The Dark Shore (16 page)

4

In St. Ives the white houses were basking in the golden glow of evening and the sea was still and calm. In the little house in one of the back-alleys
near Fish Street.
Justin was holding a mug of steaming coffee in his hands and wonde
ring
what had possessed him to tell this woman the story of his life. It was her fault. If she had not questioned him so closely about the aftermath of that terrible weekend at Clougy he would not have needed to explain anything about his grandmother and the parting from his father, but for some reason he had wanted to explain. At first he had been guarded and cautious, but when she had seemed to understand he had lost some of his reserve. She hadn’t laughed at him. As the afternoon slid gently away from them, he began to trust her sufficiently to be able to talk more freely.

“And you never told anyone what you saw that night?” she said at last. “You said nothing?”

“I didn’t think it would help my father.”

“But you’re sure now that he didn’t kill her.”

“He told me he didn’t. Someone else must have killed her. I have to find out who it was.”

She thought about it for a long moment, and the smoke from her cigarette curled lazily upwards until it was caught in the slanting rays of sunlight and transformed into a golden haze.

“I thought at the time that Jon had probably killed her,” she said at last. “But it was a mere suspicion backed up by the knowledge that he had more than enough provocation that weekend
...
And then last week Max phoned me and asked me out to dinner. As soon as I saw him I realized he was itching to discuss his meeting with Jon earlier and speculate on why Jon should return to Clougy. We talked for hours, recalling all our memories, and in the end he said Jon had half-invited him down to Clougy and he had a good mind to accept in order to have the chance of finding out what was going on. He was convinced that Jon had killed Sophia and he thought it curious, to say the least, that Jon should take his new wife back there ten years later. I’d planned to take a few days’ holiday anyway at around this time, and I suddenly thought it might be rather interesting to come down here so that I would be close at hand if Max should discover anything
...
But the more I thought about Jon and his connection with Sophia’s death, the more I felt—” She stopped.

“Felt?”

“I—I felt that it was better to let sleeping dogs lie
...
After all, it was ten years ago, and Jon’s married again now. I suddenly disliked the thought of Max deliberately going down to Clougy with the idea of probing a past which was better buried and forgotten.”

“So you wrote to my father to warn him.”

“Yes, I thought he should know Max’s motives in returning to Clougy.” She leant forward and stubbed out her cigarette. “Odd how convinced Max was that she had been murdered
...
After all, murder was never mentioned at the time, was it? And the jury at the inquest decided it was an accident. But maybe we all knew she’d been murdered although we were too frightened to say so. That’s ironic, isn’t it! We all had a motive, you see, each one of us. We all had a reason for killing her, so we all kept silent and accepted the verdict of accident because we were afraid of casting suspicion on ourselves by speaking our suspicions aloud to the police
...
What’s the matter? Didn’t you guess I might have had a motive for wishing your mother dead?”

He shook his head wordlessly, watching her.

“
I
was an outsider from the first,” she said, lighting another cigarette and shaking out the match as she spoke. “They all belonged to a different world—all of them except Sophia, and even her world of Soho cafes wasn’t exactly mine. I was only eighteen then; I hadn’t been working in London for very long. I met Max by accident at some party which I and a few friends had gatecrashed and I didn’t know the kind of man he was. I just knew he was rich and moved in an expensive, exciting world, and I didn’t find it difficult to fall in love and start to imagine all kinds of exotic, romantic pictures. It’s so easy when one’s only eighteen to live with one’s head in the clouds, isn’t it? Anyway, we had an affair, and eventually he took me to Clougy for that weekend.

“I was still in love with him then, still dreaming my romantic little daydreams.

“I think I hated Clougy from the first moment that I saw it. As for the other people, I didn’t understand them at all—God, how baffling they seemed at the time! I found Jon interesting but he scarcely seemed to notice I existed—he was entirely engrossed with his wife and his cousin, and cared for nothing else. As for his cousin—well, I had nothing to say to her; we simply didn’t even begin to talk the same language. The solicitor-husband was nice but too polite to be friendly, and anyway he too seemed to be almost entirely wrapped up in his personal problems. I disliked Sophia straight away, but it wasn’t a very active dislike. I remember thinking that she just seemed rather common and vulgar.

“She started to flirt with Max about an hour after we’d arrived. I didn’t take her seriously at first because I thought she surely couldn’t flirt with one of her guests under her husband’s nose, but that was my mistake. She meant it all right. The next morning Max and I quarreled violently and he went off with Sophia to St. Ives on a—quote ‘shopping expedition,’ unquote. I don’t think I’ve ever been so unhappy either before or since. I stayed in my room all morning and until the early evening when I heard them come back from St. Ives. After a while I went to look for Max and you told me—do you remember?—that he’d gone down to the cove with your mother for a swim. So I went out, taking the path down to the beach.

“I heard
th
em talking before I saw them. She was saying in that ugly foreign voice of hers that she had a wonderful scheme all planned. She was sick to death of Clougy and wanted to get away from Jon and go back to London, and Max was to be her savior. She had it all worked out—a cosy little
ménage
a deux with just the right-sized luxury flat in Mayfair and maybe a cosy little divorce at the end of the rainbow. It sounded wonderful. God, how I hated her! I can’t describe how much I hated her at that moment. And then I realized that Max wasn’t exactly enthralled with all these beautiful schemes and I suddenly wanted to laugh out loud. He tried to put it tactfully at first but when she refused to understand, he spoke more frankly. He didn’t want a
ménage
a deux in Mayfair or the scandal and publicity of being correspondent in his best friend’s divorce suit! The last thing he wanted was to have Sophia permanently on his hands in London! He didn’t really want an affair with the woman at all and the thought of her shouting from the rooftops that she was his mistress was enough to make his blood run cold. ‘Look,’ he said to her. ‘I can’t and won’t play your game the way you want it played. You’d better find yourself another lover.’ And then just as I was closing my eyes in sheer relief I heard the woman say, ‘I have to get away from here—you don’t understand. I’ll go mad if I have to stay here any longer. If you don’t take me to London and give me money and somewhere to live I’ll make you the most famous correspondent in town and blow your friendship with Jon to smithereens.’

“And Max said with a laugh, ‘You wouldn’t have a hope in heaven of doing either of those things!’

“ ‘Wouldn’t I?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t I? Just you try and see!’

“And after a moment Max said, ‘I’d better have time to think about this and then I’ll have to talk to you again. I’ll meet you out at the Flat Rocks after dinner this evening and we can discuss the situation in detail.’

“I moved then. I came round the rocks towards them and Max saw straight away that I’d heard what they’d been saying. When he lost his temper with me and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing spying on him, I turned on Sophia and called her all the names I could think of. I blamed her for everything—Max’s changed attitude towards me, my own misery, his violent loss of temper which upset me more than anything else in the world. And she just laughed. I stormed and raged and poured out abuse and all she did was laugh.

“I found my way back to the house somehow. I went to my room and stayed there while I shed enough tears to fill the Atlantic Ocean. I knew then that everything was finished as far as Max and I were concerned, and that I meant no more to him than Sophia—or any other woman—did. I’d been deceiving myself for weeks that he cared for me, and I knew then that
I’d been both incredibly blind and incredibly stupid. But I was only eighteen
...
It’s so easy to make mistakes at eighteen, isn’t it?”

“I knew what time he was going to meet Sophia. I thought that if I could see him for a few minutes alone, if I could meet him by the Flat Rocks before Sophia arrived, I could perhaps persuade him not to listen to her, to call her bluff, and perhaps I could show him how much I still loved him. But I didn’t know where the Flat Rocks were or how one reached them. In the end on an impulse I went out of my room and moved downstairs. It was late. There was a hell of a row going on in the music room, but I didn’t stop to listen. I went outside to the gate to see if there was any sign of Max leaving for the Flat Rocks, and just as I reached the gate I saw him; he was walking down towards the beach. At the head of the cove he paused to watch the sea for a few minutes, and then he turned to retrace his steps and he saw me straight away. When I asked him where he was going he shrugged and said he was going back to the house.

“ ‘I thought you’d gone to keep your rendezvous with Sophia,’ I said. ‘Why have you come back?’

“ ‘It’s colder than I thought,’ he said. ‘I’ve come back for a sweater.’ “I tried to talk with him then, pleading with him to ignore Sophia and begging him to take me back to London straight away, but it was no good. He wouldn’t listen, and just told me not to try to organize his life for him as he was perfectly capable of organizing it himself. When we reached the house again, he left me while he went inside to fetch his sweater, and I waited in the bushes by the gate, meaning to follow him when he came out again.

“He came out again almost at once.

“I followed him a little way, but he must have seen me for he lay in wait and stepped out in front of me as I reached the point where the path forked to go up to the cliffs. We had one final bitter useless row there and then he went on out towards the Flat Rocks while I sat down on a rock near the fork in the path and tried to pull myself together.

“When I finally went back to the house there was a light on in the music room where I had heard them all quarreling earlier, but the door was open now and no one was there. I was just standing in the hall and wondering where they all were when Jon came down the stairs. ‘Marijohn’ he called, seeing my shadow on the wall and thinking I was his cousin, and then he saw it was me. ‘Where’s Marijohn?’ he said. ‘Where’s she gone?’ I shook my head. He was very white. ‘I have to find her. I have to find Marijohn.’ He kept saying it over and over again. ‘Where is everyone?’ he said at last. ‘Where’s Max?’ I told him then, and he went straight away to the front door, stopping for a moment by the chest as if he were pausing to look for somethin
g, but there was nothing
there.
The next moment he was in the drive and I was a
lone a
gain in the hall.”

She shook ashes
from
her cigarette onto the carpe
t
. “
I
didn’t kill your mother,
”
she said at last.
“
I could have done it, but I didn’t. I went up to my room again and stayed there until Max came up to tell me the news.” There was a silence in the room. When she next glanced at him she saw to her surprise that he was leaning forward and his eyes were dark with concentration.

“My father was at the house when you returned to it from the cove?”

“Why, yes,” she said. “I told you.”

“What was he wearing?”

“What was he wearing? God, I haven’t the faintest idea! I wasn’t in a mood for noticing clothes that night. Why?”

“Was he wearing a red sweater?”

“I don’t think so—no, I’m sure he wasn’t. When I saw him he was wearing only a shirt and a pair of trousers—I remember noticing that his shirt was open at the neck and I could see the sweat glistening on the skin at his throat. God, he did look shaken! He was white as a sheet and all he could do was ask for Marijohn
..
.”

Five

1

As soon as it was dark that evening Sarah made an excuse to go up to her room, and then slipped outside into the cool night air to wait in the shadows by the gate. She didn’t have to wait long. As she plucked a leaf from the rhododendron bush nearby and tore it to shreds in her fingers she saw the front door open noiselessly and the next moment Rivers was crossing the drive toward her.

“Sarah?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Good.” He drew closer to her and she was conscious of his air of authority. He could cope with the situation, she thought with a rush of relief. He’s spent his life dealing with other people’s problems and her own problem was something which probably he alone was fully able to understand. “The first thing to do,” he said, “is to walk away from the house. I don’t want to run the risk of anyone overhearing our conversation.”

“Shall we go down to the cove?”

“No,” he said, “that would be the first place they’d look for us. We’ll go up on to the cliffs.”

They set off along the path, Rivers leading the way, and the night was dark and clouded, muffling the roar of the sea.

“Don’t let’s go too far,” said Sarah suddenly.

“We’ll stop around the next
corner
.”

It was much too dark. Sarah found her feet catching in the heather and jarring on the uneven ground.

“Michael—”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll stop here.”

There was an outcrop of rocks below the path and he helped her down the hillside until they could sit side by side on a rocky ledge and watch the dark mass of the sea straight in front of them. Far below them the surf was a fleck of whiteness on the reefs and lagoons of the shore.

“Cigarette?”
said Rivers.

“No,
t
hank you.”

“Mind if I do?”

“No, not at all.” How polite we are, she thought. We should be in a stately London drawing-room instead of on Cornish cliffs at night far from the formalities of civilization.

“How did you meet Jon?” he said suddenly, jolting her away from her thoughts.

She tried to concentrate on the effort of conversation.

“We met through a friend of mine,” she said. “Frank’s business was connected with Jon’s, and one night we all had dinner together—Frank and I, Jon and some girl whom I didn’t know. It never occurred to me at the time that Jon was the slightest bit interested in me, but the next day he phoned and asked to take me out to a concert. I went. I shouldn’t have because of
Frank, but then
...
well, Frank and I weren’t engaged, and I—I wanted to see Jon again.”

“I see.” The cigarette tip glowed red in the darkness and flickered as he inhaled. “Yes, that sounds like Jon.”

She said nothing, waiting for him to go on, and, after a moment, he said, “I met both Jon and Marijohn when old Towers died. I was then the assistant solicitor in the firm which had looked after his legal affairs and I was helping the senior partner in the task of proving the will and winding up the estate. Marijohn was eighteen. I’ll never forget when I first saw her.”

The cigarette tip glowed again.

“I managed to take her out once or twice, but there were about ten other men all wanting to take her out and there are only seven evenings in a week. They had more money and were older and more sophisticated than I was. She always chose the older men; the ones that mattered were all over thirty-five, but I was still fool enough to go on trying and hoping
...
until I went to the party and heard people talking about her. It was then for the first time that I realized she was completely and utterly promiscuous and slept with any man who would give her the best time.

“I left her alone for a while after that, but then I met her again and it was impossible to put her out of my mind. I had to keep phoning her, finding out who she was living with, going through a self-induced hell every day and night. And it was all for nothing, of course. She didn’t give a damn.

“Then, quite suddenly, everything changed. One of her affairs went very, very wrong and she had to have an abortion. She had no money and was very ill. And she came to me. It was I who helped her, I who put up the money, arranged the abortion, paid off the necessary doctors—I, a solicitor, committing a criminal offense! But nobody ever found out. Gradually she got better and I took her away to a quiet corner in Sussex
f
or a while to convalesce, but she wasn’t fit enough to sleep with me even if she’d wanted to, and after a week she left me and went back to London.

“I followed her back and found she was planning to go down to Cornwall. ‘I want to see Jon,’ she said to me. I can see her now, standing there, her eyes very blue and clear. She was wearing a dark blue dress which was too big for her because she’d lost so much weight. ‘I don’t want you to come,’ she said. ‘I want to be alone with Jon for a while and then when I come back perhaps I’ll live with you and you can look after me.’ When I said—for the hundredth time—that I wanted to marry her she said that she didn’t even know if she could live with me let alone marry me, and that I would have to wait until she had seen Jon. I said, ‘What’s Jon got to do with it? How can he help you?’ And she turned to me and said: ‘You wouldn’t understand even if I tried to explain.’

“She came back from Cornwall a month later and said she would marry me. She was transformed. She looked so much better that I hardly recognized her.

“We had a very quiet wedding. Jon and Sophia didn’t come and although I thought at the time that it was strange, the full significance never fully occurred to me. For a while we were very happy—I suppose I had six months of complete happiness, and even now when I look back I would rather have had those six months than none at all. And then Jon came up to town one day from Penzance, and nothing was ever the same again.

“It was a gradual process, the disintegration of our marriage. For the first time I didn’t even realize what was happening and then I realized that she was becoming cold, withdrawn. Ironically enough, the colder she became the more I seemed to need her and want her, and the more I wanted her the less she wanted me. In the end she said she wanted a separate bedroom. We quarreled. I asked her if there was some other man, but she just laughed, and when she laughed I shouted out, ‘Then why do you see so much of Jon? Why is he always coming up to London? Why do we always get so many invitations to Clougy? Why is it you have to see so much of him?’ “And she turned to me and said, ‘Because he’s the only man I’ve ever met who doesn’t want to go to bed with me.’

“It was my turn to laugh then. I said, ‘He’d want to all right if he wasn’t so wrapped up in his wife!’

“And she said, ‘You don’t understand. There’s no question of our going to bed together.’

“It was so strange, the way she said that. I remember feeling that curious sickness one gets in the pit of the stomach the second after experiencing a shock. I said sharply, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ And she just said, ‘I can’t describe how peaceful it is. It’s the most perfect thing in all the world.’

“I suppose I knew then that I was frightened. The terrible thing was that I didn’t know what I was frightened of. ‘You’re living with your head in the clouds,’ I remember saying to her brutally, trying to shatter my own fear and destroy the barrier between us which she had created. ‘You’re talking nonsense. ’ And she said untroubled, as if it were supremely unimportant, ‘Think that if you like. I don’t care. But no matter what you think, it doesn’t alter the fact that sex for me has long since lost all its meaning. It just seems rather ridiculous and unnecessary.’ And as if in afterthought she added vaguely, ‘I’m so sorry, Michael.’ It was funny the way she said that. It had a peculiar air of bathos, and yet it wasn’t really bathos at all. ‘I’m so sorry, Michael
...
’

“I still couldn’t stop loving her. I tried to leave, but I had to go back. I can’t even begin to describe what a hell it was. And then we had that final invitation to Clougy, and I resolved that I must talk to Jon and lay my cards on the table. I knew he was absorbed with his wife, and I thought at the time that his relationship with Marijohn would be a much more casual, unimportant thing than her attitude towards him.

“We hadn’t been five minutes at Clougy before I realized that Sophia was driving him to the limits of his patience and testing his love beyond all the bounds of endurance. And suddenly, that weekend, his patience snapped and he turned away from her—he’d had enough and could stand no more of her petulance and infidelity. And when he turned away, it was as if he turned to Marijohn.

“It was the most dangerous thing that could have happened; I was beside myself with anxiety, and tried to get Marijohn away, but she refused to go. I tried to talk to Jon but he pretended he hadn’t the faintest idea what I was talking about and that there was nothing wrong between him and Marijohn. And then—then of all moments—Sophia had to stumble across what was happening and drag us all towards disaster.

“She’d been having an affair with Max and they’d driven into St. Ives for the afternoon. Jon was in the music room with Marijohn, and rather than make an unwelcome third I went out fishing and tried to think what the hell I was going to do. I didn’t come to any conclusion at all. The child came, I remember, and sat talking to me and in some ways I was grateful to him because he took my mind off my troubles. When he went I stayed for a little longer by the shore and then eventually I went back to the house for dinner.

“Sophia and Max were back, and Sophia was looking very uneasy. She talked too much at the start of the meal, and then, when Jon and Marijohn were silent she made no further efforts at conversation. When Jon and
Marijohn began to talk to each other at last, ignoring the rest of us entirely, I saw then without a doubt that Sophia had realized what was happening and was going to make trouble.