After Clare Page 10

  ‘It’s not entirely up to me. I do have a partner, you know.’

  ‘I do know,’ he said, his tone sharpening.

  ‘Don’t be tiresome, Val. Give me a little credit. There won’t be any drastic changes to the library, and I’ll see to it that we certainly won’t overcharge. She’s – actually, she’s really rather an old dear, isn’t she?’

  ‘Lady F?’ Val raised an eyebrow at this very different tune Poppy was now singing.

  ‘All right,’ she admitted, flushing as she bent to retrieve a stray piece of thread from some newly made, wavy-striped black and white curtains, presumably meant to resemble zebra skin. ‘Maybe I was wrong, perhaps one shouldn’t judge a person before you’ve met them properly. And she has wangled you that job and everything . . .’

  Val let it pass. ‘What’s your opinion of Stronglove?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘I don’t know him well enough to have one. I used to see him occasionally when I stayed with Dee in the school hols and that’s about it.’

  ‘He calls me his amanuensis.’ He laughed shortly. ‘Better than dogsbody, I suppose, which is what I really am.’

  ‘Does it matter what he calls you, ducky, when he’s paying you so well?’

  ‘Not if you look at it like that, I suppose . . .’ He wished they didn’t both have to be so aware of money, but it was difficult not to be when you’d been as hard up as they had for so long. He shrugged. ‘Oh, it’s not so bad, really.’

  In fact, in many ways he felt sympathetic to Dirk, struggling to finish a book while coping with the problem of his failing eyesight. So far Val had been able to work with him better than he had thought possible, although Stronglove had a high opinion of himself, a result of the acclaim brought to him by his books, which in Val’s lofty view did not rate highly in the literature scale. But since working on the new book with Dirk, he had to admit to a grudging admiration and respect for the craftsmanship and hard work which made them so successful.

  ‘I’m no good at dictation,’ Dirk had said right at the beginning, ‘too many second thoughts and the need for alterations and crossings out. You’ll have to do what the young chap who worked for me before the war did – decipher the scrawl my handwriting’s become and get it all into reasonably good shape. Anyway, I don’t suppose you do this shorthand malarkey – but I hope you do know how to use a typewriter?’

  Val had replied diffidently that he had taught himself to type. He didn’t feel it necessary to explain that he’d tackled this during the writing of his own novel. Stronglove hadn’t mentioned that he knew about his attempt at authorship – though Val was sure he must have been told about it – and Val himself certainly wasn’t ready to discuss it, not at this stage anyway.

  Although his new employer was touchy about his work, and often in a strange mood, as if he had something on his mind, almost certainly due to the operation hanging over him, Val had decided that, all in all, the job wasn’t turning out so badly. Apart from bringing in some money, there was an added bonus in the shape of Rosie Markham. So far, he’d managed to exchange little more than pleasantries with her because she and Lady Fitzallan, working in the garden together, had always looked too busy and absorbed to be interrupted for long. It was a state of affairs he intended to remedy.

  ‘What did you want to see me about, Val, coming so far out of your way? You came over here specially and you must have had a reason for that.’ Poppy looked pointedly at a black ceramic disc without numbers, only white hands, and flicking back a wing of black hair regarded him narrowly. She looked as glossy and enamelled as the clock. ‘Come on, I haven’t got much time.’

  ‘I came to see you, Poppy, because I thought you might want to know that the police have a name for that skeleton that was found at Leysmorton.’

  ‘Me? Why should I want to know that?’ Her groomed eyebrows rose in mild surprise.

  ‘You might want to sit down before I tell you who he was.’

  Earlier that day, while Val was pushing the pedals towards Kingsworth Halt, the middle-aged chauffeur who drove the Daimler for both Hugh and Gerald was waiting on the neat gravel sweep that led to the front door of Steadings, ready to drive Gerald to the publishing house at Clerkenwell as he did each day. He repolished the already pristine wing mirrors as eight resonant strokes of the clock above the stables at Leysmorton floated clearly across to him. Slow, again. That clock hadn’t kept good time since the old man, Anthony Vavasour, had died, but Deegan checked his pocket watch again. Ten past eight, and Gerald, who invariably came out on the dot of eight, was nowhere to be seen.

  He was in fact looking for his wife to say goodbye before he left. He had expected to find her sitting up in bed as usual, scarcely awake, sipping tea and flicking through her post, but her maid informed him that Madam had been up for an hour and had gone out for a walk. What? Stella, usually inaccessible until eleven, after her bath and a leisurely dressing routine, out at this time of the morning? For a walk? Gerald, momentarily confused, looked around the house but found no sign of anyone – breakfast already cleared away, Rosie out riding, and his father shut into the snug little room the children called his den (as if he were a lion! grumbled Hugh) that was now his own private sitting room, where he always spent the hour after breakfast with The Times and everyone knew not to disturb him. After a moment’s consideration, shrugging his shoulders, Gerald went out to the motor car and told Deegan to drive off. It was just another of the things he didn’t understand about Stella lately. Or more truthfully, he admitted, clenching his jaw, one he understood only too damned well.

  Dirk and Stella met in their usual trysting place, as it amused Dirk to call the old pavilion, a sort of folly built in a distant part of the Leysmorton garden by an eighteenth-century Vavasour who had been fond of the view across the undulating fields and woods to the chalk hills in the distance. It was set on a little rise and offered views of anyone approaching and a door at the back for a discreet exit, a useful back-up should anyone take it into their heads to come here, unlikely as that was. The pavilion, falling into disrepair, its furniture decrepit, had of recent years almost been forgotten.

  Although it was barely eight o’clock, at a time when Stella was normally being wakened by her maid with a cup of Earl Grey and a water biscuit, this morning she was dressed, immaculately as ever, in lime green linen, and made up with care. She had put Chu down on one of the old cushioned rattan chairs, where he sneezed and looked offended at the dust raised by his body weight. She bent over the little dog, murmuring endearments, then straightened. She appeared cool and collected, though her hand shook a little as she accepted a light for her cigarette from Dirk.

  ‘Darling, you mustn’t worry.’

  She gave him her thin, closed smile and drew deeply on her cigarette.

  When the identity of the skeleton found under that rubbish had been revealed, Dirk’s first, primitive emotion had been one of anger. How dare he? How dare Peter Sholto come back like this, from the safely dead, to haunt them? More than that, to threaten? Then, last night had been spent wrestling with nightmares, waking in the darkness at three o’clock in the morning in a cold sweat. The terror had receded with returning consciousness, seeming like nothing compared with the ever-present despair about his failing sight, shadowing him like a grey ghost. Yet now, in the light of day, the sense of outrage about Peter Sholto was no less, and the feeling of imminent danger was resurfacing, bubbling like the lava just beneath the surface of a sleeping volcano. Danger for himself, yes, but for Stella also. As if they didn’t have enough problems.

  He took the cigarette from between her fingers, pinched it out and threw it to the ground. Chu gave the sharp, yapping sound that was his impression of an outraged bark as the cigarette flew past his ear. Stella let Dirk take her in his arms, for once ignoring the little dog. Dirk felt her bird-like bones, and looked with concern into her white face and the curious flecked hazel of her eyes under the thinly arched brows, with the small crease between them that was fast be
coming permanent. Close up like this, he could see without the spectacles he was coming to regard as both his cross and his salvation. He constantly worried about what would happen to these secret meetings when his eyesight grew so bad he could no longer stumble about, even with the assistance of the stick he now needed to help him get around outdoors with any degree of dignity.

  ‘I always told you,’ Stella said, ‘that little – that creature – would bring trouble.’

  ‘He was useful. But he’s dead, we’ve nothing to fear, my love, nothing.’ He wished he could be as certain as he had attempted to sound.

  ‘Well. Well, you know, this must be the last time we meet.’

  Dirk stared. ‘The last? God dammit, no!’ he said violently.

  ‘Darling, for the time being, yes, I’m afraid. Big-footed policemen all over the place and all that, we have to be careful.’

  He stared at her again. Stella, with her thin, sideways smile, bitter, discontented and, he suddenly saw, bored. Oh God, was that all it had been, all this time? A little dalliance, to alleviate the ennui? But after a moment he saw the sense in what she had said and reluctantly nodded in agreement. He looked wretched, but she did not offer to comfort him.

  Marta, an inveterate early riser, was finding it utterly impossible to look on what had happened with her usual stoicism. She too had slept badly, and forced herself to sit down and face the situation with the help of the third cup of coffee of the morning. She made good coffee, strong and bracing.

  She would have felt better if she could have talked to Dirk, but he was not around. She had heard him moving about early that morning, although he hadn’t joined her for breakfast. She went into the study and, finding it empty, she remembered he had given that nice young Valentine the day off.

  She knew where he would be, in that place they thought so secret. Her lips twisted at the thought of that woman. She did not go and seek him out; it was better that they kept up a pretence of secrecy. She was used to keeping her own counsel about his affairs anyway, and Dirk was no longer the little brother he had once been, who had confided his woes to her and allowed her to comfort and kiss him better. In her heart she knew she had not been supplanted – look how kind he had been to her when they had heard that terrible news about Peter being found. She thought she might make him one of her sweet puddings for supper, the Dutch ginger butter cake he so loved. Peter had liked that, too, in fact he’d liked most of the things Marta made. Tears began to roll down her cheeks again.

  Emily was dreaming as she had not done for years, and last night had been no exception.

  In her dreams she travelled continents. Egypt . . . sand, dust. Feluccas crossing the Nile against ineffable sunsets. Ancient monuments and the awesome silence of the Valley of the Kings. Cairo and its din, dead donkeys in the canals, natives in dazzling white, with smiles to match. Egyptian nationalism.

  South Africa . . . Mafeking, the Place of Stones, on the veldt. Haunting singing from the native kraals in the evening. The war against the Boers. The Seige. Baden-Powell, the hero of the hour. Natives dying of starvation. The more-favoured rest surviving on horse meat and mealie porridge.

  Armenia . . . a parched, stony land where wild flowers in the mountains grew stiffly, conditioned by the thin soil. Almond blossom in the spring and fountains everywhere in the dust-bowl of Yerevan, a city old as Babylon. Tall-hatted priests. Mount Ararat across the Turkish border, its snow-capped peak rosy against the blue sky. Turkish oppression and genocide – nowhere had fascinated Paddy more. Nowhere had contributed more to his downfall.

  But above all, she dreamt of India . . .

  Twelve

  Then

  She had long ago pushed India and what it meant into a closed drawer at the back of her mind, along with all the other memories she did not care to revisit. But who knew what alchemy brought memory to the surface? Occasionally unexpected things, a stray word, the scent of sandalwood or jasmine, the hint of certain spices in food would unlock the drawer and there she was, rummaging among the sights, smells and sounds that had once been so familiar.

  India overwhelmed her, her first sight of it and ever thereafter. Nothing about it was moderate. Everything went to extremes: beauty and ugliness, wealth and squalor, famine and plenty, drought and flood, pitiless sunshine and relentless rain.

  Perhaps she had looked forward too eagerly to a new, strange and exciting life, an exotic paradise, but when she and Paddy arrived, the immediate reality was so contrary to her expectations that her spirits sank into her shoes. Where was the brilliant sun, the deep blue sky? Instead, nothing but towering banks of grey cloud, heavy humidity and a thick, oppressive heat. Wearing her lightest clothing, the moment she stepped unsteadily onto the quay from the steam launch which had brought them across the choppy waters of the harbour, perspiration prickled under her arms and ran down between her shoulder blades and her breasts. You could almost taste the air, soupy, steamy and metallic. They said that despite the recent rain which had left puddles already drying to dust on the quay, the monsoon season had hardly got into its stride; the rainfall was still intermittent, just squally showers that merely heralded the succession of torrential downpours that would inevitably come later.

  At least the tea plantation (the tea garden, she had learnt) was in the hills. Where it will be cooler, she thought with relief, not so humid, where we might make another sort of garden, English style, Paddy and I . . . and Paddy’s father.

  Where was Daniel Fitzallan? He was supposed to have met them, but he had not been waiting at the disembarkation point as he had promised, and Emily was forced to wait in the clamouring chaos on the quayside while Paddy went to enquire for him. Most of the ship’s other passengers soon departed, including Mrs Maybury, a kindly young matron whose husband worked as an administrator in the Indian Civil Service, and who had taken Emily under her wing on board ship. She was returning from Home, where she had been compelled to leave her two boys at school, and had been glad of company to take her mind off it. She promised to keep in touch. ‘Don’t expect too much at first, my dear, India’s like nothing you’ve ever been used to – it will take time for you to adjust, and to make friends.’ Kind advice, from the wisdom of experience, that sounded ominously like a warning. ‘Before you leave Bombay, we must meet again, make sure you have a chance to enjoy yourself. The Prince of Wales is to visit soon and there’s sure to be a vastly entertaining time ahead.’

  Emily doubted there would be the opportunity to join in any such frivolities before she and Paddy departed for Assam, but she smiled and thanked Veronica Maybury, who kissed her warmly and departed in the carriage that had been waiting for her, leaving Emily by the sheds that flanked the quay, alone with their luggage, her ears assaulted by the din surrounding her on every side.

  Workmen, barefoot and wearing nothing but a dhoti tucked up between their legs, scuttled about carrying the trunks, bags and baskets belonging to disembarking passengers, while others unloaded cargoes onto bullock carts, trotting along, bent almost double with tea-chests – sometimes two – roped onto their backs, or balancing immense bundles on their heads. People jostled and pushed past her, jabbering incessantly in an unintelligible language. Unavoidably, she breathed in the malodorous fusion of smells: the cloying scents that did not mask human body odours; a breath of something that brought to mind Aunt Lottie’s High Church in London – incense perhaps; an acrid tang like bonfires; the stench of rotten meat, and worse.

  By the time Paddy returned, after a fruitless search for his father, there were no horse-drawn tongas to be had to take them to their hotel – Watson’s, the place to stay, for Europeans – and they were compelled to hire a rickshaw for themselves and their luggage, pulled by a single man, a demeaning circumstance which shocked Emily but seemed of no great import to the man himself, who cheerfully picked up the shafts and set off on naked feet at a great pace.

  ‘If this isn’t just like my father!’ Paddy’s lips twitched, amused rather than annoyed by the situati
on. ‘Most likely he’s forgotten what day we’re arriving. At least I hope that’s what it is,’ he added obscurely, but just kept smiling when she asked for an explanation.

  Emily forced herself not to press him for one. There was a strong element of hero-worship in the way Paddy regarded his father, glossing over minor peccadilloes, and she was beginning to find her new husband was very good at answering questions he did not like with only a smile. Which was . . . not exactly annoying, but a tiny blip in the perfection of their so far blissfully happy time as man and wife.

  It had not happened without opposition, her marriage to Paddy. Aunt Lottie, predictably, had not been slow to have her say. First Clare, and now Emily! Emily, hitherto the one who never gave any trouble, throwing herself away, getting ridiculous notions about marrying Paddy Fitzallan, charming as he was. Her father must rouse himself and put his foot firmly down, talk some sense into her. Even Anthony could not countenance this.

  Any doubts Anthony might have had when Paddy asked for the hand of his daughter in marriage, he appeared to have smothered, however. As usual, he let events dictate their own course, retreating from the upheaval that would have ensued if he had forbidden her – and in any case, why should she not marry the boy, he had answered, silencing every objection Mrs Arbuthnot put forward. Paddy Fitzallan was a likeable fellow, of good family – his father was a baronet, he would inherit the title. An impoverished baronet, that was true, but that didn’t trouble Anthony overmuch. It mattered little to him whether the man his daughter had chosen to marry was a prince or a pauper – there was the money left in trust by her mother for when she married, as well as his own marriage settlement. And there would eventually be the not inconsiderable sum of what he had to leave. ‘If that’s how you feel, child, I won’t go against you,’ he had said finally.