Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  At last the serviceman stepped back, and let the hood slam down, and talked at some length on his two-way radio. And then he said, to me, ‘This will not start. Our closest office is in Evora, so I will take you there now, and we can give you a new car. There may be a little wait, because this is an automatic, and they do not have an automatic there, so they will have to find one from somewhere else, but we will hope to have you on the road again before too long.’

  ‘There’s no way you can just take me to Lisbon?’

  ‘No, because we are now very close to Evora. We have an office there, and it is very clear, our policy, to use the closest office. I am sorry.’

  Wendy Taply wandered up to join me. ‘Something wrong?’

  The serviceman explained, again.

  Wendy asked him, ‘Would they have an automatic at your Lisbon office?’

  ‘At the airport, yes, but—’

  ‘Well, then.’ Taking charge, she told me, ‘We can run you up to Lisbon, if you like. We’re going there ourselves. We’re making one small detour to the north, at Dad’s request, but we should be in Lisbon shortly after lunch, if that suits you, and we can drop you at the airport, if they’ll have your new car ready for you then.’

  I glanced again towards the traffic, growing heavier, behind her. Matt hadn’t circled back yet, but I knew that, if he didn’t, someone would. Besides, if I’d been followed from Lisbon, they’d have known where I’d rented my car – they’d be able to track me down, now, to the office in Evora; pick up my trail again. They’d have a harder time finding me, I thought, if I were travelling in someone else’s car – especially if I were coming into Lisbon from the north, and not from the direction they expected.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘if you can take me to Lisbon, I won’t need another car. I can get by on foot, once I’m there.’

  The serviceman spoke to the rental car company at length again, on his radio, but finally things were settled, and I cleared my few belongings from the car. There wasn’t much: a pair of sunglasses, two pens, and the manila envelope that Anabela had prepared for me.

  ‘No luggage?’ Wendy asked.

  My suitcase was, of course, still back in Lisbon, at the York House. I hadn’t planned on staying overnight in Evora, but, as with the night I’d stayed over at Patrick’s parents’ house, I’d made do with little more than my trusty toothbrush. With my job, I had grown used to doing that, from time to time, but I realised how strange it must look to a woman like Wendy, and I wished I had a better excuse to offer her than simply that I’d left my things in Lisbon.

  She was going to ask something else, but I jumped in first. ‘Thank you for doing this. It’s very nice of you.’

  ‘Not a problem. Dad will enjoy having the audience.’

  He clearly did. He rattled on for half the morning, stopping only when a wave of drowsiness appeared to overcome him, and he fell asleep mid-sentence.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Wendy said. ‘He always does that. It’s his medication.’ Glancing round to make sure that her mother, who’d been dozing for some time, was still asleep as well, she said, to me, ‘You know, you really needn’t humour him. He’s not so hard done by. We do let him off his lead, once in a while.’

  ‘I didn’t…’

  ‘No, but that’s what you’re thinking, I know. “Poor old man,” you’re thinking, “with those bloody women bullying him.” Truth is, Dad’s not someone you can bully,’ she informed me, a note of fondness creeping into her gruff voice. ‘He’s all right, my dad. It’s just that when you’ve heard those stories told a hundred times, you don’t need to have them told again. Besides, he never tells the really meaty ones. He was shot down in the war, my dad was. He was on a reconnaissance flight in the Mediterranean, flying Mosquitoes. Had to ditch over the Vichy French coast, but he didn’t get caught. Made his way through the mountains – God only knows how, as he didn’t speak Spanish or French – and then here, into Portugal, right down to Lisbon. They got him a flight to Morocco from there, and then back to his base. But he never tells those stories. Too close to truth, they are.’

  He was, in that way, like my Grandpa Murray, who had also been shot down in France, and had somehow escaped, and had managed, with what I could only assume was a great deal of difficulty, to find his way through enemy terrain to safety.

  He had never talked about it, either. Not to me.

  Wendy said, ‘This is the first time he’s ever been back. He and Mum have a friend with a flat in the Algarve, that’s what got him down here, but it’s taken him about a week to work up to Lisbon. It’s really a bit of a pilgrimage for him – that’s why he’s insisting we come from the north, through the town where he was billeted when he first made it into Portugal. It’s a spa town, he says, with hot springs, but in those days it was full of refugees, and those who’d escaped out of occupied Europe. Like Dad.’

  A spa town, with hot springs. I felt the hair prick at the back of my neck. ‘What’s it called, this town?’

  ‘Caldas da Rainha.’

  The same town that Deacon had gone to, that Saturday so long ago, with Jack Cayton-Wood and Alvaro Marinho. I had the fact fresh in my memory. I could still hear Regina Marinho’s voice saying how sad she thought Deacon had looked on the following Monday, and how he’d sent a message to someone at one of the hotels in Caldas da Rainha.

  I’d been right, I thought, not to discourage Len Taply from telling his stories. He might yet have something of interest to tell me. Not that I expected he’d known Deacon – it would have been too much of a coincidence to think the two of them had ever met – but his knowledge of the town itself, and what had happened there, might be of use to me.

  The trick would be to find a way to make him talk about the war. Like Grandpa Murray, he appeared to hold those memories private. So much so that, as we neared the town, he seemed to change his mind.

  ‘Stop here,’ he said to Wendy.

  Wendy stopped.

  He didn’t leave the car. He sat for several moments looking out the window at what little we could see, and then he roused himself, and said a quiet, ‘That’s enough. We can go now.’

  They must have been strong memories indeed, for him to want to touch them only through a pane of glass.

  Not wanting to miss the chance to see the town with someone who had been there in the Forties, I tried to think of some way to persuade him not to leave.

  ‘Why don’t you let me treat you all to lunch?’ I offered, but before I could go on to say that there must be a restaurant or two that would suit us in Caldas da Rainha, Len Taply spoke up.

  ‘You’re our guest,’ he said. ‘We’ll buy your lunch. As I recall, there’s quite a lovely town just south of here, called Obidos. A little town, with walls all round, and rather picturesque. We could stop there.’

  Which wasn’t what I’d wanted. But my disappointment faded when we pulled into the parking lot outside the walls of Obidos. The Taply women were talking as we got out of the car, but I only half listened, staring upwards instead at the small grassy hill that rose behind them, maybe twenty yards away.

  Len Taply came up close behind me – looking up, too, at the hill…and what was on it. He said, ‘It’s been a good many years since I’ve seen one of those.’

  I’d seen several, in my travels – different shapes and different sizes. But I hadn’t thought I’d see one here, in Portugal. It was a windmill, squat and round, with whitewashed stucco and a blue stripe painted round both base and top. It looked, in shape and colouring, exactly like the windmill in the painting I had seen in Deacon’s house; though, in that painting and his photograph, the windmill’s canvas sails had been in use, spread fully on the large revolving frame of ropes and wood.

  This windmill’s sails were tightly rolled and tied along their spokes, the frame unmoving. It looked sadder that way, as though it had outlived its usefulness and been forgotten.

  At my shoulder, Len Taply said, ‘Shall we go take a closer look?’

 
Wendy glanced over. ‘Up there? You must be joking.’ She stayed in the parking lot, with Ivy, but I went with Len.

  It took a few minutes to find the path up, in the tangle of brambles and trees that had covered the hillside. Then we climbed. Len went first, with surprising agility. I scrambled after him, holding at times with my hands to small rocks, clumps of grass, anything I could find. I was warm when I got to the top, breathing hard. I paused to catch my breath.

  I wasn’t altogether sure Len even knew that I was there. He had the contemplative look of someone dealing with a memory – not a sad one, but a memory. And perhaps because he’d done so much remembering today, the private wall that had been holding in his wartime stories seemed to crack from all the strain, and as the thoughts spilt over, it appeared to me he felt a sudden urge to talk.

  ‘I saw inside a windmill once,’ he said. ‘Might even have been this one, though I don’t recall a town close by.’ He looked around, as if to judge the landmarks. ‘Still, it might have been. I wonder if there’s some way we could have a look inside.’

  As if in answer, an old woman trundled past us, leisurely, in a black dress and headscarf, and took up position outside the locked door of the windmill. Turning towards us, she smiled, her face wrinkling more with the change of expression, and silently held out one hand, palm turned upwards, expectant.

  The coins Len Taply offered to the woman seemed to satisfy her, because she took an old plain metal key from her pocket and unlocked the door, motioning us to go in, still with that unspeaking smile.

  Inside, the windmill was quiet, and filled with the scent of old sawdust. A flight of open wooden stairs wound up along one wall into the loft, where at the centre of the bare swept floor the round stone millwheel lay unmoving, a few grains of corn still caught rough in its edges. There was a small round window up here, to let in light, and tools hung round the walls – a coil of rope, a metal-handled rake – but all of it looked old, as though it had been quite some time since anyone other than tourists had been in here.

  Standing in the loft, Len looked around the cramped and tidy space, and shook his head. ‘No, this isn’t the same one. I’d know. I’d remember. Rather exciting, it was, when I went. Very secret. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. Likely I shouldn’t be telling you, either,’ he said, with a wink, ‘but then, the war’s long over. Can’t hurt anybody now, I shouldn’t think.’

  He paused, as though he wanted prompting, so I asked, ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘I was sent to fix a radio. They’d rigged one of these windmills up, you know, to make transmissions from. I don’t remember, as I say, exactly where it was. He drove me to it in the dead of night, this chap. Said here, fix this radio. That’s what I did, you see. That was my job. Not my job in the Air Force, but that’s what I worked at before I joined up. I loved radios. This chap who drove me, he’d found all that out, when he’d talked to me first. That was his job, to debrief all of us who came down out of France, to find out what we’d heard, what we’d seen, what we knew. Just a young man himself, not that much older than most of the boys, and an officer, but he’d been wounded at El Alamein. Had a gimpy leg.’

  Cayton-Wood, I thought, and felt a small thrill of excitement that the stories were connecting up in ways I’d never hoped they would. So Len had met with Cayton-Wood. At least, I thought he had, and then I knew it for a fact when he went on,

  ‘I don’t recall his name. He looked a bit like Douglas Fairbanks. And he drove a big, black Humber limousine. Very posh. Where he was transmitting to, I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. I only did the job, and that was that. It wasn’t much, but being in the night-time, and so secret…well, I thought it was exciting.’

  There were a hundred questions I wanted to ask him, about his time in Caldas da Rainha, and when exactly he had been there, and if there was anything else he remembered about Cayton-Wood, but they weren’t easy questions to work into plain conversation, so I took a more general approach. ‘I expect there were lots of exciting things going on, so close to Lisbon, you know – foreign spies, and intrigues; bodies turning up in alleys…’

  ‘Oh, I heard some stories, yes. But none that would be fit to tell a nice young lady like yourself.’

  He drew himself up gallantly, regaining his control, and I could almost hear the door slam shut again against that section of his past. He told me, ‘Anyway, we ought to go back down and join my wife, and Wendy. Go for lunch. There’s nothing here to see.’

  The old woman, still standing at the open door, stepped back to let us out.

  As she was locking up, I paused and turned back for another last look at the squat little windmill, standing forlorn on the rock-strewn hilltop, and once again I had that bothersome feeling, the same as I’d had after leaving Regina Marinho’s. Well, maybe, I thought, not exactly the same, because then I had felt that I’d overlooked something important, while now I felt more as though something important was missing.

  And then, in an instant, the two feelings melded in one, and I knew what it was. I could see in my mind the old photo she’d shown me of Deacon, with Cayton-Wood standing a few faces over, a tall figure leaning his weight on a walking stick. And over that image James Cavender’s voice, like a ghost in my memory, repeated the story of how he’d discovered his uncle, despondent and drinking alone, after spending the day up in London. ‘… it seemed to me that he was staring at one photograph, specifically.’ The photo of the windmill, like the one that rose now from the hill in front of me. ‘And when my uncle told me, “He’s not dead”,’ the voice went on, ‘I rather fancied he was speaking of the man who’s in that photograph. A tall man with a walking stick – the outline of the figure’s fairly clear.’

  That solitary figure was the thing my mind had missed, just now, when I’d looked at the windmill. From my own imagination I could conjure it, no longer just a shadow. I could see the face, the features – see the man about whom Deacon had been speaking when he’d said, half to himself, half to his nephew: ‘He’s not dead. He should be dead.’

  I saw Jack Cayton-Wood.

  Deacon looked to the windmill again, judging distance, then back to his camera, adjusting the settings to make the best use of the late morning light.

  He’d chosen a slightly different angle than the one that Garcia was painting from. Garcia, with an eye to colour and texture, showed more of the trees in the landscape behind, whereas Deacon preferred the uncluttered, clean lines of the far-distant hills and the ocean beyond.

  The Spaniard looked up from his easel and smiled. ‘You take as long to make your photograph as I take with my painting.’

  Deacon admitted it. ‘But I rather doubt my end result will be as good.’

  ‘You flatter me.’

  ‘I don’t. I tell the truth.’ He did, at that. ‘You ought to sell your paintings, Manuel. You could make your living at it.’

  But Garcia, mixing colours on his palette, only shrugged. ‘I do not think my wife would be so happy with an artist’s pay. She likes too much the money that I earn from Mr Reynolds.’

  ‘Sell your paintings on the side, then.’

  Once again the shrug. ‘Perhaps, someday.’ He was back at work now, concentrating.

  Deacon liked to watch Garcia paint. It was one of the rare pleasures of his week to take a Sunday drive into the countryside and pass a few hours in Garcia’s quiet company, sharing the capture of beauty on canvas and talking of things that had nothing to do with the war.

  It gave him hope to know that all the ugliness and hatred of these times had not yet managed to destroy completely that which was, to him, the very essence of humanity: the simple need for people of like minds to make connections; the capacity for friendship.

  He was mindful, naturally, of what Garcia was, and mindful, too, of his own orders, his own loyalties. But still, he couldn’t help but like the Spaniard.

  Without looking up this time, Garcia dryly said, ‘It is supposed to be the quicker way, you know, to use the camera. We
have been here twenty minutes, and you have not moved.’

  ‘I’m waiting for that cloud to pass.’

  There wasn’t much wind to help matters along, but at length the long cloud drifted clear of the frame, and Deacon, his eye to the viewfinder, prepared to take his shot. He hadn’t expected the door of the windmill to open.

  The man who came out didn’t see them, at first. He locked the door after him, took a few paces away from the windmill and paused, a tall figure against the expanse of blank sky. Deacon, watching him still through the camera lens, wasn’t aware that his own hand had moved till the shutter clicked.

  It was the tiniest of sounds. He doubted whether even Garcia, behind him, had heard it, and Garcia was a good deal closer to him than the man beside the windmill, but instinct advised him to lower the camera as Cayton-Wood turned.

  Garcia had stopped painting, in surprise.

  Deacon couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw Cayton-Wood cast a quick glance at the door of the windmill before starting down the small path towards them. By the time he’d reached the halfway point, his smile was in place.

  He greeted them both, took a moment to admire Garcia’s artwork, then, as though it were quite normal that the three of them should run into each other in a setting so remote, he squinted skyward and remarked that they had picked a lovely day for it. And then he dropped his gaze to Deacon’s camera. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘if I spoilt your shot.’

  And with that he excused himself, nodded, and left them, retreating along the steep path through the trees, leaving Deacon to wonder.

  Not only had Cayton-Wood not told them why he had come there, or what he’d been doing alone in the windmill, but he’d also shown the physical reactions – the faint flush, and the adrenalin-fuelled eye movements – of a man caught unawares; a man who hadn’t wanted to be seen.