Final Witness

Chapter 28

On a bright spring day four years later Thomas drove the Aston Martin that had once belonged to his mother from Oxford up to London. The university term had just finished, and he had arranged to pick up his old friend Matthew from his family home in Battersea. Then they would go up together to Flyte, arriving at the House of the Four Winds before dark, if the traffic didn’t slow them down. Matthew had asked to come. Thomas had not seen him for a long time, and his old friend had just lost his father.

“I’m sorry, Matthew. Really I am,” said Thomas as they roared away with Matthew’s suitcase wedged upside down beside Thomas’s on the backseat.

“It’s all right. He never spent much time with me, you know. Or anyone else for that matter.”

“Yes, he did seem like a bit of a loner. He was always in that little room at the end of the corridor that you had a funny name for. What was it?”

“His cubbyhole. No one went in there except my dad, and then after he died they opened it up and found all these books of crossword puzzles. A few empty vodka bottles and piles of crossword books. What a life!”

“How’s your mother taking it?”

“Great. She’s learning Japanese. My sister Dorothy thinks she’s got a Japanese boyfriend. The life insurance paid for a nanny so she can live it up now. God knows she’s got some catching up to do. What about you? How’s your father?”

“All right, I suppose. He never comes to Flyte, so I only see him every couple of months, and then we haven’t got a lot to say to each other, although it doesn’t seem to matter too much. He drinks a lot of whisky and we have companionable silences. Sometimes he tells me about the book he’s writing.”

“What’s it about?”

“Spies. Traitors. People who have betrayed their country.”

“Yes, I can see why he’d be interested in them.”

“It’s good for him to be doing something. He was very lost after the trial when he resigned. He’s better now, although he still drinks too much.”

“Has he seen Greta?”

“He tried to after the trial like I told you before, but she wouldn’t see him, and now I don’t think he’d want to see her. She’s in a prison up north the last I heard. Perhaps she likes being near her mother.”

They made good time on the road and passed through Carmouth just before seven, but then Thomas slowed down as they approached the House of the Four Winds. He had not been home for a month, and he worried as he always did that Aunt Jane’s health would have deteriorated while he was gone. The old lady made a secret of her age, but Thomas guessed that she was nearly eighty, and the years since the trial had slowed her down so that she could no longer do what she once did. Grace Marsh came in three times a week to help her in the house and Christy looked after the garden, but the old housekeeper still insisted on dusting the family portraits and cleaning the family silver.

Thomas need not have worried. Aunt Jane wrapped him up in a tight embrace as soon as he came through the door and wanted to feed them a huge tea without delay, but Thomas was determined to walk down to the beach before it got dark. He left Matthew to unpack and walked out onto the north lawn. The red sun was hanging low on the western horizon, and the shapes of the old elm trees were sharply defined in the twilight.

Thomas crossed over to the door in the wall and went out into the lane. He could hear the crash of the incoming waves long before he reached the beach, but the sea still came as a shock when he saw it. He stood with his feet in the surf and drank in the last of the light.

Thomas felt at that moment that there was nowhere in the world except the sand and the sea and the sky and behind him the House of the Four Winds standing high above the cliff. Thomas felt the presence of all the Sackvilles who had gone before him and all those who would come after. He thought of his grandmother galloping across the beach on her horse and his mother swimming in the cove before he was born, and he thought of himself as a child and now a man. He was a link in a great chain stretching back to people whose names he would never know and forward into a distant future he would never see, but for now this small corner of England was his own. It was his inheritance.