by Lorna Gray
Now I couldn’t quite read the expression beneath that bruise. It had eased to something like curiosity. I thought that in Mrs Abbey there was a growing interest in my inexplicable stillness, only she couldn’t have known that for me the stillness was contradicted by the pulse I could feel pounding through the contact I had with Richard. Still he had his fingers entwined with mine; not for comfort or kindness but as a security to keep me on his side. I don’t know what he would have done if I had resisted it. I felt that I alone was being asked to choose and I suspected that, in all honour, I ought to be standing with her.
Still Mrs Abbey said nothing. We all said nothing. I turned my head. A few long seconds passed before the Captain withdrew his gaze from her to find I was looking up at him too. He tipped his head almost imperceptibly towards his car, where it waited before the machine barn. His mouth formed a very muted but urgent shape of, ‘Please?’
It went through me like an arrow. He specifically didn’t want me to speak to her. His hand dropped from mine. Under his scrutiny I chose to betray a beaten woman and broke every commitment I’d ever made to consideration and care. I should have been reacting to the inexcusable violence of the awful bruise that coloured her skin, but instead I turned and marched before him towards his car. I went in near-perfect silence. Mrs Abbey made no move or sound to stop us. Halfway to the car I stopped myself when I remembered the cane. The Captain was there beside me.
‘The Colonel,’ I told him in a race, meaning, I think, to find the old man myself but I wasn’t remotely surprised to find that my hand was met and encouraged after only the slightest resistance to surrender the stick to his grip. I reached the passenger door to the car. It was opened for me and I slid in. The cane flashed overhead as Danny appeared in the doorway from the barn and put out his hand to catch it. I saw the shake of his head and the way he mouthed the word gone.
The car door was pressed shut on me and then the Captain was around the other side and in beside me and we were away, taking the turn past the cottages and up onto the lane from the village towards the main road. As we went, I knew I still had absolutely no justification for the choice I had made except one small excuse and it was this. It was the way Mrs Abbey’s expression had changed as she reached the corner of the tithe barn in time to observe the moment that the Captain dropped into his seat beside me. It was the way the ugly lopsided tug of the bruise upon her mouth had changed as she had smiled. Her mood had been lightened by our flight; her eyes were alive with fascination where they ought to have been delivering a glare of condemnation. I’d dreaded that my parting view would have been of a frightened woman and beneath the interest she was frightened; at least her eyes had been fixed and wide as she had watched us. But now my head was echoing with the memory of Mrs Abbey’s only words spoken through the open window as the car had curved past. She’d made a point of thanking him quite seriously for driving her to the doctor’s house earlier, and her children had waved.
Chapter 17
The brief bare ground of the squatters’ camp between all the fields of grain had flown by long ago. It had been possible to discern the scorch mark where the flames had consumed a small outhouse and crept painfully close to the line of tin houses. No wonder the residents had been alarmed.
It made me ask a little tentatively, ‘Did the men from the camp have anything to add when you spoke to them in the field?’
The reason why my question was posed awkwardly was that he hadn’t yet said anything. I suppose I’d been expecting quick reassurances now that we were in the car and that he would say something, anything, to restore our peace after that odd encounter. But he hadn’t. He’d done nothing except set this car at the freedom of the main road to Gloucester and turn those alert eyes to the task of negotiating the thin traffic ahead, as if I wasn’t even here. I felt as if I’d done something terrible in leaving her and that in the process I’d somehow betrayed him too.
Finally he spoke and his answer to my question about the source of the bonfire was a sharp sideways glance followed by a swift shake of his head and then, ‘They didn’t say much, no. They were thinking about getting down to my father’s meeting.’ The car checked with a hard touch of brakes for a turn before accelerating again. We’d passed beyond my knowledge of this area. Our speed wasn’t even close to reckless but beneath his hands the car – his brother’s car – was loving this chance to prove its power.
Unnervingly, I wasn’t entirely sure that the thought wasn’t uppermost in his mind too because he chose that moment to ask, ‘Do you drive?’
‘I can drive. My brother’s friend taught me in his Sunbeam coupé. It was a dream.’
My tone betrayed my unease. I wasn’t quite sure whether the question had been designed to permit me to introduce the awful subject of Mrs Abbey’s last words. But I wasn’t brave enough to do it blind. The car abruptly dropped like stone over a deep wooded escarpment so that the wide fields of the Severn Valley spread in a patchwork from the white pillar of a cathedral tower that must have been Gloucester.
‘Runkled.’ Again my driver broke the silence and this time it really didn’t make any sense at all. After a swift sideways glance to catch my stare as I waited for him to give a better cue, he added, ‘You said your change of outfit would be runkled. A combination of wrinkled and rumpled, I presume?’
Oh. It was as if he’d forgotten that we’d had a minor disagreement about a point of vocabulary once before. I’d thought, at the very least, he’d wish to ease the peculiar shame that had run through that confrontation with Mrs Abbey, but I was carrying it with me. I suppose I felt a little like I’d been sullied by the choice I’d had to make and I was waiting for him to say something that would smooth the thoughts away. Instead I was being made to revisit a subject that couldn’t help but make me feel just a fraction smaller.
It took considerable effort to sound normal as I said, ‘I noticed my use of runkled myself and, actually, I’ve thought about it and I’m pretty sure it’s a valid term. I swear I learned that one from someone else.’
‘I’ve never heard it.’
‘In which case,’ I retorted slightly less patiently, ‘it’s a legacy of war.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Really. And how, may I ask?’
High hedges streaked by and the occasional cottage gleamed grey in the gaps. We were racing along a road that led like a spear straight towards the distant prospect of the heart of the city.
Suddenly energy awoke within me. I fidgeted in my seat so that the leather squeaked. I told him, ‘I believe you’ll find that my grasp of the English language lies abandoned somewhere in an underground station that was doubling as an improvised schoolroom in an air raid. It was accidentally left there after a particularly disrupted – and final – grammar lesson at the age of thirteen and fifty-one weeks. I never went back to claim it.’
The tartness of my reply made a brief touch of what presumably was amusement show at the corners of his mouth. Probably because he could tell it blatantly wasn’t true. The occasional entanglement of my word use was a weakness that was a part of me and stalked me as a faithful reminder of just how endlessly difficult I found it to voice precisely what was in my thoughts. Impatience made me try a little harder.
I asked, ‘Did you see much of my pursuit of that man? Did you come back with Danny from the field in time to see me follow him through your house?’
‘What man?’
It must be said that I really didn’t expect this bland reply. I was, in fact, utterly stupefied. It wasn’t just the absolute denial of what we had shared but the manner of it. His profile was relaxed, calm and conveyed mild curiosity. He steered the car around a bus. Blindly, I clung stubbornly to the thought I had that I was supposed to tell him this. ‘I met that man today in your house when I was looking for your father’s cane. He ran when I spotted him so I followed him out, only you held me back and left Danny to run onwards on his own. Why did you do that?’
‘Why do you think?’
I watched him as I said slowly, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
In truth I hadn’t the faintest idea about any of it. Houses closed in; the vast hangars of an airfield retreated beyond our wing and I barely saw any of them. This wasn’t merely the old confusion of reaching for the right words to convey precisely what I meant. In my mind was the memory of the way he’d steered me as he’d led me quietly back to the house for a chat just so long as he’d thought we were only dealing with imposters and itinerant arsonists. But then Mrs Abbey had appeared on the scene and he’d practically bustled me into his car. I believed I never would quite escape the chill that had possessed the way he had said the word please.
I said carefully, ‘I believe you meant to prevent me from speaking to her, or rather stop her from speaking to me and I thought that was why you brought me along. I thought you meant to explain.’
He didn’t explain though. He negotiated a junction and then, as the first houses of the city closed in, I found that I was suddenly in the midst of a long lecture about the people hereabouts and the River Severn. He paid particular attention to its tidal bore and the local adoration of jellied eels.
It was so mundane, it felt like an insult. As he did it, the man beside me was looking the way he always did and yet also completely unlike himself. He was calm, concentrated and unnervingly attractive, which didn’t seem right at all because it wasn’t like him to capitalise on it. It was as if he’d decided I was a stranger and was tactically evicting me from this scene by any means possible, even to the point of using charm; quite as if I hadn’t myself just been party to the abandonment of a woman with an awful bruise on her face to a lonely and unguarded walk back to her isolated farmstead. He was making absolutely no allowance for my own raging guilt.
It made me say loudly into a pause, ‘Do you know, I’m increasingly concerned that despite everything, Mrs Abbey might be the victim of this thing, not the perpetrator of it.’
That got though. ‘Fine,’ he said at last in a tone that implied we might have been bickering about the availability of eggs. ‘Since you clearly are determined to make a point here, I really ought to let you get it over and done with. Do you want to ask me if I hit her?’
He knew I didn’t. He’d just said it for effect. My exclamation came out as though I’d received an act of violence myself. ‘No!’
Then I added gingerly, doubtfully, ‘Did Danny?’
The question provoked a short, hard laugh. ‘You don’t like Hannis much, do you?’
‘I feel as if I can’t get to know him. But you should; he’s your old childhood friend and yet you call him Hannis when you could call him Danny and he doesn’t like it.’
‘Emily, I call him Hannis because, given our respective positions in this place now that we’re grown men, to call him Danny would be to risk dismissing him to the level of old-time Manor servant. Particularly as situations must inevitably still arise when he would have to address me as ‘sir’. Elsewhere we could forget it. Here the use of surnames is the best balance we have. And, anyway, he calls me Cap’n. I doubt you’ll find he means to imply much respect by that.’
While the brief flare of better humour faded, the real question hung unanswered. He finally said firmly, ‘No. I do not believe Danny Hannis struck Mrs Abbey. For the sake of curiosity, whatever would make you ask?’
‘Because there’s something between them—’
‘Between them?’
The way he repeated my words made me flush. I was fighting an increasingly desperate battle to assert some control over what I said and how he took it, and finding it all systematically eroded. It touched a nerve. I’d experienced this before and not from him. I said in a hard little voice, ‘Yes. And when he spoke to you in the yard this morning, he said very specifically – as a warning, I thought – that he’d seen her face.’ And in my head was the Captain’s awful reply; grim and resigned. I know.
Unexpectedly, my question seemed to shake him. I mean it shook him out of the concealment I now knew he was trying to exert here. I saw his mouth suddenly lose its air of disinterest. He took a shallow breath and then another and with an urgency which was quite unlike the rest of his carefully unhelpful answers, he told me briskly, ‘That was something else. Nothing. It doesn’t have anything to do with Mrs Abbey. You needn’t concern yourself with that.’ It was for the first time an honest plea.
I saw his hands shift on the wheel. An almost angry narrowing of his gaze as he searched out some guiding landmark on the road ahead, and used it to avoid meeting my stare. There was something here that could wound, that was somehow more unpleasant to him than his strange decision to make a secret of his hunt for the man who had invaded his house.
After some time while the buildings around us grew from stained brick terraces into warehouses and grand company frontages, he risked a glance at me. He caught me watching and what he read in my expression he didn’t like. And that was the moment I realised that Danny Hannis hadn’t been warning this man about the marks on Mrs Abbey’s face. Danny had been commenting on the emotion he’d read on mine. It was my face that had raised comment and my feelings that had caused him alarm. And now this man beside me had attempted to make a hasty deceit of it. And it was both touchingly protective and humiliating at the same time. I’ve never known mortification like it.
I’d already been feeling unnerved by all these things I couldn’t quite comprehend. This was a crushing, burning shame. It made me feel like the delicious conflict between what I kept presuming he must be and what I was repeatedly discovering he was – and the confusing power of the latter – must have been drooping from my lips like the simpering of a dewy-eyed schoolgirl. Suddenly I had no control whatsoever over how my mouth shaped itself. My face felt bloated like a gargoyle’s. I couldn’t settle to any particular expression and I couldn’t look at him because then I’d have to test how he himself had perceived the rushing in my heart and watch him struggle to tactfully meet whatever awful contortions were marking my face now. It made me lurch into speech purely for the purpose of refuting the idea that there had ever been any warmth inside me at all.
I turned my gaze fiercely to the dirty terraces passing outside my window and said with such airiness that it betrayed my disgust, ‘Do you know, after our misunderstanding yesterday I’ve realised I don’t know how to address you any more. ‘Captain’ seems a touch pointed now.’
The car had slowed to wait at a junction. ‘Well, make it Richard, then.’
There was unease in the way he said that. He knew that I’d guessed this particular secret. It also made me suspect that I might have called him by his name from the start. The use of my first name by him hadn’t been a mark of my inferior status but an assumption that there was no distinction to enforce between us at all. It was horribly disarming, but I was already sweeping on with all the blind bitterness of a woman who had thought she was playing a part of quiet usefulness, only to learn that she had cast herself in the role of a slavish fool who was almost certainly becoming an ever- increasing liability. I said in that same brittle tone, ‘So I wondered if, instead, I should take the other tack. I wondered if I should call you Langton …’
He concealed his flinch well. It was a terrible thing to say. It was the kind of cruelty that was born from the sheer dumbfounding agony of finding myself exposed here, and I had no right to do it. I suppose he might have taken it as a clumsy demonstration that he wasn’t alone and I had at least guessed something of what had disturbed him in that encounter with Mrs Abbey, but he didn’t. It still didn’t suit him to shed these secrets. They bubbled away in that house and multiplied with loneliness and his father had been right to worry because now they were working to claim this man’s decency too.
I knew they were because while I rushed headlong into a genuine and heartfelt apology for the appalling barb, my eyes took in the shabby frontage of the building that was looming alongside our slowing car.
I found my pulse settling back into cold reaction. He could
read any emotion he liked in my eyes now. They were all there, plain to see. I forced out the words in an unnatural snarl. ‘The railway station? This is where you’ve been taking me all this time?’
He didn’t have a reply. The car slid to a stop with a hiss of brakes and after a few painfully speechless seconds, his hand moved to set the handbrake and silence the engine. Without the roar of the motor, I could hear the distant cry of the announcer and one sharp blow of a conductor’s whistle.
In that same altered voice, I said, ‘You’re packing me off back to parents and London and you didn’t even leave me time to collect my clothes, or a jacket and handbag … or money.’ My breath caught on the shock of comprehension. I said slowly, ‘That’s why you wanted me to bring my bags with me on our outing today. You never were going to carry me and my cousin back to her cottage. You were merely intending to soften the blow by breaking it to me over lunch first.’
I’ve never known revulsion like it. The feeling in itself scorched every nerve. ‘Did you …?’ I had to stop and begin again. ‘Did you have this in mind all morning?’ I meant from the awful moment that I’d been rattling on about my cousin’s letter as if honesty mattered. My mind shied from the rest of that conversation. I continued in that same voice ripped to roughness by disgust. ‘Or did it come about when I first mentioned Duckett by name and you thought I’d been speaking to Mrs Abbey?’
I saw his head tip in the only brief, uncontrolled gesture that betrayed his frustration at being brought back yet again to the subject of Mrs Abbey. For me it was inescapable. For him it was rapidly suppressed to the level of an inconvenience. With his gaze fixed on the people milling outside, he conceded carefully, ‘I was going to ask you about it over lunch. But time’s slipped away from me and circumstances have … changed.’