Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  Acland said no; he said that place was a black place, he wouldn’t go there. So Constance went on her own. She was afraid at first, going down into that black black place. She took a step, then another step. She went deeper and deeper. She became quite brave. She dug with her hands, faster and faster, all day yesterday, all day today. She thought-she believed—Constance believed—that if you went right down inside the sin, if you burrowed down as far as you could go, you came through. You reached the place on the far side of sin, and once you were there, the light washed you.

  It said: You are here, Constance. Lay down your burdens. Look at the loveliness of the world. You see? The leaves are inevitable. The grass springs up. Night is followed by day. The planets keep to their appointed course. A man dies and a child is born. This is the world—can you see the providence in its patterns? That was what the light said, on the other side of the dark.

  Don’t write any more, it said. It anointed my head. It said: All alone.

  You can rest now, Constance.

  It was late when I finished reading this strange entry. The fire had burned down. The room was quiet. I closed the black cover and put the last of the notebooks away.

  I thought that Constance could not have written this unless she had been mad. I thought that Constance could not have written this unless she had been sane. Her opposites touched me, love and hate, sanity and insanity, death and birth—I suppose even those childhood terms, words I had not heard pronounced for many years: sin and redemption. It was as if Constance took my hands, right and left, and placed them on two terminals; a current flowed through me.

  It must have been, I think, about three or even four o’clock in the morning; the dawn was still hours away. I went to the windows, pulled back the curtains, and looked out.

  There was a full moon and a hard frost. Winterscombe was monochrome. I could see the gunmetal lake and the copper cockerel on the stable roof; I could see the band of black that was the woods, and there, on a rise to one side of the gardens, beyond the hothouses and the orchards, the spire of the church where I was baptized—where Constance, too, was baptized, on the same day. I think she believed that, as I did.

  I did not want to sleep, though I think I did, in the end, fall into some kind of sleep, wakeful, uncomfortable, propped up in a chair, half dreaming, half alert.

  At six, when it grew light outside, I rose. I walked around the room and then, quietly, the sleeping house. I think I was saying my last goodbye to Winterscombe, to all the people I now saw there. It felt a next and necessary step. As I went from room to room I thought I knew why Constance had given me those journals. I thought that if they were full of death, they were also full of life, and love; Constance had tried to be evenhanded. I thought: How odd; they have freed me.

  I went from place to place; it was like a pilgrimage. I stood in the conservatory, where Boy proposed, where the frames were now rotten and the glass falling in. I went up the stairs, to the nurseries, to the King’s bedroom, to my parents’ room with its bay window. I went back down to the ballroom, where Constance had selected her husband, and I had waltzed with Franz-Jacob. Just rooms, quiet, many of them empty—and yet, not just rooms. As I left each one, I closed the door behind me.

  When I returned to the drawing room I stood at its far end, in the alcove where my mother’s piano had been. That piano, on which she had played on the night of the comet party, was long gone, but I remembered its position exactly.

  I stood where my mother would have sat that night, facing an invisible keyboard and the room beyond. I waited. I watched, as people on a film set watch while cameras are repositioned: time for the reverse shot. If I could see these past events with Constance’s eyes, I could also see them with my mother’s.

  I was her child, too—I could see that now. Her identity rested upon me; it fused with that of my father. I resembled them, not just in the physical sense—that did not matter—but in the heart and in the mind. I stood very still; I could hear the music from that piano quite distinctly. Note after note; its resonance filled the house.

  I felt a great and most powerful sense of love—love past and love present. Its force was in the air all around me. My parents’ love for each other; Constance’s love for Stern and his for her: love enduring, and love wayward. Opening the doors, I walked out into the morning.

  So many places to visit one last time: I went to the gazebo, where my father once read a Scott novel upside down. I went to the birch grove, where Boy died; to the Stone House; to the church; to the stables.

  I looked up at the loft window from which Jenna and my father watched a comet’s light decline. I looked up at the nursery window, where a small child planned her father’s murder while she spied. Constance and Edward Shawcross, fighting it out to the death. Constance might have killed her father, I thought, but he had killed her first. Both of them, parent and child, were murder victims.

  Last of all, I turned back to the lake. I walked along the shore, by the reed beds. I watched the gray shape of a heron rise from the water. I thought: I can do it now. I shall walk through the woods to the clearing.

  I took the path Shawcross must have taken that night, the path Constance must have taken when she followed him. In summer it would have been impassable; even in autumn the track was faint. I walked on through the early morning. The woods were filled with the industry of animals. The woods were light, sun filtering through the tracery of the branches. I saw a hare break from a thicket. I could breathe in hope; I trod upon optimism.

  Even in the clearing; even there. I found it in the end. Light slanted; the grass was cropped short by rabbits; the only sound was birdsong. If there had ever been, here, the shadow of past events, it was long gone; the place had been purified by the passing of the seasons. The air smelled of the morning, of damp leaves, of woodsmoke. Beneath the oak tree the ground was thick with fallen leaves. I bent, brushing them to one side, making a space here, a space there, but too much time had passed, of course. The little grave Constance once made was not visible.

  There were no snares here now, no keepers, no game to protect. The woods might have been colonized once, but they had been reclaimed, long reclaimed, by nature. I bent a leaf between my fingers. I held it up to the light and traced its veins with my fingers. I straightened. I heard … well, let’s say I heard my name being called, although the woods were silent.

  I began to walk back. I walked slowly, sure there was no need to hurry. Ein Zauber Ort. I thought: I shall walk down to the lake and along the shore and across the lawns, and when I reach the lawns I shall hear the telephone ringing. I shall begin to run then, although there is no need—it will continue to ring for as long as need be. I will run, though, up the slope to the house, across the terrace. I looked at my watch. I calculated that particular distance. I thought: I shall hear his voice, in twenty minutes.

  In this I was wrong. As I left the woods and came out into the open, as I looked out across the lake and the gardens, I saw Frank on the far side of the water. His face, too far away for me to make out his features, was turned in my direction. His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his coat. He waited.

  I can tell you what the distance was between us then: It was no distance, and a quarter of a mile. I can tell you the length of time it took us both, between us, to traverse it: five minutes, maybe six. When I reached his side it was seven-thirty on an autumn morning.

  I touched his hand, and then his face. He was calmer—somewhat calmer—than I was. It was eight—I think it was eight—when we turned back to the house together.

  “Why is it,” Frank said, “that when you write me letters, I seem never to receive them? What did this note of yours say?”

  “If you walk out on receptions in your honor, and go out the back way and climb in your car and drive miles in the dark and then walk about in the gardens here half the night … Did you really do that?”

  “Yes. I was thinking.”

  “Then you don’t receive my me
ssages.”

  “Or I do. But indirectly. What did it say?”

  “Nothing important. Nothing that matters now. Nothing that could ever matter again.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Quite sure. It was very brief. A question of moves. A chess problem.”

  Frank stopped. He said, “I love your memory.”

  “Did you see me at the lecture, Frank?”

  “No. But I knew you were there. In mind, I thought. I lost the sense, mid-sentence. Had I known you were actually there, I would have thrown my notes to the four winds—”

  “You weren’t speaking from notes. It was extempore.”

  “I would have rushed down from the platform. The professors would have parted before me like the waves of the Red Sea before Moses. And …”

  “And?”

  “I would have given that very distinguished audience something much better than a lecture. A demonstration. Of some more elemental forms of biochemistry.”

  “Frank,” I said, after a pause and on a note of warning, “you do know Wexton is staying at the house?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter. Wexton is a tactful man. He will remain invisible. It is a little cold, kissing in the open air, I think. We’ll go inside, yes? Besides, there’s something I want to show you.”

  “Something to show me?”

  “Yes. A present, I think. Once meant for us both. I haven’t opened it yet. It was delivered to my hotel last night. No message. Just a label, with my name. I recognized the writing.”

  I recognized the writing too. A small leather valise, an old-fashioned luggage label: DR. FRANK GERHARD. The strokes of the letters were bold; the ink, black.

  I lifted the case, which was heavy. I looked at Franz. “Do you know what this is?”

  “I think I do. Yes.”

  “So do I. Shall we open it?”

  “Later, I think. Now—there is no urgency.”

  We finally opened it the next morning, sitting there in the drawing room at Winterscombe. We laid the case down on the carpet; we opened it up—and there they were, all our letters. As the lid was lifted, they spilled out upon the floor, all those old, now-faded envelopes, still sealed. My handwriting, round and unformed; Frank’s handwriting, which was, and is, European. American stamps, English stamps, French stamps, German stamps. We counted them; they were all there. Not a single one was missing.

  It was a gesture, as Frank was later to say, which had all Constance’s hallmarks: surprise; reversal; a certain defiance. What I should also have seen was that it was a final gesture, Constance’s last piece of stagecraft, her way of ringing down the curtain on a life in which she had never given less than a bravura performance.

  Frank, I think, did see that aspect of this gift, though he said nothing at the time. I did not see; I was too happy—and besides, I knew by then I had nothing to fear from Constance.

  Frank and I were married in London, with a rumpled Wexton as best man and a beaming Freddie, a triumphant Winnie, as witnesses. That wedding was in November—almost twenty years ago now as I write—but I remember it with the greatest clarity. For me (as Constance would have said) it is yesterday.

  Constance waited. I still believe that, although Frank remains uncertain. She waited until the marriage had safely taken place, and then—when she could perhaps wait no longer—she acted.

  The news of her death reached us some three weeks later. I heard of it first, not from a friend but from an unknown reporter, a Scottish stringer for a London newspaper, seeking confirmation for his story.

  That would have pleased Constance, who so liked indirection. It would have pleased her, too, that the circumstances of her death should remain unexplained, and be attributed, finally, to accident. Constance succeeded in dying, as she had lived, amid speculation and puzzlement.

  That, at least, is the public version of her death, the one accepted by newspapers, by her colleagues, friends, lovers, and rivals. It is not my version. I have always been quite sure what happened—but then, I had read her journals.

  Constance chose to die—and I have no doubt that she chose to investigate that last best secret of hers—in the place where she had spent her honeymoon. That house, once my grandfather’s, had been purchased by Stern. Stern had willed it to Constance, as you know. I think that until the occasion of her death, it was a place she had never revisited.

  Shall we walk to the wilderness? Constance had been walking in that direction for some time; once the news reached me, I began to understand that. Her timing remains her secret—as, no doubt, she wished. Why then? I would ask myself—and there was no certain answer.

  Sometimes I would think Constance began on that last journey of hers when Steenie died; at other times I would think, no, she embarked on it much earlier, perhaps even at the time of her husband’s death. Sometimes I would feel she was guided by coincidence, by the symmetry of numbers: She was thirty-eight when she entered my life; I was thirty-eight when she departed it. On the whole, though, I think the likeliest explanation was the simplest one: Just as Constance, once upon a time, would announce at midnight that she would leave for Europe the next morning, so, perhaps, one day she woke up, snapped her fingers, and said, Enough of this. Let’s see what it’s like—death.

  But if I cannot explain her timing, there are things I can tell you. I can tell you, for instance, about her route.

  First stop: that cocktail-age apartment on Park Avenue, kept unchanged from the days Stern owned it, where she had left me her journals. After that, a trail of visitations, the details of which emerged in the weeks after her death. There are gaps—but there are also certainties. I know she went to two of the London houses she and Stern once rented. I know she went in search of Stern’s childhood home, in Whitechapel. When I retraced her steps, I found the same house, the same Bengali family; they recognized her photograph.

  Whether she was searching for Stern in those months before she took her train to Scotland, I’m not sure. I think, rather, that—like me—she circumnavigated a part of her past before she said farewell to it. She was certainly alone when she did so; no evidence was ever produced of any traveling companion. I thought of that last telephone call she had made to me, from a station. I thought I knew the identity of the man she had said grew impatient, was waiting.

  Perhaps this is true; perhaps I invent, and read too much into a series of chances and coincidences. But walk to Stern’s wilderness she did, in the end. She stayed in that red sandstone mock-baronial house for one week, alone except for an elderly housekeeper.

  At the end of that week, on a clear fine day, not a breath of wind, the sun shining, the air icy, she walked from the house down the track to that black loch which she had always hated.

  It was a sea-loch, and subject to tides; she had calculated those tides, it seemed, with some precision. She took one of the boats that were left pulled up above the waterline, and she must have rowed herself, or allowed herself to drift, some way out, for she was seen sitting in the boat in the distance, in the late morning, by a passing fisherman.

  She was too far out for him to discern whether the figure in the boat was a man or a woman. A man, he assumed, and—thinking nothing of it—continued his walk back to his village. Later the same day, in the afternoon, he returned that way with his dog. He saw the boat still drifting; he saw it was empty. Some time, then, between eleven and three: a time when the tides were ebbing.

  Frank and I flew to Scotland as soon as the news came. I went to a house I knew only at second hand, from Constance’s journals. We talked to the housekeeper, to the fisherman, to the police, to the men from air-sea rescue. In the afternoon, when we were finally alone, Frank and I walked down the track to the loch.

  I looked at the mountains on the farther side, whose peaks were reflected in the water’s black and glassy surface. It was just as Constance had described it: a desolate yet beautiful place, not one to be alone in.

  Bravado and bravery, don’t you think? I certainly thou
ght so then, and do so still. Frank and I stood for a long time in silence, looking at the surface of that water. Preternaturally still, it would sometimes shift, heave, and then subside, like the flank of a great animal. When it did so, the images of the mountains bent; they fractured before re-forming.

  I thought: Full fathom five thy father lies—but of course the water was many fathoms deeper than that, and it was a sea-loch. They never found her body.

  AFTER WORDS

  FOUR YEARS AGO, FOR THE FIRST TIME in almost twenty years, I went back to Winterscombe. It was January of 1986; our two children (they are almost grown up now) remained in America. Frank and I went to England. There were two reasons for our visit, which Frank categorized as the major one and the minor one. The minor one was professional: Frank was giving an address to the Royal Society, of which he had recently been made a fellow; the major, he insisted, concerned my uncle Freddie. Freddie had, that previous summer, reached his ninetieth year—a fact of which he was exceedingly proud. Belatedly, we were to celebrate his birthday. But how? Neither Freddie’s nor Winnie’s zest for life had diminished by one iota; it was difficult to plan a birthday treat that would be sufficiently splendid.

  Such a great age! A trip to a restaurant or a theater seemed a little tame for a couple who had visited the Amazon at eighty. A party? Freddie, who had outlived almost all his contemporaries, now disliked parties.

  The matter was still unresolved when we reached London. It remained unresolved until the night after Frank’s speech, when we returned to our hotel room. I was looking through London listings in some desperation, wondering which musical (they all seemed to be musicals; they were all by the same composer) Freddie might enjoy. Frank was leafing through the glossy brochures for glossy hotels which came supplied with our room. Frank, who rarely stayed in such places if he could avoid them, was fascinated by them nonetheless. That evening, riffling through pages, he gave a sudden exclamation, then brandished the brochure in my face. I looked down, and there was Winterscombe.