by Rachel Hore
‘I’ve been doing quite a bit of research since I saw you last. I was sent another collection of letters, you know, this time written by the gardener cousin we talked about, Paul Hartmann, to Sarah Bailey.’
‘Letters,’ Mrs Clare mumbled through a mouthful. ‘I heard something about that.’
‘Did Greg tell you?’ Briony was surprised.
‘Yes. The whole thing has upset his father by all accounts. You know it’s all very well this digging around in other’s lives, but it doesn’t do any good. To some of us it’s not history, it’s personal. We lived through it. It was a terrible time and some people were put into situations they would never have faced in peacetime and we can’t entirely blame them for things they did.’
Briony blinked in surprise at Mrs Clare’s heartfelt bitterness. ‘Greg’s father, he must be older than I thought if he fought in the war.’
‘No, no, he was born after it ended, but his mother only died a few years ago and he doesn’t want the family reputation ripped to shreds.’
‘Ripped to shreds. Why should it be?’
‘Because of that man Hartmann. Well, what did he have to say for himself in these letters of his?’ Robyn Clare fixed her with her watery blue gaze and Briony sensed again the change wrought by her illness. The guardedness had gone, she’d become more direct.
Briony began to explain, haltingly at first, then with more confidence. All the time she watched Robyn Clare, interested to see the surprise in her face.
‘Sarah and Paul were friends, but then they fell in love.’
‘I didn’t know that at the time, though I heard it later. Mrs Bailey was very displeased, I was told, not that I cared about her finer feelings. Paul’s father was German, you see, even though he was related to my mother.’
‘Yes, I know that, but he was totally loyal to Britain. He wanted so much to fight against the regime responsible for his father’s death. But Greg’s grandfather . . .’
‘Poor Ivor.’
‘ . . . he was jealous of Paul because he loved Sarah too. And Paul was unfortunate enough to find himself in the same unit as Ivor Richards. Ivor became his commanding officer and treated him unfairly.’
‘A lot of nonsense. It was Paul who was insubordinate, caused Ivor all kinds of trouble.’
‘And you learned that from . . . ?’
Mrs Clare’s eyes were furious. ‘Everyone round here knew it. Ivor had a terrible time, was nearly court-martialled, you know. Think of it, the shame, especially for his poor parents. As it was, he was given a dishonourable discharge. His army career was ruined. All because of that German man. Paul Hartmann.’
‘But what happened? What had he done?’
‘A young Italian boy was killed. He’d been looting, Ivor said. Something like that. These things happen in wartime, of course, but in this case there were complaints. The boy had been a relative of someone important.’
Briony suddenly remembered the memorial in the church in Tuana. ‘Was the boy’s name Antonio?’
‘I have no idea. All I know is that Ivor hated Paul. Said he’d left him to take the blame.’
Briony frowned, wondering why the young Robyn Clare had had no room for compassion for Paul when, after all, he was her flesh and blood. She thought then of the group of friends she belonged to: Ivor, Jennifer and her brother Bob, Harry and the others. Perhaps the bonds of friendship were stronger than her relationship with this strange distant cousin who’d become the family gardener. That must be it.
‘But what exactly had Paul done?’
‘What had he done? Lied, I don’t know. Gone against the word of his commanding officer.’
‘Do you know the circumstances?’
‘No. Too long ago and it wasn’t spoken about. Major and Mrs Richards were devastated, we could see that. You have to understand how it all was. So many families had suffered loss. Others came back from the war having experienced things beyond ordinary comprehension. The only thing to do was to carry on as normal. There wasn’t all this talking nonsense that there is today. It wouldn’t do any good going over and over the unpleasantness. No, people tried to put it behind them and continue their lives as best they could.’
‘What happened to them all after the war?’ she asked and Mrs Clare’s eyes clouded.
‘Initially we were simply relieved that the war in Europe was over, that Hitler was dead, but then the news came out about those dreadful camps, and the fighting was still going on in the Far East and there were the hydrogen bombs in Japan.’ Mrs Clare was rambling now. ‘Many local men had been sent over there and many of them never came back. There was poor Bob Bulldock, who came back from Germany in ’forty-four . . .’
‘And Paul? And Ivor? The Baileys?’
‘Dear oh dear, you do ask a lot of questions. My mother discovered my father’s affair with That Woman and we didn’t come down here much. Then all of a sudden we heard that she was marrying again, she’d taken up with one of her husband’s old army pals, some old lover of hers, I wouldn’t be surprised. She moved to Suffolk, I believe. Didn’t want to be too far from her daughter.’
‘You mean Sarah?’
‘No, no, Diane, of course. A funny girl, Diane. I’m sure I have the wedding photograph somewhere. Stand-offish until the day she died. I can’t think why Ivor married her.’
By the time Briony left Mrs Clare the light was beginning to fail and the ground beneath her feet already crackled with frost. Away to the west, beyond the village, billowing cloud cover was blushing a peachy orange. She had a two-hour drive back to London before her, longer if the traffic was sticky, but something held her here. Perhaps she’d take a little walk first.
Loneliness tracked her like a black dog’s shadow as she followed the path down towards Westbury Lodge where she’d stayed four months before. It was shut up, forlorn, it seemed to her, as she peered through the windows, thinking all sorts of thoughts about Paul who’d lived there once, about Luke and Aruna and the laughter they’d shared, about Greg, who’d come to find her.
Greg. She wondered if she’d ever see him again, whether she wanted to. So his grandmother had been Diane Bailey. When Mrs Clare had told her, she’d been stunned into silence. It was odd that he’d never mentioned Diane’s name and she wondered why. How had the marriage come about? Can’t get one girl, marry the sister, that was not uncommon in life. Briony thought about the photograph Mrs Clare had found for her in an old album. Diane had been pretty, in a doll-like way, with large, wide-spaced eyes and a tiny mouth in a heart-shaped face as she hung on Ivor’s arm. Ivor, in a civilian suit, looked proud as he faced the world, but Briony wondered what they were each thinking behind their smiles for the camera.
What was that? A movement at an upstairs window broke her thoughts. She caught her breath, but then she knew it for the reflection of a tiny bird. There it was, behind her, flitting from tree to tree. This place spooked her. She moved on.
The door to the walled garden creaked open and she stopped, first astonished and then dismayed. The smooth summer lawns had been torn up as though by a giant mole. More likely a digger. Greg and Luke had been at work. To one side lay a pile of brand new pipes, blocking the path. The irrigation system, waiting to be laid. Why was Greg doing this? It must be expensive for a pet project. She remembered his plan for a nursery and a farm shop. For a while she stared round at the desolate scene, then turned away. She didn’t belong here any more. Where did she belong?
As she pulled the gate to, the softness of the light drew her further along the path towards a copse of trees. She guessed where this led and suddenly she wanted to see it. She walked on and there it was, the pond, dark and sullen, the willows bending over it like mourners trailing their hair. A stench of something rotten, stagnant, made her nose wrinkle. It was only of vegetation, she told herself, the breakdown of dead leaves and muddy water. She remembered the story of the child who’d drowned here, Robyn’s brother, little Henry, and she shuddered. Perhaps it had been an enticing place to a sm
all boy then, with trees to climb and glimpses of the speckled backs of fish, a flick of a tail on the surface. It would have been easy to lean too far from an overhanging branch and to slip . . . She could see him in her mind’s eye, his small head disappearing, his feet sinking in the deep mud at the bottom, weeds catching at him, drawing him down to darkness and silence.
She’d turned to go when her phone vibrated in her coat pocket. She dug it out, surprised that there was a signal, and read the caller’s name with shock, let it ring twice, three times, before she found the will to answer. ‘Hello?’ The phone was cold against her ear. ‘Aruna?’
‘Are you alone?’ Aruna’s voice sounded accusing.
‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m in Westbury actually. What about you?’
‘Westbury? Why?’ Aruna asked, ignoring Briony’s question.
‘I’ve just seen Mrs Clare. She’s recovering from her stroke and said she’d see me.’
‘Still chasing red herrings?’
‘Yes, if you mean Paul and Sarah. Nothing fishy about them as far as I know.’ Where was this conversation going?
‘I should say thank you for helping me the other night. I was a bit out of it.’
Out of it was an understatement. ‘You were upset, you poor thing.’
‘I suppose you knew what it was about.’
‘Your mum told me the bare bones and then you mumbled a few things. Otherwise, no, I don’t know the details. Aruna, I think I may understand what you’re getting at, but it’s simply not true.’
‘What? What isn’t true? How can you know what I’m talking about?’
‘Hang on, this is getting way too complicated. Are you OK?’ She was sure she had heard a snivel. ‘Oh, Aruna, I’m sorry.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘Why did I do what?’
‘Take him away from me.’
‘Aruna, this is nonsense. I didn’t. I haven’t done anything. Except exist. That’s all I’ve done. I don’t know what Luke has told you, but nothing has happened between us. I’ve been trying to stay away from him so that nothing did.’ She realized instantly that this confession was unwise.
‘So you did know how he felt. You must have done something to make him feel that way.’
‘I can’t think what, I’m sorry.’
‘Is that all you can say, that you’re sorry.’
‘I don’t mean sorry in that I’m guilty of anything, just sorry in that I am sad about what’s happened. I hate it that you’re unhappy.’
‘You knew how important he is to me. I told you.’
‘Yes, you did. And I was happy for you, that you’d found someone.’
‘I expect you were jealous.’
‘No. I really wasn’t. It may not be normal, I don’t know, but I was pleased for you. Genuinely. You were my friend.’ Were. ‘Are.’
There was a silence, followed by another snivel.
‘Aruna, it’s really not my fault and I don’t know how I can mend things. It’s between you and him and since I don’t even know what he said to you . . .’
‘He said . . . just that, oh God, that he had tried to think of us being together the rest of our lives and he couldn’t do it any more.’ Aruna started to sob.
‘Where are you now? Still at your mum’s?’
‘No, I came back to London. I have work, don’t I, not that I can concentrate much at the moment.’
‘Do you want me to come round? I should be back home early evening.’
‘I’m going out for a meal with Mike and Zara. And I . . . if he . . .’
Aruna’s voice had begun to fade in and out. ‘The signal’s bad. What did you say after Mike and Zara?’
‘I asked Luke if he wanted to come, but he didn’t.’
‘Oh, Aruna.’ She remembered how her friend had thrown all his possessions out of her window and felt embarrassed that Aruna could misread Luke that much to think he might want to make up. Briony knew he wouldn’t, that Aruna shouldn’t have treated Luke like that. And the realization that she knew Luke intuitively, better than Aruna, finally made her feel guilty. Aruna’s voice wavered in and out of hearing. ‘I’m losing you,’ Briony spoke into the handset, but she was talking to a slab of glass and metal. She waited in case Aruna rang back, then tried to call her, moving about to pick up the signal, but to no avail. Finally, she pocketed the phone, feeling miserable. Aruna didn’t want to see her and blamed her for the break up and yet . . . There was something else, too. It was that it didn’t sound as though Briony had figured as much as she had feared in Luke’s parting with Aruna. On the one hand that made her feel less responsible, but on the other it made her wonder if she was wrong to imagine Luke’s feelings . . . Except Aruna had accused her of—
‘Damn,’ she said aloud and squeezed her eyes tight shut for a moment in an attempt to banish her spinning thoughts.
From a nearby bush a bird started to sing, a beautiful full-throated liquid sound, its evening aria, then, looking about, she glimpsed him, a cock robin, whose beady gaze rested on her as she listened. All around, the twilight deepened, birds sang in distant trees as they settled for the night. Clouds were thickening overhead. It was time to go.
It was while she was on the motorway back to London, hunched forward in her seat to see past heavy rain blurring the windscreen, that Briony realized another source of unease. She hadn’t had a chance to ask Aruna about the guide to Tuana and her interest in Antonio’s memorial. How had Aruna learned about the link between Paul and Ivor and Antonio? Perhaps it was connected to the man in the car who had spoken to her outside the Villa Teresa that day. Aruna, being a journalist, would not have been able to resist following the scent of a good story.
Forty-two
Briony was late into college on Monday morning after a breakfast meeting with her publisher, and two young female students with rucksacks on their backs were sitting on the bench outside her office like patient snails, bleary-eyed from the long term.
Inside, she sifted quickly through the post she’d snatched from her pigeonhole, noting a cheap white envelope addressed in a familiar round hand, before dumping it all on her desk as the first of the students entered. She sat down tentatively on the sofa, laying her essay on the coffee table. Briony joined her with an inward sigh, picked up the pages and began to read.
Although the girl’s written work was always excellent, with her pale mask of make-up and voice too tiny to hear well, the advice she most needed was to have faith in herself. It might have been her own younger self sitting there, Briony mused, and resolved to give this girl the support that a lecturer had once given her. ‘Trust yourself,’ the woman had urged her. ‘You have grown strong wings, now fly.’ It wasn’t so much the words themselves as the sense that the woman was there encouraging her, believing in her. This was the legacy she could pass on to her own students. She smiled at the girl and congratulated her on her work, and for a moment the young woman’s nervous expression was transformed by a smile.
At lunch break – a sandwich at her desk – Briony closed the door against visitors and finally, fingers trembling a little, slit the flimsy envelope and pinched open the single slip of paper inside. The message was short, but it was enough. There was a telephone number given. For a moment her hand hovered over the handset on her desk, then she snatched up the receiver and pressed the buttons. When the call was answered, there was some scuffling at the other end before a quavery old man’s voice spoke. A voice she knew from the tapes in the Norfolk Record Office.
Derek Jenkins lived on the third floor of a small block of flats on a modern estate Briony reached by the Central line going east towards Essex.
‘Hold on, I’m coming.’ A muffled voice, then a frail man in his eighties with shaking hands admitted her to the stuffy cheerfulness of his living room.
‘Nice to see children having fun,’ she said. A picture window looked out on a green where toddlers played on a blue-and-red climbing frame while mums laughed and chatted close by.
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br /> ‘It’s as good as the telly, isn’t it? Even me grandsons are grown up now and I miss having kids around. Me and the wife, we wanted lots of them, but in the end only our Lindsay came along.’
‘How many grandsons do you have?’
‘Just the two, Euan and Ashley. That’s them.’ Derek nodded at some framed photographs on a narrow mantelshelf above an electric coal-effect fire that whirred away quietly. One of the young men wore a mortar board and black gown, the other, a real rogue, grinned from his seat astride a huge motorbike, the helmet under his arm.
‘You must be proud of them,’ she said.
‘I am. If only Pat was still around to see ’em. Ten years she’s been dead and I miss her every day.’ He hobbled over to the huge television, which dominated a corner of the room, and indicated another photograph hanging on the wall nearby. ‘Can you lift it down?’ he asked, ‘I’ll only drop it.’
She obliged and together they examined the colour print of a friendly-looking woman, somewhat stout, sitting behind a garden table spread with sandwiches and an elaborately decorated birthday cake. ‘That was her seventieth,’ Derek sighed. ‘And the next year she was gone.’
Briony murmured how sad this was and obediently returned the photograph to its hook. Leaning attentively in the easy chair where he bade her sit, she learned through gentle questioning about Derek’s life, his mother’s death in a bombing raid, his eventual return to London to live with his father, how he gave up school at sixteen for a series of jobs he hated, the short, failed marriage before he met Pat, then forty years as a telephone engineer. ‘I can’t say I liked every moment of it. I stuck with it for Pat and Lindsay’s sake. But you haven’t come because of any of that. You want to know how I got the letters.’ He fixed her with his bright-eyed gaze.
Briony nodded and he settled back in his chair and closed his eyes. For a moment Briony was worried that she’d tired him, but then he opened them, glanced at the portrait of his wife Pat as though to seek her reassurance and began to speak.