“Didn’t she have any friends at all?”
“One or two. I think they knew she had this dark place inside her, and they were afraid of it. They were afraid of getting sucked in. Even Granny. Only Daddy wasn’t afraid.”
The drizzle’s paused, and she’s smoking again, staring into the bowl of the fountain. Outdoors, her eyes are very blue, almost as blue as her brother’s. Her pale hair lashes against her cheek.
“You noticed a lot for a ten-year-old.”
“I sometimes think I was soaking up the details on purpose. I remember so clearly the last time I saw Daddy. He had to leave early for the station, to go back to the front, and I was supposed to be asleep. But the sun rises so early in June, you know. I looked out the window and saw them in the drive, Mummy and Daddy. It was only half past four, and he helped Mummy climb into our old Wolseley—she was expecting Benedict, she was just enormous with him—and then he got into the driver’s seat. He was wearing his uniform, no overcoat. I remember wishing he would take off his hat so I could see his hair. He had the most wonderful hair. It was much redder than Benedict’s, like flame.” She tosses the cigarette in the water. “And that was it. They drove away. The telegram arrived a week later.”
“It was the Somme, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. The very first day. One of his captains went down in the first surge, and most of the lieutenants, so he picked up his rifle and led the company himself. He was a major, a career officer. So he knew, you see. He knew what war was about.” A wave of drizzle comes across the meadow. She squints angrily at the sky. “Come along. There’s a place we can shelter.”
I’d like to tell her that I don’t want to shelter, that I welcome the hardship of a cold rain, but she’s already tramping onward. The ground’s begun to slope, the bare trees to gather. I smell the river before I see it, a giant, teeming perfume of freshness and rot. The branches part, and there it is, about a quarter mile across, brown and rambunctious with rainfall. Inside the shelter of the trees, the larks sing earnestly. It’s December, after all, and no time for fun and games.
“That’s where my mother drowned herself,” Margaret says. She lifts her arm and points to a ruined building, choked with vines, on a small island connected to the riverbank by a footbridge. “It was November, a few months after Benedict was born. She would feed him and put him to bed and then come here, in the middle of the night. And one night she just went down those steps and didn’t come back. I woke up to this terrible fuss. Benedict was screaming for milk, and the maids were crying, and all these men were tramping over our lawn. Granny had taken charge, she was giving people orders left and right. I saw them carrying Mummy into the ambulance. She died in hospital a few hours later. They wouldn’t let me see her, the disgrace was too awful. And she couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground, so they had to bury her on the estate.”
“Where?”
Margaret swivels and points back toward the house. “Somewhere over there. Granny took charge of that too. It was all such an awful disgrace, she didn’t invite anybody. I wasn’t allowed to go, it was just Granny and her sisters and the minister, so I never got to properly say good-bye. It’s not even marked. Mummy wanted to be buried next to my father’s kit, apparently.”
“His kit?”
“His kit bag. It came home after he died, and Mummy couldn’t bear it, so she made Annie bury the thing.”
“Oh, poor Annie.”
“It was jolly awful for her, I imagine. Everybody adored Daddy. He was the most—the best—the most wonderful—”
I don’t say a word. What can I possibly say? I kneel in the clean-smelling mud next to Margaret while she goes to pieces. The larks keep on yammering, as if nothing’s happened.
When we return, Margaret climbs the stairs for a nap, and I return outside. I’m too restless to lie down, my head too crammed with new ideas, new images, this damp, heartbroken childhood of Thorpe’s.
The drizzle’s eased, leaving behind a bleak landscape, December gray. I walk past the carriage house and its air of abandonment, its missing roof tiles, broken door. I think how it must have looked thirty years ago, and how long it’s been left like this. Whether Thorpe might have learned to ride a pony here, or whether the decline had already begun. The ground’s soft beneath my boots, the grass limp and dying. I realize I’m headed toward the place Margaret pointed out, the place where Thorpe’s mother is buried, next to the effects of her husband, but when I reach that place, the general area indicated by that long finger, there’s nothing to see. No marker of any kind. The same grass, the edge of a thicket. And yet they’re there, the two of them. The grief, it’s inside the soil.
I hear the sound of squishing footsteps an instant before the brisk Scotch voice. “You ought not to be out like this, Mrs. Thorpe.”
“Annie! You startled me.”
“You ought to be inside, where it’s warm.”
“I don’t mind the cold. It makes me feel closer to him.”
“Won’t do him a bit of good, though. Nor his babe.”
I nod toward the thicket. “Is that where they’re buried?”
She hesitates. “Who, ma’am?”
“Margaret said they’re buried here. Her mother and—well, not her father, but his kit bag. You buried it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she says, but there’s a note to her voice that sets something stirring in me. You know how it is when you’ve been reporting on people’s tittle-tattle for the past two years. You recognize the sound of someone wanting to unburden herself. I turn my head. She’s wearing a worn raincoat, worn rubber boots that must be several sizes too big for her, a strange floppy oilskin hat like something a fisherman would wear in a gale. Her hands fret about inside her pockets.
“Something the matter, Annie?” I ask.
“Poor Master Benedict. Poor lad. Just like his father. And you! Expecting a wee babe, just like his mother.”
“I’m not anything like his mother.”
“Oh, but you are. There’s only a few who love like that. Only a few that can bear it.”
“But she didn’t bear it, did she? When he died, she couldn’t bear it.” I gesture to the thicket. “She made you bury his things.”
“That was just the darkness in her, ma’am. I knew she didn’t mean it. She had a darkness in her, like my mum had. Came on when she had her babes. Poor wee thing. I knew she didn’t mean it.”
She’s looking off into the thicket now, as if she sees something inside it. I turn to face her, and still she doesn’t regard me, so I reach out to take her elbow. I left my gloves behind, and my hands are wet and raw, and her raincoat is about the same.
“What does that mean, Annie? What are you trying to say?”
“I did keep it safe, ma’am. All these years. The poor dear major. It wasn’t right to bury his things in the dirt.”
Lulu
July 1943
(The Bahamas)
I woke to the sound of a ringing telephone, sometime past eight o’clock in the morning. At first I thought it must be Thorpe, but then I remembered how, a few hours earlier, I had settled in the dark sand and watched the sun crawl over the edge of the world, until the drone of the Liberators merged into the noise of the ocean and Thorpe was gone, my husband was gone, and I had staggered back to bed.
The telephone persisted shrilly. There was no closing your ears to a sound like that, repeated over and over by a person who evidently meant to get his point across, one way or another. I raised my head from the pillow. My brain ached with champagne and sorrow. I lifted my hand to the sun that splintered through the shutters and saw the ring on my finger like an exotic object, a thing never before seen in human history, a band of gold clamped above my knuckle. I rolled over and fell from the bed, aching in every joint and sinew, each tendon screaming with its own particular anguish. Like the telephone, over and over. I stumbled naked out of the room and found the receiver in the parlor. The shutters were still closed, the room streaked with bands of light.
“Hello?” I said.
A man’s voice. “Mrs. Randolph.”
“Who’s this?”
A rush of static came over the line, like the fellow at the other end was simply breathing into the mouthpiece, considering his words. “Mrs. Randolph, it’s Jack,” he said at last.
“Jack! Jack from the Prince George?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re up awfully early. Say, I’ve got a little news for you—”
“Listen, Mrs. Randolph. It’s important. You got a minute?”
“Sure I do. But it’s not Mrs. Randolph anymore, you know. It’s—”
“I know, I know.” He made a sound of impatience, a grunt. “Listen up. You heard the news about Oakes?”
“Sir Harry? What about him? Has he left town already?”
“He’s left town, all right,” said Jack. “He’s dead. Murdered last night in his own bed.”
Jack wanted to meet me all the way out at Lyford Cay, an odd and awfully inconvenient location, because he had something important to tell me, and you couldn’t trust a telephone line not to have an operator listening at the other end. I was shaking a little, from shock and lack of sleep. I asked what about, and he said he couldn’t say, just that it was important, Mrs. Rand— Mrs. Thorpe. I said I had my shift at the canteen, the ladies were counting on me, which was true. I said how about after lunch, and he hesitated and said all right, in such a way that I felt it wasn’t all right at all. Then he hung up so suddenly, the telephone swallowed the last of his words to me.
Sometimes I wonder how things might have turned out if I changed my mind and called in sick, as I had any right to do, having just been married the day before and seen my new husband off to jolly England a few hours later. But you can’t second-guess yourself, I’ve found. You don’t know what lies in that parallel dimension, you don’t know what fate is contained inside those infinite hypothetical worlds in which you made other choices. Anyway, what can you do about them? They’re like the past itself, they’re gone. You can’t just get on your bicycle and travel there.
In this world, the world in which I hung up the telephone and stared at the wall and said to myself, Harry Oakes is dead, he’s been murdered; the world in which I ran a bath and scrubbed away the sweat and salt, the remnants of Thorpe from the hollows of my body, and the water felt like ice on my skin; in which I dressed and brushed my hair and bicycled to the canteen, repeating Harry Oakes is dead to the rhythm of the bicycle wheels, and served a hundred and seventeen men their bacon and eggs and coffee; in which I pieced together gossip about what was happening down at Westbourne—most of which turned out to be false—and then borrowed Mrs. Gudewill’s Buick for the ride out to Lyford Cay: in this world, in this history I now recount, I never did discover what Jack meant to say to me, and whether it would have made a difference.
In disregard of the heavy sky, I drove Mrs. Gudewill’s Buick with the top down, all the way along New Providence Island while the draft warped around me and the ocean spread out to the horizon. I passed the drive to Westbourne, now crawling with men, without stopping. Harry Oakes is dead, I thought, but still the words made no sense, so I kept driving. The white beaches went by, mile after mile, and I thought how lovely it would be to stop and bathe in that sea, to lie on that beach with your lover, your husband, the sand on your skin, his hair in your hands. The road streaked west along the extreme edge of the coast, while the palmettos and the scrub crawled past on my left. Above the pitch of the Buick’s engine, I heard a different noise, deeper and larger, and I looked up and saw a massive airplane dropping gracefully from the hazy sky, wheels down, aiming for Windsor Field. The din was enormous, like the end of the world. Foolishly I ducked my head as it passed. The screech of tires followed a moment later. Ahead, I saw a commotion to the right, away from the road, on the beach. I brought the automobile to a stop.
For a moment or so, I rested my toes on the brake pedal and stared at the knot of fishermen who were hauling a bundle of wet clothing with great proficiency over the side of their boat. My fingers turned cold on the steering wheel, though the day was as hot as ever, the air turgid in the wake of last night’s storms. I got out of the car and walked closer. A couple of men stood by, arms folded, and I asked them what was happening.
“There’s a body.” He pointed to the water. “They found a body in the harbor.”
“Who?”
The fellow shrugged. “Never seen him before.”
I worked my way closer, until I saw them lay out the body on the damp, hard sand. I wondered why nobody had called the police, and then I remembered the police were dealing with matters at Westbourne. As they arranged the fellow just so, his wet clothes sopped around his body, his head lolled to one side, for an instant—and just for that instant—I caught a glimpse of his blanched face. In my shock, I thought it was Tommy. That was the only dead man I had ever seen until now, so irrationally I saw that pasty skin and those blank open eyes and screamed to myself, Tommy! and my body reacted accordingly, the jolt of energy, the splintering of nerves against the skin.
Then I saw his ears that stuck out like wings from his head, and I knew it wasn’t Tommy, of course not. Tommy lay beneath the earth of Queens in the Randolph family plot, under a headstone that nobody visited or cared for, because Tommy had been the kind of fellow to raise love in someone’s heart only to slay it afterward, until nothing was left of that love. But Tommy was a handsome devil with neat, flat ears. This face belonged to the man I knew as Mr. Smith, the man who’d delivered to me the envelopes addressed to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Of Lyford Cay, Harold Christie’s great dream, for which he had mortgaged himself to Sir Harry Oakes, there wasn’t yet much. He had spent a fortune laying out pipes from the other end of New Providence Island for water and electricity and so on, but all the houses and golf courses and tennis courts had yet to be built. Lyford Cay was just an investment, was a piece of land cleared of scrub and pine and swamp and waiting for a future.
I waited some time at the entrance to Lyford Cay, but Jack never turned up. Only some workmen, back and forth, who took no notice of me. I found a rock to sit on and tried to seize some kind of control of my rattled nerves. I felt as I had in the days after I killed Tommy Randolph, like I had been flattened out by God’s rolling pin, and though my body strained for sleep and my head felt like it was made of dough, my brain kept spinning round and round inside. I mean, could you blame me? A day earlier I had stood inside the drawing room at Government House and been married to Benedict Thorpe by the Duke of Windsor. Now my husband was gone across the ocean, Sir Harry Oakes was dead, Mr. Smith was dead, and it seemed to me that evil seeped from the stones around me and hung in the air like a cloud of poison gas. I started breathing in shallow sips, so as not to draw it into my lungs. My watch ticked away. An hour passed. Across the empty, landscaped ground of Lyford Cay there was a marina, and I remember thinking what a remote, convenient location it was, that dock, if you wanted to land on New Providence Island incognito, or depart it the same way, with no more noise or notice than a cloud of poison gas, say.
Or maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe I had this thought later, in the weeks before the trial, when stories of the night of Oakes’s murder began to sift into my ears.
Eventually I got into the car and drove back to the canteen, exhausted. The fishermen on the beach with the dead body had left by now, but the crowd remained milling outside of Westbourne as I passed. I didn’t stop, I made straight for the canteen and returned the keys to Mrs. Gudewill. I had the feeling that I didn’t want to know, I had no desire at all to learn how poor Sir Harry had died. Instead I got on my bicycle and pedaled into town through the same taut, warm silence. I walked straight into the Prince George hotel in my canteen uniform, wet with perspiration, but Jack wasn’t there, he wasn’t anywhere. Like a lot of fellows over the course of those strange months following the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, he had simply disappeared.
&n
bsp; The next day, when I bicycled to the canteen, the ladies were all abuzz with the news. Had I heard? The chief prosecutor of the Bahamas had arrested a man and charged him with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes.
Not, as you might expect, the fellow who had slept in the adjoining bedroom the night of the murder, who had discovered the body the next day, who had been in debt to the dead man to the tune of untold thousands of pounds.
No, they arrested Alfred de Marigny, the son-in-law of Sir Harry Oakes. After all, the two of them were known to be on the outs, and de Marigny was a scoundrel of a man, a fortune hunter, a mountebank.
Lulu
December 1943
(Scotland)
“I don’t understand,” Margaret says to Annie. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why, you were too young, Miss Margaret. And then I was too old and forgot.”
“How could you forget a thing like this?” She sinks into the straw and lifts her hand to touch this thing, this brown canvas bag, the leather straps, one by one, the way you might touch a holy relic.
We’re speaking inside the hayloft of the carriage house. They hay is largely gone, as you might expect, and the bag’s sitting snug underneath the eaves. When she first deposited it here, Annie covered it with a striped horse blanket, which she now holds in her hands, folding and unfolding and folding again. The rain drums softly against the roof and drips in places to the floor.
I kneel next to her on the old wooden floor, the bits of hay and dust. The air is musty, but if you taste it carefully inside the chambers of your nose, there’s a horse there somewhere, long absent from the stalls below. There’s also the smell of gasoline, because the Morris occupies the center hall, next to a stately old brougham, coated in dust. Margaret’s in some kind of trance, just staring and staring at something nobody else can see, some memory. I say gently, “Should I open it? Or do you want to do it?”
The Golden Hour Page 38