The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  He left the car a safe distance up the old road and walked to the cottage. Before he reached it he knew that he was going to be out of luck. The place where she normally parked her car was empty. The cottage was in darkness. He walked round it, satisfied himself that no one was there and then went back to his car.

  Calmer, it occurred to him that so far it had always been Margaret Tucker who went to Maxie. It might not increase his bonus payment to be able to prove that the bastard went up to the house to her as well, but it would prove that if he did a job he did it properly. In your own house, too, Mr Bloody Bernard Tucker. That could make any man see red.

  So Billy Ankers slipped inside the drive gate, moved on to the turf edging and went carefully towards the house. There was a light showing from the hall and from one of the main ground-floor windows through the curtains. He lodged himself in the wet cover of a group of rhododendrons and considered his next move. Maxie must be there. But if anyone thought that he was going now to wait until one of the bedroom lights went on they were wrong. All he wanted was one peep through a curtain chink to put truth in the place of a guess and he could imagine the rest and get back off home to some warmth and dry clothes.

  He was about to move closer to the house when the front door opened. Outlined against the lights in the hall he saw the figure, unmistakable to him, of Margaret Tucker. She was wearing a raincoat and a dark-coloured beret. She closed the door and went along the side of the house, her figure silhouetted momentarily against the dim light through the main room window. Then the darkness hid her from Billy Ankers.

  Billy was puzzled. If Maxie was in the house why had she come out? And if he was not in the house – and certainly not in his cottage – where on earth was she going? To meet him somewhere? To bring him back here? That seemed hardly likely. Clearly she wasn’t going down to his cottage or she would have gone to the garage and got her car.

  Baffled and wet, the goading of his disappointed flesh long gone, his limited integrity as an agent finding no response to the questions that filled his mind, he suddenly swore gently to himself and went back up the drive, his mind already on the pleasure of reaching his room and getting warm again.

  The walk in the rain and wind had done him good, Bernard told himself. And by good he really meant good because in a very short space of time he had seen how wrong he had been. This was not the first time that he had walked out of the house to avoid a discussion or real confrontation with Margaret. Always before he had left her because he had known what was coming and known even more surely that there was nothing to be gained by anything he could say or do for her. The escape she so clearly wanted had always been within her own power. Yet the moment she had found it, why had he reacted as he did? He had faced her without charity, with a conventional response which had centred not on her happiness (to which he owed any contribution he could make, and more) but on a concern for her money chiefly, a stuffy warning for her to watch out or she would be robbed, a stiff-necked, violent disregard of any joy which rode with either the truth or the illusion which had changed her at last from a puppet into a human being. All he had been able to find for her was an angry denial of all she believed she had found, and a stupid material caution to watch her bank balance.

  As he picked his way along the rain-slippery path on the edge of the steep combe which ran down from the house the thought, for the first time during his angry, disturbed walk, came to him that there were other factors and emotions which had coloured his unexpected reaction to Margaret. Jealousy and pride were there, but most potent was his surprised sense of the sudden, and real, appreciation in value of a property already half-possessed by another man. He had to acknowledge the instinct to hoard and deny to others the thing which he knew he would never want to use himself. Discount it how he might, it was a revelation to him, pain-edged, because it showed that his passions held a primitive control over his intellect. The clarity he could use in his professional life was denied him in his personal life.

  Perhaps after all he did love her … that it had taken all these years and one simple act of courage on her part to bring him the only important discovery of his life, a discovery that might hold the prospect of a peace of mind which he had known in the days before he had met Warboys.

  A cloud-bank moved away from the low-lying moon. In the pale wash of its light he saw Margaret step out from the shadows of a tall growth of elderberry bushes. As he half-turned to her, a spontaneous movement of relief and welcome filling him, she put out her hands and pushed him violently. Taken utterly by surprise he stumbled and slipped on the mud-greasy path and then fell, grasping at the thin thongs of a broom bush on the combe edge for support. The broom growths broke away in his hand and he rolled backwards over the edge of the steep fall. As he went he saw Margaret’s face, hard-set, as though she moved in the bondage of some dream, her skin like wet ivory, her long hair free of the beret, loose in the wind, turned to a dull silver by the brief moon whose light cast deep pits of black shadow under her eyes.

  He fell outwards over the thirty-foot drop of craggy, granite outcrop towards the combe bottom, rock-strewn and noisy with the turbulent waters of the flood-swollen brook.

  He died fifteen minutes later, and until the last few minutes he was conscious. But, before those last few minutes came, the instinct for order and the need for a just resolution of his problems by the simple rule of the facts known which had characterized his professional life stayed with him – raising his wrist watch to his mouth, he flicked the recording catch and began to speak.

  A few minutes later Margaret returned to the house. In the hall she slipped off her coat and hat and hung them up, then she took off her half-length rubber boots and put on her house-shoes which she had left below the coat stand. She went into the sitting-room, picked up her whisky glass which stood on the small table behind her chair, and then sat down.

  She sat for a long time, staring straight, in front of her, unthinking, seeing but not seeing, possessed by a familiar isolation which had its own strange form of caressing, all-shielding comfort which sustained her, as it had done so often before, in the immaculate cocoon of a peace which neither fear nor memory could penetrate.

  She came to life some time later with the warm taste of whisky in her mouth, the glass half-empty in her hand, and for all she knew it had only been a few minutes since Bernard had left her. She felt exhausted, the back of her head still hurt a little where it had struck the wood of the chair. She thought over all he had said, forming his moods and words slowly in her mind, and she waited for him knowing that when he returned he could well have out-walked his anger and might have decided to withdraw his opposition. But if he were the same, it would make no difference. She would leave this house, go to live with Maxie and, no matter how long the wait, prove that Bernard had been wrong.

  After an hour, when Bernard had not returned, she went up to bed, leaving the light on in the hall for him. He had walked out of the house before when she had tried to talk with him about their life together. There was no set time for his moods to last. He went as he wished and he returned when he would. Tomorrow he must be calmer. They would talk again.

  She bathed and then lay in the darkness, listening for his return. But sleep overrode her vigil, her hand touching Maxie’s beach stone under the pillow as she drifted away.

  When she came down in the morning the hall light was still burning. Bernard, she thought, must have forgotten to switch it off. She made herself toast and coffee in the kitchen and sat with the radio turned down softly. Sleep had reformed her, and there was a new courage in her that came from having brought into the open her relationship with Maxie. Whatever Bernard might say or do, she was now her own mistress. Deceit and the shams of the past between them had gone. He must – and would – do what he would, but her path was quite clear.

  She made coffee for him, as she always did when he was home, and took it up on a tray to his bedroom. She knocked, waited, habit still firm in her, and then knocked again
and went in.

  The bed had not been slept in. From below came the sound of the door bell ringing.

  Chapter Seven

  A farm worker had found him in the early morning as he came up the combe to look over some sheep on the higher pastures above the brook.

  He lay a few feet from the spate-heavy brook, between two large boulders. His body was soaked with the rain which had fallen intermittently all night. The farm hand, recognizing Bernard Tucker, and assuring himself that he was dead, left him and went back to the farm and telephoned the village constable. From there the morning had slowly taken its course; sweeping shock, dumb momentary disbelief and the forced actions of circumstance and convention before it like driftwood.

  Real grief was denied Margaret. Unsuspected in her was a core of honesty that kept her silent where others might have paid lip service to the outward aspects of tragedy. The moment of opening the door to a detective-constable from the town had been the worst. From then on she wrapped herself in a stillness of spirit and limited thought. No matter what impoverishments had marred their relationship she knew that at some time she would weep for Bernard, acknowledge an anguish which would all be for the brightness and hope of their early days so soon shadowed, and for him as a man, a life gone.

  She had identified him; the corner of a rough-washed sheet pulled briefly back from a wheeled trolley that was bier, in a small, stone-flagged room.

  She sat now, in another room of the police headquarters, high up in the Civic Centre, its windows overlooking the long stone bridge that crossed the river, the tide out, sand and mud banks exposed and a vortex of gulls screaming over the rubbish that drifted downstream. There was an untouched cup of coffee before her. The young detective-constable sat across from her, well aware of her standing, of her wealth and social position, and of her grief which he had to reduce to official form and order.

  He asked questions, a pad of notepaper before him, and he wrote her answers down slowly and carefully, almost as though the act of writing was a strange labour for him. She would have to go through it all again, he knew, but he did not tell her this. For the moment all he wanted was the rough picture, knew that it was too soon after her grief and shock to expect more. He selected his questions with care and respect. He was young and she was a good-looking woman still, tragedy marking her with a remote nobility and waking in him an unprofessional tenderness.

  She said, ‘He had been working all day … on some business report. Then he came from his study at half-past six to have a drink with me.’ She paused, watching his writing hand, noticing a slight fraying on the inside edge of his cuff.

  ‘How many drinks, Mrs Tucker?’

  ‘One or two … nothing unusual. We talked and then he said he was going for a walk and went out.’ She would have to tell them, she knew, about their quarrel, but she could not face it now. She had a solicitor, almost a friend; she felt she must see him first. And firmly, she knew this was no moment to bring Maxie’s name into the light.

  He finished writing and said, ‘He wasn’t worried or upset about anything …? You know, his business affairs or things like that?’ The last was a useful compendium phrase. It opened the way for people to give or to hold back. You could usually tell.

  ‘No … but he was preoccupied. I think he was still wrapped up in the work on his report.’

  He stood later before his Inspector. As the man finished reading his report, they looked at each other without need to speak the questions which at these times always hung poised between them. He said, ‘ It’s not that some people are odd. They all are. She knew very little about him, or what he did. He works in London but she doesn’t know the name of his firm. Something to do chiefly with tea-broking – she thinks. You know him?’

  ‘Of him. They’ve been here for a good few years.’

  ‘He’s not often here, or wasn’t. My guess is they went their own way. No quarrel, she says. No upset. He just went out for, a walk.’

  ‘It was a bad night for it – and a long walk. I see she went to bed before he got back.’

  ‘Not unusual, apparently. She had just taken his morning coffee up to his empty bedroom when I arrived. Separate rooms. Either a cold fish or he had someone else in London.’

  The Inspector shook his head. ‘You run too far ahead. Leave it with me. I want the doctor’s report as soon as it comes, and you’d better warn the Coroner’s clerk.’ He sighed. ‘ He went for a walk in the dark, slipped on a muddy path and fell over twenty or thirty feet to the rocks. I’d go for more height than that if I wished to do someone in.’

  ‘She never left the house. Personally I think—’

  ‘Don’t. We’re too busy.’

  Nancy, bringing Billy Ankers his mid-morning coffee, kept it from him until she was at the door, about to go.

  She said, ‘Someone in the shop a little while ago was saying your Mr Bernard Tucker’s dead. Went for a walk last night and fell over some rocks or something. He paid you up to date yet?’

  Surprise not really with him yet, Billy said, ‘ You sure of that?’

  ‘That’s what they said. Nasty thing to happen, isn’t it? Poor devil.’

  His mind and attention not with her, already his real concern spreading rapidly over the ready list of possibilities which his self-interest instantly conjured up, he said, ‘Even if a man dies the law protects his creditors. I’m not worrying about that. Sad, though. Oh, yes, very sad.’ And then – because Nancy was rigidly conventional about the proper responses to the news of death, near one, relative, friend, local worthy or national figure – he added portentously, ‘ God rest his soul.’

  Nancy eyed him for a moment and then said affectionately, ‘You bastard.’

  When she was gone Billy eased himself back from his table, stretched his feet to the electric fire and, while he waited for his coffee to cool, began to think about Mr Bernard Tucker and allied matters.

  And as he sat there, Margaret sat at the long table in Maxie’s cottage to which she had come direct from the police in the Civic building.

  Maxie had been painting when she arrived. Propped before him was a half-finished picture, of pin-tailed duck, a part-formed clumsiness which was transformed in his mind’s eye to the real thing as he listened. The moment of her unexpected entry was over, the incoherence which had broken from her and then been smoothed away in their embrace, was gone. She was calm now and sat apart from him, not reaching for his hand across the table, needing, he knew, only his presence there to give her the steadiness which at first her words and action had lacked.

  He listened to her, the black-and-white absurdities of the half-painted duck transformed, memory’s vision exact and clear. He had the growing sense of a friendly, watchful genius signalling to him, clearly and promisingly, that this day was marked for him. He realized, as she told him of the quarrel with Bernard, that she had gone further in stating their relationship and intentions than had ever been established between them. They had talked romantically and wishfully of being together, living together, of going away and finding some new setting in which their love could flower untouched by any blight from this familiar environment. Marriage, yes … but only as a wish, part of the chorus of her bliss. But for himself he had made no commitment beyond feeding her fancies as she lay talking on the bed with him after love-making, or as they walked the sands or some moorland river bank. He had expected opposition from Bernard, but had known that she would come to him. Now – without any move from him, like manna from heaven, unexpected – all his hopes were fed.

  He smiled to himself as she said, ‘I told him everything, Maxie darling. That we wanted to be married and all he could find to say after all these years of neglect was that he had to protect me against you. And not knowing a thing about you. Stupid talk about your being after my money, would take it and then tire of me … Oh, Maxie, I hate myself even to repeat it.’

  ‘Don’t bother about it, love. There’s plenty of men who grudge what they can’t or won’t use themsel
ves. I But you should have told the police about it.’

  ‘I couldn’t. Not then, I wanted to see you first.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But you should know – and you do – that there’s nothing lost by honesty. It can lead you up some rough paths, but in the end it takes you where you want to be. We’ve nothing to hide, least of all our love for one another.’ He got up and walked round to her, stood at her back and put his warm palm on her cheek, cupping it gently. ‘When you see your solicitor, tell him everything. There’s no shame in anything we’ve done or been.’ He slid his hand down the line of her neck and under the top of her blouse, his fingers stroking the first fall of the valley of her breasts and the odd wonder took him that once, long ago, this dead Bernard must have touched and caressed her so and then, still living, had passed away from her. That was really when he had died for her. Her grief now was only the last gesture to rites almost lost in her memory. He said, his accent strengthening without deliberate imposition by him, for once the warm, country earthiness entirely natural, ‘God took him. ’ Tis no good trying to blind our eyes to the freedom that gives to us. Neither of us would have wanted the gift at that price. But there it is, girl. There’s birth and there’s loving and mating and there’s death. And there’s a due season for them all, except dying … Aye, that’s a happening for which no man can see his time.’

  She stood up and came into his arms, her head against his shoulder and he held her warmly to him and there was a tenderness in him for her which flushed rapidly to a blood-stir for her in his body. But he held it down, surprising himself by the ready schooling of his body’s rude hunger. Although he didn’t know the man, had rarely seen him, he knew that the tribute of self-denial was this day the only prayer he could form for him.

  When she was gone he went back to his painting. He touched in the bronze-green wing patch and, with a fine-pointed brush, in black, the scientific name – Anas acuta – because he had discovered that the visitors for no reason he could see liked to have it. There were always a few of the birds from October until March out on the estuary waters. After that they were away to their nesting in Iceland or the Continent … By March, too, he could be away, married to Margaret – that would have to come now and there was no turn in him against it. He would paint no more birds … He would be a married man, his wife a woman of property … She would eventually make a will in his favour, and his favour would be her favour for as long as her body held him. No matter how strong the salt of its present season in his blood, he knew that it would run its due course and then die. And when that happened … then she, too, must die, liberating him to his freedom and her fortune. The thought of that time to come wreathed in his mind like a snake, elusive and never still…