Broken Music

by Marjorie Eccles

  And he had lost her, anyway.

  ‘It was a crass thing to do,’ he said now, determined not to prevaricate any longer, ‘showing you that photograph. I can’t think what made me do it like that, except that the whole situation had been preying on my mind for months. You see, Nella, what it was…when you and I met out there, Dolly, my wife, had already left me. Or rather, since I was in France, it was Jamie she left; took herself off and left the child to the care of his nursemaid and his old grandfather. I had been with the army about six months. She ran away with a naval officer she had met, a man named Kidson. I should have told you all this, but I was very bitter and…to be perfectly honest, I could never be sure she wouldn’t come back one day – and that if she did, I wouldn’t, for Jamie’s sake, feel duty-bound to try and patch things up.’

  ‘And…did she come back?’ She had grown very tense. Her knuckles showed white, and her voice had taken on an edge of uncertainty.

  ‘She’s dead, Nella. She was in fact already dead when you and I met, although I had no idea of it then – if only I had known! She was killed in one of the Zeppelin raids on London, in a hotel where she was staying. I was never notified because she was registered there as Kidson’s wife. Kidson himself was actually with his ship at the time of the raid, so he didn’t find out for some time, and even then wasn’t in a hurry to inform either me or her father of what had happened.’

  ‘Duncan, I am so sorry.’ Sorry, and berating herself for not having sensed the unhappiness that had been there beneath the casual surface; all the time when he had unfailingly met almost insuperable physical and emotional demands, and smiled and rallied his flagging team to do the same with a joke or a laugh. ‘How hurt you must have been.’

  Hurt? His pride, for a while, certainly. But as for Dolly…how could he explain about Dolly? The truth was, he had fallen in love with nothing more than a pretty face and charming manners, so bowled over by her that he had not realised until too late how frivolous and pleasure-loving she was, disarming him by showing herself sympathetic to his ambitions, though only if, as he was to learn by bitter experience, they didn’t interfere in the slightest with her pleasures. What she really wanted for him, he learnt too late, was to leave the coalfields and the miserable existence of Lillington’s miners behind and for him to take up a fashionable practice in London, the sort some people were advising him to take up now. Whereas he, brought up with a strong Presbyterian background, had found his ambitions centred on what little he could do to alleviate the misery of the people he had found himself working amongst. Their marriage was already doomed, even before he enlisted in the RAMC.

  ‘We met when I went as a junior partner to Dr Hedley in Lillington. Her father was a wealthy colliery owner, a widower. He wasn’t a bad man, not a tyrant, like some of the coal owners, he was simply insensitive, a hard-headed businessman who doted on and spoilt his only daughter.’

  All this he had intended to tell Nella after making that clumsy, thoughtless blunder over the photograph. But next morning, she had not been there, had been despatched back to the base hospital, extremely ill with that poisoned finger. And although he had managed to scrawl several hasty notes to her, she had never answered.

  He told himself that there was no guarantee she had ever received them, but he was not sure whether he believed this, and because he was so ashamed and angry with himself, he felt he had no right to seek her out and force explanations on her. If ever this is all over…he said to himself, and tried to believe it was better for the time being to let things ride. Working so near the front line, in the very heart and centre of battle, as he was doing, the odds on him surviving the war were not great anyway. He threw himself into his work, with no thought or care for his own safety. The Military Cross he was awarded meant little or nothing to him.

  The war over, he had made his way home, spending a few days’ leave in Paris which, amongst other things, gave him time for more sober reflection. He began enquiries as soon as he got back to England and found she was working at the convalescent hospital in her home village. He pulled strings to get himself a temporary position there.

  The fire had caught hold now but he saw Nella shiver. So far, he hadn’t even noticed the chill of the room. He looked around and then, seeing nothing else, lifted a crocheted wool antimacassar from a chair back and placed it around her shoulders. She smiled and drew it around her, grateful for its warmth, as he went on, needing to finish the whole story. ‘My partner, Hedley, seemed to think Dolly leaving like that helped to kill James Lowther, her father, but who knows? He died of a stroke only a few months ago, settling the substantial part of his fortune on Jamie. I was staggered to find he had also named me as trustee of a large fund to be used to provide some sort of care for the miners. He and I had always got on rather well, as a matter of fact, never mind the fierce arguments we had about the miners’ welfare and so on, and maybe they helped to change his mind, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a marvellous opportunity. Clinics, better medical care…’ His face became animated as he spoke for a while about his hopes, his aspirations.

  She listened without saying anything until he had finished. ‘Why, that’s…simply wonderful. What a chance! No one could do it better than you.’ Her cheeks were flushed. The light of the fire danced in her eyes. And he determined to take the plunge and say what he had, after all, come here to say.

  ‘Why don’t you join me, Nella? Together we could do a wonderful job.’

  The very idea was so splendid, providing just the opportunity she had been looking for, to do something worthwhile with her life, that she could hardly believe it. Better than shorthand typing, any day! She said simply, ‘Thank you. I would love that, more than anything, I think. If you believe I have the experience. But then, I could always learn…’

  For a moment he didn’t understand what she was saying, but only for a moment. ‘Oh, dammit, I can’t even get that right. Nella, I’m not offering you a job! I’m asking you to marry me.’

  After that, there was a great deal of lost time to be made up, and dusk was falling, the room was in shadow, the fire had died to a heap of pink ash and Duncan was heaping more coal on it from the scuttle, when he said, his back to her, ‘We should see your father.’

  ‘Mm,’ she murmured. She was in no hurry for all the fuss there would be when their intentions became known. ‘In a while.’ Any time now, someone was going to come in and disturb them anyway.

  ‘We should perhaps make it now. About our marriage – yes, but meanwhile…’ He stopped and added abruptly, ‘Meanwhile, there’s something more I have to say, which he, above all, should hear.’

  ‘Duncan…?’

  ‘I told you that on my last leave, before I came home, I spent some time in Paris.’

  ‘Yes? And?’ She was all attention now.

  ‘Well, Paris is still…Paris. Licking its wounds. On the one hand, grey and dismal, full of foreign politicians arriving with talk of peace settlements – a lot of sadness – on the other hand, everyone determined to return to the old life as soon as possible…art, and fashion now their dressmakers have come back from the front, good food – no horsemeat there, I can tell you!’ He came and sat beside her on the sofa and took her hands. Look,’ he went on, ‘look, there are tales, incredible tales, to come out of this war…God knows, I don’t want to upset you, but there’s no way to break this gently. When I was in Paris, I met someone we both thought dead…’ He kept a very tight hold of her hands.

  Her heart began to hammer. She knew the name he was going to say without him uttering it. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she cried. ‘You’re pulling my leg?’

  ‘Would I do that? About such a thing? Yes, impossible as it is to believe, I met Grev, your cousin Grev, there.’

  This time tea, dispensed by Eleanor, was drunk while they all listened to what Duncan had to tell them – Francis, remote and grave, his face impossible to read, Mrs Villiers sad, almost as if she could sense something cataclysmic was coming, and Amy barely
able to conceal her excitement. Francis had asked that they should all be present.

  ‘What about his mother?’ was the first thing Nella had asked Duncan, after the first stunned moment when she’d heard Grev’s name.

  ‘Eunice is telling her. She has had letters from her brother.’

  So that explained Eunice’s talk about going to find work in Paris, and her hesitation. She must have been torn between waiting for William, due home any day, and the hope that she might actually see Grev again.

  That night in Paris, Duncan had heard someone speak his name as he left the small but exclusive restaurant where he had dined – a farewell dinner with a doctor friend on his way home to Canada– when he felt a touch on his shoulder. He spun round, hand on his wallet, but it was no apache, no ruffian ready to rob him. There was no mistaking him, it was Greville Foley. A young man he had believed dead, blown to bits. ‘Good God, it is you, Foley? I’m not dreaming?’

  ‘Who else? You look well,’ Foley said, as coolly as if they had met on a London street.

  Which is more than I can say for you, my friend, thought Duncan, summing up the hollow cheeks, the skeletal frame, the feverish eyes.

  They faced each other awkwardly, silent. ‘How is Nella?’ Grev asked at last.

  ‘I don’t know, we’ve lost touch.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I thought you and she—’

  ‘No.’

  Grev was all at once racked with an onslaught of helpless coughing. They stood underneath a street lamp, Duncan with his arm around the young man’s shoulders, steadying him until finally the spasm passed and he leant against the lamppost, handkerchief to his mouth, looking ghastly under the yellow glare. ‘Well, you see how it is with me,’ he said, when he had his breath back.

  Duncan had seen too many cases of TB not to recognise another when he saw it. ‘How long?’

  ‘How long have I had this, or how long have I got? To the first – since I left the army, and to the second, God knows, but not long, I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘Look,’ Duncan said. ‘We can’t stay here, talking. Come back inside with me and have a drink.’ He needed one as much as the young man obviously did; they had wined and dined themselves very well indeed, he and his Canadian friend, but the shock of meeting a ghost from the past like that had sobered him immediately.

  ‘We thought you dead.’

  ‘I hoped you would.’

  They went back into the restaurant, where the patron, recognising Duncan but casting a wary eye on his companion, showed them to a discreet corner. While they waited for their drinks to appear, Duncan studied the emaciated young man. Now that he was getting over the first shock of their meeting, he speculated on why, if he had indeed hoped to be thought dead, as he said, Foley had approached him. They could have passed in the street without Duncan ever being the wiser. As an ex-soldier, not in fact now dead, as presumed, and not having made any attempt to rejoin his unit, he would be considered to have deserted his post, and would face serious consequences, if he were caught. The precarious state of his health, however, seemed likely to be its own answer to that. Maybe he did not, at this stage, care very much one way or the other.

  Nella said, ‘Did he tell you exactly what happened? How he escaped being killed, when the others were blown to bits?’

  ‘For some reason, when the shell that blew up his companions burst, he was simply blown aside. That sort of miraculous escape happened all the time, as we both know. He did have superficial injuries – he was hit on the head for one thing, and must have lost consciousness, though for how long he doesn’t remember.’

  There was, as a matter of fact, a good deal Grev didn’t remember, Duncan thought. How he had got to the ploughed field miles away where he eventually found himself, for instance, stumbling along, aware only of a blinding pain in his head, and the fact that he was almost stark naked, remembering nothing of the shell which had blasted his clothes off, or indeed anything that had gone before the explosion, not even who he was. The only thing that seemed to matter was the wound on his right hand, which for some inexplicable reason he knew was catastrophic for him.

  Mrs Villiers said softly, ‘His right hand? Grev? Dear God. It must have seemed the end of everything to him.’

  Francis got up abruptly and stood in his favourite position, his back to the room, staring out into the afternoon.

  Was it that wound to his hand which had pushed Grev over the edge, determined that he would never go back near the front line; which had made him stumble on for miles as all hell was still breaking loose behind him, until at last he came to a lonely, half-ruined shack where the Flemish couple who took him in had cared for him and asked no questions? Was it that which had kept him from ‘remembering’ who he was, how he had got there? Perhaps. One thing was sure. He had remembered enough of the French he had learnt as a student to try and pass as French. They probably didn’t believe him, of course, his rescuers, but they detested the Boche, who had killed their son, devastated the farm which had been their only means of livelihood, and left them with nothing but this hovel as a refuge. They kept him for a couple of days, replaced his rags of clothing with ones of their dead son, and then he was passed on to the nuns at the nearest convent. From there, he managed to get to Paris, where he had been ever since, living with one of his pre-war tutors who was not sympathetic in any shape or form to the war.

  ‘If he had given himself up, with a wound like that to his hand, he would have been sent home,’ Nella said.

  ‘It was bad, but nothing like as serious as he must have thought it at first. In fact, there’s little wrong with it now.’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ Amy said suddenly. ‘Why should he have stayed there to be killed? But why doesn’t he come home now?’

  Duncan said gently, ‘He can never come home, Amy. There would be charges to be faced.’ He did not add that it was too late for that now, in any case.

  ‘Oh, oh, that’s monstrous! The beastly war is over, and he was so brave!’

  Francis turned back from the window. ‘Yes, Amy, he was,’ he said, in a voice from which all emotion had been drained, and then to the rest of them, he said, ‘You will excuse me, I hope. I must go at once to his mother.’

  Epilogue

  April 1919

  The Channel ferry steams towards Boulogne. The tall woman in black who came aboard with those others – her daughter, the young man with the red hair and the reverend gentleman – has left them below and is now alone as she paces along the deck. She walks with head bowed against the light wind, her hat pulled well down over her brow, the capacious bag she carries hooked over her arm.

  She walks forward and leans across the bows, feeling the rhythm of the waves as they slap against the sides of the boat, listening to the music of the wind. They are approaching the port. What was just a blur on the horizon becomes the outline of sheds and buildings on the quayside and is rapidly becoming clearer as they steam towards the land where her son awaits her.

  Please God she will not be too late. Duncan Geddes, the doctor, has told her, gently, that Grev does not have long now. Long enough, she prays, long enough to put things right between them. His last letter to Eunice had included one to her, which Eunice had passed on: a short, unrevealing note, reminiscent of the ones he used to send her from school. She was adept at reading between the lines, however, and at last he had written to her.

  That other letter…

  She dips her hand into her bag and withdraws the small grey suede pochette she had once given to Edith Huckaby, and which her husband had hidden in the gun cupboard the night she died. Only she, his wife, had heard, and understood, his dying words, what he was trying to say. ‘…the gun cupboard, a letter…’ She has not opened the envelope, addressed to the police. She knows what it contains: the confession Arthur had already made to her, when he found her in the music room that night, after he had followed Edith Huckaby and killed her. Followed her, meaning only to warn her off, to tell her plainly that her blac
kmail was an empty threat. But her insolence had enraged him, and with the sudden fury of a normally mild man, he had snatched the umbrella…

  Only Sybil knows this. Reardon, the police inspector, suspects, but he has no proof. It lies here, in her hand. She looks into the water, grey-brown and choppy. The bow cuts through the waves, making white wings of water either side. She holds the bag tighter.

  Ahead is France. Paris, where her son awaits her. Screaming, wheeling seagulls begin to surround the ferry as it nears land. One swoops down towards her in a graceful arc, and perches on the rail beside her, the feathers on its breast white and dazzling. It stays, motionless, its bright, cold, beady eye unwinking. She wills it to fly landwards, a sign of hope.

  In a sudden movement, she leans further over the rail, then drops the pochette over the side and into the water. The predatory seagull beside her gives a mournful cry and swoops after it, folding its wings as it sinks below the rail and disappears. The little bag is not heavy and for a moment it sits on the surface, before being swallowed up in the creaming waters of the ship’s passage as it cleaves through the waves towards land.

  Also by Marjorie Eccles