by Lorna Gray
Then I added regretfully, ‘There’s concealment in all of it, isn’t there?’
‘Yes.’ In him it was a reference to that question that remained unanswered. And I knew, of course, that my reply must still involve his brother. Only I knew that it wasn’t anything criminal.
The Captain moved forwards, to pass me and reclaim his car I thought, but he stopped when I clumsily put out a hand, palm towards him, as a sign of submission. I had to put his mind at rest. ‘I’m sorry, Captain, you ought to know that everything else she said to me in that house was simply a variation of the usual salacious gossip. She was talking about your brother, but not about his business activities. Today she was distracting herself by talking about his romantic habits … and yours … and warning me—’ I stumbled. I was too sensible to say the rest. Instead I repeated lamely, ‘Sorry, Captain, but you should know I wouldn’t go by what she said about you, I really wouldn’t. I wouldn’t presume … I mean, I don’t know you, but I know I wouldn’t judge you on that.’
He was closer than he had been. I had the sudden absurd suspicion that he’d been approaching me and not his car. To tell me something that would lay my own unease at rest once and for all, perhaps, because he still felt responsible for my distress. Now he took the time to draw his car keys out of a pocket. Suddenly he was bemused and nothing more. My embarrassment was a relief to him. He observed dryly, ‘So we come to it at last. What is this terrible slander she’s made against me?’
Oh heavens, I thought. He was actually going to make me say it; every word of it. Of course he was, purely because we’d already said so much. He kept leading me into blindly telling him things and I didn’t know how to stop it.
I said exasperatedly, ‘Surely, you must know what she will have said. She told me about your brother and his …’ The Captain’s eyebrow lifted by way of encouragement. I continued stolidly, ‘… his efforts at courtship that tended to get a little complicated along the way. She said that you were … well, you know, the same; only the fuss over his death had ruined your chances in good society and so I—’ I took an impatient breath and had to look away. He would regret making me say this. ‘She said that unless I wanted to join the ranks of the … the idle distractions that are a temporary comfort, I—I should be careful too.’
I thought I’d offended him. I hadn’t. Instead he said so easily that it was almost an insult, ‘That’s hardly something you need to worry about. And what did she say then?’
I risked a glance at him and then shook my head. ‘Nothing. That’s it.’
His silence disconcerted me. Suspicion was there in him again, more like wariness now in case a pitfall lay ahead, and I liked it even less than before. The car keys were in his hand now. They were cupped in his left hand and it was hanging free by his side. The other was loosely hooked into a trouser pocket. It was the first time I’d noticed that his hair was cut in the military style, cropped much closer at the sides than Danny’s sandy mess, and dark, without the ordinary working man’s flop over the brow. It might have made him look hard around the edges, but in truth it served to reinforce the peculiar experience I was having of the contradiction of what I thought he was and how he might superficially be described. I suppose I meant to observe that the cut of his hair only mattered in that it suited him.
In the same way, he defied the standard inhibition that should have made this none of my business and told me briskly and quite unnecessarily, ‘You might as well know that I was set to marry a woman late last year who would have kept the scandal-mongers busy for months dissecting our comparative wealth and titles, and finding both of hers superior to mine. But I think we were neither of us as the other thought we were and so we parted company instead. It was around the time I spent my spell in a London hospital trying to remember how to walk and long before John’s death, so that’s another thing I really can’t blame him for. I may have courted here and there, but John and I have very different tastes, and he certainly isn’t responsible for ruining my ‘chances’.’
It was said startlingly dryly and was more proof of the superiority of his idea of honesty over mine. I was still leaning there propped against the side of his car, almost tasting the reek of impending isolation in the air of this place, when he brought me round to the point he’d meant to make all along. He observed, ‘But you aren’t the sort of woman to go by rumours anyway, are you? Because, as you told me just now, you don’t judge me on that.’
I couldn’t look at him again. I said quietly in the pause he left, ‘Please, Captain. I don’t want to hurt you.’
I thought for a moment he had accepted my caution. But then he was adding thoughtfully, ‘I think you are aware of the bar held over my head by pretty much anyone who has ever heard the name Langton – the bar that is occasionally used to give me a stern reminder of my place in this world. Mrs Abbey’s recent efforts are, I think, a good example. But you tell me you don’t set much store by anything she says and so, since you still patently don’t believe me when I say that I’m not about to start treating you of all people as my next enemy, I can only presume that you’ve found your own way of measuring me. I can’t help wondering what that is?’
I knew he had identified the feeling as distrust. It stung me because it was a hard enough judgement to contemplate and I thought he was probing for something deeper; something else within my feelings that I couldn’t even guess at.
Suddenly the other me, the one who was shy of unpleasantness, was back in the fore. I was saying desperately, ‘I do believe you. Really I do. And surely it doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t have anything to do with Mrs Abbey or that man. Can’t we just leave it at that and get on?’
I believe I was ready to throw it all away, even to the extent of abandoning this trip and heading for home, all for the sake of not having to face this single thing. What I didn’t expect was what my sudden plea betrayed to him. His feet shifted. Not with the design of making me flinch, although it certainly did. But to abruptly join me in my lean against the side of the car. I felt the tilt as the springs took his weight. I saw comprehension hit him almost with what looked like relief – to the point that compared to whatever else he had been dreading, this ranked as better – and then the moment that relief faded into reality and the jerk of his head as it turned aside to suppress a laugh.
I heard him say softly to the distant base of the boundary wall on a tone that must have been absolute disbelief, ‘It isn’t what I thought. The clue has been there all along in the way you use my name, hasn’t it, and it belongs to a woman who craves peace. Captain …’
My eyes drifted left to him. His head was still turned away but I could see his heartbeat racing in the turn of his throat at the point where his skin met the collar and both ran away into the line of his shoulder beneath his shirt. He was used to being called to account for his brother’s choice of career, and perhaps even for his family’s as a whole, but I thought this was the first time he’d ever been criticised for his own. His head turned back a little to catch me watching. I raced to explain and made it worse.
‘Believe me,’ I said urgently. ‘Whatever else you think, I am very aware of the gift people like you have given to people like me, who never had to go abroad, never had to do anything except take your sacrifice and grow up and live.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘The war is over, most of the uniforms have been put away and we’re meant to believe the biggest danger that persists from that time is likely to be a petty criminal touting the long-lost contents of some poor old lady’s cupboards that they’d retrieved from the rubble during the Blitz.’ I was watching him. I couldn’t help it. He was very still. He was simply leaning there beside me with his back against the sun-warmed metal of his car while the slanting daylight cast his body into living relief, and frowning a little at the ground before our feet. I’d forgotten that any reference to looting must touch upon his brother.
It took some nerve for me to add, ‘Personally, I find it rem
ains very hard to accept this simplified summary of the way things are now, when I can’t help knowing that a good number of the men I will meet in perfectly civilised surroundings will have lately taken human life.’
I felt his response to that. It conveyed itself through the metal at my back as a miniscule quiver. After a time he let out the tension in a long, measured breath. ‘That,’ he told me, ‘is a very odd way to put it.’
‘It is,’ I replied, ‘a very odd experience.’
And most of the men I’d met had only served as conscripts. This man had chosen do to it, and still did.
He still didn’t move. I felt empowered and feeble all at the same time. If I’d ever wanted to bolster my sense of importance by proving another person’s confidence in their value was a bitter sham, this was my moment.
Only if I had, I could have never forgiven myself and, in truth, with this man it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. So instead, eventually and on a painfully humble note, I added my last meagre crumb of honesty. ‘I truly am sorry. If it’s any consolation, you’re nothing like how I expected you to be.’
His head turned at last. The depth of my apology startled him even more than the rest. Falteringly, I met his gaze. Then I dropped mine to the metalwork of the car between us. He knew I couldn’t help how I felt, but he also knew that I really did care that I’d wounded him. He could read it on my face. I forced myself to bear the scrutiny of those eyes, even though doing it made my heart ache. I was conscious of the way the faintest touch of doubt was lingering at the corners of that mouth as he tried to understand what he saw. Then the puzzlement grew into the quick gleam of amusement. He’d wanted the truth from me. I didn’t think he’d ever anticipated receiving anything quite as honest as this.
Affection grew there. And I, having braced myself for the shame of completing this man’s alienation, suddenly found we were tipping into friendship.
And closeness. We were leaning side by side against that car once more and I was experiencing a shy thrill of comfort in this man’s company; and discovering the sunlight and restfulness that for me must come from the unexpected release of finding that the workings of my mind – now that I had formulated the words to share them – were not to be argued out of existence or into humility. Right or wrong, they were being ranked equally beside those of an alert mind like his.
He was, I suppose, being protective of me again but it was in a different way and for once I didn’t feel like I should resist it.
He claimed my first true smile. Then he said briskly, ‘Shall we get on? I think it’s safe to say neither Mrs Abbey nor that man are coming back again.’
We left a note for Mrs Abbey. It was impossible to know what her intentions were or, indeed, if we really ought to be put on guard by her repeated references to the Captain’s brother, but we could hardly leave the woman unaided. The note told her that we’d seen the man on her trackway, that the police would be told and she and her children could come to the Manor if she was worried.
Chapter 11
‘For someone who seems to crave a quiet life, you sound as if you envy her.’
This came from him after a particularly incoherent lecture from me on the wonderfulness of a life spent charting far-flung places on behalf of the War Office. We were making gentle conversation about something that was easy for me. We were talking about my cousin.
I ran a lazy hand over my hair. ‘Do I? I suppose I do envy her in a way. Since you grew up at the Manor you probably remember that your father’s old steward had seven children. My cousin is the youngest of them and the only daughter. I don’t know her brothers terribly well, but she’s terrifically bright. She studied geography somewhere very prestigious and later, by the time her father the steward died and his widow moved into that cottage, she had work as the assistant to someone important at the Royal Geographical Society. It was her apprenticeship to them that got her the part she was to play in the war. She became one of those fearfully invaluable people who worked right on the edge of things, gathering intelligence and surveys and so on and assembling it all into useful maps. I would have loved to have had something important like that to contribute. Imagine the places she must have seen.’
‘And this from the pacifist. Anyway, they’d have never let a nice young thing like you go. Work and travel of the nature undertaken by your cousin requires a rather harder breed of person. And I don’t, by the way,’ he added quickly as an afterthought, ‘mean that as a set-down. I’m fully aware that most people are capable of extraordinary courage when presented with a certain situation. But it doesn’t mean we should recklessly put every fresh generation there just to prove the point.’
We were coasting gently into a village – the next one along on the ridgetop, which housed the shop that Mrs Abbey wouldn’t use.
The change of speed prompted me suddenly to say shyly, ‘You’re being very kind.’
I saw his eyebrows lift. He might have pretended that he hadn’t understood, but he didn’t. He confided gently, ‘You didn’t actually do anything wrong, you know. At least no more than I.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But it helps that you say it.’ I nearly added ‘Captain’ to the end of that but it was hard to use his title out loud now. Instead I gave a restful sigh as the heart of the village curled into view. It was a pretty little chequerboard of communal vegetable gardens surrounded by the most uneven square of cottages I’d encountered here yet. I said wistfully, ‘I do envy her. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I envy you. You have this confidence that helps you act, secure in the belief that your judgement is sound, even if other people don’t immediately see it that way. I don’t know if it is typical of women or unique to me but either way, my confidence is always behindhand to the act. It likes to wait, to see how the event has been received before the first hint of self-belief finally, grudgingly, creeps into the scene.’
I made him laugh.
Then my exclamation made the car slow. His head turned almost at the same time as mine to see what I had seen.
The short run of houses and rough cottages that made up this village were set on a square built around rough vegetable gardens. Nestling into the wall that bounded the far corner of these gardens was the blackened hulk of what had once been a communal outhouse. There were a few village boys standing about – all limbs and tanned skin and aimlessly kicking about ashes while the smell of charred wood drifted on the warm air. The smell was familiar to me. It had drifted down the valley last night.
The boys drifted down in a similar manner too, only they came to admire the car. Their answer to my enquiry of what had happened here wasn’t very pleasant. Someone had lately relieved the gardens of their vegetables and then, last night, after the agitated villagers had harvested what remained, the shed had been set alight. These gardens had not been the first to be hit like that in recent weeks, we were told, and in precisely that order. I thought it almost gathered weight for that other neglected theory about who had hit Mr Winstone; the one where he’d disturbed a passing vagrant. It was not a grateful traveller who repaid his debt of food in this time of shortages with an act of vandalism.
The other vital piece of news the boys could give us was, however, rather more beneficial for my peace of mind. This was the second car they’d seen today and the other was a black Ford ‘Y’ and it had taken the lane to the left at the end of the vegetable gardens towards Gloucester. We took the road to the right since the Colonel had no tenants in the other direction. It meant we didn’t need to pursue the driver of that car in a race to the next name on the list in the accounts books.
‘May I borrow your other great specialism?’
The Captain’s voice brought me out of a deep musing on the peculiarities of responsibility; the way this man bore the responsibility of doing what he could to manage any threat to his father’s tranquillity, set against the probability of bringing his family name deeper into this himself if he made a reckless choice. In my mind, the latter would have been someth
ing like going tearing down into the streets of a city after that man; which wasn’t, needless to say, a decision I remotely craved. I hoped the Captain knew that. Not that there would ever have been any hope of tracing that Ford in the crowded streets of the nearby city anyway, but there was always that niggling suspicion that, given what I’d just said about confidence and my capacity for uncertainty until it was proved I’d been understood, it was possible that my sudden abstraction of thought might be taken as disappointment that we were meekly leaving that man to make his escape.
With that in mind, I turned my head and said with unnecessarily brightness, ‘This sounds ominous. Which specialism is that?’
‘Did you happen to notice the stack of furniture in the barn back there? At Eddington, I mean?’
The debate about whether the Captain was imagining that I was feeling disappointment or otherwise was proved irrelevant. He wasn’t detecting anything in me and, quite simply, he wasn’t foolhardy. He knew precisely where his responsibility lay. It lay in knowing that I was not the sort of passenger to incite a man into pursuing a dashing chase and it lay in seeking to understand the details of what we had already seen.
There was a certain sharp thrill in discovering how far his intentions mirrored mine. I asked rather more seriously, ‘Did the furniture match the pieces in the house? Some of it was very good in its day.’
‘In its day?’
I explained, ‘Time, a family of boys and a leaking roof have taken their toll, I think. My dad is very severe upon any piece that would require extensive repairs. Unless, of course, it has been undertaken by his workshop, in which case it has been ‘sensitively restored by an expert’. Why do you ask?’
I saw the brief show of a smile. ‘Did Mrs Abbey happen to mention the other rumour that abounds around my brother’s name? The one that says that the hoard the policemen recovered last March was only the tip of the iceberg and he’s got vast troves hidden away yet?’