A Dark Devotion

by Clare Francis

  ‘Jilly, he’ll have to. There’s nothing he can do about it!’

  ‘He won’t,’ she repeated miserably, and for a moment she seemed close to tears.

  I reached through the window and patted her sleeve clumsily. ‘Don’t let Edward take it out on you. Don’t let him bully you.’

  She blinked. ‘It’s not that.’ Then, as though the full meaning of my words had only just sunk in, she straightened up and said defensively: ‘It’s not that at all!’

  Chapter Seven

  Maggie’s car was parked outside her cottage, but when I knocked there was no answer. I tried the handle but the door was locked, and I knocked again. Thinking my raps might have got drowned out by the gale, I peered through the sitting-room window, then, braving the full force of the wind, went down the side of the cottage to put my eye to the small pane set into the kitchen door. The breakfast dishes still stood on the draining boards the coffee cups on the table, while Maggie’s uneaten melon lay unwrapped on the counter.

  At the first touch of the handle, the kitchen door caught the wind and flew open, banging against the stop. Closing it rapidly behind me, I called into the quiet, ‘Maggie?’

  I kept calling as I walked into the passage and up the stairs.

  She was lying on her back on the bed with a towelling wrap pulled roughly over her. In the meagre light she looked so still and so cold that she could have been dead.

  Abruptly, she turned her head, though not enough to look at me.

  ‘Maggie—are you all right?’

  ‘Tell me,’ she commanded, ‘what did the police say?’

  I took her hand and it was like ice. ‘You’re not well.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she insisted, in a voice that contained both impatience and entreaty.

  ‘It was mainly old ground,’ I reported obediently, sitting on the edge of the bed. Folding her hand in mine, I gently rubbed the parchment skin to bring the circulation back. ‘They asked Will to go through everything that happened that Wednesday. Times, places, the problems with the sluice, why he had to stay up most of the night, that sort of thing.’

  The moment I paused, she looked at me swiftly and her hand tensed in mine. ‘What else?’ she demanded.

  ‘There was one new thing,’ I told her, choosing to forget Grace’s alleged visit to the solicitor. ‘They think they have a sighting of Grace that day. A witness who saw her driving down Salterns Lane in this direction at about five forty—’

  She snatched her hand from my grasp and drew it against her side in a fist. ‘Damn him! Damn him!’ I watched her face. ‘Who, Maggie?’

  ‘Damn him!’

  ‘You know who this person is?’

  She couldn’t speak the name.

  But I was already there. I remembered the conversation I had interrupted between Maggie and Barry Holland, the sound of their voices as I put my hand to the knocker, and Maggie’s distress when she opened the door.

  ‘Barry Holland?’

  She affirmed it with a despairing lift of her eyes.

  ‘He told you yesterday?’

  ‘He wouldn’t listen. I said he was not right, but he wouldn’t listen. No, no! He knew best! He said he must go to the police. I knew it would be a bad thing. I knew it.’ She shook both fists.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Maggie. Hang on. He could have been mistaken. He could have got the time wrong—anything. But tell me—just to get it straight—Grace brought Charlie over at about four, is that right?’

  She dropped her hands. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she left within ten minutes?’

  ‘Two minutes. Two. But, Alex, I tell you—she didn’t come back again! She did not come back. And now this stupid man goes to the police and says these things! So they will think Will has been lying or I have been lying, or both of us have been lying!’ I recognized the despair in her voice; it was the despair of someone worn down by deep tiredness and unremitting stress and endless days waiting for news that never came.

  ‘Maggie, listen—it was dark, Barry Holland might have been some distance away. Did he say where he was when he thought he saw Grace? Did he say if he was in his house or his car?’

  She gestured uncertainty.

  ‘And how well did he know Grace, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, he—’ She pulled up abruptly, with an exclamation, a hiss against her teeth. ‘He knew her well enough.’

  ‘But in the dark? Maggie, there’s a wealth of difference between thinking you’ve seen a person and being sure.’

  She considered this for a while, she closed her eyes as if to impose some sort of calm before pushing the robe away from her body. With an audible intake of breath and a brief grimace, she lifted her legs and swung them over the far side of the bed. She sat up very straight with her back to me, motionless, as though drawing on scarce energies. ‘He is certain,’ she said dully.

  I went round the bed and perched on a small chair in the corner where I could see her face. ‘Grace’s car is a grey Volvo estate, isn’t it? Well, there must be dozens of people in this area with almost identical cars. Someone in a Volvo might have been visiting one of your neighbours, someone with blonde hair…’

  She turned her head into profile. ‘I tell you—he says he is certain.’

  I took a long breath. ‘Okay…Maybe Grace did come back. Maybe she came back to tell Charlie something or to bring him something or…And maybe you were elsewhere, in the loo or the bathroom or whatever, and she came and went very quickly without your knowing it.’

  This brought an adamant rejection. ‘No, that’s absolutely not possible. No—Charlie didn’t see her. No, it couldn’t have been that way!’

  ‘Perhaps you were both out of earshot.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Grace couldn’t have been visiting anyone else in the lane?’

  ‘No.’

  But for all her refutations I could sense that she was starting to open her mind to the possibilities, starting to realize that this evidence might not be as incontrovertible as it seemed.

  In the pause that followed, I went and sat beside her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Maggie, what are they doing about these gallstones of yours? There must be something—’

  She made a pah! sound and frowned.

  ‘Can’t they take them out?’

  ‘Oh, sure. The knife, they love the knife, but they cannot promise anything at the end of it.’ She lifted a hand and tilted it one way then the other as she chanted, ‘You may be better, you may not…’

  ‘But—’

  She patted my knee. ‘Alex, it’s nothing. I tell you, the smoking will kill me long before the gallstones.’ And she laughed gently.

  Something told me it would be futile to tackle her about the smoking. From my years with Paul, I recognized the self-destructiveness behind her addiction, the sheer determination to continue against all advice, though in her case, unlike Paul’s, I couldn’t imagine what had caused her to turn her energies against herself. In the old days Maggie had burst with a zest for life; now she seemed contemptuous of the damage she was wreaking on herself.

  ‘And still it blows,’ she sighed, lifting her head to the storm.

  We listened, and I thought I could make out the thunder of the waves beyond the dunes, thought I could hear the sea as it drove against the defences, and it seemed to me that the water was very high. But then you could hear anything in a wind like this. If you let your imagination run wild, you could hear the sea breaking through the dunes and cascading over the marshes towards you.

  Touching my hand, offering me a fleeting smile of unhappiness, Maggie stood up. ‘I suppose I should think about this flood.’

  ‘Is it going to flood? I thought—’

  ‘No, no. There will be no flood. But I feel I should go through the motions. Eh? Go through the motions.’ She rolled the expression around her tongue.

  I followed her towards the door. ‘Let me know what I can do.’

  ‘Just a few things to come upstairs.’


  ‘Give me a list.’

  ‘Dear girl.’ She turned and embraced me solemnly. Drawing back a little, she fixed me with fervent eyes. ‘I knew you would not let us down.’

  And, touching a hand to her hair, she pulled a strand back from her face, smoothed her sweater and, drawing a breath as if for battle, led the way slowly down the narrow stairs.

  ‘How long do we have?’ I asked.

  ‘They said eleven tonight.’

  There were easy things, like rugs and books and photo albums, there were objects that were going to be far more difficult, like cabinets and chairs and sofas, and there were totally impossible things like dressers and bookcases. The books took longer than I’d thought because there were so many of them and few horizontal surfaces at a safe height close by. In the end I carried them through to the dining room and stacked them on the table. Maggie kept wandering in from the kitchen where she was dealing with the food and saying, ‘Oh, darling girl, leave them, leave them…That’s enough, really…enough.’

  I found a home for the last pile of books as an early dusk closed around the cottage, bringing an uneasy gloom. I had just carried a pretty little button-backed chair upstairs when a car horn tooted outside and the cottage door banged and I heard Will’s voice.

  Seeing me, he exclaimed, ‘Alex!’ He seemed disorientated for a moment, as though he couldn’t think how I had got there. Glancing around, he saw the books and the rolled-up rugs and dining chairs standing on the table. ‘You…?’ And when he looked back at me, he smiled with gratitude and affection, and before I could stop myself my heart squeezed with foolish pleasure.

  Turning away, I said, ‘I wasn’t sure what to do with the sofas and the rest of the heavy stuff. Whether they were to go upstairs…’

  And then for a brief moment he laughed, an explosive sound that creased his eyes and showed his even teeth. I had not seen him laugh like this since we were young. The strain fell from his face and he looked twenty again, just a handsome carefree son of a gun.

  I laughed too, though I had the feeling I was being teased.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He tried to suppress a smile. ‘It was the thought of you trying to get the sofas upstairs. Sorry…’

  I grinned back at him. ‘You mean, you doubted me.’

  ‘I didn’t doubt you’d try.’

  Charlie appeared unexpectedly in the doorway.

  I said, ‘Hello, Charlie. Not at school?’

  He was solemn and pale and unlaughing. His eyes flickered up to mine, a greeting of sorts.

  ‘More use here,’ Will said, and laid a hand on his head.

  A car door slammed, and Frank Yates and John Simons arrived to help with the furniture. They greeted me warmly, as though I were a valuable and much missed friend, and I thought how very long I must have lived in the city to think this unusual.

  The men started in the hall, with a small antique table that wouldn’t tolerate the water.

  ‘Do you want to help me with the curtains?’ I said to Charlie.

  He looked around for his father, faintly alarmed.

  Will called, ‘You help with the curtains, Charlie. We’ll shout if we need you.’

  Charlie followed me reluctantly to the dining room. I showed him how to lift each curtain off the floor and tie it in a giant knot.

  I said, ‘Did your father tell you about the flood that happened years ago, when he was a young man?’

  A small nod.

  ‘Of course it was different then. They hadn’t reinforced the dunes. It’s much safer now.’

  His expression told me he wasn’t worried about the dunes. Crossing the hall, standing aside for the men as they carried a cabinet up-stairs, we moved on to the long curtains in the sitting room.

  ‘The whole village turned out,’ I told Charlie. ‘Your father and I went to help in one of the Salterns cottages. Did he tell you that when the men were moving the furniture they got a dresser stuck half-way up the stairs?’

  He was intent on pulling the tail of the knotted curtain through, but he was also listening.

  ‘Couldn’t move it, and the old lady who lived there was stuck at the top, wailing blue murder.’ We finished the curtains and stood back to inspect our work. ‘The more upset she got, of course, the more solidly the dresser got wedged.’

  He fixed me with an unblinking gaze, and I thought I had never seen eyes quite so pale and clear before. They were the colour of ice, far paler than his mother’s which in all the photographs looked closer to sapphire. I tried to remember what Veronica Bailey’s were like, if Charlie could have got them from her.

  ‘So there it was,’ I said, ‘the dresser wouldn’t go any further up the stairs and they couldn’t very well leave it where it was, not with the old lady stuck on the landing, so it had to come down again. A big chunk of plaster came with it, I seem to remember. And by the time they’d finished there might have been one less banister, too.’

  He was waiting for an ending to the tale.

  ‘The only thing they could do with it was to plonk it on top of the outhouse.’

  He looked uncertain about that. ‘Was it all right?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Oh, safe as houses. Or safe as outhouses.’

  It was an awful joke, but he had the kindness not to groan.

  I cast around. ‘Well, what next, Charlie? What d’you reckon?’

  This threw him for a moment. Then, thinking hard, he said. ‘Down here.’

  He led the way to a cupboard, whose lower shelves contained photo albums and board games.

  As we began to gather them up, Charlie asked, ‘Was it high, the water?’

  ‘Quite high,’ I said. ‘Seven cottages got flooded. I think it was seven, anyway. But all the important things were saved. Cats, budgerigars, chickens, books, valuables, food. The flood didn’t come till morning, you see. We had all night to move everything upstairs and get the people to safety. There was only one old chap who wouldn’t move, wouldn’t let anyone lay a hand on his furniture, but it didn’t matter in the end because the flood stopped just short of his door, he managed to keep dry. Your father and I sat up all nighty though, keeping watch.’

  Charlie appeared satisfied with this, though nothing seemed to lift his air of general apprehension.

  He carried the albums out of the room, leaving me to memories of the flickering candlelight in old Mr Kemp’s kitchen, of Will’s profile as we sat beside the old-fashioned range in the dead of night, of my sense of complete and perfect happiness. A storm had seemed romantic to me then, I had been intoxicated with the drama of it, with the idea of danger and rescue. The wind had made an extraordinary noise—I could remember it even now, a whistling that was sometimes a moan, sometimes a drumming—and I saw again the flimsy curtains shifting restlessly, I heard the ill-fitting windows rattling in their frames. Soon after Will and I had arrived, the power had failed. Old Mr Kemp had thought this funny. Chortling with delight, boasting that he knew all about surviving storms, he had lit a stump of a candle and poured tots of whisky, one each for Will and me, and a succession of large ones for himself ‘according to age and need’. When he fell asleep in his chair Will and I had huddled round the stove, giggling like conspirators. Alive with the excitement of the storm, fired by the whisky, it was some time before we stopped laughing, and then we’d sat shoulder to shoulder, talking quietly, and I was aware of a new mood between us, as though in the progress of a single day Will had come to realize that I was virtually grown up, not so very far from him in age after all. When we had touched fingers and held hands, when we had lightly kissed, I had thought with the simplicity of youth that there was hope for me after all.

  Charlie returned.

  ‘What next?’ I said.

  After careful consideration he suggested, ‘The cushions?’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’ We began to strip the sofas. ‘How was school today?’ I asked brightly.

  He shrugged.

  ‘You like school?’

  Still
he didn’t answer, but his frown said a great deal.

  ‘Not so great, eh?’

  The frown deepened.

  It occurred to me that school must be very hard for him at the moment, with his mother’s picture all over the TV news.

  ‘I remember thinking school was a real pain sometimes,’ I offered. ‘And then it got better again. In the end I quite enjoyed it. Do they give you much homework?’

  He scooped up a cushion and gave a single shake of his head.

  ‘What, none at all?’

  He stood stranded in the middle of the room with a large seat-cushion tucked under each arm and shot me an uncertain glance, assessing the risk of going further. ‘I’m dyslexic’

  ‘That must be a nuisance for you. Do they give you extra tuition?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Where are we going to put these?’ I asked from over the pile of cushions, which reached almost to my chin. ‘Upstairs?’

  As I followed him, I said chattily, ‘They have teachers trained in dyslexia nowadays, don’t they?’

  He didn’t reply.

  We dropped the cushions in a corner of Maggie’s bedroom, next to a stack of dining chairs.

  ‘So much better than the old days,’ I meandered on. ‘At least it’s recognized now. Some friends of mine send their son to a special school in London. The kids use these sunglasses, except they’re not really sunglasses. They filter out parts of the colour spectrum. Something like that. Have you heard of them?’ I was so sure I was on safe ground that it took me several moments to realize that Charlie was locked with sudden tension, eyes frozen on the floor.

  ‘Charlie?’ I took a step closer. ‘Something the matter?’

  He twisted his head away and would probably have escaped if I hadn’t been standing between him and the door.

  ‘Was it something I said?’ But of course it was; I could have bitten my tongue off. I had thought Veronica’s scornful talk of sending Charlie away to a special school was malicious invention, but now I wondered if the idea hadn’t been a serious consideration and a source of terror to Charlie.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I didn’t mean to say anything wrong. I know nothing about dyslexia. Nothing. I was just…talking.’