by Nina Bawden
She stood up as she spoke; she was looking at Henry. He said, “Sit down, my dear, and don’t be a fool. Of course you’re going to stay with us.”
Her lips moved, but she didn’t say anything. She sat down on the sofa, looking quite exhausted, and very white and still. Henry went up to her. He said, in a voice that tried very hard to be off-hand:
“I’m sorry about all this, you know. It hasn’t been your fault. You mustn’t think it has. And … er … please don’t think too badly about Venetia. She was just made like that. She couldn’t help it altogether.”
I had never seen Rella look as she did then. Her face was suddenly gentle and soft. She looked like a kind child. She said, “You are very good, Mr. Sykes. I think you must be the best man I have ever known.”
Chapter Eleven
During the afternoon Walker arrived and said he wanted to see me. I wondered why he hadn’t asked me to go to the police station, and decided that he was trying to put me at my ease, which wasn’t very comforting whichever way you looked at it. He was friendly in a kind of cautious way that reminded me of a cat with a bird.
At first we talked about Venetia. He still seemed to be clinging to the idea that she might have killed herself, because he made a great point of asking me whether she had seemed at all depressed or unhappy. I hadn’t thought she was, and I told him so. Apparently the fool of a doctor had said she was neurotic, and liable to fits of violent depression. That may have been true enough, but she would never have killed herself. She wasn’t the kind. Depression had never turned her inward upon herself.
“What do you mean?” asked Walker, when I said something of the sort. I was sure that he knew perfectly well what I meant, but I humoured him, and said:
“She did get depressed, but she worked it off on other people. I mean she never sat in her room and got morbid about it.”
“Can you give me an example?” he said.
I said, “When she was young, after she had lost her leg, she would get these fits. They usually came after a bout of exhilaration … that’s pretty common, I believe. And when she got depressed she usually took it out on her sisters … order them about and bully them. That sort of thing.”
I remembered one Christmas. Brigid had been fat and spotty, at her most awkward age. Venetia had been particularly miserable, and she took it out on Brigid. I had come in to tea, and found Brigid in floods of tears, and Venetia, her eyes bright and all her misery gone. No one had ever tried to stop her behaving like this, because of her leg. She couldn’t help it, they said, we must all be patient with her.
“You said her sisters?” said Walker, looking very dumb.
“But you knew about that, didn’t you?” I said, trying to make him look at me. “There were two sisters. Brigid and a half-sister. Her step-mother’s child, a little one that died.”
“Mrs. Sykes was very fond of her own mother, wasn’t she?” said Walker innocently. I wondered what he was getting at. I knew, really, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.
“Naturally she was,” I said. I had often thought that Venetia’s mother was the only person she had ever loved. She had been like Venetia in a way, only not so beautiful. She was clever and witty and very hard. Her husband had been afraid of her. So afraid, that when she caught a bad chill, and refused to stay in bed because she was going to the theatre, he had not had the courage to stop her. When the chill turned into pneumonia, and she died, he had probably felt no emotion other than relief. When he married again, Venetia had never forgiven him.
Walker said, “Did she bear any grudge against her step-mother?”
I shook my head. “And what about her half-sister … Caroline?” He brought the name out casually, and he wasn’t looking at me.
I said deliberately, “I don’t really know. I don’t think she bore her any grudge.” It was true, in a way. She had never given any sign of how she felt about Caroline. She had gone with the little girl to the dancing class they both attended without any sign of resentment. Venetia had danced beautifully; she had a natural grace and a feeling for movement. Caroline was good, too, when you didn’t see her with Venetia. I believe that, after Venetia had lost her leg, there had been some talk of Caroline giving up her dancing classes, so as not to remind Venetia, but it had been Venetia who had said that it would be silly, that she didn’t mind. I never knew, really, whether she did or not.
I said, “Isn’t this rather old history?”
He looked at me in a fuddled sort of way. He said, “Perhaps it is. But interesting, you know.” He looked meditative, and I wondered how much he really remembered.
He said suddenly, “How did Mrs. Sykes get on with her husband?”
“They were indifferent to each other,” I said firmly.
“There was never any disagreement between them?”
“Sometimes, I expect there was. But I haven’t seen much of them, you know.”
“No, of, course not,” he said hurriedly. “I only thought you might have noticed something … or she might have told you herself.”
“Told me what?”
“That recently they had quarrelled, badly.”
I remembered that he had seen Sebastian, and I wondered whether the child had told him what he had told me. I said, “There may have been a quarrel at some time. I’ve not heard anything about it. But all married people quarrel some time or other, don’t they?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “I suppose they do,” he said. “But there were rather special circumstances here, weren’t there?”
“Perhaps,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. He was playing with the paper knife, pressing it down on the sheet of blotting paper in front of him, and making a complicated pattern of circles and squares.
“Mrs. Sykes had a lover, didn’t she?” he said. “And Mr. Sykes … er … wasn’t all that far behind?”
“If you mean he is in love with Brigid,” I said, “I believe he is. And his wife knew all about it. She didn’t mind.”
“Are you sure?” he said, and gave me a direct look. I felt my heart beating a little faster. I said:
“She gave me the impression that she was rather pleased about it.” He raised his eyebrows at me, and looked rather smug. I said angrily, “You can’t judge her by ordinary standards, you know. She wasn’t ordinary.”
“I don’t think she was,” he said, and widened his eyes and smiled as if we shared some private knowledge. I didn’t want to share anything with him, so I looked up at the ceiling. When I looked at him again, he was wearing an apologetic air, as though he felt that he had been presumptuous. He said:
“You know, I think you have been wrong about Mrs. Sykes. We have a statement from Mrs. Dougan that suggests that she wasn’t as indifferent to her husband as all that.”
“Mrs. Dougan?” I said, before I realised that he must mean Dorry.
“Yes,” he said, and produced a black file. He selected a sheet of paper and stared at it for a moment. Then he started to talk, disjointedly.
He said, “She says there wasn’t anything noticeably wrong between them when they first came here. She says that Mrs. Sykes was a ‘bit sharp’with her husband, but that she wasn’t very well at the time, and that may have been the reason. Apparently she’s been housekeeper here since Mr. Sykes went to school. Before that she was nanny to the whole family in turn. As one might expect, she said that she didn’t think Mrs. Sykes was the right wife for ‘Master Henry,’ but very sensibly she had decided that it wasn’t any of her business, and it was her duty to like Mrs. Sykes if she could. She seemed a very honest, intelligent woman, I thought.
“Anyway, after a bit, she began to notice that things weren’t going too well. She says, ‘She took to nagging at him all the time.’ Not, apparently, when other people were there, she was always very nice to him then. She says that they didn’t seem to be quarrelling about anything in particular, that it was always Mrs. Sykes that did the talking, and that it seemed to upset Mr. Sykes v
ery much. They never quarrelled in front of her, she says, but she always knew when they had been, because if she came into the room Mrs. Sykes wouldn’t say anything, but just look at her husband as though she hated him.”
He put the paper down and looked at me. “Of course she is obviously very fond of Mr. Sykes,” he said, “and you would expect her to be on his side. But she seemed a very reasonable woman, and she made it quite clear that it was always the husband who was particularly upset if there had been a row. That rather ties up with what you were telling me, doesn’t it?”
“She was always like that,” I said. “It doesn’t mean that she hated Henry, she was just working off her depression.” Suddenly I was feeling miserable, and rather afraid.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Had Mrs. Sykes any reason to hate her husband?” he said.
I hesitated. “Not that I know,” I said, and hoped that Walker hadn’t noticed my hesitation.
He looked a bit embarrassed. “What were their relations,” he asked, “as husband and wife?”
“They didn’t sleep together,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, and suddenly he didn’t look embarrassed any more. He even smiled a little to himself as though something had clicked into focus. “I believe,” he said, “that it was Mrs. Sykes’ idea that her sister should come and stay in the house. And that once she was here, Mrs. Sykes persuaded her to stay longer than she had originally intended to.”
I said, “It seems that I was right when I said that Venetia encouraged the relationship between her husband and her sister.”
He looked at me in astonishment. “Oh, yes,” he said, “she encouraged it all right. But I don’t think it was because she was indifferent to her husband.”
“She could have got rid of Brigid any time she liked,” I said quickly, and then I realised that I was playing Walker’s game, because there was a sudden, little smile on his mouth.
“Of course she could,” he said, and changed the subject abruptly. He said, “How did you, yourself, get on with Mrs. Sykes?”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was thinking about Henry. I hadn’t realised how bad things looked for him; I wondered whether there was anything I could do to make them any better. I said:
“I never found her difficult to get on with. I was very fond of her.”
“And she of you?”
“Of course.”
He looked as if he were going to say, “This will hurt me more than it hurts you.” It was a very sanctimonious expression. He said, “Do you know of any reason why she should put chloral hydrate into your brandy flask?”
I felt very cold. I don’t think I answered him. Then I heard him saying, “Her fingerprints were on your flask. All over it, in fact. She couldn’t have known that Sebastian was going to take a swig at it. Did she have your flask, with your knowledge, at any time?”
“Not with my knowledge,” I said. I was surprised to hear the bitterness in my own voice.
“She herself asked you to come and stay here, I believe?” He didn’t sound friendly any more; his voice was clipped: the Midland accent made it ugly.
I said, “Yes, she asked me.”
“You had no reason to suspect that she wanted you out of the way?”
I shook my head. He let me go then. I got out of the room as quickly as I could and went upstairs. I lay on my bed and smoked and stared at the ceiling. I thought of Venetia, putting poison into my brandy flask, her lovely face intent, and with that remorseless look about her mouth that she had sometimes. Suddenly my stomach contracted, and I felt that if she had been in the room with me I would have wanted to kill her. To have put my two hands round her long, white neck, and felt the anger and the hatred going out of me through my fingers, choking the life out of her. But perhaps I wouldn’t feel like that if she were really there. Perhaps I would love her too much. Perhaps I would love her even while I killed her. I kissed her ere I killed her. I knew what Othello felt like. Love and hatred mixed. Then I was crying. I hadn’t cried for years. I could feel the shuddering breath at the back of my throat and the warm tears on my hands. I lay on my stomach and cried into the pillow like an adolescent, until I felt warm and weak and sleepy and not angry any more.
I must have been there quite a while, because it was almost dark in the room when Brigid spoke to me from the doorway. Her voice was alarmed. She said, “Paul, are you all right?”
I twisted round. I was very cold and cramped. I said, “Yes, I’m all right.”
She said, “Oh,” slowly and rather doubtfully. I couldn’t see her very well; her face was a blur against the dark doorway. Then she switched on the light so that the room was very bright, and the window, that had seemed still light with day, darkened with the night. I swung my feet off the bed and stood up, brushing my crumpled suit.
“Has Walker gone?” I said.
She came into the room. She seemed, I thought, to have grown more graceful overnight. Her movements had always been clumsy, like the movements of a girl in her’teens who has not yet learnt to be assured. Now she walked with a certainty about her.
“Yes,” she said. “At least, he did go, but he came back again. They’re looking for Tom Adlesburg.”
“I thought he’d gone away,” I said.
She said, “He went to Shrewsbury and came back again on a lorry. The man who brought him back came into the station this afternoon. He dropped him near some hills called the Stiper Stones. They’re looking for him there.”
“What do they want us to do?” I said.
“Henry’s going up with them,” she said. “He knows the hills, you see.”
“What about the local police?” I said. “Isn’t that their job?”
“They’re up there already,” she said, and looked suddenly compassionate, as though she were thinking of Adlesburg dodging back on his tracks and being hunted down.
“He wondered if you would go with him,” she said. “I think he’d be happier if you went.”
Henry was waiting for me in the hall. He was wearing riding breeches and a hacking jacket. He looked very much the gentleman farmer.
“Oughtn’t we to have red coats?” I said. “And a hunting horn?”
“What?” he said. “Oh, I shouldn’t think so.” He found me a pair of boots that had belonged to one of his brothers. They pinched a bit, but they were more serviceable than my own shoes. The police car was waiting outside. Walker was sitting in the back, and there was a sergeant in the driving seat. Henry got in beside him and I piled in at the back. We drove off the main road and along a lane that wound up into the hills. The hills were lonely looking, and quiet; dreary expanses of grey heather with patches of snow and an occasional outcrop of bleak stone. Once or twice I saw a few sheep, but the sky darkened so quickly that it soon became impossible to see anything.
The car stopped just before a hump-backed bridge with parapets of rough grey stone that glimmered whitely in the darkness. Walker got out, and there was a flash of a torch and I could see a policeman in uniform. I couldn’t hear what they were saying; Walker had closed the car door behind him, and they stood well away from the windows. Then Walker got in again.
“He’s up on the hill,” he said. “We’ve got our men this side. They saw him go up over the rocks before it got dark. He hasn’t had time to get down the other side, and anyway, he won’t get past the road. Mr. Sykes, you said there was a path up the other side?”
“There used to be a rough sort of road,” said Henry. “There were mines up there … they went out of use before I was born. We used to play round the shafts when we were kids. There’s a sort of hut up there, or there used to be.”
I saw him peer out of the window as though he thought he could see it. We swung round the hill, and the engine roared as the driver changed down. Then Henry said something to the driver, and we stopped. We all got out. The hill looked steeper from this angle, though you couldn’t see much of it. It was very cold, and though we seemed to be in a sort of gully and shelter
ed from the wind, I could hear it cracking away through some trees above us, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.
“We’ll have to go across a bit,” said Henry. “We should hit the path all right.”
We went in single file through the heather. It was as thick and soft as a feather bed, and just as easy to walk through. There was still snow: it lay in long streaks on the top of the heather in an elaborate tracery. Henry was in the lead, then Walker. I could see his short, square body just in front of me. We went on through the heather for about ten minutes, and then I heard Henry say that he had found the path. Walker cursed, and I saw him stumble. There was a clatter of dislodged stones, and it was stony, but it was easy going after the heather. We went upwards for a bit, and then we must have come out of the shelter of the gully, because the wind hit us like a knife. It was an icy, damp wind, that licked its way down the back of my neck. I went on and up, too busy keeping my breath for the climb to wonder what on earth we were doing, and what would happen when we got to the top. I couldn’t see Walker any longer, but I could hear the sergeant puffing grimly behind me. Then the path seemed to flatten out a bit, and the backs of my legs felt easier. The wind was whining round my ears, and I thought of Adlesburg hiding up on the hill with only the wind for company, and the net tightening round him. Then I banged into Walker. He and Henry had stopped, on what seemed to be an open plateau. I could see some queer-shaped rocks ahead of us, and a few yards beyond them the heather dropped away below the skyline. We were on the top, and it was cold and dark and miserable. Walker and Henrys were talking a few feet away from me, but the wind was blowing towards them, and away from me, and I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I saw Walker waving a flashlight about, and down in the valley on the far side of the hill two answering flashes of light flickered and wavered on the road beneath.