After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  That explained it, I thought. Clemence could not withstand the combined efforts of Koo, Booty and Sha-sha (who could?), hence the presence on my bedside table of the leather volume. I could bet, though, that Clemence would be anything but soothed to reflect on having let it out of her clutches, and if she knew it was here with me she would be having absolute kittens.

  ‘Dreadful, dreadful thing,’ said Hugh, and we fell silent. Just as well, perhaps, since we were having mutton and if one does not shut up and eat it while it is hot, especially in a chilly place like our dining room, it can congeal quite horribly before one is halfway done.

  I fetched the album down to the drawing room when I left the dinner table, and was sitting staring at the picture of Cara on the landing when the door opened. Hugh and I rarely sat together after dinner and I had expected Alec and him to return to the library. Indeed I was beginning to despair of getting a chance to talk to Alec at all, knowing that he should be out at the stables the next day, but here was a piece of good luck: Alec entered the drawing room alone.

  ‘Hugh asks you to excuse him, but he has work that must be done tonight. Something about a contractor? And asks me to excuse him, and asks me to ask you to excuse him to me, and generally wants us to spend the evening apologizing to each other on his behalf. Are there contractors?’

  ‘There are certainly drains,’ I said. ‘I rather thought it was clearing, which would suggest plumbers, but it may have been building, so contractors might be indicated.’

  ‘Or perhaps he just can’t face it,’ said Alec. ‘I’ve noticed people simply not knowing what to say to me.’

  I poured him some coffee and decided to indulge in a little straight talking.

  ‘People don’t know, Alec dear. That is, they don’t know – and I didn’t myself if it comes to that – how you are taking the whole thing. You don’t seem perturbed. And it’s not –’ I said, holding up my hand to stop him interrupting, ‘it’s not because you know she’s not dead, before you say that. Because it was exactly the same when you thought she was. Bluntly, no one wants to extend the hand of sympathy for a sorrow you don’t appear to be suffering.’

  Alec came and sat on the other end of the sofa; I think so that he might speak without having to look at me.

  ‘It wasn’t a great romance, if you must know.’ He spoke with a quiet, hard deliberation as though pushing the words out of himself as one forces notes from a brass horn. ‘But I liked her. Well, you know Cara, Dandy – she’s impossible not to like. And she seemed to like me, although I admit she seems to like everyone, so I can’t feel too flattered.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She’s that rare thing: an absolute darling who doesn’t make one sick. Less so recently, perhaps. More troubled. But generally, one would rather wonder why she wasn’t engaged long ago than marvel at her being so now.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Alec. ‘So I daresay I should think myself lucky she didn’t want a great romance any more than I did. We should have been happy, though, I’m sure. For one thing we had known each other all our lives, or known of each other at least, and that’s a start.’

  ‘Yes, you’re a distant relation, aren’t you?’ I said, only now remembering that someone had told me this. ‘And so were you always meant for Cara? From the cradle? Very touching.’

  ‘What a Victorian you are,’ said Alec, laughing. ‘From the cradle, indeed! Cara was just a cousin in Canada as far as I was concerned.’

  But there was a shifty defiance about the way he spoke despite the laughter, and I knew he was rattled, embarrassed by more than just my teasing, and I remembered something he had mentioned lightly just in passing.

  ‘The mystery you hinted at, to do with Cara’s settlement? Have you any idea what it was?’

  I was lucky again; Alec laughed so hard and so long this time that I could not help but join in.

  ‘You should have seven daughters, Dandy, instead of your sons. Talk about Lady Bracknell! But to answer the question . . . I always imagined that Gregory was to settle everything he could on Clemence and felt he couldn’t tell me this outright.’

  ‘Why on earth would you think that?’ I said. ‘Cara is by far his favourite, so much so that I feel sorry for Clemence sometimes.’

  Alec turned to face me, to enjoy the look he was about to put on my face.

  ‘I rather thought he would settle what he could on Clemence because Dunelgar, Culreoch and the London house are coming to me. I’m Gregory’s heir.’

  I choked on my coffee.

  ‘How too Mr Collins for words,’ I said at last, and luckily Alec gave another bark of laughter instead of slamming out of the room as I should have deserved.

  ‘What an idea! What things you do say, Dandy! No, I didn’t quite resolve to “make my choice from among his daughters” – although you’ve no idea what the girls in Dorset would have thought of moving to the Highlands; they shrank away at parties when they found out. Broke into a run, some of them. Anyway, as it turned out, my elder brother . . . And so I might have stayed in Dorset after all.’ He laughed again, but this time absolutely mirthlessly, and went on in a loud, blustering voice with a small tremble at the back of it that made me want to take him on to my lap like one of my sons. ‘Since I was getting Gregory’s pile, I convinced my father to settle on my younger brother after Edward was killed. Now what do you bet Gregory changes his mind and I end my days in a home for old soldiers?’

  ‘But could he change his mind?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it an entail?’

  ‘Liferent,’ said Alec. ‘I don’t think you get entails up here, do you?’ I shrugged. ‘Meaning he can’t sell them but must pass them on along the male line. So, more or less an entail really, except that it needn’t be me.’

  ‘But you’re an Osborne,’ I said. ‘Not a Duffy. How can you be male line? I’ve never understood how Mr Collins can be Mr Bennet’s male heir, come to that.’

  ‘My grandfather, Gregory’s father’s brother, married a Miss Osborne,’ said Alec. ‘She was an only child and so, much to the delight of her family although to the disgust of his own . . .’

  ‘He changed his name?’ I was laughing again.

  ‘It’s not so unusual really,’ said Alec. ‘Much commoner than you’d think.’ He was looking away from me again and seemed defiant.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘Darling, tell me you weren’t going to!’

  Alec had the grace to look sheepish.

  ‘As I say, when there’s land or loot hanging on it, it’s not as unusual as you’d think. And in my case I’d be changing back anyway, to what I should have been if my grandfather hadn’t been swayed by the Osbornes.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. I thought about all of this for a moment, wondering if it had any bearing on the case. ‘It’s all very dynastic,’ I concluded.

  ‘To tell the truth,’ said Alec, ‘I hardly thought about it until after the war. When I went off to the front, Lena and Gregory might easily have had a son of their own and I might easily have not come back.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, sobered. ‘In 1914, Lena can barely have been forty and the girls were still children. I suppose because they had the two of them so quickly and so close together and then no more, one doesn’t think of it. But look at Queen Victoria.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘So it was only when I came to visit a year or two ago that I really began to believe in it.’

  ‘And you met Cara again, and your eyes locked over the estate accounts and –’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  ‘What if Cara never comes back?’ I said. ‘And the only way to keep the estate together – your bit and Clemence’s bit – is for you to –’

  ‘Will you shut up!’ said Alec louder, but still laughing. ‘I am not quite such a Mr Collins as to run through the family, even if there is no Mary waiting at the bottom of the barrel.’

  ‘What about the diamonds?’ I said. ‘Are they part of the “boys only” bit? I must say it’s very unfair if they are.’

  ‘Don�
�t know,’ said Alec, shortly.

  He didn’t know? This was strange. Diamonds as precious as the rest of the estate put together and he didn’t know whether they were to be his? Or his wife’s, if she ever came back. It spoke volumes to his credit to be so unconcerned about their fate, I thought. But did he know they weren’t insured? Had I told him that? Or was he perhaps this careless only because he assumed that a huge insurance cheque would be his instead?

  Finding the diamonds seemed to be the best idea all round, and the best way to go about it seemed just as clear: find Cara. I turned with relief to something I knew, spreading the album open on the sofa between us. Alec looked as pleased as I was at the change of topic.

  ‘Two pieces of earth-shattering news, darling,’ I said. ‘These pictures, this one and this one,’ I flipped back and forth between the two images of Cara’s smiling face, ‘were not taken at the cottage at all.’

  Alec looked at each them for a long time, then at the others, and began nodding slowly. I was disappointed; I had hoped for a chance to explain. Gratifyingly though, when he spoke at last, he said: ‘I think you’re right. There’s something funny about them, but I can’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, eagerly, bending over the album with my head beside his. ‘Here she’s resting her arm on a mantelpiece, and it’s directly opposite a window, which means it’s in the middle of a flat wall. Now the fireplaces in the cottage were all set across the corners of the room. Look at the picture of the garden, see? Just one chimney with eight pots right in the middle of the roof. Sitting room, dining room, morning room, kitchen range and four bedrooms; I could practically draw you a floor plan. And just to make sure, if you look closely at this one of Lena in what is supposed to be the same sitting room, same wallpaper, same curtains, you can just see that this corner of the wall doesn’t turn at a right-angle and look! What’s that?’ Alec bent even closer over the picture and scrutinized the object in the corner.

  ‘Dark wood and brass hoops,’ he said. ‘It’s a coal bucket.’

  ‘A coal bucket, yes. By the fire in the corner. That dark block that stops halfway up the wall is the fireplace. And there’s no way it could be the same fireplace as in the picture of Cara, is there?’ Alec shook his head.

  ‘Now the one on the staircase. This one isn’t at the beach cottage either. You see how the window behind her is set into the wall like an ordinary window? Well, the upstairs windows at the cottage were all dormers, you know, set into the roof. And once again if we look at the picture in the garden you can see the side of the upstairs windows sticking out. If there was a landing window flat on a wall on the front of the house we should be able to see the taller part sticking up from this angle and we can’t. These two pictures were not taken at the cottage.’ I waited for the praise that was to come. Alec flipped back and forward a couple more times and then nodded firmly, with his lips pushed out in a pout of either satisfaction or grudging admiration, I was not sure which. I should tell him, I knew, about the other cottage and not let him think I had got all this from looking with a better eye at what he himself had also seen. Perhaps I would some day, but for the moment I was content to be thought of as a detective genius.

  ‘Now,’ I went on. ‘The question is why? Why did Lena go to all the trouble of redecorating the cottage to make it look as though these pictures were taken there? Why not simply take pictures of Cara at the cottage?’

  ‘Are you really asking?’ said Alec. ‘Or do you already know?’ He said it in a good-natured enough way, but I thought I should be careful not to be so triumphant as to be sickening.

  ‘There are two possible reasons,’ I said. ‘Either because Cara was never there, or because the pictures had to be taken after she left, or without her knowledge.’

  ‘That’s three,’ said Alec, but I ignored him. ‘And we know that she was there because of the other pictures.’ He flipped through the album until he came to the snap of Mrs Duffy in the garden with Cara disappearing into the house behind her.

  ‘That,’ I said and paused dramatically with my finger on the crêpe-de-Chine back, ‘is not Cara. It’s Clemence in Cara’s dress.’

  ‘Did you find the person who took the picture?’ said Alec.

  ‘You are looking at her,’ I said. ‘She’s there.’ Alec stared first at me and then at Clemence/Cara’s back in the photograph, and I took my finger and put it down on the paper, just where Lena’s hand disappeared behind a fold of her dress, then I traced the path of the cable down the back of the chair leg and under the picnic rug into the foreground, stopping where just the tiniest little piece of it was visible at the edge of the frame.

  ‘Very clever,’ said Alec. ‘It did seem odd that Cara should flounce off the way Clemence described. Not typical Cara at all.’

  ‘And if she were flouncing,’ I said, ‘she’d be blurred.’ We both looked in silence at the sharp outline of the figure in the dark doorway.

  ‘But what about all the others?’ said Alec. I waited in smug silence for him to discover what I had discovered as soon as this idea began to take hold.

  ‘There’s only one more,’ he said, presently. ‘On the cliff.’

  ‘And that could be anyone,’ I said, peering at the figure in the billowing dress standing beside Lena in the distance, with her hands jammed into her pockets while Lena waved. ‘Although in fact I think it’s no one. I think it’s a dressmaker’s dummy and that’s why it was taken from so far away and why they had to pose in long grass. You know, I had thought that it was a silly mistake to take all of the pictures with “Cara” in the same dress, but actually it was only the dress that made us believe it was Cara in the first place, and it almost worked.’

  ‘So she wasn’t there?’ said Alec, closing the album. ‘She was never there at all. She just wrote the letters at home before they left and Mrs Duffy or Clemence posted them from the cottage, timing them perfectly so that I should arrive just too late.’

  ‘Now for my second staggering piece of news,’ I said. ‘She was there. At least for one night. Mrs Marshall saw her on Tuesday.’ I described to him the old woman’s glimpse of the ‘third’ girl and the elaborate attempts to establish the existence of two identical sisters during the rest of the week. Alec shook his head as I spoke and looked increasingly troubled.

  ‘I should have got to the truth much quicker,’ I said. ‘Only when Mrs Marshall mentioned this girl on a bicycle pedalling hell for leather I naturally thought it was the poor little maid.’

  Alec’s mouth had dropped open and far too late I realized what I had said.

  ‘A poor little maid? Why is this the first I’ve heard about a poor little maid? And why poor?’ I shrugged, hoping to avoid the unpleasantness of explaining. Alec spread his hands wide and practically shouted at me.

  ‘You must find her, Dandy, and see what she has to say. You must talk to her as soon as you can. I don’t know what’s got into you!’

  ‘I . . . Well, I can’t talk to her, if you must know,’ I said, and took a deep breath. ‘She died.’

  ‘When? How? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Suicide, I suppose you would call it,’ I said. ‘Dr Milne told me. Rather against his will since he had hushed it up for them and was embarrassed. And I didn’t tell you because Dr Milne asked me to keep it to myself.’ Alec was still looking at me as though I were a halfwit, and I suppose with good reason. I was still bowdlerizing. No wonder men end up unable to deal with the grislier aspects of life, when they go through their lives being invited by nannies, wives and daughters to look the other way while hurried drapes are thrown over anything ugly.

  ‘Suicide,’ said Alec and whistled. ‘That must have given them pause. I wonder they had the nerve to go ahead with the fire. And I wonder why she did it.’ I looked back at him blankly.

  ‘But about your Mrs Marshall seeing Cara,’ he said presently and I was glad that the little maid was dropped. ‘Why would they let her bicycle away in the daylight after all the other
precautions? The redecoration, the photographs, the letters. These things are all so very careful and elaborate, and Cara rolling along the country lanes would ruin it.’

  ‘Well then, perhaps she wasn’t “leaving”. Perhaps she had just slipped out on some errand or other.’

  Alec thumped his hand down on the black leather of the album, making me start and rattle my cup which was, thankfully, empty by now.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We know she slipped out on an errand. She went to post a letter, didn’t she?’

  Once again the letters were taken from his inside pocket and spread out side by side.

  ‘“If you could pretend to Mummy”,’ he read, ‘“that you came in search of me off your own bat . . . I think she’s being perfectly ridiculous, but I don’t want to make her any crosser.” She sneaked out to post this to me, Dandy. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘As we thought. You were never meant to be there,’ I said. ‘I was supposed to turn up on my own and be taken in.’

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ said Alec. ‘I’m afraid so. I’m rather afraid Lena was grooming you for the role of the stooge from the time she got her claws into you at Croys. Yes, I’m sure of this now. The second letter was the only one I was ever supposed to see.’

  ‘Yes!’ I said, suddenly remembering. ‘Lena referred to “a silly letter” when I saw her in her bedroom on the day of the inquiry. And I remember now, when I mentioned about you showing the Fiscal the letters – plural – she flinched.’ I knew this was right, unflattering as it might be to have been cast as Lena’s puppet.

  ‘I still don’t see what the point was, though,’ I said. ‘All that furious bicycling to deliver such a casual letter. If she wanted to see you badly enough to send it she would have told you to hurry, not said you might like to come when you had a free minute. Why did she not ask you to come straight away?’

  ‘Oh, Dandy,’ said Alec, suddenly reaching out and taking hold of my hand. ‘Don’t you see? Can’t you?’ I didn’t and couldn’t, but I knew some part of our story would soon have to give way under the weight of all the things that no longer made any sense.