After the Armistice Ball (27 page)

I felt it most grievously myself that we
still
did not know what had happened to the jewels and so despite all my muck-raking Daisy and Silas were exactly where they had started. And there they would stay, I was sure, since the only way out of it depended on me. Oh yes, I had been all set, that morning, to blackmail – let us call it what it was – to blackmail Lena into silence. Now, though, I felt that had I the nerve to go through with it, I should never be able to look myself in the glass again. And anyway I had not the nerve, I knew.

We were there. Alec looked up as I laid my hand on the gates of the Municipal Cemetery and pushed them open, then bowed his head again while we traversed a network of paths to the back corner where some newly filled plots sat in a row. There were five recent enough. Five, packed so close that there was barely a strip of flat ground between them and they looked more like the furrows of a ploughed field than graves. Three of them had flowers upon them, some florists’ wreaths as well as little hand-picked posies.

‘So it must be one of these two,’ I said, looking first at one and then at the other of the two graves which lay quite unmarked. ‘Oh, Cara.’ I felt a huge bulge of tears revolve somewhere inside me, but bit down hard on my lip to hold them.

‘You’re sure,’ said Alec. It may have been a question.

‘When I was speaking to Mrs Tig – to Mary just now,’ I said, ‘she pinched out her cigarette in her fingertips and didn’t feel a thing. And I thought, those are kitchen maid’s hands, you know, tough as boots. Not scrubbed raw, as Dr Milne said. With bits of metal pot-scourer under her nails. Kitchen maids don’t have nails to get things stuck under.’ Somehow that seemed the worst thing of all, imagining Lena taking her still-warm hands and setting about them with a scourer to add a convincing little touch to the tale.

‘How do you know this is the place?’ said Alec.

‘Dr Milne told me it was in town,’ I said. ‘Then I just telephoned around, pretended I was organizing a little marker of some kind. It’s the sort of thing a kind employer might do – Hugh has done in the past – although not Lena admittedly. I had to gamble that in fact no marker was already arranged.’

‘And was one?’ said Alec, his voice beginning to sound gruff.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Apparently not.’

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.