by K. M. Peyton
‘Bloody cheek, going through his desk like that! What did that have to do with Helena?’
‘Language, Simon, please! But yes, out of their brief, I would have said. They were taking advantage.’
‘Very strange,’ murmured Mr Goldbeater. ‘Do you know when your father’s coming home, Antony? He really ought to learn of his daughter’s death.’
‘No. He never told me.’
‘Where is he? What country?’
‘South America. That’s all I know.’
‘And that aunt of yours, she needs to know. Where is she?’
‘In the South of France somewhere. But I’ve no address.’
The parents went indoors, and in the kitchen Mr Goldbeater said to his wife, ‘I always thought there was something fishy about Sylvester. One hears a lot of rumours. Why should the police be rifling his desk?’
‘There’s always talk in the village,’ she replied. ‘What does he do for a living? No one seems to know – save, whatever it is, it makes him a lot of money. The servant bill for that place must be enormous.’
‘He has to do with the Foreign Office, I believe. He goes up to Downing Street and all that, to do with armaments, they say. Just rumours. No one seems to know him at all.’
‘That poor kid. He’s virtually an orphan when you come to think about it. No background at all. No one loves him, save poor Lily.’
‘Oh, come on, there’s nothing poor about Lily! Lily’s love is worth ten of anybody else’s.’
‘Yes, you could say, with Lily on your side, you’ve not much to worry about. We’ll get him to stay here in the meantime. He can’t stay in that dreadful house with just his poor sister’s corpse.’
But Antony insisted on going back to Lockwood. After the lunch and support of his friends he was reviving, and said he must go home and sort out Rose and Violet and see what the police had trashed in his father’s study. With Mrs Goldbeater’s advice that he come back later ringing in his ears, he left the house with Lily at his side.
But Lily left him to go back to her father. ‘He will be wondering where I am.’
Antony looked so white and stricken still that she hated to leave him, but he said he wanted to be on his own. He walked up the long drive to the house and was relieved to see that the police cars had gone. The afternoon was still very hot, the lake placid below the lawns, the swans drifting as usual among the reeds. He stood looking across at the grotto, reliving the glorious party, trying to put out of his mind its terrible aftermath.
He could not get out of his head the unearthly sound of Helena’s voice, more a wailing lament than singing, a lament for all she could feel but not see nor express, petrifying the shenanigans of the drunken, uproarious idiots trying to escort her home – her swansong, almost as if she knew she had come to her end. Perhaps she had willed it, perhaps she had actually fallen of her own accord. He could not exactly remember how she had fallen, only the panic that sent him plunging in after her. How was it possible, he having been so swift, that he had been unable to grasp her dress or her hair, or touch any part of her, that she had vanished in seconds? In his mind he was beginning to accept that it was an act of God, perhaps a kindness that she should die in the full flower of her youth and beauty. Perhaps he had been the catalyst for her finding peace in the ever-after. It would reassure him if he could believe that.
But what his father would have to say when he heard the story, Antony did not dare think about. He did not know how he would be able to face his father.
He turned and went back into the house. It was dark, silent, like a prison. It was hard to remember it otherwise. At least Helena had lived in the sun, in her lovely room at the end of the house. He made his way towards it, along the miles of corridors and up the stairs and opened the door to her quarters.
Rose and Violet were just leaving, their outdoor clothes in place. Between them they had two enormous laundry bags, so heavy they had to drag them rather than carry them. When Antony appeared, blocking the doorway, their faces sagged.
‘I see you’re leaving. I was going to settle up with you but it looks as if you’re helping yourselves.’
‘Just a few clothes, sir, that no one will ever want. And our own things.’
‘Let me see.’ He made them tip out the bags over the floor. As he had guessed, wrapped up amongst sundry items of nightwear and underwear were precious boxes filled with the jewellery Helena had been given by her parents: all her little valuable knick-knacks and the smaller of the paintings from the walls, thousands of pounds worth of goods that would have paid off their wages for a few hundred years. ‘Just a few mementoes to remember her by? How lucky I came by! I was here to pay you and wish you well, a reference for another job perhaps, but now – now—’
His mounting anger choked the words in his mouth. It was all he could do to stop himself from lashing out and hitting their stupid faces, knocking them to the ground and stamping on them. They cowered back from his rage, mouths open, incoherent.
‘Get out! Get out!’
‘But – our stuff—’
‘Go! SCRAM! Before I hit you – GO!’
‘But—’
‘GO!’
They went, scuttling, he thought, like rats, running away along the corridor into the distance. He stood panting, startled by his own reaction. He kicked at the piles of beautiful clothes, and then stepped over to where Helena still lay. Since he had seen her last, she seemed to have departed still further towards the afterlife, her beauty fast fading, her face now waxen and stiff. She was now just a thing, no longer Helena. John had said the undertakers would call in the late afternoon and he thought the sooner she was screwed away in her coffin the better. How strange to think that only the previous afternoon none of this had happened: the world then had been so fine.
He left the room and locked the door behind him, pocketing the key. Those women would never set foot in this place again. The house was his own and he wanted peace. He wouldn’t go back to the fussy Goldbeaters, kind as they had been.
He went downstairs to sort out his father’s study. It was just as the police had left it, the desk drawers all pulled out and papers scattered everywhere. It was hard to know where to start. Just cram everything back, he thought, but maybe if he looked at some of the addresses he might find a way to contact his father. He sat in his father’s desk chair and started pulling papers towards him.
He sat there until the evening shadows made it too dark to see. At one point he got up to give entry to the undertakers who went upstairs with the coffin; he had to show them the way and unlock the door, but they departed later without disturbing him. As he shuffled through the mountain of letters his father’s presence started to fill the room, the secretive, watchful, humourless person whom Antony felt he knew morphed into a dictatorial highflyer, conversing with governments and diplomats of obscure far eastern and South American countries with extraordinary names about orders with only hieroglyphics for titles, mostly meaningless stuff or coded to make it indecipherable. What was it all about? No wonder the police could make neither head nor tail of it. If it was serious, he imagined that higher officials would come with a search warrant to take it away.
But was his father in trouble? Strangely Antony realized that, at the back of his mind, this possibility – of his father being involved in something slightly sinister – had always lurked. Why no bonhomie with friends or drinks parties, no business dinners, why the aura of secrecy that surrounded his coming and going, the phone calls in the night? Why did he never talk about his business or laugh, or confide in his son that one day he might join him, as most fathers did? He had never discussed his son’s future with him, and now that Antony had finished with school, his future had arrived, and what did it hold? Antony hadn’t the faintest idea.
He sat back in his father’s chair and wondered if, indeed, his father had scarpered. Was he really now alone in this hideous mansion with no mentor, no money, no future? It was hard to take in. But, to be fair, h
is father had told him vaguely of a date for his return and it wasn’t for a week or more yet; that was how he had decided on the date for his party. So it was a bit stupid to make wild surmises about his father’s business.
He tidied the papers as best he could, without finding any useful information to suggest his father’s whereabouts, and stuffed them back in the drawers. And then, pulling open the bottom drawer he was astonished to find a revolver lying there. He thought he was imagining things, the way his mind had been led on through the mystifying papers, but the revolver was quite real. He picked it up and looked to see if it was loaded. It was.
With it in his hand Antony walked to the window, stunned. Had the police seen this? Why would his father have a revolver? He stood staring out. The shadows lay long across the lawns and nothing moved. Only a blackbird sang from the willows, otherwise all was silence, peace. He moved the revolver from hand to hand. It was a very perfect instrument, quite small and light. How strange, he thought, that he could, in a moment, end his life as perfectly as Helena had ended hers, so that his father would come back to no one. Within twenty-four hours they could both be gone. Who was there to mourn them?
What was he going to do? The talk on the lawn all afternoon had been about the future: even dreary John was talking eagerly about his place in some terrible retreat somewhere where he could contemplate his future. Perhaps he should join John and see the light? Simon had got a place at Balliol and couldn’t wait to go. Antony, if he thought hard about it, imagined he would gravitate towards Brooklands and the flying, but he knew that with all the pilots and aircrew still unemployed from the war there would be no job for him there. No job for him anywhere really, without his father’s help and with his school’s hostility damning his leaving report. Even with all his faculties he was as useless as Helena when it came to a place in the world. Two coffins leaving Lockwood Hall would make a neat closure.
Across the lake at the far end near the village two pale specks on the bank caught his eye. It was Lily, wandering down by the water with Squashy. Seeing her, Antony felt an instinctive recoil from his morbid thoughts, shocked at the way his mind had been wandering. Dear Lily, when she had dared to give her life for him jumping out of the plane, how could he even think of doing away with himself when she loved him so much? How he took for granted her overpowering adoration! He knew he wasn’t worth it, knew that she knew that; it was a joke between them, yet it was so much the part of her life that lifted her from the poor, dreary, overburdened role she had been born to that to tear it away would be cruelty indeed.
He would put the gun back where he found it.
He had a funeral to organize, unless John had done all the work.
Late that night the telephone rang in his father’s study. He unhooked the receiver, trembling to hear his father’s voice. But he did not recognize the caller. The voice was well-educated, peremptory.
‘Claude, just a warning. Lie low for a bit. Things are looking grim.’
Before Antony could reply the caller rang off.
15
The whole village turned out for Helena’s funeral, filling the church and the churchyard. Antony was the chief – and only official – mourner, and he sat at the front with Mr and Mrs Goldbeater and his friends. Before the service started he asked Cedric to go to the back where all the estate workers sat and bring Lily and her family up to the front.
Gabriel refused to move, but Lily came with Squashy, who was asking of Cedric in a loud voice, ‘Is she going to be buried like your cow?’
No one remarked on the little dog that trotted into the pew at Squashy’s heels.
The cortege came from the house on a farm cart pulled by Hector and Olly. The coffin was covered with flowers. Gabriel had cut the finest from his gardens for Helena, and many of the villagers had plundered their own gardens and children had made posies of wild flowers. Along with Hector and Olly decked out in their finest show harness with their manes and tails braided and decorated, the cortege was more impressive than many a rich person’s departure in a large town.
There was also a tangible atmosphere of love and respect for the poor corpse, with, of course, the undertow of gossip of how the death had come about. Some newspapermen had wangled their way into the churchyard and were busy quizzing the spectators, enquiring the whereabouts of the well-known Mr Claude Sylvester, the question on everybody’s lips. Miss Maud Sylvester was also wandering about in the south of France in a state of ignorance, although it was possible she might read of it in an English newspaper. Long might they both stay away was Antony’s fervent prayer.
He had been asked to say some words from the pulpit, but he knew he could never lay himself bare in that fashion in public. The job was obviously John’s, so the congregation was forced to listen to his heavy eulogy, which suggested that Helena’s death was a blessing, a very obvious path to take, while Simon’s mother shook her head and whispered: ‘With all that money, why ever did that dreadful man not get her some professional help, an education for God’s sake? They can help so much today.’ Antony thought Simon could have made a better fist of the speech, or even Lily, and half wished he had been brave enough to do it himself after all. But bravery had never been one of his attributes.
The farmworkers, including Mr Butterworth himself, carried the coffin out into the churchyard where a grave had been prepared next to Helena’s mother.
Lily held Squashy’s hand tightly and when he started to cry and shout, ‘I don’t want to be buried in the ground!’ she led him away and sat him down in a quiet corner. Barky scrambled up and licked his face.
‘Don’t be silly, Squashy. You’re not going to die until you’re an old man and it won’t matter then.’
‘I want to lie dead in a field or somewhere, not in the ground.’
‘You can’t do that. Bodies get all smelly left about.’
‘I don’t mind being smelly.’
‘Other people don’t like it. They don’t want to walk past smelly bodies when they go shopping and that. Besides, the birds come and peck you, and the foxes will eat you, and the maggots grow inside you.’
It seemed that Squashy didn’t mind the birds and the foxes but drew the line at the maggots and he quietened down. ‘I’m not going to die,’ he decided.
‘No, of course not. Nor me. Nor Daddy, so there’s nothing to worry about.’
When they went back to the grave the service was over. All the flowers from the wagon were being carried to cover the raw earth, and Lily found Antony being shepherded away by Mrs Goldbeater, her arm round his shoulders. She along with her friends had made a funeral feast of sorts in the field next to the graveyard and everyone was on their way there, but Lily went over to Antony’s side.
‘I want to go home,’ Antony said.
Cedric said, ‘I’ve got to take the horses home. I can take you back on the wagon if you like.’
‘Probably that’s best for now,’ Mrs Goldbeater said. ‘I think those newspapermen are after you, Antony. It’ll be best to keep out of the way. I’ll fob them off.’
‘Take me too,’ Lily said.
‘Ride on the wagon! Ride on the wagon!’ shouted Squashy.
He lifted Barky in before there could be any argument, and jumped up himself, and Lily and Antony followed. Cedric unhitched the pair of horses from the fence, sorted out the reins and climbed up.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ Antony said.
Lily felt, for the first time, amazingly light-hearted. It was true that the funeral made one feel as if a pair of gates had been shut on the bad memories. ‘It was wonderful, Antony, before that happened. A fantastic party. Just remember that part of it. It wasn’t your fault. Helena—’
‘Lots of people were saying it was a blessing,’ Cedric said cheerfully.
‘I don’t see it like that. That we couldn’t save her.’
‘No. But it happened, so forget it.’
‘Yes. Remember the good bits. And I think she died happy. She looked happy, s
o remember that.’
‘There’s some fantastic beer in the house that Ma made for the funeral do,’ Cedric added. ‘Come in and have a drink. That’ll cheer you up.’
They saw to the horses, which took ages, undoing all their decorations. But when the horses had been turned out to graze they went back into the house and Cedric fetched the beer. Lily looked around the farmhouse kitchen and thought how lovely it was, quite unlike Mrs Goldbeater’s and the vicar’s and those of the posh people in the village, but so comfortable and homely, just the sort she would choose if she ever had the chance. At home they only had one room downstairs, and a scullery, so they ate in the sitting room: it was all the same. Squashy had to rescue Barky from the over-attention of the motley farm dogs that wandered in through the open door and put him on the table, but Cedric did not protest, although Lily said it was wrong.
‘What does it matter?’
In the whole scheme of things very little, Lily agreed. The beer was wonderful, likewise a pork pie that Cedric brought in from the larder, and they sat growing more cheerful by the minute until even Antony laughed.
‘You can stay here if you like,’ Cedric said. ‘Mum would be pleased to have you.’
‘No. I must go home. I’ve got things to sort out.’
‘Are the staff back now?’
‘Yes. I’ve got to pay them – their money’s overdue – see to that for a start.’ And sort out the valuables in Helena’s room that were lying all over the floor. He doubted Rose and Violet would be returning for their pay.
