Trish laughed. ‘Me? The only sort of Bosch I could afford is a washing machine.’
‘Nice one.’ The voice on the other end of the phone had relaxed again. ‘Goodbye.’
Helen had been counting the days. Once counting the days would have meant waiting in blissful agony for Jean-Pierre to reappear, as mysteriously as he’d gone. Now it meant trying not to believe what she knew was true. She was only three months late. She’d been late before. It could happen for all sorts of reasons. But when your breasts were swollen and tender and you felt sick in the mornings and you’d been making love, there wasn’t much doubt about the reason. She didn’t know what to do, but she knew she hadn’t long to decide. Soon, in two months at the very most, it would be unmistakable and then she’d be shipped home at once, in disgrace.
Her family wouldn’t want to know; they hardly wanted to know her any more as it was, so coarsened did they believe her war service had made her. She had no money of her own. She would never be able to keep herself alive, let alone a child.
Panic made her feel as though lice were cavorting all over her back again. She’d caught them more than once in the front-line dressing stations, but she knew she was free of them now and kept herself that way with the harsh carbolic soap they all used. It was just the fear that made her skin crawl. Just. She nearly laughed at her own stupid word.
‘Helen! Helen!’ She recognized the voice of her best friend and turned to see what she wanted.
Myrtle was running towards her beckoning. Her cap was slipping sideways and her face was red. One of the doctors, or perhaps the sister, must be screaming for Helen, even though she wasn’t supposed to be on duty for another twenty minutes.
‘What?’ She almost hated Myrtle, not for interrupting her but for not being able to help. ‘What is it?’
‘Jean-Pierre’s back,’ Myrtle whispered, although there was no one anywhere near enough to hear either of them shout. ‘He’s helping Major Jamieson at the moment, but he wants to see you. Come on.’ She tugged Helen’s wrist.
How was she going to tell him? Helen waddled after Myrtle, wondering if, in her mother’s terrible phrase, he would ‘stand by her’ in her disgrace. Perhaps he would know somewhere she could go, some family who might employ her here in France once the baby had been born.
He saw her as soon as she walked through the flaps of the tented hospital ward, and he smiled. His lips didn’t move, but his eyes warmed and told her that something was still all right. She gestured to herself, then out of the tent. Behind the doctor’s back, he nodded.
As soon as he could extricate himself from Major Jamieson’s clutches, he followed her to the bottom of the old orchard, where a straggling hedge gave them a little privacy. Fat white ducks were picking their way through the scrubby grass.
‘Hélène, ma mie. Thank God you are still here. I was afraid when they told me you would be on escort duty again that you might—’
‘Where have you been all these weeks, Jean-Pierre?’ she asked, not naggingly but because she had to know.
‘I could not get back sooner. I was trapped on the wrong side of the line.’ She shivered, then felt his hands on her hair, stroking her. ‘But I am here now. What have you been doing to yourself? Are you ill?’
Nerving herself, reminding herself that he loved her and that he had once told her she had more courage than anyone he knew, she stood up straight, looked him in the eye, and said:
‘I am going to have a child. Our child, Jean-Pierre.’
Scorching fury blazed out of his eyes. She took a step backwards, and gasped as her foot caught on something in the ground. Her ankle twisted under her and pulled her even further back. Staggering, she fell heavily on the rock-like ground. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except his fury. She lay where she had fallen, her face turned into the sharp grass, and the gold of his miniature pressing into the flesh of her chest.
‘Hélène. Helene, ma mie.’ Amazingly his voice sounded kind again. A second later, she felt his hands running over her back, her head, gently pulling her body round. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No.’ She managed to wipe her eyes on her sleeve before she turned fully. Somehow she got herself on to her knees, then allowed him to pull her up. ‘Jean-Pierre, I’m—’
‘Don’t talk any more,’ he said, laying two fingers against her lips. ‘All that matters is that you are all right, not hurt, healthy. You must forgive my shock. I was just so frightened for you. It is too soon.’
‘I know this is no world into which to bring a child,’ she said, tugging at her hair to tidy it. ‘But I couldn’t help it. I didn’t ever think—’
‘No.’ He smiled again. ‘But I do not understand how you have hidden it for so long, from me and also from them.’
Shocked herself, she looked down, but there was no swelling yet in her abdomen. She put both hands over it.
‘Can you tell?’
‘Not yet, but to have worked so long in these conditions. Have you not felt unwell?’
‘Of course. But what is that to do with anything?’
He stood in front of her, shaking his head. ‘I have always said you have more courage than any man I ever knew. We must make arrangements now. We must be married at once.’
So he was going to stand by her. Helen felt weaker than ever in her relief and tears leaked out of her eyes.
‘I had hoped to wait until the end of the war, until we could have a proper ceremony with your family present. Now we cannot wait. Do not look so sad, ma mie. Come here.’
She lay against his chest, feeling the kind of safety that comes only once or twice in a lifetime.
‘There is a curé near to here. I will take you to him. He will marry us. Then when the time comes and you must resign from the service, you will tell them that you are now Madame Gregoire, with a husband of your own and a home in London, and you will go there to wait in safety, with our child.’
‘But how long must I wait? Why can’t you come with me?’
He smiled, spreading his hands in a gesture so typically his that she had to smile also. No one else she had ever known had so effectively demonstrated helplessness.
‘I have no laissez-passer, ma mie, even though I own the house in London. You will be safe there. Eventually, when the war is over and travel is possible again, I will come to you and our child and we will all be happy together.’
Chapter 17
‘That was amazing, Miss Maguire. You did great. I never expected to win, you know. Mr Wilkins said we didn’t have much of a case.’
Trish smiled at her client’s exuberance, but she was pleased. His future in the catering business looked much healthier now that he was going to get damages from the firm that had supplied him with faulty equipment.
‘But he did tell me to trust you. And he was right, wasn’t he? I can’t wait to tell my wife.’ The client suddenly lost his head and kissed her soundly.
Matthew Wilkins, the solicitor, shot a worried glance at Trish. She smiled again at both of them. ‘I’m really glad you’re pleased. It did go well.’
‘Thanks to you. Will you come and have some bubbly with us now? My wife’s waiting at home to hear the result and she insisted on putting a bottle on ice, you see, whatever Mr Wilkins said.’
‘That’s really kind,’ Trish said. She could see that the solicitor thought all these congratulations were rather exaggerated, but she was touched. ‘Unfortunately I have to go and see someone in Godalming while I’m in the area. Will you forgive me?’
‘If I must.’ He grabbed her right hand between both his own and pumped it up and down, hardly able to bear to let it go.
‘Mr Jones,’ said the solicitor. ‘I think Miss Maguire really does have to leave now.’
‘Yes. I know. I’m sorry. And you do look tired. You must have been up all night preparing for today.’
It was true that she hadn’t slept much, but it had been Toby Fullwell’s problems that had kept her awake, not this man’s. She couldn’t get th
em out of her head now, wherever she went and whatever she did. She was even beginning to wonder whether Mer’s red-headed giant might be real, after all, and his broken arm something to do with whatever had been terrifying his father. In which case, the need to get the whole problem sorted was even more urgent than she’d thought.
She got rid of the client at last and went back to her car, thinking of everything that had poured through her mind last night as she’d tried to decide what to do about Toby.
Only as grey light had drawn lines around the edge of her bedroom curtains had she realized that she would have to talk to Peter Chanting’s father, however reluctant he might be to see her. With that thought had come another, trailing a whole new story of what could have been going on in Toby’s life.
In this one, Martin Chanting was an avenger, punishing Toby for driving a wedge between him and his son. In a way it felt more convincing, perhaps because it was so much less dramatic, than the version in which Toby had been using the Gregory Bequest as cover for money-laundering or selling forgeries he’d had made to pay off a crippling drug debt. And it would mean that Mer’s giant was a fantasy after all. No one in Martin Chanting’s position would deliberately break a child’s arm, even if he were taking revenge on the child’s father.
Now, only four miles away from Godalming and the house where Chanting lived, Trish prepared herself as carefully as she did for the toughest cross-examinations. Even the adrenaline provided by her win in court couldn’t stop her yawning, so she went in search of caffeine. A double espresso in the nearest coffee shop should give her brain the necessary kick to send her on her way and the energy to keep going if she faced serious opposition.
Martin Chanting’s house proved to be a sizeable red-brick villa, which looked as though it could have been designed by Lutyens. It seemed too big for one elderly inhabitant, but his wife had died only about a year ago, so he might not have had the energy or will to move yet. Or he could have been clinging to the memories the house contained.
Trish heard the bell clanging inside, but there was no other sound for nearly five minutes. At last a light was switched on, providing a red glow through the leaded lights at either side of the front door, and hesitant steps shuffled towards the door. Hearing effort and difficulty in those steps, she felt guilty about her disruption of the old man’s afternoon.
He didn’t put the door on its chain or seem at all fragile when he flung it open with a simple ‘yes?’ He was taller than Trish and stood perfectly straight. Not for him the kind of defeated stoop to which Toby had been reduced. She remembered an old joke about the extrovert actuary being the one who looked at your shoes rather than his own. Smiling, she watched his sharp eyes take in her suit and briefcase.
‘Mr Chanting?’ she said. ‘My name’s Trish Maguire, and I—’
‘The barrister who telephoned the other day,’ he said in a dry, light voice that had no quiver in it at all. She wondered whether it had been fear of the phone that had made him sound so trembly when she called, or whether it had been some kind of disguise.
‘Yes. I am sorry to disturb you.’
‘You said that last time.’ He was leaning against the edge of the door, effectively blocking the opening. ‘Along with the fact, I believe, that you were once a friend of my son. He never had any lawyers as friends that I can remember. Were you lying?’
Approving of his directness, Trish nodded. He removed himself from the edge of the door, opened it wider and invited her in, presumably as a reward for belated honesty.
‘Thank you,’ she said, stepping over the threshold.
Inside the house was a high, square hall with an open fireplace. The first thing Trish noticed was an ugly Knole sofa. Upholstered in crimson cut velvet, with shiny gold cords lashing the finials together, it suited neither its surroundings nor the little she knew of the man who owned it. The incongruity interested her and she wondered whether it could be deliberate, a way of unsettling stray visitors. Or perhaps, she told herself caustically, it represented his wife’s taste rather than his own and carried no intentional messages whatsoever.
A comfortable-looking Labrador seemed much more appropriate as it heaved itself up from a torn hearthrug and came to sniff Trish’s shoes. There were plenty of white hairs around the dog’s muzzle and it moved as stiffly as its owner.
‘Do you mind dogs?’
‘Not when they’re as calm as this one.’
‘Good. Then come and sit down and tell me what you really want.’
She dropped her briefcase on an uncomfortable-looking settle under one of the windows and joined him on the sofa.
‘And don’t apologize again. I dislike it. We must accept that you have disturbed me and go on from there. Your only chance of retrieving yourself is to tell a good enough story to excuse it.’
‘I don’t think it is a very good story,’ Trish said, quickly changing her plan. With this invitation, it would be better to launch straight into it, instead of asking her carefully drafted questions. ‘But I’ll tell it all the same. Nearly twenty years ago, there were two friends at Cambridge. One had money and flair and courage; the other, expertise and knowledge of art history, along with a desire to please anyone who seemed more powerful than himself.’
She paused, waiting for permission to carry on, but the old man merely nodded.
‘Between them, either for profit or perhaps for a joke, they decided to try a little scam. One of them – at this stage, I’m still not sure which it was – could draw. Somehow they acquired some sixteenth-century paper, perhaps from the flyleaf of an old book, and presumably did some research into the kind of crayon or chalk an artist of the time would have used. Having acquired something roughly similar, they produced drawings in the style of François Clouet.’
‘So?’
‘Am I getting warm?’
‘To be crude, Miss Maguire, so what if you are?’
‘I’m trying to track down those drawings.’
‘Then you have had a wasted journey. To my knowledge, no such drawings exist.’
‘But they did once, didn’t they?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think they must have because I cannot believe so many people would remember the story if they hadn’t. Besides, three drawings in coloured chalks, catalogued as being “by François Clouet (known as Jannet)”, are recorded as having been sold at Goode & Floore’s in 1983. I have been in touch with them, you see.’
‘And?’
‘And, alas, I have not been able to persuade them to tell me who either the vendor or the purchaser was. But 1983 is the right year for the sale of the three Clouet drawings discovered in Cambridge by your son. I think it would be too much of a coincidence to suggest that they are not the same drawings.’
Martin Chanting’s face was expressionless. ‘I see. And you have come here in the expectation that I will tell you the name of the purchaser, have you?’
‘Expectation would be putting it a little high,’ Trish said and watched a faint smile thicken the creases around his mouth. ‘Call it hope.’
‘All right. It was, I believe, an American philanthropist, who planned to donate them to his alma mater.’
‘And yet you say that they do not exist. How come?’
‘Perhaps someone else bought them from the philanthropist.’
Trish had spent a long time last night thinking about what she might have done if she’d discovered that a rather older David had participated in a fraud like this.
‘In order to destroy them?’ she suggested and had to wait again. This time there was no nod or smile to encourage her. ‘To protect his son, maybe, from any future charge of fraud? Or even to protect his own reputation?’
‘Who will ever know?’ Martin Chanting smiled as though he was enjoying her frustration. ‘Since the drawings do not exist.’
‘Mr Chanting, I wish you’d be frank with me.’
He laughed, still as upright as he had been when he opened the door. He stir
red up the Labrador with his foot. The old dog barely raised his head.
‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ he said. ‘I’m like the dog: too old and tired to hunt any longer. All I want is to be left to snooze in peace.’
‘I’ll do that in a moment, but please let me ask one more thing.’
‘You can always ask.’
‘Where is your son now? I badly want to talk to him.’
Trish had had fantasies of hearing the old man say he wished he knew, that he had been putting pressure on Toby Fullwell as a way of reaching out to his lost child. She’d even had visions of his dying wife, begging him to make peace with their son and bring him home before it was too late.
‘Now? I have no idea,’ Chanting said, showing no sign of any of the emotions Trish had hoped he might feel. ‘He could be anywhere.’
‘You sound as though you don’t care.’
‘Why should I? I told you. I’ve not seen him for seventeen years.’ Some human feeling twisted the muscles of his face under the blotched skin, but it was closer to rage than any kind of affection. ‘He was always a wastrel.’
‘In what way?’
‘The usual way, Miss Maguire.’ The sharpness of his contempt stung. She tried to imagine its effect on a child. ‘I could perhaps have forgiven his extravagance and fecklessness if there had been nothing else. Young men do occasionally grow out of that kind of stupidity, even if they have been given too much money too young.’
‘Is that what happened to your son?’
‘I don’t think that is any of your business.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Trish said, forgetting his dislike of apologies until she saw his twisted face. To retrieve her position, she quickly added: ‘What did you mean when you said: “if there had been nothing else”?’
‘My son succumbed, in spite of his excellent brain and first-class degree, to some ludicrous mish-mash of invented religion,’ he said, speaking much faster and more freely, as though he had wanted an opportunity to justify himself for some time. ‘I could never have forgiven that. I dislike religion of all kinds, but I could have stomached Christianity, Buddhism or any other properly considered system of belief. But this! It was neither Eastern nor Western, just a sentimental, self-indulgent muddle of incense, temple bells and nonsense dreamed up by a bunch of British and American, drug-mazed dropouts in Kathmandu.’
A Place of Safety Page 18
