Strange Recompense

by Catherine Airlie

  The home which Dennis Tranby had been asking Ruth to share with him for years was indeed worthy of her, a gracious, lovely old house leading directly from the pavement, but with a walled garden behind it where apple trees bent low over mossy grass and almost every flower that grew made a brilliant splash of color along the borders. Peach and nectarine and pear rambled along the walls, the fruit already thick on the branches, and a weeping willow drooped over a rustic seat beside a tile-bordered pool.

  The house was furnished in perfect taste, too, the lovely period pieces carefully polished by Dennis’ elderly housekeeper, who brought them coffee in the dining-room. She set the silver tray down on the end of the oval table where it lay reflected as in a mirror, and left Ruth to pour out.

  Anna watched Ruth with a stabbing envy in her heart, realizing how much she longed for the peace and security of a home such as this, and then she realized that Ruth must long for it too, that it was here for her to take but for a promise made long ago when Noel was very young. There was no sign of impatience in Ruth’s gentle, immobile face, however. She had achieved the quiet of perfect inward peace and it was reflected in her eyes for all to see.

  When Dennis finally joined them he accepted his cup from Ruth with a smile, their fingers just touching under the delicate china, and Anna saw the unconscious longing behind that smile and knew that she was not alone in the bitterness of her renunciation.

  Looking up suddenly, she found Noel’s eyes fixed on her across the room with such a look of intensity that they might have been there together alone, yet somehow he seemed to be looking beyond her, too, seeing down into the future, perhaps, and finding no hope there.

  “Shall we go?” he asked almost harshly. “It’s after eleven, and we did plan to get as far as Llangareth before lunch.”

  They motored quickly along the high road with the green panorama of the hills all about them, and then Noel turned the car towards the sea and Anna felt that she recognized the road.

  “Wasn’t it here you picked me up that day?” she asked Ruth unsteadily. “I’m sure I recognize it—the big, humped mountain over there and all the lower hills dipping down to the sea.”

  “Can you remember the exact spot?” Noel asked from the front seat. “Was there any special landmark?”

  “There was a milestone and a clump of mountain ash on the far side of the road. Ruth pulled up under the trees.”

  She found no difficulty in remembering now and Noel nodded encouragingly, though he did not comment until she was deep in conversation with his sister about the exact location of the trees, and then he turned to Tranby to remark:

  “You see, Dennis, the memory is quite unimpaired otherwise. Her brain is naturally quick, her impressions incisive. That’s what gives me so much confidence when otherwise we seem to come up against one blank after another.”

  They came to the trees and he pulled the car in off the road, parking it in their shade.

  “We’ll sample your coffee and sandwiches now, Ruth,” he suggested, “and then we can walk light.” He glanced round at them. “Everyone agreeable?”

  Anna nodded, trying not to let him see her utter nervousness because now that she was covering old ground the past seemed to come rushing up to mock her, the part of the past she could recall. Thus far and no farther! it seemed to say. For all your eagerness you still can’t remember clearly enough!

  She set her teeth and bent to help Ruth with the hamper. She would remember! She must. She must!

  While they sat under the shade of the trees she tried to force memory with a concentration which showed only too plainly on her pale face.

  “Don’t make too great a labor of it, Anna,” Noel advised in an undertone, coming to sit beside her while he filled his pipe. “Just allow yourself to come to it naturally. Treat today like any ordinary day—like what it is, a planned picnic between friends.”

  The kindness of his words stung tears into her eyes, but she battled against them and would not let him see how much his thought for her could reduce her heart.

  “If I fail in this you must let me go,” she said in a stifled whisper. “I know I’m not reacting nearly as quickly as you had hoped and—and—”

  “And what, Anna?”

  “It isn’t fair to you—all the time you are spending on my case.”

  “If you were only a ‘case’,” he said quietly, “I should still go on persevering until I had freed you from this dreadful bondage.” He felt in his pocket and produced a small, gleaming object which lay in the palm of his hand as he held it out to her. “I thought you would like to have this,” he said.

  She gazed down at the thin gold circlet of the new wedding ring and her heart contracted with all the old agony of uncertainty.

  “Put it on,” he commanded. “It may make you feel more secure. You can pay me back when you feel you can afford it.”

  This matter-of-fact reference to the purchase of a new ring did much to steady her, and she took it from him, but she did not put it on immediately, knotting it into the corner of her handkerchief instead and putting it safely away in her pocket.

  Noel made no comment as he watched. He was paler than usual and his mouth was perhaps a trifle grim as he rose to help her to her feet, but that was all.

  They set out to cross the moor in the direction of the sea and he fell naturally into step beside her, with Dennis bringing up the rear in Ruth’s company.

  “We’ll cut up over Bransby Beacon,” he suggested after the first mile. “It’s a stiffish climb, but it cuts off all that winding bit of road between here and the coast.”

  “Think you can manage it?” Dennis asked Ruth. “We can leave you serene and resting in the shade if you like.”

  “I’m not quite that age!” Ruth laughed back. “No! I’m coming with you even if you have to carry me back!”

  “Heaven forbid!” Dennis grinned, holding out his hand to her as they began to climb. “Come on! I’ll give you a tow!”

  The keen mountain air went down into their lungs like a tonic, and Anna drew in deep breaths of it, climbing steadily by Noel’s side. It was as if they were on a journey to a new world, and she thrust everything behind her the desperation of these past few weeks, and the fear and the loneliness, determined to live this one day to the full.

  They reached the top of the Beacon long before Ruth and Dennis, and stood there together with the whole panorama of the coastline spread out before them; not saying very much, but conscious of fulfilment that was not altogether to do with reaching the top of a hill.

  Anna gazed down, shivering suddenly.

  “I don’t want to go down there,” she said. “I feel as if—all this will be swept away if I do—all the beauty and the freedom—”

  The last word baffled her and she stood wondering why she should have used it, she who was so deeply in bondage to the past, and then Noel moved, turning toward her and drawing her hands within his strong, warm grasp.

  “We’ve got to go down, Anna,” he said. “Whatever lies down yonder, whatever comes of your remembering for both of us, nothing would ever be gained by turning away.”

  She clung to his hands for one breathless, unhappy moment, longing to deny what he had just said but knowing that she could not, because it was the only way for them to go.

  “How far is it?” she asked stiltedly.

  “Not very far,” he said. “You’ll make it, my dear.”

  If his voice had trembled slightly on these last two words he gave no other sign of emotion whatever, and when Dennis and Ruth joined them five minutes later, he was pointing out Bardsey Island to Anna and the vague grey outline of Braich-y-Pwll shrouded in the mist of distance away to the north.

  He offered Anna his hand as they went down towards the coast, and Ruth, following with Dennis Tranby’s supporting arm about her, said almost bitterly,

  “There goes the perfect partnership sacrificed to a whim of fate!”

  “I’m afraid so,” Dennis answered unhappily. �
��Pity there’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve known Noel was in love with her for a very long time.”

  “It can’t be more than days,” Ruth corrected. “She hasn’t been with us for a very long time.”

  “It doesn’t take a man much longer than a few days to know when he’s met the one woman who will ever mean anything in his life,” he retorted. “I knew about you, for instance, within hours!”

  “And we all have years before us yet!” Ruth said unguardedly, and on a note of despondency which was very unlike her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WHEN ANNA HAD accepted the fact of her love for Noel, the complication of his returning that love had never occurred to her, but she could not have stood alone with him on that high hill-top and looked up into his eyes without knowing that life had played them one of its shabbier tricks, and given them a love which could never know fulfilment. That one flawless, ecstatic moment when she had realized herself beloved was all she might possess. For the rest they must walk their separate ways, apart, divided by the very token he had just given her, the slim, golden emblem of her own bondage.

  The wind was whipping the sea up into little white horses, galloping in across the bay, but the waves were small and there was no pounding at the base of the cliff as she had half expected.

  Expected? Her heart appeared to stand still as she halted on the narrow path and looked down. Expected or remembered? It was all the same. She had thought to find a raging sea here in this wind-swept place, and a sky dark and devoid of stars.

  “Noel!” she said. “Noel, it happened here—in a place like this.” The surge of water rushed in upon her mind, but over and above it she could hear Noel’s voice, strong and encouraging, urging her on.

  “It had been raining, Anna, and there were high seas,” he suggested. “You were in a car, driving along a cliff road.”

  She drew back with terror in her eyes for a moment.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes!”

  “With the man you loved,” he continued inexorably.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know about that.” She turned away from him, to hide what was in her eyes. “It’s all so dark. Just the car rushing through the night and the sound of the wind and the rain blotting out everything else. I can’t remember anything else, Noel! I still can’t remember.”

  The cry came straight from her heart and it struck through him with the force of a knife-thrust, but he dared not give up now.

  “You were being driven at great speed along this road, Anna,” he repeated. “Anna the man you were with was your husband. Think back. Think, Anna! You’ve got to think. You were travelling through the night with your husband in a car which he was driving at a high speed. Can you tell me why?”

  He had switched the subject deliberately away from the heart-searching question of her marriage and her response was instantaneous.

  “It was so late. We had to get back to my hotel.” Her voice faltered, but she was concentrating on his last question. “Ned always drove fast.”

  “Ned?” He passed the name back to her carefully, not over-emphasising it. “How long had you known Ned?”

  “All my life. He was always there.”

  “And—you were in love with him?”

  He asked the question with no change of expression, only a small pulse beating suddenly fast high in his tanned cheek was witness to any emotion as he waited for her answer, but the feeling in his heart was one of emptiness and void, as a man might feel at the foot of the gallows who still hopes for a reprieve.

  “No,” she said slowly. “No.

  He knew that she took that for granted and the admission did nothing to ease the tension under which he was forced to work. A name had come to her out of the past, but the searing revelation for which he waited had not followed it. A lifetime of friendship apparently lay behind the name of Ned, but it had not been strong enough to shatter the amnesia.

  Without showing his disappointment, he waited for Ruth and Dennis to come up with them, suggesting immediately that they should rest there for a while before they turned back.

  Anna sank down thankfully on the coarse grass and Ruth launched forth into a tale of rum-running which had been current along the lonely coast south of where they sat for some time, feeling that her companions’ pre-occupied silence demanded just such an effort on her part.

  Noel looked across at his friend. “Would you find it too much of an effort to take a look at the cliffs above Longreach Rocks? I believe the road has been closed along that section, and it was a favorite path of ours at one time, remember?”

  He had kept insistence to a minimum, but Tranby detected something in his voice which he recognized from long experience, and rose immediately.

  “I’ll concede a mile each way,” he agreed lazily, “but no more!” The look which her brother gave her kept Ruth seated on the cliff top as the two men walked away. They walked in silence for a while, drawing on their pipes, their hands thrust deeply into their trouser pockets.

  “Well,” Dennis demanded at last, “what now?”

  “The car angle was the right one,” Noel said with conviction. “There was a car, and it was being driven far too fast, or at least fast enough to cause Anna a considerable amount of nervousness. Then—something happened. What,” he went on, “we can only guess at just now, but there’s one thing we can be more or less sure about. The car was being driven by a man Anna knew well, someone called Ned, whom she had known all her life.”

  Dennis looked puzzled.

  “The name brought no revelation, no complete remembering?” he asked.

  “Nothing at all definite.”

  “This Ned person?” Dennis asked. “You feel that he might be the husband?”

  “Probably.”

  The short, clipped admission left Noel’s lips as if it had been driven from him against his will, and he strode on without speaking for another hundred yards or so until Tranby said:

  “We’ve established the car and the husband. It was being driven at a high speed and Anna was afraid. Supposing,” he added quietly, the car went over the cliff?”

  “And she jumped clear just in time?” Noel’s lips tightened. “No, Dennis, it won’t do. These things just don’t happen.”

  “There was considerable bruising, consistent with a fall,” Tranby reminded him.

  “And no car found afterwards!”

  Tranby drew him towards the edge of the cliff.

  “Look down there.”

  Beneath them the water churned and boiled against the base of the cliff, breaking on a ridge of cruel-looking rocks several yards out from the shore, and even on this comparatively calm afternoon the scene was one of wrath leashed only for the moment, of power unlimited surging in towards the land. Noel watched the waves breaking far beneath them and cascading back again to be lost in the great roll of the bay, with a sickening doubt growing in his heart.

  “What can we know!” he exclaimed “What sort of evidence can we really piece together with certainty? Anna came near enough to the truth just now, but the scene isn’t the one that is dominating her subconscious to the exclusion of everything else. Her own safety was not the overwhelming thought in her mind on that night.” His strong voice underlined the words and he bent to knock the contents of his pipe out against a boulder as if it no longer gave him any satisfaction. “Until we can find what was,” he added, “we’ll continue to come up against these disappointments, the blanks in this story that are constantly confronting us!”

  Tranby followed him farther along the cliff top with his brows drawn together in a deep frown, and even when they came to the first warnings of erosion he did not speak. The cliff edge had been cordoned off, and they halted simultaneously where the road had been closed to traffic, looking along the winding way ahead, their eyes speculative as they measured the distance between road and cliff.

  “Anyone coming round that bend at high speed on a darkish night could quite easily go over, especially if he wasn
’t paying a great deal or attention to the road,” Tranby suggested. “Right over, Noel, without so much as a sign.”

  “And no track marks?”

  “Let’s walk on.”

  Tranby led the way, and less than a couple of hundred yards ahead a whole section of the cliff was cut off where part of it had crumbled into the sea.

  Noel went through the ropes and strode across the narrow grass margin to the edge of the cliff, standing there for a long time in deepest thought before he turned and came slowly back to his friend.

  “It could have happened here,” he agreed, “and there would be no sign of tire marks or anything else. The whole cliff face could have given way not long after the weight of—say a car—had bumped across it.” He was staring down at the grass, frowning, reluctant to accept the evidence of surmise. “These are only calculations built on the slightest evidence, of course. We can’t afford to jump too hastily to conclusions.”

  “But we’re pretty certain about the car, old man,” Tranby pointed out. “If Anna came anywhere near here she could not very well have walked.”

  “She walked back to the main road.”

  “Granted. But why would she come to such an isolated spot as this in the first place, unless she came by car?”

  “People walk considerable distances for pleasure.”

  “But not in the sort of clothes Anna was found in—a light frock and a thin coat and high-heeled shoes, and not in the early hours of the morning, unless something decidedly unusual has happened!” Noel straightened, still looking out towards the sea.

  “I’ve been through all that,” he admitted, “over and over again, and all I can honestly accept is the fact that she drove late at night—or even through the night—with someone called Ned.”

  “Whom we presume to be her husband.”

  Noel turned with a look in his eyes that was as turbulent as the sea itself.

  “On that assumption,” he said slowly, “we are believing him dead.”

  “If we can prove that a car went over there at any time during the past few weeks I believe that will be the answer,’ Tranby said, not looking at him.