by Lorna Gray
I noticed the change that came with this last part. It was as if it had suddenly been voiced on a revealing note, rather than with the blinding mask of temper. I noticed the change in the way she was looking at his averted profile, and the way she was suddenly feeling again that path ahead where she truly assumed the label my father had given her. I also noticed the small adjustment in the way Danny was leaning beside her upon the tabletop as something she’d said made his sense of purpose subtly lighten from survival into something equally intense but rather less closely guarded from her.
Movement in the doorway from the dining room drew both their minds raggedly away from this debate. The rooms upstairs had been deemed secure. Richard was passing through the kitchen with PC Rathbone, who was clutching an enormous bunch of keys in his fist – the housekeeper’s set, I thought. They were accompanied by a few other men who were keen to examine Abbey’s lairs in the tithe barn and the watershed. I believe the constable thought Danny ought to be leading them there rather than Richard, but one sharp encounter with Danny’s gaze as he lifted his head told us all what he thought of that idea.
Richard passed my space behind the kitchen counter. There was a moment when he reached out a hand to me. My hand answered and he touched his fingers to mine. A gesture of reassurance and an acknowledgement of my own tasks. Then he was out of the door and walking with five or so uniformed policemen, all looking very correct and straight and determined behind the young and wiry-haired PC Rathbone.
It was hard to return from that light touch to the tangled mood of my companions. Phyllis was glowering at Detective Fleece, who had passed through the other way with a warning that he would soon be requiring this room for his interview with the Colonel. I wondered if someone had mentioned to the detective that the old man was more at home in this part of the house than any other. I wondered, too, if this was the real, unspoken, purpose of the meal I was preparing – an excuse to bring the Colonel in here without injuring his precarious dignity. Phyllis only glared at the man who would dismiss her own important conversation as the inconvenience of a minor domestic disaster. Danny returned his attention to Phyllis – I thought his own manner had grown more gentle. He was still leaning in to rest his forearms on the tabletop beside her and he had his fingers intertwined in an easier grip now. His gaze rested upon them as he told her quietly, ‘We’ve been friends our whole lives, you and I. I’ve known you while the forthright girl of my childhood marched off to pursue her studies and university, and waved you off when you took up your role in the war just days before I assumed mine. It seemed to me that it was perfectly fitting that I should have to meet you again in Gloucester this spring, paddling about in the floodwaters with your suitcase held over your head and barking out instructions to anyone who needed them as though we were merely the grubby farm boys of your youth. To be frank, it was nothing short of a relief to me, since I was one of about thirty tired soldiers who were desperate to be demobbed, but cursed with one more hard duty of battling a flood with sandbags whilst ducking the sort of opportunistic idiots who always seem to emerge from the brickwork in a crisis.’
I’d never heard him run so many words together. It was clear this wasn’t easy for him. It was also clear just how well these two people must truly know each other. They’d grown up together and if I felt war had changed my childhood, I could only imagine the void it had left where their first years of adulthood ought to have been. She must have been roughly twenty-three at the outbreak of war and he only a couple of years younger. I thought it must have been odd for them to meet again, both thoroughly ill-fitted now for the habits and limitations of their old lives and yet still recognisably the same people, really.
He said in a rougher voice, ‘Then your mother died. It isolated you in the way that only grief can. You retreated to the cottage to sort through her things at the same time that I was learning that all hell had broken loose here. I hadn’t exactly reckoned on coming back to find all those in charge either dead or gone and the running of the Manor farm left to me. And, besides all that, it’s been hard enough for any of us to adjust to the shock of meeting normal life at the end of our war service, hasn’t it? I bought my house in the weeks that you were learning that your mother’s will had left you her cottage. I know she only left it to you because your brothers are all married and you aren’t, and she wanted to give you your independence. Only I think she must have also left you her mad old life of retirement, because I’d always thought your identity was the most robust thing about you until you came home weary and disorientated and found another person’s idea of living as a single woman laid out on the doorstep to meet you.’
The Colonel shuffled in, handed me a sherry as if I wanted one, and shuffled out again. I suspected that this was his idea of a strong cup of sugary tea and it told me that he must have heard something of the account of the disaster at the pump house and my part in Richard’s injury. I thought it a very touching mark of solidarity.
Across the room, while I was laying out the last few ingredients for the Colonel’s cold lunch, Danny was adding, ‘I didn’t dare tell you about my house at that time because then we’d have had to discuss why I was still here and staying with my parents. You knew I didn’t intend to go on labouring on the farm here any more, whether I counted as the last man standing or not – and if I’d mentioned the house in Gloucester, it would have been very hard to deny that its rent would have given me the security to set up work elsewhere.’
Phyllis’s brows were puckering. ‘What’s wrong with my identity? And, more to the point, why did you stay?’
For a moment there was a flicker of exasperation on Danny’s mouth that came very close to amusement. ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you at all. Nothing, except the trap of that blasted cottage.’
Then, just as suddenly, amusement evaporated. His voice grew very hard. Those clasped hands were gripping each other tightly now. ‘Do you honestly think that my tiny corner in my mother’s squalid attic might ever have been quite so appealing if you hadn’t been here? This clearly is going to come as a surprise, but the truth is I only bought that house because I could afford it and I’d been advised that the rent it would bring would be a useful income when I first moved away. Patently, however, it was a ridiculous mistake because it has become a lie I don’t need and now I’m frantically trying to sell it back to its original owner after I spoke to the woman about it last week and she said she wanted it. I want to be free of it and it’s a damned good job we settled that she does want it because, as it turns out, I’m not going to be funding my future life. I’m going to need the money now to ensure my parents can stay in the home they’ve loved all their lives.’
His frustration burst from him like a whip. It hadn’t really occurred to me to consider before that anything that had been done here for the upkeep of the estate during the Colonel’s absence had been done by him. This was a man who felt the different calls of his life very deeply, and performed them without anyone giving him much credit for the struggle he had to lay his thoughts before others in the form of plain speech. Phyllis sat up rather straighter.
Danny swept on. ‘I hate that cottage of yours. It has worked its way into your brain. It suffocates your thoughts just as mine get turned to sullenness by the effort of juggling all that work.’ Now he was ducking his head closer to hers and lowering his voice to a rather more private level as two uniformed policemen came in to find the detective. ‘Oh, I’ll admit that our rare days out with the car have been companionable enough, but there’s always been the grim threat of having to return you to that place stuffed with all those interminable trinkets, reminding you to cling to old things instead of thinking about the future. I couldn’t even guess what you wanted from me when you were there. Occasionally you’d give me a glimpse of your usual decisiveness. But in that cottage you grieve and you’re docile, or at least I thought you were until last week. That was the moment when I realised I was going to sell my house. I thought it was perhaps t
ime we talked so I brought up the age-old discussion of my plans but, instead of listening, you started screaming at me about curtains. Suddenly you had an opinion after all. You made me think that all these months of waiting while you sorted through your mother’s bits and pieces had been a deliberate delay, because it turned out you actually wanted the life she’d left for you. It looked as if you’d finally fallen into the trap of that place and I’d scared you by suggesting we went away because suddenly you started lecturing me about becoming the tame companion of your life in your cottage. And then you told me to get out. I wasn’t entirely sure you hadn’t staged the whole thing. You knew I didn’t want to stay here, hoping to curry favour with the new owner of this estate, trying to be the next steward to march in the footsteps of your father. Good as the job might be, that man can’t be me. And it’s taken me until now to realise that the woman in your mother’s kitchen isn’t you either.’
‘What do you mean?’
His reply was touchingly simple. ‘Because this is who you are. This woman before me now. She looks the same, but she has a very different energy. When you asked me just now why it should matter that you’re here and not in that cottage, it’s this. Until this moment it hasn’t so much been that you wouldn’t listen to my questions, but that you couldn’t. Honestly, this is the first time I’ve thought you’ve been able to hear me. When I asked you just now what had suddenly changed for you, I was wondering about the fact that this is the first time you’ve let me know that you’d taken my talk about my plans as a kind of punishment. It explains an awful lot if you thought I was hinting that I intended to leave you behind. I meant them as an invitation. For you to tell me about your own plans, I mean, and say what you truly wanted, and we could work out everything from there. Except, I really, really hope you aren’t now going to repeat your offer to redecorate that cottage …?’
There was a blankness on her face that looked like a memory of heartbreak.
‘And,’ he added after leaving a silence that she hadn’t filled, ‘I hope I’m right for telling you this because the simple fact of it is I’ve been missing you for years and these past months have been making me miss you even when I’m beside you. Now I don’t know whether we’ve got to thank your brief stay in hospital or your cousin, or whoever for this sudden piece of liberation, but this is the first time in months that we’ve been free to act like our old selves again.’
At last, with an effort, my cousin found her voice. She asked him on a cracked note, ‘How can you tell?’
He turned his head and studied her. Gently, he said for the second time, ‘Phyl, love, you stole my dog.’
I thought he meant it as a good thing. He definitely did. I thought that this morning, when he’d realised what she’d done to force him to speak to her, he must have taken it as the first real glimpse of hope that she knew her mind and he was wanted after all. It turned out that there had been rejection on the other side of that argument about curtains too, and the pain hadn’t just been hers.
But I’m afraid the single point that registered through this lesson on the benefits of trying to understand another person’s point of view wasn’t the relief of finally understanding the true nature of Mrs Abbey’s hold on him. It didn’t matter to me that his worry had been the burden of maintaining this secret while he negotiated his way through the complication of selling the house back again. It was the fact that Mrs Abbey was able to contemplate buying it at all.
I knew she was poor. She’d said so, and that much I could believe. I believed too that she’d sold the house to pay for the legal work that had led to her husband’s release. So, if she was buying the house back again now, she had to be buying it on the expectation of future money, and with an idea of gain that long pre-dated Richard’s arrival in this place.
The only other source of wealth I could think of beyond blackmail was Duckett’s share in the business. She was a stakeholder, after all, beside her brother, so the power was there to take it, and Richard and I had guessed already that her plans for Duckett were very final indeed. But, actually, it came as a surprise to find the woman conforming to this blandly mercenary turn.
Or rather, to be truly accurate, it left me with the worry of trying to calculate what other older, baser ambitions might be lying concealed beneath the present ruthlessness with which she and her husband were pursuing Richard.
Chapter 28
I walked through the house to find the Colonel and to tell him that his lunch was ready and then I followed a trail of policemen up the stairs. I’d never been in the Captain’s room before. It was neat and orderly and quietly papered in soft greens and blues, so that the affected grandeur that made his brother’s room oppressive was eased here. It made me realise that, in a way, these rooms did reflect the tastes of their occupants after all. But I wasn’t here to pry. I was doing my job and seeking anything that Abbey might have left awry.
In John’s room, I found that Phyllis had completed her mission to expunge that man’s ownership of this place and had, slightly foolishly, hung my few rather grubby clothes alongside hers in that vast wardrobe. I reached to pull them out and found John’s jacket in the way. It was filthy, like my slacks had been after last night’s excursion, and possibly the source of the faintly sickly smell that had met me on my first visit to this room. Because the jacket’s collar and left sleeve were rancid with dried blood.
It was the light summer coat Abbey had worn during his encounter with Mr Winstone. It explained precisely how the man’s wife had been inspired to tell me that I must have met John’s angry shade on the garden path. It surprised me that she hadn’t simply chosen to destroy this piece of proof that her husband was in the habit of borrowing clothes, just as he thieved other people’s food, but perhaps they’d hoped that the myth of John’s wrath would be a useful disguise.
With the knowledge of how she had spoken of John that night in my cousin’s kitchen, I thought that Abbey must have come here to shed his borrowed clothes after he had left me on Mr Winstone’s path. He might have been lurking up here while I had been speaking to Richard on the telephone. This was what had kept Mrs Abbey from her home so late that night. She’d come here herself for the purpose of consulting with the man about what might be done about me. Then she’d come knocking on my cousin’s door, eager to get me, the only witness to her husband’s crime, to walk her home to Eddington.
I remembered her sudden change of heart when she had spied my suitcase on the stairs and informed me that I was planning to continue my holiday elsewhere. There must have been a moment before that, when she’d intended to take me out there into the darkened woods between her house and mine, and introduce me properly to her husband.
But she hadn’t done it. And the return of this jacket to its hanger represented the time when the plan had still been merely to escape the consequences of the assault on Mr Winstone. But yesterday Abbey had come again for something else. He’d been drawn here for the sake of something that must have grown from their inspiration to use Richard and to think of him as the surviving replica of John. And Abbey had run from me because he hadn’t yet had time to tell his wife about the discovery of the Colonel’s gun.
I found his secret concealed in the jacket’s sleeve. The left sleeve – the one coated in blood – was stuffed with green silk. It was a skirt of mine and it hadn’t been given to the squatter woman with the frock after all.
The skirt the squatter woman had listed had been merely an old rough skirt for menial work and was a different kind of green. This skirt was the other portion of my mother’s old evening gown and it was soft and pliable beneath my fingers. Mine and yet alien to me and hated now too because they’d corrupted it, adulterated it with splatters of blood so that it pretended to belong to the attack on Mr Winstone.
Well, this at least was the harmless part – apart from my natural recoil that slung both jacket and skirt hastily back onto their hanger and into the wardrobe, and the dubious worry about where Paul Abbey had sourced t
he blood. Because this was all Abbey had been doing here yesterday. He’d been secreting this trace of me, which was part and parcel of their plan to leave the scorched remains of my other clothes in the turbine house. He had meant to ensure that Duckett really could be tied to the attack on Mr Winstone as well as all the fires. Unless Mrs Abbey had lied earlier about that part too and this had all been meant as a warning to Richard. But even if it was, it was still harmless because that particular threat was obsolete.
Footsteps tramped along the gallery and drew me to the door. And a silken whisper drew me back again as the skirt slid a little on its hanger.
I was reaching to draw the wardrobe door open as the front door slammed downstairs. A car engine was idling in the drive. Then it crawled away again and after that brief flurry of thinking I ought to gather the policemen in here, I was glad that my private search had found peace again. There was a paper in the skirt and it rustled and tumbled as I fumbled for it. I reached gingerly between bloodied fabrics to retrieve it.
The sheet was written on both sides and the first was penned in that same neat style that had lately been working late into the night filling out the new records for the Manor accounts. It was a letter from Richard dated September 1946 and written to his brother from his London hospital bed in a rather dry humour. It said:
Thank you for your sympathetic note. It is such a relief to know that your long train journey home was improved by the chance to read that particularly saccharine article published in a certain women’s magazine. I’m glad you enjoyed Lady Sarah’s account of her tragic cares for the crippled war hero. I had no idea she’d been so much on hand to assist my first faltering steps out of bed. Nor did I know it was vital that she should tell the world in such syrupy terms about the bittersweet honour of being loved by a man who’d been ‘damaged in the cause of the national interest’. It’s alarming how many people have read the thing. Even the man who mops the floors in this benighted place, would you believe?