Cocoa Beach

by Beatriz Williams

  My mother wasn’t all that experienced in the kitchen, and the cake was a simple one: white layers alternating with lemon curd. She didn’t want to use the lemon curd that our kitchen maid had already cooked and put in jars for the winter, so we created our own out of fresh Florida lemons and sugar. When it was finished, I stuck my finger in the bowl and tasted it, and it was awful, not nearly as good as Charlotte’s, grainy and sour, and I puckered my lips in disgust. What’s wrong, darling? Mama asked, and I said, without thinking, It’s not as nice as Charlotte’s lemon curd.

  In that instant, the rare, hopeful radiance of her expression turned dark, and I realized the awfulness of my mistake. I stammered something out, some kind of mitigation, but she was already reaching for the bowl, already lifting it high above her head and hurling it to the polished wooden floor.

  I remember how the sticky yellow curd splattered everywhere, studded with tiny shards of porcelain. I remember how Charlotte came running into the room, her face a picture of shock, and how Mama picked up a rag from the sink and threw it into Charlotte’s chest. Clean up this mess! she shouted. I can hear those words now, and the exact tone in which she said them. I can still feel the misery that bore down on my ribs, because it was my fault. My fault for saying such a thing, when I knew better. Knew better than to suggest that Charlotte, of all people, held any sort of advantage over my mother.

  Charlotte picked up the rag, of course, and silently cleaned the floor of the lemon curd my mother and I had made together. What else could she do? She was only a servant. A week later, my mother was dead, and it turned out that the baby she had been expecting was not my sister after all, but a brother.

  And to this day, I’m really not sure which loss hurt me the most, in that terrible time after Sophie found her body on the kitchen floor, covered with blood: my mother or the sister I had imagined, who never really existed.

  My mother. I thought about her constantly during the week after I arrived at Penderleath. For one thing, there wasn’t much else to do. Simon, shortly after rushing upstairs to assess his parents’ condition for himself, had driven me to this small, strange little cottage so I would be out of the way of germs, he said, and while the shelves contained books (old ones, bound in cloth) and a sort of village washerwoman brought me my meals, I found I couldn’t take much interest in either. My brain was too charged, my stomach too clenched. I would take down a book from the shelf and try to read, and find myself in the middle of a chapter without any idea who the characters were, or what had happened. I would be thinking instead about that last summer in the house in Connecticut, which was also by the sea: a friendlier sea, a wholesome, soft-lipped shore on Long Island Sound, where anybody ought to have been happy. But she wasn’t. That whole summer, I felt as if some thundercloud were driving in from the west, about to blacken the sky, to blacken the whole earth. And now that premonition had taken hold of me again. I could not get the image of thunderclouds out of my mind.

  I took walks instead. The cottage snuggled next to the sea, in a crevice along a series of cliffs, not far from a path that I imagined might have been used by smugglers, some day long ago. Or perhaps it was still used by smugglers; who knew? This was Cornwall, after all: a strange, remote claw dragging into the confluence of three seas. The skies remained gray, the drizzle intermittent. The air softened by springtime but not yet warm. I liked to stand at the point where the cliffs made their highest ascent and stare west across the gray-green wash, brooding and tempestuous, where America eventually lay. If I looked northward, along the coast, I could just see the headland where the shore bent inward to Port Isaac.

  But I didn’t venture into Port Isaac. Simon had warned me not to, in case there was more influenza. The disease was terrible; it was ravaging everybody, especially the young. So I remained isolated in the cottage, obedient to my husband’s orders, fed only by the washerwoman and the terse, anxious notes that arrived daily from Simon and my own imagination, until one afternoon when the rain dried out and the sun appeared, and Samuel Fitzwilliam walked up the pebbled path and found me sitting on a boulder.

  For so large a man, he moved with utmost quiet, and I must have jumped a foot when he stopped behind me and said my name.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Pack your things.”

  “What? My God, has something happened?”

  He was smoking a cigarette, nearly finished. He threw it down on the path and crushed the stub under the heel of his shoe. “You could say that, yes. Are you all right? You look pale.”

  “Just tell me what’s happened! Is Simon sick?”

  “No. No, Simon is not sick. Not with the damned Spanish flu, anyway.” He reached out to me with his large shovel hand and dragged me down the path. “Your husband is just fine, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, as he always is.”

  “Then what are we doing? Your parents—?”

  “My parents are dead, or will be shortly.”

  “My God!”

  “They’re dead, and you’ve got to leave, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, leave the lot of us here in Cornwall and go back to New York where you belong.”

  I dug my heels into the path and skidded along until he stopped and turned to me. His face was thunderous and bewildered. “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? What are you doing? What’s going on? Has Simon sent you?”

  “No. Simon has not sent me, by God. I’ve sent myself. He’s ruined enough, hasn’t he? I’ll be damned if he ruins you, too.”

  “He hasn’t ruined anything! He’s been risking his life, trying to save your parents, which is more than—”

  “Save them? Save them?” Samuel’s cheeks were red. He dropped my hand abruptly, so that I nearly fell to the ground, and ran his hand through his dark hair. “No, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. You’ve got it all wrong. He wasn’t trying to save them. The opposite.”

  I reached out for a nearby boulder and sat down. My ears felt as if something had started whirling inside them. “What are you saying? Simon’s not—what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying he wanted to get rid of them. Get rid of them and claim his inheritance, before it’s gone entirely. He already has, almost. I was just in the village, and the word is they’re both unconscious, death expected any moment. Mind you, I don’t half blame him, but—”

  “But that’s ridiculous.” I stood. My legs wobbled and held. “We arrived a week ago, and they were already sick.”

  “Yes, of course they were. Because my brother came down here a few days before your wedding and made them sick. Poisoned them. The same way he did his father-in-law.”

  “That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard! Poisoned his father-in-law?”

  “Well, it wasn’t ’flu, was it? The magistrate himself told me that—in strict confidence, of course—straight from the coroner’s mouth. A magistrate and a coroner, mind you, who just happen to be on excellent terms with one Simon Fitzwilliam. They are all terribly snug with one another, the local gentry.”

  “But Simon—it’s impossible. It had to be ’flu. What kind of poison could make you sick like that?”

  “God knows. I suppose a chap like my brother might be up-to-date on all the most modern methods of poisoning.”

  “Stop it! Stop saying such things! It’s ridiculous. Simon would never—you’ve got no proof—he would never—”

  “You can believe what you like, of course. You’re in love with him.”

  “And you’re the opposite. You despise him. You want to think the worst of him, whatever the evidence.”

  Samuel shrugged. “I know what I know.”

  “Besides, Simon didn’t go to Cornwall last week. He couldn’t have. He was busy making arrangements for the wedding.”

  “Is that what he said? Well, I daresay it wasn’t an absolute lie. He drove down here to ask them to go to the wedding after all, to give the whole affair the appearance of their approval. Naturally they refused. Told him exactly what they thought. A frightful old row
, or so I’ve heard. Not having darkened the old doorstep myself, in recent years.”

  I opened my mouth to say that this was a lie, too, but the truth was, I hadn’t actually seen Simon in the days before the wedding. For a week or so before, he had been away—running errands, as he told me—interviewing with some hospital about a position, squaring away the license and that sort of thing. I hadn’t asked him to account for himself, and he hadn’t given me any details. But I remembered, now that I thought about it, how haggard he looked when he visited me in my private room at the hospital in Hampstead, upon his return. It was the night before the wedding, and I had just finished packing my trunk, which he loaded onto the back of the Wolseley. I told him he looked tired, and he said he’d done an awful lot of driving, and I kissed him and said he should go to bed early and rest. Because tomorrow was a big day.

  Yes, he had said, kissing me back. Tomorrow is a very big day, indeed.

  I said, Aren’t you happy? You don’t look happy.

  He had pushed back my hair from my forehead and told me he was the happiest and luckiest man in England at that moment.

  But I thought, at the time, he was putting up a bit of a front. That the strain of everything had taken too much hold, and maybe it was the divorce. Divorce was always a tremendous strain, I’d been told, even if both parties approached the dissolution amicably, and he’d always been reluctant to share his troubles with me. He had always wanted to protect me from upset.

  And I thought, as I searched his face that evening, how this had to stop. How I would do everything in my power to make it up to him. I would do everything I could to be a good wife, a wife who brought joy and comfort to her husband.

  I said to Samuel Fitzwilliam, “I suppose it’s possible he visited them. Obviously, he wouldn’t have told me about it, if your parents were awful about the whole thing. He hates to upset me.”

  Samuel stared at me without replying. The breeze lifted the hair on his monumental forehead, but that was all that moved. The muscles of his face lay still; the knuckles of his right hand pressed into his waist, while his left fingers braced against his thigh.

  “You don’t know anything, do you?” he said. “Of course you don’t, or you wouldn’t have married him.”

  “I know everything I need to know about Simon. I know how good he is—”

  “Did he tell you about Lydia?”

  “Of course he did. He was awfully upset. Drowning like that—”

  “Drowning! Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes. He thinks it was suicide.”

  “Suicide. Oh, that’s rich. That’s priceless. Suicide. Tell me something. You never thought it was a little bit convenient, that poor old Lydia—what was it?—that she vanished into the sea, after proving so unexpectedly difficult to divorce?”

  The strangest thing. The sun still shone, in its feeble April way, but I felt as if a cloud had swallowed it. I felt as if the small warmth lighting my cheek had winked out.

  “Of course I didn’t think it was convenient. What a horrible thing to say. I didn’t even know she was gone, until after the . . . after the . . .”

  My voice faded.

  “Ah. Didn’t he bother to tell you until after you were good and married, then? How odd.”

  “But the divorce wasn’t contested,” I said. “Not at all. She agreed to everything. She wanted Simon to be happy.”

  “Really? Did you ask her?”

  “Of course not. I’ve never met her. Did you ask her?”

  He glanced at the sea. “No. I hadn’t seen her since the end of summer. But I do know that her father kicked up an almighty fuss and said that if they divorced, he’d take back her inheritance.”

  “Simon didn’t care about that.”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “He said that her father”—I tried to concentrate my memory—“he said that her father needed the capital anyway, to replace the shipping he’d lost to the U-boats. So it wasn’t even worth the trouble.”

  “Hardly that. There might not have been much cash left, but the ships remain, the ones still afloat and the ones being built, and I daresay they’re worth a great deal to somebody. And in order to inherit it, Simon and Lydia had to remain married, because that was the point, of course, the whole point of the marriage, combining the ships and the orchards. The dream of some future empire to rescue the family fortunes. Lydia’s father was obsessed with it, God knows why. So you can see why his death was a marvelously timely development indeed for my dear brother, coming before the divorce papers were signed, so that Simon and Lydia get the whole lot, without any irksome clauses. And then Lydia drowns herself soon afterward.”

  I thought I might be sick. The seconds passed, the wind stiffened. This time a cloud did scud by, sending a shadow across Samuel’s face.

  I thought, Just like Mother.

  “It’s not true,” I said. “It can’t be true. I’m sure Simon will explain everything.”

  Samuel laughed. “Oh, I’m sure he will. He was always terribly clever at explaining himself afterward. Let me guess. You find out some inconvenient fact from another party. You start to have doubts, to renounce him in your head. And then he turns up at just the right moment, brimful of some wonderfully reasonable account of the crime, allowing just a touch of human fault but largely exculpating himself of anything but the very noblest of intentions. Does that sound at all familiar?”

  “Excuse me.” I pushed past him, down the hill toward the cottage. In my mind I tried to fight back the creeping blackness. To think of Simon’s face, heavy with emotion as he placed the ring on my finger. With this ring, I thee wed. With my body I thee worship.

  “She didn’t just drown!” Samuel called behind me. “He went to visit her because she’d lost her nerve, she was thinking about rescinding the divorce petition because of her father. She wanted to try to make the marriage work instead, because that’s what her father wanted. And the next day she was gone.”

  “Stop! Just stop!”

  He took me by the arm. “Can you honestly say it wasn’t Simon? Can you honestly say he didn’t want it badly enough?”

  “Want what badly enough? Her money?”

  “No,” he said. “Not hers. Yours.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “Stupid girl. I mean your father’s money. His millions.”

  “But he doesn’t know about that. Not how much, anyway.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “I never told him!”

  “You told me.”

  He looked even larger now, looming over me, a step or two higher on the steep, pebbled path. At that moment he looked astonishingly like Simon, though his expression had changed to one of anger: eyes fierce, mouth clenched. The sea crashed below us. One good push, I thought, and in my madness I didn’t know whether I meant I should push him or he should push me.

  Simon’s voice: Of course it was venal. But it did the trick, didn’t it?

  “And naturally you had to tell him,” I whispered. “You had to taunt him with it. You had to test him. Because you didn’t think he meant to marry me.”

  “Dear girl, nobody thought he meant to marry you. Nobody at home knew a thing about you. He hadn’t said a single bloody word to anyone, least of all his wife.”

  “Then how did you find out?”

  “The usual gossip. You can’t easily hide a love affair from your fellow officers, it seems, however discreet you imagine yourself. Any number of well-meaning chaps stood ready to tell me the fascinating news.”

  I stood there, panting. Unable to speak.

  Samuel went on. “But of course, he wouldn’t say anything to us. A gentleman never speaks to his family about his mistress.”

  I slapped him then. I didn’t think about it; I just lifted my open hand and struck Samuel across the face. He flinched and touched his cheek with one finger. “Well done,” he said calmly. “But I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong man.”

  The strange thing was, when t
he door of the classroom opened and the headmistress motioned to my teacher, I knew what was wrong. I knew it was something to do with my mother, something terrible. I knew in my heart long before I accepted the fact of her murder in my head. It fit, that was all. All the wrongnesses in the house, one on top of the other. They were all leading to this.

  My father was waiting in the headmistress’s little office. He had forgotten to take off his hat. I remember how his hands shook, how he smelled strangely metallic: a scent I now recognize as that of blood. Blood, and the strong lye soap that had washed it away. He took me by the hand and led me outside. We had an electric Columbia runabout in those days, the kind that used a tiller instead of a steering wheel. He helped me inside, into the seat next to his, and on the way home he told me what had happened. That Charlotte had found Sophie in the kitchen with my mother, and my mother was dead. He didn’t give me any details; I discovered those later. How she had been stabbed violently, and Sophie was soaked with her blood. Father just told me to be careful with Sophie, to hold her close and to protect her, because of what she had seen.

  She probably won’t remember anything, Father said, because she’s so young. At least, I hope she won’t.

  I think he wiped away a tear, though at the time I thought he was only adjusting his spectacles to see the road.

  When we arrived home, there were policemen everywhere, wandering about my house as if it were a shop or a hotel, as if it belonged to them. Father took me upstairs—through the front of the house, so I wouldn’t see the kitchen—and told me to pack my things. We were going away. We couldn’t stay here, not after what had happened.