After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  No sooner had I hung up the earpiece before the telephone rang again and the same aggrieved voice – I should like to box that girl’s ears – told me I had another caller. It was Alec.

  ‘I’m in Edinburgh,’ he said. He had gone home to Dorset, I think to quiet his mother (understandably rattled by the news of yet another death in the family he had been to join). ‘But I’m just about to start for Dunelgar to meet Gregory. Can I pick you up on the way?’

  ‘Have you decided to tell him more?’ I asked. ‘Have you changed your mind?’

  ‘I’ve been summoned,’ said Alec. ‘And I can’t make up my mind, much less make it up and then change it. I’ll see what he has to say, but I need an ally.’

  I had to agree, of course, but I felt very little enthusiasm for the visit because I had been trying my best to keep Gregory Duffy out of my thoughts. The daughter who had so clearly been his favourite was dead, his wife was dead, and as for his other daughter, the mystifyingly dispreferred Clemence – and it really did mystify me any time I considered it – his current treatment of her was a puzzle I could not begin to solve.

  I had always been more taken with Cara myself and I expect the same was true of most people who knew them both. There had been something so fresh and sweet about her little monkey face that had to be found charming and Clemence’s beautiful mask and cold elegance could not compete. I should have thought, however, that a parent could love them both and love their difference more than any sameness. But Clemence was off to Canada after all. I had learned this from Mary, who had thrown up the area window and called to me as I descended the steps of the Drummond Place house after leaving a card of condolence on the day of Lena’s funeral.

  ‘I couldn’t think for the life of me what the noise was,’ she said, looking more than ever like Mrs Tiggywinkle as she leaned out over the sill above a frothing tub of washing. ‘I thought wee boys were whacking the railings.’ Sure enough, the best that could be said about the sound of the wooden clog strapped on to my plaster, the steel tip of my cane and my one proper shoe was that it was percussive. Grant was all for keeping me in the house for six weeks, such pain did it give her to see an outfit of hers wrecked by the white lump sticking out from the bottom of my skirt.

  ‘How are things?’ I called down to Mary, with a glance up and down the pavement to check that I was unobserved. (Drysdale, agog at the wheel of the motor car, would have to make of it what he would.)

  ‘An earthquake would be peace perfect peace compared to this place,’ she said. ‘Miss Clemence left from Leith two nights ago, gone to meet the liner at Gibraltar. She didn’t even stay for her mother’s funeral and if you know why, madam, don’t tell me. The less I know about any of this the better. I’m off at the start of the week. Down the other end of the street there, to a lawyer and his wife and three wee ones and another one coming, and I’ll be well shut of it.’ She looked over her shoulder as if at a sudden noise and then with a wiggle of her eyebrows she thumped the window down and was gone.

  So Clemence was already started on her long journey and would miss her mother’s funeral. I doubted if even Mr Duffy would go and there was something dreadful, I thought, about a funeral with only the minister and the other officials, even for Lena. I only thought that for a moment, mind you, before I shook myself with disgust at my mawkishness. That kind of flabby sentiment – thinking that there is good in everyone – is responsible for a great deal of harm.

  Why then, I wondered, after Alec’s telephone call, was I trembling at the thought of telling Mr Duffy the truth?

  Had I seen him at any time in the weeks since Lena’s death, I should have had a convenient answer. No one with an ounce of compassion could have piled more pain on to the shrunken shoulders of the old man who opened the door to Alec and me later that day. I gasped at the sight of him, and instinctively went forward to take his cold, papery hands in my own. He squeezed them and gave a nod to Alec.

  ‘Osborne,’ he said, and I was relieved to hear some of his old self in the curt, barely polite, masculine greeting.

  The shutters were open today, but otherwise the hall looked as it had the last time, with the rug still rolled and the furniture still sheeted. He led us to the back of the house, and I was glad not to have to climb the stairs with my cane, and even gladder not to have to pass the exact spot. We went through the baize door to the servants’ quarters and I suddenly knew where we were going. I did not follow them up the narrow stairs, but waited in the ground floor passageway resting my foot, listening to them walk along the stone flags above my head and then stop. They stood still for five minutes and more, perhaps talking although I could not hear their voices, and then they moved again, slowly, back to the head of the stairs and down to join me.

  ‘You look cold, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Come out and sit in the orangery and we shall have some whisky. I’m afraid I can’t rise to tea.’ He smiled, holding out his arm, and led us through another maze of passages then out into the light of a conservatory, empty of anything but a few tough-looking palms. It was dusty and neglected, but comfortable in the warmth of the afternoon sunlight.

  ‘What made you go along that passage, sir?’ said Alec, once he had fussed me into a comfortable chair and lifted my legs on to another. Mr Duffy handed me a beautiful old glass one-third full of whisky and sat down with his own, gesturing Alec to go and fetch one from the decanter.

  ‘I was searching the house,’ he said, ‘looking for the diamonds.’ Alec looked around, startled.

  ‘And did you find them?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Duffy, taking an appreciative though dainty sip, an old man kind of sip, from his tumbler. ‘I knew she wouldn’t have sold them. She loved them, you know. Really loved them. The Duffy diamonds. I think they were the only reason she married me.’

  I took a gulp from my glass. I abhor whisky, and can usually only choke it down with a great deal of very cold water. In fact, I think it’s best to do what the Americans do – ice, lemon and soda – but Hugh will not hear of it. I shuddered as it spread through me, the liquid setting me on fire all the way to my stomach and the fumes rising up and coming out of my nose. I can well believe cars can go for miles on the stuff if the petrol runs out.

  From the table beside him, Mr Duffy lifted a small stout chest and passed it to me. It was plain mahogany with silver hasps and a silver crest worn with polishing in the middle of the lid. He waved at me to open it. Inside, bedded snugly in velvet nests, were more cases, lizard skin this time I thought, six lizard skin cases from a huge bulbous one in the middle, to a tiny one like a bread bun, almost too small to support the elaborate hinges. I noticed the scuff marks and the snags in the soft silver of the locks. One by one, I opened the lids.

  The stone in the centre of the necklace caught the sunlight and made me blink. People called it pear-shaped; ‘a pear-shaped blue-white diamond’ was how it was always described in the society pages when it was worn at Court, but I thought it looked like a quail’s egg. It was blue-white, even against the faded pinkish silk of its case, and the light skipping off it was as cold and as sharp as icicles. Two more of the same stones in the earrings, three in the headdress, then the small ones in rings and bracelets, all looking like little nubs and chips and crystals of ice. They were mesmerizing, quite breath-taking the way they seemed to hum and shimmer with light. But hard on that thought a voice in my head said: two lives lost. Pink cheeks, brown eyes, red blood, all lost while these blue-white stones glittered on and on.

  ‘She loved them so much,’ said Mr Duffy. I closed the cases and shut the lid of the chest. ‘I should have been warned right then. No one who can feel real love for something as useless as a diamond could possibly be a wife. Or a mother. You only have to look at Clemence to see that a mother with that kind of flaw is a dangerous thing. She passes it on in the blood and then she teaches the child that there is nothing wrong with it and so any check that there might have been is missing.’ He swirled his glass around and st
ared down into it.

  ‘Of course I could have been the check, but all I thought about was my beloved girl. And Clemence turned out as cold as her mother before her. Not a bad girl – hard to like, you know, very proper, very concerned about right and wrong – but nothing really bad about her.’

  He fell silent again and then roused himself with a brave smile that it hurt to see.

  ‘Nothing can bring her back,’ he said. ‘I realize that I am quite alone now, but still I want to know what happened. It’s clear that Lena was planning to kill poor Mrs Esslemont that day if you had not arrived in time. That in itself does not surprise me, but I don’t know why. I want to know why.’

  Alec stared at me and then looked away out of the dusty window and across the gardens, and his message could not have been plainer. I cleared my throat.

  ‘We believe, I’m afraid, that Lena killed her daughter.’

  ‘Cara?’ said Mr Duffy.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I should not be afraid to use her name, I told myself. I should not hide behind ‘her daughter’, ‘your wife’, ‘her sister’, but should speak plainly. ‘Lena used Cara to expose the theft of the diamonds and then planned to kill her to ensure her silence. I know it seems unbelievable –’

  ‘But it doesn’t, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Haven’t you been listening? Lena loved them more than almost anything else in the world and she was quite ruthless. So I am not at all surprised. Anyway, I knew, I suppose. At least, I never believed the fire was an accident. Oh, I did not want any more trouble than I could avoid, certainly did not want a murder trial. With my beloved girl gone, what was the point? All I could do was get rid of the pair of them as far as possible as soon as I could.’

  ‘Was Lena’s intention to go to Canada with Clemence, then?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Not that I cared where she went. I couldn’t cast off Clemence into destitution – it wasn’t her fault who she was and what she was and, as I say, perhaps I should have tried harder not to let her turn into her mother’s child, but by then it was too late.’ He shook himself out of the reverie into which he was sinking. ‘I suppose Daisy Esslemont knew something, then? But how did she get involved?’

  I told him and he listened with no more than a rueful shake of his head.

  ‘Quite ruthless, you see,’ he said. ‘Of course I knew what had happened when Lena started all the nonsense with the cleaning. The jeweller came to me and told me about the pastes and I said to him just to give the things back to Lena and say nothing. Then I quietly stopped paying the insurance premiums, in case she should get greedy. I am surprised at her going after the Esslemonts in particular, though. Why them?’

  ‘We’ve never been able to work that out,’ I said.

  ‘But I’m not surprised in any general sense,’ Mr Duffy went on. ‘She was a greedy, ruthless woman. But not really bad, I don’t think.’

  I wondered how much whisky he had drunk before Alec and I arrived. Even if he did not know the truth yet, how could he say that a woman who had killed her own child in cold blood was not really bad? Perhaps the big gulps of whisky had affected me too, for I was not aware of deciding to speak, but simply found myself speaking.

  ‘She was bad, Gregory. Worse than you yet know. Cara did not die in the fire.’ His head jerked up and I saw a quick leap of hope in his eyes.

  ‘No! I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘she is certainly dead. But Lena killed her in anger, killed her brutally. It almost ruined everything. She was ruthless, you are right to call her so. But there was rage and evil in her too. It’s as though she was two quite different people. She laid all her plans and then just smashed through them as though they were nothing.’ I was speaking without a trace of kindness now. ‘Cara, your beloved girl, is buried in an unmarked grave not a mile from your house in Edinburgh, buried as a servant, given a death certificate full of lies by an idiot of a doctor who cares only about niceties. I’m sorry, Gregory, but Lena was not just greedy and ruthless, she was evil. She must have been, to do such a thing to her child.’

  Gregory shook his head at me, smiling, and I thought once more that he must be drunk.

  ‘Lena would never have harmed her child, Dandy my dear. Lena kill her child? Why, her child was the only living thing in the world she ever loved.’ I stared at him, and felt Alec turn and stare too. Those deep down things were shifting again, bumping gently against each other, making low echoes I had to strain to hear.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ said Gregory. ‘I must start from a long way back, I’m afraid, but it’s the only way to explain.

  ‘We went to Ontario straight after our honeymoon and before we had docked I knew what a mistake I’d made. Of course, no one else knew a thing. As far as anyone was aware, we left in ’99, a happy young couple, and came back five years later a happy family with two little daughters. No. No. The truth was this. I went on a long trip up-country shortly after we got there and when I came back my wife tried to pass off her condition as happy news, but I was not such a fool as all that. I was only a big enough fool to throw myself immediately into the arms of someone else, and so before the year was out we did indeed have two little girls, one hers and one mine, born four months apart.

  ‘If the lady who was Cara’s mother had not died, I might have – I like to think I might have – dared to divorce Lena then. But on my own with a baby girl, all I could think was to make a deal. I should give a name to her brat if she would make a home for mine.

  ‘And so we went on. I wanted to make a family for the girls, but Lena would have none of it. Clemence was hers alone and it was only too plain that all she wanted from me was a share. Her share, she called it. Clemence’s share. Such arrogance. I gave up trying to tell her that she had no right to anything, that Clemence had no call on me, and then I grew stubborn. I stopped discussing it, but I determined that neither Lena nor Clemence would ever see a penny of my money nor an inch of my land. I was going to settle everything on Cara. Oh, I know this place and Culreoch must go through the male line, but they are nothing really, white elephants. Cara would have been a very wealthy woman.

  ‘Lena was incensed, of course. And I should not be surprised if the idea of killing Cara started as long ago as then. I think she had forgotten the details of our arrangement. At any rate, she was shocked that I did not intend to settle anything on Clemence and she blamed that for Clemence’s inability to attract a husband, but I always thought that had more to do with Clemence herself, poor thing. Lena wasn’t supposed to tell her that I was not her father – we agreed that neither of the girls would know – but I think she must have. Certainly she managed to stamp out any chance of affection between us. She spent her entire life bringing Clemence up and it’s a dangerous thing for a child – too much devotion, and a constant drip-drip of hints that she’d been wronged – it turned her out so prim, but with no real goodness underneath.

  ‘Towards the end of the war, Lena came to me and said that since Cara was to have everything else, was I really going to split up the diamonds and hand Cara a share of them too? Didn’t I see it made more sense for all of them to come to Lena and thence to Clemence in time? I laughed, and she didn’t understand why I was laughing. I asked her what on earth made her think that she and Clemence would have any of my diamonds? I can still remember her face. It was as though I had told her the sky was the ground and the ground was the sky. She loved them so much, you see, so much, that the idea that they were not hers was quite unthinkable.’

  What he was saying made perfect sense, but what a sorry, silly little mess it was. Surely they could have done better than that. Could not Gregory have broken through the walls Lena put up between him and Clemence? Could he not have seen that his devotion to Cara, while it bathed his own daughter in warmth and light, did Clemence damage? I could well believe that Lena had spent her life pouring poison into Clemence and twisting her little mind into horrid shapes, and although I had never thought it before, I could see he was right about what lay behin
d the mask – prim, cold piousness – but if all Gregory had ever given her was his name he was as much to blame.

  ‘And you see now, don’t you, Dandy my dear, why I say Lena is not actually as bad as all that. There was something wrong with her somewhere deep down, something missing where the rest of us keep our morals, but harm her own child? She would never have done that. That, perhaps, is the only thing she and I shared. We each of us would have gone to the ends of the earth for our girls. We each of us would forgive any wrong.’ He shook his head and spoke even more softly. ‘The only thing we had in common. We loved our little girls.’

  The three of us sat in silence for a while until, the sun having moved behind a tree on the lawn, the room started to feel chilly and my toes sticking out of their plaster cast in their little sock began to nip with cold.

  ‘So Alec,’ said Gregory, in a brisker tone, ‘it is yours for the taking. All of it. And please don’t spend your life in mourning. I should like to think of this place ringing with children’s footsteps, even if they are not to be Cara’s children after all. The Edinburgh house you will probably sell, I expect. Terribly dull kind of a life for a young woman, and I don’t expect that you will feel the same compulsion as I did to keep your wife dull and quiet for fear of what she would do if you let her have her head. Choose wisely, when the time comes.’

  ‘I hope, sir,’ said Alec gallantly, squirming a little, ‘to be an old man myself before any of this becomes a matter of concern.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you will be disappointed then,’ said Gregory, in the same brusque voice. ‘I have nothing left now and I have no intention of going on. I’m an old man anyway, but however short my time is it’s too long to spend missing my girl and thinking of all the things I could have done better. I shan’t do it here, of course, or anywhere else that will make a mess and a fuss for you, but you must prepare yourself for it soon.’ After a long pause, he spoke again. ‘I would like to see her grave, though. I would like that very much.’ And then, businesslike and chilling: ‘Alec, let’s you and I meet at the cemetery at ten tomorrow morning and you can take me to see her grave.’