The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  “My motive was revenge. Revenge for the occupation of my island. Revenge for driving off my parents. Revenge for the years that he’d spent in my house unjustly. I wouldn’t have killed him myself, but I didn’t see any reason to prevent his death either.”

  Yes, thought Franca, that’s understandable. Hardly anyone could fault her for that. No one would fault her. But she — she won’t forgive herself for it. She’s never gotten over it.

  “You let Dr. Wyatt in on it then?” she’d asked matter-of-factly, really just to have something to say without having to respond to Beatrice’s answer.

  “We had to let him in on it. He couldn’t have said that he’d already been at the house on account of Pierre. He wrote the death certificate for Erich, claimed that Erich had attempted to kill himself by shooting himself in the head and in the end had bled to death from the failed shot just over his heart. He took care that the body was carried off and buried. He promised us that he would keep silent about the actual course of events that May 1st. To him, of course, we acted as if we’d wanted to save Pierre. Wyatt understood it to have been an extreme situation in which, as he saw it, we couldn’t have acted any differently. He was thankful that we hadn’t told him anything about Erich when he was there that afternoon, because he wouldn’t have been able to reconcile it with his conscience and with his professional oath to refuse Erich medical help. But this way he hadn’t known, and thus he didn’t have to rebuke himself. He explained that he would tell his wife, because she knew already that he had been with Pierre and had been entirely within reach all day. Mrs. Wyatt would keep quiet, we knew that.” Beatrice had smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “And now, after all this time, she apparently spilled the beans, right? I don’t think you can be angry with her for it. She’s well over ninety, and she’s probably not all there anymore. Things are certain to be no different for us at her age.”

  Five people, thought Franca. Five people knew about it and kept silent. And it probably kept Beatrice more tightly bound to Helene than she thinks. They had committed a crime together. It had melded them together, even if it wasn’t clear to them.

  She went farther along and suddenly saw a man sitting on a bench, and even though she couldn’t recognize his face, she knew that it was Alan.

  They were pretty far away from The Terrace, on the broad street that led to the pier where tourists’ cars were loaded onto ships. On large signs the names of the ferry connections indicated which lanes one had to steer into. At this hour of night there was no one around. Large arc lights threw bluish light onto the parking lots and the empty, silent administration buildings. The water lapped quietly at the quay wall.

  She walked up to Alan and said carefully, “Alan? We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  He turned towards her.

  How anguished he looks, she thought sympathetically, and how lonely.

  “Oh, Franca, it’s you. What are you doing here this late?”

  She was stunned to realize that he wasn’t drunk. He might have had a few glasses of wine over the course of the day, but there was no question of it being a significant amount. The bar crawl Beatrice had been convinced he would undertake that evening had obviously not taken place.

  “Like I told you, we’ve been looking for you. Your mother and I.”

  “Where is my mother?”

  “I sent her home. She’s not doing well today. Helene and the rest of it …,” she made a vague motion with her hand. “You know.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  He looked back out towards the water, and she lingered for a while, hesitating, then sat down next to him.

  “Wouldn’t you like to come back home with me?” she asked. “You can’t very well keep sitting here all night.”

  “How late is it?”

  “After eleven o’clock already. Just about half past.”

  “I don’t know … I think I’d like to stay here a while longer.”

  “Beatrice is worried about you.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I’d bet anything she thinks I’m plastered! That’s why she’s been combing all of St. Peter Port, right? And you’ve got to give up time and sleep for it too. Mum thinks I’m down here stumbling around, at some point I’ll black out and fall in the harbor.”

  Franca’s first impulse was to deny this — “What are you talking about, we were just worried when you didn’t turn up for dinner!” — but then this seemed to her to be too see-through, and too dishonest on top of that.

  And so she asked, “Is it any wonder that she thinks that? I don’t think you can seriously blame her for it.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said wearily. “I guess I can’t.”

  “But you haven’t been drinking,” Franca offered. “Your mother will be very relieved.”

  “And very surprised,” he said. “Above all, she’ll be surprised.”

  Again he turned away.

  “Would you rather I went?” Franca asked. “And left you alone?”

  He was silent for a moment, and just as Franca was considering whether she should repeat her question, he said abruptly, “I broke it off with Maya. It’s final. There’s no going back.”

  “Why?” Franca asked, and a second later she could have kicked herself for making the comment. She knew Maya, she knew what she’d done to Alan. And Alan knew that she knew. How dumb her question must have seemed to him. But he said, very calmly, “She’s even more depraved than I suspected. The things she’s done are much worse than I thought. I invested time, energy, and love in a regular …” He hesitated, didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he said, “it makes no difference now anyway.”

  “Maya is young and careless,” said Franca. “Maybe she’ll become an entirely upstanding person once she’s thoroughly indulged herself.”

  “I don’t know. To be honest, I doubt it. Today she told me a few things about herself that any normal person can only come to the strictest possible judgment against. She has no morals, Franca, not in the least. She has no sense of honor. She has no pride, either, since once honor goes, pride’s out the door too. There are no boundaries for her, and no restraints. She lives as she pleases. The feelings of others don’t interest her one bit. She doesn’t even bother herself with notions like respect for others’ property or something so musty as law and order. These values have no meaning for her. We’re not talking about a careless youth anymore or a pronounced need to really live it up. That’s her character. Immoral and dishonorable. And I loved this woman. Oh God,” his voice got very quiet, it sounded like broken glass. “I really loved this woman.”

  Franca had no idea what Alan might have found out about Maya, but she understood that it must have shaken him, and that he was at the limit of his strength. So much so that this time he hadn’t even sought calm and comfort in alcohol, since in that case he would have sunk deep into a bar and would have kept drinking till the next morning. His despair pierced her heart, and she said, “It’s awful, I know. It’s awful to learn the complete truth about a person. It doesn’t even have to be something dramatic. I think that to look into a person’s every recess is always difficult to bear. In any case, it destroys a host of illusions, and we barely get over having to say goodbye to the images we’ve formed of a person. It hurts, and it makes us profoundly unsure.”

  Finally he looked at her again. His features were full of sorrow, but very gentle. “Yes, that’s just how it is. It has us reeling when we expose something to be an illusion. Maybe it has to do with our entire capacity for judgment being called into question at that moment. Where else have we so fully deluded ourselves? Why didn’t we realize earlier what was wrong? Why were we so blind? And so deaf?”

  “It’s not just that,” said Franca. “Of course we get hit with self-doubt, fears, insecurities. But I think the worst part is that our feelings are hurt. Above
all, it’s these that were deceived, much more than our judgment. There’s hardly anything that hurts as much as disappointed feelings.”

  “They heal with time,” he said softly, more to himself than to her. “That at least is certain. Eventually, they heal.”

  She would have liked to tell him something comforting, something that would have renewed his strength and driven the terrible hopelessness from his voice, but she wouldn’t have known anything else to say other than this truism, which he had just uttered himself, but which arose only from his mind, not from his heart.

  “Beatrice heard something about Helene from Kevin that’s got her completely out of sorts,” she said. Beatrice hadn’t explicitly made her promise not to speak with anyone about this; Franca herself had felt that the matter was to be held in confidence. Nevertheless, she thought at that moment that she could justify telling Beatrice’s son about it: In order to take his mind off his profound sorrow, in order to show him that what he had come up against was something that every person came up against, that every day someone was affected by it.

  “About Helene?” Alan asked. “Kevin knew something that Beatrice didn’t?”

  “Oh — I believe Kevin was her closest confidant. Helene was thoroughly frightened of Beatrice’s sharp tongue, but with gentle Kevin she felt she was understood.”

  Alan smiled slightly, not seeming any more cheerful. “Did dear Helene have a secret love affair? A passionate relationship over the years that no one knew a thing about?”

  Franca returned his smile, for no other reason than to take it up herself and so keep it alive a moment longer. “No, I think she actually remained faithful to her Erich even after his death. And she had some reason to do so: before he died, he made her a terribly rich woman.”

  “Helene was rich?” Alan asked, unbelieving. “Our Helene?”

  “She was sitting on a fortune. Literally. Most of the money she had in her room, in the wardrobe. But bit by bit she also spread large sums across various bank accounts. She must have had almost half a million pounds. Again and again she helped Kevin out with his constant financial woes — probably in order to make herself interesting and important for him, and to maintain a hold on his affections. It eventually occurred to Kevin, too, that it was impossible for her to pay all of it with only her pension, and he asked her where the money came from. She couldn’t keep it to herself, and told him the truth. From then on Kevin was a regular customer. He took money from her by the thousands.”

  “But where,” asked Alan, deeply confused, “did Helene get a fortune? I mean, where did Erich get it, if you’re saying she received it from him?”

  “From Jews,” said Franca. “Erich had enriched himself on Jewish property. He was often in France during the war. He took possession of loads of money and jewelry belonging to French Jews, who had been driven from their homes and deported. And there were two wealthy Jewish families on Guernsey whom he’d promised to help flee in exchange for everything they had. He got what he wanted, but he let the wretches walk right into the arms of the patrols on the coast and then had them shot. In any case, he left behind a well-provided-for widow, who was better off by far than anyone thought.”

  “Was Helene aware?” Alan wanted to know. “I mean, during the war, did she always know what her husband was up to, and that a sizable fortune was accumulating in her house?”

  Franca shook her head. “No. She didn’t know. He told her the day he died. She sat with him, hour after hour, until he was dead. And at some point in these long hours he told her about the money and where she could find it. Beatrice was outside in the garden. She didn’t hear any of it.”

  “My God,” Alan murmured. “And all these years …”

  “… She didn’t say one word about it. Being in possession of a fortune would have put her in too strong of a position. In the end, Beatrice would have actually managed to turn her out the door.”

  “She always complained about having so little money,” Alan remembered. He seemed upset and confused. “Sometimes she would add up for us what she got from her pension, and she would say it was too little to live on and too much for dying. And you could see for yourself somehow that it was true. It really was very little.”

  “One of her many tricks for making Beatrice look after her all her life,” said Franca. “She fought with every means she had. Hers was an absolutely egocentric personality.”

  “And only Kevin knew …”

  “Yes, and naturally he was careful not to say anything. He wanted to be the only one milking the cow. On the day of the funeral he snuck into your mother’s house. He was going to search Helene’s room in the hope that he’d find some of the money there. But he came across Beatrice, and finally he confided everything in her. He seems to be stuck in a state of dramatic financial urgency.”

  Alan screwed up his eyes. He looked more awake than before, no longer as sunk in his despair. Something rapt and attentive was in his face.

  “So Kevin was the only one who knew,” he said slowly. “Kevin knew, and Helene was murdered. On the night that she was Kevin’s guest. On the day of the burial, Kevin tried to find the money …”

  Unspoken, and yet distinct and unmistakable, the suspicion hovered between them. Franca gasped with horror.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Not Kevin! I can’t imagine that.” But she saw in Alan that he could absolutely imagine it. And even she had realized by now that in the end there was nothing that was unimaginable.

  “Come on, let’s go home,” she said.

  5

  The next morning there was nothing left of the radiant, beautiful weather, as if sometime in the night someone had flipped a switch to signal rain. The air had been mild and the sky clear as Franca and Alan had come back to the house and walked up the drive. Not one of the windows had been lit.

  “I hope so very much that Beatrice was able to go to sleep,” Franca had said. “She looked so bad earlier. She desperately needs rest.”

  They had crept up the stairs on tiptoe. At the door to Franca’s room they had paused, and Alan had pressed Franca’s hand. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What for?” Franca asked.

  “For looking for me and bringing me home.”

  She was suddenly embarrassed. “Please … it was nothing … I’m happy you’re doing well.”

  “No,” said Alan. “It wasn’t nothing. It was, however, very kind of you.”

  “You helped me once, too,” she reminded him. “That time it would have been easier for you to ignore this half-cracked foreign woman. You didn’t know me at all.”

  “You were leaning on my car. I couldn’t ignore you.”

  “Still, you didn’t have to make as much of an effort,” Franca insisted, and at the same time she thought, here it was again, the typical, awkward way she had of speaking to a man. She found him attractive, she liked him, and it was a warm, quiet night.

  Anyone else, she thought, would have flirted a bit at this juncture. Or would have said something that cast them in a good light, something witty, zippy … and I stand here like a stump and swap polite clichés with him … Oh God, he must think I’m dreadfully boring.

  “So each of us has taken greater than usual pains for the sake of the other,” said Alan, and Franca thought she picked up a very faint undertone of irritation, or at least annoyance, in his voice.

  She did something crazy. Something she had never done before, something she would never have thought she had the courage for: She stood on tiptoe, brushed his cheek with a kiss and said quickly, “I’m sorry, I talk an awful lot of nonsense sometimes!”

  And then she vanished into her room, quickly closed the door and thought how at least this once she had done what she had felt like doing. Even if Alan found her behavior ridiculous and forward, still she believed she could stand by it, because it had matched what she had be
en feeling at the moment.

  She saw him again the next morning at breakfast. When she came downstairs, he was already in the dining room, sitting down to cereal with fruit, toast, and coffee. When she walked in he put the paper he had been reading aside, stood up and gave her a kiss. “Good morning,” he said. “Did you sleep well? In the few hours that were still left of last night, I mean.”

  “Like a log,” she said. “I fell right into bed and I was out.” She looked at the window. “What a shame that the weather’s turned. Yesterday it was almost like midsummer, and now …” Rain gushed down from the sky, and thick clouds hung close to the horizon where the ocean was, though nothing could be seen of it today. The trees bent in the wind.

  “The weather here changes quickly,” said Alan. “But luckily that means the rain doesn’t last too long either. It’s entirely possible that we’ll have sunshine again this afternoon.”

  Franca sat down and pulled the coffee pot towards her. She felt a bit self-conscious and wished she could find some harmless topic of conversation, but naturally nothing occurred to her at that moment.

  “Wouldn’t you like to eat something?” Alan asked. “A piece of toast at least?”

  She shook her head. “Thanks, but I almost never eat anything this early in the morning. Which means at ten o’clock I get terribly hungry and wolf down something senseless, like chocolate.”

  “Ah, well, you can get away with it.” He played around with the toast on his plate, crumbled it between his fingers. “I’ve been thinking,” he said finally. First he had thrown a quick look at the door and lowered his voice somewhat. “I don’t think we can just keep our suspicions to ourselves. We’ve got to speak to the police.”

  “What suspicions?” Franca asked, surprised.

  “Kevin,” said Alan. “What you told me yesterday … Helene’s money. Kevin, as the only one who knew about it …”

  “That’s according to Kevin,” Franca quickly interrupted him, “he says she told only him. But we don’t know that. Maybe she told a few other people.”