The Dying of the Light

by Robert Richardson

  “I’m not sure I can match Gertrude Lawrence,” Tess warned her.

  “Having seen you play Shakespeare, I’m sure you’ll make a good fist of it. I look forward to seeing how you do.”

  “Thank you.” Tess frowned as she noticed gathered sadness pass across the elderly woman’s eyes as their hands slipped apart. “And you met your future husband that night?”

  “Yes. He was the son of friends of my parents and was in our party. Not that anything happened. Our eyes didn’t meet or anything amazing like that. It only began three years later when we met again at Cambridge. We married straight after graduation.” Abruptly she turned and looked across the bay. “We spent our honeymoon on the Black Sea. So long ago now.”

  Maltravers and Tess exchanged glances. Her appearance in one particular play had spontaneously triggered a lot of memories, and they did not all appear to be happy ones.

  “What happened to your husband?” Maltravers asked.

  “He was killed in the blitz in 1942.” Catapulted into the past, Edith Hallam-West was speaking almost automatically. “Our son and daughter died with him. He’d taken them out for the evening and they were caught in an air raid. They should have gone to the nearest shelter, but they weren’t far from home and must have decided to reach me. They wouldn’t let me see the bodies.”

  Laughter of a family on the beach floated up to them as she suddenly shook her head fiercely.

  “How silly of me, but …” She turned to face them again, apologetic and embarrassed. “It was talking about Private Lives that did it. I expect it’s been at the back of my mind ever since I saw it was on. I’m sorry, I’m not usually as maudlin as this.”

  “That’s all right,” Maltravers assured her. “If you want to talk about it, we’re good listeners. We have testimonials.”

  “But you don’t want to be bored by an old woman.” Edith Hallam-West closed her drawing pad and picked up her chair. “Anyway, I’ve finished here and you probably want to walk on.”

  “Not particularly,” said Maltravers. “We’ve walked from Porthennis and if the seals aren’t going to put in an appearance we’re going back on the main road. May we come with you?”

  “Only as far as my car. I’m too old now for five-mile hikes. I can give you a lift if you like.”

  Maltravers carried her chair as they climbed from the beach and followed a path through a farm to where a red Mini, which looked as if it had been driven at least twice round the world, stood in a lay by. Edith Hallam-West put her chair in the boot and they accepted an offer to run them back to Porthennis; Maltravers wanted to take the opportunity of asking other questions.

  “We were talking about Agnes Thorpe earlier,” he said as the car coughed into life, juddering as Edith Hallam-West forced it into gear. “You must remember her.” He twitched apprehensively as the Mini leapt forward.

  “Very well. I was one of her unpaid helpers building the Botallack. We were all younger then of course.” She finally moved into second gear. “It was damned hard work. The only one of us used to lugging lumps of rock around was Patrick Dawson.”

  “Where did he learn to do that?”

  “He’d been a miner in Lancashire. He went down the pits after his father died in an accident sometime in the thirties. Didn’t stick at it long, but it built his muscles up. After that he joined the Merchant Navy which kept him fit. Then he was a Commando in the war. Made the rest of us look right namby-pambies.”

  She turned round to talk to Tess in the back, casually indifferent to road safety; they were already travelling at more than sixty miles an hour on a country road. “You know that arch on the left of the stage? The one you make your first entrance through? That was a solid piece and Patrick raised it into place on his own before it was carved and —”

  “There’s a bend coming up,” Maltravers put in hastily and the car swerved sharply back into line. For a few minutes he mentally went over the terms of his will and contemplated which God he might have to make his peace with. Edith Hallam-West was continuing her story of the building of the Botallack, but he found it difficult to concentrate on what she was saying. Finally he asked another question.

  “Agnes Thorpe was planning to get married around the time she vanished, wasn’t she?”

  “When she drowned herself. Yes.” A meandering sheep escaped instant conversion to mutton by the thickness of its summer fleece. “Chap called Hopkins or Jenkins or something like that. I only met him once. Potter; not making it, selling it.”

  “And you’re positive she did drown?” Maltravers’s hand gripped the fascia of dashboard, controlling a desire to grab the wheel as the car hurtled towards a black and white arrowhead board indicating another sharp bend at the bottom of a hill. There was a blur of hedges as they screeched round it. He glanced back at Tess; her eyes were closed and he was certain she was silently praying.

  “She was dying,” Edith Hallam-West replied; Maltravers identified with her. “She had cancer.”

  Mercifully they had reached a stretch of main road where space made Edith Hallam-West’s driving marginally less homicidal.

  “Had she told you that?”

  “No. None of us knew until the suicide note turned up. She’d kept it to herself.”

  “What about her fiancé? Had she told him?”

  “He said she hadn’t.” Left indicator flashing, Edith Hallam-West knocked several years off the life expectation of a cyclist as she turned right. She was still in second gear and they were back on twisting country roads.

  “But there’s still a mystery about …” Maltravers clenched his teeth and forced the word out, “about her body. Why was it never found?”

  He wished he had not asked as Edith Hallam-West took both hands off the wheel in a gesture of incomprehension; smothered by the racket of the engine, Tess muffled a whimper of panic.

  “Washed out to sea? Freak tide? Treacherous place Mounts Bay.” Hands took control again after what seemed at least an hour. “Could have become trapped in underwater rocks. Nobody knows what happened. Why are you so interested?”

  “No particular reason, but …” Maltravers spotted the gate where they had started their walk along the coast path in the morning. “Could you drop us here? I want to take some photographs.”

  “Where’s your camera?”

  He tapped a small square bulge in his shirt pocket. “Miniature one. Japanese.” Brakes engaged savagely and his seat belt saved him from a serious encounter with the windscreen.

  “Thanks for the lift.” He held the front passenger seat forward for Tess to climb gratefully out. “Hope to see you again before we leave.”

  “I’ll see you next week, anyway,” Edith Hallam-West told Tess. “At the Botallack. You may hear me crying, but don’t let it put you off. Goodbye.”

  The car roared off down the hill; one brake light was not working. Maltravers reached into his pocket and took out his pack of cigarettes.

  “Good job she didn’t ask to see the camera,” he remarked. “I wanted a last one of these before I died.”

  “If she was fifteen in 1930, she’s more than seventy now,” said Tess. “Do they know she’s on the roads?”

  “It’s not a thing they’d forget. My entire life passed before my eyes several times and —”

  “And you weren’t in it,” Tess interrupted. “Very old, darling.”

  “Sorry.” Maltravers took her hand as they began to descend Fern Hill towards Porthennis. Even close to the sea it was burningly hot, mirages of shimmering air on the road ahead of them. “However, it’s been an interesting day out.”

  “If you like risking instant death.”

  “More than that,” he corrected. “We know several things we didn’t before. Not much, but put together perhaps they start to add up to something.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Cambridge. The Black Sea. A pottery manufacturer and a Lancashire miner. Think about it.”

  “After what I’ve just been
through, riddles I don’t need,” Tess told him. “You’ll have to explain.”

  “It’s too vague yet. However Mortimer was quite right when he said things would happen that would give us ideas where to look, but …” He shook his head. “But I didn’t expect to be looking in this direction.”

  Hand in hand, they walked on past Martha Shaw’s cottage and the studio where she had died.

  *

  Edward Cunnningham found it interesting to guess what customers who came into his shop would buy. His prices put many people off, but he offered a range of pottery seconds and smaller items which meant few left empty handed. He was watching a couple he had instantly labelled as yuppies deciding between a vase and a fruit bowl — his personal bet was on them having both — when the telephone rang in the office. Leaving his assistant to watch for shoplifters, he went to answer it.

  “Patrick. Has Ruth been to see you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “She’s got a thing about Martha. Reckons it wasn’t an accident. She thinks someone pushed it.”

  There was a silence, before Cunningham spoke again. “You mean she thinks one of us pushed it.”

  “She didn’t come straight out and say that, but she must do.”

  “Well you can count me out. I didn’t do it.”

  “Neither did I.” The denial was absolute. “What about the others?”

  “You’re serious aren’t you?” said Cunningham.

  “Ruth’s serious.”

  Cunningham sighed heavily. “Dorothy, Edith or Belvedere? It’s not impossible. That rock would have fallen over if someone leaned on it. What’s Ruth going to do?”

  “I don’t know. The police apparently think it was an accident. Perhaps she’ll let it go.”

  “And perhaps she won’t. What should we do?”

  “Keep our heads down,” said Dawson. “And hope it goes away.”

  “You mean you don’t think it was an accident either?”

  “I want it to be. I’m getting too old to deal with anything else.”

  “We’re all getting too old.”

  “Anyway, you know what to expect if Ruth turns up,” Dawson added. “Tell her she’s barmy. I’ll see you Wednesday. It’s Agnes’s anniversary.”

  “God, I’d forgotten,” Cunningham sounded weary. “Why do we still bother? It was a bloody lifetime ago.”

  “Because it’s one of the things that keeps us together,” Dawson told him. “I’ll pick you up and give you a lift up the hill. Edith took me last year and I nearly wet my pants. Keep the bloody faith.”

  Dawson rang off and Cunningham remained seated at his desk, littered with scribbled orders, invoices not sent out and bills waiting to be paid. Filmed with dust, a forgotten invitation to a regimental reunion caught his eye and he tore it up and threw it into an overflowing tin wastepaper basket. Lance Corporal Cunningham, Army clerk, Royal Corps of Signals, 1939 to 1945, had no wish to be reminded again that he had been unable to fight. He swung his right leg out of the knee space in the desk with unthinking acquired skill of years and stood up. Only his oldest friends knew it was artificial; and they were about the only ones who remembered that war.

  He stepped back into the shop where the couple had started querying prices with his assistant.

  “That’s how much it costs,” he interrupted. “It’s on the label.”

  “We’ll think about it.” The girl put the bowl back on the shelf. “We’ll call in again.”

  “Bastards,” Cunningham muttered as they walked out.

  *

  Maltravers searched among the display of local history booklets inside the door of the harbour front newsagents until he found one called The Porthennis School and its Art. He was leafing through it as he and Tess walked back to Lifeboat Row.

  “First published in 1959, so it’s a bit out of date,” he commented. “But it’s got potted biographies of them all … That’s reckless Edith, the undertaker’s friend, thirty years ago.”

  He held an open page towards Tess; more than half was filled by a photograph of Edith Hallam-West with a painting of a cormorant.

  “Why did she never marry again?” Tess took the booklet for a moment to examine the page more closely. “She was beautiful.”

  “You can still see that.” Maltravers rapidly read the text below the picture, then quoted: “‘Edith Hallam-West began sketching wildlife during holidays in the Soviet Union with her husband. After he and their children were tragically killed during the war, she moved to Porthennis in 1948 to develop her talents — she had never been trained — under the guidance of Frank Morgan. Today she is widely recognised as a leading artist in her field and has illustrated several books.”’

  He flicked through another few pages, pausing occasionally to read again swiftly, then closed the booklet.

  “A very good two quids’ worth,” he remarked. “Let’s see if Helen can fill me in a bit more.”

  “Do you really think you might have an idea who killed Martha Shaw?” Tess asked as they reached Lifeboat Row. “Just from talking to Edith Hallam-West and that book?”

  Maltravers held the gate open for her. “Frankly, no. But I think I can see something, which is interesting … and might be important. I’ll have to think about it.”

  *

  Nick Charlton went to see Ruth Harvey that evening. As he had guessed, Dorothy Lowe was with the others in the Steamer and Ruth was alone, weariness of grief staining her face as she opened the door. She had returned to Martha’s cottage because at least it offered memories for company.

  “Hello, Ruth. I brought you these.”

  Unsure and embarrassed, he held out the bunch of carnations like a child, but chocolate-brown eyes watched her carefully. Normal friendly gestures did not come easily to him. Ruth looked surprised.

  “Oh! Oh, how kind of you, Nick.” She had received flowers from Edith, but suspected they were no more than a token gesture, probably sent after consultation with the rest of the School. Dorothy had passed on the baldest message of sympathy from Belvedere Scott and Edward Cunningham had not even been in touch. Patrick Dawson’s final “Sorry about Martha”, had casually dismissed the terrible end of the most important thing in her life in three words. She smiled at Charlton with gratitude and opened the door wider.

  “Come in.”

  Inside the cottage, his eyes flickered snake-like at walls lined with books, heads carved by Martha Shaw on shelves in an alcove, the comfortable clutter of furniture and possessions accumulated over a lifetime by two people in love who had shared everything. He watched Ruth Harvey’s thin body, trying to assess what it had been like when she was young, crudely imagining her in bed with Martha. Sitting in a plump fireside chair, he looked comically small, feet dangling several inches above the floor. Ruth sat opposite, thin hands clasped on her lap.

  “It’s nice to see somebody,” she said. “Nobody else has been yet.”

  “Well, they’re busy aren’t they? With all the tourists.”

  “Yes, I expect they are, but …” Ruth shook herself, dismissing bitter thoughts. “Sometimes it’s best to be on your own.”

  “Well I won’t leave you on your own,” Charlton assured her. “There’s still the garden to look after and there’s things need doing around the cottage. I can help you with, you know …”

  He looked away uncertainly, confused by what were to him unnatural actions of kindness. Ruth interpreted it as embarrassment over the limitations of his handicap.

  “That’s kind of you, Nick,” she said. “And I’d be very grateful, but I’m afraid I can’t afford to pay you much. Hardly anything at all to be quite honest. You see —”

  “I don’t want money,” Charlton interrupted, then lowered his head and mumbled the rest of what he had to say. “Miss Shaw — Martha — and you have been good to me and … and I don’t have many friends.”

  It was a line he had carefully planned, certain that it would bring a sympathetic response; it worked better than he had expec
ted.

  “Oh, Nick,” Ruth suddenly sobbed. “Martha was the only friend I had. I feel so dreadfully alone.”

  Charlton kept his eyes fixed on the carpet; she was not going to give him any problems.

  Chapter Seven

  “Whose yacht is that?”

  “The Duke of Westminster’s I expect. It always is.”

  Tess and Neil Levis paused as the laughter at one of Noel Coward’s most famous exchanges went on too long. The audience should by now have adjusted to the surreal experience of watching the first act of Private Lives performed at the Botallack; two people on a hotel balcony overlooking an imaginary sea when the real thing was actually spread behind them. Tess waited until the laughter started to subside, then triggered a wave of hysterics with her next line.

  “I wish I were on it.”

  Hysteria engulfed Elyot’s reply that he wished she was on it too. Bewildered, Tess saw Maltravers sitting with Helen in the middle of the amphitheatre; he caught her eye and pointed behind her, shaking his head helplessly. It was impossible to continue and she filled the moment by casually turning round. Then she giggled.

  “There’s a bloody fishing boat out there!” she stage whispered at Levis. The audience spontaneously clapped as she turned back to face them, biting her bottom lip to prevent herself from losing control. Levis leaned his arms on the balcony rail and shook his lowered head.

  “Does it pass this time every night?” he muttered.

  “We’re going to find out.” Tess replied like a ventriloquist then returned to the script, relieved that there were no more maritime references.

  “There’s no need to be nasty.”

  Loaded down with its catch of plaice and turbot, the trawler Cornish Maiden passed out of sight towards its home port of Newlyn, its skipper unaware of his inadvertent contribution to English comedy of manners. At the end of the play, Levis doubled the applause as he waved in acknowledgement at the shimmering backdrop behind them. Making their way out up the stone terraces with the rest of the audience, Maltravers and Helen met Edith Hallam-West with Dorothy Lowe.