A Double Life

by Flynn Berry

  One of James’s friends is also a doctor, and works at a clinic on Harley Street. “Have you considered switching to private?” he asks.

  “No. I want to work for the NHS.”

  “Well, I’m glad someone does.” He says it without malice, though, and he doesn’t tell me how much more money I’d make.

  At eight we move into the dining room and Rose directs everyone to a seat. I’m near the end between Luke and Alice. I’ve never eaten in this room before. All of the children ate near the nursery, though once, when I wasn’t feeling well, I was allowed inside to sit on Mum’s lap.

  Two girls in blue linen shirts bring in bowls of risotto with wild mushrooms. While we eat, Luke tells me that he lives in Hanoi. Alice snorts. “You have a flat in Fulham.”

  To me, he says, “I’m back and forth a lot.”

  Our movements around the long table make the candlelight flicker on the ceiling and the walls. I look at a Tudor painting of a woman in a black dress and spiked lace collar, holding a rosary. Splinters of other conversations come down the table. “This was when we were at Cambridge.”

  “They’re just back from Cortina.”

  “The Lion d’Or?”

  “We’re going to Rovinj.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Croatia.”

  Alice looks at her parents. “You’ve been to Croatia, haven’t you?” James shakes his head. “I thought you went after Greece, I thought you stayed in Skopje.”

  “That’s in Macedonia. We went to Macedonia after Greece.”

  Luke answers my questions about his job and his travels at length, which means I can mostly listen to the other conversations. After dessert, slices of chocolate ganache tart, we leave our plates on the table. A few of the guests go onto the terrace to smoke and the rest of us move to the drawing room.

  “My phone’s not working,” says Beatrice.

  “There’s no signal,” says Rose. “We think there must be lead in the walls, nothing gets through.”

  There are twelve of us, a big enough group that I can recede without anyone noticing. They all have their own concerns, anyway. One couple isn’t getting along very well, and the man from Rose’s office is drinking much faster than any of the others. I wonder if he’s realized he wasn’t meant to be invited.

  And James doesn’t seem to want guests at all. Whenever he can, he busies himself with small tasks, separate from the others, like fixing the wobbly leg on the bar cart. At dinner I catch him reading the label on the back of a bottle of wine. He’s affectionate with Rose, though. I think he’d rather be alone here with her and their daughter, which is a shame. If they hated each other, one of them might tell me what the other had done.

  • • •

  Someone came into my bedroom during dinner to draw the curtains and close the wooden shutters. I pull them open again and watch the moon reeling behind the clouds. I’ve never stayed anywhere so quiet before. In my flat, I can hear radiators hissing, pipes clicking, my neighbors’ voices, car alarms. The water and heat and electricity here are all somehow silent.

  I wish I could have brought Jasper instead of leaving him with Laila for the weekend, and thinking of him makes me homesick, like I’ve been away for months.

  I wait for a few hours, then softly open my door. The corridor is so long that if someone were standing at its far end, I wouldn’t be able to see his face. I listen from the top of the stairs. The wind against the house, nothing else. It’s three in the morning now, everyone must be asleep. I won’t have much time. James wakes at five during the week, he might keep the same schedule here.

  On the ground floor, I remember from our visits that the kitchen wing is to the left, and an office is somewhere to the right. I open six doors before finding it, a small room near the west end of the house. On the walls are framed landscape plans and a shelf of farming almanacs. The desk is covered with papers, books, and a stuffed partridge under a glass bell.

  I start to sort through the papers, but all of them have to do with the house. They’re bills for repairs on the chimney, maintenance on the tennis court, an estimate for replacing a section of roof damaged in a storm. It’s an estate office. Rose and James might never come into this room, none of the papers have their signatures, only the estate manager’s.

  I leave the office and move from west to east, opening doors, searching for box files, a planner, an address book. In the library, I find a few envelopes and scraps of paper stuck between the books, but none of them are useful, and already it’s almost five.

  • • •

  In the morning, sheep move through a thick fog on the lawns around the house. I watch them while dressing in a loose cashmere jumper, jeans, and moccasins. Normal, a normal houseguest. Someone has set coffee, bread, and fruit on the dining table, though the house is quiet, the drawing room empty. I step onto the terrace. James is coming up the slope of the lawn in a green waxed jacket. His face is pinched and white from the cold, but he looks happier than he did last night. “Morning,” I say, as he climbs the steps, stripping off a pair of work gloves. “Have you been in the garden already?”

  “Yes. Stay away from gardening, it’s a thankless job.”

  “Can I see it?” He seems to consider pointing me towards it, then steels himself and leads me down the slope. He says, “It might hail tonight. Not the September weather we expected, unfortunately.” He doesn’t sound disappointed.

  “Still gorgeous,” I say.

  “Yes,” he says, with feeling. We step into the walled garden, where quinces, plums, and pears hang from branches. James notices me looking at the holes in the brick walls. “They’re fireplaces,” he says, “though we don’t use them. Winters aren’t as cold anymore.”

  I remember curling into one of the spaces, Mum coming to find me, saying, There you are! I have to force myself to turn away.

  James stands with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets. He’s different than he was at forty. He’s different even than he was nine years ago, when I followed him. He was more confident then, he didn’t have this current of unease, and I wonder what happened to change him.

  After he shows me the stables, we walk to the edge of the property, to a stone church surrounded by hemlocks. Rows of gravestones rise in the tall grass. “Whose are they?” I ask.

  “My family,” he says, switching a stick through the grass, then realizes this sounds cavalier, and says, “Distant ones. None I ever met.”

  I count eight graves. “When was the last person buried here?”

  “Nineteen fifty-four,” he says. “My great-uncle.” We stand for a moment looking at the worn stones under the hemlocks.

  There was a rumor that my father never left their property that night, that one of his friends shot him and they buried him in one of these graves. It’s never seemed likely, they didn’t have a motive.

  The ground is raised in places where the land has settled, so it looks as though the coffins are pressing from under the earth. Apparently it’s the best place to hide a body, in an existing coffin. No one wants to disturb a grave.

  We climb the hill to the house, where Alice’s cousins are smoking on the terrace in their pajamas. The girls stretch and yawn. Beatrice rubs her eyes, and Anna looks me up and down. “You look nice.”

  The others are inside having breakfast, and I pour myself a coffee and take a piece of soda bread, though my appetite’s gone. Luke crunches toast while reading the memoir of a man who founded a nonprofit in Nepal. Rose turns over the newspaper with a sound of disgust. “I can’t look at him.”

  After a pause, Luke says, “Aren’t you used to that sort of thing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a barrister.”

  “Corporate. Not criminal.”

  A heavy rain starts to fall. Through the open doorway and the wide stairwell, we can hea
r it thundering on the roof. “It could be like this for forty-eight hours,” says the man from Rose’s office, eagerly.

  Later in the morning, I return to the dining room, but the table’s been cleared. I search downstairs until I find a basket of newspapers next to the fireplace in the library, and sift through it for the one Rose was reading. On the front page is a picture of a man in Bristol who murdered two children. I sit there for a long time, looking at his face.

  There’s a photograph of Rose on the mantel. It was taken years ago, she can’t be much older than thirty. She’s leaning against a stone wall somewhere, with her arms behind her back. I look at that for a long time too.

  One of their neighbors said he heard a gunshot the night my father came here. A few hours later, at dawn, the neighbor went into the woods with his dog, and part of his route took him by the fence around Ashdown. He told the police he saw a man walking up the slope from the churchyard, between the hemlocks. The light wasn’t good, it was still early in the morning, but he said the man was holding a shovel.

  • • •

  In the servants’ wing, the floors and walls are stone, the ceiling is low, and the air is much colder than in the rest of the house. Where the corridor splits, I remember that one way leads to the gun room and the other to the kitchen.

  The kitchen has a vaulted ceiling, with ribs, like a cathedral. It’s large enough to feel empty, even though there are two vast ovens, a deep soapstone sink, and long counters. One wall is covered by a mechanism of iron rods and gears, a roasting spit, large enough to cook huge sides of meat. A charnel smell rises from the iron. Footsteps come down the hall, and I hurry through the scullery and out a side door onto the lawn.

  You can’t see the church from the house. It’s down a slope at the edge of the property, hidden by the hemlocks. I can’t remember if James was more uneasy in the churchyard than in the garden, he seemed discomfited the entire time.

  My father arrived at their house at eleven thirty that night, and no one ever saw him again. How can that be possible, with a search that size, with his picture in all the newspapers. He might have never left the Frasers’ property. Sam’s flight the following night might have been a coincidence, he might have told the truth about only going to Whitstable.

  I’ve never considered the possibility seriously before. But it seems more likely now, when decades have passed, when search methods have improved so much, and still he’s never been found.

  • • •

  James is hitting golf balls from the top of the lawn in the rain. He raises the club over his head, then pauses before bringing it down. There’s a crack and the ball whips into the distance. The rain makes it difficult to see where it lands.

  I’m reading in the drawing room, with Alice at the other end of the sofa. She’s meant to be working on new menu ideas, though she hasn’t written anything down in a while. Rain streaks the windows, and a crack comes from outside every time James’s club hits the ball.

  Golf was a Ramsden Club tradition. Another tradition was that once a year they dressed in tailcoats and drove out of Oxford to a country pub. They posed for a photograph in front of the pub, a group of eight handsome young men.

  They rented a room at the pub, the sort normally used for leaving dos or special anniversaries. They had a long meal and drank wine. They were impeccably polite to the servers, and pretended to be enthusiastic about the food.

  Then, before they left, they smashed the room to pieces. Broke all the furniture, tore the paper from the walls, stamped on the glasses.

  They offered the owner of the pub a huge, absurd sum of money to pay for the damages, more than would come from insurance or a court settlement. A few of the owners still called the police, but over the years most, by far, took the money. So it wasn’t really about fun, or excess, or rioting, it was about humiliation.

  None of them were punished. Our prime minister joined in the tradition, as did our foreign secretary, and my father, and his friends.

  • • •

  While everyone else is upstairs dressing for dinner, I walk to the gun room. The door is locked. I feel along the lintel for a key, and my hand comes away covered in dust. I press my face to the crack between the door and the frame, and see a cabinet with rows of upright rifles.

  At dinner, we’re served iced lobster soufflés and champagne. Everyone is talking even faster than last night, and I have to wait for a pause in the conversation before turning to Rose. “Do you have services at the church?”

  “No,” she says. They did before, I remember. There’s a separate gate at that end of the property, and on Sunday morning it was opened to the locals. “Our congregation was combined with the one in Maresfield.”

  “When?”

  “Years ago, early nineties.”

  After my father disappeared, then. The Frasers might not have wanted people on their property anymore, near the graveyard.

  Maybe Rose refused to help my father, and he threatened her. They were best friends, he knew everything about her and James, he could have blackmailed them. He wouldn’t need to know much. She’s a barrister, even a small misconduct could destroy her.

  They own rifles. Maybe she shot him, and James helped her bury the body in one of the graves. She drove the car to Newhaven and left it near a cliff so it would look like he’d committed suicide. She allowed the police to suspect that she’d helped my father escape, because that was better than if they suspected she’d killed him.

  She could justify it to herself. She’d met Emma, and he had murdered her. She would be doing him a kindness, in a way.

  • • •

  Late in the night, I step outside, lifting the hood of my coat. A few of the others are still awake, I can hear them in the drawing room, but it’s raining, no one will come outside. I walk to the edge of the property and climb down the slope, between the hemlocks, the wet grass sliding under my boots. I stand beside the church and look at the eight gravestones.

  No one will be able to see me from the house. Beneath my feet the ground is soft and cushioned. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness and I can see the white spots on the oldest gravestones. This could all be over in a few hours. I saw where they keep the shovels.

  I look down the path towards the woods. No one is coming to help. The police were told to look here and they didn’t.

  A few hours with the shovel, that’s all. When it’s over, I won’t remember it. It will seem like a dream, it already does.

  Rain slides from the hemlocks. I should have started by now. I won’t be able to dig in the daylight, someone might come past. But my arms hang at my sides. I open and close my fists. I could be at a police station soon, warm and dry, while officers finish exhuming his body.

  I walk around the church for the shovel. Maybe this will be easier once it’s in my hand. I return to the graves, push the tip of the shovel into the dirt, and use my foot to drive the blade further into the ground. I wipe my dirty hand across my forehead and start to dig.

  29

  WE WERE DRIVING to the Highlands. I had the atlas open on my lap, even though Mum said she wouldn’t need directions until after Inverness. We’d passed Dalwhinnie and were crossing the floor of a broad valley where the shadows of clouds moved over the hills and the moors.

  I found our destination on the atlas. Glen Affric was on the other side of Loch Ness, in the northern Highlands. Mum had already told Robbie that a glen was a valley, and he said, “I know, we’ve done that.” It was impossible to guess what Robbie had covered in school. His class had learned about Kepler’s laws, for example, but not fractions.

  Robbie was in the backseat, wedged in the small space left beside our bags and Finn, who was sitting up on a corduroy dog bed and looking out the window. A few presents were hidden in the bags, it would be Christmas in three days. Mum’s friend from work had loaned her his cottage for the holiday. The drive would
take around four and a half hours. Already the landscape had started to change, and I was eager to travel farther north, to put more distance between myself and school. My exams hadn’t gone well. I’d been staying up late to read about my father, and hadn’t been able to concentrate on the test questions. Thinking about them made me feel sick.

  Mum flailed her arm towards the backseat. “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Crisps.” I opened the bag and held it towards her. She was wearing an old fleece and a thick wool scarf. It would be colder in the north.

  Alongside the road, the hills had the texture and color of deer hide. My exams started to seem like less of a problem. I’d have to work harder next term to make up for them, but the holiday had just begun, that was still days away.

  We crossed the suspension bridge over the Moray Firth, and I looked between its spans at the dark water flooding into the North Sea.

  “You need the A832 now,” I told Mum. Behind us, Robbie was reading a comic book, with one arm draped over the bags to rest on the dog.

  The road narrowed, curving past farms and paddocks. We stopped in Cannich for supplies. “There won’t be anything near the house,” said Mum. We bought food, jugs of water, and a large box of matches for the hob.

  The last stretch of the drive was on a single-track road along a river until we reached the house, an old cottage at the bottom of a mountain with spruces planted behind it to block the wind. Robbie and the dog spilled out of the car and ran to look at the river. Mum found the key under a stone, and we went inside.

  We weren’t completely alone in the glen, there was also a private estate, and an estate keeper’s cottage. The estate house was on an island in the river at one end of a short, humpbacked wooden bridge. Smoke rose from its chimneys, someone was at home. “Who lives there?” I asked Mum, and she shrugged.

  I could see two horses in a paddock by the estate keeper’s cottage. No people, though. Mum said she doubted anyone lived here year-round, since the roads must often be blocked by snow. Which meant we could be snowed in, too. The cottage’s power came from a generator. “What happens if it turns off?” I asked.