The Dark Shore

by Susan Howatch

  From somewhere far away, the latch on the front door clicked and someone stepped into the hall.

  He was back.

  She put the finishing touches to her make-up, stood up and went out on to the landing.

  “Justin?”

  “Hullo,” he called from the livingroom. He sounded calm and untroubled. “Where are you?”

  “Just coming.” He doesn’t know, she thought. He hasn’t seen the paper. It’s going to be all right.

  She reached the hall and moved into the livingroom. There was a cool draught of air, and over by the long windows the curtains swayed softly in the mellow light.

  “Ah, there you are,” said Justin.

  “How are you, darling? Nice day?”

  “Hm-hm.”

  She gave him a kiss and stood looking at him for a moment. “You don’t sound too certain!”

  He glanced away, moving over to the fireplace, and picked up a package of cigarettes for a moment before putting them down again and moving towards the long windows.

  “Your plants are doing well, aren’t they?” he said absently, looking out into the patio, and then suddenly he was swinging round, catching her unawares when she was off her guard, and the tension was in every line of her face and body.

  “Justin—?”

  “Yes,” he said placidly. “I’ve seen the paper.” He strolled over to the sofa, sat down and picked up the Times. “The photograph didn’t look much like him, did it? I wonder why he’s in London.” When no reply was forthcoming, he started to glance down the personal column but soon abandoned it for the center pages. The room was filled with the rustle of the newspaper being turned inside out, and then he added, “What’s for dinner, G.? Is it steak tonight?”

  “Justin darling—” Camilla was moving swiftly over to the sofa, her hands agitated, her voice strained and high. “I know just how you must be feeling—”

  “I don’t see how you can, G., because to be perfectly honest, I don’t feel anything. It means nothing to me at all.”

  She stared at him. He stared back tranquilly and then glanced back at the Times.

  “I see,” said Camilla, turning away abruptly. “Of course you won’t be contacting him.”

  “Of course not. Will you?” He carefully turned the paper back again and stood up. “I’ll be going out after dinner, G.,” he said presently, going over to the door. “Back about eleven, I expect. I’ll try not to make too much noise when I come in.”

  “I see,” she said slowly. “Yes. Yes, that’s all right, Justin.”

  The door closed gently and she was alone in the silent room. She felt relieved that he seemed to have taken such a sensible view of the situation, but she could not rid herself of her anxiety, and amidst all her confused worries she found herself comparing her grandson’s total self-sufficiency with Jon’s constant assertion of his independence...

  3

  Eve never bought an evening paper because there was usually never any time to read it. The journey from her office in Piccadilly to her flat in Davies Street was too brief to allow time for reading and as soon as she was home, there was nearly always the usual rush to have a bath, change and go out. Or if she wasn’t going out, there was even more of a rush to have a bath, change and start cooking for a dinner-party. Newspapers played a very small, insignificant part in her life, and none more so than the ones which came on sale in the evening.

  On that particular evening, she had just finished changing and was embarking on the intricate task of make-up when an unexpected caller drifted into the flat and upset all her carefully-planned schedules.

  “Just thought I’d drop in and see you ... Hope you don’t mind, I say, I’m not in the way, am I?”

  It had taken at least ten minutes to get rid of him, and even then he had wandered off leaving his tatty unwanted rag of an evening paper behind as if he had deliberately intended to leave his hall-mark on the room where he had wasted so much of her valuable time. Eve shoved the paper under the nearest cushion, whipped the empty glasses into the kitchen out of sight and sped back to add the final touches to her appearances.

  And after all that, the man had to be late. All that panic and rush for nothing.

  In the end she had time to spare; she took the evening paper from under the cushion and went into the kitchen absently to put it in the rubbish bin, but presently she hesitated. The paper would be useful to wrap up the bacon which had been slowly going bad since last weekend. Better do it now while she had a moment to spare or otherwise by the time next weekend came...

  She opened the paper carelessly on the table and turned away towards the refrigerator.

  A second later, the bacon forgotten, she turned back towards the table.

  “Jon Towers, the Canadian property millionaire...”

  Towers. Like ... No, it couldn’t be. It was impossible. She scrabbled to pick up the page, allowing the rest of the paper to slide on to the floor, not caring that her carefully-painted nails should graze against the surface of the table and scratch the varnish.

  Jon without an H. Jon Towers. It was the same man.

  A Canadian property millionaire ... No, it couldn’t be the same. But Jon had gone abroad following the aftermath of that weekend at Clougy ... Clougy! How funny that she should still remember the name. She could see it so clearly, too, the yellow house with white shutters which faced the sea, the green lawn of the garden, the hillside sloping down to the cove on either side of the house. The back of beyond, she had thought when she had first seen it, four miles from the nearest town, two miles from the main road, at the end of a track which led to nowhere. But at least she had never had to go there again. She had been there only once and that once had certainly been enough to last her a lifetime.

  “... staying in London ... English fiancée...”

  Staying in London. One of the more well-known hotels, probably. It would be very simple to find out which one...

  If she wanted to find out. Which, of course, she didn’t.

  Or did she?

  Jon Towers, she was thinking as she stood there motionless, staring down at the blurred uncertain photograph. Jon Towers. Those eyes. You looked at those eyes and suddenly you forgot the pain in your back or the draught from the open door or a thousand and one other tiresome things which might be bothering you at that particular moment. You might loathe the piano and find all music tedious but as soon as he touched those piano keys you had to listen. He moved or laughed or made some trivial gesture with his hands and you had to watch him. A womanizer, she had decided when she had first met him, but then afterwards in their room that evening Max had said with that casual amused laugh, “Jon? Good God, didn’t you notice? My dear girl, he’s in love with his wife. Quaint, isn’t it?”

  His wife.

  Eve put down the paper, and stooped to pick up the discarded pages. Her limbs were stiff and aching as if she had taken part in some violent exercise, and she felt cold for no apparent reason. After putting the paper automatically in the rubbish bin, she moved out of the kitchen and found herself reentering the still, silent livingroom again.

  So Jon Towers was back in London. He must have the hell of a nerve.

  Perhaps, she thought idly, fingering the edge of the curtain as she stared out of the window, perhaps it would have been rather amusing to have met Jon again. Too bad he had probably forgotten she had ever existed and was now about to marry some girl she had never met. But it would have been interesting to see if those eyes and that powerful body could still infect her with that strange unnerving excitement even now after ten years, or whether this time she would have been able to look upon him with detachment. If the attraction were wholly sexual, it was possible she would not have been so impressed a second time ... but there had been something else besides. She could remember trying to explain to Max and yet not being sure what she was trying to explain. “It’s not just sex, Max. It’s something else. It’s not just sex.”

  And Max had smiled his favorite ti
red cynical smile and said, “No? Are you quite sure?”

  Max Alexander.

  Turning away from the window she went over to the telephone and after a moment’s hesitation knelt down to take out a volume of the London telephone directory.

  4

  Max Alexander was in bed. There was only one other place which he preferred to bed and that was behind the wheel of his racing car, but his doctors had advised him against racing that season and so he had more time to spend in bed. On that particular evening he had just awakened from a brief doze and was reaching out for a cigarette when the telephone bell rang far away on the other side of the mattress.

  He picked up the receiver out of idle curiosity.

  “Max Alexander speaking.”

  “Hullo, Max,” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice at the other end of the wire. “How are you?”

  He hesitated, aware of a shaft of annoyance. Hell to these women with their ridiculous air of mystery and cool would-be call-girl voices which wouldn’t even fool a two-year-old child...

  “This is Flaxman nine-eight-double-one,” he said dryly. “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “You’ve got a short memory, Max,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “It wasn’t really so long ago since Clougy, was it?”

  After a long moment he managed to say politely into the white ivory receiver, “Since when?”

  “Clougy, Max. Clougy. You surely haven’t forgotten your friend Jon Towers, have you?”

  The absurd thing was that he simply couldn’t remember her name. He had a feeling it was biblical. Ruth, perhaps? Or Esther? Hell, there must be more female names in the Scriptures than that, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of any more. It was nearly a quarter of a century since he had last opened a copy of the Bible.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said for lack of anything better to say. “How’s the world treating you these days?”

  What the devil was she telephoning for? After the affair at Clougy he had seen no more of her and they had gone their separate ways. Anyway, that was ten years ago. Ten years was an extremely long time.

  “... I’ve been living in a flat in Davies Street for the past two years,” she was saying. “I’m working for a Piccadilly firm now. Diamond merchants. I work for the managing director.”

  As if he cared.

  “You’ve seen the news about Jon, of course,” she said carelessly before he could speak. “Today’s evening paper.”

  “Jon?”

  “You haven’t seen the paper? He’s back in London.”

  There was a silence. The world was suddenly reduced to a white ivory telephone receiver and a sickness below his heart which hurt his lungs.

  “He’s staying here for a few days, I gather he’s here on some kind of business trip. I just wondered if you knew. Didn’t he write and tell you he was coming?”

  “We lost touch with each other when he went abroad,” said Alexander abruptly and replaced the receiver without waiting for her next comment.

  He was sweating, he noticed with surprise, and his lungs were still pumping the blood around his heart in a way which would have worried his doctors. Lying back on the pillows he tried to breathe more evenly and concentrate on the ceiling above him.

  Really, women were quite extraordinary, always falling over themselves to be the first bearers of unexpected news. He supposed it gave them some peculiar thrill, some spurious touch of pleasure. This woman had obviously been reveling in her role of self-appointed newscaster.

  “Jon Towers,” he said aloud. “Jon Towers.” It helped him to recall the past little by little, he decided. It was soothing and restful and helped him to view the situation from a disinterested, dispassionate point of view. He hadn’t thought of Jon for a long time. How had he got on in Canada? And why should he have come back now after all those years? It had always seemed so obvious that he would never under any circumstances come back after his wife died...

  Alexander stiffened as he thought of Sophia’s death. That had been a terrible business; even now he could remember the inquest, the doctors, the talks with the police as if it were yesterday. The jury had returned a verdict of accident in the end, although the possibility of suicide had also been discussed, and Jon had left the house after that, sold his business in Penzance and had been in Canada within two months.

  Alexander shook a cigarette out of the packet by his bed and lit it slowly, watching the tip burn and smoulder as he pushed it into the orange flame. But his thoughts were quickening, gathering speed and clarity as the memories slipped back into his mind. Jon and he had been at school together. To begin with they hadn’t had much in common, but then Jon had become interested in motor-racing and they had started seeing each other in the holidays and staying at one another’s houses. Jon had had an odd sort of home life. His mother had been an ex-debutante type, very snobbish, and he had spent most of his time quarreling with her. His parents had been divorced when he was seven. His father, who had apparently been very rich and extremely eccentric, had lived abroad after that and had spent most of his life making expeditions to remote islands in search of botanical phenomena, so that Jon had never seen him at all. There had been various other relations on the mother’s side, but the only relation of his that Alexander had ever met had come from old Towers’ side of the family. She had been a year younger than Jon and Alexander himself, and her name had been Marijohn.

  He wasn’t in the room at all now. He was far away in another world and there was sun sparkling on blue waters from a cloudless sky. Marijohn, he thought, and remembered how they had even called her that too. It had never been shortened to Mary. It had always been Marijohn, the first and last syllable both stressed exactly the same. Marijohn Towers.

  When he had been older he had tried taking her out for a while as she was rather good-looking, but he might just as well have saved his energy because he had never got anywhere. There had been too many other men all with the same aim in view, and anyway she had seemed to prefer men much older than herself. Not that Alexander had minded; he had never even begun to understand what she was thinking, and although he could tolerate mysterious women in small doses he always became irritated if the air of mystery was completely impenetrable ... She had married a solicitor in the end. Nobody had known why. He had been a very ordinary sort of fellow, rather dull and desperately conventional. Michael, he had been called. Michael something-or-other. But they were divorced now anyway and Alexander didn’t know what had happened to either of them since then.

  But before Marijohn had married Michael, Jon had married Sophia...

  The cigarette smoke was hurting his lungs and suddenly he didn’t want to think about the past any more. Sophia, astonishingly enough, had been a Greek waitress in a Soho cafe. Jon had been nineteen when he had met her and they had married soon afterwards—much to the disgust of his mother, naturally, and to the fury of his father who had immediately abandoned his latest expedition to fly back to England. There had been appalling rows on all sides and in the end the old man had cut Jon out of his will and returned to rejoin his expedition. Alexander gave a wry smile. Jon hadn’t given a damn! He had borrowed a few thousand pounds from his mother, gone to the opposite end of England and had started up an estate agent’s business down in Penzance, Cornwall. He had paid her back, of course. He had made a practice of buying up cottages in favorable parts of Cornwall, converting them and selling them at a profit. Cornwall had been at its height of popularity then, and it was easy enough for a man like Jon who had had capital and a head for money to earn enough to pay his way in the world. Anyway he hadn’t been interested in big money at that particular time—all he had wanted had been his wife, a beautiful home in peaceful surroundings and his grand piano. He had got all three, of course. Jon had always got what he wanted.

  The memories darkened suddenly, twisting and turning in his mind like revolving knives. Yes, he thought, Jon had always got what he wanted. He wanted a woman and he had only to cro
ok his little finger; he wanted money and it flowed gently into his bank account; he wanted you to be a friend for some reason and you became a friend ... Or did you? When he was no longer there, it was as if a spell had been lifted and you started to wonder why you had ever been friends with him...

  He thought of Jon’s marriage again. There had only been one child, and he had been fat and rather plain and hadn’t looked much like either of his parents. Alexander felt the memories quicken in his mind again; he was recalling the weekend parties at Clougy throughout the summer when the Towers’ friends would drive down on Friday, sometimes doing the journey in a day, sometimes stopping Friday night en route and arriving on Saturday for lunch. It had been a long drive, but Jon and Sophia had entertained well and anyway the place had been a perfect retreat for any long weekend ... In a way it had been too much of a retreat, especially for Sophia who had lived all her life in busy crowded cities. There was no doubt that she had soon tired of that beautiful secluded house by the sea that Jon had loved so much, and towards the end of her life she had become very restless.

  He thought of Sophia then, the voluptuous indolence, the languid movements, the dreadful stifled boredom never far below the lush surface. Poor Sophia. It would have been better by far if she had stayed in her cosmopolitan restaurant instead of exchanging the teeming life of Soho for the remote serenity of that house by the sea.