The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette (14 page)

‘Nope. All’s quiet on the Western Front. Her Ladyship’s compliments and would Mrs Antonia Rushton care to go and see her now?’

‘Would Mrs Rushton ...?’ Miss Garnett pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Hermione actually
said
that?’

‘Yep. She wants to see her.
Now.’

‘So Lady Mortlock knows I am here?’ Antonia put down her cup.

‘Oh yes. She knows all right. She recognized your voice and everything. She told me all about you, actually.’

Antonia blinked. ‘Really?’

‘She told me how you used to kill stoats.’ Norah laughed exuberantly. ‘Only kidding. In my kind of job, if one doesn’t crack jokes, one would go mad,’ she explained. ‘You agree, don’t you, Miss G.?’

‘That would be enough, Norah,’ Miss Garnett said and she turned to Antonia. ‘What do you think? You’d be quite safe, I am sure. Norah will be outside the door. On the other hand -’

‘Hurry up, Miss G. I suggest Mrs Rushton goes at once, otherwise Her Ladyship may change her mind. She may go back to where she was earlier on and
that,
I must tell you, wasn’t a good place.’

‘Don’t call her “Her Ladyship”, Norah.’

Antonia rose. ‘I’ll go. After all, that’s why I came.’

As they walked down the corridor, Norah popped a piece of chewing gum into her mouth and said, ‘These old bags are driving me mad. In some ways Miss G. is worse than Lady M. There it is. The lair of the beast.’ She opened a door. ‘I’ll be here.’ She pointed to a chair. ‘Give me a shout if she turns nasty. You’ve written your last will and testament of course? You’re insured? Only kidding.’

The bedroom was as large as the sitting room, its walls covered in wallpaper of Delft blue. The pattern was of snow-white cranes in vertiginous flight. There were no pictures on the walls, only a magnificent mirror encrusted with bees in ormolu. In the middle of the room stood a four-poster bed made of rosewood. Lady Mortlock sat bolt upright, propped up by satin pillows, clutching a pair of rimless reading glasses over what looked like a small black prayer book. Antonia was surprised - Lady Mortlock had always been scornful of religion. Well, people mellowed with age and last minute conversions were not unknown.

Lady Mortlock was still recognizable as the imperious woman whose family history Antonia had been writing twenty years earlier, but only just. Her frame in a cream-coloured nightdress was shrunken, her face emaciated, the parchment-like skin stretched across the skull, the lips wasted and grey. Her eyes were like bullet-holes, almost invisible in their orbits, rimmed with startlingly vivid red. The eyelashes were gone, though she still had her brows. Her hair was white and wispy and it was covered with an old-fashioned black net. Lady Mortlock’s Roman nose seemed more prominent now - the only prominent thing about her. The hands that clutched at the book were brown with liver spots and claw-like.

Antonia had expected the dazed-sheep look of the gaga old, but Lady Mortlock’s eyes were unnervingly alert. She looked a cross between a mummy that had been reanimated by some mad scientist and an ancient bird of prey.

‘No doubt you disapprove? You always disapproved of them, didn’t you? You never said anything but I could see you disapproved.’

‘Good afternoon, Lady Mortlock,’ Antonia said brightly, reminding herself that her work at the club had equipped her for dealing with the non sequiturs of old people. She felt sudden horror at the thought of shaking hands with Lady Mortlock. She imagined Lady Mortlock’s hand to feel like a loose set of bones tied inside a very dry suede bag. Mercifully, the old woman’s hands remained on her lap.

‘I mean my father’s books. This is one of them.’ Lady Mortlock tapped her glasses against the book on her lap. Her voice, surprisingly, was very much as Antonia remembered it - deep and autocratic, though there was a somewhat hollow ring to it now. ‘I saw you looking at it a minute ago.
The Future of Eugenics.
It was written in 1928. I don’t suppose many books are written on the subject nowadays, are they?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘What is the future of eugenics? Never mind. Come and sit here, Antonia. Beside me.’ She pointed to a small armchair upholstered in maroon velvet. ‘Bea says it’s extremely comfortable and about such things Bea is usually right. That’s where she sits when I ask her to read to me. I am no good in the evenings. I go blind. Let me look at you,’ she said as Antonia sat down beside her. ‘Well, neither of us is getting any younger. You are far from repellent, but you have put on weight. You need to take more exercise. Have a massage once a month. Have your hair dyed blonde, now why don’t you? It would suit you, I think. I never did any of these things, mind. Despised women who did. Despised the flesh, rather refused to recognize it - with one notable exception.’ She paused. ‘You were in the sitting room, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ Antonia shifted slightly in her chair.

‘You recognized her, didn’t you? Don’t deny it. Now she -
she -
has changed beyond recognition. She came to see me some time ago ... Change and decay ... Change and decay everywhere I see! You know Elizabeth Street?’ Lady Mortlock pointed a skeletal finger towards the window. ‘I bet you didn’t know it started as Eliza Street? Duchesses do their shopping there now but one hundred years ago it was a terribly disreputable place, with tarts plying their trade and earning a few pence from the river traffic. Now,
that’s
one change for the better, but I can’t think of many others.’

‘How are you?’ Antonia asked.

‘The mind goes first. Every minute, every second, brings me closer to the grave. I am constantly made aware of it. When I turned eighty -’ Lady Mortlock broke off with a frown. ‘How old am I now?’

‘Eighty-seven.’

‘When I turned eighty, I suddenly became extremely self-conscious about my age and the decline in my powers. I realized that intellectually I had started slipping. In consequence I tried to learn even more things than usual by heart, partly to prove to myself that I could do it, partly to ensure that I didn’t bore or irritate my visitors. I also insisted that I be given a course of vitamin B12 injections. Well, I have fewer visitors now and I no longer remember things. The injections continue, but I don’t think they have any effect, apart from making me feel rather sore and a bit nauseous. The very distant past sometimes comes back, crystal-clear, to taunt me mainly, but what I did ten minutes ago is lost in a fog. It’s no mere loss of memory. I believe I
have fugues.
Was it me who scratched the nurse woman? We don’t keep cats, so it must have been me.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t want to upset me. You think I might get a heart attack or something if you do.’ Lady Mortlock paused. ‘You did see the photographs in the sitting room, of course?’

‘I did.’ Antonia decided she might as well take the bull by the horns. ‘You knew Lena before she married Lawrence Dufrette.’

‘Was it ever suggested otherwise?’

‘Yes. You said that you had first met her when Lawrence introduced her as his young bride.’

‘Really? I believe you are right. I did. Lena came to see me, you know. I don’t remember when. Was it last year? Two years ago? It might have been last month. It doesn’t matter. She told me all manner of useless things. That she and Lawrence had separated, that she had had a fortune which she had frittered away and was now destitute, that Lawrence had been
quite
unable to keep his hands off that girl of theirs and how her mother’s heart had been broken, how much she missed Baltic herring on buttered brown bread, how ungrateful and mean someone called Vivian was -’

Antonia frowned. ‘Sorry to interrupt you -’

‘Lena seemed to believe I would be
interested.
She looked dreadful. She’s got really fat. Her hair was sickly orange and she reeked of brandy. She kept snivelling, bemoaning her fate. She tried to hold my hand. She even attempted to kiss me. It all made me so grievously ill that Bea thought the end had come. Bea had no idea of course that my visitor and the girl in the photographs were in fact the same person. Well, in a manner of speaking they weren’t ... Do you dream, Antonia?’

‘I do.’

‘I had a very peculiar dream the other night. The wake of a
battu.
Dead boars, at least fifty of them, all very young, laid out on the drive leading up to the house. Some of them still twitching. The house, I am sure, was Twiston. All lit by
flambeaux
held by beaters - while men in letter-box red outfits were cutting out the boars’ livers. It has to be done at the moment of death, you see, that’s when it becomes a delicacy. One of the men was Michael and he was extremely busy cutting away with an enormous carving knife. His hands were covered in blood ... He looked different from the others. He was got up in white robes, like some high priest ... Funny how badly Michael took it when that little girl drowned. One would have thought she was his daughter!’

‘Miss Garnett thinks the girl in the photographs is your daughter.’

‘Well, that was a fiction which was started by George. Michael’s son. In the name of decency and propriety, I imagine. George had guessed my secret, you see. George is the master of polite fictions. He used to be in the diplomatic corps. Insufferable prig. Can’t stand him. When he is here, I always put on a show. I act as though I were really demented.’ Lady Mortlock laughed - it came out as a cackle.

‘Was Lena one of your pupils?’

‘Most perceptive of you. Yes, she was one of my pupils. She was at Ashcroft from 1951 till 1956, I think. She was not the brightest of girls, but one of the prettiest. No - “pretty” is not right. Lena had a certain quality, I can’t quite explain it ... I taught her German. I allowed myself to become extremely fond of her. In academic terms she was little better than “satisfactory”. Do you know how I define “satisfactory”? “Neither laudable nor culpable.” None of it matters now. Long time ago.’ Lady Mortlock paused. ‘What else do you want to know? You are after something, aren’t you? You didn’t just wake up this morning and say to yourself, high time I looked up Hermione Mortlock, did you? You must have a good reason. Out with it.’

Antonia began, ‘Yesterday was twenty years since Sonya’s disappearance -’

‘Whose disappearance?’

‘Sonya’s. Sonya Dufrette - Lena’s daughter.’

‘Oh yes. Lena’s daughter. I remember her. Shrimp of a girl.’ Lady Mortlock yawned, displaying dazzling white teeth of preternatural regularity, clearly the result of superior dentistry. ‘She drowned, didn’t she? She had some form of mental deficiency. She was damaged goods. Hardly surprising. Bad heredity on both sides. If she’d been allowed to grow up, she’d have been one of those slobbering child-like idiots.’

‘What do you mean “allowed”?’

‘That’s only a figure of speech, Antonia. I’d be extremely grateful if you refrained from snapping at me,’ Lady Mortlock said grandly. ‘I did tell Lena to reconsider when she told me she was pregnant - we were still on speaking terms then - and she promised she would, but didn’t. She said afterwards she had forgotten - that it would have been too much trouble, having an abortion. I wanted her to have an abortion. Among other things, that would have made her marriage to Lawrence less real ... Oh she was hopeless - hopeless!’

Antonia opened her mouth but then decided against saying anything. Better let her speak on, she decided.

‘I did warn her of the possible consequences. Lawrence suffered from pathological folie de grandeur while hers was an addictive, irresponsible, rather reckless personality - and of course she was a Yusupov on the distaff side. It was a recipe for disaster. The marriage itself should never have taken place ... Sonya drowned, didn’t she? Michael cried his eyes out, the old fool. He kept calling out her name in his sleep ... In my opinion that was the best thing that could have happened in the circumstances. What good would it have been to anyone if the girl had lived on - if she had grown up? So much time and energy, not to mention money, are spent nowadays on the care of idiot children. It’s like growing weeds in a garden. That poor young woman, I remember, Sonya’s nanny, didn’t have time to breathe. What good was Sonya to anyone?’

‘Her father loved her.’

‘A little bit too well, perhaps? No, don’t ask me what I mean -
please -
too tedious for words! A bee in Lena’s bonnet, that’s all. I shouldn’t have mentioned it at all. Lolita love. Still, to be fair to her, Lena had to put up with an awful lot. Not only married to a madman, but with an idiot child. Small wonder she became so fat and took to drink ... Do you know? Every now and then I’d remember the sunny girl with skin as smooth and pale as pearls, the radiant smile and lithe limbs, and I’d feel warm - here.’ Lady Mortlock touched her shrivelled bosom. ‘Lena, you see, was the love of my life. My one folly. My only taste of the forbidden fruit. Lena made me happy in a way I’d never been happy before - or since.’

‘Didn’t Sir Michael suspect anything?’

‘About my vicio
nifando?
No. Nothing at all. Poor Michael. He who trained spies for a living wasn’t particularly perceptive in his private life. I took good care not to be discovered of course. Oh I hated the secrecy, the subterfuge, the pretence, but it was necessary. Duty and discipline, that was my motto. It wouldn’t have done for anyone to know. Remember that I was an extremely successful professional woman. It was under my headship that Ashcroft became a byword for academic excellence at a time when many other supposedly good schools were reeling under the pressures of post-war inflation and social change. There was Michael’s career to consider too. Dear me. It was so difficult. I remember reading Radclyffe Hall and feeling absolutely terrified. Are you familiar with
The Well of Loneliness?’

‘I know what it’s about, but I haven’t read it.’

‘You needn’t sound so defensive ... Look at this. You might as well.’ Lady Mortlock took a folded sheet of paper from inside the book on her lap and handed it over to Antonia. ‘Read it. Read it aloud.’

Antonia obeyed. The paper was yellow and brittle with age.
‘Dear Mine, my darling Mine -’