The Hunt for Sonya Dufrette (2 page)

There was a pause. ‘He was right, actually,’ Antonia said. ‘Sex and power, jealousy and rage, despair, menace, violent death — you find them in baroque opera and in most murder mysteries. Especially violent death. That was clever of him.’

‘Death,’ Emma said. Amazingly she pronounced that one word perfectly.

‘What was his name? No, don’t tell me. Penderby. Major Horace Penderby.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s Payne. Hugh Payne.’ Antonia found herself looking at Emma. For some reason her heart had started beating fast.

‘Major Payne. Oh yes. You fancy him too, don’t you? Well, he was a presentable sort of chap. Better-looking than Dad. Not as ancient as the others. Can’t be more than fifty-three or four. They say that fifty is the new forty.’

‘If fifty is the new forty, then forty’s the new thirty - which means twenty is the new ten, right?’ Bethany said. ‘Which means that I am fourteen. You are married to a girl of fourteen and have fathered a daughter by her. You’ve broken the law.’

‘No, no, it doesn’t work that way at all ... What is Major Payne? Divorced? Bachelor?’

‘Widower. His wife died last year.’

‘There you are.’

‘What do you mean - there you are?’

‘Has he got any children?’

‘A son. In the Guards.’

‘Forgot to tell you. I saw Dad the other day. He didn’t seem at all well.’

‘Oh? What’s the matter? Did he tell you?’

‘I was on the top of a bus in Oxford Street.’

‘Was Sally — ’ Antonia bit her lip. It still hurt, each time she recalled that her husband had left her for a young woman of Bethany’s age. What was it now? Nearly two years ago.

‘No, she wasn’t with him. He was walking by himself. He looked pale and haggard - older. I tried to phone later but no one answered.’

‘I wonder if — ’ Antonia began. If Sally’s left him, she was going to say but didn’t. Well, she’d always maintained that this kind of thing wouldn’t last. Richard, after all, was old enough to be Sally’s father. She felt a thrill at the thought that she’d been proved right, and she didn’t like it. She told herself it wouldn’t do to gloat - that giving way to
schadenfreude
was beneath her.

‘Do they allow women in the club?’ Bethany asked.

‘They didn’t use to, but now they do. Wives and sisters and, I suspect, mistresses. One can’t always tell which is which.’

‘Don’t mistresses have a certain ... air?’ David said.

‘I don’t know. I may be entirely wrong, but I think they tend to
laugh
a lot. Exhilaration, exultation - or nerves. I don’t know. There are widows of club members too. One of them, Mrs Vollard, relic of Admiral Vollard RN, was rumoured to have started a secret brothel on the premises. It’s an apocryphal story. Part of the club mythology.’

‘Hookers or rent boys?’ Bethany said.

They all laughed.

Afterwards Antonia was to remember what a happy occasion it had been up till that moment. Emma had stomped around the place, keeping up her prattle of separate words, kissing her grandmother with exaggerated affection and allowing, nay demanding, to be kissed in return, being charming to Antonia’s two cats and generally lovable. Then, suddenly, and without the slightest provocation, it turned to tempestuous tears, shrieks, ugly anger and violence. Reaching out, she swept two teacups off the table, causing them to smash. She then kicked the pieces.

Emma’s face had become dark and suffused, the usually friendly eyes flashed alien and hostile. In the stunned silence that followed she picked up a slice of Bakewell tart from the cake stand and flung it at her grandmother. It hit Antonia on the chest and disintegrated on her lap. Never having seen this side of her granddaughter before, Antonia was appalled and distressed.

‘She’s just tired, it’s nothing,’ Bethany said in a matter-of-fact voice, picking Emma up, only to have her face hammered at by two vicious little fists. David intervened at once, taking Emma away and slapping her bottom lightly. The child screeched and jabbered and tried to claw at his face, writhing like a snake the while. Then she started sobbing uncontrollably. Despite their reassuring smiles, Antonia could see that David and Bethany were discomposed and puzzled. Soon after, they left. She felt shaken up by Emma’s outburst, more than she thought possible. She had imagined an accusatory glint in Emma’s eyes. For a moment Emma had reminded her of somebody ...

Antonia’s mind became clouded by a certain unidentifiable sense of dread that wouldn’t go away. She had the very palpable feeling of - well, the only way to describe it was, of something having been
unleashed.

She knew it was absurd of her to feel like that and sought a rational explanation. No doubt the tantrum had been the sort that three-year-olds experience every day. She was overreacting - she was being neurotic, getting things out of all proportion. She was still smarting from her divorce. Her confidence had been dealt a blow. She hadn’t recovered yet. The trip abroad hadn’t really done the trick. She was in a fragile state. She was still feeling tired after her long plane journey. (There had been a four-hour delay and they had arrived at Heathrow at three in the morning.) She had also drunk champagne on the plane, which she shouldn’t have done. She was a poor drinker. She should have resisted the Roscoes’ well-meant attempts to cheer her up. And why had she needed cheering up? Well, she had been depressed. She had burst into tears.
That
hadn’t had anything to do with her marriage. She had convinced herself that she could never possibly put pen to paper again.

‘Unleashed,’ she said aloud. ‘Nonsense.’

But the dark cloud wouldn’t go away. Tired. That was it. Terribly tired. That was the reason. When she was tired she became subject to odd fancies, like a pregnant woman - a proclivity she did not always succeed in keeping well under control. It had all happened before. The fact that she was going back to work tomorrow morning and had to write a report for the club committee by the end of the week didn’t help either.

Antonia sat down and listened to a Haydn sonata. She managed to persuade herself that that was the salve she had needed. (Haydn’s common sense had ‘penetrated’, was how she thought of it.) She then glanced at the twenty pages of the novel she had started writing and thought the whole thing implausible in the extreme - rather silly, actually. She had got the premise of self-imposed amnesia — of repressed memory that turns out to be false memory - from an article she had read in
The Times,
but she didn’t seem to have been able to do much with it. Did people behave like that? Did people
think
like that? Did that sort of thing
happen
to people? Why had she chosen a subject she knew nothing about?

Exasperated, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pushed the pages in. The bottom drawer was the one she opened only when she wanted to get rid - no, to
half
get rid of something. It contained various discarded papers. She was waiting for it to get full before she made a bonfire in the back yard and burnt its contents. (Not an entirely rational thing to do, but then she had to admit she wasn’t an entirely rational person.)

The drawer wouldn’t shut. There was something at the back that had got jammed. After two attempts, she gave up, leaving the drawer gaping. She refused to take that as a sign, though she did imagine it might be a sign. She vaguely wondered what it was that had caused the jamming but felt reluctant to investigate.

‘Hate writing but love having written. Dorothy Parker said that. Well, not true — I hate
both,’
Antonia told her cats as she fed them a little while later. ‘I am afraid this is a writer’s block from which I may never recover. My first novel will also be my last. I may be going mad too.’

The cats looked back at her with indifference and licked their whiskers.

She had a cup of hot milk, took two sleeping pills, turned off all the lights and went to bed.

Antonia hadn’t expected to sleep well and she didn’t.

She woke up in the middle of the night, feeling hot, drowsy and confused, her heart thumping in her chest. She turned on the bedside lamp and reached out for her glass of water. Once more she had a sense of foreboding. She also felt consumed by guilt. And this wasn’t the familiar dread of facing a lonely future, nor the guilty feeling she had had over her failed marriage. She was conscious of having done something appalling. Something that had resulted in disaster - no, not the disaster of losing a husband to a younger woman, something worse. Much worse.

Falling back on her pillow and shutting her eyes, Antonia found herself remembering, of all things, a production of Eliot’s
The Family Reunion
which she had seen a couple of years back. In it the Eumenides had been presented as children, which she had thought an extremely spooky and effective decision on the part of the director. One didn’t expect children to look and sound menacing, accusatory, slyly knowing ...

Violence and children ... one particular child ... something unresolved ... a death that could have been prevented ... something she had allowed to happen ... a little girl ... no, not Emma ...

As she drifted into an uneasy sleep, she heard a man’s voice hum,
‘When I am King, Dilly, Dilly, You shall be Queen
...’

She saw a doll floating on a river ... blood coming out of a hollow in the middle of an ancient tree ... a Mary Poppins-like figure disappearing into the sky ...

2

The Day the Earth Stood Still

It was the following morning as she took the Tube to work that she knew what it was her subconscious had been trying to tell her. Somebody standing beside her on the platform was reading the
Metro
and she saw the date.

29th July. My God, she thought, it’s twenty years. To the day. Did she hear a woman’s voice behind her say that it was the anniversary of the royal wedding, or did she only imagine it? Well, for some people the day of the royal wedding still meant only one thing: Charles and Diana walking up the aisle. Wild cheering crowds. Flags and flowers and fireworks. A fairy-tale come true. The wedding of the century. A hopeful nation. A hopeful world. If statistics were to be believed, 730 million viewers worldwide had watched it on television.

That was when it had happened. If they hadn’t been sitting glued to the TV, Sonya would have been alive now. Alive and, very possibly, given the progress medicine had made over the past twenty years, well too. Yes, why not? Sonya might have been completely cured of whatever she had had wrong with her, leading a normal life, a happy, healthy life with a husband and children. Instead of which ...

Once more the smell of the river came to her nostrils and she heard Lena’s accusatory voice: ‘It was all your fault. It was you who showed her the way - she’d never have gone there if you hadn’t shown her the way.’

No, she didn’t want to dwell on it. She mustn’t think about it. She had managed not to so far. There would be no point. She would only get upset and that would never do - not on her first day back at work, not after the bad night she had had. There was nothing to be gained by getting upset over a twenty-year-old event - was there? Well, she could have prevented the tragedy. If only she had been less selfish - if only she had taken David with her! Lady Mortlock had said she could. David would never have allowed Sonya to go to the river by herself. Antonia had wanted a holiday - a
proper
holiday. She had been selfish and because of her selfishness a child had died -

Stop it, she told herself. Don’t be melodramatic.

She edged her way into the carriage and eventually found a suitable place where she could stand and read her book. She had deliberately picked up a book on library lore before she had left the house. She had meant to take Daphne du Maurier’s
Don’t Look Now,
but had decided against it. The library lore book was as dry and unappetizing as sawdust. The discarded Daphne du Maurier, on the other hand, was one of her old favourites. Not all the stories were as good as the title one. The title story of course was the best of du Maurier’s short fiction - her most effective excursion into the macabre, her most atmospheric. Venice in the twilight - running steps alongside the narrow canal - cellar entrances looking like coffins - a lonely church - a little hooded figure skipping from boat to boat.

Was there any particular reason why she had decided against it? Could it be because it too dealt with the drowning of a young girl? (A psychiatrist would have a field day, should she ever decide to consult one!)

Twenty years. Sonya would have been twenty-seven. Just a bit older than David. What a lovely summer’s day it had been. The house party at Twiston. The scent of roses and freshly mown grass wafting in through the open windows, mingling with the smell of beeswax. Bowls of flowers everywhere. Lilies festooning a portrait of the Queen in the hall. Sheikh Umair heaving a sigh: ‘Now I know what old England is like.’ The servants in their Union Jack hats. Balloons and party poppers. (The excitement at one point reaching fever pitch as discussion turned to the footman and the maid who had chosen the day to get married themselves at the local church.) The giant TV set, specially hired for the occasion. Lawrence Dufrette shaking his forefinger: ‘There she comes, the silly young goose, in her doomed glory!’ Sir Michael clearing his throat: ‘It’s a bit too early for a drink, but do help yourselves, if you feel like having one. After all, it’s a special occasion.’ Bill Kavanagh pointing out the Countess Spencer. ‘I used to know Raine jolly well before she married Johnny. Remarkable woman. What a shame the Spencer children never got to appreciate her properly.’ Lena screaming at her: ‘You showed her the way to the river! You as good as killed her! It was all your fault.’

No, no - that had come
later.
Antonia opened her eyes.

The train was crowded — well, it always was. Even late in the morning it was the same, though they said the Piccadilly line wasn’t as bad as some of the others. There were no more poems on the walls, sadly. What vacant expressions people had on their faces. Those who were not gazing into space were drinking Coke out of cans or biting at sandwiches and buns. As it happened, they were all young people, of David and Bethany’s age. They should have had a proper breakfast before they left home, or failing that, they could have stopped at a café. Besides, it was bad manners, eating on a crowded train, didn’t they know that? Some of them looked hung-over, or tired from partying till late, or more likely sitting in front of their computers, e-mailing, surfing the net, or joining chat rooms. Major Payne had made the suggestion that she consider the sinister potential of chat rooms for a possible novel. A chameleon-like figure - a man assuming multiple identities - changing his age and gender depending on whom he was chatting to - targeting the vulnerable and the lonely - winkling secrets.