After the Armistice Ball

Chapter Fourteen

There then began a curious stretch of calm that was yet as tiring as any time I have ever endured. The case was closed, I believed, but one might almost have said that other parties disagreed. Had I believed in fate, I might have blamed myself for tempting it with that first nightmare served up to Dr Milne. Had I believed in ghosts, of course, I should have blamed Cara herself for her determined, beseeching presence. Perhaps though it was only the weather, a spell of heavy warmth both day and night; liquid weather, although no rain actually fell. It was as if a flood was held in the sky by a single trembling membrane, pressing dull headaches down upon all beneath it, seeping just enough vapour for one’s clothes to be always limp and one’s hair lank and oppressive against one’s neck.

In the heat each night as I slept, short and furious dreams of Cara raged through me and then wrenched me up and out, leaving me flailing under a soaked sheet listening to the blood thunder in my ears. Night after night I willed my leaden arms and legs back to life, rose, splashed my face and changed my nightie, then lay back down in the cooling damp of my bed, hoping to slip into a gentler sleep without her finding me.

At last the month dragged to a close and I began to look forward to the return of the children for the summer – ‘look forward’, that is, in the sense of knowing that it was sure to happen and had to be prepared for. By and by, it came to me that if I made my final report to Daisy, if my part in the affair could be tied in pink tape and filed, then the dreams might stop. There was a twinge of shame each time I considered how I was shirking my duty to tell Daisy that I had failed. And failed I had, for all thoughts of applying pressure to Lena had wilted and died in me in the Municipal Cemetery weeks before. Admittedly, if Daisy had contacted me in a sudden panic, if Lena had renewed her vague threats, I might have found courage enough in my outrage to do something. But Lena was either biding her good time or had abandoned the plan after Cara’s death or perhaps was to return to extortion only after a proper period of mourning, if such a ludicrous clash of sensibilities were possible.

So one morning, dry-eyed and sick from weariness, and with Cara’s stark face still behind my eyelids whenever I shut them, I sat down at my desk intending to report my failure and return my fee. As it turned out, however, I wrote something quite different, looking detachedly but with interest at what poured from my pen, and grateful once again not to believe in the spirits by which I might otherwise have felt invaded.

My letter was short on detail, extremely long on mystery. In effect, I told Daisy nothing, or nothing much: only that I firmly believed Lena would not be in touch again – I was less sure than this in reality, of course, but I hoped to excuse the terseness of my note with a suggestion that things were dealt with – but, I went on, if there were a renewal of Lena’s hints, a fresh round of her not-quite-stated demands, Daisy was to say the following: ‘I know you took no servant to the cottage.’ I assured her that if she said just that, ‘I know you took no servant to the cottage,’ Lena would immediately and for ever desist.

Calling Bunty, I set off to the post box at the farm road-end where I dropped in the envelope, with high hopes that I should now have seen the last of the nightmares. Or perhaps my imminent plunge into family life for the summer would effect the necessary jolt. That very night, of course, I dreamed of Cara again, horribly, sickeningly, until I rose and went to the pitcher, peeling off my nightie as I walked. So one last tremor then, caused by writing the letter, but the boys would be here in the morning, in less than five hours I saw from squinting at my mantel clock in the grey light, and my life would resume its course.

For one day it looked as though that might be true. The boys, collected from the station by Hugh, clattered into the house with the greatest possible confusion that two boys, two trunks, five excited dogs and as many excited servants might be imagined to produce, so it was just as well that their mother merely waved and smiled from the perimeter, adding nothing to the mayhem. They cantered upstairs to hug Nanny and inspect the nursery for the slightest changes, startlingly tall as they passed me, and before I had had a chance to organize their newly angular faces in my mind and remove the image of the round cheeks and sweet curls which I always substitute for reality, they were back, charging out of the house still in their grey shorts and black shoes to go and see the ponies, with Hugh marching after them, bellowing that they must not upset the poor beasts and must change into boots that instant.

‘Tomato sandwiches, Mrs Tilling,’ I said. She would have made tomato sandwiches without being told, of course; it was not so much an instruction as a blessing in code.

‘They have been ripening on my kitchen windowsill since Sunday, madam,’ said Mrs Tilling. ‘And will I make cheese scones? And which do you think between a chocolate cake and a walnut cake? Or perhaps…?’

‘Both,’ I said, as we knew I would.

‘This tea is quite good,’ said Donald with his head tipped back and his lips tucked in to stop cake crumbs spraying as he spoke. Teddy, a year younger and thus less able to control himself, exploded into giggles although, to be fair, he did catch most of the scattering mouthful in his napkin and Bunty soon snuffled up the rest. ‘Quite good’ was clearly to be the phrase of the summer. They always brought one home with them; a word or two whose repetition was the last thing in wit, which Hugh would become unbearably irritated by and begin to hand out punishments for before the week was out. Last year every picnic, walk and party we arranged had been agreed to by the boys ‘if I’m spared’ and although it made me smile to hear them repeat this dainty phrase, it drove Hugh wild with rage and produced more than one slippering.

Teddy took another huge mouthful of cake and a slurp of tea and leaned against me comfortably.

‘It’s quite good to be home, Mother,’ he said.

‘It’s quite good to have you home, Teddy Bear. And you, dear,’ to Donald, who closed his eyes at me slowly like a cat.

Almost enough becoming domesticity to choke on, then, but it did not work. I awoke drenched and shaking that night as usual, half-forgetting the details of the nightmare and glad of it. I crept through the silent house to the nursery wing without knowing why. I make little pretence of rampant maternal passion and have always found chocolate box displays sickening both in myself and on the few occasions when I witnessed them in my own mother. Besides, mine are boys which means that already, at ten and eleven, they are lost to me. Still there I was, standing at the end of Donald’s bed, shivering slightly, listening to his breathing and that of Teddy in the bed behind me, no idea what had drawn me there. They kept pace with one another, breathing in and out in perfect time, and I wondered if it was because they were brothers or if it came from sleeping in the same room and if so whether at school a dormitory full of little boys breathed in and out in time all night. These musings, aimless as they were, drifting around and through me like smoke, nevertheless seemed to give me whatever I had come for because the dream slipped off me at last and the sick rumbling it had left behind quieted, the thoughts dissolving before I had even thought them.

All three of us were breathing in time now, and I could have stood there for ever, I think, although the hard floor began to make my bare feet ache. I thought of curling into an armchair but, imagining their scorn in the morning to find their mother mooning over them like a lovesick cow, I gathered myself and returned to my room.

Alec stood at the front of the church in his wedding clothes, Hugh as his best man and six bridesmaids in pale green crêpe-de-Chine. The cadaverous minister from the memorial service was on his hands and knees shouting down into the floor of the altar, shouting to Cara to come out, telling her everyone was waiting. Her father sat in mourning in the front row with his hands clenched on his knees and we, the rest of the congregation, pretended not to hear the scuffle and gasp of a struggle going on under our feet. ‘Help me,’ screamed Cara’s voice. ‘Somebody help me.’

I too tried to call out but could only make a dream’s smothered straining mumble. When I woke I knew I had made the sound aloud and was thankful that I had got myself out before I really found my voice.

Once more, through the house, even colder now at the dead still of four o’clock when the embers are grey and even the night creatures outside have fed and killed their night’s measure and turned for home.

The boys, tired out and having slept hard since ten, were drifting up to meet the morning and they stirred as I crept back into their room. This time I knew why I was there. I had not, as feared before, come up here to channel motherly feelings like some opportunistic medium whose seance looked like going flat; much less had I turned to the easy sentiment of ‘my dear boys come home to me’ simply to drive away the horrors. I had come to force myself into honesty and make myself face what had to be faced. I had failed Daisy and I had failed Cara. I had failed because, however short of the ideal I might fall when it came to cooing and sighing and gazing fondly, deep down I could not help thinking like a mother. Thus, hidebound, hog-tied, I had allowed myself to ignore a sign so glaring that my own brain presented it to me night after night and looked as though it would continue to do so for my whole life unless I gave in. Well, I was ready to give in now.

Lena had planned her daughter’s death. Lena had prepared the fire that was to have caused her daughter’s death. And now Lena’s daughter was dead. The missing step, where I had tried to cram Cara’s inexplicable change of mind and then her killing herself, that space could only sensibly be filled one way. I could hardly bear to think it, I was such a coward, but I knew it was true: Lena had killed her child and I, least motherly woman one could imagine, could not stand listening to the breathing of my own children and ignore it.

‘Cara,’ I whispered, then went on even more quietly as Donald flinched and resettled, ‘I promise you. I promise.’ I did not need to speak the promise, not to someone who was in my head and orchestrating my dreams, but it was no less sincere for that.

There was no instant clarity, however, just because I had let go of my resistance. As to what exactly Lena had done to kill her child I did not know and could not bear to speculate. And as for why, I had no idea where to start. There was so much of it all and it made no sense, as though more than one story in loose leaf had got shuffled in together and I was reading now a page from this, now a page from that, never knowing where the join should be. I needed help.

Brightly, at breakfast the next morning – the children breakfast with us in the holidays, at least to start with until all parties tire of it – I announced to the boys, and hence indirectly to Hugh as well, that we were to have a visitor.

‘His name is Alec Osborne and he’s a friend of Daddy’s and mine, but younger. He has had a rotten time lately and he needs a quiet break in the country with his friends.’

Donald groaned and said with what I hope was affected weariness, for it would not be pleasant to think that one’s eleven-year-old boy was really that jaded: ‘Not another shell shock case, surely, Mother. That was years ago.’

Hugh’s eyes bulged but he said nothing.

‘No, dear,’ I replied calmly, understanding what Hugh refused to understand, that there was no way we could hope to explain to the boys anything about the true nature of the war. They had lived through it but they had been so well protected that they still viewed it as a game; one which had unfairly finished before they were old enough to play and which had left behind it only its most dreary components – the wounded, the money worries and indeed the shell shock cases. What Hugh and I did share, I am sure, was a fervent wish masquerading as a conviction that at least we should never see its like again and they had missed it for once and all.

‘He was to be married,’ I went on. ‘But there was a dreadful fire and the girl died in it.’ Donald’s and Teddy’s eyes grew round with delight. ‘So you see he is very sad and needs to be jollied up with games and expeditions.’ I hoped by this to fix their interest on the possibility of a more exciting companion than either Hugh or me. I failed, of course.

‘A fire! Gosh, Mummy, did he try to save her and get beaten back by the flames?’

‘And have to listen to her gurgling screams while she -’

‘No!’ I said, almost shouting. ‘Where do you get this? Gurgling screams indeed. You are forbidden to mention it to him, do you hear?’ This seemed to diminish Alec’s value rather severely and both boys pulled wry faces and went back to gobbling.

Still, Hugh had been informed of the visit and had not made a murmur, so now my only task was to summon Alec, but I was not quite sure exactly where he was. He had gone to the Duffys’ after their return from the Alps, had been staying with them at the time of the memorial service, but he was not there now, none of them feeling equal to the situation. Had their estate been open he might have skulked there inconspicuously for weeks until the relationship faded, but I quite saw how neither he nor the family could bear his presence in the narrow confines of the Edinburgh house, with wedding presents still arriving and having to be sent back, and visits of condolence being paid. Perhaps he had returned to Dorset.

My telephone was ringing as Bunty and I came back into the house after our morning walk and although I broke into a lope to reach it I was still only halfway across the breakfast room when Pallister disappeared through my door with a withering look at me over his shoulder. He was holding out the earpiece towards me when I caught up with him and spoke in a chilly voice even by his standards.

‘A young gentleman, madam.’ This of course was exactly what Pallister feared a private telephone was for and it was hard to say whether distaste or pity was the chief ingredient in his expression as he withdrew. Little I cared.

‘Dandy?’ said Alec’s voice, and despite everything my heart lifted a bit.

‘Alec, I need to speak to you most seriously,’ I began, shrugging off my coat and pointing Bunty fiercely towards her rug.

‘Yes, but since I telephoned to you, dear,’ said Alec in his most amused drawl, ‘I’m afraid you shall have to wait.’ I heard the click of him resettling his pipe and waited for him to go on. This appearance of such extreme relaxation had to be a deliberate act, for if it were not why had he rung me?

‘I have had the most peculiar interview with old Cousin Gregory,’ Alec said. ‘Last evening in his library. I was invited, not for dinner but to come and see him at ten o’clock and was bundled in and upstairs like a chorus girl being brought to a stag party. Then we had a long talk about Cara.’ Alec must have heard me catch my breath and correctly interpreting my interest he dispelled it immediately. ‘Nothing to the point of our investigation, Dandy, just generally, you know. I think the poor old boy can’t be getting much of a chance to talk about her. Lena’s act of “grief to the point of distraction” is still going strong. And as you know he has no time for Clemence, so I daresay he’s just had to bottle it. He looks ten years older.’

‘And?’ I said, beginning to feel disappointed. ‘Would you like me to visit and “draw him out”?’

‘Stop interrupting,’ said Alec. ‘I’m getting to something important. Two things, actually, and I hardly know which is more startling. First thing: Gregory wanted to assure me that I was to remain his heir. That in itself I’m sure you will agree is nothing, but he was vociferous on the topic of my marrying Clemence.’

‘What?’ I said, before I could help myself. ‘Alec, are you…?’ I had been going to say ‘mad’, but bit my lip just in time. Clemence? Clemence knew. She at least knew something. I was sure she did. ‘Are you to be a Mr Collins after all then?’ I finished lamely.

‘Concentrate, Dandy, please,’ he said, and his tone told me that at least I had managed to conceal the extent of my fright. ‘Cousin Gregory, talking around and around, and never quite saying it exactly or even hinting at why, has let me know that if I marry Clemence I am to be disinherited and the estate will pass to another branch of the family entirely. Now what do you make of that?’

‘He knows something,’ I said. ‘He must know that Clemence was bound up with Cara’s death. But why on earth…? Have we got it wrong, then? Is it all Clemence and nothing to do with Lena after all? Because why should Mr Duffy be so down on Clemence alone?’

‘That brings me to the second item,’ said Alec. ‘He’s not concentrating on Clemence. Far from it. He told me that he is going to divorce his wife.’

I was speechless, my mind racing but failing to find a thought to grasp and hold.

‘He is divorcing Lena,’ Alec went on, ‘settling the Canadian property on Clemence, who we can only assume is to be packed off there, and handing the estates over to me.’

It is to my shame that what should have been the least important of these points, that Alec might be coming to live on the Duffys’ Perthshire estate after all, lodged in my mind as firmly as all the others.

‘How can he divorce her?’ I said. ‘You mean he is to let her divorce him?’ Even that was a ludicrous notion. Mr Duffy, stiff, proper and sixty-five, allowing himself to be photographed at an hotel with a girl hired for the purpose. But Alec was adamant.

‘He can’t just cast her off with no grounds,’ I said.

‘He has grounds,’ said Alec. ‘“I will have no trouble producing grounds” were his exact words, and you’ve no idea how grim he looked when he said it.’

I could only whistle.

‘How soon can you get here?’ I said, sensing that we could spend the remainder of the morning on the telephone before we had done turning this over between us. ‘I’ve already warned Hugh that you’re on your way. I’m afraid he thinks you’re coming for solace and there’s worse – my boys are home and there will be a fair bit of letting them win at tennis and mending kites to be got through.’

‘You’ve already said I’m on my way?’

‘Yes, darling. Because Cousin Gregory who knows something is not alone. We know something too. Or I do anyway and I can’t go on pretending I don’t. Look, I don’t want to talk about it on the telephone, but unless I face it and do something about it, I am never going to sleep a peaceful night through again. Only -’ a sudden thought had struck me – ‘Mr Duffy didn’t say anything about wanting you to let sleeping dogs lie, did he? I mean, it’s not a condition of the inheritance that you don’t make any trouble? Because if it is…’

‘You think I might let Lena off with murder to get my hands on it?’ said Alec. His voice was cold and it was that I first responded to, flushing at his offence, at my insult. Then I realized what he had said, and the silence between us lengthened.

‘So,’ I said, at last.

‘Just so,’ said Alec.

Having arranged for his arrival two days later, we rang off. I walked around the room for a while picking up and setting down ornaments and disarranging the flowers. Clemence, Mr Duffy, Lena, Alec, the fire, the abortion, the photographs, and countless other flitting ghosts of ideas too vague even to be named whisked around my head, only obliquely visible, disappearing if I looked straight on. I despaired of ever being able to organize it all and view the whole thing at once. If I could only lay out each fact in order in front of me. For things are connected and life does make sense – I had decided that as early as the Croys visit and it had served me well until now. But this was like trying to play soldiers with kittens, goldfish even, seven disappearing for every two I managed to set in place and hold there.

Despairing of a head-start then, although it galled me to admit that I must wait for Alec, I thought I could at least make some practical preparations. Slipping into Hugh’s business room I helped myself to a quantity of the large sheets of paper he uses to sketch out his interminable improvements. From the day nursery I took an India rubber and some pencils, and I looked forward to standing in front of my fire sharpening them with a pocket knife; this is one of my few manual skills, learned in childhood from a rather dashing drawing master and something which I felt would give me a welcome air of competence in front of Alec. Passing out of the nursery again, I stopped at the bookcase and, feeling rather silly, extracted the illustrated volume of Sherlock Holmes stories.

For the rest of that day I sat curled in my chair devouring it, hoping for guidance, but as tea approached I concluded that the working methods of a genius are of no use to lesser beings. Besides, real life is rather less neat than Mr Conan Doyle would have us imagine, or perhaps I should say rather more neat, people (as a rule) not dropping the ends of unusual cigars and abandoning scraps of their garments on convenient thorns as they pass. Really, when one thinks about it, story-book villains must be hardly decent and must suffer terribly from draughts, considering how much of their clothing they leave behind them. I closed the volume and hid it in my desk.