“Jamie, leave the nice lady alone,” commanded his sister.
“She was being rude,” he said. “No one else here yet?”
“Mother is still upstairs, and Adrien is in his study,” replied Damaris. “We’ll give him another ten minutes and then call him. Mother won’t thank me for waking her. Perhaps you can do it, Jamie. She’s less likely to bite your head off.”
He stuck his tongue out at her, but did as he was bidden and disappeared upstairs to tell his mother that tea was ready. By the time he got back, Ada had been in with her tray. Jamie sat down and took a sandwich from the plate as Damaris poured tea and handed the cups round.
“She’s having a cup taken up to her,” he said, and Juliana caught the sense of relief that all three experienced at his words.
“Good,” said Damaris, ignoring the glance her brother sent her.
He gave up and took a bite of his sandwich. Damaris helped herself from the plate, then looked at her watch and gave a squawk.
“I’ll miss my train if I don’t get moving,” she said and jumped to her feet. “Adrien said he’d drive me up for the five-twenty. I don’t want to be late back. I’m on early tomorrow.”
“Run up and get packed,” said Juliana. “I’ll bring you something to eat.”
She left Jamie steadily working his way through a plate of scones and took a fresh cup of tea and a plate up to the second floor. Damaris’ room was already tidy, and her case was on the bed. She was folding a sweater, placing it on top of a pair of flannel pyjamas and a tweed skirt. Juliana handed over the tea, and Damaris gulped at it before bringing her sponge bag in from the bathroom.
Juliana looked at her watch.
“I think you must be fast, Didi. There’s the half hour now. You’ve still got time.”
She sat on the end of the bed as Damaris ate a piece of currant cake rather more slowly.
“I’m truly sorry about Mother, Juliana. I don’t know how she can behave like she does,” she said suddenly. “But since you disappeared there’s been no one to rein her in. Poor Adrien doesn’t even notice it any more. He was so distraught at first, she could have set fire to the place and he wouldn’t have noticed.”
She finished her cake and drank some more tea before looking over at Juliana.
“You know, we were here then. I had a week’s leave. It was all going so nicely, until…”
Damaris shuddered. She pushed her hairbrush and comb into one end of the case, and a powder compact into the other.
“Do you remember much about it?” Juliana asked, curious. “It’s so strange to me, not remembering anything of what happened, when everyone is thinking about it so much.”
“It was a dreadful end to a horrid day, that much I can say. Everyone was in a bad mood. You and Adrien weren’t talking again, and Jamie got out of bed on the wrong side that morning. He was ready to fight with his own shadow. He and I argued about something stupid, and then he and Mother got into the worst argument they ever had. Jamie stormed out and left in a rage to go back to Plymouth. You know, he doesn’t lose his temper much at all, but when he does, it’s terrifying. I didn’t see Mother again that day, apart from taking her some supper; she retreated to her room in high dudgeon. Margaret had been over earlier, wailing about something Helena had done. Her father had got into a wax and really ticked them off. Then you and Adrien started yelling at each other after dinner and I just shut myself in my room. I had an awful headache, so I took an aspirin and went to bed.”
She locked her case and stared at the bedspread, without moving. Her voice was subdued.
“No one even knew you were missing until the next morning. You’d been gone for half a day before we even knew! That made it worse. Normally I’d have seen you before bed, and so I would have noticed. But I’d gone to bed early, so we hadn’t had our usual bedtime chat.”
Juliana was interested. She had enjoyed the time they had spent together this weekend; from what Damaris was saying, this was not new.
“You used to make cocoa, and bring it to me before bed and we’d talk,” Damaris continued. “You would tell me stories about China, and I’d tell you about what I’d been up to at the hospital. When Jamie came for the weekend, he had some too, and sat on the bed with us. But that one night, when you needed me, I wasn’t there for you.”
She gulped and looked up. Her eyes were wet.
“You didn’t come home that night. Normally, Adrien would have seen that you were missing. But he went out and didn’t come until late. I remember the police asking why he hadn’t raised the alarm then. And it turned out that he had slept in his dressing room, so no one knew you were not in your room.”
Juliana was surprised. Whatever had passed between her husband and herself that evening, it had been ugly enough that Adrien had chosen not to sleep in their room with her. She had caught Damaris’ hesitation over the words. It sounded as though normally they had shared a room. But not on this night, the one night it might have made a difference. How bad an argument had it been? It did not sound like it had been the first time, either. What had she said? “You and Adrien had been arguing again.”
She realised that Damaris was still talking.
“It was awful, Juliana. When Adrien found your shoes, and your wedding ring, at the bottom of the cliff… he was crushed. I’ve never seen anyone so broken. He could barely talk to the police when they got here. I had to cope with them; Mother took herself off to bed, claiming she was too upset to do anything. Luckily, William came over straight away. He was better than anyone else at calming everyone down. I had to tell Jamie, though. That was difficult.”
She looked cautiously at Juliana.
“Be careful with Jamie, please, Juliana. His heart is much softer than mine. He… I think he was almost in love with you, back then. You were so kind to us both. You know what Mother is like. I came to terms with it a long time ago. Jamie didn’t, and your disappearance caused him a great deal of pain. All of us, really, but Jamie… well, he’s still such a boy sometimes.”
She did not elaborate further, but Juliana thought she understood enough. She had felt the attraction between Jamie and herself already. He appealed to her with his gentle boyish nature, and she had sensed his desire for love. They were almost the same age, but she felt years older than he, even as they drew towards one another. Perhaps that was a result of her life in London. Perhaps it was a result of Jamie’s experience of going to war at such a young age; she sensed that his emotional state had been frozen as a result.
She knew that they got on well; in a couple of days they had slipped back into some old comfortable patterns together. If it wasn’t for Adrien, she thought that she might very easily like Jamie Evans a great deal. But at some point Adrien had meant something significant to her, even if it was not clear at the moment. She read it in his eyes when he looked at her unawares, and felt it when he was near, a physical reaction to his presence that unnerved her.
“I am extremely fond of both of you already,” she said firmly, dismissing her thoughts and concentrating on the present, “and that is not going to change.”
Damaris gave a nod at the tone in her voice. They understood one another.
Chapter 7
Juliana awoke early the next morning and suspected that at such an hour absolutely none of the family would be abroad. Instead of waiting to go down to breakfast, she pushed a note under Adrien’s door telling him she was going out for a walk, and went to the kitchen, where she begged a flask of tea and some buttered bread before going outside on her own.
Her guided perambulations over the weekend had left her with a good idea of the layout of the countryside. She retraced her walk with Jamie, going to the Roscarrock first, then down to the boathouse. She did not go inside, but started to circle back round the estate border. Jamie had pointed out the path that led inland and she enjoyed the climb, the wind cool at her back as she rambled across the moor. She ate her picnic breakfast atop a rock, watching the curlews as they swooped a
round hoping for crumbs, then set off towards the enormous tree that marked the crossing point of ancient paths. The Gallows Tree, Jamie had told her, with a history as clear as its name. It stood not far from the main road to Mawnaccan, and could be seen for miles around from all directions.
“Most useful, for finding your way about,” he had told her. “If you can find the tree, you’ll find your bearings well enough.”
Keeping it in her sights, she tramped upwards, glad she had worn her boots, for the way was rough and on occasion waterlogged. Finally she reached the tree, and the shelter of the little hill and thick grove of furze and bracken that surrounded it. Rounding the enormous trunk, she almost fell over the young man reclining in the fork of its roots. As she steadied herself with a hand on the scaly bark, he sprang to his feet and drew away from her, wary eyes never leaving her face. He was holding a brace of rabbits in one hand; he had been unwinding wire snares from their necks. He stumbled, and the rabbits fell to the ground.
She would have called Jamie Evans lean, but this man was more so. His bones lay close under pale skin, and he lacked Jamie’s air of comfortable finish. His clothes were old and thin, apart from an oiled wool guernsey that was dirty across the chest, covered in lichen and small flakes of tree bark, as though he had been lifting logs. As he backed away, grabbing up the furry bodies at his feet, overlong hair fell forward over a pair of sable-dark eyes that never blinked. The hand that pushed the black locks from his face was long and delicate, the etiolated fingers of the musician or artist, but scarred white over the palms.
Juliana apologised for startling him, but no words were forthcoming in return. He simply stared at her and shuffled backwards, like a cornered animal working out an escape. As he reached the high broom that sheltered the little grove, he gave her a final glare and abandoned his shuffle, turning swiftly and scrambling in ungainly fashion out of sight round the green fronds. She could hear him moving away, last year’s dried leaves and twigs mapping his leaps and bounds as he ran off through the surrounding copse.
A little bewildered over this encounter, Juliana continued her walk, arriving back via the stables, where she spent a happy hour grooming Hester and passing chopped apples around to the various horses as she talked nonsense to them and they murmured back to her as contented equines do. She did not see Jamie until the afternoon, when he was eating an early tea in the kitchen before going to the station and back to Plymouth. He had not been at lunch, having spent the day helping Mags out at the garage.
“I like helping her,” he said. “It’s nice to get messy sometimes.”
Juliana raised her eyebrows at him. Pathology sounded like a very messy business indeed. He caught the unasked question and laughed.
“I meant with oil and grease, rather than blood and formaldehyde,” he replied, his eyes amused.
“Margaret certainly seems to like it,” she said.
“She has been that way since she was tiny. Refused to play with dolls, or tea sets, or anything like that.”
He ate a ham sandwich with gusto. Mrs Fennell had provided a huge meal for him and he was making the most of it.
“Enjoy yourself today?” he asked. “Where did you go to?”
“Round and about. Oh, I saw your Simon Cundy this morning. At least, I think it must have been him. Terribly thin, black hair, dark eyes? Doesn’t talk?”
“That sounds like him,” said Jamie slowly, putting his elbows on the table and almost upsetting his plate, which rocked with a smack in front of him. “Where did you see him?”
“I fell over him, actually. By the Gallows Tree.”
Jamie twitched, and his face paled. “Did he… are you all right?” he asked.
Juliana looked at him, curious. “Why wouldn’t I be?” she said.
Jamie looked relieved. “Well, he can be jumpy, you know,” he replied. “If he gets a fright, he sometimes… loses his temper.”
“He didn’t say a word. Just looked at me queerly and ran off,” she replied.
She thought how jumpy Jamie himself was, and wondered just what he thought Simon might have done. No one else had mentioned that he might be dangerous, but from the little Geoffrey had said, she wondered if Simon had suffered from shell shock during the War. She knew that such a trauma could cause all sorts of strange behaviour.
“Don’t take it to heart,” Jamie said. “There are not many people he can be around. Even the Cundys don’t see him much, and they are family, as Daphne said yesterday.”
He took another sandwich and bit into it. Juliana watched him chew with a smile on her face. His appetite was enormous.
“It’s all the noise, you see,” he said after he had finished his mouthful. “No peace in a doctor’s house. The phone rings non-stop. The dogs bark, and the boys rampage around. They all shout to one another. Aunt Daphne’s as bad as the boys. Most of the time it’s a zoo.”
He looked happy at the thought of the Cundy family.
“Not too much for you, then?” asked Juliana.
“Not at all. I think they are all mad as brushes, but they are always happy to welcome someone new and it makes a difference,” Jamie replied. “They may make more noise than Victoria Station on a bank holiday, but they love each other so much that it just feels like a proper home.”
Having seen his reception by Fancy upon his arrival, and watched their interaction, or lack of it, over the weekend, Juliana could understand. A colder fish she had yet to meet than Fancy Evans. With Juliana herself, she could understand the froideur. Fancy had made herself extremely comfortable at Trevennen; it must have been a shock to hear that the true mistress of the house was coming home. But Jamie was her only son; he and Damaris were the closest relatives Fancy had, apart from a sister who lived in Egypt, and from what Juliana had heard, Fancy got on no better with her than with anyone else.
But to be so cold with one’s own children was what Juliana found hard to understand, even after her talk with Geoffrey. Fancy treated her own children like an annoyance, and it was clearly not something new. How difficult must their lives have been with such treatment? No wonder they sought out other places to relax in. She determined that Trevennen would not be somewhere they would want to escape from.
***
It began raining on the Monday evening, just after Jamie had cadged a lift to the station from Margaret. The rain fell in thick grey sheets all the next day, and it was still pouring down late in the evening when Juliana opened her bedroom curtains before going to bed. She looked out into the gloom, with the sharp scent of waterlogged earth and the constant hum of raindrops falling.
By the following morning the sky had cleared, and the clouds had lifted and torn into puffy shreds that gadded about in a stiff wind. She woke to her bedroom curtains flapping wildly in the breeze from the open window, and the fresh scent of damp earth and burgeoning plant life. After breakfast, desperate to get out of the house, Juliana buttoned her coat to the neck and chose her stoutest shoes, and then walked out along the path to the town. She needed some stamps. There were none left in the desk in the library, where Adrien had thought they would be, and she did not want to have to ask Fancy where she might find some. She would buy her own stamps and Fancy be damned.
The door to the post office and general store was so clouded by condensation that she could not see inside at all. As she pushed it open, a bell rang sharply, and the few people in the place turned as one and looked in her direction, then pointedly turned away. Aware of Adrien’s comments about the whole thing being a nine days’ wonder, and knowing despite her distaste for infamy that he was correct, she held her head up high and walked over to the post office counter. She was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her flinch.
The whole enterprise appeared to be run by one woman, the same one who had bowed to her upon her arrival, an angular woman of middle age with greying hair coiled in earphones and a pair of pince-nez on a sharp beak of a nose. She finished stacking cigarettes and moved over to Juliana with an
unnerving air of expectancy.
“Ten penny and ten ha’penny stamps, please.”
“Of course, Mrs Creed,” said the woman, counting out the stamps and pushing them over the counter. Her eyes were bright and curious, with that same veiled question that Juliana seemed to see everywhere she looked, but she was restrained and polite in her manner. “Can I help you with anything else?”
Juliana was about to answer in the negative when the bell rang again and Simon Cundy came in. Juliana watched the pleasant expression on the woman’s face change to a look of distrust that sent him scurrying over to the grocery shelves with his head down. Juliana was moved to see what happened next, and instead of leaving as she had planned, she turned to the woman with a smile.
“I need some odds and ends. I’ll let you get on until I have everything.”
“Just let me know, Mrs Creed,” said the woman with a pleasant nod.
Juliana moved to browse the postcards, watching as Simon Cundy walked to the till with a packet of tea and a tin of corned beef in his hands.
The woman’s smile faded as she looked him up and down, her eyes narrowing. Without speaking he held out some coins, and she deliberately made a show of checking them before putting them into the till, then handing over his tuppence change without touching his hand, instead dropping the coins into his palm. His face darkened, but he said nothing, instead grabbing his purchases and stuffing them into his pockets. He slammed the door on the way out.
Juliana was bemused to see the woman’s coldness with him, and she could have sworn that the other occupant of the shop, a fat woman in a loud tweed coat, made an odd gesture with her right hand in the direction of Simon’s retreat before turning back to her perusal of the tinned fruit.
Aware that with Simon’s departure, she was now back to being the centre of attention, Juliana picked a reel of black cotton and one of navy, some picture postcards of the harbour in summer, and a couple of bars of nut chocolate. She was treated entirely differently to Simon Cundy, with a paper bag for her purchases and a smile upon completion of the transaction. As she left the store, she looked around, but Simon was nowhere to be seen. Instead she saw William Saxby by the harbour wall. He gave her a wide smile and she walked to join him. Whatever William thought about her coming back, he showed nothing but kindness and goodwill to her.
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