Jilly drew in breath to speak, only to pause and go through the process again. At the third attempt she finally blurted out, ‘Edward saw something when he was young. Something…terrible. For a child, I mean. He…saw your father…’ She faltered.
‘Saw Father what?’
‘With Maggie Dearden.’
I stared at her. I was very still.
‘He saw them together…I mean, actually in the…act of…’ She examined her hands hurriedly. ‘…making love. Up at the, er…barn at Upper Farm.’
The words caught me like a blow, they left me reeling. I felt a lurch of astonishment, a sharp snatch in my stomach, my throat was suddenly dry. ‘My God…’ For a moment, all I could think of was the barn. The barn. ‘But…was this…? Had they…?’ It was a moment before I could pull a coherent thought together. ‘Was this a…long-term thing?’
Still avoiding my face, Jilly pulled her clasped hands tight into her lap. ‘I couldn’t say…’
Another lurch, and I was overtaken by a powerful sense of unreality. So many sensations rushed through my mind, so many conflicting emotions that I wasn’t sure what I was feeling any more. Astonishment certainly, hurt—yes, quite a bit of that—but also something like wonder, at the capacity of life to deliver such massive surprises, at the way it could so quickly cut the ground from under one’s feet.
A part of me was desperate to know more. ‘When was this again? When?’
‘Edward was nine.’
‘Nine…’
It was the year I had taken my A levels, the year I had gone backpacking. I tried to remember what life had been like at home then, if it had been so very different from before. I searched my memory for clues, I looked for momentous events, and found none. I tried to picture Father as he’d been then, and it seemed to me that he was his usual benign self, always busy, occasionally overtired from the night calls, but never less than calm and equable, rarely to be seen without the expression of mild amusement he liked to present to the world, rarely without a quip or aphorism on his lips, for he had loved words more than anything, the neat parcelling of them, the pinpointing of meaning. I saw a man who had seemed contented with his life, a man for whom a good crossword, a glass of claret, a satisfying dinner conversation had seemed quite enough to round off the day. I saw—and the thought brought a fresh stab of incredulity—a man without great passion, a man with an apparent distrust for what he had called ‘romantic nonsense’, a man for whom courtship and love had been a necessary path to marriage but not a major consideration thereafter. If anything he had seemed reticent in his dealings with women, polite, engaging, but essentially reserved.
The sense of wonder returned, the astonishment at how little you may know or guess about the people close to you, at how determinedly they guard their secret selves. At that moment I felt that I’d hardly known my father at all.
And a barn! I tried not to let this image get too firm a grip on my mind—it was too disturbing by far—yet I couldn’t help remembering how fastidious my father had been about his clothes, the way he had brushed his jacket every morning before leaving the house, the way he had polished his shoes. A barn! The straw, the dust. God—the roll in the hay. To have committed such a terrible cliché in middle age seemed the ultimate affront.
More stabs of realization as it came back to me that Mother’s health had been particularly bad that year, that she had deteriorated suddenly and taken months to make any sort of recovery. We knew that the cycle of relapse and remission was part of the illness, we’d seen it often enough, we knew there was never any obvious cause for the relapses, yet now I imagined causes aplenty for her deterioration. The thought that she had known about Father’s affair was so excruciating that I winced visibly, I gasped aloud.
‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ Jilly cried miserably, in a frenzy of nerves again. *I’ve done the wrong thing—I shouldn’t have told you. Oh dear, I knew I shouldn’t have told you! Oh dear!’
‘No, no…‘I was regaining my breath. ‘I’m glad you did. Glad.’
‘Really? Really? But you won’t tell Edward, will you? I think it would be a mistake to tell Edward.’
But I couldn’t think that far, I couldn’t think far in any direction at all. I felt as though I was on a slippery slope looking for handholds.
Jilly pleaded, ‘But now you see, don’t you, why he was so desperate about everything to do with the Deardens?’
She was talking very fast, I was only half listening.
‘Why he was so furious about the Gun Marsh. I know he got it out of all proportion, I know he did, but he couldn’t help it! Coming on top of the money, coming on top of all that! Well, he felt he’d been cheated again! You can see that, can’t you, how he’d feel cheated? And these things are like death to Edward. His pride, you know! Such pride! Everything destroys him, everything! But you do see, don’t you, how it was, coming on top of everything else?’
Now I knew I was lost. ‘Everything else?’
‘Well…Oh dear!’ Her eyes flitted around the room in a new fit of agitation, she squeezed her arms close against her sides, like someone caught in a draught. ‘Oh dear, I’ve said too much again. Oh dear…’
‘The money,’ I prompted as her words came back to me. ‘You said, “coming on top of the money”.’
‘Oh dear…’ But she was relieved to be telling me, she was glad to have let it slip. With a gesture of giving in against her will, she whispered, ‘Your father’s money—the money missing after his death? Well, Edward is convinced it went to Maggie Dearden.’ She waited in vain for a reaction from me before bracing herself to discharge the rest of the secret. ‘And…he thinks she got a whole lot of money from your father before that, when your parents moved away. He thinks that’s how she managed to buy her cottage!’
Strangely, my reaction when it finally came was one of relief. Despite the barn, this had obviously been no brief impetuous fling. No, this affair had lasted for years and years, maybe—the calculation came as another small shock—as many as eight or ten, if one assumed the affair started when Mother began to be seriously disabled—I didn’t want to imagine it had started any sooner—and ended with my parents’ move to Cornwall. A relationship, moreover, that would seem from the gifts of cash to have been one of deep commitment and obligation. This thought consoled me perhaps more than it should. But in life—and certainly in my work—I had always found it hard to condemn people for taking happiness as they found it, had always proclaimed that a little love never did any harm so long as no one got hurt along the way.
In this case someone had got hurt, though. Perhaps someone always got hurt.
Jilly exhaled suddenly, her shoulders slumped. ‘Well, I’ve told you now,’ she cried in her little mouse voice. ‘I just hope I’ve done the right thing.’
The door banged open and Edward strode in, hair damp from the rain, face stormy from life.
Glowering, he demanded aggressively, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to see you.’
Edward threw a dark look at Jilly who immediately jumped to her feet and, eyes averted, scuttled past him and out of the room.
‘Well?’ He struck an exaggerated pose of impatience, hand gripping the edge of the door, body turned towards it, as if to conduct me off the premises at any moment.
‘I know about you and Grace.’
His expression didn’t alter. He said gruffly, ‘What about me and Grace?’
‘Your relationship. The lunches at the Brasserie, the flat in Hans Place, the four or five calls a day.’
He didn’t move for a long time. Then, his face fixed in a cold mask, he pushed the door closed and came and stood in front of the hearth, glaring down at me, arms tightly folded. ‘So?’
‘Don’t you think you should have told the police?’
‘Why?
‘Oh, come on, Ed!’
‘My relationship with Grace had nothing to do with her death!’ His rage was as abrupt as it was furious. His arms flew out, his
skin grew red, his neck bulged. ‘Nothing! Forget about me and Grace! Just go and talk to Will Dearden about what happened to Grace! Go and talk to your beloved wife!’
‘Ed, for heaven’s sake! You must know that you can’t keep this sort of thing—’ But this was a futile path, it would only antagonize him, and I began again in a more reasonable voice. ‘The moment you decide to become a witness, then I’m afraid your relationship with Grace gets to have everything to do with it. You’re not an independent witness any more, you’re an interested party—and that’s putting it mildly.’
‘You’re going to tell the police, then?’
‘Ed…They’re going to find out sooner or later.’
‘Fine,’ he barked. ‘Doesn’t bother me!’ He twisted away and kicked the fire with the toe of his boot, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. Fury unquenched, he picked up a couple of logs from the basket and threw them onto the embers with equal force.
I said quietly, ‘I gather you were there with Grace that day at Marsh House. That you were there when this phone call came. Could you tell me about it?’
Jamming a forearm against the mantelpiece, fist tightly clenched, Edward stared fiercely into the fire, until, containing himself with an effort, he growled, ‘Which version?’
I wasn’t sure what he meant. ‘Whichever.’
‘Well, the official version then—’ Breaking off, he bit savagely on his lip as though to forestall some powerful emotion. ‘Yes…‘he rasped. ‘Yes…We were having tea, Grace and I. Tea. We were talking about the festival The phone rang. She answered. I could see it was something serious. She was very upset. Hysterical. Ranting down the phone. When she rang off she said, “He’s opened the sluices! He’s trying to flood the Gun!” And then she—’ Disturbed again by some painful thought, he swung his head away and gave a cough that sounded like choking. When he looked back at the fire and got started again, his voice was low and rough. ‘And then she was in a frantic rush, pulling on her coat, grabbing her car keys. I offered to go with her, but she wouldn’t have it. She could be bloody stubborn when she tried. Bloody stubborn!’
‘She didn’t say who it was on the phone?’
Straightening up, he dug deep into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cigarette packet. ‘Well—no.’
‘You didn’t ask?’
‘It didn’t come up! There wasn’t time! She was out of the house before we could talk!’
‘And did she say anything else before she left?’
He jammed a cigarette into his mouth and grabbed some matches off the mantelpiece. ‘Nothing. She was speechless. Couldn’t believe what he was doing. Couldn’t—’ He cut himself short with a jerk of his cigarette.
‘She was angry?’
‘What difference does it make if she was angry?’ he shot back at me without warning. ‘That was no bloody excuse for what happened to her, for God’s sake! She had every right to be angry! Christ!’
Selecting a deliberately neutral tone, I said, I’m not saying she hadn’t every right. I’m not saying anything. I just want to build up a picture, that’s all.’
He eyed me darkly, not entirely convinced that I wasn’t trying to outmanoeuvre him in some devious way. ‘She was angry,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘Bloody furious, in fact. But what the hell difference that makes I really don’t know!’
With this last salvo, he seemed to lose his energy for hostilities. He lit his cigarette and, throwing himself into the chair opposite, tipped his head back so that I could hardly see his face.
‘Should have stayed with her. Should have stayed,’ he declared roughly. ‘Did to begin with…Worried what he might do to her, the bastard. Thought he might give her a hard time. Drove round, got near the cottage, stopped short, got out of the car, stood and listened. Heard this almighty racket. A screaming match…’ He tightened his lips, he inhaled sharply. ‘But then it died down and, well…Knew Grace wouldn’t be at all pleased if I bowled up. Knew Will would probably try to kill me. So…thought I’d better keep out of the way.’ Abruptly he brought his head forward and slid a hand over his eyes. When he let it fall again his expression was desolate. I had never seen such feeling in his face before, not since he was young and had first learnt to despise everything that might touch him.
The fire crackled and hissed. Beyond the window, the rain fell steadily and silently.
I asked, ‘Did Will know about you and Grace?’
He was staring into the distance, lost to another world. It was a while before he heard my question. ‘No. Grace didn’t—’ He pulled himself up short as if he had been in danger of saying too much and took a long drag on his cigarette. ‘No, Will didn’t know. We were very careful that he shouldn’t know.’ He added defensively, ‘But it wasn’t just any old affair! It wasn’t like that. It was something…else. Something…’ A brilliance leapt into his eyes, his lip trembled, and again I was taken aback by the depth of his feeling.
‘She wanted to leave him, you know. She was desperate to leave him! She was very unhappy!’ He gave me a searching glance, gauging my response. Then, unwinding a little further, he said in a more confiding tone, ‘She would have left him months ago, months, but all her money was tied up in the farm and the house and Will’s disastrous financial mess. She couldn’t escape. Not without losing everything. And then there was the boy—custody and all that. She knew she was going to have a battle on her hands. She was trying to sort it all out. Trying to get clear. ‘
I nodded silently.
‘She was very unhappy,’ he repeated, as though I needed convincing on this score.
‘I knew she’d seen a lawyer.’
‘And pretty useless he turned out to be!’
‘You were obviously very fond of her,’ I said.
Even now he found it hard to admit to anything as powerful as an emotion. ‘Impossible not to be,’ he conceded tightly. ‘She was…well, she was…’ He fanned out his fingers, he jabbed his hand impatiently into the air, searching fruitlessly for some expression that lay outside his reach. ‘Quite amazing. Quite…stunning.’
I leant forward a little, as if to hang on his words.
He struggled again. ‘She was…not like other people. You know? Went for life flat-out. Full of energy. Full of ideas. Swept you along. A real whirlwind!’ His frustration intensified as he attempted another,) more elusive thought. ‘She had this way of…’ The hand with the cigarette did several jerky loops. ‘Making you feel good, you know? Making you feel sort of—number one.’ Dissatisfied with this, or possibly embarrassed by it, he barked, ‘I don’t know!’ and withdrew to the comfort of his cigarette.
I wondered what Grace’s ambitions had been for this relationship, but I suspected I already knew. Grace would never have invested so much time and trouble in clandestine visits to London and up to five phone calls a day if she hadn’t been aiming for marriage and occupation of Wickham Lodge. Edward was the closest thing to the man of her ambitions, if not her dreams. A bona fide landowner, an undisputed member of the gentry, owner of four farms in addition to the one he rented to Will, with a healthy income that even Grace’s extravagances would have been hard-pressed to exhaust, and a large house which only needed total renovation to make it into a spectacular base for entertaining. No, Edward was a good catch. He was six years younger than Grace, but that wouldn’t have bothered her; it might even have added to the attraction. I asked, ‘Did the two of you have plans?’ Edward gave me a superior look, as if to show he wasn’t going to get caught as easily as that. ‘If you’re suggesting we were going to run off together, the answer’s no. Grace wanted to get clear before we thought about anything like that. She wanted to sort everything out as fairly and honourably as possible. Keep things civilized.’
I bet she had. She was, beyond everything else, a great planner. She’d have realized what a long and bitter battle she faced if Will ever discovered she was leaving him for Edward. The humiliation for Will would have been too greats the idea of Charlie coming to live here
in Edward’s house too terrible. No, she knew she had to get ‘clear’ with her money and the custody agreement before she delivered her bombshell. The only thing I couldn’t work out was why she had waited this long before starting divorce proceedings. Perhaps there had been a problem. Perhaps she hadn’t been quite sure enough of Edward to make the leap.
‘But there was an understanding between you?’ I prompted.
There was conflict in his face, and irritation. ‘We’d talked about the future, yes. Of course we had. I told you—it wasn’t a casual thing!’
Abruptly and for no apparent reason, I remembered the Gun Marshy and wondered if this was the real cause of the delay. Perhaps Grace had been waiting for the sale to go through. Or Edward had made her wait. The more I considered this, the more likely it became. Edward would have wanted her to wait until the Gun was safely in his hands because, deep down, he still trusted land and possessions far more than people, because revenge was a more dependable objective than love. For Edward, the true prize was the Deardens’ humiliation at losing the land they had farmed for a hundred years, Grace the more uncertain icing on the cake.
I stood up. ‘Thanks for telling me all this,’ I said rather formally.
Edward threw cigarette into the fire. ‘You going to tell the police, then?’
It was a good question. ‘Not at the moment anyway.’
‘No. Wouldn’t look too brilliant for Will, would it?’ Having delivered this remark, he seemed to appreciate just how true it was, and a look of calculation came over his face, his eyes glinted with possibilities. Watching him then, I thought what an irredeemably cold-hearted person Edward could be when he really tried. It occurred to me that he and Grace would have been ideally suited.
I remembered something. ‘Just now, you talked about the official version of that afternoon. What was the unofficial version?’
‘Did I say that?’ He affected a look of bafflement. ‘Mistake.’
He didn’t get up when I left.
A Dark Devotion Page 34
