The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  She looked up, her body shaking with the misery of silent sobs, and saw the garden and the river beyond it. Slowly, against the turmoil in her, she felt and welcomed the broad warmth and comfort of an unseen, familiar hand cradle her temple and knew the beginning of a strange peace and a clear purpose.

  She stood up and walked away from the table, leaving the letter and its envelope lying there.

  Maxie came down the side of the valley through a pine plantation and out on to the river bank. The flood was running high, almost to the level of the meadow. He stood for a moment or two looking downstream. Fifty yards away the spate was cascading over a weir, a chocolate-coloured frenzy of water. He watched, fascinated by the power of the flood. Tree trunks and old branches swept by in a ragged armada. A heron, flapping lazily up the valley, legs trailing, saw him and veered away. A flock of lapwings rose from the top of the meadow. He watched them and saw a handful of fieldfares with them break off into their own flight pattern. He turned away towards the house, picking his way along the muddy path.

  The rain had gone, the sky was lightening. The sun would soon break through. And his own sun, he thought, had already broken through. He had what he wanted – though nothing hoped for and finally gained was ever the same as the image which had been long treasured. Still, he had no grumbles. All this business over Commander Tucker had been a surprise. But that would soon be done. Quint and Lassiter would find their stupid papers and clear off. The sooner the better. He wanted to be alone with Margaret, and wanted beyond that the coming of that still amorphous freedom whose definition, now that it was so unexpectedly and quickly within his reach, he could not yet bring himself to picture in definite terms. He only knew that it could not be complete until he was entirely alone, and on his own. Fate had dropped everything into his hands so easily. Margaret had given him the house and willed all she owned to him. If he loved her it was only a form of pride in his physical and personal delight in her. He had trapped her like a bird, caged her, and treated her well. There was time and plenty ahead before he need consider his own true freedom. First of all he wanted her truly to himself. That would come when these men went. They would buy a farm, and after a few years of quiet establishment he would by some simple act of concealed ruthlessness, smooth, never to be questioned, truly become his own man.

  A jack-snipe got up from a clump of sedges almost at his feet and he watched it zigzag in alarm up the river and disappear around the bend below the house. As he did so, he saw a blue patch riding down on the surface of the flood. For a moment or two he watched it, thinking it was an empty fertilizer sack picked up by the rising waters. Then the blueness was lifted by a swirling fall in the current and he caught a glimpse of a face, of fair hair and the flash of a half bare arm.

  He stood on the bank, shocked as though a sudden blow had been dealt him; stood, watching the blueness, knowing that it was no drifting sack, knowing the blueness of Margaret’s dress as she had sat opposite him at breakfast, knowing the fair hair which he had caressed that morning when he had drawn the firm length of her body to him. Reason abandoned him, leaving only a sudden rage. He knew that he stood now watching another turn of Fate in his favour, a Fate that had already worked too busily and quickly for him, doling out its charity to him who had been born into charity, had lived on charity, and who hated charity because it had usurped the place of love and deeply sapped his self-respect. Here now it was making another offering to him as though without its bounty he by himself could achieve nothing.

  Margaret, his wife to be, the woman who had already given him everything she had, came rolling down towards him, spun and twisted by the strong flood, not a woman but an object, an empty blue sack, flotsam lifted and being carried away by the waters. Over his anger he heard an inner voice almost shout into his ears, See, I’m doing it for you! You would never have found the courage, never have found the will in yourself to do it!

  He watched her go by and saw her face momentarily as her body rolled and one of her hands broke water as though in a gesture of farewell. The simple, random movement suddenly freed him from his anger, from all design, from everything except the swift birth of a new truth about himself. He stripped off his pilot jacket, kicked off his gum boots, and threw himself into the river to go after her.

  Warboys stood by her bed. Outside, Margaret could see the rise of a faint evening mist hanging a bout the trunks of the pine trees and faintly she could hear the sound of the still swollen river.

  Warboys said, ‘Would you like me to pull the curtains and put the light on, Mrs Tucker?’

  She shook her head. Maxie had left them together reluctantly against Warboys’ request. She wanted him back, felt now in her weakness that she could never bear him far from her, felt, too, uncertain about this tall, grave man with his pale face and still, dark eyes. He was of Bernard’s world from which nothing good had come to her.

  Warboys said, ‘I was a friend of your husband’s, a very close friend. He made a tape before he died, a tape in which he spoke personally first to you and then to me. The words he left for me I have wiped from the tape. My reason for doing so belongs to me…’

  He put out a hand towards the instrument which he had set on her bedside table and Margaret saw his eyes half-close for a moment as though he were shutting out pain, closing off some memory which haunted him.

  She said, ‘I don’t understand it, but I only know that I am sorry for you … strangely, perhaps, more sorry than I am for myself and for all that has happened…’

  Warboys said, ‘Listen to the tape, Mrs Tucker. The words are for you.’ He switched on the machine and walked to the window and stood with his back to her as the tape began to play.

  Margaret lay in the dying light of the December evening and suddenly, distantly, faintly distorted but unmistakably Bernard’s, the voice inhabited the room with its opening anguish…

  Jesus Christ! Jesus, Jesus…

  There was a pause during which Margaret caught the sound of Bernard’s breathing, heavy, fighting for the strength to go on speaking, and then came his next words, calmer, growing controlled against the distress of his body.

  God in heaven … I would never have believed it. Never … That such a thing could happen … I was coming along the path, a path I’ve known for years, and I… I slipped … God help me, such a stupid, stupid thing to do…

  Margaret shut her eyes. She saw Bernard lying out in the night, knowing he was dying, saw nothing but that as the tape ran silently for a while, and then Bernard began to speak again.

  Tell Margaret this – that in my own way, if only for a time, I loved her, could have wished it to have been more than it was but could find nothing … nothing in me worthy of all that was offered because my eyes looked for other things, things, too, which I gained and then found only worth despising … I ask for no forgiveness, only perhaps some understanding. Tell her, I regret my anger this evening, that I wish her all the joy which she deserves and pray for it with all my heart in these last few minutes of my time … and that time too short for any hope of grace for me … To be taken so stupidly like this after all the wartime days of danger. Fate knows how to belittle us all even in death when we merit it…

  The tape ran silently on.

  Warboys moved from the window and switched off the machine.

  He said quietly, ‘There is no more, Mrs Tucker – except this. You have no reason for reproaching yourself or nursing stupid fears of what you might have done. We’ve seen the anonymous letter you received. It’s a pack of lies. You will have no more trouble in that direction. Forget you ever received it.’

  He closed the lid of the machine and picked it up.

  Margaret, her face turned from him, said, ‘It could have been all so different. Thank you for letting me hear it … Poor Bernard…’

  Moving to the door Warboys said, ‘Shall I tell Mr Dougall to come up?’

  ‘Please…’

  He went out, and she lay there, the memory of Bernard vividly in her
mind, the memory of the man who in the last few minutes of his life had spoken to her with truth and affection.

  The door opened and Maxie came into the room. He crossed to the bed and sitting on it raised her and, putting his arms around her, held her close, saying nothing, just holding her and stroking her hair as she pressed her face into his shoulder. After a while he held her away from him, kissed her gently on the lips, and then said, ‘We’re going to have to look after you, girl, better than we have done till now. You’re a rare one for getting the wrong notions in that head of yours. But there’ll be no more of that not while I’m around and that’ll be for all the seasons of our lives…’

  Quint watched Kerslake reading the letter. He was young, about the same age as he had been himself when Commander Tucker had given him his chance to join the department. The people at the top went, others moved up and there had to come the new hands to leaven the bottom of the pile. From them came just a few who had the skills to go with their ambition.

  Kerslake handed the letter back to him and Quint said, ‘You know who wrote it?’

  Kerslake nodded. ‘Ankers. Borrowed typewriter – could be traced.’

  Quint began to tear the letter into small pieces. Kerslake watched him pile the fragments into the ashtray on the table and set fire to them. Flame and a little smoke wreathed upwards, a tiny pyre.

  Quint said, ‘ There’s no truth in it. Commander Tucker gave a full account of his accident on the tape. Mr Warboys wants no official action taken.’

  Kerslake smiled. ‘I understand, sir. I’ll talk to him privately at the right moment. For the rest of his days if he’s needed for anything he’ll be on a string. Just pull it – and he’ll dance for you.’

  Quint said quietly, ‘ Would you like it to be for us?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Kerslake looked out of the window, at the evening sunlight on the tide-swollen river, at the traffic crawling across the old town bridge, at a familiar scene which he knew he would soon be leaving. He was well content.

  Lassiter handed the Parks papers to Warboys, the roll of documents and letters tightly bound by three flat, strong rubber bands just as they had been left by Commander Tucker in their hiding-place.

  He said, ‘When Commander Tucker put in the new bathroom door from his bedroom he used three hinges. Between the top and the middle one he made a long cavity covered by the apparently continuous run of the face of the casing. The edges of this were masked each end by the hinge plates screwed to the door casing. Taking out the screws of the top and middle hinge – you could do it in a few moments with a coin – allowed a piece of casing to be pulled out like a slide. The back of the slide was covered with a layer of lead to muffle any hollow sound if tapped. It was a very nice piece of work. I’d already examined the door a few times before Mrs Tucker pin-pointed it. Bad mark to me, I’m afraid, sir.’

  Warboys nodded, scarcely hearing what Lassiter had said. He held the roll of papers in his hands. They might be used or they might not. He would hand them over and take his reward in due time … in due time. Time was now the enemy, arrayed and inexorably waiting, to be lived through until grief itself became mortal.

  Outside, high in the pine trees by the river a pair of coal tits were calling to one another as the evening light went. Maxie, who had sat watching over Margaret until sleep had claimed her, stood by the bed. In the shadowed room, in this house by the river, he accepted with a firm, quiet peace of heart and mind that he owed an everlasting debt to that Fate against which he had known anger. Through it there had been revealed to him the reality of a love which he would honour and cherish for the rest of his days.

  Copyright

  First published in 1974 by Heinemann

  This edition published 2013 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-4430-1 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-4429-5 POD

  Copyright © Victor Canning, 1974

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