by Anne Morice
“I don’t know, Toby. It covers a lot of the ground, but not all. For instance, for how long did James imagine he could keep up the pretence that he and Andrea would be able to marry? He must have known that this could only happen when there was proof of Rosamund’s death, which is the last thing he’d have wanted.”
“I am not a magician and I can only tell you how things were up to the time of his arrest, not what he had in mind to do, if that had never happened. My guess is that he was so infatuated with the silly creature that he did not try to see further ahead than a week or a month. He simply snatched what he could, while he could.”
“And you haven’t produced any explanation for the fire.”
“Oh, that fire! How you do go on about it, Tessa! Why ever can’t you accept the official verdict that it was an accident? Why do you always think you know best? It’s becoming a fixation.”
“Most people do think they know best. The only difference is that I admit it.”
“Thinking doesn’t make it so and, in this case, I consider you are foolish to admit it. However, I see that I have not convinced you. I suppose it would take more than rational argument to do that.”
He was becoming so tetchy about it that I pretended to be half won over. It was not true, however, for I had noticed several omissions and discrepancies in his rational argument. One of the more serious, in my view, concerned Alan Ferguson’s invitation to the Welsh cottage. Admittedly, he now claimed this had never been confirmed, but he had made a note of it in his diary and the fact that James had also remembered it must surely have meant that he was prepared for Alan to turn up. In which case, he would hardly have made an assignation with Andrea for the same weekend.
Furthermore, I had seen the look of terror in her eyes when she realised the mistake she had made in her memory sequence. If it was true, as, in any event, it had to be, that she felt herself to be in no danger of betrayal by James, then who or what was she so afraid of?
One way to get the answer might have been to find out how, in fact, she had spent those lost five days. Unfortunately, since it was obvious that she would henceforth do her utmost to keep out of my way, it was going to take a bit of doing. I decided to begin, as usual, by consulting Ellen.
TWENTY-ONE
“Where would someone of her age and background be most likely to spend five days of her life and afterwards declare herself to be unable to remember a single moment of them?” I asked. “Just reel off a list of places that occur to you and we’ll see which one best fits her temperament.”
“Only two come to mind,” Ellen replied, having considered the matter, “and I should say that they both fit her equally well.”
“Not a bad start. What are they?”
“The most obvious one is that she was with some man, although presumably not the one she is now going to marry.”
“Yes, that idea had already been mooted and, in my opinion, found wanting. Let’s hear the other.”
“She’s already been away on some weekends of that sort and consequently had to spend a few days in a private nursing home.”
“Well done! But would it really take as long as that?”
“It might, if there were complications, or if she’d let it drift on a bit too long.”
“Which, with her mentality, is most likely what she would have done. Yes, that fits splendidly. I suppose you wouldn’t have any idea who the father of this embryo might be?”
“No, sorry, none at all.”
“Pity! Still, it’s a handful of grist, I suppose, and clever thinking on your part.”
Ellen shook her head. “It was Andrea herself who gave me the idea.”
“Oh no! Don’t tell me she actually admitted this was what brought on the amnesia?”
“No, but the other day she was telling me about a similar sort of incident in her murky past. Only that time it turned out differently because she really had let it run on too long. Abortion was out.”
“So what happened?”
“She went into hiding until the baby was born. Her father fixed everything and arranged for it to be adopted.”
“I find it hard to understand how anyone could go into hiding for five or six months, without being recognised by someone, somewhere. What did she do? Sail round and round the world on a cruise liner until she went into labour?”
“No, her father rented a cottage for her somewhere near Newquay, where the baby was born. He went down to see her as often as he could and she had her old Nannie there to look after her.”
“And she told you all this only the other day? Why?”
“She was working up to the big scene, where she confessed all to Marc. She asked me whether it would be fair to marry him, if she didn’t.”
“And what was your advice?”
“Not to say a word about it, either now or in the future. For one thing, knowing Andrea as I do, there is no guarantee that she hadn’t invented it. And telling Marc could only mean disaster. It certainly wouldn’t put him off wanting to marry her. In fact, our little St. George would probably be all the keener to make it up to her for all the nasty dragons in her past.”
“And you have no idea who the father was?”
“No, she didn’t mention him.”
I sighed, wondering how it would feel to have been born like Ellen and to go through life minding my own business.
“Well, I know it goes against your grain, but, if the subject should come up again, do try and find out a bit more, will you?”
“Okay, Tess, I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you, darling, and, with those words ringing in my ears, I’ll be on my way. Unless there’s anything I can do to help you get ready for the party?”
“Oh, no thanks. I don’t suppose I’ll need to lift so much as an ice cube. Marc has laid on the same caterers as they had for Millie’s birthday. I suppose there’s no need to ask if you’ll be coming?”
“No need at all. Six to eight-thirty, did you say?”
The chip off the old Roxburgh block had not only packed in some of his own friends, but had also been thoughtful enough to invite a sprinkling of mine, one of whom was my agent. This was a mixed blessing because, although it is always a pleasure to see her, if she has a weakness, it is her inability to detach herself from professional preoccupations. No matter what the surroundings, given quarter of a chance, she contrives to transform them into an extension of her own office.
On this occasion I had scarcely set foot in the room before she had backed me into a corner and started hammering away about the American television offer. This was not what I had dressed myself up and fought my way through the rush hour traffic for, but it did at least have the side advantage of providing me with a panoramic view of the room and the fifty or sixty people now crammed into it.
Most of them were strangers to me and to Elsa and Millie also, I suspect, for they were talking to each other in an animated fashion, which was certainly not their practice at home. Someone else must have been struck by the incongruity of it too, because as I watched, Jeremy went up to them, spoke a few words, then gripped Millie by the arm, propelled her across the room and thrust her into a group of four, who had been getting on very well without her and looked as though they could hardly wait to do so again.
This manoeuvre had left Elsa on her own, but not for long, for after a moment or two she was joined by Gregory Laycock. There was little animation now, however, and, judging by his gestures and expression, he was expounding on some subject of the utmost gravity, such as the new car park. She meanwhile stood gazing up at him with the soulful look which people sometimes adopt when they can’t hear, or don’t want to know what is being said to them.
Perhaps my own expression was not dissimilar because at this point my agent interrupted herself to ask me what I was looking so po-faced about.
“Oh, I don’t know, I just wondered if we were doing the right thing by talking shop at a gathering like this? Aren’t we supposed to mingle or something?”
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“Are we?” she asked, looking about her, as if for the first time. “They appear to be getting on all right without us and I don’t think I know any of these people,” which was another way of saying that none of them were clients.
“You know Ellen.”
“Yes, of course I do, my darling, but have you ever seen anyone who looks less in need of minglers?”
“Then let me take you by the hand and introduce you to some of the others. I can see one who might be glad of us.”
“Andrea’s looking radiant,” I remarked, my agent having taken on Elsa, whom she could now remember having met before.
“Thank you. I like to think she always does.”
“Oh yes, but there’s an extra sparkle tonight, don’t you agree? But then being in love always acts like a tonic, doesn’t it?”
Few more fatuous remarks can ever have been uttered, even at a gathering of this nature, because Andrea’s appearance was nothing out of the ordinary and her expression sullen and discontented, while Marc, presumed to be as deeply in love as any young man alive, was comporting himself as though he had just learnt that he was to be executed at dawn.
Gregory, however, for whom flattery on this subject could not be shovelled on too lavishly, seemed oblivious of its ineptitude.
“Indeed!” he murmured, as though I had uttered a profound philosophical truth. “Indeed, indeed! How true that is!”
Struggling now and thinking that even Elsa, who was no doubt being urged to persuade me to give serious thought to spending sixteen weeks in California, must be having an easier ride than mine, I tried again:
“How’s her memory coming along?”
“Alas, poor child, no sign of any improvement, I fear.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“Yes, it is a sad blow for her, but what can one do? One can’t force these things.”
“And it would probably be fatal to try, but, left to itself, it will doubtless come back after a while.”
“Evidently not,” he replied, shaking his noble head. “It seems there is no chance of that now. We have to accept the fact that this void in her life can never be filled.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t accept it yet, if I were you.”
“That is the medical verdict, on which I think perhaps I may be better qualified to speak, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“Yes, of course I will, but I don’t see how it’s possible for the cleverest doctor in the world to be certain in a case like this. One day, I feel sure, some sight or sound will switch it on and everything will come back to her, as though it were yesterday.”
Evidently, he was another who liked to think that he was right and everyone else wrong, for he said: “It would be nice to believe that, but I think you will agree that yours is a layman’s view and we should not place too much reliance on it.”
I was really getting annoyed with him, both for his pomposity and his insistence on sticking to the pessimistic line, so to pay him out I said:
“A layman who speaks with experience, however,” and proceeded to relate some purely imaginary tale concerning a non-existent friend of mine, who had suffered from a similar loss of memory, only to retrieve it six months later in a train between Exeter and Newton Abbot. I must have put a lot of feeling into it too, because he listened attentively throughout and by the end of it Elsa and my agent had also been halted in their tracks and become part of the audience. So I seized my chance and, by drumming up another friend, a real one this time and close at hand, was able to make my escape.
Ellen saw me to the lift.
“Thanks a lot, Tessa,” she said, while we waited for it to come up.
“What for?”
“Taking on old Greg. He’s a bit heavy on hand, isn’t he?”
“You could say that, and you could call him a sanctimonious old prig.”
“It’s just that I can never find anything to say to him, but you were a great success. He told me you’d had a most interesting conversation.”
“It wasn’t in the least interesting, it was all about his rotten, scheming little daughter.”
“Oh yes, he is obsessive about her, isn’t he? Verging on the incestuous, I sometimes think. I just hope he cools down a bit once she’s married. Otherwise, it seems to me that, between the two of them, Marc’s life will be one long hell. What was the gist of it this evening?”
“He was going on about her amnesia and, come to think of it, Ellen, it did have its interesting side.”
“Lucky you!” she said, as the lift doors opened and I stepped inside.
“I had taken it for granted, you see, that he was worried that her memory would never come back, but I realise now that it was the other way round. I really believe he’s more worried that it will.”
TWENTY-TWO
“Well, you’ve managed to send Alan Ferguson into a flat spin,” Robin said on Sunday morning, “which is probably a rare achievement.”
“What about me? I’m the one who should be spinning. Imagine leaving me shut up in that loft and taking the ladder away! Do you suppose he did it on purpose?”
“No, of course not, he’s drowning in remorse. Can’t think what made him so stupid and careless. He puts it down to having so much on his mind and the worry about James and so forth.”
“When did he tell you all this?”
“On the telephone, while you were still asleep. He wants us to show our forgiveness by having dinner with him this evening.”
“At his bachelor quarters?”
“No, at a restaurant somewhere off Sloane Square called Chez Angelina.”
“Did you say we’d go?”
“Subject to your approval, of course. I’m to call him back, if you’re otherwise engaged, or not in the mood.”
“Oh, I think we should go. It’s not the sort of invitation to be turned down lightly.”
“Well, that’s very magnanimous of you!”
“No, it isn’t. There’s something I want to ask him, and that’s not all. I was taken to lunch at Angelina’s when they first opened and I can tell you this, Robin, the price of our forgiveness is going to be very high indeed.”
Throughout dinner he drank only whisky and water, although this did nothing to cut down expenses, as he insisted on ordering a very superior bottle of wine for Robin and myself. As soon as this and the other preliminaries had been dealt with he started apologising for the unfortunate oversight at Orchard House and he was still at it when the smoked salmon arrived.
“Oh, please stop worrying about it,” I said for the second time. “I’d spent a most interesting and rewarding afternoon, up to that point, so I’m not complaining.”
“It’s good of you to take it so well, but I still feel guilty about it. It must have been a fearful shock and, quite honestly, I’m at a loss to know what there can have been up there to interest someone like yourself.”
“Old newspapers, for a start.”
“Old newspapers?”
“You may well sound incredulous,” Robin told him, “but the fact is that Tessa could spend a happy afternoon reading the instructions on old detergent cartons.”
“And that wasn’t all. There were masses of photographs too.”
“Well, it takes all sorts, I suppose, but personally I’d have my work cut out to say which I’d find more tedious: old detergent cartons, or photographs of people I’d never met.”
“I had met some of them.”
“James, you mean?”
“Yes, James, of course, and yourself. There were lots of you. Not many taken when you were young, which was a pity. They were mostly quite recent, I should say.”
“Why was that a pity?”
“Because it’s often instructive to see how people age, isn’t it? Sometimes they develop quite differently from the way you’d expect. In your case, I’d say that, on the whole, it had been for the better.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“There were some of Rosamund too, which was also fascinating
.”
“And now I know you’re pulling my leg. How could you recognise, let alone be fascinated, by someone whose existence you’d never heard of until after her death?”
“Easily. There were some of her and James at their wedding, so it couldn’t have been anyone else. She seems to have been one of those women who changed very little as she grew older, which made it easy to pick her out in later periods. Which reminds me, Alan: there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“About Rosamund?” he said, without enthusiasm.
“Yes. You said, the other day, that she was attractive, or to be precise that you could understand men finding her attractive.”
“Did I? Well, yes, I daresay I may have said something of the kind.”
“Then I hope you won’t mind my asking, but did that imply that you found her attractive yourself?”
“Me? Good heavens, no, not in that sense. She was my wife’s cousin, part of the family.”
“All the same, there must have been some basis for your remark. So, if you personally never thought of her in that way, presumably you knew of at least one man who did? How else could she have given you that impression?”
“I know of one who did, certainly.”
“One will do.”
“I doubt that, because I am referring to her husband. He was very much in love with her.”
“But how do you reconcile that with . . . ?” I began, but Robin, who had taken no part in the conversation, had now listened to enough of it:
“Leave the poor man alone, Tessa! He hasn’t brought us out to dinner to be cross-examined. Let’s talk about something else. Like this excellent wine, for instance.”
We talked about the excellent wine and a number of other topics and the subject of Rosamund was not referred to again, but I doubt if she was forgotten. I twice caught Alan glancing at me and I could tell from his expression that he had guessed what I had been about to say when Robin headed me off. He continued to be friendly on the surface, but there was an awkwardness and uncertainty in his manner which had not been there before and it was evident from the way he sometimes lost track of the conversation that part of his mind had travelled a long way off. He gave the impression of a man who, had there been a loft handy, would have been happy to have shut me up in it.