A Year Less a Day

by James Hawkins

  “You are terrible,” Bliss had exploded as Daphne put the phone down, but she had sloughed it off. “Why shouldn’t I lie to the press? They usually lie to me.”

  Now, as the snowdrops and crocuses begin to force their heads into the lengthening daylight, Daphne has brightened as she bustles in from an afternoon’s assignation that she’d purposefully kept from her lodger.

  “We thought you’d got lost,” Bliss jokes, stroking the kitten on his lap, although he had been more than a little concerned when he’d awoken from a post-prandial nap to discover that she’d sneaked out without even leaving a note.

  “I’ll just put the kettle on ...” Daphne begins, then changes her mind and blurts out that she has been to visit Jeremy Maxwell at Thraxton Manor.

  “Who?” asks Bliss

  “Don’t you remember, Millie ...”

  “Oh, yes. Christmas Day. You said you knew his parents.”

  “I think I will make that tea,” she says as if a shadow has suddenly veiled the sun again, and she slips into the kitchen.

  “Did you ever fall in love with the wrong person, David?” she calls from the kitchen’s sanctuary after a couple of minutes, and Bliss asks cynically, “Is there ever a right person?” before realizing that Daphne’s question was rhetorical.

  “You mean ... You and Jeremy Maxwell?” he questions as he pokes his head into the kitchen.

  “No,” she says testily. “Of course not. He’s only a boy.”

  “Oh. His father, then?”

  Daphne nods, though she keeps her eyes on the can of Whiskas she is opening for Missie Rouge. “Nobody would take much notice today. Even prime ministers have little indulgences amongst the prettier back-benchers, but forty years ago ...”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Monty Maxwell was our member of parliament. Nothing fancy. He didn’t have his own portfolio—he had too many enemies for that. He was a bag carrier for the minister of defence.”

  “And you fell in love with him?” breathes Bliss, but immediately sees in Daphne’s sheepish face that there is more—much more.

  Daphne strokes the purring kitten as she seeks the past and the future simultaneously, while trying to work out the ramifications of revealing the painful details of a long-lost relationship. The whistling kettle shocks her into action eventually but, as she switches it off, she finds in its shiny façade a pair of young eyes sparkling with happy memories, and her thoughts take her back to Buckingham Palace, May 1963.

  “By order of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Ophelia Daphne Lovelace is hereby awarded the Order of the British Empire for services rendered in the security of the Nation, its Commonwealth and Dominions,” the master of ceremonies had trumpeted on that occasion, and Monty Maxwell had been waiting with his chauffeured Rolls Royce to take her and her parents to dinner at the Ritz afterwards.

  “It’s not every day that one of my constituents is elevated to the aristocracy,” he had insisted, and Daphne had been so light-headed with joy that she’d flung herself at him—body and soul.

  “He was married, of course,” Daphne tells Bliss as she snaps herself back to the present, but he’s already guessed that much.

  “And did he love you?” asks Bliss.

  “Love is a mystery, David,” muses Daphne as she pours the boiling water over the tea leaves. “This is Keemun tea,” she adds, trying to break the spell. “It’s the Queen’s favourite. Did you know?”

  “No,” he admits, but he won’t let her off the hook. “So, tell me about Monsieur Maxwell.”

  Daphne loses herself in the aroma of Keemun—the sweet dry scents of the Mediterranean—and contemplates the intensity of illicit love and the gravity that draws two bodies together to form a union stronger than any that can be forged at the altar.

  Monty had brought sunshine into her life with such passion that, for the year that their affair lasted, she had swum in Nirvana’s perfumed waters from Monday to Thursday almost every week. But every Friday, when Monty left London to go home to his wife and young son on their country estate in Westchester, the waters had muddied and cooled.

  “Do you have to go?” Daphne would plead as they breakfasted together on Friday mornings, but she always knew the answer. “One day, Daph,” Monty would say as he kissed away her tears. “One day soon it will be just you and me.”

  “You know, David,” Daphne says as she fills Bliss’s cup. “In so many ways, love can be like a pot of tea. It’s comforting, warming, dependable. Something to look forward to as you take the bus home in the rain. There’s nothing worse than coming home to a cold empty house in the middle of winter, but a cup of tea makes all the difference.”

  “So does a lover,” pushes Bliss, seeing which way she is headed, but she stalls as she inhales her tea meditatively.

  “A fresh pot of Keemun always makes me think of a honeymoon in Provence. I can smell the oleanders, the hibiscus, and lavender, and it even has a hint of dryness, like eucalyptus leaves chattering in the Mediterranean breeze. Mind, after awhile, when it gets stewed and stale, it leaves a stubborn brown stain.”

  “Like a marriage,” Bliss suggests, and he gets a nod of agreement from her.

  “Yes. Like marriage.” But the marriage she has in mind is Monty’s, not hers.

  “My marriage is a thing of the past,” Monty had repeatedly assured her, yet, every weekend and every public holiday, and especially Christmas, she’d been alone in her London apartment waiting to rush to the phone. And how many times had it rang just to annoy her?

  “Oh. It’s you, mother ... What am I doing? Nothing much.” Now, I’m waiting for the phone to ring again.

  “All right?... Yes, I’m all right.” But I’ll be better when I hear his voice.

  “Lunch? ... No. Not today, mother. I’m expecting a call.” Please, Monty. Please call.

  “Tomorrow? ... Maybe, Mum. I’ll let you know.” But only if he calls. But will he call?

  Why doesn’t he call? she had asked herself a thousand times each and every Saturday and Sunday as she’d passed on parties and suitors to sit by the phone. But she knew why, and even felt satisfaction from the sacrifice. See—This is how much I love him, she would tell herself, while he was dining and dancing away the weekend with his wife in Westchester.

  “Monty Maxwell and his wife opened the fete on Saturday,” Daphne’s mother would rattle on, oblivious to her daughter’s involvement. “They make such a lovely couple, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know ...”

  “Silly of me. Of course you don’t, now that you’re stuck in London all the time.”

  Daphne didn’t have to stay in London on the weekends—there was always a bed for her at her mother’s in Westchester; always a roast leg of lamb or a rib of beef for Sunday lunch. But Monty Maxwell would never be far away—in body or in mind—and the thought of being dragged to Communion by her mother on Sunday morning made her cringe further.

  “Oh, look. It’s little Ophelia,” the church’s nattering spinsters would chirrup, unable to grasp the fact that Mrs. Lovelace’s little daughter was nearing forty, and had long ago ditched Ophelia in preference to Daphne. “Ophelia sounds more like a bloody opera singer or ballerina,” she had bitched to the other girls in her billet. It was the day she had started her wartime training to infiltrate France and aid the Resistance against the Nazis, and she had dug out a dictionary to prove her point. “Ophelia means ‘help,’” she’d read aloud, though neither she, nor the other young women, could decide whether that meant she was supposed to help, or she needed help. But she had no such dilemma over Daphne. “It means ‘a laurel leaf,’” she had proclaimed triumphantly, and had ended up being suitably crowned for her heroism. As Daphne Lovelace she had left Ophelia, her prissy counterpart, far behind as she’d parachuted into the path of the enemy and fought her way to Paris after D-Day. And, after the war, she had used a dozen other names as she’d finessed the escape of defectors through the Iron Curtain before battling alongside the
French at Suez.

  The thought of her mother’s churchy friends addressing her as Ophelia was enough to deter her from seeking the Sacrament, but a much stronger deterrent was sure to be proudly sitting in his family pew at the front of the nave. And Daphne would have to force a look of indifference as the fawning vicar would make a point of bowing in Monty’s direction and throwing in a special blessing for “Our honourable and most noble member of parliament and his beloved wife and son.”

  The term “honourable” was a paradox that Daphne had never comfortably reconciled in relation to Monty; however, the noble visions of Sir Lancelot on his charger sweeping her off her feet and carrying her to his lair were wholly consistent with the situation in her mind.

  “Have you ever loved so fiercely that nothing else in the world mattered?” Daphne asks Bliss as she sips her tea by the fire.

  “Yes,” says Bliss, “I have.”

  “I mean, loved someone so much that you would actually be prepared to sacrifice yourself to save them?”

  “Yes, I think I did. But it ended in disaster.”

  “It always does, David. It always does,” says Daphne despondently.

  “So what happened to Monty?” prods Bliss, but the dancing blue flames of an oak log grab Daphne and she sinks into the past—to a warm Sunday in late June, 1964.

  The tragic day had started off well enough, with Daphne’s phone ringing at eight in the morning. “I’m just taking the dog for a walk,” Monty had said as he’d fed coins into the payphone in Westchester’s marketplace, and he’d ended, as always, by declaring, “I love you, Daph. You know that. We’ll soon be together for always, I promise.”

  Monty’s words would have been reassuring had she not heard them so often and, as she’d left her apartment to seek distraction among the pigeons in St. James’s Park, all she could do was hum the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” over and over again.

  “When? When? When?” she had mumbled to herself, as she had paced alone around the park before enviously watching a newlywed couple posing for photos in front of Buckingham Palace. Behind them, in the Palace grounds, the flamboyantly costumed band of the Coldstream Guards had struck up “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and the crowd was still cheering as Daphne choked back a tear and headed towards the river.

  Lunch at a depressingly dingy tourist trap on the south bank had dragged her spirits even lower, until she had taken the subway to Berkeley Square, where she had been convinced that she had heard a nightingale singing—though it may have been nothing more than a common sparrow or even a squeaky bicycle wheel.

  “Everyone who knew about us said there was no future in loving a married man,” Daphne explains to Bliss, as the flames of the fire gradually flicker out and leave only a smoulder. “But I suppose I wanted to believe it would somehow work. I thought she would finally understand and let him go.”

  “And she didn’t?”

  “If only it had been that simple.”

  Daphne’s shoes had developed a mind of their own that June Sunday and, as she’d traipsed the sights of London from St. Paul’s to Westminster Abbey, she had tortured her mind for a solution. I could wait for him, she’d told herself for the thousandth time. Wait until he’s out of politics and young Jeremy has gone to university.

  But she and Monty had walked that field before, and had waded through a stockpile of mines. “We’ll never be able to keep it secret for fifteen years ... You’ll get fed up ... Imagine the ruckus if we’re caught ... Marylyn will take me to the cleaners ... What happens if I’m offered the PM’s job?”

  “You could turn it down. King Edward abdicated for Mrs. Simpson,” Daphne had insisted.

  “And look what happened to him. Anyway, slipping out from under a crown is kid’s stuff compared to Marylyn’s ball and chain.”

  Five-year-old Jeremy was the major problem in Daphne’s opinion, and she had often worried aloud about the trauma that a divorce would inflict on him. Maxwell had seemed less concerned. “He hardly knows me,” he had protested more than once. “He probably thinks I’m the bloke who just comes to cut the grass on Saturdays.”

  “Stop worrying, Daphne,” Maxwell had told her at breakfast that Friday before he had headed home. “I’ll think of something.”

  There was an inexplicable sense of unease in her mind as that fateful Sunday evening dragged on, but the more she was pulled toward her empty apartment, the more she resisted. Another evening alone staring at “Sunday Night at the London Palladium” on television was more than she could bear.

  Monty Maxwell was ever-present in her mind, and the moments without him were excruciating, but as she traced and re-traced her steps along the Thames embankment in the late-night sunshine of the summer solstice, she finally saw an answer. Ahead of her lay London’s most renowned picture postcard—Tower Bridge, with its magnificent stone portals linked by lofty walkways high above the traffic’s roar and the sluggish river.

  Could she? Was he worth it? Was any man worth it?

  But I’d be doing it to set him free—my last great act of martyrdom, she had tried persuading herself as she had stopped midway across the bridge and peered down at the torpid murky water far below.

  But whether or not Daphne’s death would liberate Monty would never be put to the test.

  “What are you doing, Madam?” a voice had demanded out of the blue and she had spun to find an enormous policeman at her shoulder.

  “Just looking, officer.”

  “As long as that’s all,” he’d responded with a knowing eye, and Daphne had quickly backed away.

  “Yes, of course. What did you think?”

  “I’m not paid to think madam,” he had replied pompously. “I’m just paid to protect life and property.”

  Then he’d softened, “Take it from me, luv. No man is worth that. And I should know, I am one.”

  Daphne had laughed just enough to bring her to her senses. “Don’t worry, officer. I know that,” she’d said and, as the sun set under Westminster Bridge, she’d headed home with a clear mind. Monty Maxwell’s extramarital shenanigans had come to an abrupt end.

  “I’d finally decided to dump him,” Daphne tells Bliss as she stokes up the embers and sets another log ablaze. “But Monty had other ideas. Though it didn’t turn out the way he had planned.”

  “What happened?” Bliss asks quietly as he helps himself to more tea.

  “I may as well tell you. You’d only dig up his file if I didn’t.”

  “His file?”

  “A murder file, Dave. I assume central records at Scotland Yard keeps them forever.”

  “Murder?”

  Daphne uses the poker as a delaying tactic and viciously prods at the log as if it is somehow blocking her way. “I knew something was wrong the moment I got back to my apartment,” she tells Bliss eventually. “The front door was ajar. It was either a burglar or Monty. He was the only one with a key, but he wasn’t due back from Westchester until Monday afternoon.”

  The apartment’s open door had drawn Daphne inquisitively, and it simply hadn’t occurred to her to call the police. However, she had quietly slipped a needle-sharp steel hatpin out of her purse and loosened her legs before entering. “A sweet smile and a swift kick in the bollocks will drop any man to his knees,” her unarmed-combat instructor had taught her as she’d prepared for war more than twenty years earlier, and it was a tactic that had never let her down. Though, on this occasion, she had needed neither. Monty Maxwell was the intruder, and he was already on his knees. In fact, as Daphne silently crept into the room, she was fearful of disturbing her ex-lover, thinking that he was praying as he knelt on the floor with his head buried in the seat of an upholstered chair.

  “Monty,” she had called softly, but he hadn’t moved.

  “He was dead.” Daphne says as she puts the poker down and faces Bliss. “He took the honourable way out—a single bullet in the brain.”

  “Suicide,” muses Bliss, now understanding the reason for Daphne’s paroxysm
when Millie had mentioned the Maxwells on Christmas Day.

  “There was a note,” says Daphne and she rummages through her writing cabinet to find the forty-year-old scrap of sepia-edged paper.

  “I wanted to take you with me, my beloved, but I couldn’t wait for you any longer,” reads Bliss. “They will know where to find me. I love you with all my heart. Take care of Jeremy for me ... MM.”

  “But you said, ‘murder,’” queries Bliss as he hands back the precious note.

  “Marylyn,” Daphne replies. “Apparently Monty had visions of the three of us being together in the afterlife, so he sent Marylyn off with an earful of lead and came for me.”

  “But you were out.”

  “I was. Although I don’t know why. Any other weekend I would have been there, in suspended animation, waiting for Monday when I’d spring back to life.”

  “Subliminal messaging,” suggests Bliss. “Something in his manner or tone probably reflected what he was planning, and you subconsciously picked up on it.”

  “That’s very clever of you, David. Though at the time it just seemed ironic that at the very moment I was thinking of chucking myself into the Thames, Monty was getting ready to bump me off.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I got the blame of course. I suppose I should have known that would happen, but I guess that if loving him was wrong, then I didn’t want to be right. But it wasn’t fair. Everyone was devastated about poor old Marylyn, but I was the one whose heart had been torn to shreds, and I was the one who had to live with it. I didn’t get any sympathy. Nobody said to me, ‘Oh, you must miss him, you poor thing,’ like they would have done to his wife, if she’d lived. Nobody blamed her for being a miserable money-grubbing social climber who drove him away.”