelled. Except she couldn’t be sure of that. And that was what she had to live with. No. I had been wrong. My report couldn’t help take away her grief. She needed it too much. To keep at bay the guilt.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I need to ask you a few questions.’ She gave no sign that she had even heard me. ‘Aside from yourself and Frank Comfort, did anyone else know that you had employed me?’ She shook her head. ‘What about Carolyn’s mother?’

  ‘You seem to forget,’ she said quietly. ‘I was her mother. In all but name.’

  Surrogacy. This whole bleak little tale was riddled with it: women who couldn’t have the thing they wanted most in their lives, using others to try to get it for them. So they didn’t find me through her. No matter. If the police had managed to track me down then someone else could have done it too. I had left enough cards all over the place. Whatever else I needed to know, it better be now. She wouldn’t answer the door to me again. But all I could think of was that new pair of ballet shoes tucked away in a box lined with bills. Cause and effect.

  ‘Please don’t get up,’ I said softly. ‘I can see myself out.’ On the piano the Victorian father stared out at me in unrelenting disapprobation. Parents and children. I was getting sick of the pain they seem to bring to one another.

  I took a mental cold shower on the walk back to the station. It didn’t get rid of the dirt but it woke me up. The Hamilton family phone number was still in my book from the last time I had called. Once again it was the father that answered. And once again our conversation wasn’t really worth the money. This time I told him my name, but it obviously didn’t ring any bells. He’d had no contact with anyone since her death and his wife was not available for comment. She was staying with her sister, convalescing. Three weeks ago she’d been in hospital having a major operation, women’s stuff. Of course that didn’t preclude her from instructing a solicitor, but she didn’t seem like the kind of woman to go behind her husband’s back and it was clear he didn’t know what I was talking about. I cut my losses and went south.

  Back at King’s Cross I used what I’d got. Greville’s number turned out to be a paging service. Eventually we connected. He sounded pleased to hear from me, especially when I told him it was ready.

  ‘Splendid. That was fast work. I’ll send a bike round to pick it up straight away. Are you at home?’

  ‘No, I’m at King’s Cross station. And I’m not giving it to any bike rider. I want to see the client.’

  ‘Ah, I’m afraid that’s out of the question. If you remember—’

  ‘I do remember. But I’ve changed my mind. If they want to read what’s in the report they’ll have to come and get it from me themselves.’

  ‘Miss Wolfe, I don’t think you understand. I must remind you we signed an agreement. You were paid a lot of money.’

  ‘Not that much. And if I don’t hear back from you in a couple of days I’ll send you a cheque.’

  The pause was so lively I could hear the wheels turning.

  ‘I…er…I’m going to have to get back to you on this one. I must say I consider it rather shabby behaviour on your part. However…Will you be at home?’

  ‘Me or a machine.’

  Although it made me feel better, it was really a Pyrrhic victory. Until I opened the door to—whom? a face I already knew or someone I had never seen before—I was still the one being most used. Back to the question. Who apart from Miss Patrick and her real mother could possibly need to know enough to employ an investigator to find out? ‘Her’ he had said. But then he would, wouldn’t he? So what if the ‘her’ had been only the bait to hook me. In which case who was the ‘he’? Christ, the cast list wasn’t that long, who else was there? Eyelashes? Surely not. He couldn’t afford the fees
. One of the Belmont maison? It was a delicious thought, juicy with possibility but fraught with contradiction. Why should everyone go to such lengths to keep me silent if somebody had instructed me to find out all along? Come on, Hannah, you know better than this. Don’t waste time on questions you can’t answer. Particularly when time itself might just do it for you. Go home and wait for the call.

  It didn’t come. Not that afternoon or that evening. Or the day afterwards. By the second evening I had got tired of waiting. The only thing worse than a plot that doesn’t work is one in suspended animation. Maybe my attitude was wrong. Maybe the telephone was like the kettle: the longer I sat looking at it, the less likely it was to do its stuff. I had been working for too long. What I really needed was an evening off.

  I bought a bag of popcorn and a large Coca-Cola and sat in the second row, where my mother always told me it would damage my eyes. More likely she was worried about me being so near to any naked flesh that might appear. The movie was pure Hollywood, well dressed and not unintelligent until the last ten minutes when it double-jointed itself to reach a happy ending. I imagined Carolyn standing on the wet grass by the river, poised for death, an orchestra of strings in the background while belmont ran through the rain towards her. ‘You don’t need to do this. I shan’t persecute you because—well, you better know the truth. It wasn’t my baby after all. The sperm bank got their frozen vials mixed up. The father of your child is really…’ but my imagination deserted me at the last slow-motion moment and she flung herself in anyway. Not a single member of the violin section put down their instruments to help. Bastards.