by Lorna Gray
As I say: poor woman. I suppose she saw it as her duty to expose me now.
I’d left my book on the table and had to go back for it. The Miss Bartlemans said something to me but I was too busy noticing the way Mrs Alderton’s voice altered as she spoke again. I didn’t need to hear mention of his name to know who she was speaking to now. She had after all been waiting for him. Mrs Alderton said rather more loudly, “It’s a disturbing way to carry on, don’t you think, Mr Hitchen?”
His footsteps stopped as she snared him. He’d been nearly at the dining room door. After the tightest of silences, I heard him say what I’d been forcing myself to keep from doing. I believe I’d even engineered the delays such as finishing my tea, forgetting my book and a hundred and one other little things just so that I absolutely could not go out there and make the obvious retort. I didn’t need to be responsible for any more scenes.
Adam wasn’t making a scene. He was saying calmly, “Actually, she told me as much on the first day. So to be honest she’s not really the best example to support your cause.”
I really wished he hadn’t said that. It was kind of him, of course, and honest but he ought to have politely agreed and kept walking. Instead he provoked Mrs Alderton into saying shrilly, “How interesting that she told you, Mr Hitchen. What else did she tell you?”
Someone moved out there. There was a scuff of shoes upon polished marble; perhaps as Adam turned to face her. More distantly, a child’s voice prompted an answering greeting from a startlingly large number of adults. It made me dive across the gap into the unlit lounge. I didn’t think the group loitering in the foyer saw me but the Miss Bartlemans watched me go, wide eyed and goggling. Then there seemed to be a general rush for the dining room door. I waited for Adam to prove that he was moving with the crowd and conveniently leave the way clear for me to make my discreet exit through the door of the lounge into the space beneath the stairs but he didn’t.
He stayed to listen while Mrs Alderton confided forcibly, “I notice she has no children. I shouldn’t like to wonder if that was why he left her. Perhaps that’s why she’s been clucking over the little boy here. Perhaps she feels that fawning over other people’s children is her last chance of motherhood, poor dear. What do you say to that, Mr Hitchen?” The demand was an echo of her mania last night. Presumably it betrayed rather more about her preoccupations than it did mine. I’d only been pleasant to Samuel because it was easy to be. For her, this point about parenthood mattered.
“Alice,” remarked Mary quietly, “they got divorced because he wasn’t very nice. The idea of having children probably didn’t suit him.”
Mary was right; the idea hadn’t suited Rhys. By rights there ought to have been a string of illegitimate children scattered up and down the country in his wake, but there wasn’t a single one. I don’t mean to imply he was the sort of beast that pushed women into having abortions or anything horrific like that. It was just that Rhys would have found a child a tedious distraction and I think nature must have believed it too.
Mrs Alderton didn’t even falter. She retorted, “Well Mary, since you know so much; did she happen to tell you why she’s here? Because it can’t be for a holiday. No self-respecting single woman would choose to travel alone as she has, without a friend or organised tour group or anything. And as if her behaviour last night to poor Mr Bristol wasn’t odd enough—” I heard the catch in her voice. It was followed by the soft click-click of heels across the marble floor as she closed the space between herself and her target. Her next words took on a confidential hush that made the room around me infinitely darker. “Seeing how quickly she attached herself to you, Mr Hitchen, did ring a few alarm bells. After all, the rest of us manage to retain a certain degree of dignity in the company of a celebrated author, particularly when that person is the wonderful A. E. Woolfe …”
Oh no.
No.
I saw the stillness that consumed the dining room. I saw the way the Miss Bartlemans exchanged raised eyebrows. Suddenly I was out of the clutter of dark furniture in a dark lounge and in that space under the stairs. I believe I intended to make a scene after all. I knew what this would mean to him. And it was being done in my name. But it was too late to salvage this. They had already moved. Mary, Mrs Alderton and Adam had already passed into the dining room and Mary’s shocked reproof was all that met me out there. “Alice! It was supposed to be a secret.”
There were still a few people lingering in the foyer but I didn’t acknowledge them as I slid along the length of the stairwell. I barely even saw them. In the dining room, Mrs Alderton was already gabbling out her excuses, “It was? Oh yes, oh dear; I forgot we were in the special position of being guardians of your identity, Mr Hitchen.” Her voice dropped to a strategically carrying whisper, “But I’m quite sure that you can depend on everyone here to be discreet …” And then she sought to distract him from her error by lurching deeper into her attack on me.
She confided desperately, “That woman … Not only has she failed to make clear her real position amongst us but I have to tell you I believe she has actually gone to some lengths to conceal it.”
I heard the creak as someone, presumably Adam, sat down, then the scrape as two further chairs were drawn out.
Mrs Alderton lectured breathlessly, “In fact, don’t you think – Mary, you said something like this last night—”
Mary wouldn’t help her. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. You said it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe she’s here, travelling in this odd way, because this is his town and she intends to attempt a reconciliation.”
If at any moment I had truly been tempted to find something in this insane attack funny, I might have laughed at that – if she had only known my husband.
“I doubt that.” This was from Adam. At last he spoke. It was dry and deliberate and seemingly not at all angry.
I must have put my hand onto the heavy newel post at the foot of the stairs. I stared, fascinated, at the way my fingers were trembling. They felt like something removed from me. In fact they had absolutely no feeling at all. Or rather, too much. I could feel the warmth and the peculiar contradiction of the cold as painted wood met bloodless fingers.
“Why?” Curiosity piqued Mrs Alderton’s voice. I couldn’t see much of the dining room. The open door obscured most of the tables. But I could tell she didn’t like being corrected. She also had an air of puzzlement at finding herself lurching into open scandal mongering when she had only ever meant to indulge in a thoroughly enjoyable moan. It was almost as if she had anticipated that her attack would goad Adam into running away, leaving her with nothing but the delicious agony of further reasons to worry about my hold on him. Only here he still was, calmly contradicting her. She covered her surprise by asking silkily, “Did she tell you that too? It certainly would explain her unusual behaviour if he’s rejected her, don’t you think? Jealousy can take a woman like that.”
“No.”
“Oh, but …”
There was a clatter of plates behind. The serving girl bustled out of the kitchen door that stood at the furthest point of the stairwell and then abruptly turned about and banged back in again. She hadn’t cared who I was. By contrast, the dining room seemed oddly stiff as if the Miss Bartlemans were frantically trying to indicate that I might still be listening. They needn’t have bothered though. No one spoke my name but I was absolutely certain that Adam knew I was out here. And it was in spite of that knowledge, or possibly because of it, that I then heard him say:
“Mrs Alderton. If she’s been a touch emotional, I believe it has been with very good reason.”
I’d been mistaken when I’d thought his calm voice matched his mood. He was very angry indeed. The lady saw it too. Her reply was faintly tremulous. “It has?”
“Yes. It has.”
A pause.
Then he added, “Because Rhys Williams killed himself two weeks ago, almost to the day.”
I stepped out of the lee
of the stairs in a daze. There were people out there, Jim amongst them, I think, but I moved through them swiftly as I made for the street outside.
If I had thought the public revelation of Adam’s identity was cruel, I don’t believe anything could have prepared me for the revelation that this man had known the secret of my visit here all along. It wasn’t the fact he had known; that at least was an eventuality I had prepared for. But now I had to realise that all the time he had been talking cheerful nothings at Devil’s Bridge and pointing out harmless distractions like sleeping owls, he had known the grim purpose of my visit there. And he had done nothing with it except act with quiet kindness in the face of my endless distrust and buy my lunch.
Now I had to learn that he was the sort of man who would do all that – spend two days proving the harmlessness of his friendship – only to deliberately betray it suddenly and crudely like this; and I had to wonder what it should mean.
Chapter 11
There was his name in bold type, or rather A. E. Woolfe’s, on the shelves of the town’s most established bookshop.
I’d spent the last three hours in a tearoom frittering away a little more of my precious reserves. At long last and several cups of tea later, eleven o’clock had drawn near and I couldn’t put off the dash through the dirty streets to the police station any longer. Only I didn’t entirely dash. I cursed the fact that in my haste to exit the hotel I’d stepped out into the cold damp blind of a Saturday morning sea fret without stopping to collect my coat. And then I took a little detour into this shop.
The latest of Adam’s books was here, as anyone might have guessed. It was in its second edition already and by virtue of the way these paperbacks always list the author’s other works, it proved that the copy that Mary had been tossing around the downstairs rooms at the hotel was his first. This book and the middle one which was promoted on the last page showed that Mr A. E. Woolfe had thoroughly immersed himself in the genre of gritty crime fiction. They also proved he had been telling the truth when he’d told me that he’d been unable to think of anywhere else but home all the time he’d been away at war. The plots of both his second and third books unfolded in his native high Cotswolds.
It was hard to have the evidence before my eyes, robust and indisputable, that Adam knew Cirencester and knew me. It put a different texture on his attempts to befriend me over the past few days. Rougher and more calculated to confuse.
In some ways, though, it was liberating because it reminded me that this was not a repetition of the days of my marriage. Back then, there had been an endless feeling that I should at least attempt to understand what my husband wanted from me and an ever increasing wretchedness for never quite getting it right. But I was married then. It really had mattered to me that I tried.
Now, I reminded myself, I was not that same woman and this was not a petty crisis of confidence in an unhappy life. This was something hard and complicated and I didn’t have to try for these people or play that endlessly futile guessing game of trying to buy peace by moulding myself into whatever they wanted me to be. After all, my marriage had also taught me how that game ended.
Continuing the theme of rough people connected to a place I desperately wanted to avoid, there was neither sight nor sound of those two men or their car on the last dripping stretch of shopping street before I reached the dark fortress of the police station. I was shown into an interview room, one of those dank badly lit holes with a table bolted to the floor and a set of thoroughly battered chairs that looked as though they doubled as leverage when a suspect was holding back the last grudging speck of evidence.
“Sit down. Wait here.” The desk-sergeant’s dismal weariness hadn’t improved with the arrival of the weekend.
I sat. I waited. I had to suppress the urge to fiddle with my handbag. It was impossible not to recall that my recent experiences involving policemen had not exactly been positive. It didn’t help either that the interview room was a blank and inhospitable box with a stain on the floor in the corner. Imagination cheerfully decided it was blood.
The door opened and a light switched on, rendering the room merely yellow and tatty in the manner of a converted storeroom. I could see holes on the wall where shelves might have hung. The chairs, I could now tell, were just grammar school rejects bought by a hardworking service run on a limited budget.
Further defying expectations, my policeman was not built like the caricature of a Welsh hill-man; short and all shoulders with a curly mop on top. Instead, Inspector Griffiths was so English as to be almost embarrassing. He was wiry with a sallow complexion beneath fair hair just beginning to turn grey, and eyes slightly creased around the edges as if he’d spent a lifetime squinting after cricket balls. The only thing more fearsome about him than his manner was his moustache, which was thick and well combed, and covered his upper lip completely. It was suddenly easier to comprehend the depression that afflicted the desk sergeant.
The inspector slid into the seat opposite. “Well, Mrs Williams.” His voice was clipped and his eyes were set deeply beneath fine eyebrows that went up and down when he spoke. He set an evidence box down on the table before me. It had the name Rhys Williams written on it, above the name Dafydd Evans which was crossed out, and the names Alun and Kyffin Morgan below that. Inside were a few ragged and moss-smeared clothes, one sock and a broken Olympus camera.
Inspector Griffiths lifted out the latter and placed it on the table so that he could rummage deeper in the box. The camera was old, good in its day but battered now and dirtied, with a nasty looking split in the casing at the back. The neat lettering that indicated its maker – Olympus – gave me a jolt because I had been bracing myself to encounter a Leica. That camera had been a gift in honour of our wedding, a beloved Rangefinder and his faithful servant, and it had travelled with him everywhere. But not, obviously, on this last journey.
Perhaps the Leica’s importance had faded in the two years since I’d left. Perhaps it had finally broken.
“Well it’s certainly broken now.”
“Hmmm?” I looked up, startled. I must have spoken that last thought out loud. I drew my hand back to my lap. I had been reaching out a finger to very quietly, very cautiously touch this contraption which had been so much a part of Rhys’s life that it was practically an extension of his soul. “Oh, er, yes,” I said hastily. “I suppose it is.”
“Which is why, I’m afraid, that a good portion of Mr Williams’ film was damaged. Light was getting in through the cracks, you see.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do see.”
The inspector extracted a contact sheet and a few enlargements from their paper envelope and spread them before me. The contact sheet was a direct copy of the negatives on a piece of photographic paper and it illustrated his point about the damage. A good half of the set was scarred by a flare of bright white so only the earliest exposures, and therefore the innermost on the reel, had escaped unscathed.
The first of these were not by Rhys’s hand and I would have been sure even if I hadn’t been able to identify his figure amongst the group of people arranged within the miniature prints. They lacked his confidence. Even Rhys’s throwaway shots had a certain penetrative quality about them. It was as though his unfortunate subject’s most private thoughts were laid bare on a platter and with his customary self assurance, Rhys always captured them without question.
The rest, however, were unquestionably by his hand. Even at that tiny scale I was able to recognise the symmetry of landscape and model, and there too I was left a little surprised. She had the same grace and the same extraordinary figure as all the rest of his models who had in turn each been the one, his muse and so on and so on until the faces and figures had merged into one in my memory. But this woman was different. She seemed to have lasted the course.
“You know her?” The inspector passed me an enlargement and I took it gingerly. After years and years of having it drilled into me, it was very hard not to snap at him for leaving fingerprints on the f
ragile surface.
There she was, in full bold black and white; confident and beautiful and alluring, and the living embodiment of Rhys’s experience of war. “Yes,” I said. “Christi Bollini; he met her during the Allied push into Italy. She worked as his model when they came back to England, although out there she was rather more impressively a Classical scholar’s daughter who stayed throughout the war to record whatever she could. You must have heard of the Four Days of Naples when the desperate inhabitants initiated a liberation of their own just before our troops got there?”
“Unimaginable bravery.” I could tell from his ponderous way of speaking that his was the mind that had pushed Rhys’s grieving mother into conceding that her son had shown signs of shell shock. For the policeman, my own reference to the awful war-torn scenes only mattered in the way that I was reinforcing the idea he was nurturing of Rhys’s general fragility since his return home.
Reluctantly now, I added, “This woman was there. I think her father’s training must have been an influence because she made an archive of the survivors’ stories. She’s a very talented woman, actually.”
Inspector Griffiths nodded very sagely over the elegant pose. “Yes,” he agreed. “I can see that she is.”
Then the smile was abruptly twitched away beneath his moustache and he handed me the next enlargement. It was one of the group photographs – presumably taken by Christi – and since I‘d already experienced a jolt when I’d encountered the physical proof of Rhys’s life, and death, in the form of the old shattered camera, I really should have anticipated the impact it would have on me to see these photographs of my dead husband’s face.