Every Secret Thing

by Susanna Kearsley

  There was no wren in the yew tree today; no sign of life within the quiet churchyard. I passed a freshly mounded grave, as yet unmarked, on which the flowered offerings had already begun to fade and wither, and I stood and looked at them a moment before wandering on through the wind-feathered grass to a lonelier spot in the churchyard’s north corner.

  Andrew Deacon didn’t have a headstone either, yet. Maybe he’d never have one, now, I thought. His nephew, the last of his family, was no longer around to arrange things. I supposed that it didn’t much matter, in the greater scheme of things, whether you had a headstone or not – when you were dead, you were dead. But still, it didn’t seem quite right for someone to have lived a life and then to…well, just disappear, with nothing left to show where they had been.

  I thought I was alone, until a man’s voice asked, behind me, ‘Can I help you?’

  The vicar of St Stephen’s was in gardening gloves this afternoon, a San Francisco 49ers baseball cap pulled low to shade his eyes. He’d been pruning a shrub or a hedge, something spiny, and carried a bunch of the branches in one hand, the shears in the other. He looked at my face as I turned, and I saw his polite friendliness give way to recognition. ‘It’s Miss Murray, isn’t it? Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been battling a hedge at the back of the church. Not my thing, really, gardening. I’ve a friend who’s an absolute wizard at it – born with green fingers, he was. I just dabble.’ He set down the branches and stripped off one glove, looking pleased. ‘Well, this is quite a lucky meeting. I had hoped you’d come back. I’ve been having a devil of a time trying to find your address, you know. Your newspaper said they weren’t sure where you were…’

  ‘I’ve been travelling,’ I said, and would have asked him why that mattered when he cheerfully cut in, ‘A good thing that I didn’t post that package to you, then. Can you wait here a minute? I’ll just run across and fetch it.’ And then, in case I thought him rude, ‘I’d ask you to the house for tea, only my wife’s having one of her meetings, and they can get rather fierce. I stay well clear of them, myself.’ He smiled, not looking the slightest bit clerical. ‘Won’t be a minute.’

  He took a bit longer than that, but not much. ‘Here you are,’ he said, holding out an old-fashioned document storage box, its corners reinforced with yellowed tape. ‘I know I wasn’t any help to you in finding that report that you were after, or anything having to do with Ivan Reynolds, but after we spoke on the phone last I did find this. Most of Andrew’s things were sold at auction, you understand, but my wife had her eye on this rather nice night-table – mahogany…she’s partial to mahogany – and so she managed to persuade the auctioneer to let her have it, straight out of the house, for a price. It had three drawers, all full. This,’ he said, and handed me the box, ‘was in the bottom one.’

  I held the box and frowned. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Newspaper cuttings, mostly. Some photographs. My wife and I, we thought that it should properly belong to you.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘It’s yours by rights.’

  I didn’t understand. I dropped my gaze to Deacon’s grave.‘I don’t have any claim, you know, to anything he owned. We only met the once.’

  He was looking at me curiously, quiet. Then he said, ‘Sometimes the once is all it takes.’

  I raised my head.

  He smiled. ‘I believe there are no random meetings in our lives – that everyone we touch, who touches us, has been put in our path for a reason. The briefest encounter can open a door, or heal a wound, or close a circle that was started long before your birth…you never know.’ He gave a small shrug, bending to retrieve his armful of branches and the garden shears. ‘You’ll understand,’ he promised, ‘when you’ve had a chance to go through that.’

  I looked where he had nodded, at the box held in my hands, but as tempted as I was to lift the lid, I knew that this was not the time or place. Not here, with Nick still sitting watching from the van, outside the churchyard. So I told the vicar, ‘Thank you. It was kind of you to keep this for me.’ Then I asked, ‘Did all his art collection sell at auction, too?’

  ‘Yes, I sent all the paintings up to Sotheby’s, you see, because I knew Andrew had dealt in art for years, and I have no idea, myself, of value. Couldn’t tell a Rembrandt from a reproduction, if my life depended on it. One of the paintings, I’m told, sold for quite an outrageous amount, to an American, bidding by telephone. Andrew,’ he concluded, ‘must have had an expert eye for art.’

  Oh, well, I thought. So much for my idea of buying the windmill painting. It would have been nice to have owned it, a kind of connection with Deacon, and all that I’d learnt about what had gone on, but the painting was no longer here, to be bought.

  Looking down, I asked, to change the subject, ‘Will he have a headstone?’

  ‘Andrew? Strange as it may sound, he didn’t want one. Left express instructions, in his will. He never was the sort to call attention to himself.’

  And so in death, as in his life, I mused, the man remained invisible.

  The vicar, watching my reaction, said, ‘I don’t suppose he thought there’d be too many people coming here to look for him, with all his family gone. He’d have been pleased, I think, to know that he was wrong, to see you standing here.’ And then, as if remembering he still had work to do, he smiled again and asked me to excuse him. ‘Good luck to you, Miss Murray,’ was the way he chose to say goodbye. ‘Take care.’

  The churchyard felt a colder place when he had gone. I hugged my arms around the box he’d given me, and, looking down one final time at Andrew Deacon’s grave, I turned and slowly made my way between the silent headstones to the lychgate, and the waiting van.

  I was alone when I opened the box.

  I don’t know what I had expected I would find. Newspaper clippings, the vicar had said, and some photographs. My mind, I supposed, had been stuck in one track for so long it had simply assumed that it would all be somehow linked to what had happened all those years ago in Portugal. So when I finally lifted up the lid and saw what actually was in there, I was not at all prepared.

  The clippings – photocopies of clippings, actually, with the stamped name of a clipping service marked in every corner – had been stacked in reverse chronological order, so the first one, on top, had the most recent date. It also had my byline – the first piece I’d written on the trial from London, in September. Beneath it was another of my articles, from Paris, and another, and another… Not, by any means, the comprehensive body of my work, but a pretty fair sampling.

  It felt strange, to be leafing through the clippings, and to know that Andrew Deacon had been following my progress since I’d started with the Sentinel; that he’d actually paid a service to keep track of my articles, and copy them, and send them to him.

  And it had gone beyond my own work, my own newspaper. Descending through the stack, I found the notice of my college graduation, from a different paper, and my father’s death; my mother’s death, my birth, my parent’s marriage – the entire history of my life, played briefly, in reverse. But it was not my life, alone. Here was my grandfather’s obituary, and my father’s birth announcement, and, at last, on genuine newsprint, flaking and yellowed, the marriage of my grandparents.

  Beneath that, in a jumble, were mementos.

  A programme from the Broadway musical Oklahoma!; the ticket stubs from that performance; the paper menu from a restaurant; matchboxes; a handkerchief, that smelt of roses, faintly, when I raised it to my face.

  And then, as promised by the vicar, photographs.

  The prints were small, the kind that people used to take with those little Brownie box cameras, but each, to me, was like a jewel. My grandmother, in New York City – young, and laughing, arms outstretched against the New York skyline in a wide embrace of life. She was alone in all the pictures. Deacon must have been behind the camera, playing the infatuated honeymooning husband, taking snapshots of his bride in front of all the major city sights, like a
ny other tourist.

  These would doubtless, with the Broadway programme and the other keepsakes, have been part of Deacon’s cover; something to keep with him in case anybody searched his things in Lisbon.

  And yet, I thought, he’d kept them all these years, long after they could be of any use. It wasn’t just a question of remembering my grandmother; he’d kept these bits of her preserved as though their marriage had been real, as though the family he’d kept track of in the newspapers, year after year, with all those careful clippings laid aside, had been his own.

  I took the final item from the box – a folded leather picture frame, the kind meant to stand freely on a tabletop or desk, with a solid book-like cover that flipped open to reveal the photo mounted on the inside. Something warned me, as my fingers raised the cover, what the photograph would be, but even so it stole my breath.

  The wedding photograph. My grandmother and Deacon. And so, at last, the shadow at my shoulder had a face. Not the face as I had seen it in September, but the youthful one by which, perhaps, a person ought most properly to be remembered. My grandmother had said he was an ordinary-looking man until one saw his eyes, and I agreed. His eyes were pale, intelligent, his best and strongest feature. For a long time I sat silently, intent on studying the image that for so long had eluded me, determined to commit to memory everything about him: how his hair waved, and the way he smiled; the angle of his chin.

  And then my eyes came back to his, and stayed there.

  ‘Hello, Mr Deacon,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’

  It was closure, of a kind. But still, I knew the journey wasn’t over yet.

  I set the photograph beside my bed, that night. They’d come this far with me, my grandmother and Deacon. I could only hope they’d give me strength to do what I knew needed to be done.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Home

  The night is gone;

  And with the morn those angel faces smile

  Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

  JOHN NEWMAN, ‘LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT’

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11

  There was very little left to mark the site. In fact, as I took the turning south towards the lake and found myself surrounded on all sides by low stretching industrial buildings, I nearly thought I’d got it wrong…and then, beyond the buildings to my right, I saw the flags – four flags, unfurled against a sky that had been growing greyer as I’d travelled eastward.

  This was it, I thought. I slowed the car.

  The road curved, and the buildings on my right gave way to open space – a small green rise of hill, and on its top a low-walled concrete monument, not large, that held the four tall flagpoles with their emblems of the Province of Ontario, and Canada, and Britain, and the States, all set at half-mast. I was very near the water now. I could tell from the strength of the wind as it slapped the flags around and rippled up the grassy hill to where a sign, in plain black letters, read ‘Intrepid Park’.

  It didn’t look like much of a park – only the unassuming monument, and a few young maple trees with trunks so slender they seemed scarcely able to withstand the bursts of wind that shook the leaves like something wild.

  But I wasn’t the only pilgrim. A Canadian Forces bus had blocked the driveway of one of the industrial buildings, and mine was the last in a long line of cars that had parked at the edge of the road. Still, the little assembly of people beneath the four flags looked quite small, I thought. More like a gathering of family than a formal Remembrance Day ceremony. I felt conspicuous as, head bent to the driving wind, I climbed the gently rising hill towards the monument.

  No one paid me any real attention. Most of the people were busy talking amongst themselves, some obviously politicians, working the crowd with their handshakes and smiles. There seemed to be a scarcity of old men, and old women – that struck me straight away. I counted only a scattered handful of them, most wearing uniforms and ribboned bands of medals, sitting quietly on metal folding chairs that had been set in rows for those who found it difficult to stand. The people around them were younger, respectful in dark coats with red plastic poppies pinned through their lapels, or dressed in military uniform, without a coat, and shivering against the cold.

  There was no shelter on the hill. The modest monument’s low wall had been shaped as a long open crescent, like arms spread to embrace the slate-blue water of Lake Ontario that stretched away unbroken to the stormy grey horizon.

  Just a half-hour’s drive to the west lay Toronto. There, the lake was more civilised, reflecting back the bright lights of the cultured city skyline, with the small bit of well-controlled green that was Toronto Island lying just off shore. But here, at the southernmost boundary of Whitby, the lake had no such pretensions. It looked icy and forbidding, chopped up by the wind into frothy white waves over which seagulls dipped and hung, shrieking.

  The landscape looked forbidding, too. Where the little park ended at the bottom of the hill, the rough ground began – dead brown grass tipped with gold and the odd tenacious patch of green, split by a narrow bicycle path that came from the fields ringed by woods to the right. Beyond the bicycle path there was nothing but scrub brush that fell off abruptly as though there were bluffs or a cliff at the lake’s edge.

  It was a lonely place. And yet today, Remembrance Day, these people round me had all made the journey, as I had, to stand here in this spot above a long-abandoned site, now turned to blowing field.

  There was movement from the monument. The soldiers of the vigil were about to take up their position. Soberly, they stepped forward from the ranks, two of them, each moving to one end of the curved monument. A few sharp, barked commands, and measured motions made in unison, and both were soon like statues, heads bent, rifle barrels resting on their polished boots. They’d stay like that, I knew, the whole length of the ceremony. Motionless.

  Between them, I could see a plaque set in the centre of the wall. I couldn’t read the words from where I stood, but then I didn’t need to. I’d already done my research. I knew what was written there. It read:

  CAMP X

  1941–1946

  ON THIS SITE BRITISH SECURITY COORDINATION OPERATED SPECIAL TRAINING SCHOOL NO. 103 AND HYDRA. S.T.S. 103 TRAINED ALLIED AGENTS IN THE TECHNIQUES OF SECRET WARFARE FOR THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE (S.O.E.) BRANCH OF THE BRITISH INTELLIGENCE SERVICE.

  HYDRA NETWORK COMMUNICATED VITAL MESSAGES BETWEEN CANADA, THE UNITED STATES, AND GREAT BRITAIN.

  THIS COMMEMORATION IS DEDICATED TO THE SERVICE OF THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO TOOK PART IN THESE OPERATIONS.

  I turned again, letting my gaze travel out across the windy, unkempt field to where the line of dark trees rose to block the view across the lake. Somewhere down there, in a building long gone, in this place full of silence and secrets, my grandmother had first met Andrew Deacon.

  Now there was nothing, just the shadows of dark snow clouds chasing over empty space, and overhead a single gull with black-tipped wings that rose and wheeled and headed out across the lake like an escaping spirit.

  The flags above my head flapped noisily, their cords and metallic rings striking the tall flagpoles with the hollow clinking sound of cold aluminum. The sound wrenched me back to the present.

  The service began.

  It was simple, short on speeches, just the solitary bugle and a reading from the military pastor, who had chosen as his text a passage I had never heard, from the Apocrypha, beginning ‘Let us now praise famous men.’ The words were fitting, bittersweet: ‘And some there are who left a name behind, to be commemorated in story. And there are others who are unremembered; they are dead, and it is as though they never did exist…’

  I thought of Deacon, in his grave without a headstone; of his grey and faceless presence that had haunted me so long. Not faceless now, I thought. Deliberately, I closed my eyes to conjure up his image from the photograph, his smile, his eyes.

  And then, as if in answer to my effort and my mood, the readi
ng changed. Another voice, the younger voice of one of the cadets, read out the words of Binyon’s proud ‘Prayer for the Fallen’:

  ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.’

  I opened my eyes. The sun, on cue, broke through the clouds at just that moment, falling warm upon my frozen back like a comforting hand, and casting long shadows across the dead grass at the feet of the uniformed young men and women standing still, in ranks, before the monument. And for one brief minute, to my eyes, those shadows made a second army – ghosts who stood at fixed attention in between the living bodies, silent and aware.

  I hadn’t been to a Remembrance Day service since I was a child. I didn’t know that Binyon’s poem called for a response; so it surprised me when it came, from those few older men and women in the crowd, from those old soldiers, standing straighter now than anyone around them, their scattered voices finding strength: ‘We will remember them.’

  I very nearly said, ‘Amen.’ But I stayed silent, while the clouds came back. The shadows melted on the ground. The soldiers of the vigil stirred, becoming human once again. The people round me stirred, as well, and broke off into small groups, chatting, huddled in the cold.

  I looked across the empty, blowing field, and tried again to see it as my Grandma Murray had described it: the gate, and the checkpoint; the transmitter tower; the huts and the buildings; the commandant’s comfortable office. But even my imagination couldn’t fill the gaps. It was a field, and nothing more. I remembered her saying, ‘I’ve never been back. Never even had a look at it. It wouldn’t be the same.’