‘What did you do?’
‘Survived as best I could. Served in the Army during the Second World War. Did my little bit to kill off fascism, in Germany and Italy if not in Spain. Afterwards, I drifted. I must have had a dozen different jobs in a dozen different towns before …’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Before something snapped here and I fetched up in a mental hospital, trying to glue it back together again. I mentioned Beatrix’s offer to one of the doctors, apparently. I can’t remember doing it. But he wrote to her on my behalf and she responded. She became a regular visitor. And eventually she became a friend. The farm was her idea for when I was well enough to leave hospital. And it was a good one. Out here, I don’t have to listen to lies or breathe polluted air or swallow my principles. Sheep don’t pretend to be clever, you see. They’re just grateful for the life they lead for as long as they lead it. And so am I.’
‘Was it you or Beatrix who wanted to keep your friendship a secret?’
‘It was both of us. Beatrix because she didn’t want her family to think her gullible or sentimental. And I because I didn’t want people like Emerson McKitrick beating a path to my door looking for tit-bits of knowledge about Tristram Abberley’s last days.’
‘What did Beatrix do here?’ Charlotte hesitated as the impudence of the question dawned on her. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—’
‘She tramped the hills. She cooked meals for me. We reminisced. We laughed. We quarrelled. We spent time together.’
‘Every June – for more than thirty years?’
‘Yes.’
‘And was this year different in any way?’
Griffith’s gaze narrowed. ‘In retrospect I see it was. She was distracted, often to the point of irritability. I blamed old age, which only irritated her the more.’ The ghost of a smile crossed his lips. ‘She said nothing about fearing for her life. If she had— Well, let’s just say I had no inkling of any such thing.’
‘How did you hear of her death?’
‘By her own hand. The letter Lulu sent me made it clear its despatch meant she had died suddenly and unnaturally – as I subsequently confirmed.’
Charlotte could hear her own heart beating rapidly as she asked: ‘What was in the letter?’
‘A note from Beatrix and a sealed package. The note told me what I’ve just told you – and asked me to burn the package without opening it. She said it contained letters from Tristram—’
‘From Tristram? Then Emerson’s right. She did keep them.’
‘Presumably.’
‘Presumably? Surely you didn’t—’
‘Burn it?’ He looked directly at her. ‘What else do you think I did? It was Beatrix’s last request. I owe her the peace I enjoy here. How could—’ He turned away and his voice faltered. ‘How could I not do as I was asked?’
Charlotte stared at him for a moment, then up into the sky above their heads, where a bird of prey was circling slowly in the void. Had Beatrix stood here a few short weeks ago, she wondered, and planned all this? A paper-chase in which the prize could never be found. Blank pages for Ursula. An unopened package for Frank Griffith to burn. And who knew what else besides? ‘Were you aware she left three other letters with Lulu?’
‘I was not.’
‘One to Ursula, Maurice’s wife.’
‘I know who she is.’
‘Well, would you like to know what her letter contained?’
‘No.’
‘Not even to satisfy your curiosity?’
‘I’m not curious.’ He looked back at her. ‘I know and understand as much as Beatrix wanted me to. That’s enough.’
‘But why should she want you to destroy her brother’s letters?’
‘If I could tell you why, there’d have been no point to her request, would there? Can’t you simply accept that she had the right to decide how they should be disposed of?’
Faced with such a direct challenge to her inquisitiveness, Charlotte fell silent. Beatrix’s wishes deserved to be respected. There was no disputing that. Yet they were so inextricably bound up with the mystery of her death that to obey them blindly was also to conspire at a suppression of the truth. Just as to defy them was to be disloyal to her memory. Neither choice was beneath contempt and neither wholly honourable.
‘Have you had any breakfast, young lady?’ asked Griffith with disarming gentleness.
‘What …? Well, no, I …’
‘Come down to the house and I’ll cook you some. You look as if you need it.’
20
THE AROMA OF bacon, mushrooms and tomatoes sizzling in a pan reminded Charlotte of breakfasts she had had in her childhood, mopping up the molten fat on her plate with a soldier of bread whilst her father grinned and winked at her across the kitchen table. ‘Be good, squirt,’ he would say, rising hurriedly to go after a glance at the clock. A lock of his hair would always flop on to her forehead as he stooped to kiss her and he would invariably add in an artificial growl: ‘See you later …’
‘Alligator,’ she murmured, more than twenty years on from the last time she had finished his sentence.
‘What was that?’ Frank Griffith frowned across at her from the range, spatula in hand.
‘Nothing.’ She shook her head, as if to dislodge what she had remembered. ‘Nothing at all. I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologize to me. I talk to myself all day long. It’s a hazard of living alone.’ He began distributing the contents of the frying-pan on to plates. ‘You have lived alone, haven’t you, since your mother died?’
‘Yes. How did—’ She broke off, then added: ‘Beatrix would have told you, of course.’ Breakfast was placed before her. Griffith sat down with his own on the other side of the table. ‘Thank you. It’s rather strange, I must say, to meet somebody for the very first time and to find they’ve known all about you for years.’
‘Beatrix didn’t tell me that much.’
‘Just enough?’ She smiled, but he did not respond. They ate in silence for a moment, then she said: ‘And you’re quite certain you don’t know who the other two recipients of Beatrix’s letters are?’
‘Beatrix never mentioned a Miss van Ryan in New York or a Madame V in Paris.’
‘Do you think they might also have known Tristram?’
‘Old girlfriends, you mean? Or mistresses?’
‘Perhaps. You spent several months with Tristram in Spain. He might have said something … let a similar name slip one day …’
‘He might have. But he didn’t.’
‘How well would you say you knew him?’ There was no reply and the pointed way in which Griffith went on eating made it clear there was not about to be. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Am I asking too much?’
He glanced up at her. ‘That’s not the issue, is it?’
‘Then … What is?’
He pushed his plate aside and poured some tea into their mugs. Then he lit his pipe – a lengthy process in itself – and leaned back in his chair, still apparently considering Charlotte’s question. ‘I knew Tristram Abberley as a comrade-in-arms,’ he began between puffs of smoke. ‘And I thought I understood him as a poet. When he first joined our company of the British Battalion, in the summer of 1937, I was suspicious of him. I was afraid, I suppose, that my literary idol would turn out to have feet of clay. And I was afraid the principles he stood for would bring us into conflict, because by then I was sick of the whole damned business and just wanted to be free of it, whereas he was newly arrived, with every illusion about the struggle for liberty and democracy intact.’
‘Why did you stay? Surely, as a volunteer—’
‘You could volunteer in but not out. Our passports were confiscated – if you had one, that is. I’d left England in November 1936 on a weekend excursion ticket and if I’d tried to go back without permission I’d have been arrested by the Republican authorities as a deserter and probably shot. Requests for home leave were always denied, of course. They knew you’d never come back. Not once you’d se
en through the lie you were fighting for – the lie that there was actually a Spanish Republic to defend. There wasn’t. The Republic was a sack full of snakes, each one more concerned with biting the other occupants than uniting against Fascism. The Basques and the Catalans struggling to break free. The Anarchists and the Communists vying for supremacy. And the Russians clutching the strings that held the sack shut, doling out arms and ammunition according to ideological prejudice rather than military logic, manipulating and deciding everything on instructions from Moscow.’
‘Did Tristram see it that way too?’
‘Eventually. But he didn’t let it drag him down. In a strange kind of way, he didn’t seem to care. I think it was enough for him that one small band of men should fight honourably together for what they believe in, even if their beliefs have long since been betrayed. The attack on Saragossa in October ’thirty-seven, Tristram’s first action, was a typical cock-up. Russian tanks were used to break through the enemy lines, with our company among the infantry following. But the tanks went too far too fast and were cut off, leaving us stranded in no man’s land, exposed to machine-gun fire. Three of us found a poor kind of cover in a ditch. Me, Tristram and a Spaniard called Vicente Ortiz. Most of the battalion’s reinforcements were Spaniards by then and Vicente was a case in point. We had to lie there till nightfall before we could even try to get back to our lines, with bullets whining overhead and screams of agony floating across from wounded men nearby. We could do nothing for them, of course. We could do little for ourselves. Except keep our courage up. And I don’t think we’d even have managed that without Tristram. He sustained us with jokes and stories of what we’d do in Madrid the first night of victory. And then he led us back to safety under cover of darkness. But for him, I’m not sure Vicente and I would have made it. We agreed afterwards that he’d probably saved our lives.’
‘Were you with him when he was wounded?’
‘Yes, though I didn’t see it happen. That was at Teruel. The worst …’ His voice took on a distant tone. ‘The worst of all.’ Then he seemed to regain his concentration. ‘Teruel must be the coldest and grimmest city in Spain. To launch an offensive against it in mid-December was plain lunacy. But it’s what we did. And all for no strategic advantage I could understand. Later, I found out the whole battle – and every life lost in it – was just to persuade the Republican government’s paymasters in Moscow that the army they were funding and equipping could still fight. Well, we certainly fought. And died.’
He seemed to slip into a reverie, puffing at his pipe and staring into the middle distance. ‘What happened?’ Charlotte prompted him.
‘What happened?’ He looked up sharply, then relaxed. ‘Our battalion wasn’t called in until the Republican forces who’d taken the town found themselves besieged and in danger of being cut off – as we’d all predicted they would be. We had to dig trenches under three feet of snow. I still dream sometimes of feeling as cold as I felt that winter on the heights above Teruel. Still, cold or not, we held the line, at least for a while. There was a lot of grumbling in the ranks. A good deal of dissent. Even reports of mutineers being shot. Spirits were low. Except Tristram’s. He blazed with some inner light of certainty and confidence. But it didn’t protect him when it mattered. He was hit by rifle-fire during an operation to recapture some hills from which the Nationalists were threatening to cut off the Canadian Battalion. It was a nasty leg-wound, but I never thought for a moment he wouldn’t pull through. In fact, I envied him for being evacuated. Told him so to his face. The next time I saw him, in the hospital at Tarragona, he was dying of some infection he’d picked up there. I regretted my words then, I can tell you.’
‘How did you get back to Tarragona?’
‘By the skin of my teeth. And the self-sacrifice of another.’
‘Who?’
‘Vicente Ortiz. He was a cross-patch little anarchist from Barcelona who you’d curse for his pessimism one day and praise for his determination the next. Our battalion abandoned Teruel in late February and withdrew to the Aragon hills. We were still licking our wounds when Franco launched a new offensive early in March. The effect was devastating. The Nationalists pushed back the entire front as easily and quickly as if they were rolling up a rug. It turned into a headlong retreat. We were too weary and short of ammunition to fight, too afraid of summary execution to surrender. It was just a mad scramble to escape, in which you could easily fall behind and find yourself overtaken by the enemy advance. That’s what happened to Vicente and me. We were resting in a ruined barn in the hills, waiting for darkness, when a Nationalist patrol stopped nearby. Vicente could hear them debating whether or not to search the barn. It was odds on they would, which we knew would be the finish of us, because the Nationalist commander on that part of the front, Colonel Delgado, was notorious for having prisoners shot.’
‘How did you escape?’
‘Vicente suggested that if one of us went out to meet them and surrendered, he could make them think he was alone. Then they might not bother to search the barn. Since I didn’t speak more than a few words of Spanish, only Vicente stood any chance of pulling it off. He realized it had to be him – and so did I – the moment he came up with the idea.’
‘And he went?’
‘Yes. He went. I wish I could tell you I tried to stop him, but I didn’t. I bit my tongue and let him go because I knew it really was the only chance we had and because I was glad – yes, truly glad – I wasn’t the one who had to do it. I can see him now, stumbling down the rocky slope towards them, hands above his head, gabbling out some abject words of surrender. And it worked. Whatever story he told must have satisfied them, because they trussed him up and started back with him straightaway, while I watched helplessly from the barn. Gratitude was all I felt at first, though it didn’t last long. Then came guilt for what I’d let him do. And that’s never left me.’
‘Do you think they killed him?’
‘I’m sure they did. They or whoever he was handed over to. I hope for his sake it was quick. If I could have that day over again, I’d tell him to stay in the barn with me. If they’d come to search it, we could have put up a fight. At least we’d have died together.’ A long sigh escaped him and he shook his head, as if in response to some thought he had not spoken. ‘I pressed on after dark and had got ahead of the Nationalists again by dawn. How I carried on after that I don’t really remember, but eventually I caught up with what was left of the battalion. I was in such a bad way they sent me on to Tarragona to rest up and recover. I knew I’d see Tristram there and I was dreading having to explain what had happened to Vicente. They’d become good friends over the months. When I saw the state he was in, I realized he couldn’t last long. I don’t suppose I’d have told him the truth if he hadn’t asked me about Vicente point blank. Then I recounted the whole story. I felt better for getting it off my chest. Tristram didn’t reproach me. He knew I’d be reproaching myself for the rest of my life. But the news seemed to depress him more than any of the other deaths I had to report. There were plenty of them, God knows. And soon there was Tristram’s as well.’
‘You were with him at the end?’
‘Yes. I was. I did what I could for him – which was very little. He was anxious his papers and keepsakes should be returned to his wife – your mother – and I promised him they would be. After he died, I parcelled them up and took them to the British Consul. When he heard they’d belonged to Tristram Abberley the poet, he left no diplomatic stone unturned to make sure they reached their destination. I didn’t know then whether I’d ever make it back to England myself. Frankly, I doubted it.’
‘But you did, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I was still alive come the autumn, when the Republic decided it no longer wanted the International Brigades. The outcome of the war was certain by then. We marched out of Barcelona two months before Franco marched in. All we left behind were futile memories – and the bodies of men like Tristram Abberley.’
‘Have you ever been back?’
‘Never. Under Franco it would have been unthinkable. Now it’s too late. It was probably always too late.’ He propped his pipe against the teapot, gathered up their plates and mugs and carried them to the sink. ‘Most of those who were there just want to forget. It’s the only form of healing they know.’
Charlotte watched him as he began rinsing the crocks, his back turned to her so that he was unaware of her scrutiny. It was strange to reflect on how much this lonely old man had witnessed in a life destined to end where now he stood, in hiding from the world. Had he really burned Tristram’s letters without opening them? Had he burned them at all? She could not ask him again. It was too pointed, too heedless of the tragedy he had recounted. He had said it and he had meant it. Or had he? ‘What else do you think I did?’ They had been his words. ‘How could I not do as I was asked?’ How indeed? After what she had just heard, Charlotte was beginning to doubt whether that was the question at all.
21
DEREK REACHED RYE shortly before noon. Stung by Colin’s scornful remarks, he had decided to approach Beatrix Abberley’s housekeeper in an attempt to learn whether she was holding back any vital information. He did not think it likely, but at least the exercise would prove he was still trying to do something on his brother’s behalf.
At Colin’s request, Albion Dredge had sent Derek copies of the statements made by the prosecution witnesses. These had included their addresses, in Mrs Mentiply’s case The Dunes, New Road, Rye. The name had led Derek to expect a seaside setting, but the reality was stubbornly landlocked. The Dunes was a hedge-shrouded bungalow on the eastern outskirts of the town, whose only hint of the ocean was a bedraggled seagull perched on the apex of the roof.
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