Old Sins

by Penny Vincenzi

  He believed Miles had taken it very badly that Mr Dashwood had not offered him a job in his company; he had felt in some way that it was his due. Of course it was not, and it was very foolish of him to think that way, but the fact remained that if it had been possible, it would have made the greatest difference to Miles and his life. But then on the other hand Mr Dashwood had been so good to Miles, so generous, it was hardly fair to expect any more.

  What had Mr Dashwood been like? Oh, a very typical Englishman, Father Kennedy would have said, a fine-looking man, very tall and slim, and what he would always have imagined a public school person would be like, but Lee had told him that wasn’t right, he had gone to a grammar school and made his way in the world himself. He had had a wife, yes, Lee had also told him, with some old-fashioned English name, Alice, now that was it, and two or three children, boys if he remembered rightly. He had been a good friend to Lee as well as to Miles and done a lot for her when her husband had died.

  The house in Malibu was still empty, be believed, although there had been rumours it was up for sale; if she wanted to go and have a look out there, it would do no harm, he could tell her where it was, it was only half an hour’s drive away.

  And where was Miles now? Well, he supposed there was no harm in telling her the address, although he had written there himself and not had an answer, so it was possible that they had moved on. He had been sad to have lost them, Miles and Mrs Kelly. He hoped they were well. If she went out to Malibu one of the neighbours might have a more recent address.

  ‘Now, I wouldn’t go rushing off to Nassau yourself,’ he said, looking at her with concern in his faded old blue eyes. ‘I really don’t know that they are still there, and it would do you no good in your condition. Write to this address, child, and see what comes of it. Now, Mrs Kelly’s friend is called Mrs Galbraith. That is the lady they were staying with. You may have more luck than I. Or send someone else. That would be a better thing.’

  ‘I probably will,’ said Phaedria, standing up and smiling down at him. ‘Thank you, Father, you have been so very kind. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. How can I thank you?’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing, now what has it cost me?’ he said, smiling back at her. ‘However –’ Father Kennedy would have starved to death without a whimper of complaint himself; for his flock he was shamelessly greedy – ‘if you felt able perhaps to make a small donation to the refuge that would be a wonderful thing.’

  ‘Oh, of course I will,’ said Phaedria. ‘I would be really happy to. Here –’ she thrust a hundred dollars into his hand – ‘take this for now. When I get home to England, I will see that a trust fund is set up for you, supplying you with a regular income. I promise. I won’t forget.’

  Father Kennedy believed her. She was a sweet, pretty child, and he wished her nothing but well. But he watched her drive away, waving to him gaily, with a little foreboding. He hoped she wasn’t going to learn anything about Miles that would cause her distress.

  Andrew Blackworth stood miserably in the Reception of the Cable Beach Hotel and wished he had never heard of the Morell family. It was hot here, it was ugly, and he felt suddenly sharply homesick. He decided to make his stay here extremely short and to continue with his inquiries at long distance. Mrs Emerson could come down here herself if she was so extremely anxious to find young Wilburn.

  It was lunch time, and after checking in he sat in the bar for an hour, developing a stiff neck from the fierce air conditioning, drinking iced beer and wondering what he should do next.

  He decided the telephone directory might yield a Wilburn or two, but it did not; the next step was either the police, or the barmen. The barmen were usually better company.

  That afternoon he did a dozen bars along Cable Beach; and learnt nothing. At the twelfth that evening, the barman told him sympathetically he should try Paradise Island. ‘My friend Barney, in the Royal, he knows everything that happens in this place. You try there.’

  Andrew took a cab and went to the Royal. He ordered a champagne cocktail and asked where he might find Barney.

  ‘I’m Barney,’ said the bartender, smiling him one of the huge Bahamian smiles that despite himself Andrew was beginning to like. ‘What can I tell you?’

  ‘I’m looking for Miles Wilburn. Do you know him?’

  A rather wary look came over Barney’s face. ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘A family in England I represent.’

  More wariness still. ‘You a detective?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The face went blank, closed up.

  ‘I don’t know him. I never heard of him. Sorry, mister, you asked the wrong guy.’

  Andrew was baffled. ‘Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not the police. I’m a private detective. He hasn’t committed a crime.’

  ‘I told you, mister, I never heard of him. OK. Now you want another drink, or will you go and sit down and be comfortable over there?’

  Andrew, baffled, went and sat down.

  ‘As if I would tell on Miles,’ said Barney indignantly to his wife Josephine late that night in bed. ‘That’ll be one of those spies sent by one of his lady friends’ husbands. Well, he done a lot for those ladies, he don’t deserve to get into no trouble over it. What’s more, I’m going to see none of the other boys tells this English guy anything either.’

  Josephine looked at him admiringly. Then she lay down and turned her magnificent black breasts to her husband. ‘You’re a good friend, Barney. Miles is lucky to have you. How about you being a good friend to me now for a while?’

  Andrew found the same baffling lack of helpfulness in all the other bars on Paradise Island. Weary and irritable by the end of the second day, he made his way back to his hotel. Clearly all these people had known Miles. Why wouldn’t they tell him where he was? He felt discouraged, and in addition he had indigestion from all the bowlfuls of peanuts and crisps he had been consuming in all the bars, and a filthy headache. When he got back to his hotel room he felt worse. The pain in his stomach had intensified. Damn. He knew what this was. It was his ulcer working its way back into his life. No wonder, the punishment he had been meting out to it over the past few days. Well, he wasn’t going to suffer the torments of a perforated ulcer in this benighted place. He was going home. The Morells could wait. He would make some inquiries long-distance. He picked up the phone and asked them to check on the next available flight to Heathrow.

  Phaedria turned the Mercedes in the direction of Malibu. Driving in California was a very pleasant experience. Nobody rushed, the speed limit was fifty-five and you could simply bowl along in the sunshine, enjoying the view. And it was a beautiful view. The ocean stretched endlessly, gloriously to her left; to her right now the dark sharp shadows that were the Santa Monica Mountains were beginning to rise. It was hot; she was glad the Mercedes was convertible. If she hadn’t been pregnant she would have stopped and gone in the sea. She stopped briefly at Malibu Pier and had a glass of iced tea and a crab sandwich in Alice’s Restaurant, watching the surfers riding endlessly on the waves, zooming, skimming, swooping in or sitting appraising the sea from the beach, chatting, laughing, sun-soaked. She could see why Miles had liked it as a lifestyle. Who was she to take him away from it, she wondered. If she ever found him.

  She paid the check, walked over the hot road, back into her car and drove on. Latego Canyon, Father Kennedy had said. Make a right just after Pepperdine University. Here it was. She swung in, drove cautiously up the winding dusty road. She had to stop twice just to drink in the view: the interweaving hills, the sea, the endless range of headlands. It caught hold of her heart; she wanted to stay for ever.

  She drove on, about three or four miles. ‘Then the road will fork. Take the left fork. Two miles on, there is a blue house. That’s the one.’

  And there it was, the blue house, built cleverly on three levels into the hill. There was parking space in front of a garage. She pulled in and parked. Then she got out and looked at the house. It was quite definitel
y empty.

  Phaedria wandered round it, up and down the steps, peering in at the windows. It was desolate, dusty, still. The furniture wasn’t even covered in sheets. It was modern furniture, neat, soulless. No clues.

  Everything was locked. Every door, every window. She tried the garage. That was locked too. She sat down on the grass to rest for a while and try to think what she wanted to do next when she heard a voice.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Phaedria jumped. A man stood on the grass, smiling at her; friendly, helpful.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. We live next door. These folks moved years ago. Never sold the house, though. Are you looking for them, or looking to buy the house?’

  ‘Oh, I’m looking for Miles and – and Mrs Kelly,’ she said. ‘Do you know where they’ve gone?’

  ‘Can’t rightly say,’ said the man. ‘Mrs Kelly kept herself pretty much to herself, and Miles was a bunch of no good. We didn’t have much to do with them.’

  ‘I see.’ Phaedria was silent. ‘Well, thank you anyway. I just thought I might find a clue or something. But everything’s locked.’

  ‘Did you try the shed down there?’ asked the man, pointing to a hut on the lower lawn. ‘That might be worth a try. They left in a mighty big hurry. They didn’t take hardly anything with them at all.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Phaedria. ‘Thank you.’

  She clambered down to the lower lawn and pushed cautiously at the shed door. At first she thought that was shut too, but a second, harder push and it yielded.

  Her heart thumping violently, she went in.

  It had obviously been Miles’ shed; in it was his skate board, an old surf board, a bike, some roller skates. She looked at them, mildly amused and charmed by the personality that was emerging. But there were no clues as to his whereabouts.

  Then she saw the satchel. An old school bag it was really, stuffed into a corner. Phaedria looked at it for a long time, then cautiously, as if she might be burnt, reached out and took it. It was dusty, covered in insects. She shook it, took it outside and sat down on the grass.

  It was full of letters. Letters from girls at school, all with patently big crushes on Miles, letters from Granny Kelly written on his birthdays, all urging him to work hard and do better at school right in the same breath as wishing him happy birthday; heartbreaking letters from Lee, written in hospital, telling him how much she loved him, how she trusted him, how she wanted him to be good.

  And then a last few, stuffed right to the bottom of the satchel, typewritten letters from Hugo Dashwood. One was very old and faded, dated 1971, saying how very very sorry and sad he was to hear of Miles’ mother’s death, asking him if there was anything he could do for him, and promising to come to the funeral; another dated two years later, saying how pleased he was to hear Miles had made the water polo team, but he hoped he would still go on working hard at school as well; and finally three more recent, undated, all rather admonitory in tone, telling him that he should stop fooling around on the beach, and get himself a job, that he was fortunate to have such a good education, that he owed it to his parents’ memory as well as to his grandmother and indeed to Hugo himself to show what he could do.

  Phaedria read them in silence, wondering at them, at the heat of emotion so obviously contained in them, at the proprietary tone. Whoever Hugo Dashwood had been, he had felt very strongly about Miles. And moreover he could type. Odd, that. Not many men typed letters. Well, if the signature was anything to go by, it was just as well. It was virtually illegible, just a scrawled ‘Hugo’ – if she hadn’t known the name, been looking out for it, she would not have been able to make it out at all.

  Phaedria sat looking at the letters for a long time, aware that they were engaging her attention on some quite different level. And then became aware that her brain was focusing very strongly on that signature. And that her heart was suddenly thundering in her and that the sun seemed suddenly almost unbearably bright. A darkness came over her briefly; a frightening, rushing hot darkness. She closed her eyes, swallowed, put out a hand to steady herself. The entire earth seemed to heave beneath her.

  Then she opened her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said to herself. ‘It isn’t, it couldn’t be.’

  She stood up. She felt shaky, weak. She took the satchel and climbed very slowly back up to the car and sat in it for a while. The baby, still all day, suddenly woke up and started moving energetically inside her; it had less room now, the movements were different, stronger, but more forceful somehow, more controlled.

  The normality of it made her feel better, hauled her back into the present, herself.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ she said to it, to her baby, to Julian’s child, ‘let’s go home and have a rest.’

  She started the car and drove very very slowly down the hill. It took her a long time to summon sufficient courage to cross the teeming highway, but she finally managed it. Then she headed back into Los Angeles.

  Tomorrow she would go and see Father Kennedy again. Ask him some more about Hugo Dashwood. But now she just had to get back and lie down. She had a strange taut pain ebbing and flowing at the base of her back, and her head throbbed. She was terribly frightened.

  Afterwards all Phaedria could remember of that night was bright lights. Bright lights coming towards her from other cars: the bright welcome lights of the hotel, there at last to receive her after the nightmare drive of fear and pain; the bright brilliant light as the doctor summoned by the anxious hotel manager looked into her eyes and then as gently, as carefully as he could, said he had to move her to hospital, that her baby was being born; the fearfully bright lights of the hospital reception as she was rushed through on a stretcher, silent, stoical through her terror; the piercing white light of the delivery room as she was taken in, moved on to the bed, her legs put in stirrups, her pulse, the baby’s heartbeat, taken feverishly, anxiously, her own pain set aside, taken no account of, not through disregard, nor callousness, but urgency, necessity; the light came and went then, sometimes it seemed dark, almost peaceful, but then again and again she was surfacing into the room, the pain, the brightness; you’re doing well, they kept saying, not long now, hang on, hang on, now rest, relax, breathe deeply, and she would start to sink, and then, there it was again, the awful wrenching tearing in the centre of herself, so fierce, so violent she could not see how her body could survive it.

  And then at last, quite quickly they told her afterwards, not more than an hour after she had arrived, the great primeval urge to push, to go into the pain, to let it carry her forward, onwards, to endure it somehow, anyhow, because through it, at the end of it, there now, yes, she heard it, was the cry, the triumph, the new life, the love. Love such as she had never imagined, never even begun to know, a great invasion of her every sense, love at first sight and sound and touch and smell. And they placed her in her arms, her daughter, a tiny, too tiny scrap of life, a great mass of dark hair and surprisingly wide dark eyes, just for a moment, just so that she would know that this was what for the rest of her life she would fight for and give to and be concerned about, over and above everything else she ever knew.

  Then they took her away again; she was two months early, they said, she must go quickly to the special care unit, to an incubator, to be cared for, to stabilize. Phaedria wept, sobbed, tried to climb off her bed and follow them, but the doctor said no, she could not go, that the child would very probably be all right, that caring for prems these days was a most advanced science, that seven months was considered almost full term, that she must not worry, but have some rest. And then at last they moved her away from the brightness into a quiet, dim, peaceful room, and Phaedria, soothed by the assurances, exhausted, triumphant, fell asleep.

  In the morning the news was good. The baby was lively, hungry, breathing well. Phaedria said she was to be called Julia, and ate an enormous breakfast. Later they took her down in a wheelchair to the prem unit and she sat and gazed enraptured at the t
iny scrap she had created, she and Julian, as she moved and stretched and curled up into her pre-natal shape again; sneezed, clenched and unclenched her hands, kicked her tiny legs. They let Phaedria put in her hand and touch her, feel her soft crumpled silky skin. She put her finger in the tiny fist; Julia took it, gripped it, clung on. Phaedria smiled triumphantly: the baby was strong.

  Two days later she was not doing so well; she had developed, a respiratory infection. ‘Nearly all prem babies do this,’ said the doctor, trying to soothe her out of her wide-eyed terror, ‘she’s strong, you must try not to worry, she should pull through.’

  Twenty-four hours later she was still holding her own, but plainly distressed; she was restless, feverish, she wouldn’t take the breast milk Phaedria was expressing for her, and the nurses were trying to give her.

  Phaedria sat and watched her for almost thirty-six hours, scarcely moving, hardly sleeping; she was afraid to close her eyes lest she should open them and see the baby still, dead, gone. While she looked at her, she felt she could keep her safe. In the end, the doctor led her away, saying she would collapse if she stayed any longer, that she could do nothing for Julia, that she must rest. He put her to bed and sat with her, trying to reassure her; as soon as he had gone she climbed out of the bed again and dragged her poor sore, weary body down the corridor, back to Julia’s side.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ she kept whispering urgently, fearfully, to the fragile, brave little piece of humanity: ‘Stay with me. I need you. I can’t lose you too.’

  Towards the end of that night she fell asleep, and awoke suddenly to see the tiny body still, quite quite lifeless; she opened her mouth and screamed endlessly.

  A nurse came running to her, took hold of her and shook her. ‘Stop it, stop it,’ she said, frightened herself. ‘You must be quiet.’