Painting The Darkness - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  Baverstock, who was returning to Bath at the same time, offered to convey us to the Spa station in his four-wheeler, and I readily agreed. On the way up the drive, whilst Constance gazed thoughtfully back at the dwindling view of the house, I asked him how long he had acted for the Davenalls.

  ‘Not the Davenalls, Mr Trenchard,’ he replied. ‘Lady Davenall. Sir Gervase used a cousin of his. I was only taken on when Sir Gervase became incapacitated.’

  ‘I see. You don’t have any dealings with Sir Hugo, then?’

  ‘None at all. Sir Hugo seldom comes down here.’

  At this point, Constance showed herself to have been less preoccupied than I had supposed. ‘You would not remember the maze, then, Mr Baverstock?’

  Baverstock smiled back at her over his shoulder. ‘Sir Harley’s Maze? You’d not visit Cleave Court often without hearing mention of it, though not from Lady Davenall.’

  ‘Then, from whom?’

  ‘The staff. They all thought it a crying shame when she decided to abandon it straight after Sir Gervase was taken ill. I wouldn’t know myself. Crowcroft, the head gardener, left on account of it, though, which says something. There were a good many changes then. Quinn, the butler, left, too, though not—’

  ‘Did Lady Davenall give a reason for her decision?’

  Baverstock chuckled. ‘I should say not.’

  ‘It seems a pity,’ Constance continued wistfully, ‘that there aren’t more staff left who remember James.’

  ‘There is always,’ I put in sarcastically, ‘Nanny Pursglove.’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Constance. ‘Did I gather she still lives on the estate, Mr Baverstock?’

  ‘On the dower portion beyond Limpley Stoke, Mrs Trenchard. A charming little cottage near the canal. I’m confident her tenure won’t be prejudiced by this latest eccentricity.’

  ‘If you wish,’ I said, ‘we could perhaps call on her. You and she do have something in common, after all.’

  Constance looked at me sharply. ‘Would that be possible, Mr Baverstock?’

  ‘Simplicity itself, I should say. The dear old soul adores visitors.’

  So it was agreed and, as Baverstock had implied, easily accomplished. We descended through Limpley Stoke to the flat valley bottom and there, in a sunny hollow overlooked by the railway line, found Miss Pursglove’s grace-and-favour cottage, smoke curling from the chimney, the thatch well kept, hanging baskets still in blossom, the rush of the weir on the river behind us softening the silence. Miss Pursglove saw us coming from the kitchen window and pushed it open to trill a greeting. She recognized Constance at once.

  ‘It’s Miss Sumner, as I live and breathe. It’s been too long, my dear, far too long.’ Her wizened bright-eyed face was transported with delight. A moment later, she was at the door. ‘Welcome one and welcome all. Mr Baverstock and …’

  ‘My husband, Nanny,’ Constance said. ‘I am Mrs Trenchard now.’

  Momentarily, Miss Pursglove looked crestfallen; I found myself guessing what she might have hoped. ‘Do all come in and make yourselves at home. Will you take some tea? Lupin and I have baked some scones.’

  Lupin, it transpired, was a cat, whom Miss Pursglove fussed over between filling pots and jugs and cups and passing plates and spoons and doilies. Baverstock lent an ineffectual hand in a way that suggested he was no stranger to the ritual. He and I were seldom called upon to speak. When Miss Pursglove was not talking – which was not often – Constance was. Their memories, it seemed, were of brighter, better days than Lady Davenall had ever known. And, borne in with their memories, there stood an invisible guest at our tea-party beside the river: James Davenall, the man both women wanted to believe was still alive.

  ‘How I did cry when I saw my Jamie again,’ Miss Pursglove said at length. ‘How I did chide him for misleading us all.’

  ‘Now, Nanny,’ said Baverstock, ‘you know Lady Davenall doesn’t want this man Norton talked of as if—’

  ‘Stuff and nonsense! If she can’t tell her own son from Adam, let the woman who raised him do it for her. I never believed he was dead anyway. That’s what you lawyers would have had us believe, but I knew better.’

  There was no denying her conviction; Baverstock cast a defeatist glance in my direction. Constance, however, seemed eager that she should continue. ‘How did you know for certain, Nanny?’

  ‘He came in here with that shy-eyed bit of a stoop he used to put on when he’d misbehaved as a boy. I’d have known him anywhere. He’s my Jamie and no mistake. I know Sir Hugo doesn’t think so, but he wouldn’t, would he? Always a difficult boy, that Hugo. Not sweet-tempered like Jamie.’

  ‘Even so—’ I began.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Trenchard, but, even so as even is, Mr James is back among us. Sir James, as I must learn to call him. Back as he promised he would be.’

  ‘Promised?’ said Constance.

  ‘The last time I saw him. Eleven years ago. He came up to see me in my room over the nursery before he went on that trip to London. Said he was going away and might not be back for a long time. I never thought he meant this long. But I did make him promise to come back. And he said he would. “Don’t worry, Nanny,” he said. “You’ll see me again.”’

  ‘Perhaps,’ put in Baverstock, ‘he meant when he returned from London.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks! He meant what he said. And now he’s kept his promise. “Well, Nanny,” he said when he called on me here, “I’m back, just like I said I would be.” Doesn’t that prove he’s the same man who said goodbye to me all those years ago?’

  ‘I hardly—’ Baverstock began. He was cut short by Constance rising from her chair.

  ‘Would you all excuse me for a short while?’ she said. ‘I think I am in need of some air.’ I made to rise, but she gestured me to remain. ‘Do stay and finish your tea, William. I know you will have more questions for Nanny. I will be back long before you have asked them all.’

  I looked at her nonplussed. ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Please,’ she said. Suddenly, in her eyes, she was imploring me to let her go. She craved this time alone as water in a desert and, though I could not imagine why she should, I had not the heart to obstruct her.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘You’ll not stray far?’

  ‘No, William. Not far.’

  ‘Bless me, Constance can’t come to any harm round here,’ said Miss Pursglove. ‘Have another scone, Mr Trenchard, and settle your mind.’

  I subsided into the armchair and consoled myself, as Constance went out, with the thought that she might have tired of Nanny’s confident assertion that James had returned. I had myself, though not because the old lady had shown herself to be as feeble-minded as the Davenalls had portrayed her. Far indeed from that was this gimlet-eyed little figure in her pinafore dress, polishing her memories as bright as the copper kettle that stood on her range, defying us with the confidence her lost charge had given her eleven years before: he would return.

  ‘Sixty-five years I’ve worked for the Davenalls,’ she recalled, nodding proudly. ‘Long enough, I think, to make me sure of some things. The year of grace 1817, it was, when I was just fifteen, the year Sir Gervase was born. Sir Lemuel was my first master, you see, though I was just a nurserymaid then. It wasn’t until the first Lady Davenall took homesick for Ireland and went back there for good that I had to look after the young master single-handed. To think I remember him in his cradle and lived to see him in his grave. Well, well.’ She nodded her head. ‘He was a holy terror, was Sir Gervase, man and boy. Sir Lemuel banished him once to his mother’s in Ireland, but I don’t know as it did much good. He came back just as scapegrace as he went. Now, little Jamie, he was different. You could tell from the moment he came into the world that he would be a proper gentleman …’

  VII

  Trenchard was whistling in the dark. Constance had not tired of Nanny Pursglove’s recollections, nor yet of her recital of the ways by which she knew James Davenall. It was simply that she
had returned in her mind to that last leavetaking in June 1871 and wished now, whilst she could engineer some time alone, to return to it in person.

  Nanny Pursglove’s home stood hard by the canal. Constance knew that she had only to walk up the steep lane to the lock-keeper’s cottage and could there gain access to the towpath. She did so unhurriedly, glorying in the solitude of the gentle afternoon. For this, she knew well, was the way she had come before, walking up from Cleave Court in answer to her fiancé’s summons. She knew no better now than then what it was that troubled him, but went obediently, sensing as she trod the path that this was to be no ordinary rendezvous.

  The canal dappled sluggishly at the bank. On its other side bunched the greenery of Conkwell Wood, beyond whose slopes, then as now, stretched secret pastures where, if you knew the path, as they once had …

  A narrowboat came into view, turning into the straight from the aqueduct ahead of her. Below, to her left, lay the river and the railway line. Behind, in cosy ignorance at Nanny Pursglove’s cottage, her husband sat seeking ways to deny what, even now, she dared not quite admit herself.

  On that day in 1871, she had reached the bend wondering if he would, as promised, be there waiting for her. She had hesitated in the shelter of the overhanging trees, felt heat and doubt grow momentarily, then had gone on, and found him, leaning against the parapet, gazing down at the river and smoking a cigarette, his hair a touch awry, his cheeks hollow, his eyes shifting and uncertain. He had looked up at the sound of her approach, had smiled without erasing that first impression of desperation in his pose, had stepped forward to kiss her and been the first to speak.

  On this day in 1882, she reached the bend unnerved by her own presentiments. She hesitated in the shelter of the overhanging trees, recalling the words and expression of their rejected visitor, retracing in her mind the lines of his unexpected letter. ‘Neither of us can forget, can we?’ In that he had been right. How could he know? Unless …

  She went on. She walked slowly, following the curve of the towpath as it rounded the right angle described by the canal. A little way ahead, the waterway narrowed as it crossed the aqueduct. The open valley loomed suddenly beneath her. A man was standing in her path, leaning against the parapet, smoking a cigarette. He was there, as she now knew she had foreseen he would be. He was there, awaiting her.

  VIII

  ‘… So I didn’t believe them when they told me he was dead. No, you may be sure of that. I said to Mr Quinn, I said: “If Mr James tells me I’ll see him again, then I know he’ll be as good as his word.” Quinn scoffed at that right enough, as he scoffed at much else. I wish he was here now to admit I was right. Not that he would. No, not him. It was odd, now I come to think of it, that Mr James didn’t ask why Quinn had left. Not that I knew the ins and outs of his going, of course, but he was Mr James’s valet, when all’s said and done. Yet, when I mentioned him, Mr James said nothing at all, almost as if he already knew what—’

  The clock on Miss Pursglove’s crowded mantelpiece struck five. Baverstock started in his chair. ‘Upon my soul,’ he spluttered. ‘Is that the time? I should have been in Bath half an hour since. Where’s your wife, Mr Trenchard? We must be going.’

  It was absurd. I had almost forgotten that Constance had left us. Now I grew suddenly anxious: she was long overdue. Leaving Baverstock with Miss Pursglove, I hurried out into the lane, but there was no sign of her. My anxiety increased. I tried the uphill route, thinking she might be out of sight at the top, but came only on the canal, and a bailiff in waders by the bank, cutting back the reeds. I asked him if he had seen a lady pass that way. He paused in his work to consider my description, then nodded slowly.

  ‘Ar, more ’n ’alf-hour ago. She followed the towpath towards the aqueduct.’

  ‘Aqueduct?’

  ‘That way.’ He gestured with his thumb. ‘Just under the mile.’

  I found myself running in the direction he had indicated. His words had struck a chord. During our courtship in Salisbury, Constance had occasionally referred to her last meeting with James Davenall ‘by the aqueduct’. There could not be two. This had been no mere stroll for fresh air’s sake. This had been the retracing of a route that led unerringly to a lost allegiance. I quickened my pace, fleeing as much as pursuing the suspicions already massing in my head.

  IX

  He had been the first to speak.

  ‘When you told me in your letter that you were to visit Cleave Court, I knew it was not to seek my mother’s reassurance as you said, but to seek reassurance of a different kind. So here I am. You knew I would be waiting for you, didn’t you? Now as then.’

  If you had happened to be standing on the river bank beneath the Dundas Aqueduct that October afternoon, if you had happened to look up and see two people standing by the parapet, one an elegant, modestly bearded man in a grey jacket and pinned cravat, bare-headed and gazing imploringly at the other, a woman in a violet dress, lace shawl and ribboned straw hat, one hand clutching the coping stone with an intensity mirrored in her face, what would you have thought? Would you have read the struggle of wonder with doubt in her expression as she looked towards him? Would you have guessed the question already forming on her lips?

  ‘How did you know? Who told you these things? It isn’t possible that—’

  ‘Nobody told me, Connie. I lived it, like you, with you. There’s no illusion, no trick. I met you here eleven years ago, when the leaves were green, not yellow.’ He glanced back at the basin beyond the aqueduct. ‘We crossed at the lock gate and walked up through the woods. Didn’t we?’

  He looked at her directly, seeming to compel her to recollect, with him, the events of that day. Her reply, when it came, was from the distance of eleven years. ‘Yes.’

  Now he was looking past her and speaking more loudly. ‘We went as far as the bluebell meadow, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there …’

  Suddenly, Constance spun round. Her husband was standing twelve yards away, panting slightly, his face contorted not with exertion but with trust betrayed. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘William—’

  ‘Be silent!’ Trenchard’s voice was a stern travesty of its normal self. He strode past her and stopped beside Norton. ‘You followed us here, didn’t you? You staged this meeting to convince my wife—’

  ‘I staged nothing!’ Norton removed his elbow from the parapet and squared his shoulders, facing Trenchard without the slightest flinch. ‘I came here for the same reason as Connie. Had you not intervened, I would have told her the truth about why I went away—’

  ‘Easy to say!’

  ‘—and why I have returned.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Now that must await another opportunity.’ He looked at Constance and bowed stiffly. ‘Until we meet again.’ Then he turned and walked smartly away across the aqueduct.

  Not until Norton had passed from view beyond the canal basin did Trenchard speak to Constance and then without looking at her. His words were addressed to her, but his gaze remained fixed in Norton’s direction. ‘You should not have come here, Constance. You should not have spoken to him. Don’t you see what harm you’re doing?’

  Constance, too, was looking elsewhere. ‘I hardly know what I see any more.’

  Trenchard took her arm. ‘Come back with me now. We will speak no more of this. Henceforth, you will leave me to handle this affair. You will not see him again. I forbid it. Should you do so by chance, you will not speak to him.’ They began to move slowly back along the towpath, back towards where Baverstock would be waiting with his four-wheeler to hurry them to the station. ‘Do you understand me, Connie?’

  Her reply was meek enough to suggest compliance. ‘I understand.’

  Indeed she did. She understood that day, for the first time, where her duty lay.

  Chapter Three

  I

  THROUGH THE DECEPTIVE calm of the day after our visit to Somerset, I watched Constance as a gaoler would his charge. There were no bars,
of course, no keys, no locked doors, just all the other barriers that Norton had succeeded in erecting between us. It was only a week since he had entered our lives and, already, the possibility that he might be James Davenall was worse than any certainty.

  Patience played on the carpet after tea that Sunday afternoon, and Constance sat reading by the window. I slunk away to my study, where at least silence was normal, if no more bearable, and sought in vain to calm my anxieties. If only I could have talked to Constance, if only I could have asked her the vital question: if she believed him, what of her love for me? But I had placed an embargo on all such conversation, and she had abided by it. I had asserted my authority as head of the household, and she had respected it. I had insisted on being left to deal with the matter alone and now, pacing the room or peering uneasily from the window to check that the street was empty, I realized how helpless I was to do so.

  My confused state of mind must explain the foolish course I took the following morning. Leaving home after an early breakfast, before Constance had risen, I diverged from my normal route to Orchard Street and proceeded to Paddington, harbouring the absurd notion that I might be able to take Norton unawares at his hotel and extract from him a withdrawal of his claim.

  The clerk at the desk intimated that he was taking breakfast in the dining-room: I went straight in. There, sure enough, at a pillar table, Norton sat reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette over the last of his coffee. The room was full but quiet in the way of such establishments at such an hour. A periodic rattle of cutlery and waiters’ whispered enquiries were all that was to be heard.

  Norton saw me approaching him, but displayed no reaction. He did not even lower his newspaper. Eventually, after standing awkwardly by his table for some moments, I said: ‘I’d like to speak to you.’