‘I’m so pleased to have something I can do to help,’ I said at last. Mr Duffy frowned slightly at me and glanced towards his wife, and I thought once again how self-centred I seemed to be. He was about to go to the inquiry into the death of his child and Alec’s letters were only a tiny part of his worries. Why could I not take care of this one little matter for them without pushing myself forward and demanding thanks? ‘Please put it out of your minds,’ I said, seemingly unable to stop talking. I drew a deep breath. ‘Mr Duffy, may I say once again how very, very sorry I am. And I hope this morning won’t be too dreadful.’ Mr Duffy gave a vague smile and took the hand I was proffering.
‘I’ll leave you now,’ I said, turning back to Lena. ‘But if you or Clemence should want me this morning while your husband is away, I’ll be here. Just send Mrs McCall to fetch me.’
‘Clemence is summoned to the inquiry,’ said Lena, her voice quivering. ‘I can scarcely believe it, but it’s true. A court! I have tried my whole life to protect her from ugliness and now she must go to a court!’ She turned to her husband and spoke piteously. ‘Are you quite, quite sure that you could not have got her out of it somehow?’
Mr Duffy’s face was unreadable as he regarded her, then he turned to me and thanked me for my visit. I took the hint.
I had been keeping my distance from Alec, as I say, but coming downstairs I caught sight of his blurred profile through the fancy glass of the public bar and, thinking I might as well get it over with, I pushed open the door. This was less startling behaviour than it may sound for apart from Alec the bar was completely empty. It had been so for a day or two now; I assumed that the newsworthiness of the incident at the cottage was outweighed by the sheer quelling doom of the Duffys’ presence. It was much to the credit of Mrs McCall, however, that she seemed unconcerned by the quietness of her usually thriving bar trade, but turned her hand with great readiness away from pints of beer and hearty sandwiches and on to bowls of thin soup.
The public bar was rather a disappointment if the truth be told. No spittoons, I noticed, no questionable prints and no stronger a whiff of beer than there is in my own servants’ hall at Christmastime. I joined Alec at the bar, resting my elbows on its glossy surface and hooking my foot over the brass rail momentarily until, at the upward lift of his eyebrow, I removed it.
‘Are you going?’ he asked, looking at my grey day dress and hatless head. He was dressed in only slightly less extravagant mourning clothes than Mr Duffy, his own silk hat sitting incongruously on the bar beside his glass of beer.
‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think so at all.’ I almost said that I doubted Hugh would approve, but felt a reluctance to show any such wifeliness to Alec. ‘So I shall want to hear all about it.’
‘I should be very surprised if there were much to tell,’ said Alec. ‘I foresee accidental death, much commiseration, a word for the volunteers with the buckets and a sermon on fire safety.’ He lifted his almost empty glass, and drained it. ‘Is it my imagination, Dandy, or have you been avoiding me? Have you had a change of heart?’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘Witness me seeking you out now. I have a message from Mr and Mrs Duffy.’
‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘You have a message for me, otherwise I shouldn’t have seen hide nor hair of you. Quite.’
I ignored this and pressed on.
‘They wanted you to know that they do not expect you to tell the Fiscal about Cara’s letters. And I must say, Alec, I agree with them. Apart from anything else, there will be press reporters there.’
‘Quite,’ said Alec again.
‘And it would serve no purpose,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’m sure you would come to regret it in the end. One often does, after all, come to regret the confidences one bestows in moments of heightened emotion.’
‘It would serve no purpose?’ said Alec. ‘You don’t see a difference between a happily engaged young girl dying in a fire or an extremely unhappy young girl with a secret breaking off her engagement and dying in a fire, evidently unable to smell smoke, raise the alarm, or leave the cottage by any one of the many doors or windows?’
‘You make it sound so sordid,’ I said. ‘Think what the pressmen would do with that.’
‘You’re right,’ said Alec. ‘One tale is much more sordid than the other. And you say her parents would prefer the less sordid version to be entered into the public record?’
He sounded as angry as I had been an hour before comparing Cara and the unfortunate maid, and I squirmed as much as Dr Milne had. Suddenly I felt no better than Dr Milne. After all both girls, if one got right down to it, were being more or less tidied away, the main thing seeming to be to avoid a scandal. What hypocrites we were, all of us. How eager I had been to believe that Alec and I had made something out of nothing. And, if I were honest, it was not because the matter had actually resolved itself into plain view, but just because it was unthinkable that I should make a fuss, and make a spectacle of myself and my friends.
Alec reached into the pocket of his coat, drew out two envelopes, extracted the letter from each and spread them on the bar. I read them again over his shoulder.
Dear Alec,
Mummy, Clemence and I have come away to the beach cottage for a few days but I should like it so much if you were to come and visit us here. There is something momentous I need to tell you. Please, when you arrive if you could pretend to Mummy that you came in search of me off your own bat that would help enormously. I think she’s being perfectly ridiculous but I don’t want to make her any crosser than she already is. Sorry to be so mysterious, Alec dear, but I do think it would be best told not written. I trust completely in your affection for me and hope that I am right to do so. All my best love, Cara.
Dear Alec,
I cannot marry you. I am very sorry for the hurt and trouble I know this will cause, but it is much better this than what would come to pass if I were to keep quiet and go along with it. I cannot explain my reasons, except to say that I am convinced I could never make you happy, and that knowing that, I should be miserable myself. Yours sincerely, C.
I had forgotten, I think, what the letters contained. Or rather, having read them that day in Edinburgh sitting in the gallery, when all that faced us was a puzzle with a happy ending around the corner, they had seemed very different from what lay before me now. Unthinkable, unthinkable, not to admit that something quite horrid had happened in the day that separated them. I wondered which one Mrs Duffy considered to be the silly one – ‘a silly letter’, she had said. Presumably the one which broke off the engagement, although it was the other, the first, which touched unflatteringly on Mrs Duffy herself, and I have found one is more likely to brush off as silly something which shows oneself in a bad light, than something which is hurtful to others.
Life makes sense. One thing is connected to another. And no matter how fastidious we are in turning away from ugliness, or how brazenly we stare down the world to hide our ugliness from others, things are as they are. That maid, poor creature, caught the eye of some man somewhere and so set herself on the path towards her death, each thing connected to the next, no matter how confidently the man responsible might have reassured her at the beginning nor how discreetly Dr Milne handled it all at the end. It was no different with Cara, no matter how we all shrank from it. The theft, Cara’s secret, the broken engagement and her death, coming all on top of one another like that, must be connected. They each had to be a thread in a pattern I could not see, a story whose organizing element was hidden from me. It was a much more complicated story than the tale of the maid, of course, or at least more unusual and therefore much harder to make out from the glimpses of it we had caught so far, but it had to be there. Things are connected. Life makes sense.
‘I think you should read them out,’ I said at last. ‘I wasn’t having a change of heart, you know. Just a failure of nerve. But I’m over it.’
Alec, to my great surprise, shook his head.
�
�No, Dandy. You underestimate the power of respectability, I think. If I read these letters out today, then later, once we – you and I – have found out what we need to know, we will come up against a brick wall. I can see us trying to make a policeman listen to us. “But these letters were heard at the inquiry,” he will say, “and it was agreed then that they were not of any significance.” No, much better to keep them up our sleeves until they can do us some good. Accident, commiseration, commendation and safety warning is the order of the day today.’ He took out a black-edged handkerchief and pressed it to his lips, possibly fighting a display of emotion, but more likely wiping away traces of beer, then he set his hat dead straight on his head and gave me a grim smile.
‘Can you wait five minutes for me to change?’ I asked. Bother respectability, bother Hugh and bother the reporters. For Cara’s sake, and somehow, obscurely, for the sake of the servant girl whose name I did not even know, I was going to the court.
Chapter Seven
Like the days before, the inquiry seemed to slip past almost at one remove, as though the witnesses were speaking in a code that only the Procurator Fiscal himself could understand, frustrating the crowd’s desire for details, a desire so keen as to be almost tangible in the stuffy atmosphere, like citric acid spilled somewhere. If ever a witness seemed to be edging towards sensation – as when one of the volunteers described the heat and high leap of the flames – the Fiscal would first stifle the witness into silence, then quell the rustle of pleasure in the room with a look so pained, so superior, that I wanted to shrink down into my seat, slither to the floor and crawl away.
I had expected the Fiscal to be a desiccated, Dickensian character, blinking behind half-spectacles and using Latin where English might do. Had this imagined figure appeared, the chasm between his chill disapproval and the vulgar delight of the crowd might have been put down to his age and unworldliness and I might have been able to feel affronted by him and a little justified in being there. As it was, though, he was a young man of hardly forty with gleaming chestnut hair swept back from a handsome brow and with powerful shoulders which, even though draped in sober blue suiting, looked incongruous above a sheaf of documents. I imagined him summing up and directing the jury, then pulling on a helmet and goggles and, with a sweep of a white silk scarf, stepping back into his Avro and roaring off.
I brought myself back with a jump. Clemence had taken the stand while my mind was wandering and the room had stilled into perfect silence, broken only by a few soft cluckings from some of the more maternal townswomen. The younger females in the audience simply craned and stretched in an effort to see her shoes.
Could she describe what happened on the morning of the fire, in her own words and taking her time? He could hardly have been gentler, but still Clemence’s eyes pinched up in that wary way of hers and her head went back so that she seemed to be looking down her nose. I heard a tut behind me and from somewhere else in the room a scornful noise like a little pff! of gas escaping from a beer bottle, and I knew that poor Clemence was not going down well. But just then, although she could not possibly have heard them, she moved her head slowly, putting her chin down and looking up, her eyes scared and huge. That’s more like it, I thought and there was a confirming murmur of satisfied pity from the tutters and pff-ers around me. Clemence started to speak in a small voice.
Mummy and she had set out for a walk along the cliffs as they did most mornings, leaving Cara alone in the cottage.
Why?
Cara had some letters to write. She did sometimes go walking with them – she took quite as much pleasure as her mother and sister in life at the cottage – just that this morning she had letters to write and elected to stay at home. The fire in the little sitting room was burning and, Clemence expected, the kitchen range must have been lit, but the fires in the bedrooms were not, it being warm spring weather. Cara might have fed the sitting-room fire, although it was well built up when Clemence and her mother left. There were no other fires in the cottage, no wireless or other contraption that might have overheated, and no cellars or windowless rooms which might have necessitated Cara’s lighting a candle. Cara did not smoke, none of the ladies did, and so there were no hot ashtrays for her to overturn. No, she did not use a seal on her envelopes, and so would have had no call to strike a match to melt the wax.
Was Miss Cara in the habit of keeping all her letters?
Clemence hesitated, and then answered that she did not know what proportion of letters Cara kept or discarded. She expected she would keep letters from her family and other loved ones, but might throw away unimportant notes. What exactly did he want to know?
The Fiscal merely wondered whether, as part of dealing with her correspondence that morning, Miss Cara might have had letters she wanted to destroy, in fact, to burn? Clemence hesitated again and moved her head as though to look at Alec. Her eyes stayed on the Fiscal’s face however and at length she answered him in a slightly firmer although no louder voice.
No, Cara did not as a matter of course burn letters, although it was certainly possible that if there was a letter she did not want specially to keep and there was a fire lit in the room, she might throw it on as the easiest way of discarding it. But she tended usually to write letters up in her own room where she had a little table in the window looking out over the sea.
Not in the sitting room where the fire was burning in the grate?
Another long pause, and then – No. At this point, Clemence caught her father’s eye, where he sat black and stiff in the front row of seats, and began to weep into her handkerchief, at which she was released from the stand and joined him, putting her head down against the shoulder of his coat although he kept both hands clamped on his knees and did not move to comfort her.
‘We shall never know for sure,’ said the Fiscal, summing up, ‘the chain of events by which the fire started and took hold before Miss Duffy was able to escape. We can, however, take some comfort in the knowledge that it was so unlikely as to be impossible that she suffered in the slightest way.’ This he directed towards Mr Duffy and Clemence in the front row, still sitting there, one rigid, one huddled and seeming not to hear him. ‘The unfortunate young lady would certainly have been rendered painlessly unconscious through inhaling smoke long before . . . any other part of the tragedy occurred. Indeed, the very fact that she did not escape leads one to suspect that she had fallen asleep when the blaze started and would have known nothing at all.’ He continued in this vein for quite some time, carefully quashing all possible sources of prurience, before pronouncing, as we had expected, upon the courage of the volunteers and the pressing need for constant vigilance in the home. The jury retired and very shortly returned.
‘Let it be recorded, then,’ said the Fiscal, ‘that Miss Cara Duffy met her death by accident. No further investigation is required and I hereby release the remains and grant leave for the funeral to take place.’ He was slightly, just slightly, knocked off his sonorous course by a recollection, visible to the crowd, that the remains were so utterly destroyed that the timing and nature of the funeral were rather by the by as far as evidence was concerned. These grisly thoughts struck all in the room at the same time causing a collective shudder and the Fiscal’s euphemizing, sanitizing efforts were thus completely undermined. We filed out with quite the most unpleasant possible images fixed in our heads.
Had I not known how weakened Mrs Duffy had been a few hours previously, I should have thought she had spent the morning packing, so promptly after our return from Kirkcudbright were she, Clemence and Mr Duffy installed in their motor car and leaving Gatehouse. I barely spoke to either of the ladies, actually not at all to Clemence and only enough to a rather calmer Lena to find out that they were taking Dr Milne’s advice and going away to the house of a friend of theirs at Grasmere, and from there on to Switzerland until they could face coming home. Switzerland I could see and the sooner the better, but Grasmere – if that was the spot where the Wordsworths led their peculiar live
s – I had always thought of as dank and joyless, all puddles and forest and likely therefore to have what we used to call ‘bad air’. One does not hear so much about ‘bad air’ as one used although whether because modern science has given it a grander name or has proved its non-existence I could not say for sure.
Alec and I met up in the parlour at tea-time. The public bar had clearly sprung back into full life concurrently with the Duffys’ driving away for we could hear the men’s voices from where we sat. I was glad of it. Mrs McCall would be busy at the other end of the inn and we were that much more likely to have peace for our talk.
‘What did you make of Clemence?’ asked Alec, as an opening. I had been thinking about Clemence’s evidence most of the day and welcomed this indication that my thoughts had been usefully directed.
‘Very interesting,’ I said, washing down a mouthful of rather overly soda-ish scone with a draught of tea. ‘My overall impression was the slanderous one that she was well drilled and therefore not able to think on her feet nimbly enough to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity.’
‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘It was all she could do not to smack the table and say “Damn!”’
‘And do you think that it’s an actual possibility?’
‘That Cara was burning my letters and set the house alight? No, I do not. Ludicrous.’ I waited for him to justify this, hoping there was something more behind the dismissal than his natural wish to avoid even this much responsibility for her death. ‘Try to imagine the scene,’ he went on. ‘Cara sits by the hearth stuffing papers into the grate, and not armloads at that. I’m no great writer of love letters, I can assure you. One falls out, or wafts out or however it may have happened, and the rug starts to burn. The fire spreads despite Cara’s efforts to beat it, forcing her further and further back until she reaches . . .?’
After the Armistice Ball Page 10