Sophie waited, not liking to break into his thoughts, wondering what visions of the past he saw. Not pretty ones, from his expression.
‘It was a very hot August,’ he slowly began again. ‘Prague was crowded, the streets were cobbled, traffic made a hell of a racket on them, my wife was delicate, even then, and couldn’t stand the city heat, the noise and traffic. More and more she stayed indoors, homesick, miserable – it wasn’t good for her, or for our child.’
Sophie had heard her mother’s version of this – Mamma had said Mrs Gowrie was highly strung, a hysteric, her moods always changing, weeping or laughing for no reason. She had spent a lot of time lying down on a sofa or not even getting up in the mornings, spending days in bed at times.
Don Gowrie sighed, his face setting into weary lines. ‘I wanted to send her back to the States, and the child too, but she didn’t want to go alone. She wanted me to come with her, and of course I couldn’t, I had a job to do. So she wouldn’t go either. I should have insisted.’ He rubbed a hand across his eyes as if they were sore, and the rims were red as if he had been crying.
Sophie felt sorry for him; the charmer, the plausible politician had gone and in their place was a real man who was full of anger and pain.
‘But if I talked about it she just started to cry,’ he said. ‘And I was afraid to let her work herself into a crying jag, that always made her worse. I’d got into the habit of giving in to her; it made life easier. So I let her stay, but it seemed better for her to be out of the city, so I looked around for a house somewhere in the country. I knew a scientist who was working in Prague at the university. He offered me his cottage in your village, Kysella. It was a small place: a couple of bedrooms, a sitting-room, a kitchen, but it had a bathroom, and there was a delightful garden; I remember a hedge of honeysuckle, the scent was overpowering on hot nights . . . and roses, old-fashioned roses, big red and pink ones, with an incredible perfume.’
His face was dreamy. Watching him, Sophie said quietly, ‘It isn’t there any more. My mother told me it was pulled down in the Seventies when they built a new road.’
He came out of his memories and grimaced. ‘Really? That’s progress for you. They tear your life up behind you as you live it. You never have time to visit your own past these days – it has usually gone when you go back there. I remember that house so well. It was a mistake for me to rent it, though. My wife wasn’t strong enough to run the house herself, or even take care of our little girl – we had brought a nanny with us from the States but she got homesick after a few weeks. She gave notice and went home. We asked the village priest to recommend someone to help out, and he suggested your mother because she was the only woman in the village who spoke any English.’
‘Yes, she learnt it from my father’s books – he was a linguist, you know, he could speak half a dozen languages.’
‘I never met him, but I remember my wife said your mother talked about him all the time.’
Her mother had desperately wanted to keep up with him, feeling that in going away to university he was leaving her far behind. When he’d had his degree he would have been able to start a good career, earn a lot of money, so she put up with their separations for months on end, but she was conscious of the gap between them and wanted to bridge it.
Pavel Narodni had been clever and ambitious, a young man with a brilliant mind. He had had a wonderful future ahead of him, and his wife had wanted to fit herself to share it.
Lucky we can’t see the future, Sophie thought; at least she had a few happy years, without any premonitions of his death during those awful days when the Russians invaded. She loved him so much – she never felt that way about Franz, I’d stake my life on it. She was fond of him, yes, but she wasn’t passionately in love, the way she was with my father. Even now, when she speaks about Papa, her eyes glow.
‘My wife couldn’t speak Czech although she had a little German,’ said Don Gowrie. ‘Of course, German was the second language to most people in your part of the country. I spoke Czech but I was rarely there. I didn’t know your mother too well; I interviewed her when she first started work for us and I saw her briefly whenever I came down to Kysella, but when I was there she kept out of the way most of the time to give me time alone with my wife and our child.’
‘Mamma says your little girl loved to play with Anya,’ Sophie volunteered.
He looked blank. ‘I guess she did, but not often when I was there. But Elly started helping your mother with her English; it gave her something to do. She was lonely out there in the country, but she couldn’t bear living the life of a diplomat’s wife. They have a lot of socialising, you know; in foreign countries they tend to live in each other’s pockets, endless parties and chit-chat. Elly hated that. She wanted peace and quiet, she went for long walks through the fields, she rambled in the woods near the village. Early nights and early mornings suited her, not parties and drinking and gossip. And she took to your mother from the start. They had more in common than you’d think. They were both mothers of little girls the same age and they both had husbands whose work took them away a lot of the time.’
And did they both feel uneasy about keeping up with a husband whose ambition drove him? Afraid that they would let him down, that his lifestyle would never suit them? Did Don Gowrie make his wife feel that, for all her family money, she was somehow a failure?
Sophie watched him, wondering what sort of man he really was behind his politician’s mask, behind the charm and good manners, the carefully chosen words, the coaxing smiles. Had he loved his wife? Did he still love her? Had he loved their child, or had she only been a means to an end – the necessary child he had to have to make certain of the Ramsey fortune? If only she knew for certain, because the next obvious question was: did he love Anya? Or was she also just a means to an end? Was the Ramsey money all he had ever cared about?
‘And then there was an outbreak of measles in the village,’ he said flatly. ‘And Cathy went down with them. My wife went into panic immediately, she always did where illness was concerned, for herself or me or the child. Elly had always been delicate herself; she was ill a good deal during her own childhood, she grew up a bit of a hypochondriac. The local doctor didn’t speak English, but your mother translated for them both. The man told my wife to keep Cathy in a darkened room, to avoid problems with her eyesight, and keep her away from other children.’
‘Didn’t your wife send for you?’
He hunched his shoulders, frowning. ‘Yes, but we were short-handed; several members of staff were on vacation and I couldn’t get away.’
He’s guilty about that, thought Sophie. But does he admit as much, even to himself? The man is in denial about so many things – or has he a facility for ignoring what he finds uncomfortable to remember?
‘A few days later, the Russians invaded,’ he said, ‘and there was utter panic in Prague. I was told to get out with my wife and child. I drove down at night to get Elly and the baby. When I got there I found Elly in a state of collapse and the baby dead.’
Sophie flinched. ‘How terrible.’
Without looking at her, he went on, in a flat voice, ‘Your mother told me the baby’s temperature had soared overnight; she had tried to get a doctor, but the local man had gone off to Prague to help in the hospital where he had trained, they were asking for volunteers because they thought there might be a lot of casualties. In fact, there were very few deaths, you know – only a handful of people were killed.’ He stopped, made a face, said, ‘Anyway, your mother did everything she could, but she didn’t know what was wrong, she gave the baby aspirin and tried to get the temperature down by bathing her with a sponge and lukewarm water, but she couldn’t get the temperature down, and an hour before I arrived the baby had died.’
He stopped talking, and Sophie was so upset herself that she couldn’t look at him. She sat staring at the floor, hearing him breathe roughly.
When he started talking again it made her nerves jump like a needle on a scra
tchy record.
‘Elly was crazy,’ he said. ‘Hysterical. Screaming. Your mother and I both tried to calm her down, but we couldn’t get through to her. I didn’t even have time to think about the baby, about the death; I was too busy trying to look after Elly and not having a clue what to do for her. Then your sister came toddling into the room and Elly gave a gasp and ran to pick her up, sat there rocking her and crying.’
Poor woman, thought Sophie.
‘I tried to talk to her, but she didn’t seem to see or hear me. It was as if I wasn’t there. She just kept kissing the little girl, saying Cathy’s name over and over again. I knew you weren’t really dead, she said, I knew it wasn’t true. Then it dawned on me – she thought your sister was Cathy. My wife’s a hysteric, you see; and hysterics know they are half-acting, they know they could stop if they tried, but it helps them cope with what they can’t bear, what they find intolerable.’
‘A sort of refuge,’ Sophie said, understanding. ‘A sanctuary from what they find too terrifying to face.’
The more he talked about his wife the more Sophie understood how it had all happened. The woman was neurotic and out of touch with reality. What sort of marriage had it been for him? She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.
He had paid a very high price for the money and power her family could give him. He had no child of his own and his marriage must always have been a sham. She had not heard love in his voice when he talked of his wife. She had heard impatience, pity, irritation – but not love.
‘Yes, I suppose that describes it,’ he said, absently, as if he wasn’t really listening, was still locked back there in the past. ‘Elly didn’t want to believe her child was dead, she knew she could never have another one and she couldn’t bear to face up to what had happened. The two children were very much alike, you see; the same colouring and size, much the same age. Elly wanted to believe it was Cathy – or maybe in her state of mind she no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t.’
‘So you asked my mother to let you swap the children – you left her a dead child to bury as her own, and you took Anya away with you.’ Sophie couldn’t help the harsh, accusing tone. Her mother had been haunted all her life by what happened that day; she had lived a lie and it had festered under the skin of her mind. Sophie remembered those visits to the grave in the little church just down the road, she remembered the day her mother stopped visiting the grave, almost never went near it again. What Don Gowrie did had destroyed their family.
She had lived a lie. Perhaps it might also explain her fatal illness? She was dying with a sickness of the blood, her whole body poisoned, as her mind had been poisoned with regret for so long.
Sophie had always believed her mother stopped visiting Papa and Anya’s grave because Johanna had married again and wanted to forget her first husband. But it hadn’t been that at all. She could not bear to remember Anya, or her own weakness in letting her child be taken away. What Don Gowrie did had destroyed their family, not the death of Pavel Narodni. When her mother married again, started a new family and deliberately turned her back on her dead first husband, her dead first child, Sophie had felt that her mother had turned her back on her, too, because she was a reminder of the wrecked family her mother wanted to forget.
If Don Gowrie had stolen Anya out of love for his wife, Sophie might forgive him, but she couldn’t forget that Don Gowrie’s whole future lay in having an heir to the Ramsey fortune. He had to have a child, a living child; and it obviously hadn’t bothered him at all to walk away from his dead child and let her be buried in a foreign country, under a stranger’s name. She did not believe he loved his wife, and he certainly had not, could not, have loved his child.
‘All you thought about was yourself!’ she threw at him, and he heard the contempt in her voice and went red then white.
‘Don’t judge me! You weren’t there. Elly wouldn’t let go of the child, she screamed and fought when I tried to take it away from her. I was terrified she was mad. Then your mother got the news that your father had been killed, and she collapsed, too. She begged me for help, I think she had some idea of going to America with us, but of course the Russians would never have let her leave. But she was desperate . . . that was when I thought of swapping the children.’
‘You talk as if they were toys,’ Sophie muttered, looking at him with dislike. ‘How could you do that to a woman who had just lost her husband?’
‘I was doing her a favour, I was taking your sister to a life of luxury, where she would never want for anything, would be loved and cared for, and would grow up in freedom. Whatever your mother says now, she knows our bargain wasn’t one-sided.’
‘You pushed her into making a snap decision when she was in shock!’
‘She wanted her child to have a better life than she could give it. I looked after her, and you – when you arrived. Your lives would have been very different if I had not helped you both.’
Sophie knew he was telling the truth; her mother had told her he had kept his side of the bargain, for the next few years had sent money which made it possible for them to live comfortably until she married Franz.
‘Maybe that’s true, but the price was too high. You could at least have let my mother know how Anya was! All these years, she was dying to know what she looked like, how she was doing at school, if you had only sent a photo once in a while. But total silence was cruel.’
‘It was part of the bargain. Her child was dead, as far as everyone was concerned, and she had to keep up that pretence, had to believe it herself. I didn’t want her to think about Cathy.’ He stared insistently at Sophie. ‘And you have to stop thinking about her, too! For her sake, as well as your own and your mother’s.’
‘Don’t threaten me!’
‘I’m just warning you . . .’
‘Do you think I don’t know why someone tried to push me under a train!’
He went very pale, his eyes alarmed. ‘I swear on my word of honour I had nothing to do with whatever happened to you in the subway. I only heard about it afterwards.’
She had no doubt he was a liar, but if this was acting it was good. The best. Sophie looked at him uncertainly, wondering how she could believe him, yet half-convinced.
‘But there are people who are not too happy about your interference, at this precise moment,’ he said very quietly. ‘There’s a lot of money riding on me, you know. I have powerful friends, wealthy friends, who are prepared to back my bid for the presidency – and they are not men who have many scruples about ways and means.’
She shivered. ‘You are threatening me.’
‘A warning isn’t a threat. And anyway, if you care at all about Cathy you’ll leave her alone!’
‘I care about my mother more than anything else. My mother needs to see her – to know that she is OK, that she’s happy.’
‘Of course she’s happy, she’s married, she loves her husband, of course she’s happy! You don’t know what you’re doing. Go back to the Czech Republic and forget about the past. You have a life of your own to live. You’re a clever girl – why not start your own business back home? I’d be happy to help you. How much would you need?’
‘I don’t want your money! You can’t buy me!’ Sophie had come here to America on a quest and she wasn’t yet ready to give up that quest. It wasn’t simply that she had to fulfil the promise she had made to her dying mother. The truth had changed the way she saw her life. She was in search of something indefinable; in search of that first happiness, the family she had lost all those years ago, her mother, most of all, until she had remarried and built herself a new family, and the dead father and dead sister whom death had made unchanging, who had never deserted her the way her mother had. Finding out that Anya was alive somewhere had shaken the kaleidoscope of time, whirled the coloured fragments of her life into a new pattern, strange, bewildering, making her see herself and the past in an entirely new light.
‘Is there a man in your life back home? If you were thin
king of getting married, you would need somewhere to live, wouldn’t you? I could do a lot for you, Sophie.’
‘I just want you to help me meet my sister,’ she stubbornly repeated. ‘I promise I won’t tell her anything, not without telling you first, but I must meet her, talk to her. You owe me that.’
He lost his temper then, snarling at her. ‘I don’t owe you anything! Stay away from me and my family or you’ll regret it!’
‘You don’t frighten me. I’m going to see Anya whatever you say or do – nobody is going to stop me.’
He stared at her, his face clenched in rage, then walked out, slamming the door after him.
Steve walked out of the hotel lift. Under his arm he held the big buff envelope containing the enlarged photographs of Sophie’s family. He had called in on Lilli half an hour ago, given her back the big black wheel, shown her the photographs – but they had meant no more to her than the originals. He could tell from her wry expression that she thought he was barking up the wrong tree, and maybe he was. But he had this strong sense that the photos meant something – or why would the men who ransacked Sophie’s room have taken them? Steve always played his hunches. In his business, instincts could mean the difference between getting a story and missing it.
On his way to his room he heard the click of a door opening. A door across the corridor from his own. His whole body jerked in alarm as Don Gowrie came out from the room, glanced quickly, almost furtively, both ways. What the hell had he been doing in Sophie’s room?
At that instant a door on Steve’s right opened and a blonde swayed there, giving him the impression she was holding on to the door to stop herself falling down. A transparent black nylon négligé clung to her like a second skin, showing the whole of her full-breasted, long-legged showgirl body as if it was naked.
‘Hey, bud, got a lemon?’ she throatily murmured, and Steve blinked.
Walking in Darkness Page 14