Letter To My Love

by Elizabeth Cadell

  She paused and then went on in a heavy, monotonous voice.

  “When you came down to Spenders,” she said, “and told me that Corinne was dead, I was feeling ill, because Lotty had just given me her shattering piece of news, and it had lodged itself in my head and was battering and battering until I thought I was going mad. Paul was not Geoffrey Summerhill’s son. That was a staggering thing to have to believe, but beyond it there was something else—the letter. Lotty had lost a letter…a letter from Paul’s father. When you told me that, I felt a sort of…I felt absolutely convinced that Mrs. Tennant had found it. She had found it and she had read it. It explained everything that had happened on the day she died.

  “And then—I was left remembering the day before she died. I remembered that I had told Grant, who was at Spenders that week-end, that I couldn’t find the papers his mother wanted — papers that had something to do with Geoffrey Summerhill. I remembered Grant’s telling me that I’d been looking in the wrong places — the papers wouldn’t be among his mother’s, or his, papers, but among Lotty’s.

  He was right. The papers were there. I put them into a long envelope and I put the envelope on Mrs. Tennant’s breakfast tray along with her other letters. Had I by some terrible chance put Lotty’s letter into the envelope by mistake? Had the letter been among the papers or had I missed it? I didn’t think so; there were only two or three documents and a paper or two; I’d opened everything to make sure that the documents were the correct ones. I didn’t see a letter, but . . . could that be the explanation? Had I, without knowing it, given away Lotty’s secret?

  “It was a terrible thought. But not so terrible as what was to come. Because”—she was staring across the room and she had ceased to address Claire—“because later, when Claire came down, she told me that Corinne was dead, and she told me that Corinne had had the letter and that Richard had guessed, and Richard had got it. And then, without any warning, she told me what the letter was like. A thin blue sheet. A single thin blue sheet. And then I knew I’d seen the letter. And I knew where.”

  The room was very still.

  “And in the end, I knew that I had to tell Claire. Loving you, she’ll understand as I understand. She’ll forgive, as I do. But she has to know that it wasn’t I who looked for those papers in Lotty’s desk. It was you. And when you brought them to me, I looked through them, and checked them, and then you said—Oh God, why did I have to remember? — you said you would put them into an envelope. And so I gave you the papers, and if you’d put them into an envelope straight away, I would never have known. But you didn’t. You must have fought it off for a little while. It wasn’t until you were leaving the house that night that you made up your mind—and I don’t know whether it was God’s hand, or the devil’s, that took me into your mother’s study at the moment that you put the papers into a long envelope, that let me see you put in with the papers a thin, single blue sheet folded in half. You sealed the envelope, and I thought it natural at the time. Perhaps it seemed even more natural afterwards, when I understood. You thought your mother ought to know, and you took the only way you knew of telling her. You thought it was wrong to have deceived her—and so you let her read the letter. You couldn’t know, you didn’t know what it would do to her—or what she would do to us. You’d forgotten the Puritan streak in her. You acted without thought for anybody but your mother, who had been deceived, and Claire will forgive you. Dear Grant, Claire had to know.”

  She paused, and her eyes went round the room as though she could not remember where she was. Then they came to rest on Claire, and she spoke to her quietly.

  “You said that Richard had gone to the hospital three nights ago, between half past seven and eight. He didn’t. He couldn’t have been at the hospital because he was at Spenders with Lotty and with Ronnie Pierce and myself. He—”

  “It was Grant,” said Mrs. Marston, “who went to the hospital. When Richard sent for me the next morning, and told me that he wanted to see Miss Remington, he said that he had not been there the night before. I believed him, but it was easy enough to prove. I sent for the doorman, and he gave a description of the man he had seen. But I think,” she ended gently, “you guessed that it must have been Grant.”

  “He had to have the letter.” Mrs. Peel addressed her in a voice of desperate appeal. “Don’t you see? All he wanted to do when he first read Lotty’s letter was to end what he must have seen as a wicked conspiracy against his mother. When he realized what effect it had had on her, his one idea was to…to make amends. He offered—Claire knows that he offered—to Lotty and Pierre and myself—everything his mother had promised. He gave up the house because he couldn’t bear the terms under which he had inherited it. He was going away, leaving the house, leaving England. All he wanted to do was forget. But there was the letter.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Marston said. “There was the letter.”

  “We had given up … I had given up any hope of ever finding out the truth about the letter I saw Mrs. Tennant reading . . . until Claire mentioned an old lady in hospital and seemed to think that she had some connection with us. I found myself wondering afterwards whether…it didn’t seem likely to lead to anything, but if it was Corinne . . . When Grant got in touch with me, I reminded him of what Claire had said, and asked him if he thought . . . But he said there was no use reopening the business of the letter—and so I put it out of my mind. But you can see that Grant might go on wondering—and might try to get Lotty’s letter back. You mustn’t blame him too much for going to see Corinne” — she turned beseechingly to Claire — “you mustn’t blame him for giving Richard’s name. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I understand,” Claire said.

  “He never,” Mrs. Peel said, “did a mean or a bad thing in his life. But he couldn’t bear to see his mother . . . couldn’t you call it Victimized?”

  “You could,” Claire said.

  “I wanted to tell you everything, and that’s why I came here. If you love people, Claire, you can forgive them.”

  “Yes,” Claire agreed. “You can.”

  She got suddenly to her feet, and went blindly towards the door and out of the room.

  She went towards the staircase, and then turned away. There was only one room in the house into which problems, never entered. There was only one person in the house protected, sheltered from conflict and mental stress and unhappiness.

  She knocked on her father’s door and entered the silent, sunny room. Here, nothing would touch her. For a little while, she would be isolated, insulated from the trouble and confusion that lay outside.

  “Have you,” her father asked, “come to read to me?”

  “If you like, darling. What shall I read?”

  “There isn’t much choice. One of those library books is in the form of letters, and the other is about horses.”

  Claire chose the horses, and sat down to read.

  Chapter 10

  “Richard knew,” Claire said.

  “Yes, he knew,” said Mrs. Marston.

  It was quiet in the green and white bedroom. Claire, sitting on the window seat, looked out and watched the sun sending a last glow over the shadowed sea. The sky was pale pink; across it lay smudges of cloud. The sea, still restless after the morning’s wind, turned green and then grey. The sky darkened and the sails of little ships scudding homewards looked like paths faintly marked on a hilly road.

  Mrs. Marston, sitting on the bed, looked almost beautiful in the soft light. Claire turned to speak to her.

  “You knew,” she said, “that morning in the hospital. You knew, and you let me believe that Richard—”

  “All I knew then, Claire, was that Richard hadn’t forced his way into her room. He knew nothing about it until he called at the hospital next morning—and ran into trouble. The doorman wasn’t on duty, but his name was enough. He was told that his intrusion of the evening before had had a very serious effect on the patient. He guessed she was dying. He left the hospital a
nd went to the nearest telephone and asked me to meet him. I was, he said, to say nothing to anyone. When I got to the hospital, he was waiting. He said that he had not been there the evening before; the only proof necessary was to send for the doorman, who said at once that he had never seen Richard before. He described the man he had seen, and Richard and I both knew it was Grant. But I was still afraid to let him into the room; if she saw anybody in her weak state who upset her, I would be answerable for the consequences. So he asked me to take her a message—and I did. She wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it was Richard; she had to send another message, to make sure. When he went in, she . . . she didn’t have long, but he made that last hour happy for her. She died in his arms.”

  “And you knew all that, and you let me...”

  “I promised Richard I would say nothing. He loved Grant, and he loved you and he wanted you both to be happy. He told me what Mrs. Peel told us both in the drawing-room today—that Grant had never done a mean or a wrong action in his life, and that he acted as he did only because he was horrified at finding out that young Paul was not Geoffrey Summerhill’s son, nothing to do with Geoffrey, and had no claim to the affection his mother had lavished on him.”

  “You knew I didn’t love Grant.”

  “I was almost sure you didn’t. I was almost sure you loved Richard—but how could I be quite sure? I knew that he loved you—but how could I be sure that you hadn’t been . . . swept off your feet? When I met him, saw his strength and charm and force and compared them with Grant’s hesitations and weakness, I tried to warn you; I told you to keep away from him. I felt it was impossible for you to go on seeing him for long without growing to love him as he loved you. And when I saw you look at Richard over poor Corinne’s body, look at him with horror, how could I be sure that any feeling you had for him would survive? I’m used to responsibility, heavy responsibility, but I’m not prepared to take the responsibility of telling a man that a woman loves him without seeing more proof of it than you showed that morning. Besides which, I felt that you were old enough to work the thing out for yourself; you’re a woman of twenty-six and not a girl of sixteen. And lastly, I’m not your mother; I’m merely your stepmother.”

  Claire stared out once more over the darkening sea.

  “Do you believe,” she asked slowly, without turning, “that Grant acted on his mother’s behalf?”

  The pause that followed was so long that she turned.

  “Well?”

  “You knew him and I didn’t,” said Mrs. Marston. “You can make up your own mind. Richard believed in him. He said that Grant shouldn’t be made to pay too highly for what he did.”

  “It depends, doesn’t it, on what his motives were?”

  “You’re not suggesting that he was jealous of young Paul?”

  “I’m not suggesting he was jealous of anybody—but I’m not prepared to accept the theory that he acted on impulse. Mrs. Peel said that he found the letter in the morning, with the papers in Lotty’s desk. He kept it all that day and didn’t put it into the envelope until he left the house that evening. Is that impulsive?”

  “No, but—”

  “And I think that when he decided to let his mother see that letter, he wasn’t thinking of young Paul. He wasn’t thinking of anybody. He was only thinking about the house.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then let me explain,” continued Claire. “That morning—the day before Mrs. Tennant changed her Will and died—Richard had been at Spenders. He wasn’t there long; he had a quarrel with Mrs. Tennant and left the house. The quarrel was over Lotty. Mrs. Tennant told him two things: that she had got rid of Ronnie Pierce, who had wanted to marry Lotty, and that she intended leaving Lotty—probably in trust for Paul — a share in the house. If she told Richard that, she certainly told Grant. And Grant realized for the first time that the house he loved so much would—might—never be wholly his. When his mother died, he and I wouldn’t be able to live there and bring up our children there—or if we did, we wouldn’t be able to have the whole of the house.”

  “He could have bought Lotty’s share.”

  “You never saw Lotty’s part of the house, and you don’t know Lotty. As Grant saw it, there she was, settled for ever. As Grant saw it, his mother would and could get rid of any man who ever came after Lotty—because if she lost Lotty, she lost Lotty’s little boy. I can see—can’t you?—that at her age, he meant a lot. Grant would marry and perhaps be lost to her in the way they say sons are lost when they marry—but Paul would grow up in her house and she would probably be dead long before the time came for him to marry and go away. The share in the house was a bribe for Lotty, and Grant must have visualized her settling down at Spenders for ever, taking more and more rooms for her pictures, growing more and more difficult to get rid of, or to buy out.”

  “And then, you’re going to say, he found that letter, and saw a way out?”

  “Yes. He hadn’t the imagination to see what effect the letter would have on his mother—but he hadn’t forgotten her Puritan streak. He not only remembered it—he was banking on it. His mother would—he thought—read the letter, and that would be the end of Lotty.”

  “And young Paul?”

  “What did that matter? He could, he undoubtedly would make ample provision for Paul’s future. All that mattered, all that would happen was that Lotty would have to go. And if she went, she would in all probability go to Ronnie Pierce, marry him, and give her son a good home and a good background. And room for all his animals. But Mrs. Tennant read the letter, and you know the rest. And when Grant went to the hospital, he didn’t go because he wanted to get the letter in order to guard or to preserve Lotty’s secret; he simply wanted to make sure that nobody would ever know what he had done.”

  “But you said yourself that he couldn’t know how his mother would react to—”

  “Are you on Richard’s side, or on Grant’s?”

  “Perhaps on Grant’s. Richard has so much. He has strength and confidence and a clear mind, and happy childhood memories, and lightness of heart. He loves you, but he had, and always will have a life of his own apart from you. But Grant...”

  Tears began to course down Claire’s cheeks, but she ignored them.

  “Grant had health,” she said, “and money, and a good job — and a woman who loved him.”

  “A mother he was afraid of, and a house he thought he would never own, never be his and yours and your children’s. So in a moment of weakness, he—”

  “It wasn’t weakness. It was the only strong thing he ever did. He could be strong—under cover. If he had succeeded this time, he—”

  “He wasn’t,” her stepmother reminded her gently, “a very proficient villain, Claire. Everything he did was”-

  “There’s always a first time. If it had succeeded, if it had come off, if it had paid off, Lotty would have been turned out and so would her son, and nobody would have known how Mrs. Tennant had found out, and he would have realized that cunning was a good enough substitute for courage.”

  “But even before he was found out—”

  “His plan went wrong, and he lost his nerve. He thought his mother would use a pruning knife, and she used a scythe. She mowed them all down. He got the house, but in reaching something down off the shelf, he’d pulled down a lot of other things and they’d fallen on him and hurt him.”

  “You’re less generous than Richard.”

  “You told me once before,” Claire said unsteadily, “that I was hard. You talked about forgetting. What you forget is that when I . . . when I said what I did, I was standing beside the bed of an old woman whose death I believed to have been hastened, or caused, by Richard. I had to face the fact that I had fallen in love with a man who was a liar and a cheat. So I faced it. And after facing it, I knew that I still loved him—but that I had to put him out of my mind. I didn’t love Grant, but I thought I could help him, be happy with him. Is it being hard to decide, after this, that I can’t marry hi
m and can’t be happy with him? I’m not judging. I’m not condemning. I’m only too glad, too happy, to know that Richard is . . . is . . .” She paused to steady her voice. “Richard knew Grant. I didn’t. I fell in love with Grant because he was the first man I ever met who presented passion in an acceptable form. I wanted a man, I wanted marriage, I wanted children. But I wanted them on a basis I could handle. I thought I could do without passion—until I met Richard. I was never really in love—until I met Richard. You . . . you shouldn’t have let him go away.”

  “I’ve told you why I let him go.”

  “Will he come back?”

  “No,” Mrs. Marston replied. “He won’t come back.” There was a pause.

  “In that case”—Claire spoke calmly and with finality “I shall go to him.”

  Chapter 11

  There was a sense of adventure in arriving at an airport, for the first time, without a ticket. There was something of change and interest in applying for a seat on the Paris plane, in being asked to wait, in learning after a prolonged interval that there was a vacant place. There was wonder in watching the weighing of her luggage, not, as on previous air journeys, a matter for anxiety on the score of overweight. It was difficult to believe that the small suitcase was her sole piece of luggage. It was fantastic to realize that she was at London Airport, aged twenty-six, and for the first time in her life travelling on her own initiative, with nobody to see her off—and nobody to meet her on arrival.

  She had no plan, other than to reach Paris. He was there, and Lotty had given her two addresses; if he wasn’t at his office, he would be at his flat. There was very little to be said. She loved him, she did not love Grant, she was not going to marry Grant. The rest could be said, or not said, by Richard. If the moment in the car had been for him, as for her, a shifting of the entire structure of life, there would perhaps be nothing more to say.