The Benevent Treasure

Chapter Four

Candida went up to bed that night with the feeling that it wasn’t going to be so bad. The evening meal had been formally served by Joseph in a cavernous dining-room from whose gloomy walls dark family portraits frowned upon the scene. But the meal itself was beautifully cooked – a soup, a fish soufflé, a sweet. And then the white drawing-room again.

It appeared that Derek had a pleasant voice and a light touch upon the piano, a lordly grand in a cream enamelled case. Candida found herself diverted to that end of the room, asked if she knew this or that, persuaded to join her own voice in a light duet. The Miss Benevents beamed approval and the evening passed very pleasantly.

When she got up to her room there was a girl there putting a hot water-bottle in the bed, rather pretty with a dark lively look. Candida had a friendly smile.

‘Oh, thank you. Are you Nella?’

There was a slight toss of the head.

‘Well, that’s just Auntie – her fancy Italian way of saying Nellie.’ The accent and the laugh were authentic cockney. ‘It riles me a bit, but what’s the use?’

‘Your name is really Nellie?’

‘That’s right. My old Gran that I don’t remember, she came over with Auntie about the year one, and she married an Irishman, and my Mum who was their daughter, she married a Scotchman called Brown, and they lived in Bermondsey, so how much of the Italiano have I got? Proper Londoner, that’s what I am – born there and brought up there and don’t want to be anything different! It’s no good saying that sort of thing to Auntie – she don’t understand. Only how she can go on year in, year out in a nasty dark country hole like this’ – she gave an expressive shrug – ‘well, it passes me!’

Candida laughed.

‘You don’t like the country?’

‘Like it!’ The London voice was shrill. ‘It gives me the pip! And I wouldn’t be here, only Auntie made such a point of it, and the doctor at the eye hospital he said if I didn’t knock off a bit and rest my eyes I’d be sorry I hadn’t done what he said. I’m an embroideress – but the work’s too fine, I’ll have to find something else. As a matter of fact I’m getting married, so when Auntie made a point of it and the money was good, I thought, oh, well, I can stick it out if I’ve got to – for a bit anyway. Is there anything else I can do, Miss Sayle?’

‘Oh, no. I’m going to love the hot water-bottle.’

The girl flashed her a smile as she went out. Candida had a feeling that it wouldn’t be very long before she heard all about the boy friend and the lovely suite. The bed was comfortable and the hot water-bottle was really hot. But before she had time to luxuriate in these thoughts they were blotted out by the rising tides of sleep. She went down under dreamless waters and lost herself.

A long time afterwards, when the turn of the night was past and a thin white mist lay ankle-deep on the low-lying fields beyond the garden, the tides began to go down again. They thinned away and left her in the place where dreams can come and go. She was asleep, but she was not unconscious any more. The dreams came and went. In the first one she had gone back nearly six years. A knob of rock cut into the palm of her left hand. With the nails of her right hand she dug into a shallow crack and clung there. Her feet tiptoed on a narrow ledge. At any moment she was going to fall to the bare black rocks below. The dream was not a new one. During the years it had come and gone again – when she was tired – when she was troubled – when something reminded her. But it had come less and less. In her last year at school it had not come at all. Then, with Barbara’s illness, it had started again. Some-times it ended with the fall, sometimes it changed in a flash and she would be up on the ledge above, with Stephen saying, ‘You’re all right now.’ When she fell, she always woke before she got as far as the rocks. Tonight she did not fall, nor did she reach the ledge. She heard Stephen calling from the sea, and she turned her head. She couldn’t have done it really – not without losing her hold, but in the dream it was all quite easy. She looked round and saw him coming to her across black water with wings on his feet, like Perseus in the story of Andromeda. She saw the wings quite plainly – they were bright and fluttering. He had light wind-swept hair, and he had on old grey flannel slacks and an open-necked shirt and a tweed jacket. And then all of a sudden he was gone, and so was the sea and the cliff. There was a wall with a window in it, and an open book on the windowsill. She had just written her name in the book, Candida Sayle, and someone said, ‘That is a very unusual name.’ There were two old ladies standing one on either side of her and looking at the book. One of them said, ‘It’s a very nice walk along the beach,’ and the other one nodded. One of them said, ‘It is not high tide until eleven.’ And she woke up.

The room was dark. She had pulled back the curtains, and she could just see the shape of the window. She sat up straight in bed with her heart beating fast. Her hands pressed down on the mattress on either side of her. There was a trickle of sweat in the hollow of her back, a cold running drop. Her heart beat because she was afraid, and she was afraid because in the moment of waking she remembered three things and they all rushed together. There was the dream from which she had just waked up. There was the dream which had come and gone in the moment when sleep had reached out and touched her under the lights in the white and gold drawing-room. And there was the thing that wasn’t a dream – the thing that had happened more than five years ago, when two old ladies had stood in the hall at Sea View and told her what a nice walk there was along the beach, and one of them had said, ‘It won’t be high tide until eleven.’

These three things rushed together in her mind and became one thing. It wasn’t a dream any longer, it was a fact. It was the Miss Benevents who had looked over her shoulder and read her name in the hotel register. It was her great-aunt Olivia who had told her about the beach and the tide, and it was her great-aunt Cara who had nodded assent.

Sitting up in bed in the dark room, she said, ‘Nonsense!’ There was a shaded light beside the bed. She switched it on. She had her mother’s watch, and it lay on the table under the lamp. The time was half-past five, the sort of time you did have thoughts like that. She left the light on and lay down shivering, with the clothes snuggled up about her neck. She began to get warmer at once. The bed was soft and the light friendly. The dreams receded. The two old ladies at Sea View were just any old ladies who had muddled up the times of the tides. The hall had been dark – she hadn’t really seen them at all clearly. And she hadn’t ever seen them again, because when she and Stephen had got off the cliff and back to Sea View there was no more than time for her to snatch some breakfast and catch a train home. Monica had telephoned to say her mother was really ill and would have to go into a nursing home. She herself would stay with an aunt in London. She was dreadfully sorry. Mummy would send a cheque for the bill, and there was nothing for it but for Candida to go home. So Candida went. And she didn’t see the old ladies again. And she didn’t see Stephen Eversley.

She lay in the shaded light of the lamp and thought about all these things. It was quite easy to see how she had got the old ladies mixed up with the great-aunts. Two old ladies in black in the hall at Sea View – two old ladies in black in the white drawing-room at Underhill. One taking the lead and the other following. Wasn’t that the sort of thing that would be bound to happen when sisters lived together all their lives? The idea that the old ladies at Sea View had been her Benevent great-aunts was just one of the fantastic things that happen in a dream, like Stephen in grey flannel slacks with wings on his feet. She slid into sleep again, and only woke when Nellie came in with the early morning tea.