by Rachel Hore
He met her eye with a shrewd gaze. ‘You don’t look a bit like my mother. I thought you would. You are her grand-niece after all. Which makes us cousins.’
‘And you knew all along.’
‘No. Greg only told me that you’d come asking questions, that you write books about the war. I had no idea of a family connection. It’s come as much of a shock to me as I imagine it is to you. So now you know. My father, apparently, was a bully and a coward, maybe a murderer, too. But I saw little of that. My parents were very happy together, and my mother and me, we were devastated when he died. Only sixty. That’s young now.’
‘That would have been . . .’
‘Nineteen seventy-three. I was twenty-five. It was a great blow to my mother. She lived into her eighties, doted on me and her grandson, you know. Greg and she were very close, like she and I had been. Now, I know what you’re going to ask me.’
Briony raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘How I learned the allegations about my dad. It was after both his parents had died. His mother, Margo, lived till ninety, you know, died in 1980 when I was in my mid-thirties and Greg was a boy of three or four. I was left with the job of clearing out Westbury House, where Greg lives now. There were some letters I read that my dad had sent home from the war, then I found a newspaper cutting. None of it squared with anything I’d been told and it ate away at me. I didn’t like to trouble my mother with it, but in the end I did and she told me how Dad had been unfairly accused and what a bastard, forgive my French, Paul Hartmann had been.’
‘And you believed this version?’
‘In all honesty, I felt hers might not be the only viewpoint. I had a lot of time for my dad, but he had a side to him that was hard as nails. Of course, she swore me to secrecy. She wanted me to destroy the evidence I’d found, but I’m afraid that I didn’t. I became a bit obsessed by it. After she died, I went out to Tuana to poke about, though I stayed quiet about who I was. There are long memories there and I learned enough to realize that whatever the truth was Dad hadn’t told Mum all of it. But I kept my promise to her. I didn’t tell a soul, not even Greg. Until you came along trying to find things out. Then I had to. I needed Greg on my side.’
‘And Aruna?’
Now Briony had surprised him. He looked at her warily.
‘I know you spoke to my friend,’ Briony said. ‘It was you I saw here with her, wasn’t it, in the café?’
‘I wasn’t going to bring her into our discussion,’ he growled, ‘but since you have, yes, she caught on. She met someone during your holiday in Tuana who told her about the British soldiers’ war crime, and then Robyn Clare alerted me after you visited her that first time.’
‘Oh, but why?’ Briony felt a lump of dismay in her throat. It wasn’t only Aruna who’d gone behind her back. She’d somehow trusted Robyn.
‘You’d better ask her. Anyway, your friend Miss Patel is a journalist of some sort, isn’t she? She believed she was interviewing me, but the truth is, it was the other way round. I wanted to find out what she knew, to put her off the track a bit while Greg dealt with you.’
‘This is all ridiculous,’ Briony whispered almost to herself.
‘It may seem so to you, but this is my side of the family whose reputation is at stake.’ His eyes flashed dangerously and Briony felt with a chill how important this matter was to him.
‘And what about mine?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Don’t they count in this?’
For a moment his smooth face was like granite, then he pressed his lips together and gripped the table edge as he leaned forward in a deliberate manner. ‘It would be best for both of us, don’t you agree, to let the matter lie now?’
Briony’s mind whirled with confusion. The instinct to tell the truth was strong in her, but could he possibly be right? ‘I don’t know,’ she said, drawing back in her chair. ‘I’d have to think about it.’
He nodded, but his expression remained grim.
‘Will there be anything else? Dessert? Coffee?’ The motherly waitress cleared their empty glasses.
Briony shook her head. ‘Just the bill, thank you.’
‘No, I insist,’ he told Briony. ‘We are, after all, family.’
She shrugged and let him pay.
Family, Briony thought, as she drove away through the bleak countryside towards London. What did that actually involve? Tom Richards meant nothing to her, she couldn’t say she even liked him, but still there was a link between them that meant they were bound together in some ancient, crooked way, the hidden ties of blood. Diane had been his mother, after all, strange, enigmatic Diane, whom she only knew from her grandparents’ letters. How unhappy Diane must have been as a girl, soaking up the tensions of her parents’ marriage, traumatized by the death of her baby brother, the responsibility she’d mistakenly felt for her father’s death, then giving birth to a stillborn baby during the war. Yes, she had some sympathy for Diane, and for why she should have wanted to hide the truth about her husband.
The trouble was that the secrecy, the unhappiness, had been passed down the generations. Her cousin Tom was not an easy man, close, defensive, and Greg, a different sort, had used his charm to deceive. He’d also stolen from her. Briony squeezed the steering wheel in anger at the memory of how he’d tricked her out of the letters.
Still, she didn’t have much other family and she couldn’t wait to tell her father about it all. She’d ask his advice, she decided, as she took the slip road up to the dual carriageway, into the dazzle of the westering sun. What she was less certain about was Aruna. Why had her friend betrayed her in this way? Was she right, that the journalist in Aruna had caught the scent of a story, or was it merely that strange, manipulative side of her friend revealing itself again? She remembered how Aruna used to take things of hers without asking. That it had been Aruna, too, who had set her up for that television show with Jolyon Gunn, where Briony had found herself out of her depth. Briony had always given Aruna the benefit of the doubt, but she couldn’t do that on this occasion. And perhaps Aruna had always felt vulnerable about Luke.
She wondered if their friendship would ever recover from this, whether the bonds between them were strong enough to hold. They’d always assured one another that they’d never let a man, any man, come between them, but this was before they’d met Luke.
Luke. Briony felt the strength drain out of her at the thought of him. Perhaps the whole struggle with Aruna was for nothing and neither of them would hear from him again.
Forty-five
Briony drove down to Birchmere to see her father and stepmother the very next evening, taking all the letters with her and Paul’s final note sent via Harry and, after supper, spread them out on the floor of the living room. It took a long time to explain everything clearly. The faded pictures of the young Harry in Westbury, when placed beside the face of the men on the scrap of film on her laptop, were incontrovertible evidence. Briony’s brother Will did not look like Harry. It was, rather, the wary, dark young man who shared Will’s features and that man must have been Paul Hartmann.
‘Is it really possible,’ Martin Wood asked unhappily, ‘that Paul was, um, your mother’s father? I’m simply trying to think all round the question. The whole thing seems so . . . dramatic.’
‘Look.’ Briony opened the old family album and together they studied the photographs. The face of the man who called himself Harry Andrews was almost definitely Paul’s. ‘I’ve seen a photograph of Sarah’s sister Diane, too, and she does remind me of Granny.’ She pointed to a black and white photograph of Jean’s christening. There was her grandmother with an expression of joy, holding the bundle that had grown up to become Briony’s mother.
‘But your Granny’s name was Molly.’ Briony’s father was having difficulties coming to terms with this.
‘I don’t understand how someone official didn’t find out what they’d done.’ Lavender, who had said very little so far, spoke gently.
‘If there wasn’t a photograph o
n Harry’s identity card then it must have been easy,’ Briony told her. ‘Or perhaps Grandpa managed to change it. And there was general confusion at the time anyway. People must have had to ask for replacement cards for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Who is this?’ Briony’s father was looking at the christening photograph and pointed to a woman standing close behind Briony’s grandmother.
Briony screwed up her eyes. Lavender rose and opened a drawer in her writing desk in the corner and brought back a magnifying glass. ‘I use it to read small print. The leaflets that come with my medication are awful.’
Briony wondered what medication Lavender was referring to, but was too caught up with the matter in hand to ask. Under the magnifying glass the face became clearer. She was a middle-aged woman with a proud expression and the tightest of smiles as though she wasn’t used to smiling. A delicate hat crowned her coiffed greying hair. Only one side of her body was visible, but the glimpse of her elegant, corseted figure contrasted with Sarah’s soft curves. ‘Do you suppose,’ Briony said, ‘that this is Belinda, Sarah’s mother?’
‘They don’t look very alike,’ Lavender said. ‘Except maybe something about the eyes.’
If Belinda Bailey had been there at the christening, Sarah had obviously kept up the family ties. Though there was no sign of Diane anywhere. Was it loyalty to her new husband, Ivor, that had kept her away, or had the sisters fallen out? Belinda might have been married again by the time of Jean’s birth, but if so her husband hadn’t merited a place in the photograph, if indeed he’d been present. There were so many stories that had been lost and which Briony saw no way to recover. The type of stories that aren’t documented but passed from mouth to mouth as family myths and legends. Who snubbed whom, who was jealous, who fell out but were later reconciled.
‘So Will and you have a whole new family,’ Martin said, a little too brightly. Briony had described Greg and Tom to him.
‘I don’t think we’ll see much of them, though Will is welcome to if he wants.’
She’d promised to get back in touch with Tom, though. She supposed she wanted to reassure him that she wouldn’t allow his father’s name to be dragged through the mud. ‘Do you think I’m doing the right thing, Dad? By not ever writing about Ivor’s crime? My next book involves writing about Italy, but I’ve thought of a way of being general about it if needs be, presenting it as part of a number of incidents that showed British soldiers under terrible stress.’
‘In my work, too,’ Martin reminded her, ‘sometimes I had to make that sort of decision. I know you’re a person of integrity, love, but perhaps in this case you needn’t broadcast specifics like names.’
‘It’s not as though I’m deliberately hiding anything,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll keep all the letters and finish my transcript, and if a scholar wants to look at them, I expect I’ll let them.’ One day, after Tom and Robyn were dead, and perhaps with Greg’s agreement, she might do something more with her grandparents’ love story, a radio programme, for instance, though maybe not with Aruna, but for now, was it worth hurting people close to her by exposing the full tale?
Briony’s mind roamed to Italy, to Tuana, where a memorial plaque on the wall of the church symbolized the endurance of a past wrong still felt by the community. Perhaps she had some duty there and this made her uncertain again. There were people still alive who remembered young Antonio. Sometimes truth must be exposed even though it hurt, to allow reconciliation to take place.
She sighed as she closed the photograph album, still uncertain of what she should do.
When she looked up it was in time to see her father reach out and squeeze her stepmother’s hand. ‘Are you all right, love?’ he said and Lavender nodded and gave a watery smile.
‘Of course,’ she said, bravely.
‘What’s wrong?’ Briony asked, frowning, remembering the mention of medication. Lavender had never talked of needing any before.
Lavender sighed. ‘We weren’t going to say anything until we knew for definite. I have to have a little op, that’s all.’
‘Why?’ Briony felt a growing alarm. She remembered thinking that Lavender had been so tired recently.
‘They say it’s nothing to worry about. A little repair to one of the heart valves,’ her father murmured as though he were speaking about a car. But she could see the anxiety in his eyes.
‘Oh, Lavender,’ she whispered and went to put her arms around her stepmother. ‘You should have told me about it before.’
‘I didn’t like to,’ she whispered. ‘Your dad’s worried enough as it is. I didn’t want to make you and Will worried too.’
‘That’s nonsense, Lavender. We care about you too, you know! Don’t shut us out.’ She felt a rush of love for her stepmother that she’d never felt so intensely before. She remembered, too, how her mother had said little about her illness and how this had added to the shock of her death.
‘That’s lovely of you, Briony.’ And they hugged each other tightly again.
The following day Briony walked into Birchmere, noticing as ever how much had changed since her childhood. The big supermarket was new, the White Hart pub, scene of many a Saturday night gathering, was now called the Mulberry Tree, and there were three sets of traffic lights where previously there had been none. Still, there was enough to make her feel connected to the place; the classical portico of the bank, the clock tower looming above the main square, the bright canopies of market stalls and, where the shops petered out and the common began, the mere, fringed with birch trees and now securely fenced. Briony walked round it, smiling at a sturdy toddler with its father throwing bread to the ducks, before her memories beckoned her down a lane that led from the common into a grid of residential roads behind the high street. She hadn’t been this way for years and tried to remember the order of the roads, which were all named after trees, a connection maybe to the name of the town. Ash Grove, Hickory Avenue, Willow Way . . . then she came to Chestnut Close and her heart quickened. She turned down it.
It was a cul-de-sac and much shorter than she remembered it, though the detached family houses of a 1930s style were still impressive. Number 4 was half-hidden by a privet hedge, but when she stared up at the white-painted house she was reassured by its villa-style shutters and decorative balconies. It was where her grandparents had lived. Something was different, though. Some of the garden had been asphalted over to make room for cars, though there were none parked there today.
On impulse, she walked up the drive and rang the doorbell, listening to it resound through the house, but though she waited a couple of minutes there came no answer, so she turned away with a mixture of disappointment and relief. What she would have said to the current inhabitant she’d no idea.
As she left, she caught a glimpse of the back garden through the wrought-iron gate and couldn’t resist going to look through the bars. It was large, she’d forgotten that, and the beds were heaped with spring flowers and shrubs and she remembered how beautiful it had been, how often she’d visited to find Granny out there weeding the beds or in the greenhouse with her pots. There had been a plant she’d been particularly proud of which grew clusters of pink and white flowers, each one like a small trumpet. That’s what Briony had called it, she remembered, the fairy trumpet bush, but Granny had called it by another name, and now this came to her. It was a Hibiscus syriacus. Was it still there, she wondered, and had it anything to do with the cutting Granny had brought back from India? She felt suddenly heavy with sadness, burdened by confusion about her childhood past, now lost to her, and withdrew, suddenly glad to leave the house and its secrets.
She walked away, back to the busyness of the town and the present. It would be good, she thought, to spend the rest of the day with her father and stepmother, to whom she suddenly felt much closer. Lavender’s operation would be a fairly routine one, but it clearly worried her. Briony had learned something important. Any distance that had existed between her and Lavender had been closed over the last few month
s and she understood that she loved her stepmother more dearly than she would ever have believed. Lavender could never replace the memory of her mother in Briony’s heart, but then she had never tried to do that and never would. What she had done was to make them all a family again.
Forty-six
The last few days of March were petering out and teaching was over. It had been an extraordinarily busy term, especially with the conference, which had gone better than she dared expect, but now she was coming up for air, Briony ached to get away to look over the proofs of her book. Her stepmother had had her operation and was recovering well, so Briony was free to get away. On a whim, she rang Kemi to find out if Westbury Lodge was available and habitable. Kemi said it was, then called her again an hour later to say that she had checked with Greg, who had enthusiastically agreed. What was more, he was refusing to charge her any rent.
Briony put down the phone and sighed, wondering if she’d done the right thing. She badly wanted to revisit Westbury in the light of her new relationship to the Lodge, and it was a good place to work, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to see Greg again. It was kind of him to let her stay for free – he was obviously keen to show he was sorry – but she was still suspicious of his motives and not sure she wanted to become mixed up with him. Anyway, the arrangement was made now. She’d go down later today and stay for four nights. There was a tight deadline for her to return the proofs to her publisher.
How welcoming it was to arrive at her gingerbread cottage after a rainy drive from London. It was beautifully cosy, too, because central heating had been installed. A fire had still been laid in the living room, there were milk, eggs and bread and butter in the fridge, and wine and biscuits had been left on the kitchen table. Avril’s touch, she thought, having learned that Robyn’s carer also looked after the Lodge.