After Clare

by Marjorie Eccles

  It seemed the studio had rarely been entered since Clare had last closed the door behind her. It held the musty closeness of an unaired room, one which faced north so that it never got much sun, though a sizeable oriel window provided the reflected light Clare had claimed was necessary for her work.

  Her painting things still stood in the bay formed by the oriel – the empty easel, a trestle table holding a jumble of boxes of paints and jars of brushes, a pile of cleaning rags – otherwise the room was tidy. It must have been cleaned from time to time, though not recently. Emily could detect a thin layer of dust on the floorboards and, when she approached it, on the cleared surface of the low oak chest of drawers – an objet trouvé reclaimed as a sort of desk by Clare from amongst that jumble of despised pieces despatched to the attics. She pulled up the only chair in the room and at once began to open the large drawers, still stuffed with work Clare had left behind. Two drawers held a dozen or so of her art school books filled with thumbnail sketches and anatomical drawings in charcoal, pen-and-ink or pencil, and there were more on mere scraps of paper, plus a few watercolours and small oils on canvas. Clearly that orgy of destruction Clare had embarked on when she abandoned the Slade had been halted before she had destroyed her entire output of work.

  Someone, at sometime, had removed all Clare’s personal belongings from the drawers and cupboards of the room she and Emily had once shared, and where Emily now slept, and it was in the bottom drawer that she came across what she had hoped, but scarcely dared to believe she might find. From amongst more assorted drawings she lifted the cream morocco leather jewel case, velvet-lined in scarlet, twin to the one she herself still owned. Presents from Aunt Lottie. On the lid were Clare’s initials, elaborately stamped in gold. Inside were the bits of jewellery she had owned as a child, achingly familiar . . . the little turquoise ring, the corals, the carved ivory bracelet and her silver christening locket.

  The pearls were not there. Emily had not expected they would be.

  Wild theories had been put forward at the time of Clare’s disappearance: she had been taken by force, kidnapped, and would be held to ransom; she had met with an accident, or even been murdered. But no demand for money for her release had been received, neither she nor her body had ever been found, and the theories had been gradually abandoned. Difficult as it was to accept, it had become all too apparent that Clare had left of her own accord – though reason still demanded to know why, or how.

  Why had she not taken anything with her, only the clothes she stood up in? How had she left the village without any obvious means of getting away, other than her own two feet? Presumably she had walked the seven miles to Kingsworth – a distance that wouldn’t have presented any insuperable difficulty to a fit young woman like Clare – but after that, what would she have done without the means to support herself?? She had never had any money of her own except her monthly dress allowance from their father, which quite often, uninterested as she was in clothes, she had left untouched. The money left in trust by their mother, for when she married or reached the age of twenty-one, had never been claimed.

  What had been so dreadful about her life – her family, and everything else that implied – that she had felt compelled to renounce it so completely?

  The bitter, unanswered questions, as unresolved now as they were then, tumbled about in Emily’s mind, but the missing pearls went some way at least to providing the answer to the question of money, and why they had never been passed on to Emily when Anthony died, as might have been expected. Was it possible he had never noticed they were missing – or even forgotten their existence? Well, she herself had forgotten them, hadn’t she? And it was quite possible that Anthony had never had cause to open that hidden drawer, especially if nothing else was kept in there.

  Clare, then, must have taken them when she left. Not fabulously expensive, the pearls were still valuable enough to have supported her for an appreciable time. The mechanism for opening the ‘secret’ drawer was no secret within the family – and they were, after all, her own property, to sell for money to start her in the new life she had chosen for herself.

  Chosen.

  She had not been kidnapped, murdered or met with an accident. Emily had come to know that – and not only by inner conviction. She had known for certain that somewhere, Clare was alive.

  The birthday cards had arrived every year: shiny, deckle-edged postcards, elaborately bordered, a picture of the romantically dark, velvety red roses of the kind Emily had loved, inserted into an envelope and sent to wherever she had been in the world.

  Apart from the printed greetings on the front, there had never been any message. The backs of the cards were always blank, but Emily knew without any shadow of doubt they had come from Clare. Posted in London, that great city where anyone could become anonymous if they so wished, the envelopes had been typewritten. Emily had never known whether they filled her with hope, because Clare must certainly be alive, and still cared enough to remember her birthday, or with despair and frustration because they were no help in leading her to where she was. She had known Clare had to be dead when they ceased.

  ‘I must write and tell Father!’ she had cried, running to Paddy, when the first card arrived.

  ‘How do you know it’s from Clare? More likely you have some secret admirer.’

  She ignored his attempt to turn it into a cheap joke, another dismissal of anything to do with her family as of little interest. Even something as shattering as this. The tactic was not new, she had grown used to it, but it still hurt. ‘I know it’s from Clare. He should be told, Paddy, told that she isn’t dead.’

  He was annoyed with her persistence. ‘If she isn’t, she patently doesn’t want anyone to find her.’

  This at least was undeniably true – the anonymity of the envelopes, the lack of any message proved that – but at least Clare had wanted her to know that she was still alive. Ignoring Paddy’s disapproval, Emily had written to her father.

  He, too, had seemed curiously unmoved by her excitement, and she was bewildered by his cold reply. ‘If Clare chooses to cut herself off from her family, then that is her loss.’ Clare had always been his favourite, but he would never let anyone see how much her continuing silence had hurt him.

  How had Clare known where to send the cards? It was certainly not Anthony who had kept her abreast of Emily’s moves. She had always suspected it must have been their aunt who had done so, although right up to her own death she had refused to admit to any such thing, or even to discuss the matter – and why, indeed, should Lottie have helped Clare, the niece of whom she had always disapproved?

  In the end, Emily had been forced to accept the heartbreaking fact that she was powerless to do anything to unravel the old mystery. And when the birthday cards ceased, and she knew Clare must be dead, and really lost to her forever, she realized that even that was easier to bear than believing her still alive but cruelly not wanting to have anything to do with her grieving family, and with the mystery of her disappearance left unexplained.

  Now, with an effort of will she put those thoughts behind her and addressed herself to the contents of the drawers. She braced herself and began a half-hearted attempt at the task of sorting methodically, at the same time searching for something she liked and could keep. She found a few watercolours that she thought she would have framed.

  At last she was left with only one pile, and after staring at it for a while, she pushed back her chair and walked to the window-seat, knelt on it and pushed at the window to open it. It was stuck, but eventually it moved and she leaned out, taking calming breaths.

  This was the view which had been so familiar to Clare, across to Netherley and its Norman church, the bottling factory and the red-brick convent on the outskirts, with the beech woods and the rising line of the chalk hills in the distance. Oddly enough, it was perhaps one of the only windows in the house from which one could not see the old yew.

  She refused to believe anyone could become possessed by
a tree. Yet the stack of drawings on the desk behind her disputed this. Dozens, maybe scores of depictions of the Hecate tree, in one form or another: twisted or writhing, deformed or upright, sinister in aspect or benign and beautiful. And one disturbing drawing, finely drawn in pen-and-ink, of the goddess Hecate herself, standing at a crossroads, tall and grave, holding her two hounds on a leash with one hand, the other holding aloft the torch that would light the way of travellers through the Otherworld.

  Eventually, Emily forced herself back to the desk and shuffled the drawings together, ready to stuff them out of sight. One had floated to the floor. Bending to pick it up, she saw it was a single sheet folded into four, not another drawing at all, but a letter written on onionskin paper that crackled when she opened it to reveal a spiky foreign handwriting in faded ink. Written in French, the only address was Grenoble. It began, simply: Ma chère Clare, and it was signed, Amicalement, Christian.

  Christian. There had only ever been one Christian – that young French tutor who had been with them for a short while that long ago summer, the one who had inspired Clare to take up art. Emily could not, after all this time, clearly put a face to the name, but she remembered he had left to continue his studies and they had never heard from him again.

  She had never heard from him again.

  It was, however, apparent that Clare at least had been writing to him: Emily’s French was not at all good, but the beginning of the letter made it clear it was part of a continuing dialogue. It was dated after she had left the Slade, before Emily’s marriage, not more than a week or two before Clare had done her disappearing act. For a moment, Emily sat, stunned, before attempting to read on, only to find it was making no immediate sense. She needed pen and paper to sort it out. There was no pen, and the ink in the inkwell that stood on the desk had dried up decades ago, but she rummaged in the top drawer and found a pencil and an India rubber. It didn’t take her long to realize she was going to need more than pencil and eraser. She needed a dictionary – more probably, a translator.

  Novak left the official motor in the yard of the Drum and Monkey while he went to make his call on Marta Heeren. After his talk with Mrs Dobson, it seemed to him that for all the awkwardness he envisaged, a visit to her would not be wasted. In fact, it seemed possible she might be more enlightening on the subject of Peter Sholto than anyone else he had yet spoken to, and that included Peter’s own father.

  That last thought, when he found himself passing the place where Edmund Sholto lived, one of two small, identical cottages just outside the gates of Steadings, made him hesitate, then change his plan again. He hadn’t seen Sholto since the day he’d had to inform him that his son had been murdered. The man had not then been in a state to be subjected to rigorous questioning, and in any case in his experience parents were often the least likely to know what their offspring were up to.

  Sholto himself opened the door. Not yet fifty, maybe younger, with prematurely white hair and a scholarly stoop to his shoulders. There was a touch of frailty about him, too, and the elderly-before-his-time impression was accentuated by the baggy cardigan and leather slippers he wore. The eyes that regarded Novak as he greeted him, however, were bright and intelligent. ‘Inspector Novak. Please come in.’

  He seemed to have recovered somewhat from the baffled incomprehension with which he’d received the news of his son’s murder. ‘You have some news?’ he asked at once.

  Novak shook his head, and saw the expectation leave Sholto’s face as he turned away in resignation. It would have been better to wait and see the man when he had something to report. Then he remembered Sholto had promised to look for photographs of his son. ‘Did you find any photos, Mr Sholto?’

  ‘A few snaps, though I doubt if they’ll be any use. Faded by now.’ It had been a routine request, and Novak wasn’t sure that photographs, faded or not, would help, but Sholto offered to get them. He seemed glad of something to do. ‘They’re upstairs. Make yourself comfortable meanwhile.’ He indicated a chair.

  It was a dark cottage, and this room was very small. The furniture was nondescript, apart from a small walnut table and a low chest, both of them beautifully and elaborately inlaid, but the old leather armchairs were deep and comfortable, as Novak found when he sat down, the stuffing escaping from cracks on the arms. In pride of place on the mantelpiece was a sepia photograph of a pretty dark-haired woman in a light dress, a long rope of pearl beads round her neck. There were several pictures displayed, but most of the wall space was occupied with books – so many, it seemed as though Sholto must have brought his entire stock here when he sold up.

  Sholto came back as he was examining the paintings. ‘They remind me of home.’

  Home had evidently been by the sea. Novak wondered if Sholto himself had painted them, a pleasant group of oils, almost certainly amateur efforts. His interested gaze rested on harbour views and fishing boats, angry seas and sunsets; there was one of a lifeboat being hauled in and another of fishermen mending their nets, one of women waiting, shielding their eyes and looking out to the horizon.

  ‘Cornwall,’ Sholto said. ‘I like looking at them, though I suspect no one would place a high value on any of them. I know a good deal less about painting than I know about books.’ He handed Novak several blurred snapshots and a framed charcoal drawing. ‘These are all I have of Peter, I’m afraid.’

  He crossed to the sideboard and held up a bottle. ‘Scotch?’ Novak waved a declining hand. He had work to do and it was three o’clock in the afternoon. Sholto looked at the bottle as if he’d surprised himself, and put it back. ‘I used to be a schoolmaster,’ he said, settling into his chair as Novak examined first the photos, then the drawing, ‘teaching young children, which I found very rewarding. I had a notion that in their tenth year, children are more receptive and eager to learn than at any other time. This is Peter at that same age. An old artist friend did it, the same chap who did those paintings.’ He waved a hand towards the walls and smiled slightly. ‘He was better with human subjects. This might give you more idea than the snaps. They won’t be any use, will they?’

  Nor will this, Novak thought, as he accepted the portrait from Sholto, appealing as it was, a head and shoulders of the child Peter. He had been a beautiful boy, certainly, with close dark curls, high cheekbones and a winning smile. The artist, however amateur, had captured an eager look of bright anticipation. Someone should have told him to stick to portraits.

  ‘We really need something later. I’ll keep the snaps for the moment, though. If you come across anything else I’d be glad to have it.’ He handed the portrait back. ‘You’re a long way from home, Mr Sholto. What brought you to these parts?’

  Sholto contemplated the empty grate. ‘My wife died and the place where we’d been so happy was suddenly too much. Too many memories . . . I wanted a complete change and I became a bookseller. I’d collected books for years, old books, though nothing terribly valuable, as and when I could afford them. I heard that a man I’d bought from was selling his business and I scraped up the cash and bought it.’

  ‘St Albans, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Not my best move.’

  ‘We all make mistakes.’

  ‘A disastrous one in my case,’ he said ruefully. ‘It put me in Queer Street, no doubt about it. If it hadn’t been for Hugh Markham, we’d have been left with nowhere to live, Peter and I. Hugh often came into the shop to buy books, and we struck up a friendship. He offered me this cottage, and occasional work for the Markham Press, as a publisher’s reader. Which means I’ve just about enough to exist on, if I’m careful.’ After a moment he added, ‘I’m not an entirely well man – poor heart, you know – and I’ve been advised to take things easy. So the pace of life here has suited me.’

  Novak said, ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you some questions that might be painful, about Peter. We’re going to have to dig into his personal life as deeply as we can.’

  Sholto didn’t reply at once. ‘Your sergeant searched his room an
d found nothing,’ he said at last.

  ‘That’s true.’ Novak had glanced round the small bedroom that Peter had occupied before leaving Willard to it. Nothing would have escaped the sergeant, and the search had indeed been unproductive, though as Novak recalled, it had hardly been an onerous task. A bed, a chair and a small chest of drawers was all the furniture the room contained. An alcove with a curtain suspended from a high shelf across it had formed his wardrobe: two suits and an overcoat, and in the drawers just the usual – shirts, socks and underwear.

  No tennis racquets, cricket bats, school trophies or photographs, other boyhood paraphernalia. No books – though there were enough of them downstairs. Neat, tidy and anonymous, not the usual room of a boy or a young man. A room where he slept, and no more, revealing nothing of himself.

  ‘Tell me about his friends, Mr Sholto.’

  ‘Friends? Well, there were boys he’d been at school with and so on, but no one special, apart from the Markham boy, David. They were on very good terms. In fact Peter was somewhat lost when the war came and David joined the RFC. It was hardly a surprise when Peter himself volunteered.’ He patted his pockets, looking for a pipe, which he brought out but didn’t attempt to light. He sat with the bowl in his hand, looking at it for some time without speaking. ‘They were hardly more than boys, didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for,’ he said sadly. ‘But then, did anyone? And I suppose it came at the right time for Peter, he was at a loose end after Dirk Stronglove had gone off to live in London and left him without a position.’

  ‘Had Mr Stronglove dismissed him?’

  Sholto reddened. ‘Not in so many words. But I think the London move was a good excuse. I somehow think they were not actually getting on very well.’