Someone Lying, Someone Dying

by Burke, John

  When Walter Blythe left the valley, he left on his own. It started out ostensibly as one of his little sorties, and his wife waited apprehensively for him to come back and tell her about some wild new scheme he’d hatched while he was away. But this time he didn’t come back.

  “But surely she made some effort to find him?” protested Nell. She couldn’t imagine sitting demurely at home and bowing her head to fate if Arthur failed to return from a trip one day.

  “It’s easy enough to talk,” said Mrs Hemming. “Nowadays there’s radio, and police all over the place, and newspapers printing descriptions, and you’ve got to have an insurance card if you want to get a job and there’s all kinds of courts you can dash into and ask for maintenance or for someone to get their hands on husbands and find out what they’re up to … But not then. And a country girl wouldn’t know where to start. She couldn’t just set off on her own. Of course she asked — she got the local minister to do what he could for her, and she waited to hear, and she thought perhaps Walter was in trouble and he’d be back sooner or later. But he didn’t come. So she went to work, sewing and dressmaking, and got herself a bit of money saved, and when she’d had enough of people in the valley looking at her and making fun of her, she worked up the courage to get out and start looking for her husband.”

  “I’m not sure I’d have wanted him after all that,” said Brigid.

  “There wasn’t anything else she could think of.” Mrs Hemming spoke awkwardly. It was not easy for her to speak of obsessive physical or emotional passions. A rough red stain seeped up into her cheeks. “She … always had him on her mind. She used to tell me what fun he was, how you couldn’t resist him even when he’d let you down dreadfully — and although she had plenty to do to keep herself alive, and a young woman couldn’t move about as easily as she does nowadays, she made a sort of … well, a sort of programme, I suppose you’d say … of looking for him. And in the end she found him. He hadn’t even changed his name. He just used to expect to get away with things. It was easier then.”

  Mrs Hemming shook her head, but Nell detected an unmistakable note of reluctant admiration in her voice.

  She said: “But you never knew him, yourself?”

  “How could I?” Now there was the crack of accusation snapping across the room. “My mother and father were going to forget the past and start all over again. They met secretly, and … and he fell in love with her all over again. I was conceived. But only a few weeks later, when he was so pleased — my mother told me he’d been longing to have a child, and for all her looks and the rest of it Serafina hadn’t been any good…”

  “She did produce a son in the end,” Nell pointed out.

  “But who was the boy’s father?”

  “Well, naturally, one imagines…” Nell blinked with a new uncertainty and sat back. The lower sash of the window was open and the trees a few yards away were rustling coolly and refreshingly. It would be so nice to get out of this room and go for a walk to clear her head.

  “Naturally?” Mrs Hemming echoed scornfully. “Oh, it was easy enough for her to make out her son was Walter Blythe’s. Nobody was going to ask any questions, the way she told it. But just you try tracking down the dates and getting them all exact, and there’s no telling — you might get a different picture. Serafina could have married someone else for all we know, the minute she got back home. Or she might have met someone on the way there and … well, you know what they say about these hot-blooded Italians. From all I’ve heard of her, she was the flighty type. Could have got herself into trouble. So Luigi comes along, and she makes out his father was my father.”

  “You’re saying this is all a put-up job by Peter Blythe?”

  “Calling himself Blythe, indeed! He inherited all his grandmother’s bits and pieces and dreamed up a fine story that’d make you break your heart over him. Oh, it’s a nice story, I’ll grant you. But the one I’m telling you is the truth.”

  Brigid looked unhappily at Martin. Nell felt for the two of them. Their wedding preparations ought never to have been spoilt by that earlier shadow; now the darkness was thickening.

  There must be some light somewhere. “So your mother found Walter Blythe here in Lurgate,” she prompted. “And then…”

  “Well, they couldn’t stay on here, could they? He had to take her away and start again somewhere else. And it suited him. The way my mother told it, he was ready to move on anyway. He was restless again and needed a new … er …”

  “Kick?” said Brigid.

  “Stimulus,” said Mrs Hemming aloofly.

  “So” — Nell carefully picked her way — “he could have embezzled that money. It could have been him after all, getting the cash together ready to clear out.”

  “I don’t believe that. My mother never said anything like that. And I don’t think she’d have gone along with it.”

  “She didn’t have to know. He’d have done it without telling her a word. And just when he was all set…”

  “Then your father-in-law caught him at it and murdered him? I don’t think so, Mrs Johnson. It doesn’t make sense. I may not be all that bright, but even I can see that. Why not just expose him, have him taken to court and maybe sent to jail — get rid of him legally? Victor Johnson could still have taken over the firm, all above board, and got the money back to help him run it. No — he wanted my father out of the way. That’s the only explanation. He fixed the books, and he murdered my father. He didn’t know about my mother — nobody did. But he had to have my father out of the way so that there’d be nobody to challenge his story about the money. And nobody to share the profits with any more. Two birds with one stone.”

  Nell was silent. If there was a more rational solution, she didn’t know it.

  Mrs Hemming went on.

  When Walter Blythe had disappeared and the news of the embezzlement came out, Eiluned Blythe sadly believed that it was the same old story all over again. Walter’s feet had been itching to move: he longed for the change they had talked about; but once more it was to be Walter on his own, not Walter with her. He was leaving Serafina, as promised; but once again he was leaving Eiluned, too. She ought to have known.

  He had been giving her money, but now the money stopped. She had to leave Lurgate. She went back to Wales, but not to her own village. They would have asked too many questions, and the arrival of a baby wouldn’t have helped matters. She could honestly say it was Walter’s, but then there would be the inevitable question: Where was Walter this time? She couldn’t face contempt again; couldn’t face either laughter or callous disbelief. She went to a coastal town not unlike Lurgate — a town which in later years was to draw in more and more visitors from Liverpool and Manchester, a town where it was possible to be anonymous.

  Mrs Hemming remembered her mother’s struggles. As she grew up she had helped her. Eiluned Blythe put it about that she was a widow and told this story to her daughter also. She worked as a cook in one of the hotels when she was able to leave the little girl, Betty, on her own: she was allowed to live in with Betty on condition that she took a much reduced wage.

  It was not until Betty was about to marry that she was told the truth. She heard the full story, because her mother considered that she was now an adult woman: she was about to get married, so she was now worthy of confidences.

  Betty married a good man. “And we had a good son,” she said fiercely, glaring at Martin as though daring him to deny it. Her mother died during the war, and after the war the Hemmings decided to set up in the hotel business themselves. They worked as cook and under-manager in a large hotel on the Wirral for two years, and then saw the advertisement for Fernrock Hotel in Lurgate. It was not the only advertisement they answered, but the name of Lurgate tempted Mrs Hemming. She wanted to see the place and live in it and perhaps, one day, find out something of what had really happened.

  But she never told her husband any of the background story, and never gave her son the slightest hint.

  “I can�
�t see what all the fuss was about.” Martin found his voice at last. He spoke shakily, like a small boy on the verge of tears. “All this moral twitching — it’s pitiful. Why not tell the truth from the start? There was no shame in it so far as your mother was concerned. Or you yourself. Why this … this blanket of stuffy convention?”

  “You young folk today are so hard. You talk about anything at all, without as much as a blush. It wasn’t like that for us.”

  “It was all right to lie, then? You could twist the truth any way you liked so long as it kept up appearances. But if you told the truth there was no hope for you — no charity, no understanding?”

  His mother was silent for a moment and then said grudgingly: “Maybe some things are better today. In some ways. But only in some ways, mind you.”

  “She didn’t think of speaking to the others — to my grandfather — and proving who she was, and asking them to help her?” asked Brigid.

  “How could she? She was so ashamed. He’d left her once. Now he’d left her again, and she was going to have his baby — me. And it looked as though he’d stolen a small fortune. She could never have brought herself to utter a word.”

  “It’s funny,” mused Brigid. “It’s … well, don’t you see — it’s almost the same story.”

  “The same?”

  “As Peter’s. Shame … pride … running off and hiding in a place where you wouldn’t be heard of again. Not by people in Lurgate, anyway. Telling people you’re a widow and going on living like that for the rest of your days. It’s such a weird parallel — your mother and Serafina.”

  Nell was staring abstractedly at the open window. Startlingly, Peter Blythe’s face was framed in the opening. His hands were on the sill, and his toes must be rammed firmly again the bricks below.

  He said: “Yes, it is odd, I think. I am fascinated. Tema con variazione, eh?” Mrs Hemming let out a little shriek, but her fear changed swiftly to towering indignation. She got up. Before she could reach the window, which she clearly had every intention of slamming down — preferably on Peter’s fingers — he braced himself, thrust upwards, and toppled sideways into the room.

  “But we do know, don’t we,” he said, “which is the original theme and which the variation?”

  They sat on their favourite bench in the shelter of the white, squat lighthouse on the promontory. The wind was rising, penning the Easter Monday crowds in the town itself. It smacked boisterously against the glass panels of the pier pavilion, against the hotels and boarding houses, and against the lighthouse.

  Brigid and Martin turned towards each other to save their words from being snatched away like torn twigs. But Martin could not meet her gaze. He looked away again, tight-lipped, out over the flecks of light and darkness on the waves. A ragged tongue of black rocks divided the sands into two ochre bays. Water seethed round the rocks, tugging at them, pulling them slowly below the foam.

  Martin narrowed his eyes as though it was absolutely essential that he should see the farthest tip of rock at the very last second before it was engulfed.

  “Please,” said Brigid. “Please, Martin. Don’t just sit there scowling.”

  “Sorry.” But the scowl remained as stubborn ridges in his forehead. “I’ve got this feeling. Only it’s not feeling at all. Numbness. I want to … to do something, but I’m winded. Having this sprung on me — on us!”

  Brigid reached for his hand. It was as cold as though he had been holding it defiantly out to be chilled by the wind.

  “It doesn’t make any difference to us.”

  “I’ll take damned good care it doesn’t,” he said fiercely. Just as fiercely he said: “Oh, you know darned well we can’t just pretend all those things weren’t said. My mother going on about your family, and that dirty little creep wanting things from your family…”

  “We came here,” she reminded him, “to talk about pictures for the flat, and bookcases and things.”

  But inevitably they talked about Peter Blythe.

  “I ought to have bashed his face in.”

  “You think that would have settled everything? Tidied up the loose ends, answered all the questions, sent him away chastened?”

  “At least it’d have shut him up for a while.”

  The sound of Peter’s voice was still in Brigid’s head — a sour, harsh sound as he set about demolishing Mrs Hemming’s claims by scorn rather than sweet reason. She had shown them a locket holding a photograph of a man and woman, their heads close together. The faces were tiny, and the hand-tinting of the picture had faded over the years. One face was undoubtedly Blythe’s; the other, she swore, as her mother’s. The locket had been handed on to her by her mother. Peter inspected the picture and shook his head knowingly. The woman, he conjectured, could just possibly have been his grandmother, wearing a different hair style, but he didn’t really believe even that: it was more likely that the picture was a clumsy fake. If the face was really that of Mrs Hemming’s mother, it had been added to the original.

  Mrs Hemming had raged at him. Peter had shrugged. Was this the best she had to offer?

  Triumphantly she produced her birth certificate. What was this insufferable foreigner going to make of that, then? Her parents were shown on the form as Walter Edwin Blythe and Eiluned Blythe formerly Jenkins.

  “Do you think I’m boasting about being the daughter of a man like that?” Mrs Hemming had cried. “But you can’t deny it. There it is, in black and white.”

  Peter had airily waved it aside. “Anyone they can show the pieces of paper.” Was Blythe such an uncommon name in England? Who was to say that this was the same Walter Blythe? Even if it was, since the man was dead at the time of the child’s birth and only the mother could have applied for the certificate, what was to stop her inventing anything she wished about the father?

  They had tried to explain to him that the birth certificate could not have been made out in such a form unless Eiluned Jenkins’ own marriage certificate, establishing her as the wife of Walter Blythe, had been produced to the registrar. Still Peter infuriatingly shook his head, dismissing anything he did not wish to believe was true.

  Martin continued to stare down at the water. “I’ve had it out with Mum. She can’t come up with much, apart from that certificate. I wish … I wish I didn’t have to believe her.”

  “But she’s sure it’s genuine. Anyone can see that.”

  He allowed himself a wintry smile. “Oh, she’s sure, all right. But for all we know, our precious Pietro has a further selection of jolly tricks to pull out of the hat.”

  “Maybe he was more shaken than he liked to show. Maybe he’ll clear off now, and not come back.”

  “Oh, he won’t give in. That’s the awful thing, you know: whatever this whole business may add up to in the end, he’s genuinely convinced that he’s in the right. He may be a rotten bastard, a sharp boy, out for all he can get — but he does honestly believe that he’s entitled to it.”

  “Your mother believes just as strongly.”

  “Yes, but she hasn’t got much to offer. Against him…”

  Brigid found herself instinctively taking Mrs Hemming’s side. “What would you expect her to offer? She admitted she hadn’t got many souvenirs. When her mother and Blythe were married, they were pretty poor. If he did get his hands on any money, he doesn’t seem the type who’d have spent it on his wife. Later, when he was prosperous and he had a flashy Sicilian wife to show off, things were different. He never gave your grandmother much to remember him by except your mother.”

  “It’s been hard on her.”

  Brigid could imagine that. It had always been hard, but now her resentment must be near to boiling over. On behalf of her dead mother rather than herself, Mrs Hemming had hated the memory of Walter Blythe. Settling in Lurgate, she had resented the Johnsons, who were living on a scale which she felt her own son was entitled to.

  “Your mother and father” — Martin crashed into her thoughts — “are positive by now that my mother shoved
me at you, so that at least one of us could get something back out of the carve-up.”

  “Did you feel that you were being pushed at me?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all right, then. And it couldn’t make any difference now, anyway — not the way I feel about you.”

  Martin at last turned towards her again and looked into her eyes. He didn’t speak. Brigid said, with difficulty, not wanting to coax him but needing to have him reassure her:

  “And you? You’re not sorry you met me?”

  “Darling.” His hand had warmed in her grasp. His fingers curled over hers, gripping them painfully. “Let’s talk about pictures,” he said, “and bookcases — and things.”

  “Things.”

  “Such as being in love. I love you very much. Love, and pictures, and carpets and bookcases and … and being with you. It sounds a bit muddled…”

  “No,” said Brigid. “Not muddled at all. The way you put it, it makes wonderful sense. Particularly the bit about being with me. And as for the rest, it doesn’t make any difference to us.” She must say it over and over again so they would both believe it. “If my mother gets niggly, let her. If she and your mother get together … but no, maybe they won’t even speak to each other now. Pride…”

  “Pride!” he exploded. “Look where it got the rest of them! All that agonising all over the shop, fifty years ago. Everyone stiff-necked and holy and proud — proud of money, the firm, the family name, the right to self-righteous poverty. Pride? You can keep it.”