by Rachel Rhys
‘Well? Get in.’
‘No, thank you. I’m enjoying the walk.’
‘Don’t be an ass. You’re positively melting. Have you seen the colour of your face – it’s halfway between a decent Merlot and a beetroot. Which is not surprising if you’re going to jump out of your skin every time a car comes along.’
Eve’s stomach muscles clench. She refuses to tell him about her near-miss earlier, for fear of sounding foolish. Instead she focuses her resentment on his comments about her ruddy complexion. Noel probably doesn’t know any women who actually walk. She expects all the women of his acquaintance have cars and drivers at their disposal. She wonders that they even bother having legs!
‘Besides,’ Noel continues, ‘I was on my way to see you, so you might as well get in and save me the bother.’
Eve thinks about refusing, but really what’s the point? And the thought of walking another ten minutes or more in this heat is not one she relishes.
In the passenger seat, she turns her head as if there is something more interesting happening outside the car and waits for him to speak, but Noel seems to have nothing to say.
Finally she cracks.
‘Why exactly were you coming to see me?’
‘Diana telephoned me. She says there are three trunks of Guy’s correspondence in the attic of the new house from when she cleared out Guy’s study. By which, of course, she means from when Mrs Finch cleared out his study. He left instructions that none of it was to be touched when they moved house, insisted only he would know what to keep and what to throw out. But of course he didn’t plan on upping and dying quite so suddenly.’
‘And what has that got to do with me?’
‘She wonders if perhaps there is something in his papers that could help you find out why you’re here.’
‘And why didn’t she say this before?’
Noel turns his head to look at her, a wry smile curling the corners of his mouth.
‘Maybe because you weren’t standing in the way of what she wants before.’
It makes a dismal kind of sense. Diana wants Eve gone. And she knows the easiest way to get rid of her is to get her the information she needs.
Stupid to take the rejection so personally.
‘So, will you come?’ Noel is impatient.
‘What, right now?’
‘Unless you have some other pressing engagement.’
Eve considers inventing something, just for the satisfaction of preventing him getting his own way, but stops herself.
‘Fine.’
At the peach-and-cream villa in the hills, Diana herself comes to meet them at the door, wearing a diaphanous tunic over a white bathing suit.
‘Bernard says the buyer will give us a week,’ Diana says by way of greeting. ‘After that he will begin negotiations on a different house down the coast towards Monte Carlo. So if you could hurry your very touching quest for personal identity along, we’d all be most grateful.’
So cool she is, this woman. Eve searches for the traces of the girl Sully described. The one whose mother was a lady’s maid, and who earned her living dealing with the personal needs of an elderly woman, not even a relative. But she can see none.
They follow Diana up the grand staircase to a first-floor corridor, which stretches ahead in both directions. Everything is white, modern, sleek. No wonder she had not found Villa La Perle to her taste.
A second, narrower staircase leads up to an attic floor where there is a door on one side, ajar, through which Eve can glimpse a suite of modest rooms she assumes must belong to the staff.
‘Will Mrs Finch be coming to join you here when … if … Villa La Perle is sold?’ she asks.
Diana’s face freezes.
‘Alas not. I already have my own housekeeper in place and simply can’t afford to take on anyone else. Caroline Finch was Guy’s responsibility. He provided for her in his will and I gave her ample warning that we wouldn’t be needing her services in the new house. Besides, it was Guy she was in love with. Not me. I would be a poor consolation prize.’
In love with? Eve’s mouth falls open with surprise and she is glad that Diana has turned to lead the way through the door on the opposite side. She glances at Noel, who shrugs, as if it is all the same to him that his childhood housekeeper should have been in love with his father. What is wrong with these people? Why must everything be greeted with such languid indifference, as if none of it really matters? Poor Mrs Finch. If it is true that she harboured some decades-long unrequited passion for Guy, it is no wonder she should now be at pains to appear so relentlessly cheerful and eager to please. The man she devoted her life to was dead, and what was to become of her?
The door Diana has just disappeared through leads into a large attic room piled high with furniture: bureaux made of dark polished wood, a set of green wicker chairs – some where the weave has come undone and sticks out from the arm or back – a deep red rolled-up rug, eaten away at the edges by some sort of bug, a tarnished mirror in an ornate chipped frame leaning redundantly against the wall.
‘Guy would insist on keeping this old junk,’ says Diana. ‘Said it reminded him of the house he grew up in.’
‘Where was that?’ Eve sounds too eager, but she can’t help herself. ‘Where did Guy grow up?’
Diana frowns, as if it is none of her business, but Noel answers.
‘My grandparents had an estate in West Sussex and a rather gloomy townhouse in Kensington.’
‘So you visited them?’
‘Only once. When I was at boarding school. I think I must have been about twelve or thirteen. I knew there had been some rift between Guy and his parents but I was so sure I could be the one to breach it. You know the arrogance of young people. I saved my tuck allowance for a term and used it to buy a train ticket to London. I thought it might be hard to find them, but it wasn’t at all. The family had an investment company, you see. It didn’t take much effort to find out where the head office was. A tall building in Mayfair. I went in and asked to see my grandfather. I expect I thought he’d be beside himself with joy. Watched too many Hollywood movies.’
‘He wasn’t pleased to see you?’
‘No. In fact, he seemed scared. He took me back home to Kensington because he didn’t know what else to do with me. My grandmother was at home, but she refused to come downstairs to meet me. My grandfather said it was because she would find it too painful, on account of them being estranged from my father. I’d never heard the word “estranged” before, and I thought they were using “strange” as a verb. Couldn’t make head or tail of it. He was embarrassed, I could tell. He got the cook to make me some tea and called the school and waited with me for the cab to come and take me to the station. Only as I was leaving did he ask me about my father, trying to make it sound casual, although I could tell he’d been waiting to say his name all afternoon. I so wanted to ask him what my father had done that was so dreadful, but instead I found myself waxing lyrical about Guy – how well respected he was in France, how well we lived. Hoping he might say, “Well, in that case, we should let bygones be bygones,” but of course he didn’t. When I was about to get into the cab, he put a hand out as if he was going to touch me, but I turned away as if I hadn’t seen.’
To her consternation, Eve finds a lump in her throat, large and painful.
‘That must have been upsetting,’ she says, and her voice is thin and strangled.
Noel shrugs and thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. ‘Character-building,’ he says.
The stacked furniture takes up most of the space in the room, but there is a clearing towards the front where they are standing, and in the middle of that clearing are three battered leather trunks.
‘I had the gardener dig them out,’ says Diana. ‘I started to look through myself, but there’s too much in there and I have a luncheon engagement at Rosita’s.’
‘Rosita Winston,’ says Noel once Diana has gone. ‘The reigning queen of the Côte d’Azur. Nothing happ
ens in Riviera society without Rosita’s say-so. Diana is quite enamoured. Mind you, Diana is enamoured of anyone in a position to do her favours. They say Rosita’s luncheons cost her a hundred and fifty thousand francs a week.’
Eve gasps.
‘Anyway,’ Noel continues, ‘I don’t believe she didn’t have time to go through the trunks. The fact is, Diana has always hated being reminded of Guy’s life before he met her. She wanted him to be born anew the moment he set eyes on her.’
‘She must have loved him very much, in that case.’
‘That’s nothing to do with love, Mrs Forrester. It’s to do with possession. Well, that and insecurity.’
Insecurity. That word again. It makes more sense given what Eve now knows about Diana’s background.
‘I feel sorry for Caroline Finch,’ she says, remembering Diana’s easy dismissal of the woman. ‘Even if she did have a … crush … on your father. It will be hard for her to start again somewhere else after being with your family so long.’
Noel shrugs. ‘I’m sure you think us very heartless, but she has been well provided for in Guy’s will. And of course we’ll do what we can to help her find another position, if that’s what she wants.’
He glances at Eve, perhaps reading some sort of silent accusation in her expression because his tone becomes defensive.
‘Anyway, Duncan and I were never that close to Caroline Finch. She arrived when we were already too old to form those kinds of attachments, and besides, we were mostly away at boarding school. And—’
He presses his lips together.
‘And?’
‘It sounds awful to say it, but she always tried so hard to get chummy with us, particularly when my father was around. It ended up putting us off.’
Noel opens the first trunk. It is packed full of books and papers, some old trophies presumably from youthful sporting events long since completed. A striped university scarf is crammed in down the side.
Noel groans. ‘He always was a messy beggar. This will take us all day. You’d better make a start on one of the other two.’
‘But are you sure I should be looking through your father’s private things? And what am I looking for?’
‘Just anything that chimes with you, anything you recognize from your own life. And as for the other, I think Guy sacrificed his claim to privacy when he involved a complete stranger in our family finances, don’t you?’
The ‘complete stranger’ stings, and Eve unbuckles the lid of the trunk furthest from Noel in silence.
This trunk seems to be full of correspondence. She starts working through it with a tingle of excitement, sure she is about to discover a signature she recognizes or an address that seems familiar. But soon anticipation turns to weariness. It’s clear Guy was someone who never threw anything away. There are letters to bank managers, to accountants, to old army chums. There’s a protracted correspondence involving a trust fund Guy came into on his twenty-first birthday. The letters fly between the firm of lawyers involved and Guy himself, chomping at the bit to hurry the process along.
In an old cardboard folder she finds a sheaf of letters from Guy’s father, starting when Guy was a boy at boarding school. The letters are formal and stilted, and fail to grow any less so when Guy leaves university and joins the family business.
‘Overall I am pleased with your performance since you joined the company. That having been said, I would remind you that you are still a junior partner and your holiday accrual is significantly lower than you are requesting,’ reads one.
Another speaks of Mr Lester Senior’s ‘profound regret’ that Guy should be coming into his inheritance from his grandfather at an age when, in his opinion, he remains ‘woefully lacking in the maturity to manage the responsibility of such a fortune’.
Eve prickles with discomfort. She should not be reading this. Whatever happened between Guy Lester and his father, whatever the ins and outs of the Lester family purse, it is none of her business. But Noel is in no mood to entertain her protests.
‘Do you wish to go home, Mrs Forrester? Back to your husband?’
He seems to be waiting for a response, so she says, ‘Of course’ with a vehemence that surprises them both.
‘Then I suggest you give me a hand to go through all this stuff. I can’t believe the things he held on to. I mean, look at this.’
Noel holds up a pen-and-ink drawing of a man’s face, clearly done by a child. The letters below – painstakingly, if unevenly – spell out ‘Daddy’.
‘Don’t tell me – that’s an example of your early work.’
Eve is joking, but Noel shrugs and turns away, putting the drawing face down, and it occurs to her too late that he might have been shyly offering her a glimpse of the child he used to be.
They continue sorting through the trunks in awkward silence. Eve starts thinking about that word ‘Daddy’.
‘When did you and Duncan start calling your father Guy?’
She has never got used to the Lester brothers’ casual use of their father’s first name. She knows it is probably very modern and sophisticated, but it seems disrespectful, as if denying Guy his status as parent.
‘When he got together with Diana so soon after Mum – our mother – died. It was embarrassing. Diana was only eighteen when they met, twenty when they married. I wasn’t far off that age myself. Guy had given us this great speech after my mother’s funeral, how it was the three of us together now, how we would be our own tight little unit and he would be both father and mother. And then just a few meagre months later, he was telling us that we were adults now and as all adults together we should be glad that he had found happiness again.’
‘Oh. Yes. I can see that would have been difficult.’
She picks up a small leather-bound photograph album. Someone, presumably Diana, has inscribed in the inside cover ‘The Family, 1932–39’. Glancing up to make sure Noel is preoccupied, she leafs through the pages. Here are endless pictures of the baby Libby engaged in various infantile activities. ‘Libby sleeping, 1932’, reads the description underneath one, followed immediately by ‘Libby waving’ and ‘Libby laughing’, from 1933 and 1934 respectively. There are images of the other Lesters in their youthful incarnations. Diana being pulled behind a boat on water skis, her hair flying behind her. Guy, handsome and bare-chested, sitting on the sand reading a newspaper, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. A skinnier version of Noel playing a bat and ball game with his father, thigh deep in the water, watched from the shore by a painfully young Duncan sitting under an umbrella.
Towards the back there are various posed family photographs. The last has an extra person in addition to the usual line-up of Lester children, a striking young woman with sparkling eyes that seem to be asking a question, and a smile that draws Eve’s attention as if it is a magnet. ‘Libby, Duncan, Noel and Anna, 1938’ reads the inscription underneath. Eve tries to ignore the dull thud in her chest when she notices how Noel’s left hand seems to be resting lightly on the mystery woman’s back.
‘What is it? Have you found something?’
Eve looks up to find Noel watching her from the other side of the room.
‘No. Just old photographs,’ she says. Then, before she can stop herself, she asks, ‘Who’s Anna?’
In two strides, Noel has crossed the floor and snatched the album from her hand.
‘No one,’ he says, tossing it into his own trunk.
They continue working in awkward silence for a few minutes, Eve aware of having said the wrong thing. Then he clears his throat.
‘She was my fiancée.’
‘Oh.’
Suddenly it all makes sense. The particular bitterness when he’d talked about the Germans the other day; flying all those missions, above and beyond what was required of him.
‘I also had a fiancé who died,’ she blurts out, wanting him to know she understands. ‘His name was Archie and he—’
‘I am sincerely sorry for your loss.’ Noel’s head is onc
e again bent over the open trunk so she cannot see his expression. ‘But the two things are not at all the same.’
The subject is closed, and Eve finds herself feeling as if she has blundered.
Fine, she thinks. What should it matter to me that he is unwilling to believe we might have anything in common?
She returns to the letters in the trunk, and after a while she becomes conscious of a kind of deflating feeling. She realizes now that she has been cherishing a romantic notion of Guy Lester as someone noble, larger than life. An heroic figure. Still no nearer to discovering what the connection is between him and her, she has cultivated a man she could gladly lay claim to, but Noel’s earlier words have trimmed Guy down to size. Just a man, after all. Capable of hypocrisy as they all are, of bending his principles to suit his desires.
She opens a large manila envelope. At first she believes it to be empty, but when she holds it out and shakes it, a shower of newspaper cuttings flutter to the floor. The first is a small clipping from the Daily Herald, dated 12 July 1920.
MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF A SOLDIER
A former guardsman, Francis Garvey, was shot in St James’s Park early yesterday morning. Police investigating the incident have appealed for witnesses. ‘We do not have any further information at this point,’ said Detective Sergeant Thomas Hawley.
Curious, Eve flicks through the other cuttings. All involve the same case, and all are equally brief and non-committal. The most recent comes from the Daily Mirror on 8 September of the same year.
INQUEST CONCLUDES
An inquest into the shooting of former soldier Francis Garvey reached a conclusion of accidental death. Lt Garvey was found dead in July this year. ‘It is a very unfortunate case,’ said Detective Sergeant Thomas Hawley. No further details were released.
‘Do you recognize the name Francis Garvey?’ Eve calls out.
Noel, his face sheened with the heat and the effort of extracting the items from the very bottom of his trunk, straightens up and shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Should I?’
