‘Then why in God’s name didn’t you do it?’ The words burst from Nicole.
‘Because if I had, there would have been no Lynmara for them ‒ for me, for Anna, for anyone. The real trump card against my marriage to Anna which my mother played then was money. She told me, quite bluntly, that there was no money. There was no money. My father had died only a few months before I met Anna, and they were still trying to straighten out the estate, untangle his affairs. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I just assumed the money was still there. I remember a really miserable and frightening morning when my mother summoned the accountants and our solicitor, and had them go through the figures for me. It was impossible to disbelieve them. My mother had only recently found out herself. She hadn’t painted the picture worse than it was. My father had gambled excessively, had plunged on the stock market, and lost, had pursued every wild scheme a man could think of to try to recoup, to pull himself out of the mess. Every way he turned, he lost. He’d virtually killed himself with worry and drink, and even more speculation ‒ and this on top of a heart disease. He’d mortgaged our lands to the point where the interest on that and his other debts was eating up the whole income. The lands couldn’t support the house. When my mother was sure I’d really grasped the figures, she told the accountants and the solicitor to go, and then she told me what I had to do.
‘I let Anna go, as I knew I must. And I married Cynthia Barrington as soon as possible. Cynthia was never deceived about our financial position, nor was her father. He insisted on a very thorough investigation of our affairs, which was pretty humiliating. And he insisted on a very careful marriage contract. Cynthia was his only child, and she’d been brought up like a little princess. He had great ambitions for her, and he was a multimillionaire. Perhaps he hoped for a far better match for Cynthia, but there was one awkward fact which he couldn’t get around. Cynthia had fallen in love with me. I’m ashamed to say that I used that fact as a bargaining counter without in any way returning her love. I just saw the Barrington money as the way out of our troubles. Her father quibbled a little, but his was a very new baronetcy, and people were still a bit snobbish in those days about money made in trade. God knows, he was in every sort of trade you could think of. Well, in the end he bought me, and Lynmara, and the title for Cynthia, just as he’d always bought every other thing she had ever wanted. He tied everything up in trusts. There was a trust for the children of the marriage long before we were married. There was a trust which to this day provides an income for me ‒ and I take it. There was a trust to provide for the upkeep of Lynmara. The mortgages and the debts were paid off on our marriage day. There was even a trust to give my mother an income. How she hated swallowing that! By the time we were married, we ‒ my mother and I ‒ knew that we had been bought in every way. Lynmara didn’t belong to us any more, but to Barrington and all his trusts. He didn’t become a millionaire by being a fool. He had no intention of handing over a fortune to the husband of his only child just to see it gambled away, if I turned out like my father. I could do what I liked with my bit, but I couldn’t touch the rest of it.’
He shrugged, and took a long time over resuming. ‘Well many marriages are made that way. I did it because I had to keep Lynmara. I hadn’t expected that the price would be quite so high. We were married in the summer of 1912 ‒ an enormous wedding which satisfied Cynthia’s need for show and spectacle. The party that began with the marriage never really seemed to stop. Lynmara was always full of guests, half of whom I didn’t know, or we were up in London, giving parties and going to parties. And Barrington acted like the proprietor that he was. He came to Lynmara when he pleased, used it as he pleased, even issued invitations to people we’d never heard of. And he was frankly and openly impatient for his first grandchild ‒ and it had to be a son. The only time I ever knew him to be angry with Cynthia was when she miscarried the first time she was pregnant. She had lost his grandson, the one who would have been Viscount Ashleigh. He ordered the parties to stop, and Cynthia to live a quieter life. He was going to have a grandson, he said.
‘It was fortunate for us all that Cynthia was pregnant by the time war broke out because I was sent to France as soon as I’d finished my training, and I didn’t get any leave until I was wounded and sent home for a while. That was when I first saw my son, and I was as completely hooked as Barrington himself was. It was Cynthia who was suffering. She didn’t enjoy motherhood. She didn’t enjoy the quietness the war years forced on her. She didn’t like being left alone at Lynmara with my mother. While I was in France, she kept escaping to London, but when I came back Barrington ordered her to stay at Lynmara with me. Hoping for another grandchild, I expect.
‘In her own odd, rather frenetic way, Cynthia was still in love with me. I wish I could have given her something in return, but the feeling just wasn’t there. I tried to keep my side of the bargain. I gave her everything I could, but she knew by then that there was just nothing at the centre of it. She was beginning to realize what the money hadn’t bought. The knowledge of this seemed to make her even more possessive ‒ and jealous. I was very careful to give her no reason for jealousy, but I couldn’t help showing how I felt about my son. And Lynmara also. It almost seemed she began to hate both of them, because I loved them.
‘I was posted back to France, and the scene she made was frightful. She insisted on coming to see me off, and went into a fit of hysterics at the station.’ He shrugged, ‘You see, there were some things which even Barrington couldn’t control.
‘The war ended. I came back. I longed for peace and quiet. To enjoy Lynmara and David. Cynthia would have none of it. She wanted her parties again, and so we had them. Endlessly. She also wanted me ‒ my undivided attention. She made sure she had it. The fits of hysteria became common, and demanded a lot of time and attention. I had to give it. That was part of the bargain too.’
Nicole stirred restively. ‘Look, I really don’t think I want to hear any more of this. This is your business ‒’
He cut her off swiftly, ‘Yes, you will hear it. You’ve told me Anna’s side of the story. Now perhaps it’s time you knew mine. Perhaps, some day, you’ll see Anna again. Then she can hear about Cynthia, and the sort of marriage I made. I had to hear about a man called Lucky Nolan.’
Nicole slumped back in the sofa, her gesture one of resignation. ‘Say what you have to.’
‘I have to because you ought to know the full price I paid, how far the bargain took me. There are very few people who know. I wouldn’t mind if Anna was one of them.’
He lighted another cigarette from the one he still held. ‘The real horror began when Cynthia’s hysterics changed into fits of withdrawal. The parties went on, but then there’d be a sort of sudden quiet. It was as if the music stopped for her. She’d draw into herself. See no one. Take her meals in her room. Those times she didn’t even want to see me. When these spells came on her, she’d always go down to Lynmara, as if it were some kind of bolthole. Lynmara changed too. I’d suddenly find that she’d ordered the dust sheets put on all the rooms, the shutters closed. The place was like a tomb. I used to get David away at those times ‒ send him and his nanny away to the seaside, or up to London ‒ anywhere, so he wouldn’t notice. Then Cynthia would come out of her spell. The dust covers were off, the rooms filled with flowers, and a whole mob of guests would descend on us again. For a while I thought it was the strain of living in a marriage which wasn’t working out, and I waited for her to say she’d had enough. But she didn’t want to divorce me. That would have set me free, and the trust that Barrington had set up for Lynmara was irrevocable.
‘It was Barrington himself who recognized that Cynthia’s wasn’t just the erratic behaviour of a spoiled child who’d never really grown up. He was in the house at one time when a party was in full swing. Ascot week, I think it was. She started giving the usual orders about closing up the rooms ‒ while the guests were still there. Then she just drifted off, shut herself up and refused to talk. She refu
sed to talk to anyone ‒ not to me or Barrington. That infuriated him ‒ and frightened him. We both were frightened when she complained of the noise, the voices. And the house was empty. They were talking about her, she said ‒ always talking.
‘Barrington ordered her to stay in her room. I don’t suppose she heard him, but she stayed. He brought two doctors down from London. They stayed almost a week observing her, trying to get her to talk, to react in some way. But she did nothing but complain about the voices. When she could be got to talk, she would fantasize, but so often her speech was incoherent. Then she would retreat, become, well … inaccessible. They diagnosed schizophrenia.
‘Barrington reacted violently. At first he accused the doctors of not knowing their business. Then he overreacted by deciding to send Cynthia away. No one was to know that she was ill. Of course I was to go with her. We travelled under a different name. It was the beginning of the trek round the clinics. It seemed to me that we’d been to a hundred of them, all over Europe, by the time we ‒ or Barrington ‒ finally gave up. He would hear of a doctor here or there, and off we would go. Paris, Zurich, Vienna. Always accompanied by nurses, of course. Always staying at out-of-the-way places, where we’d be unlikely to meet anyone we knew. Barrington gave the orders. We moved on when he told us to. The story was that we were simply travelling … just travelling. The truth was that he was terrified that people might get to know the nature of Cynthia’s illness. He didn’t want the stigma of that sort of illness ‒ not for himself, but above all, not for his grandson. Periodically he’d join us himself, just to see how she was. She was always worse. There were hallucinations. Delusions of persecution. She thought, once, that I was trying to kill her, and so she, in her turn, tried to kill me. There always were nurses at hand, so that didn’t succeed. The doctors didn’t know much about schizophrenia then ‒ still don’t. They tried this drug and that, shock treatment, anything and everything. In the end they said it was better if she were confined. Permanently. She was so far gone in dementia, they saw no realistic hope of a cure. Perhaps Barrington even aided them in that decision. He wanted it one way or the other. He couldn’t let us go on “travelling” for ever.’
He went and filled his glass again. Nicole slipped her hand into Lloyd’s. Manstone came back to face them. By now they knew they must hear it all. It wasn’t, Nicole realized, just because at some time this story might be retold to Anna. The man before them had the desperate need to speak.
‘I wish I came out of this whole affair with just something to my credit. But there isn’t anything. I let Barrington do as he wanted. I was used by then, I suppose, to taking his orders. And probably I was tired. I knew I was longing for a sight of my son ‒ and of Lynmara. You see, Barrington refused to let his daughter come back to England. He refused to allow her to be put into a nursing home here. He was quite sure that her real identity would be discovered. He was probably right in that. She’d had her picture everywhere ‒ the fairy princess, with a mountain of gold to command.
‘So I left her in one of those beautiful little valleys in Austria, in a beautiful clinic that was like a private house. Everything so quiet, so peaceful. The gardens a delight ‒ the walks in the woods so good for the patients, under careful watch, of course. They couldn’t have made it more beautiful, but it was a house of the dead. None of the attendants wore a uniform. It had no appearance of being a hospital. And yet you could always tell who were the patients and who were their keepers. And you also knew that once one of these patients had reached that beautiful valley with its little lake, the mountains, the beautiful house, it was very unlikely they would ever leave it. I think of it as the most dreadful place I’ve ever seen.
‘Barrington set up even more trusts. We were in the never-never land where a person is neither alive nor dead. He had arranged for the newspapers to get hold of an item that Cynthia had been killed in a motor accident on the Continent. To Barrington she was already dead, but she could not be buried. What mattered to him was that David was protected. He should not grow up, go to school, with the story of a demented mother hanging over him. Barrington was ruthless for what he believed ‒ and I can’t say, to this day, he was wrong. I’ve been back, a number of times, to that beautiful valley. I see Cynthia only at a distance. She doesn’t recognize me. They don’t encourage me to come. If she recognized me, it might disturb her ‒ might disturb the calm. And the Barrington solicitors go to make their personal checks from time to time. She is well cared for ‒ and she is dead …’
Charles shook his head in protest. ‘Barrington has been dead for years.’
‘Yes, Barrington has been dead for years, but his trusts still go on. Once he determined that his daughter was incurable, he set his solicitors to work on even more interlocking, and obscure, trusts. David was to be protected, whatever happened. He and his children were to have the Barrington money, and Lynmara. And I ‒ of course I was tied for ever to the woman who existed in that beautiful little valley. No mention of her name must ever come out in the English Press. Cynthia, his daughter, was dead. David, his grandson, must grow up exactly as Barrington decided. It must have been a great shock to Barrington when they told him that he was dying, and he wouldn’t be alive for ever, like God, to oversee all this. He made his will as tight as he could, but there was really no way he could protect it all. Since his daughter was not legally dead, a lot of difficulties came up. I can’t pretend to understand the obscurities those solicitors went into. But I was a living husband, with a living wife. He gave as much as he could to David, but David was still a child. He had no heirs. Where was Barrington to leave his money? His only hope was David ‒ David, and his children. Lynmara still had its own trust. I had my income. My mother had hers. And very discreetly, a trust was set up to provide for whatever Cynthia might need, as long as she lived. He couldn’t do more than that without revealing the condition his daughter was in. That he wouldn’t do. To be ill was one thing. To be mentally ill was quite something else. After trailing around Europe for more than a year from clinic to clinic, I was almost prepared to agree with him. Well, whatever I thought, I had no voice in his decisions. I had to say I didn’t want her back. It would have needed a braver, a more compassionate man than I ever was. And ‒ like him ‒ I cared more for David than for her.’
Without asking them, he went and refilled each glass. It was a deliberate action, as if he wished to give them time to absorb what he had said.
As Nicole expected, Lloyd spoke first. ‘Hereditary? Not in all cases. As with the treatment ‒ they still don’t know.’
Manstone echoed him. ‘Hereditary? ‒ well, we all take our chances, don’t we? What are the chances of producing an idiot ‒ or a genius? You don’t think, do you, that I was going to shadow David’s whole life by making him afraid to have children? He has as good a chance as anyone. They told me that. Now you two are going out to take your chances. Well, that’s the way it always has been.’
Nicole swallowed nervously at her drink. She had had too much drink. She couldn’t remember how many brandies she had had at the station. Too many.
‘What will you tell David? Do you want me to wait for him to come, and tell him myself?’
He shook his head. ‘No ‒ there’s really nothing to tell him, except that you changed your mind. For another man. Well ‒ don’t look like that! What else can you expect? You said you didn’t plan it. If you ‒ if you and Dr Fenton hadn’t got yourselves mixed up, hadn’t lost each other, David wouldn’t be involved. I’ll just have to tell him the truth. You wanted to marry someone else, and now you’re going to. I’ll just have to try to make him see that it was better it happened now than later.’
‘But Anna … you’re not going to tell him about Anna?’
‘Look, girl,’ he said harshly, ‘you can’t have everything! You said yourself you didn’t do this because of Anna. Now have the guts to stick to that. Whatever David may think of you, you’ll just have to live with that. Why drag in all of this? What has An
na ‒’
She struggled out of the depths of the sofa, her face flaming. ‘If Anna has had nothing to do with it, then why have you told us about your wife? Why? Only because you think that some day I’ll see Anna. I’ll be able to tell your side of the story. We all want to make our side of it look nicer. All right ‒ then tell David I’ve gone off to marry someone else. That’s true. The rest isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter. I just wish … I wish David didn’t have to think so badly of me.’
Manstone took the glass from her shaking hand. ‘That’s what will happen. He’ll think badly of you. Other people will think badly of you.’ Then he looked from her to Lloyd. ‘But you say you’re going for something better. Then for God’s sake, have the strength to stick by it! All that I’ve told you had only one purpose. Don’t trade yourself in for other people’s opinion of you. Do what you can … what you will. Have the courage to believe in it. In the end, there’s no one but yourselves …’
They went to the door. Lloyd turned back to Charles. ‘We’re going to Fenton Field. We’ll expect you, Sir Charles. There are certain formalities, since you’re Nicole’s guardian, and she’s under age …’
Charles nodded. ‘I’ll be there.’
Manstone had turned back to the fire, tossing a cigarette butt into the flames.
They let themselves out, and found a cruising taxi in Belgrave Square.
6
Later that night Iris sat, tight-faced, wordless, while Charles tried to tell what had happened. At the end she said, ‘Why? I don’t understand why!’
‘She loves him …’ Charles answered, helpless to explain any more.
‘Love! The little fool doesn’t know there’s no such thing. And for that she’s thrown away …’ For a moment her fury threatened to choke her. ‘I’ll never forgive her,’ she said finally. ‘And she need never expect it. She’ll have made me the laughing stock of London. By tomorrow they’ll be laughing …’
The Lynmara Legacy Page 29