I changed the subject. “I also received another of those notes today. Didn’t you notice when you were sorting the post?”
“Another?” He looked up, at once curious and apprehensive. “No, I was busy today. Young Debbie Hewitt sorted today’s post.”
I showed him, and he took both note and envelope for close examination. “He got the stamp right,” I said. Gordon smiled vaguely, nodding, still looking like his mind was elsewhere.
Gordon produced the magnifying glass from his coat pocket, and peered at the items. “It rather looks like the same typewriter at work. But did you notice this — he’s cleaned the strikers somewhat.” He showed me what he meant. “The previous note had ‘A’s where the triangular gap in the ‘A’ was full of muck — today it’s clearer.”
“He’s aware of the identifiability of typewriter print? Trying to cover his tracks?”
“Either that or he’s just fastidious,” Gordon said, looking at me with a small smile. “I mean to say, there’s that aroma of some sort of soap again … ” He held the note beneath his nostrils for a long moment, concentrating intently. “I wish I knew what that other smell is, though. Have you had any thoughts?”
“To tell the truth, Gordon, I’ve been much more preoccupied with the question itself.”
He looked surprised, as if the question itself was a clue he had not yet noticed. Reading it, his face fell. “Oh, Ruth … Ruth, you can’t allow yourself to believe this! He’s … it’s obvious he’s just trying to upset you. It’s so obvious!”
I explained something about my lingering anxieties about Antony’s fate, and how this note had touched a very specific nerve indeed.
“Well, it’s just as you say, it’s someone who has knowledge — rather detailed knowledge, I grant you — of the circumstances surrounding … ”
“I keep thinking, what if it’s true?”
Gordon forced a laugh, which emerged sounding more like a bad cough. “No! No, don’t be silly. He’s toying with you. He might know this very particular thing about the funeral and so on, but it’s just a lucky punt, he doesn’t know anything, really.” The look on my face must have alarmed Gordon more than I expected. He came closer, leaning forward. “Ruth — this is the pathway to madness. You know it is. First there was the insinuation about your poor father. Today this nonsense about Antony. This, this, tormentor of yours, he’s not interested in your money. He wants to make you unpick all the threads of your life! He wants to unravel you! And remember what Miss Templesmith said, that this is someone who hates you so much he could strangle you with bare hands … ” He made a throttling sort of gesture that, on him, looked strange, jarring.
For the merest fraction of a moment, less than a second, the dark and suspicious part of my mind thought, What if it’s Gordon? He’s so close to you. He knows so much about you. He probably owns a typewriter … I felt so shocked by this stray thought that my breath caught, and I sat, on the point of coughing, feeling a blush steal up my neck and over my face. I looked at him, only a few feet away. He had some money, but not much. He supported himself by working part-time in the post office, as well as doing repair work on farm machines, fishing-boat motors, and on the handful of motorcars in the area. Could he secretly be filled with envy at my comparative success and comfort? This did indeed seem like the pathway to madness. Gordon cared more for his beloved dogs and the memory of his lost Alice and his odd contraptions than anything else.
And yet …
“Ruth?”
He looked concerned. I smiled, made myself laugh lightly, and apologised. “Away with the faeries. Sorry. All this business, it’s getting to me, I think.”
Gordon nodded, smiling like a good, true friend doing his best to be helpful.
I leaned back into the recesses of the sofa and pulled the blanket more tightly around me. Outside, off in the distance, I heard a kookaburra cackling. Gordon looked up and out the nearby porthole window. “I’ve never gotten used to the noises these birds make, you know. I’ve been here all these years, and sometimes it seems as if every single wild bird is out there screaming and squawking. They always seem like they’re making fun of us, and telling us we’ll never survive here. We’re too soft, too bookish, too, I don’t know, civilised, perhaps. To make it here, you have to be like them, loud and rude and a bit on the mad side, have you noticed that?”
I said I had noticed that, but that I rather liked it, most of the time. “It’s not like back home. None of the birds there has anything you’d mistake for a sense of humour, do they?”
“I used to think geese were nature’s humourists … ”
We talked about birds for some time. It was marvellous simply to have an ordinary conversation about ordinary things with someone who understood.
And as we talked, I looked at Gordon, as he went on about rare owls and red kites and bearded tits. I had not realised before that Gordon had been quite such a birdwatcher in his former life. He said he loved British birds for their soft, muted colours and their pretty, tuneful calls. So unlike the raucous and vibrant birds here.
After a long while, and some reviving hot beverages, we returned to the matter at hand. Gordon once more had his magnifying glass out and he was poring over the envelopes of both notes. “I would not have thought there were any shops in town where you could buy such stationery, would you?”
“I had the same thought.”
He nodded. “Nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to rule out a local supplier.”
“In the interim, what am I to do with the notion that my husband deceived me?”
“You don’t know that for certain. Until such time as you see him in front of you, you can’t know that for certain. I mean to say, it is entirely possible that you did bury the poor blighter, and that he did indeed come to a bloody awful end on that battlefield, along with so many others.”
Gordon added, “Let’s leave aside the question of who might be sending these damned notes, and look at what he’s saying to you. He’s talking about your late father and your late husband. You’ve told me they were friends, that you met Antony at one of your father’s shooting parties.”
“That’s right. I had been attending only sporadically at that point, and I cannot say anyone particularly missed my presence when I didn’t attend. I was the peculiar, grumpy, sarcastic girl who never wore proper attire and who did not know her place.”
“Or, who knew exactly how to get a lot of attention?” Gordon smiled.
“It was attention I did not care for!”
“All the same, but it certainly got you noticed, including, as you’ve said, by one Antony Black.”
“I did once wonder if he would have noticed me at all if I were a proper young heiress and dressed in pretty frocks and wore my hair just so and all the rest.”
“I doubt he would have given you a moment’s thought. He probably saw hundreds of girls exactly like that everywhere he went.”
“That’s what he actually said, the one time I asked him.” I smiled at the memory, and at the memory of what he did after telling me that.
“So, who was he? How did he know your father?”
This was old news. “I’m sure I’ve told you before. Father was Secretary of State for War, and Antony was a civil servant in the War Office. He and Father would often moan about all the boring parties and receptions that correct form and official business dictated they needed to attend. It was the height of tedium meeting all these old generals, and listening, again, to their old war stories. As well, of course, Father just had a sort of knack for finding rising young men whose careers he could sponsor and encourage. That sort of thing.”
“And you’ve said that Antony spent a great deal of time overseas, particularly in Europe, on official business.”
“There was never a great deal that I wanted to know. It sounded deadly. Antony told many amusing stories, though, about the various people he had to deal with. He was a great mimic, and he could ‘do’ all these other people, with their voi
ces, the things they said. It was sometimes like watching a play with a cast of thousands, all played by him.”
“That’s very interesting,” Gordon said, and I did not, then, know why he said it quite like that.
I went on at some length, describing some of Antony’s better performances, but it was frustrating, because though I could see it and hear it all in my mind, I could not reproduce Antony’s talent for voices and so forth. Gordon, in any case, looked rather distracted, and I worried, stupidly, because my confidence had been disturbed, that I was boring him. Which was a first for me. I had never in all the time I had known Gordon been bothered for a moment by the notion that I was in some way boring him. He had always behaved towards me like a perfect gentleman, and like a man who cannot quite believe that someone as strange as I am had come along and fallen into his life. I suspect he worried at times that he was boring me.
“Did they spend much time together, your father and Antony, when you weren’t around?”
“Oh heavens yes! They were always out riding, or huddled around the fire in the drawing room playing chess, or … Why are you looking at me like that?”
He looked surprised, and blinked the expression away. “Oh, pardon. Sorry. I’m just trying to get clear in my head the sort of relationship these two men had. If you know what I mean.”
Puzzled, a little worried, I said, “Actually, no, I do not know what you mean. Explain.”
“All right. When you learned of Antony’s death, you had a pretty grim time of things for a while. Ultimately, you wound up being sent off to that spa or solarium or whatever it was for a few months.”
“That’s right. I don’t follow.”
“When you eventually returned home, had anything strange happened? In your absence.”
I did not remember this period too well, and told him. “My life was still rather a difficult blur, I’m afraid … ”
“All right. Was anything missing?”
“What do you mean, missing? Are you suggesting one of the staff — ?”
“No, no, not that. I mean,” and here he looked concerned, trying to find delicate ways to phrase things. “Were any of Antony’s personal effects missing?”
Seeing his point, I smiled and laughed a moment. “Oh! Oh, I see! Ah. I see. Right. Actually, when I returned home, I did notice that many of Antony’s personal things were gone. I asked Weatherton about it, and he said that the staff had taken the opportunity, in my absence, to collect up some of these things and put them up in the attic, in storage. They thought too many reminders of Antony would be distressing for me. I was furious. They had no right.”
“And when you went up to the attic to see everything?”
“There were several steamer trunks, full of Antony’s things. The smell, when I opened them, Gordon … ”
Gordon would not be deterred. “Does this sort of thing happen often?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean — how do I put this? — when people in the aristocracy pass away, is it usual to put their things away into storage like that, for the sake of the remaining family, and so forth? Do you see what I mean?”
“Erm,” I opened, thinking about it, trying to remember. “I suppose. Some families do, and some don’t. Some families I knew had quite the opposite idea, and turned whole wings of their houses into rather chilly shrines to the departed, with everything arranged just so, as if he’d only just stepped out for a moment, but would be back any moment. That sort of thing. It’s rather disturbing, seeing things like that happen.”
“What about your father, Sir Gustav? What happened to his things?”
“What about his things?”
“Did his personal effects, you know, his books and papers, his toiletry items, his clothes, all that kind of thing — what happened to all that? Did the family store it all, or what?”
I thought back, still puzzled and rather disturbed by Gordon’s dogged interest in these things. “As it happened, I believe there were specific terms in his Will governing what should happen to his papers and books. It had to do with the Office, I think. Anything he’d brought home to work on, and there were always alarming great stacks of signal boxes, as I recall, full of briefing papers and reports and files about this and that — all of those things had to go back to the Office, of course.”
“So they just took all these official documents and boxes and whatnot?”
“Gordon, what on Earth are you driving at? I’m having a rather dismal day, I’m tired, and I’m dreading there’s going to be another one of these damned notes tomorrow, and here you are burrowing about in ancient history!”
He looked horrified that he’d upset me and set about apologising profusely, telling me he never meant to upset me, that he was only thinking about possible reasons for what was going on. We went back and forth, with him apologising and me telling him it was all right, of course, and then I would apologise, and then he’d apologise back, and so it went. Ultimately, we called a truce and I sent Sally to fetch us fresh cups of tea. While we sat, blowing on the surface of the scalding tea, Gordon spoke, very quietly, and at first I was not sure I had even heard him properly.
He said, “It’s just … it’s just, I’m wondering if your father and husband might have been involved in the espionage business.”
18
I laughed so hard I had to put my tea down on the table. “That’s preposterous!”
“Oh dear. Er … I’m terribly sorry, terribly … ”
“I’ve never heard such an absurd … ” I couldn’t finish the thought. It took some time before either of us settled back down to anything resembling coherent conversation again, by which point Gordon looked more embarrassed than I had ever seen him, and my initial disbelief and shock had subsided into some sort of amusement. Sally appeared, not saying anything, but looking like she was just checking to see if everything was all right. I smiled at her. Gordon looked like he wanted to conceal himself under his chair.
We said nothing much for quite some time. I believe there were comments about the weather, which was starting once again to look bleak; another storm front was on its way. The clock on the mantelpiece over the fireplace ticked through the awkward silence. The fire popped and hissed. My tea cooled. Gordon excused himself to visit the privy out the back of the house. As he left, treading lightly, as if to draw as little attention to himself as possible, I watched him, thinking, You poor man. It wasn’t a kind thought. I was annoyed now, perhaps more than annoyed. I would never have expected Gordon, of all people, to say such a thing. And yet, I knew, he was only trying to help. He was trying to see patterns in the evidence. Patterns that I had never seen, it was true, and, looking back over my history with Antony, and his relationship with Father, it still did not seem likely. Father would never have sold secrets to a foreign power. He was a fine man, for all his faults. As for Antony, what could I say? He was Antony. I was fortunate that my husband and my father had established such a rapport. Earlier in my life, during my time at Cambridge, I had gone through a period of seeing starving artists and intense young writers, all of them quite penniless but almost equally dashing in a slightly seedy sort of way. They were all scruffy, like lost dogs, but they saw things in the world that I never saw, and I remember longing to see through their languid eyes, just for an hour, to see my too-familiar world as it looked to them, to see the familiar transformed and exposed. My parents, when I brought this one or that one home for the summer, reeled in a kind of horror that manifested itself as extreme politeness. Mother spent a lot of time in bed. Father, terrified that I would allow myself to be attached permanently to one of these lost causes, and yet also terrified that he might lose me if he acted too harshly, did his manful best to get to know them. The boys, for their part, many of whom came from the same sort of family background as I did, and who stood no chance of inheriting short of a calamity involving the death of almost everyone else in the world, found my parents amusing. And I found I did not like that. Whilst I did not
often see eye-to-eye with my family, it was another matter for others to regard them in this way. It was true that these boyfriends of mine did have a certain way with borrowing small amounts of cash that I never saw again. I seemed always to be the one coughing up change for train fares and cheap wine and morsels of food — even rent on a few “I promise this’ll never happen again, it’s just that … ” occasions.
I heard the phrase “it’s just that” more often than I cared to admit.
Allowing, for the sake of argument, that Gordon was correct to some extent in his allegation, exactly when would Antony even have had time for this alleged espionage work?
I sat there, wrapped in my blanket, and wrapped equally in my foolishness, thinking things like, Surely Antony was far too busy on official business to be a spy …
I liked to think I had more than my share of intelligence, and understanding of the wider world, but there were times, and this was one of them, when I could be thicker than the oldest trees in the world.
Gordon returned, still doing his best to look as small as humanly possible.
He went once more to apologise, to tell me he was foolish to have even mentioned it, that he was just a silly old duffer, and so on. I said, “It’s all right, Gordon.”
He looked so upset. I got up and poured him a single-malt; he looked like he could use it. Handing it to him, I allowed him a small smile, and I sat back on my sofa, wrapped in my blankets. I said to him, after a long moment, “Imagine if one day, in confusing circumstances, I suggested to you that your beloved Alice was really a murderer, or an anarchist bomber, or something like that — ”
“I say, Ruth, that’s — ” He went to stand, face flushed, and then he stopped, glancing first at me and then back into his drink. He sat back in his chair, landing like a sack of potatoes. “Oh, dear … ”
I knew mentioning Alice like this was playing with fire, but I wanted him to see how I felt.
He saw. We sat quietly again.
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