by Sara Craven
‘Child, are you out of your mind?’ was her aunt’s forthright greeting, as she came into the drawing room.
Briony flushed, evading her gaze. ‘I don’t think so. Didn’t you once tell me when I was quite small that the bravest thing to do when you made a serious mistake was acknowledge the fact and try to put it right?’
‘I gave altogether too much advice.’ Aunt Hes said grimly. ‘And probably I never expected any of it to be taken. Isn’t that the main purpose of advice―to be ignored?’ She sat down and gave Briony a long look.
‘You’re miserable.’ she said, half to herself. ‘The light that was on inside you has gone out.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do. You were living in my flat before you married him, my dear. I saw how it was with you. You wanted him―you couldn’t hide it. Are you trying to tell me it was all self-deception, because I warn you, I don’t believe it.’
‘Perhaps I did. Perhaps I do.’ Briony got up feverishly and walked over to the window. ‘1―1 can’t talk about it now.’
Aunt Hes sighed softly. ‘So Charles Trevor wins as usual.’
‘Daddy had nothing to do with it.’ said Briony, and then paused, remembering Logan’s jeering words. ‘At least .. .’
‘At the very least,’ her aunt agreed. ‘He likes to remain in full control, does Charles. That’s why he’s up to his ears in strikes and disputes at this moment, and we both know it. He creates discord at all levels so that he can emerge victorious. But I thought you knew that. I thought you understood, and that’s why you left home and sought a measure of independence for yourself. That’s why when I met the man you’d chosen, I was pleased, because I knew that he’d stand up to Charles.’ She shook her head. ‘I assumed, of course, that you’d be fighting for him, not against him.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Briony protested. She could feel tears pricking in her eyes, and was glad her back was turned. ‘You―you don’t know what happened.’
‘I could make an educated guess.’ Aunt Hes retorted. ‘Come and see me, child, when you’re calmer and can think more rationally. You don’t have to tell me anything. We won’t even mention it again, if that’s what you want. And forgive me if I’ve been interfering. You’re my sister’s girl, and I’m fond of you―call that my excuse.’ She went to the door. ‘I was beginning to be fond of your Logan too.’ she said, almost musingly, and went out.
Another week limped by, and the strike was clearly no closer to being settled. In early news interviews, Sir Charles had spoken scathingly of the unions and prophesied an unconditional surrender, but now he was beginning to look almost harassed, his immaculate, invincible facade showing distinct signs of wear and tear.
He came home to snatch fragments of sleep and the odd meal, and Briony and Mrs Lambert found themselves conferring worriedly over the lines of strain now prominent on his face.
‘Worry accumulates,’ Mrs Lambert said gloomily one day as she and Briony sat planning a dinner that Sir Charles would probably not be there to eat. ‘And poor Sir Charles has had a lot to contend with recently.’ She flushed hastily as she caught Briony’s eye. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Briony. I didn’t mean―it wasn’t that so much as―well. I suppose I shouldn’t be discussing this with you.’ She sat in silence for a moment looking embarrassed and uncomfortable while Briony waited in some surprise. Mrs Lambert had been a part of the household for as long as she could remember, always self-effacing and discreet, and never one for confidences either about herself or anyone else that Briony could think of.
‘Please go on.’ she said at last. ‘If there’s something else bothering my father apart from this wretched strike, it might be best if I knew about it.’
‘Oh, I think it’s all over with,’ Mrs Lambert said quickly.
‘Although it can’t have been pleasant for him.’ She sat for a minute, twisting her fingers together. ‘It was one of his lady-friends.’ she said awkwardly at last.
‘I see.’ Briony’s amazement increased. This was indiscretion with a vengeance! ‘You mean-Fiona de Bruce?’
‘Oh, no, Miss Briony. Mrs de Bruce is a very pleasant lady―and the last one to make any kind of―of fuss. This particular person―she wasn’t here many times at all. I never even knew her name. When she came to the house, she came with Sir Charles. And they dined out, not here. Then they would come back to the house and Sir Charles would ask me to take coffee and liqueurs to his study.’ Mrs Lambert looked distressed. ‘That’s when I realised what had been going on. I had the tray awkwardly one night-the last time she came here-and I couldn’t help hearing what they were saying as I put it down so that I could knock.’ She paused.
‘Go on.’ Briony said, frowning.
‘She was laughing, Miss Briony, but not a nice sort of laugh at all, and she said, “It’ll cost you.’’ Just like that. And I listened, I’m afraid, because I had this awful feeling that she might be a blackmailer and Sir Charles might need a witness against her.’
‘It’s all right,’ Briony said gently. ‘Please go on.’
‘And Sir Charles said “I don’t care how much it costs. Will this be enough to satisfy you?” Then she laughed again and she said, “My God, when you want to be rid of someone, you don’t mess about do you?” And he said, “Just as long as I am rid, that’s all.’’ And I felt dreadful then, because I realised that she must have become a nuisance, and he was having to buy her off.’ Mrs Lambert’s face was crimson. ‘Such an awful thing to happen, and she wasn’t at all Sir Charles’type. I knew that as soon as I saw her.’
‘What was she like?’ Briony’s curiosity had been aroused by the unpleasant little story. She thought back over her father’s numerous conquests in some perplexity.
She had never wondered how his little affairs began or ended, but she would never have imagined he would have to use a cheque book in order to get out of an unwanted liaison.
‘Thin,’ Mrs Lambert said. ‘And neurotic, I thought. Smart, I suppose, in a way, but not a lady.’ She hesitated. ‘I knocked and took the tray in and put it on the desk in between them. The cheque was still lying there. She hadn’t bothered to pick it up, and I couldn’t help seeing how much it was for.’
‘How much?’ Briony queried automatically. What was the selling price for a discarded mistress, who didn’t want to go, in Sir Charles’ sophisticated little world? she wondered rather bitterly.
Mrs Lambert told her.
‘What?’ Briony heard her voice rise to a squeak. ‘You must have made a mistake!’
‘No, Miss Briony.’ Mrs Lambert sounded positive. ‘I could hardly believe it myself, so I had another look, and then Madam saw me and picked up the cheque and stuffed it into her handbag, and Sir Charles said that was all, and they didn’t want to be disturbed again, so I came out.’ She sighed. ‘But your father hasn’t been himself since. It’s as if he’s had something on his mind all the time-apart from missing you, of course,’ she added conscientiously.
‘Of course,’ Briony echoed drily. ‘Thank you, Mrs Lambert. You were quite right to tell me.’ But for the rest of the day she found herself wondering just what she had been told. None of it seemed to make any sense. And Mrs Lambert had been quite correct when she had said that this strange woman had not been
Sir Charles’ usual type. He liked the Fiona de Bruces of this world, either divorced or widowed, with money of their own and figures as opulent as their backgrounds.
Someone thin and neurotic would not appeal to his taste at all―unless she had some hold over him.
Now stop it, Briony chided herself. These were realms of fantasy, and she knew it. It was Logan and his tales of bribery and corruption who had started her thinking along these lines. And the maddening thing was she could never ask her father about the woman, without betraying Mrs Lambert.
On an impulse she went along to her father’s study and looked in. It seemed the same as it always had, a rather severe and workmanlike room, not at all a back
ground for the ending of a love affair, no matter how acrimonious it might have become. And Daddy must have been desperate to payout the sort of money
Mrs Lambert had mentioned.
She walked over to the desk’ and stood there for a moment, an inward struggle going on over what she should do next. One inner voice told her not to meddle, that it was none of her affair, and she had troubles of her own. But another, more insistent voice said that this was a mystery that needed solving.
Despising herself, she began to try the drawers of the desk, one by one. Her father’s cheque book was normally kept in the top right-hand drawer, and after a brief search she found it. All the stubs were neatly filled in, except one which had been left blank―by accident or design? she wondered. None of the filled-in stubs were made out to a woman or for the amount Mrs Lambert had mentioned.
She replaced the cheque book, and began looking in the other drawers―for What, she wasn’t sure. But when she saw the manilla folder, half hidden under some papers in the bottom drawer, then she was sure. It was a curious sensation―like the pricking of thumbs, she supposed. And the rest of the quotation jumped into her brain as she laid the folder on the desk. ‘Something wicked this way comes.’
And when the press cuttings on the Harry Chapman suicide spilled out of the folder, it was as if she had always known they would be there.
Briony began to tremble. She sank down into the chair behind the desk and looked at the cuttings. Many of them were the same that Marina Chapman had brought to the cottage. Were these the duplicates she had spoken of?
Or―more likely from the appearance of the file―were these the V.P.G. collection of cuttings on the case from the office library where she herself had worked?
A thin, neurotic woman, smart but not a lady. Mrs Lambert’s description ran through her head with a terrible emphasis. ‘My God, when you want to be rid of someone, you don’t mess about, do you?’ ‘Just as long as I am rid, that’s all.’
Not a payment to rid him of a woman who had become an embarrassment, but a bribe-to someone who would readily understand such things. Someone who knew about corruption. The widow of a corrupt man now living comfortably in tax exile on the proceeds of that corruption.
Logan had wondered what could have brought her from Jersey all the way to Yorkshire. Well, now she knew. It was money. Sir Charles had been fully aware of where they were intending to spend their honeymoon.
That was how Marina Chapman had known how to find them so easily-something she had never really questioned before, although she had not really been in any fit state to question very much at all. Which her father, of course, would have relied on.
But to payout all that money, she thought, appalled, with no guarantee that the plan would work. I might have just shown her the door. He must have been very sure what I would do.
And something flat and cold inside her replied, ‘He was.’
She was still sitting there when he came home several hours later. She heard his arrival, the impatience of his voice as he called for her. There was a note of triumph there too, and she guessed that the strike had been settled, and on favourable terms to the V.P.G. board. She knew that suppressed jubilance.
At last he tracked her down; ‘Are you there, Briony?’
He peered across the room. ‘What the devil are you sitting in here in the dark for?’
‘Licking my wounds,’ she said calmly. ‘Have you won again?’
‘Just about.’ He was making little effort to conceal his elation. Charles Trevor-Fleet Street’s union basher in another victory performance. ‘Get dressed up, my darling, and we’ll go and celebrate.’ His hand reached for the light switch and clicked it on. Briony saw him look at her, register her white, frozen face; then look down at the desk, as if he too knew what he would see.’ She saw the guilt, followed closely by the annoyance at his own clumsiness in not returning the file to the library. If he’d done so, she realised, she would never have known.
She put out a hand and touched the file. ‘When were you planning to celebrate this victory?’ she asked. ‘When I received my annulment decree?’
‘I know how it must seem,’ he began quickly.
‘There is no “seem”.’ She shook her head. ‘I know how it is. I know you paid that woman to come to Yorkshire and ruin my honeymoon. She did a fantastic job, didn’t she? Even you couldn’t have hoped that I would actually leave Logan.’ She laughed. ‘Lucky Daddy!’
‘I did it for your sake,’ he said, and quite suddenly he didn’t look like the successful chairman of a giant publishing conglomerate. He looked tired and elderly. ‘You couldn’t be happy with that man. He wasn’t fit to marry you. Everyone knows my opinion of journalists. Can you imagine What I went through? The things in other newspapers? The jokes and snide remarks in my own offices that I wasn’t supposed to hear. Everyone was laughing at me.’
‘And that was what mattered most,’ she said.’
‘No!’ He was vehement. ‘All I ever wanted was for you to be happy, my darling. And you couldn’t be happy with him. Why, he was having an affair with that Wellesley woman when you first met. I know her type. She wouldn’t have allowed a little thing like his marriage to you to get in her way. You’d have sat alone night after night, wondering where he was, who he was with. You’d have been a novelty at first―someone innocent to make love to―and my daughter, which would have added an extra spice for him.’
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she sighed. ‘Perhaps everything you say is true. But I would still have had the chance of some happiness first. Your way―I’ve had nothing but misery.’ She stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ he said sharply.
‘To Logan.’ She did not look at him. She put the cuttings back in the file and replaced them exactly as she had found them. ‘To tell him what you did, and ask him to forgive me, if he can.’
‘Of course he’ll forgive you.’ Sir Charles said roughly. ‘He’d be a fool not to. He’ll stay married to you for as long as it suits him―while he collects the dossier of information which will take him the next step up the ladder. That’s why Mackenzie hired him, you know because of his investigation into the Chapman business. You were still at school when it all happened. You’re only a child now. You don’t know men like Logan Adair. You don’t know anything about the kind of world they inhabit. I wanted to protect you from that.’
‘You talk of protection,’ she said slowly. ‘You also mentioned a dossier of information. Just whom are you afraid Logan might conduct his next investigative campaign against, Daddy? You?’
She only put the barest necessities into her overnight bag. She could collect the rest of her things tomorrow, she thought.’ All that mattered now was seeing Logan and trying to put things right between them.
She felt sick and nervous as she stood outside the door to the flat. It had been planned that Logan and she should live there after the honeymoon, and Tony had moved elsewhere. She hoped that Logan had not asked him to move back again. The last thing she wanted at a moment like this was any kind of audience.
Once before she had stood here with shaking hands and rung this bell, she thought. And the wait for a response had seemed endless then too.
The door opened at last, and Briony’s little speech so agonisingly rehearsed over and over again in the taxi which had brought her here died on her lips as she saw who was standing in the doorway.
‘Good God!’ Karen Wellesley said at last. ‘The blushing bride herself!’ Her eyes fell on Briony’s overnight case, and her catlike smile widened. ‘If you’ve decided this is reconciliation time, ducky, then you’ve picked a bad moment.’
Briony looked at her. Karen’s hair was tousled, and even the most casual observer would have known that she wore nothing at all under her loosely fastened bathrobe.
Briony moistened her lips. ‘Nevertheless, I’d like to speak to Logan, please,’ she said, trying to sound cool, as if she was quite used to trying to reach him past the hostile figures of
semi-naked women.
‘Impossible, I’m afraid.’ Karen’s eyes never left her face. ‘He’s asleep, and he wouldn’t take very kindly to being woken up, I can promise you.’ She smiled with provocative reminiscence. ‘He’s had a very exhausting time just lately, poor sweet. I’m sure you understand me. Why don’t I just tell him you called, and let him get in touch with you later―if he wants to.’ She emphasised the ‘if’ very slightly, and smiled again.
‘On second thoughts,’ Briony said very calmly, ‘let’s just forget the whole thing, shall we? And thank you for making the situation so clear. I was in grave danger of making an utter fool of myself.’
‘Oh, it was hardly that bad.’ Karen’s voice was like syrup. ‘You’re just a little out of your depth, that’s all. You were from the start. Goodnight, Miss Trevor.’ But Briony had already turned away. She did not want the additional humiliation of having Karen Wellesley shut Logan’s door in her face.