After the Armistice Ball (30 page)

‘As you said yourself, Dandy, even if Lena is two separate people, one is mad and one is bad. Neither of them would want to smooth things through for Cara instead of punishing her.’

The dressing bell rang then, and I was glad to hear it. I was completely fagged with it all and thought if I tried to compose one more coherent remark, Alec would change his mind and think me the silliest woman who ever lived. Besides, I was still hugging his compliment to me, saving it until later when I could get it out and admire it properly.

‘Goodness, madam,’ said Grant, as I opened my bedroom door. ‘Have you been frowning like that all afternoon? Look at the crease you’ve put in your brow. I shall have to press a hot cloth on that, ten minutes at least. Now, lie down while I fetch it and try not to scowl, do.’

Chapter Sixteen

It was with mixed feelings that I found myself, along with Alec, engaged for a picnic the following afternoon.

‘I don’t clearly remember having accepted this invitation,’ I grumbled as Teddy and Donald dragged me downstairs the next morning to instruct Mrs Tilling.

‘That’s the nature of your madness, Mummy,’ said Teddy, barely getting it out between gusts of laughter. I foresaw that the nature of madness was to take over as the motto of the holiday and I cursed myself for blurting it out to them.

‘Very well then,’ I said. ‘But you must not disturb me all morning until it’s time to leave. I have a great deal to do.’

‘A great deal of
what
to do?’ said Donald with a depth of scorn which tugged at me. I had told myself at the time that I hated the way they clung around me when they were tiny with their little sticky hands clutching my skirts and their little sticky faces always turned up for a kiss. Now, perversely, I should not mind at all to hear voices piping how clever I was to find rabbit when he was lost at bedtime or how pretty I looked when I was dressed for a party.

I asked for a pot of coffee to be brought to my sitting room and sat sipping it, meditatively staring at the objects on my writing desk: the blank sheet of paper, the photographs of the boys as fat babies. Also there on my desk top was a puzzle, brought back as a souvenir from my elder sister’s tour of India with her bore of a husband. It was a little polished nest of interlocking structures, indivisible so that it must have been carved out of a single piece of wood, and it rattled with a pleasing, smooth sound if one shook it, but it could not come apart. So not a puzzle at all really, just an intricate curio.

That was what this case should look like, perfectly interlocking and complete, but it was more like the monkeys from the night nursery, little wooden monkeys each with one arm stretched up and its tail reaching down so that it could be suspended from the one above, arm to tail, arm to tail, in a brittle, precarious string. That was this case to a tee. Each fact could be carefully suspended from the preceding one in a longer and longer chain, but if one tried to make a loop – I remembered Donald spending hours on this – guiding the last tail gently around to the first paw, no matter how careful one was, the thing fell to bits in one’s hands.

Two murders need two motives, I wrote, then I put my elbows on the desk and lowered my head, but stopped in time. It was not even ten o’clock in the morning, and I could not possibly put my head in my hands already. Sherlock, I am sure, never put his head in his hands before luncheon. That should be my rule from now on. No head-holding before luncheon, no putting of one’s head on the table and rolling it from side to side before tea, and no audible groaning before dinner.

Two secrets, I wrote. Diamond theft, baby coming. I could not begin to see how either of these could lead to either of the murders, much less work out which went with which. Could a theft cause the planned death of one’s child? Could anything about a theft send one mad? Not in any way that I could imagine. But it was even more ludicrous to think that a baby coming too soon and from the wrong quarter could make a woman plot to kill her child. It was shameful, scandalous, it’s true, but it happened all the time and the most rigid families got over it in the end. But then Lena was such a curious mixture of respectability and complete carelessness. Clemence so protected, so coddled – I remembered Lena telling me with satisfaction how she tried to shield darling Clemence from the ugly truths of life. Cara on the other hand, since she had managed to get pregnant, must have been on a fairly free rein. And that was how it had been for years. Clemence at her mother’s heels and Cara racketing about with Sha-sha McIntosh and the others. Staying all on her own with Daisy and Silas years ago, walking in the woods with Alec, if it came to that. Questions of respectability seemed to influence Lena in random and mystifying ways. But could any mother, however odd she was, really care whether a child who is known to have killed herself is also known to have had a little accident as well? Daisy’s mother had been wild when Rupert had made his early entry in the too, too solid nine pounds of his flesh, but she adored him now.

Of course! The revelation fizzed in my head. Of course! I had said it myself, hadn’t I? It’s the sort of thing that one gets over, but it rocks one on one’s heels at the time. Lena had not known about Cara’s baby.

I had been right all along. There
were
two stories, each quite separate from the other. The planned murder, so meticulously prepared, the cottage decorated, the engagement broken and the coal laid in, was all to do with the jewels and nothing to do with the baby at all. It had to be so. Lena already knew about the jewels; the timing was right. A known fact causing a planned killing and then a nasty surprise wiping out all the plans and ending in something savage. That had to be how it was. If I forced myself to accept the one brutal fact that threatened to choke me, that Lena really had done what she had done, it fitted.

From here, finally, I could bridge the gap. From this spot on my cliff edge I could point across to where Lena had gone and at least see what had plucked her away there. I still did not know exactly why she had planned the fire but that night at the cottage, with the plan set in motion, she must have been wound as tight as a steel spring, perhaps half-crazy already with the thought that she couldn’t, but she must, but she couldn’t, but she must. Then Cara went out on her bicycle to the post box and, if Lena discovered that she had gone, she must have assumed she’d gone for good, escaped. Lena must have been flung to the farthest edge of sanity at that, or drowned by a surge of hopeless relief, perhaps, that she needn’t go through with it after all. Then cruelly, unbelievably, she was snapped right back to the middle of it again when Cara returned. Into all of that, Cara dropped her bombshell and the shock must have cracked across Lena like lightning. She attacked, and attacked as though to blot out the very source of all the disgust and shame.

But where was Clemence in any of this? Had she tried to intervene between her little sister and her mother gone suddenly, terrifyingly, mad? I had never seen so much as a word pass between the sisters in any of our meetings through the years, and Clemence was Lena’s through and through. Poor Clemence. (Why did we always say that?) What had been her part in that ugly night? She had been there, and yet it was impossible to make oneself remember her somehow. Lena and Cara with their secrets were curved around each other, interlocking, and Clemence did not fit. I shuddered. Not ‘poor’ Clemence at all. It was chilling to think that there was someone else there, besides Cara and Lena, not stepping in, not stopping it from happening, just watching it with her blank eyes and then taking her plates to the photographer’s shop to see how well they had come out. Perhaps whatever was wrong with the inside of Lena’s head had passed itself on.

I felt besmirched by these thoughts, but not for the first time I put my uneasiness down to quite the wrong cause. I thought it was the horrid idea of what had been done to Cara that was unsettling me. I actually thought that I had pushed myself to my limits and beyond in making myself repeat the idea and see the image over and over again. In fact, of course, I had turned away in squeamishness every time, taking mincing little peeks at it and then bolting, and because of this I had not seen something glaringly obvious. Had I forced myself truly to retell the tale of what had happened in the cottage that night and tried to watch it happening before me like a news reel, I could not have helped but see the gaping hole in the story Ironic that I should then have been able to turn away from it once and for all. Nanny Palmer was right: monsters faced
are
mice, but because I had not faced this one it loomed over me like a behemoth still.

It was with some effort that I arranged a suitable face to wear above my linen frock for the picnic, an effort which I surmised from Donald’s greeting was not wholly successful.

‘You look dreadful, Mother,’ he said, reminding me very much that he was his father’s son.

‘You don’t half need this picnic,’ said Teddy. ‘But it’s a shame you’re so big or you could come in the trap with us instead of the boring old motor. Now I wonder . . .’ He looked at the picnic things and unflatteringly at my figure, gauging their relative weights, I supposed, but Alec nipped this firmly in the bud.

‘No, we’re not getting it all out again when we’ve just spent such ages stuffing it in,’ he said. ‘You get in and drive the pony with Donald, and Mummy and I will crawl along behind and tell you what we think of your prowess.’ This proved the magic touch, although I pitied the poor pony, envisaging much more liberal application of the whip if the boys were playing to the gallery. Still it gave Alec and me talking time as we puttered along in their dust.

‘You do look ropy, actually, Dan,’ said Alec as we set off.

‘It’s just . . .’ I began, but could not go on. ‘I really am all right. In fact, it’s being all right that’s so shocking.’

‘I know,’ said Alec. ‘I remember this from the war. One gets used to more and more and more until one is quite happy to countenance things which would have been the stuff of nightmares in normal life. I remember –’ He broke off.

‘Please tell me, ‘I said. ‘I shan’t mind, because I know exactly what you mean. Every so often I hear myself saying “But since Lena killed her child that must mean . . .” and I think I shall faint or burst out laughing because it seems so impossible.’

‘Faint, if you’ve got a choice,’ said Alec. ‘When one starts to laugh one’s really in trouble. What I was going to . . . I once had this pie. It was in the trench, you know, and instead of the usual dried beef and mouldy biscuits, somehow from somewhere we had got these pies. Anyway, I found myself thinking that yes, I knew I had to do something about old Pinner, Sergeant Pinner, I knew he could not stay there for ever, but I was bloody well going to have my pie first and then a fag and
then
I should take him away, and it wasn’t as if he could see me anyway because his head was blown off all over the shop and that made it better. I started to laugh then and couldn’t stop, kept going until the whites of my eyes were red all over with burst blood vessels and then Pinner and I had to be carted off together. Look, one of them is still a bit pink.’ He turned towards me and opened his eyes very wide close to mine. I could not see anything in the dim interior of the motor car, but I nodded anyway.

‘So,’ said Alec, horridly brisk all of a sudden, ‘let’s at least see if you’ve been wading through the same horrors as me this morning, shall we? I concluded that . . . that . . . the nature of the attack points towards its being Lena’s sudden discovery that Cara was with child which brought it on.’

‘Yes,’ I said thankfully. ‘That on top of all the strain of what she was about to do. And, as well, there’s the fact that she is, must be, an extremely unstable woman. In our midst all the time, looking perfectly normal.’

And yet. Lena’s madness seemed to come and go so conveniently. Mad evil thoughts, and cool sane plans. Mad, ugly rages, and calm, brave solutions. I had heard of people who had hordes of unwanted guests inside their heads, independent agents each ploughing a different furrow, and I wondered again for a moment if Lena’s madness could be of this type. But no. Even when she acted like two separate people, one cleared up after the other. They were in it together.

The boys had veered off the lane and were trotting the pony over the rough ground towards our favourite picnic spot, Donald driving the trap and Teddy, totally unnecessarily, standing up waving his arms to show us where they were going. We turned and began to bump over the grass behind them.

‘What about the diamonds?’ said Alec ‘Have you got anywhere with that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘At best a lot of incompatible wisps.’

‘Me too, ‘said Alec. ‘Such as what makes Lena so sure that the Esslemonts’ ball is anything to do with it? After all, Cara told you that the jewels were in and out the bank more than once since then. To be cleaned and valued and have pastes made.’

‘Everything except to be worn,’ I agreed. ‘If I had anything as beautiful as those I should wear them all the time. Every day. I should be wearing them now.’ I was forcibly trying to lighten the mood as we drew to a halt and got ready to jump down and rejoin the children.

Mrs Tilling might not have been up all night in preparation of the feast but that was clearly the effect she wanted to achieve. As well as tomato sandwiches there were chicken legs and a glorious raised game pie which Alec and the boys fell upon but which I, still trying to dispel the story of Sergeant Pinner, could not touch. A splendid luncheon, then, which would have been quite delicious freshly served in the dining room or even on the terrace, instead of damp and dishevelled on the ground a mile from home. The hardboiled eggs, as ever, were taken by Teddy and shied into the river.

‘Where they belong!’ he cried after them. ‘Mummy, why can’t you tell her? It’s a fearful waste of eggs apart from anything else.’

‘Write me the script, Teddy darling, and I shall deliver it with feeling,’ I said. ‘And if you come up with a winner we can adjust it slightly and I’ll use it to stamp out my birthday cologne from Granny.’