Echo of Barbara

by John Burke

  It was the right thing to say: Roger, at any rate, thought so, and nodded at her across his father’s bent back.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sam Westwood in a small voice. ‘It’s just one of the things that’s happened, isn’t it? It’ll take some getting used to.’

  He was such a cowed, deflated man that she felt a surge of contempt — not for him, but for Roger and herself. Or, rather, for Barbara. Had Barbara, even as a child, spoken to him like this? Had he allowed it, and still loved her? And if not — if Barbara’s sourness had come only later — why did she have to ape the later Barbara; why not be gentle and sympathetic, as perhaps he remembered her, and coax the truth out of him that way?

  He was asking her a question. She looked blankly at him and then said: ‘Oh, sorry. Dubonnet, please.’

  ‘Just Dubonnet?’

  ‘Please.’

  He was a stranger. Even if she had been the true Barbara, he would have been a stranger. Politely he was handing her a glass; politely they were nodding and drinking; politely she looked out of the window and made the sort of remark that a visitor would make:

  ‘You’re very isolated here.’

  ‘Yes, aren’t we?’ Then he looked puzzled. ‘But haven’t you —’

  ‘Barbara,’ said Roger smoothly, ‘never came down here at all. It’s quite new to her.’

  Sam Westwood at last averted his eyes.

  ‘It must be deadly in the winter,’ said Paula, with a harsh brusqueness that surprised even herself.

  ‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Sam. Quickly he went on, with the urgency of a still unexpressed fear that she might not be staying: ‘Once we’ve settled in it’ll be ideal. A nice warm fire — the town’s not so far away — lovely walking on fine crisp days round here. You see. You wait and see.’

  He lifted his head again, and the appeal was naked in his face. She saw that she had been wrong. He did not suspect her yet. And however undemonstrative he might be, the awareness of her presence was sinking into him. It was beginning to mean more to him, minute by minute. Paula felt a flicker of inexplicable alarm.

  Mrs. Westwood came in.

  ‘That can wait for a little while now. Won’t be long.’

  She had changed into a dress that had been expensive when it was new. It was incongruous against the bareness of the land outside. But it showed that she had once been a beautiful woman and that she had had the right clothes for her type. This dark blue dress had a richness that emphasized her rather florid complexion; and it had an immediately perceptible influence on the way she spoke. The breathlessness of her manner just after Paula’s arrival had changed. She sat down with a languid smile, took a glass of sherry from her husband with a deliberately slow movement, and leaned back with a very gentle, very self-assured little sigh.

  ‘Now, darling,’ she said in a voice that Paula sensed belonged to her past, ‘tell us what you have been doing with yourself.’

  It sounded playful. But it was all calculated. Roger had probably rehearsed this as he had rehearsed so many other possible lines with Paula. She knew what to say: she took her cue and answered Mrs. Westwood. Both of them were really talking to Sam Westwood.

  The story had all been worked out in detail. She told them, in naturally brief spasms, about the job she had taken in a good dress shop. She described her room in Hampstead, casually, lingering on it for just long enough to emphasize a slight note of regret — as though the casualness were a veil for her real feelings.

  ‘Leave it in the air,’ Roger had instructed her. ‘Make out that you were having a pretty good time, and you’re perfectly capable of going back there. The least little thing — any attempt to cross you in anything — and you can walk out. Keep him worrying.’

  She knew that she was succeeding in this. Sam Westwood was worrying, all right.

  He said hardly a word then or at lunch. Roger and Mrs. Westwood steered the conversation into the agreed channels. Paula answered their questions, occasionally glancing at Sam as though to draw him in; and every now and then, as planned, there was a silence. The silence, like the implications behind all her words, was meant to worry him.

  All the time he watched her. He had nothing to say to her, yet he could not tear his gaze away from her. She shivered.

  All at once she thought of the men who had pawed magazines on bookstalls, bought them and fingered through them at home, brooded over the frozen, captured lines of her body. The greed in his eyes was nearly the same.

  What would they say to one another when they were alone together?

  ‘We’re settling in very nicely,’ Mrs. Westwood was saying across the table. ‘You never thought we would, dear, did you?’

  Roger looked at her.

  ‘No,’ she said curtly, ‘I certainly didn’t.’

  ‘It just shows you —’

  ‘What does it show?’ she snapped. This was the part as she had been schooled in it; this was how Roger had built up Barbara for her; yet it did not ring true. Or perhaps she was quite the wrong person for the role.

  Mrs. Westwood said: ‘Your father was quite right. This is just the right sort of place. Here we can . . . well, get used to one another again.’

  She turned to smile at her husband. It was a practised smile, but somehow one felt that it had not been used for a long time. It did not belong with the finely etched lines on her cheeks and in the corners of her mouth.

  Sam Westwood cleared his throat. His wife remained for a second with the vegetable dish poised in her hands, then lowered it gently to the table.

  He said: ‘You’ve given up your job, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She paused. ‘For the time being, anyway.’

  Every word seemed painful. ‘You’re going to stay here?’ His voice crackled with the dryness in his throat.

  ‘I’ll look around,’ she said lightly. ‘There might be an amusing job in — what’s the name of the place along the sea front?’

  ‘Easterdyke,’ said Roger.

  His father said: ‘There’s no question of getting a job. You don’t have to. As long as you want to stay here, you stay here.’

  ‘We’re rich?’ she said sceptically.

  The silence was unbearable. Roger and his mother were too tense. Surely the man could see; surely he must know what they were up to?

  ‘Just don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I’m telling you that you can stay here. If you want any money, tell me.’

  She was half tempted to ask now, to come right out and lead him on to telling her where the diamonds had been hidden. It was a natural opening; it would be perfectly natural for her to flash some derisive, snappish question at him. The sooner it was over, the better. The sooner the question was asked and answered, the sooner she could get away. And she was very anxious to get away.

  But she could not do it. Not yet. His own slow speech and the slowness of his reactions imposed their tempo on her.

  ‘I’ll see how things go,’ she heard her own voice saying. She was detached from it, as she was detached from the other people in this room.

  She looked round at them. Roger and his mother and father . . . they did not seem to belong together any more than she, for her part, belonged to them. She had an odd feeling that she was not the only fraud in the room. They were all playing parts, and not one of them was convincing. Four strangers, each wanting something, but not wanting it for any of the others; not loving . . . not living.

  Roger began: ‘Of course, the trouble with Babs . . .’

  She was glad that he was talking. In this moment of detachment she felt that the part she had been chosen to play was falling to pieces in her hands. If she had been forced to speak, she would have given the game away: she would have said something wildly out of character. Now she could sit back and let the others play out their scene.

  What did they want, each of them? Roger wanted money and power, that was all. Perhaps, somewhere, he also wanted his father’s affection — or, at least, respect; but it was all bou
nd up with the money and the person his father had once been, not what he was now. Mrs. Westwood presumably wanted things to be as they had once been. Her demands were few but expensive. The cost of surface respectability on a certain social level was high. Paula knew these things — had learnt them without experiencing them, in the confused world she had so recently left. She saw Mrs. Westwood only as a surface: such complications as there were must be simple, commonplace.

  And Sam Westwood . . .?

  All she knew of his desires was his longing to have his daughter back.

  The thought of it drew her inexorably back into the company of the three Westwoods. She could no longer stand aloof. They reclaimed her as they got up from the table, and Roger turned towards her with a vague remark that was of no consequence but had to be acknowledged.

  ‘That was better than some of these office snacks I’ve been having lately,’ she said stiffly.

  Her mother — for a second she actually visualized Mrs. Westwood as her mother, before she again became a stranger — coloured, and Paula knew that the compliment had been out of character. But what was so wrong with it? She had had to say something: she could not use only the set lines they had planned. Conversation went on, day after day, and its twists and turns could not be foreseen. She was bound to make mistakes; bound to fumble a remark or two as she tried to fill in a gap.

  She began to stack plates and move towards the kitchen.

  Mrs. Westwood said: ‘Go and sit down and . . . talk to your father. Roger can clear the table today, for once.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Roger. ‘Go along, you two.’

  ‘No, I —’

  ‘Do as you’re told,’ murmured Sam Westwood with a tight flicker of a smile. ‘Mustn’t argue with your mother, my girl.’

  She did not want to be alone with him. But the other two were deserting her. She followed her quarry, her selected victim (‘Father,’ she firmly said in her mind), into the sitting-room.

  A few steps inside the door, he turned. She stood before him. He said:

  ‘I’m glad you came back, Barbie. So glad. I . . . I’ve been waiting for you for so long.’

  She put out one hand and touched his arm, and moved closer. He threw his arms round her and hugged her. If she had been a little girl — the little girl he remembered and was, in his heart, hugging now — he would have lifted her off her feet and swung her round.

  She found words. ‘I’m glad too,’ she managed. ‘I’m glad . . . Sammy.’

  When he released her she was trembling with fear. The plan was working. There had been no slip yet; no suspicion. He accepted her as Barbara. And his belief was somehow far more terrifying than disbelief could have been. She was Barbara: she was trapped.

  Chapter Seven

  They had walked in an unbroken but companionable silence along the sea wall from the house to Easterdyke. On the outskirts of the small town, Sam Westwood had turned inland, and on the slope of a hill they approached an old pub. It seemed to have been made of several bits and pieces of other buildings: there were three different roof levels, and the walls all sagged slightly outwards.

  ‘Nice old place. Very soothing.’ It was the first thing Sam had said for thirty minutes.

  This was her third day. Unconsciously she was relaxing. She had enjoyed this brisk walk in the cold October morning. It would have been easy to believe that she was on a holiday — a late holiday in crisp, windy weather by the exhilaratingly restless sea.

  Being alone with Sam Westwood was not the ordeal she had expected it to be. Actually they were not on their own very much: she was beginning to realize that he, too, was nervous. He was not yet ready to be with her when there were no other people around. He treated her as though she were fragile and might easily break. His shyness was endearing. Once she had grasped the fact that he was being so careful not to ‘rush’ her — that he dreaded the thought of driving her away and was not going to say too much until he was sure of their relationship — she found herself fitting in unobtrusively with his mood. It suited her. Soon she would have to act. Soon she must get down to the distasteful job for which she had been engaged. But not immediately. ‘Take it easy,’ Roger had said before he went back to London for a few days. ‘Don’t force the pace. Try to judge the right moment for it.’ She was glad to find excuses for postponing the decision of what constituted the right moment.

  The trees on the hillside broke the wind. The two of them stopped and turned to look back at the landscape below.

  ‘There’s the house,’ said Sam, ‘over there.’

  ‘Yes.’ From here it was tiny and insignificant. When the wind blew like this, and the saltings were so clearly etched over such a great distance, all human affairs seemed insignificant. It was only when you were indoors, enclosed, that you felt the oppression of other people and other people’s problems.

  He tucked her arm into his, unthinkingly. It was not a demonstrative gesture: it happened, and she accepted it, and the two of them were friends.

  He said: ‘On a day like this you can see every boat in Easterdyke Harbour.’

  ‘You can nearly read the numbers on their sides,’ she agreed.

  ‘And count the feathers on the birds in the creek.’

  ‘And the blades of grass —’

  ‘And the sands on the shore.’

  They laughed absurdly. With his free hand he began to point out places he had been to in the last few weeks. He sketched in for her a small universe. It was the engrossing universe of a man who had nothing in common with the man Roger had described to her. She wondered whether to write to Roger, or to telephone him — to tell him that he had made a mistake, and might as well give up, for this man was a peace-lover, a stroller and a quietist, a man who wished simply to stand and stare.

  Then she dismissed the thought. She did not want, here and now, even to think of Roger and their plans. Just being here, on a day like this, was enough.

  Abruptly he said: ‘We never went to the seaside much, did we?’

  He had taken her unawares. Panic seized her. This could be a catch-question. She turned her face away, baffled. Of course it could not be a trick question: she could not have been that mistaken about his mood; but it did not help, for she still did not know the answer.

  A simple one. All she could say was: ‘No. No, I suppose we didn’t.’

  ‘Do you like it better nowadays?’

  The answer came as suddenly as his question had done. Roger’s lessons had included this. She had hated swimming — had made appalling scenes at her school when swimming lessons threatened. Tiny, she had turned her back on the sea and grimly made sand castles, merely to keep herself occupied and be able to ignore the vastness of the water.

  She said: ‘I think I could probably be persuaded to paddle — when the summer comes.’

  His flush of happiness robbed the morning of its clear contentment. She felt guilty, seeing what she had done. When the summer comes. . . . She had told him that she would be staying.

  ‘And over there,’ he said, pointing, and smiling, ‘the heronry. Next year —’

  ‘Brrr.’ She shivered artificially.

  ‘Cold?’ At once he was moving, as she had meant him to do, towards the door of the old inn. ‘Let’s go and see what we can get.’

  The interior was chill but welcoming. Logs burned in a huge open fireplace, throwing out little heat until one was within a few feet of it. The ceiling was low, supported by gnarled beams. It all looked old and traditional, but a radio was muttering away in a back room, and there was a calendar on the wall featuring a girl dressed in black net stockings and a cluster of feathers. Paula glanced at it and glanced away again: it was too familiar, too reminiscent.

  When Sam Westwood brought her a drink, and they stood close to the fire, she was conscious of the walls closing in again. To come in here had seemed, on the spur of the moment, an escape. Now she was not so sure. In a restricted space like this he became too real. He was not just a figure in a plan, as he h
ad been when she and Roger had talked about him; and he was not the undemanding companion with whom she had walked here through the morning’s brightness.

  ‘A penny for them,’ he said.

  The relays in her mind clicked, and the response was easy: ‘Worth umpteen pounds.’

  Again it meant a lot to him. These echoes were, perhaps, what he had lived on for so many years.

  ‘Umpteen pounds, then.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I don’t know that I was thinking about anything special.’

  ‘I refuse to pay up, then.’

  Was this the moment? Talk of payment struck a note that could be taken up: the theme could swiftly develop.

  But she only said: ‘It’s such a nice morning.’

  Sam looked round the bar. There were only three others in it at this time of the morning, and they were three elderly men who sat round a table in the corner, their heads nodding inwards, utterly absorbed.

  He took a deep breath. ‘You like it here? You’re not thinking of going away again?’

  ‘I haven’t had much time to consider it. Yet.’

  ‘I hope you won’t.’

  ‘Well . . .’ She had to force herself to say it: ‘It all depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘It’s too soon to say.’

  His whisper seemed overpoweringly loud. To her ears it seemed to resound through the bar. ‘But you’re thinking about it — I can tell. Don’t you enjoy coming out with me like this? I suppose I’m . . . pretty dull.’ Apology changed to attack. ‘Why did you go away in the first place, Barbie?’

  ‘I needed time to think.’

  ‘That’s not what you told Roger.’

  ‘Roger had no business to . . . oh, I suppose he had. I didn’t mean to come back. I imagine he told you that, too.’

  ‘He did. But you came back.’

  ‘It was so stupid, really.’ She put her empty glass down on a black oak table near the fireplace. ‘There wasn’t any point in making a great flourish about it.’

  ‘Wasn’t there?’

  ‘Looking back at it now —’