by Mary Stewart
‘I do, oh, I do. It isn’t that. Please don’t think I – I’m bearing a grudge or – or anything. This, the way I feel now, has nothing to do with what happened then, try and believe that.’ I added, quietly: ‘Whatever was said or done, it’s over, eight years over. There was nothing to forgive . . . and now, let’s pretend there was nothing to remember, either. Let it go, Adam. From now. It’s better not to talk about it any more. Good night.’
I turned quickly away from him, but his shadow moved again across the turf, this time with something like a pounce. His hand caught at my arm, and, almost before I realised what was happening, he had pulled me round to face him.
‘Wait. Listen. No, I can’t let you go like this. You’ve got to listen to me. It’s only fair.’
‘I don’t see that—’
‘If you’d rather wait till you’re less upset, I’ll let you go now. But I’ve got to see you again.’
I said breathlessly, trying to pull away from him: ‘No!’
‘What do I have to do? Grovel?’
‘Adam, I’ve been trying to explain—’
‘My God,’ he said, ‘what did I do that made you hate me so?’
‘I don’t, I don’t! I told you.’
‘Then stay one minute, and listen. Look, Annabel, don’t cry. It’s all right, Just let me – wait just one minute, and let me tell you . . . You’ve told me it’s all over for you; you don’t love me. Very well, I’ll accept that. Don’t worry, I’ll accept it. Good grief, how can I expect anything else? But you can’t imagine that I’ll just retire quietly to West Lodge and do nothing about it, can you?’
Somewhere, far off behind the cedar tree, the owl hooted. I said waveringly: ‘Do nothing about what?’
‘About trying to see you again.’ His other hand came up now, and he had me by both arms, lightly, holding me a little away from him. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘there’s still one thing that we haven’t made plain. It isn’t over for me.’
I felt myself stiffen, and so must he have done, for he went on quickly: ‘No, all right, I’ve told you I’ll accept the fact that you want to forget the past. But there’s still the future, my dear, and you’ve told me there’s no one else; you can’t expect me to stand by and do nothing, now that you’ve come home.’ He smiled suddenly, and for the first time there was warmth and even lightness in his voice. ‘And I owe you a courtship, don’t I? We’ll have no more clandestine romance, my love! No more notes sneaked into the old ivy tree, no more damned chilly moonlit meetings in the summer-house, with the rhododendron leaves sopping wet, and you fussing about bats getting into your hair!’ He shook me gently, and his smile widened. ‘No, this time I’ll woo you properly, by daylight, according to the book. I’ll even start by calling on your grandfather—’
‘No!’ This time he must have felt the genuine shock of panic that kicked through me, jerking me rigid against the light clasp of his hands. Here was something I hadn’t thought of. I had come to meet him tonight, with no very clear idea of what would be said, but only with the knowledge that the eight years’-past love affair must, somehow, be kept from Con. Eight years was a long time, and it hadn’t for a moment occurred to me that passion might be still there, smouldering, ready to flare up – into danger. It had seemed so easy: all I had had to do, after all, was to tell Adam Forrest the simple truth – that I did not care for him; that the past was dead and buried, and that I wanted it to remain so.
Then, the interview once over, the friendly, civil goodbyes of long-estranged lovers given . . . I had hoped, more, known, that betrayal would not come from this direction. Yet here it was: after the days of smooth, too-easy masquerading, here, where it had been least expected, was danger.
Desperately I tried to marshal my thoughts. But the only coherent thing that came to me was that Con must not know. I had a sudden vision of his face as he had looked at me, down in the lane beside the meadowsweet . . . and behind him Lisa’s watchful, toffee-brown eyes.
‘Please,’ I said shakily, ‘you mustn’t do that. You mustn’t come to Whitescar. Promise me that you won’t come to Whitescar!’
‘My dear, all right.’ He had dropped his hands when I spoke, and was staring at me now, the smile gone, and a deep crease gathering between his brows. ‘Just as you wish. Heaven knows I don’t want to tease you. I’ll promise anything you like, except not to try to see you again. You can’t ask me to go quietly away and do nothing, knowing you’re there at Whitescar. For one thing, we’re bound to meet, and I—’ the flicker of a smile again – ‘am bound to see that that happens as often as possible. But don’t worry. I think I understand the way you feel, and I’ll respect it . . . only you mustn’t deny me the chance of trying to change it, now that we’re free.’
‘Free?’ The visions crowded in again, Con, Lisa, Grandfather, Julie . . . I said, bitterly: ‘Which of us is ever free?’
‘My dear—’
The very quietness of his insistence was terrifying. Something, that could have been panic, mushroomed up inside me, and burst into words I had never meant to say. ‘You mean, now that you’re free! You mean you think you can dismiss me when it’s convenient – forget me for eight years – and then, when I come back, just calmly expect to take up where you left off? You like to keep your mistresses in your own time, is that it? “It isn’t over for you!”’ I mimicked him, cruelly – ‘No, I dare say not! Now that you’re home for good, and your wife’s dead, no doubt it’ll suit you to have me around! Well, it doesn’t suit me! How much plainer do I have to be? I’ve tried to put it kindly, but you won’t take it. It’s over. Over. So will you please, please, please, let me go and leave me alone?’
Even in that uncertain light, I saw the change in his face, and stopped, half afraid. Then my thoughts steadied. There was danger here; I must not forget that. Whatever happened, whatever I told him, whether or not I tried to go on with the masquerade, there was danger. Why not take the risk, and get it over now? Everything ought only to have to die once. Adam Forrest had gone through all this years ago; he mustn’t be allowed to start it again, and for nothing. There was only one way to prevent that. Con had shown me how to play my cards, after all.
But for the moment I could find no way to do it. I stood silent, staring at him.
Then the decision was taken from me. He spoke so pat on my thoughts that he might have been taking a cue. ‘If it weren’t absurd,’ he said, very slowly, ‘if it weren’t something so crazy as to sound like black magic . . . I’d have said you couldn’t be Annabel. Even in eight years, I wouldn’t have thought you’d change so much.’
I drew a sharp little breath, and choked over it, then I said quickly, and perhaps too loudly: ‘That’s silly! Who else could I be?’
‘That,’ he said, even more slowly, ‘is what I’m wondering.’
I suppose the interview had got through what poor defences I had had. I simply stood there, and stared at Adam Forrest, with a curious sense of drifting, of destiny. Those dark gods who watch over the moonlit trysts of lovers had helped, cajoled, and then betrayed me to this final irony. I made no attempt to speak, just stared at Adam Forrest, and watched the thing dawning, incredulously, in his face.
Even when he took a rapid step that brought him within a foot of me, I didn’t move. He said slowly: ‘I must be going mad. It can’t be possible. It can’t.’ He put out his hands and turned me round, quite gently, to face the moon. I didn’t meet his eyes. I looked down, shutting my lips tightly to stop them trembling. There was a long pause.
Then he dropped his hands again, and turned away abruptly. He took several rapid strides away from me, and I thought he was going to leave me there and then, and wondered in a brief moment of panic where he was going, but he stopped suddenly, and stood for a few seconds with his back to me, looking at the ground.
Then he turned, churning his heel in the grass, and came back. His face looked quite impassive.
‘Is this true?’
I hesitated painfully. The moment
stretched like a year. Then I saw the hesitation had answered for me. I nodded without speaking.
‘You’re not Annabel Winslow?’
I cleared my throat and managed to say, steadily enough, even with a kind of relief: ‘No, I’m not Annabel Winslow.’
‘You’re . . . not . . . Annabel.’ He said it again, the sharpness of his questions blurred now into bewilderment.
This time I said nothing. The irrational feeling of escape, of relief, persisted. The flooding moonlight; the backcloth, as motionless and silent as paint, of the ruined house and towering trees; the little sundial with its sharply etched shadow thrown beside our own, these lent the scene an air of complete unreality. We were not people who ate and worked and talked through the sunlit days: we were beings from a fantasy world, creatures of a moonlit stage, living only by our passions, able to talk about love and death and pain, only in the subtle and rarefied voices of poetry. This was the world of the doomed black sail, the enchanted cup, the swallow flying through the casement with the single gold hair in his beak. We were Pervaneh and Rafi, floating like ghosts through the night-time garden, and to us the death of love would come as poetry; not fear, and quarrelling, the grimy commonplaces of the station platform, the unanswered telephone, the letter gone astray, the years of dragging loneliness . . .
The moonlight struck the sundial as sharply as the sun. Time was.
I was still facing the light. He had come close to me again, and was scrutinising my face. ‘You look like her, you move like her. But your voice is different . . . and there’s something else . . . Don’t ask me what. But it’s . . . extraordinary. It’s beyond reason.’
I said gently: ‘But it’s true.’
He gave a little laugh that had no relationship with mirth. ‘You’ve spent a lot of time tonight assuring me of various truths. At least this one is the easiest to accept.’ He half turned away, and thrust the tangle of tendrils aside from the dial’s face. ‘Who are you?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Probably not. But it matters a great deal why you are here, and why you’re doing this – whatever it is you are doing. At least you don’t seem to be trying to hedge. You might as well tell me the lot; after all, I have every right to know.’
‘Have you?’
He turned his head as if in exasperation. ‘Of course. You must know a good deal about my affairs, or you wouldn’t have been here to meet me tonight. Who told you? Annabel?’
‘Annabel?’ I said blankly.
‘Who else could it have been?’ He had turned back to the sundial, and appeared to be tracing out the figures with a forefinger. His voice was abrupt. ‘Tell me, please. Where you met her, what happened, what she told you. What you know of her.’
‘It wasn’t that!’ I cried. ‘It didn’t happen like that! I never met Annabel! It was Julie who told me!’
‘Julie?’
‘Yes. Oh, don’t worry, she didn’t know anything, really, about you and Annabel; but she’d seen you meet and talk in the wood, and she knew about the post-box in the ivy tree. She saw Annabel put a letter in there one day, and take another out. She – she just thought it was a perfectly natural and very romantic way of conducting a love affair. She never told anyone.’
‘I see. And just what has she told you?’
‘Only this – about the meetings and the ivy tree. She wanted me to know she knew. She – she rather imagined I’d be wanting to see you again, straight away.’
‘Hm.’ He had turned back to the sundial, and seemed absorbed in chipping a flake of moss away with a fingernail. ‘A bit of luck for you, wasn’t it? That she knew, and told you? Otherwise you’d have been a little startled at our first meeting.’ A piece of moss came away, and he examined the inch or so of bronze beneath it with great care. ‘Are you sure that was all Julie told you? I’m not suggesting that she deliberately played the spy; she was only a child at the time, and would hardly realise what was going on. But one doesn’t like to think that anyone, least of all a child—’
‘Honestly, there was nothing else.’
‘Yet you played your part so very well.’ His voice, now, had an edge to it that would have engraved the bronze dial he was fingering. ‘I find it hard to believe that you knew so little. Perhaps Connor Winslow found out somehow—’
‘No!’ I said it so sharply that he glanced at me, surprised. ‘At least, he’s said nothing to me. He hardly mentions you.’ I added, lightly: ‘I’m a very good actress, of course; you’ll have guessed that. I merely played to the cues I got. It wasn’t difficult. After all, it’s what one expects to have to do when one’s involved in this kind of game. If you think back over what was actually said, you’ll find that I merely played your service back. All the statements were made by you.’
He dropped the flake of moss on to the dial. It fell with a tiny rustling click. I saw him straighten as if with relief, but he still sounded grim. ‘Oh yes, you’d have to be clever. But not, it appears, quite clever enough. The sudden appearance of a lover must have been something of a shock. I grant you courage, too; you did very well . . . And now, please, back to my question. Who are you, and what is this “game” you say you’re playing?’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve told you the truth and played fair with you. I do assure you I needn’t have let you guess. I’m not going to harm anybody, I’m only out to do myself a bit of good. Can’t you let it go . . . at any rate till you see me harming someone? Why should it concern you, what goes on at Whitescar?’
‘You ask, why should it concern me? You come back here posing as Annabel, and ask why it should concern me?’
‘Nobody knows about you and her except Julie, and I’ve already told Julie that we’re not—’
‘That’s not the point.’ The words snapped. ‘Don’t hedge. What’s your name?’
‘Mary Grey.’
‘You’re very like her, but of course you know that.’ A long look. ‘The thing doesn’t seem possible. Mary Grey. My God, this sort of thing doesn’t happen outside the pages of fiction! Am I seriously to believe that you somehow got yourself into Whitescar, and are masquerading as Annabel Winslow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
I laughed. ‘Why do you think?’
There was a silence. He said, not pleasantly: ‘Funny, you don’t look venal.’
‘Try earning your living the hard way,’ I said. ‘You never know how you’ll turn out till you’ve been down to half a dollar and no prospects.’
His lips thinned. ‘That’s true enough.’
‘Oh, yes, I forgot. You do know. You work for your living now, and hard, too, they tell me. Well, didn’t you mind having to spoil your hands?’
‘I – beg your pardon?’ He sounded considerably startled, I couldn’t imagine why.
‘Wouldn’t you perhaps have taken a chance to step into some easy money, if the chance came, and it did no harm?’
‘I did once. But they’ll have told you about that, too. And how can we expect to calculate what harm we do? Who’s briefing you?’
The question came so sharply that I jumped. ‘What?’
‘You couldn’t do this on your own. Someone’s briefed you and brought you in. Julie, I suppose, wanting to spoil Connor’s chances?’
I laughed. ‘Hardly. Con himself, and his sister.’
He stared at me unbelievingly. ‘Con? And Lisa Dermott? Do you really expect me to believe that?’
‘It’s true.’
‘Connor Winslow bring back “Annabel” to cut him out of what he expects? Don’t take me for a fool; he’d as soon slit his own throat.’
‘I’m not cutting Con Winslow out.’
‘No. Julie, then?’ His voice hardened.
‘No. Annabel herself.’
‘Annabel’s dead.’ Only after he had spoken them, did he seem to hear the words, as if they had been said by someone else. He turned his head almost as if he were listening, as if he expected to hear the last heavy syllable go echoing
through the woods, dropping, ripple by ripple, like a stone through silence.
‘Mr Forrest, I’m sorry . . . If I’d known—’
‘Go on.’ His voice was as hard and sharp as before. ‘Explain yourself. You say Connor has brought you in to impersonate Annabel, in order to cut Annabel out of her rights in Whitescar land. What sort of a story is that, for heaven’s sake?’
‘It’s simple enough. Grandfather has refused to believe she’s dead, and he’s refused to alter his Will, which leaves everything to her. As things stand now, Whitescar goes to Annabel, with reversion to Julie. I think it seems pretty obvious that, in the end, Grandfather would have done the sensible thing, admitted that Annabel must be dead, and willed the place to Con; in fact, I think he intends to do just that. But he’s ill now, really ill; and you know him, he may play about with the idea, just to torment people, until it’s too late. Con might have got Whitescar anyway, after some sort of legal upheaval, because I’m pretty sure Julie doesn’t want it, but he’d only get a proportion of Grandfather’s money along with it, not enough for what he’d want to do.’
‘I . . . see.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘And just what do you get out of it?’
‘A home, at the moment. That’s a new thing for me, and I like it. A competence.’
‘A competence!’ he said, explosively. ‘Why, you lying little thief, it’s a small fortune!’
I smiled. If the interview had seemed unreal at first, when the ghosts and dreams of passion had hung between us, how infinitely less real it was now, with me standing there, hands deep in pockets, looking composedly up at Adam Forrest, and talking about money. ‘Be realistic, won’t you, Mr Forrest? Do you really see Con Winslow bringing me out of sweet charity, and watching me pocket all the money that goes to Annabel?’