* * *
It was no time to be emotional. It was simply childish to become sentimental, to get upset because an old lady had had a glass of champagne and started to remember. Flora was not a child. She had learned long ago to control her feelings. She had only to stand very still, and press her hands to her face and close her eyes, and in a moment the lump in her throat would stop growing like a great balloon and the foolish tears would recede and never be shed.
She had been a long time with Tuppy. From the hall the swelling sounds of the party, already well under way, rose to taunt her. She had to go down. She couldn’t start crying now, because she had to go down, and meet everybody. And Antony was waiting, and she had promised him …
What had she promised him? What madness had impelled her to make that promise? And how could they ever have imagined that they would get away with their deception without destroying both themselves and everyone else involved?
The desperate questions had no answer. The dress she wore, starched and relentlessly uncomfortable, had become a physical embodiment of her own shame and self-loathing. Wearing it was torture. Her arms were forced into sleeves that were too narrow; her throat constricted by the high, tight collar, until she felt she couldn’t breathe.
Rose. Have fun.
But I’m not Rose. And I can’t pretend to be Rose any longer.
She pressed her fist to her mouth, but it wasn’t any good, because by now she was crying—for Tuppy, for the little boys, for herself. Blinding, salty tears filled her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She imagined herself, blotchy and with her mascara running, but that was of no importance because she had come to the end of the charade. She could go to no party, face nobody. Instinctively, she had started back toward the sanctuary of her own room, and now she was running, like a person trying to escape—down the long passage, till she had reached her door and was inside, shut away. She was safe.
Now the music and the laughter were deadened to a faint murmur and there was only the ugly sound of her own weeping. The room felt icy. She began, clumsily, to undo all the tiny awkward buttons of the dress. The collar lay loose and she could breathe again. Then the bodice and the narrow cuffs. She wrenched the dress from her shoulders and it slid with a whisper to the floor, and she stepped out of it and left it there, like the discarded wrappings of some parcel. Shivering with cold, she snatched up her old familiar dressing gown, and without bothering to do up the buttons or tie the sash bundled herself into it, flung herself across the bed, and was abandoned, at last, to the inevitable storm of weeping.
* * *
Time was lost. Flora had no idea how long she had lain there before she heard the sound of her door open, and gently, close again. She was not even sure whether or not someone had actually come into the room until she felt the pressure on the edge of her bed as someone sat beside her. A warm presence, solid and comforting. She turned her head on the pillow, and a hand reached out and smoothed her hair back off her face. She looked through swimming eyes, and the dark blur with the white shirt front gradually resolved itself into Hugh Kyle.
She had expected perhaps Isobel or Antony. Certainly not Hugh. She made an enormous effort to stop crying, and as the tears did recede a little, she wiped them away with the heel of her hand, and looked at him again. Hugh’s image sharpened, and she saw a man she had never seen before—not simply because he was dressed differently, but because it was unusual for him to be so patient, sitting there as though he had all the time in the world, not saying anything and apparently prepared to let Flora cry herself to a standstill.
She made an effort to speak. To say something, even if it was only, “Go away.” But Hugh—Hugh, of all people, opened his arms to her, and this she found impossible to resist. Without a second thought, Flora pulled herself up off her pillows, and cast herself into the waiting comfort of his massive embrace.
He seemed impervious to the damage she was probably wreaking on his crisp white shirt front. His arms were warm and strong about her shaking shoulders. He smelt of clean linen and aftershave. She felt his chin against the top of her head, and when, after a little, he said, gently, “What’s wrong?” the words came, incoherent and disjointed, but still they came—a torrent of words, a flood.
“I’ve been with Tuppy … and she was telling me … the little boys … and I never knew. And I couldn’t bear it. And she said … a leaf on the tree … and I couldn’t bear it…” Telling him all this was not helped by the fact of her face being pressed so closely to his shirt front. “I … could hear everybody and the music, and I knew … I couldn’t come down.…”
He let her cry. When she had calmed down a little, she heard him say, “Isobel wondered what had happened to you. She sent me to find out, and to bring you down.”
Flora shook her head as vehemently as possible under the constricted circumstances. “I’m not coming.”
“Of course you’re coming. Everybody’s waiting to meet you. You can’t spoil it for them.”
“I can’t. I’m not going to. You’ll have to say I’m sick again, or something … anything…”
His arms tightened. “Now come along, Flora, pull yourself together.”
The room became very still. Out of the silence random sounds impinged on Flora’s conscious mind: faint strains of music from the other end of the house, the wind rising, nudging the window, the distant murmur of the sea; and so close that it was felt rather than heard, the regular thud of Hugh’s heartbeat.
Cautiously, she drew away from him. “What did you call me?”
“Flora. It’s a good name. Much better than Rose.”
Her face ached from crying. Undried tears still lay on her cheeks, and she tried to wipe them away with her fingers. Her nose was running and she could not find a handkerchief and had to sniff, enormously. He reached into his pocket and produced his own handkerchief. Not the beautiful silk one which showed from the top of his breast pocket, but a comfortable everyday one, the cotton soft from washing.
She accepted it gratefully. “I don’t seem to be able to stop crying. I don’t usually cry, ever.” She blew her nose. “You won’t believe that, but it’s true. These last few days I don’t seem to have done anything but cry.”
“No, but you’ve been under a considerable strain.”
“Yes.” She looked down at the handkerchief and saw it covered with dark smudges. “My mascara’s run.”
“You look like a panda.”
“I suppose I do.” She took a deep breath. “How did you know? About me being Flora?”
“Antony told me. I mean, he told me your name was Flora, but I’ve known for some time that you weren’t Rose.”
“When did you know?”
“The day you were ill, I knew for sure.” He added, “But I’ve had my suspicions for some time.”
“But how did you know?”
“When Rose was here, that summer five years ago, she had an accident on the beach. She was sunbathing, or occupied in some other relatively harmless way, and she cut her arm on a broken bottle that some joker had buried in the sand. Just here.” He reached out and took Flora’s hand, pushed up the sleeve of her dressing gown, and drew with his finger a line perhaps two inches long on the outside of her forearm. “It wasn’t very serious, but it had to be stitched up. I pride myself on being fairly adroit when it comes to sewing people up, but even I couldn’t do a job that left no trace of a scar.”
“I see. But why didn’t you say anything?”
“I wanted to speak to Antony first.”
“And have you?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you everything? About me and Rose and our parents?”
“Yes, everything. It’s quite a story.”
“He … he’s going to tell Tuppy tomorrow.”
Hugh corrected her. “He’s telling Tuppy now.”
“You mean, this very moment?”
“This very moment.”
“So…” She was almost afraid to say it. �
��So Tuppy knows I’m not Rose.”
“By now she does.” He watched her face. “Is that why you were crying?”
“Yes, I think so. I seemed to be crying for so many things.”
“But an uneasy conscience was one of them.”
Flora nodded—a miserable confession.
“You didn’t like lying to Tuppy?”
“I felt like a murderer.”
“Well, now you don’t need to feel like a murderer any longer.” He sounded, all at once, much more like his usual dry self. “So perhaps you’ll get off that bed, and get into your dress and come downstairs.”
“But my face is all dirty and swollen.”
“You can wash it.”
“And my dress is all crumpled.”
He looked for the dress, spied it where she had abandoned it on the floor. “No wonder it’s crumpled.” He stood up and went to retrieve it, shaking it out of its creases and laying it across the foot of the bed. Flora wrapped her arms around her knees and watched him.
“Are you cold?” he asked her.
“A little.” Without comment, he went to turn on the electric fire, pressing down the switch with the toe of his shoe, and then moved to the dressing table. Flora saw the green gleam of a champagne bottle and a couple of wineglasses.
“Did you bring those up with you?”
“Yes. I had an idea some sort of a stimulant might be useful.” He commenced, neatly, to deal with the gold wire and the foil. “It seems I was right.”
There was a pop as the cork flew out, an explosion of golden bubbles which he caught expertly, first in one glass and then the other. He set down the bottle and brought Flora over a brimming glass, and then he said, “Slaintheva,” and they drank, and the wine was dry and nose-tickling and tasted of weddings and the best sort of celebrations.
The bars of the fire reddened. The room grew bright and warm. Flora took a second courage-bolstering mouthful, and said, abruptly, “I do know about Rose.”
Hugh did not reply at once to this. Instead, he retrieved the champagne bottle and came to settle himself at the foot of the bed, his wide shoulders propped against the brass rail. He set the bottle handily on the floor at his side. He said, “What do you know about her?”
“I know that she had an affair with Brian Stoddart. But I didn’t know that before he took me out for dinner. Otherwise, I promise you, I would never have gone.”
“I imagine he reminisced in some detail.”
“I couldn’t stop him.”
“Were you shocked, or were you surprised?”
She tried to remember. “I don’t know. You see, I didn’t have time to get to know Rose. We just met in London for an evening, and then she flew off to Greece the next day. But she looked like me, and so I imagined that she was like me. Except that she was rich and she had all sorts of things that I could never hope to have. But that didn’t seem to be basically important. I just thought of us as two halves of the same whole. We’d been separated all our lives, but basically we were still the one person. And then Rose went, and Antony arrived and told me what had happened, and that was the beginning of wondering about Rose. She knew Antony needed her, but she’d still gone off to Greece. That was one of the reasons I came to Fernrigg. I suppose to try and make up for what Rose had done.” It was all too difficult and Flora gave up. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?”
“I think it makes a lot of sense.”
“You see…”
But he interrupted her. “Flora, that first day I spoke to you on the sands by the Beach House, you must have thought I was some sort of a maniac.”
“No.”
“Out of interest, what did you think?”
“I … I thought you were perhaps a man who’d been hurt by Rose.”
“You mean, that I’d been in love with her?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“I never really knew Rose. She was certainly never concerned about me. And I don’t think she even looked twice at Antony. But Brian was a different kettle of fish.”
“Then you weren’t in love with her?”
“Good God, no.” Flora could not keep herself from smiling. “And what’s that Cheshire Cat grin for?”
“I thought you must have been. And I couldn’t bear it.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was so vile. And I suppose,” she added with the air of one determined to make a clean breast of the whole thing, “because I liked you so much.”
“You liked me?”
“That was why I was so horrible to you that night you brought me home from Lochgarry.”
“Are you always horrible to people you like?”
“Only when I think they’re jealous.”
“I wish I’d known. I thought you hated me. I also thought you were drunk.”
“Perhaps I was, a little. But at least I didn’t slap your face.”
“Poor Flora.” But he did not look particularly repentant.
“But if you weren’t angry because of jealousy…” It took some working out. “Hugh. Why were you angry?”
“Because of Anna.”
Anna. It was Anna. Flora sighed. “You’ll have to explain. Otherwise I shall never understand.”
* * *
He said, heavily, “Yes.” He had finished his glass, and now reached down to where the bottle stood on the floor, and refilled both their glasses. It was becoming as cozy, thought Flora, as a midnight feast.
He said, “I don’t know how much you know about the Stoddarts.”
“I know about them, because Tuppy told me.”
“Good. That’ll save a lot of time. Well, where shall we start? Five years ago, Rose and her mother came to stay at the Beach House, that you know. Looking back, I’ve never been able to work out why they came to Fernrigg at all. It was the most unlikely place for a couple of jet-setters like the Schusters, but perhaps they’d seen Tuppy’s advertisement in the Times, or they thought it would be novel to get back to the simple life. Anyway, they came, and Tuppy is always very conscientious about her tenants. She feels responsible for them, as if they were houseguests. She invites them up to Fernrigg, introduces them to her friends, and I think that is how Rose and her mother met the Stoddarts.
“Anna was expecting a baby that summer. Her first. And Brian, perhaps frustrated by potential fatherhood, was amusing himself with the barmaid at the Yacht Club. She was a Glasgow girl who’d come up to Ardmore for the summer just to do this job, and I think she and Brian probably suited each other down to the ground.”
“Did everybody know about this?”
“Tarbole is a small community. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, only in this case nobody ever talks about it, out of loyalty to Anna.”
“And she ignores what Brian does?”
“She appears to. But Anna, beneath that diffident exterior, is a very passionate and high-strung woman. Very much in love, and possessive of her husband.”
“Brian described her as an ostrich, only seeing what she wanted to.”
“How charming of him. And of course, most of the time she is, but in some women pregnancy unleashes a number of very violent emotions.”
“Like jealousy.”
“Exactly. This time, Anna didn’t bury her head. She suspected he was carrying on with this girl, and she worked herself up into a highly nervous state. What she didn’t realize, and thank God she never did, was that Rose had now appeared on the scene. The only reason I found out was through Tammy Todd who works at the Ardmore Yacht Club. Tammy and I were at school together long ago when we were both small, and I think he felt that perhaps I ought to know what was going on.
“One morning I had a phone call from Anna, very early. She was incoherent with anxiety because Brian had been out all night. He’d never come home. I tried to reassure her, and then I went searching for him and I found him at the Yacht Club. He said there’d been a party, and rather than disturb Anna, he’d decided to sleep the night there.
I told him to go home and he said that he would.
“But later in the day I got another message to ring Anna. By now I was away out in the country, a two-hour drive from Tarbole, visiting the young son of a sheep farmer. The mother suspected appendicitis, but mercifully, as it turned out, she was wrong. Anyway, Anna told me she was hemorrhaging. I told her I’d get back as soon as I could, but that Brian was to call the hospital and get an ambulance. She told me that she was still alone. Brian had never come back. So I rang the ambulance myself and the hospital at Lochgarry, and I drove like the hammers of hell back to Tarbole, and when I got to the surgery I rang the hospital again, but it was too late. Sister told me that Anna had arrived, but she’d lost the child. She said that Anna was asking for her husband, but that nobody knew where to find him. I said that I would find him, and I put down the telephone and got into the car and went to the Beach House, and walked in and found Rose and Brian in bed together.”
“But didn’t her mother know what was going on?”
“I honestly don’t know. She certainly wasn’t in the house at the time. As far as I can remember, she’d gone over to Lochgarry for a round of golf.”
“Hugh, what did you do?”
He put up a hand to rub his eyes. “Oh, the usual things. Lost my temper, flung my weight around. But of course it was too late to start being indignant, because Anna’s baby was already dead.”
“And now she’s having another one.” Hugh nodded. “And you weren’t going to stand by and let it happen all over again.”
“No.”
“Were … were there any repercussions?”
“No. By the time Anna came out of hospital, Rose and her mother had gone.”
“Tuppy never knew? Nor Isobel?”
“No.”
“Nor Antony?”
“Antony was working in Edinburgh. He only met Rose fleetingly when he happened to be home for a weekend.”
“What did you think when you heard Antony was going to marry Rose?”
“I was appalled. But I told myself that all this had happened five years ago. Rose had probably grown up. I prayed that she had.”
“And Anna? Anna never found out?”
“Brian and I made a deal. The only one we’re ever likely to make. The truth would have destroyed Anna. Thinking that Brian was running around with a little whore from Glasgow was one thing. Knowing that he was sleeping with Rose was another. It would have been disastrous, and inevitably it would have involved the Armstrongs.”
Under Gemini Page 26
