“Chris says it’s nothing to do with willpower. That’s a mistake most people make about-” He shrugged.
Charlie was looking at the bar, shaking his head in a wondering way. “That’s Chrissie.”
And in a way it did sum her up; that really was Chrissie, who never rushed to judgment, never condemned out of hand, had an open mind and a great sense of fair play.
But she wasn’t soft, hadn’t that sticky sweet manner that one might expect to find in such a person. Chris could be sardonic and ironic, so that some people thought her too edgy. What a mistaken impression! What she had in abundance was patience. Like the way she treated Charlie. No, you could tell Chris anything and not be misunderstood or judged or told not to feel that way.
“What do you mean Chris had a tough life? Tough, how?”
“She had to put up with a lot. After her mother died, it pretty much fell to Chris to take charge, she being the oldest. I guess, though, there’s some good that comes of that kind of responsibility. Once you undertake it, you don’t forget it.” Charlie stared glumly into his glass.
There was a silence as Johnny thought Charlie must have been mourning the loss of a pint. After all, he depended on it, as alcoholics say, “like a friend, a best friend.” It was perfectly possible Charlie missed beer and whisky as much as Johnny missed Chris. He said, “She hadn’t been gone long; I mean, she’d only just taken things out of the oven.”
Johnny’s tone was so dejected that Charlie reached across the table and put a hand on the boy’s arm. “This sounds like hollow comfort, but I bet when we know what happened, after she comes back, we’ll be amazed we didn’t see it.”
“It’s like she just-vanished. As if there’d been some sleight of hand, a huge trick played,” Johnny said.
Charlie smiled. “Sleight of hand’s our stock-in-trade. Given what’s going on, you’d better have this.” He pulled the fake gun from his pocket and put it down on the table.
“I thought you said a friend needed it for his act.”
“I’ve got another.” Charlie flashed a smile. “Forget Chekhov.”
12
He had crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s on the lease. He had handed over a wad of money (in the form of a draft on his bank) and received the keys in return.
Melrose was again at the house he was free to inhabit for the next three months, happily without the estate agent following him about or Agatha erupting on his horizon. Tomorrow he would take back the hired car, jump aboard the train to London, from there to Northants, collect his Bentley and some clothes, and return and live here for three months, or longer, or less.
How fortunate he was to be rich. He only partly agreed with that glib saying that money can’t buy happiness. It certainly made misery a lot more bearable. Money was at the moment freedom to live here, or to live there, or to take a lease for three months and leave after only one.
But that did not answer the question, Why was he using his freedom in this way? He had wandered into the large living room and was standing now before one of the long windows looking out over the weedy garden. He wondered if he was coming up against a midlife crisis and this move was the first sign of it. No, he decided, midlife crises were not an option with him; he was too sanguine. He was simply overpowered by the melodramatic quality of this house and its situation. He certainly was given to regard himself in more melodramatic terms. It was quite fun, really, to picture himself standing on a shelf of rock, looking out over the swell of the waves folding over the rocks: Ever stood she, prospect impressed. He couldn’t get those lines out of his head.
He turned from the window in this smaller reception room and looked at the sheeted furniture, at its ghostly glimmer in what was fast becoming dusk. He moved over to an armchair, took hold of a corner of the sheet, flicked it off like a matador provoking a bull. He then went about removing the sheets from sofas and chairs, wondering where people put the laundry. At home, Ruthven and Martha took care of such things, made them disappear from sight (Melrose’s, at least) as if a party of elves had been at work while the house slept. Could he make it on his own? Perhaps he should advertise for a housekeeper. Yes, it would be good to have a housekeeper, not so much to keep house as to bring him up to speed on gossip. Although he would not have wanted anyone like Agatha’s char, Mrs. Oilings, he thought he could strike a happy medium between capable housekeeper and capable gossip.
He wondered where he should dump the sheets. He considered putting the kettle on (so nice to have all of this equipment furnished) but decided to take a long, long walk round the house before tea. It rather delighted him, too, that he could do his own tea and drink it in the living room or library with no other company than portraits and pictures of those absent.
He found himself trying to absorb what traces there were here of the lives of the Bletchleys. Maybe it was because the family depicted in those snapshots had been so beautiful-before the double tragedy-that he wished in some way he could join them.
Melrose’s memory of his own father was fitful, fluid and vague. He had not been terribly fond of him, nor had he greatly respected him. His feelings were all for his mother. The seventh Earl of Caverness had spent most of his time riding to hounds and only occasionally taking his seat in the House of Lords-with, as far as Melrose knew, no particular effect on the country or himself. He remembered a distant man, if not an absolutely cold one; Melrose had wondered, when he was old enough to wonder such things, how his mother, a very warm and loving woman, a woman who had these qualities in abundance, could be happy with him.
She had not been; she had been happy, but not with her husband. And knowing this had weighed Melrose down. He didn’t really know why.
Nicholas Grey. Melrose had deliberately distorted the image of Nicholas Grey, again without understanding exactly why. Even knowing who and what he was, Melrose still at times hated the man, saw him as an interloper in the Belgravia house. Would it have been easier to accept his mother’s affair if Grey had been a seducer, a rotter, and a layabout? And his mother a woman caught in his spell? Or was it simply that the real Nicholas Grey was none of these things but was instead the sort of man it would be difficult to live up to?
He had seen Grey several times in the Belgravia house, which Melrose had since sold. He had sold the house for that reason-it was where Nicholas Grey had come. The sale had taken place a few years after the solicitor had handed over a letter that his mother had directed be given to Melrose long enough after her death to give him time to get over the worst of it. His mother had been dead for five years when the lawyer had given him the letter. And he hadn’t gotten over it.
He returned to that letter time and again, reading it so often he had worn down the fold so the two parts barely hung together. Nicholas Grey was Irish (the letter said), and it was that which one could say killed him. He had died in Armagh in a skirmish with the IRA. He had himself at one time when he was younger been a member of it, until he finally couldn’t put up with what he felt were random and arbitrary assassinations. Grey himself had been a hot-head but not an anarchist. He was a man sublimely caught up in his cause and had the reputation of being a brilliant strategist, a matchless orator, and an inspiration to the men under him. Grey had disliked the aristocracy, not in theory but in fact; he had hated it for what it had become.
What Lady Marjorie, his mother, had done was to trade a fairly amiable and undemanding man born to wealth and leisure for one who it would be very hard for Melrose, his son, to live up to, a father who had stamped Melrose with a nearly impossible romanticism for which he could find little or no outlet.
He thought she had been wrong to tell him, and yet her motives, if clouded, had been good ones. His mind, he hoped, was large enough to allow for this. His own motives he felt were equally cloudy. He told himself that in relinquishing the title of eighth Earl of Caverness he was squaring things with his nominal father, the seventh earl. But he suspected what he was really doing was squaring things with Nicholas Grey, though he couldn’t
say why.
He wondered if it was his vanity, rather than his heart, that had been bruised.
He would much rather weigh in as the real Melrose Plant than as the bogus Earl of Caverness.
13
She had said:
I make no apology for my behavior (which might strike you as arrogant and selfish), except insofar as you’re being made unhappy; I did not want you to read this until some years after my death-when you would be over the worst of it… There is so much of Nicholas in you, your looks, your moods, that it haunts me.
She was not telling him “to unburden myself and thereby place a heavier burden on you” but to fill in what she saw as a tremendous distance between what he, Melrose, really was and what he had to think he was, “gentleman, an aristocrat without a past-” Melrose still wondered what she meant here-
and an uncertain future, the Earls of Caverness having been unremarkable in their lives and legacies. They were perhaps what people think of when they think of the aristocracy. You do not fit this mold and never will, I think.
Even as a child you showed no interest in aristocratic trappings. You wanted to be a “plain old fellow” (your words) and go to the local comprehensive school. Your father, of course, wouldn’t hear of it; he was, he said, “scandalized” by the very notion.
Once you went missing for a whole day and we found you in Sidbury on a picket line demanding more government subsidies for the farmers. You carried a sign you had made yourself. Every word in it was misspelled except for “the,” “and,” and “Hell.” Your father was mortified.
I asked him if it was because of the spelling.
Melrose laughed. He always did, here.
You were always “organizing.” You organized the servants, the dogs, your friends, my clothes. The servants you said could all have a better time of it if they were on strike. More money, more time off. (Ruthven told me and with a straight face that there was something in what you said. It was one of the few times Ruthven tried to be witty.)
I don’t know what you told the dogs, but I did see you outside by the hydrangea bush, lecturing them. Their behavior, however, remained pretty much the same.
You organized your school friends, and all of you marched into the kitchen at school to complain about the sticky toffee pudding. You organized me, too: my luncheons, my Women’s Reading Club, my days in London, my clothes.
You always seemed to see a world of possibilities, things that needed changing, the sort of thing the aristocracy wanted to keep at bay. Change made us anxious and uncomfortable. “We’ve got to get organized, Mum. We’ve got to get organized.”
It could still catch him unawares, this letter, the concreteness of it, which made him live these scenes over again, or the sense of loss, washing across him like those waves at the bottom of the cliff. The letter answered some questions but opened up others: Why hadn’t she divorced her husband or, at least, gone off with Nicholas Grey? He remembered her as a very independent woman. Had she been stopped by her husband’s threat to keep Melrose? She had left these important issues unexamined.
Or perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps she felt that the “important issues” were exactly what she had written: Nicholas’s idealism, the sticky-toffee pud, the dogs being lectured, the sign with the misspelled words.
He must have been very important to her, even more than Nicholas Grey had been.
Melrose had all but forgotten the drab landscape at which he’d been looking; he had certainly forgotten the bunched sheets, but they were now doing service as a handkerchief he could wipe his eyes on.
Remember, remember.
Here he was, a gloomy person in an empty house looking out on gray cliffs and sea, wondering what he was doing here…
Just trying to get organized, Mum.
14
He took the pile of sheets into the big kitchen (getting closer, surely, to some meaningful laundry-disposal system). He deposited the sheets by a door that led down to some underworld he had no intention of venturing into unless Dante were with him. He would have made a hopeless detective, if a cellar could cause him such trepidation.
Turning to the making of tea, he took an old tin kettle from a shelf above the cooker, filled it, and set it over the gas flame. He watched it. Would a watched kettle ever boil? He decided not to subject it to this particular laboratory study and turned again to the shelves. Crockery abounded; he saw three tea-pots of various sizes. Cups ranged from stout white to slender floral ones. From a small market in town he had purchased the bare necessities (tea, milk, sugar, butter) and from the Woodbine Tearoom had bought several hot-cross buns.
When the kettle boiled, he poured water over the tea leaves and then arranged everything on a metal tray that he carried into the snuggery. This was the small library, with a view similar to the one above in the piano room (as he had christened it). It looked out over the broad-shouldered rock, the edge of the cliff, but had not that feeling of suspension above the rocks. If one were given to vertigo, the view from the piano room might present difficulties.
Melrose sipped his tea and ate his bun in perfect peace. How wonderful! Solitude even at Ardry End was hard to come by. Perhaps he was fit for the life of a hermit. Give up all of his worldly possessions and go live in a hut on a shelf of rock and watch the sunrise every morning. Up before the sun! What a dreadful idea; he shuddered.
He thought of the Bletchleys. He could empathize with them and their painful memories; what had happened in this house was too painful for them to continue here. And yet… memories could never be eradicated. Was it even possible that they gathered force from having been torn from a place one no longer came to?
He regretted selling the Belgravia house. He saw that gesture now for what it was: an act of revenge or, worse, spite. Punishing his mother and Nicholas Grey. His memories of Nicholas Grey were even more abundant or, at least, more finely wrought because now they couldn’t be diffused.
Melrose tried not to think of this Nicholas Grey-of heroism and courage and self-denial-preferring instead to picture him as the snake in the Eden grass, the betrayer of his father and seducer of his mother.
The trouble was, he could not love his father much because he always drew back from Melrose. This did not happen because his father knew the boy was not his son; Lady Marjorie would never have admitted this. Had his father known, she would have had to pay a high price; there would literally have been hell to pay. He would not have divorced her, no. That would have rewarded her behavior, for she could then have gone immediately to Grey.
What he realized now was that he had rescinded the titles not because it was the honorable thing to do but because he hadn’t wanted them. It would have been nice to believe that he felt like an impostor, unfair to the Caverness line and especially unfair to his father. He would have preferred to believe he was doing the honorable thing, only it wasn’t so. He just wanted to be rid of the Earl of Caverness and be, as his mother had written, “a plain old fellow.”
15
Melrose was seated at his regular table in the Drowned Man’s dining room, trying to stare down the dogs in the doorway, when Johnny Wells slapped through the swinging door of the kitchen with a jug of water and a basket of bread.
“Ah!” exclaimed Melrose. “We’ve looked for you at your various places of employment. That is to say, the Devon and Cornwall police looked.”
Johnny took a step back, wide-eyed. He still held the jug of water, slices of lemon floating on top like pale flowers. “Me? Why?”
“I’m glad you were gone. Police were called to a place-Lamorna Cove, you know it?” Johnny nodded, waiting. “A woman-not your aunt; not, I repeat, your Aunt Chris-was found dead, probably murdered. I was, as I said, extremely glad you weren’t here to be asked to look at the police photos taken at the scene.” Melrose went on to describe what Brenda Friel had said.
“Christ! I’m glad I wasn’t here, too.” He filled Melrose’s water glass and handed him the tasseled wine list. “I was in Pen
zance. My uncle lives there, and I thought he might know something.” Johnny shrugged. “He didn’t. I didn’t expect him to. I’d already rung him up once. I guess I just wanted someone to worry along with me. And you: you’re leaving, Mr. Pfinn says.”
There was that note of accusation in his tone over Melrose’s hurried-and irresponsible?-return to Northamptonshire. He was flattered to be included in those people Johnny chose to worry along with him, and said, “But I’ll be back in no time, within the next few days, as soon as I can pack up a few clothes and my car. I’ve rented Seabourne for three months.”
At this Johnny looked relieved. “Good. I’ll look for you, then.”
“I’ll be coming here on a fairly regular basis for dinner. I’m not much of a cook.” Melrose felt abashed at the truth of this and looked down at his napkin. Was he much of anything when it came to looking out for himself? He removed a card from his silver card case and wrote his telephone number on the back and held it out to Johnny. “If you hear anything about your aunt, give me a ring, will you? I’d truly like to know.”
“I will.” Johnny studied the card.
“This detective, Divisional Commander Macalvie, is head of homicide and is very, very smart. If anyone can get a lead on your aunt, he can.”
“But isn’t his time going to be taken up by this murder in Lamorna Cove?”
Before Melrose could respond, Pfinn stuck his head round the swinging door to the kitchen and motioned to Johnny.
“He doesn’t like me being friendly with guests. Do you know what you want?”
“Certainly. Same as last night. The cod and a salad.”
“Wine?”
Melrose opened the list, ran a practiced eye down the page (doubting that the Drowned Man could really be host to all of these wines), said, “the Puligny-Montrachet.”
“Right. Is your friend going with you?”
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