by Burke, John
They walked along the level stretch of grass below the main windows. Out on the skyline a tanker hung apparently motionless while blobs of cloud outdistanced it. Three blue sails twisted and darted past the end of the bluff and across the bay.
Martin’s hand gripped her arm and slowed her. “Careful.”
A few yards away the orderly pattern of the terraces was broken. A small fissure in the ground ran from the windbreak of trees beside the hotel, widening until it formed a great gash. The flowerbeds at the foot of the slope had collapsed into the miniature abyss.
“We didn’t have an earthquake last night, did we?” said Brigid. “Or was it just one of your guests, throwing one of your home-made cakes out of the window?”
“Better not let Mum hear you say that.”
They approached the edge of the gash. It was not deep, but the raggedness of the splintered stone gave it the appearance of an ugly wound. Brigid thoughtfully prodded a lump of soil forward with her foot and watched it separate and trickle down a few inches of raw, newly exposed rock. She shivered. It was as bad as forcing dirt into scratched, bleeding flesh.
She said: “This isn’t going to get any worse, is it?”
“We hope not. Don’t want our only capital to disappear into the earth.”
“Faults are always opening up along the coast. They don’t usually split more than a few inches.”
“Don’t breathe on it, anyway,” said Martin. “Come away.”
He took her hand and coaxed her away. They kissed. When their lips were parted and close together, the breeze whistled faintly between them. They laughed and turned to face the sea, so that the wind played a moaning tune through their teeth.
“How’s your mother?” asked Brigid.
It was a formality. She asked the question in the expectation of his saying, “All right.” Then they could go on to talk about themselves. And Martin said, “All right.” — but with an intonation that alerted her at once.
She said: “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Has something happened?”
“Nothing. She’s all right.”
“Is she worried about that crack in the cliff?”
He sounded relieved, glad to take advantage of this. “You know how she fusses over every little thing.”
Brigid said: “It is only that, is it?”
“What else could there be?”
She wasn’t going to nag. That was something she had promised herself, and it was one of her unspoken promises to Martin. When they were married she wouldn’t nag and fidget and go on at him. Not about anything at all. And if she wasn’t going to do it when they were married, she mustn’t do it now. But she was upset. There was something he wasn’t telling her. So far she had never been aware of his keeping any secrets from her or avoiding any questions.
Mrs Hemming came round the corner of the hotel.
“Do you want tea, or don’t you?” They went in.
The table in the small sitting room was laid with a glittering white cloth whose ironed folds stood up in small ridges. A large fruit cake stood on a plate at the intersection of the main folds.
“One of yours?” said Brigid appreciatively.
“Hm. One of my failures.”
“It looks lovely.”
“It’s a mess,” said Mrs Hemming unequivocally.
She was a lean woman with sinewy arms and rough, hard-skinned hands. She worked relentlessly and found it hard to talk casually with people who lived different lives from her own. Since the death of her husband in the Korean war she had run the Fernrock Hotel and brought up Martin without help and without complaint. The only subject on which she ever expressed resentment was her husband’s death and even then there was a flourish of contempt for those who hadn’t suffered as she had. “He ought never to have gone. He didn’t have to. He could easily have got out of it, at his age. But he wouldn’t.”
The problems of the hotel and the hundreds of guests who had passed through it over the years had fostered in her a brusque manner that was not so much aggressive as half-challenging: she could let nothing pass unobserved, could not restrain forthright comments when she felt they were deserved, and was incapable of abandoning herself to the pleasures of purely idle conversation. She expected things to go wrong somewhere whenever her back was turned, and was sure — not without reason — that none but herself could be trusted to put them right. Brigid had grown to like her because she was Martin’s mother, because she had such bright grey eyes whose shyness was not often appreciated by others, and because of something honest and appealing in her very awkwardness. Yet each time she came here she also felt afraid. There was always an odd feeling that Mrs Hemming might turn on her and repudiate her.
They started with salmon and cucumber sandwiches, and ate for a while in silence. Martin essayed a smile at Brigid and she knew there was something wrong with it. A minute later she observed that he was glancing at his mother; and Mrs Hemming was resolutely looking at her plate.
Brigid said: “Martin was showing me that fault in the cliff, right through your garden.”
“Hm.”
“After all the trouble you’ve taken over the terraces — it’s a dreadful shame.”
“We’ll have to fence it off. We don’t want people falling in.” Mrs Hemming sounded as though nothing would please her better than the sight of people falling in.
They finished the sandwiches and turned their attention to the cake.
“Let’s see the worst,” said Martin too loudly.
“You’ll do that all right.” His mother sliced angrily through the cake. “I had to leave the oven to go and calm down some fool of a woman who said she’d had a shock from the fire in her room. Lot of rubbish, of course. And I forgot about the cake, and it’s not what it ought to be.”
“None of us are,” said Martin.
Brigid held her plate out. Mrs Hemming put a large slice of cake on it and still did not look directly at her.
Brigid said: “Plenty of bookings for Easter, I suppose?”
“Hm.”
The cake was excellent, but Brigid knew that there would be no point in saying so. She wondered if there had been some sort of argument before she arrived. Something connected with their wedding cake, perhaps — the cake which Mrs Hemming had insisted on making, and about which perhaps she had been as morose and hypercritical as she had been about this fruit cake. Or there might have been a squabble over money. Mrs Hemming was even touchier than Martin on that subject. There had already been one or two outbreaks of bickering over the question of paying for the honeymoon, which Mrs Hemming wanted to take on as her responsibility — though she couldn’t for the life of her understand why they wanted to go off to Malta of all places, when there was so little of it and it was such a way away and probably not nearly as healthy as some nice place in Devon or Cornwall.
Brigid turned resolutely to Martin. She could be as stubborn and determined as Mrs Hemming. She would break up this weird, brooding atmosphere. She said:
“So they’re going to extend the research centre at last.”
“We’ve been yelling for more space for long enough, goodness knows.”
“Daddy’s been asked to tender. He thinks…”
“He can still find time to carry on working, then?” said Mrs Hemming. She glared at a spot halfway between the cake and the edge of her own plate. “It hasn’t put him off his stroke, all this?”
Martin’s head jerked round. “Mum, you know we agreed…”
“It’s a fine thing. A fine thing.” The words sprayed out as though she were uncontrollably coughing up crumbs. “Only three weeks to the wedding, and now this.”
“So that’s what’s been on your mind,” said Brigid.
“There’s no reason why it should be on my mind.”
“Then what’s all the fuss?” Brigid was curt. She had had enough of the twittering of gossip in the town. She had not expected to encounter such hostil
ity here. And if it was here, she wasn’t going to be polite about it.
Mrs Hemming raised her eyes at last, but not in Brigid’s direction. She frowned at Martin as she must have frowned when he was a small boy and had done something naughty. “Those new people who arrived this morning. First thing they asked about was the scandal. All the way from Doncaster, and it was the first thing they wanted to know.”
“Good for trade.” Martin was trying to keep it light. “A much better pull than the pier concert party.”
“Hm. I suppose you think we’d get more bookings for the summer if I put out an advertisement saying my son was going to marry the … well…”
“Well what?” said Martin dangerously, the bantering note gone.
Mrs Hemming dragged Brigid’s half-empty teacup towards her and began to splash tea into it. She slopped a yellow stain on to the clean cloth and for once appeared not to notice or not to care.
She had not answered Martin. He said: “What’s it got to do with Brigid?”
“I’m not saying it’s got anything to do with Brigid.”
“Then why are you so cross with me?” asked Brigid. “Why can’t you speak to me?”
“I’m not cross with you.” Mrs Hemming made a great effort. “I’m sorry. I … oh, it’s all too awful. I never imagined … never…”
There was a tap at the door. The porter, an ageless little Lurgate man with leathery features and yellow teeth, peered timidly in.
“Sorry, Mrs H. Those folk just goin’ — they’d like a word with you. Some mistake on the bill.”
“Mistake?” Mrs Hemming was on her feet immediately. She spared Martin and Brigid a brief nod and then left the room.
She was probably glad to make her escape. Brigid had the impression that she would work off her feelings on the unfortunate porter or even on the departing holidaymakers.
Martin pushed his chair back. “Hell. I’m sorry.”
“What’s the matter with her?” Brigid demanded. “Why is it so awful? What’s it got to do with your mother?”
“Oh, you know how she is.”
“No, I don’t know how she is. Or I don’t understand, anyway. I don’t understand why she’s so worked up about this.”
“Neither do I.”
“You’d think she’d been personally insulted in some way.”
“I know,” said Martin.
“Has she said anything to you?”
“Nothing that makes sense. She’s just … well, upset. She’s always been a bit of a fusspot, bless her.” He came round the table to Brigid and bent over her. His right hand slid under her chin and turned her face to his. “You mustn’t worry. It’s all too stupid. It’s something to talk about in the town, that’s all.”
“And in the hotel, apparently.”
“We don’t get much like it in Lurgate. Not as meaty as this.” He was trying to be flippant, and it wasn’t like him. “It’ll blow over. A few weeks from now some trippers will smash up the pier pavilion, or a speedboat’ll capsize, and they’ll all have something else to talk about. This business will die of its own accord.”
But it was not yet ready to die. Walter Blythe’s ghost, having its fling, was not prepared to lie down so soon.
A few foreign newspapers picked up the story and gave it a few paragraphs. A French illustrated weekly did a feature on mysterious disappearances of the century and wound up with Arthur Johnson’s offer to help anyone connected with the
Blythe family who might still be alive. The immediate result was another surge of telephone calls and letters. ‘I told you so’ was too banal a remark for Kersfield’s liking: he conveyed the same message with a shake of the head.
Early one evening Brigid came in from a two-hour session devoted to the fitting of her wedding-dress. Those two hours had convinced her that she undoubtedly had the most awkward proportions ever bestowed on a female of the human species. Amy, the maid, was fidgeting in the hall, obviously on the look-out for her.
“They’ve been waiting for you, miss. They said you was to go in the minute you got here.”
“They?”
“Your mam and dad, miss. There’s a young man come.”
“Were we expecting a young man?”
“He just rolled up. Asked to see the family.” Amy jiggled from one foot to the other. She was a plump, eager little girl, and when she bobbed to and fro it was like the rocking of a stout wooden doll. She had a surprise to spring and wanted to make the most of it. “Said his name was Blythe.”
It was like an echo which kept bouncing back off every wall in the town. Most echoes jangled away into nothingness after a while. Not this one.
“Blythe?” said Brigid. “Did he say what … who…”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” said Amy regretfully. “But they said you was to go in” — she nodded towards the study door — “just as soon as you came in.”
Nell had expected it to take ten or fifteen minutes at most. Another con trick. Another badly assembled sob story that would fall apart under Arthur’s polite but sceptical questioning.
After the first few minutes she began to realise that this one wasn’t going to collapse all that easily.
The young man was of medium height, only an inch or two taller than Nell herself. He had dark features and deepest, olive eyes, in startling contrast with his bronze hair. Although he had come into the room with an air of diffidence, there was something calculated about it: even when he was sitting down, lithe and graceful in each smallest movement, there was something predatory about him.
“I am Peter Blythe,” he had introduced himself.
The name did not fit his appearance. He was Latin through and through. Yet there was the incongruous hair, and when he spoke it was with only the faintest musical accent.
Arthur settled down to it. “You’re a distant relative of the late Walter Blythe?” The young man smiled a slow, gleaming smile. “I have been distant from England all my life, yes. But I had always known I would come here.”
“I mean that your relationship to Walter Blythe…”
“I am his grandson.”
Nell felt dizzy for a moment. Then her head cleared. This was where the whole business could be wrapped up briefly and conclusively. She waited for Arthur to finish it.
He said: “Walter Blythe had no children, so I don’t quite see how he could have had a grandson.”
“My grandmother did not know, when she left England, that she was pregnant.” He was quite calm and quite sure of himself. He was not making an appeal and not testing their reactions: he seemed content to state facts and let them do their work.
If these were facts, the young man’s moral claim on the firm was considerable.
Arthur said thoughtfully: “This recent discovery must have come as a great surprise to you.”
“And to you.”
“You’ll be able to let us have some credentials — some proof?”
“But of course.”
He had brought a narrow, stained briefcase with him and placed it beside his chair. Now he unzipped it and reached in, taking out the first thing which came to hand. He glanced at it, nodded, and passed it to Arthur.
Arthur was sitting behind his desk. It was a useful, formal barrier. Nell walked round it and stood at his shoulder, looking down at the photograph he was examining.
The picture was an old one, with the hard yellow gloss so typical of photographs taken early in the century. It was mounted on a stiff card with deckled edges. Time had perhaps deepened the yellow but it had not blurred the lines of the picture, which showed a young woman with dark hair and very dark eyes standing on a lawn at the back of a house.
Arthur glanced up at her for confirmation.
“There’s no doubt about the house,” said Nell. It was unmistakably the Blythe place.
The young man who called himself Peter Blythe said, unruffled but with a flicker of arrogance: “If you will please make enquiries you will find there is also no doubt about my
grandmother.”
“How did you come by this?”
“It was with the … those things I have from her…” He fumbled for a word. “With what she leave me, yes? With…”
“Among her effects?” Arthur supplied.
“That is what you say? Yes. Her effects.” he lowered his eyes. He had long, feminine eyelashes. “She did not have much to leave me.” his voice dropped. His hands opened expressively, then fell sadly to his lap.
Nell was jarred by his self-confidence. The enticing little lilt of his voice and his exaggerated little gestures were embarrassing and out of place; but she was frightened by her own growing belief that behind the emotional mannerisms there lay truth.
More aggressively than she had meant to, she said: “Peter Blythe?”
“That is how I was christened. But at home I am usually called Pietro.”
“At home?”
“Italy,” he said. “Now it is Rome. But when I am a boy it is Sicily, of course. Where my grandmother came from. And where she went back after her husband’s disgrace. Or,” he said gently, as though not to give offence, “what she believed to be her husband’s disgrace.”
Arthur handed back the photograph. Peter Blythe dropped it into the brief-case and took out a small sheaf of papers, with the corners of other photographs sticking out. He put them on the desk and delved again. This time he removed a bulge from the brief-case. It proved to be a small travelling clock. He pushed it across the desk, turning it so that Nell and Arthur could see the back.
On it was engraved in a sharp cursive lettering: Serafina Blythe.
A recent photograph lay on the top of the pile. It showed what appeared to be signatures in a register.
“Here.” The young man’s polished nail, lightly brown as though with nicotine, indicated a line. “The wedding of my mother and father. I made this photograph from the church so that you would see. My father, Luigi Blythe. My mother, Emily Parsons.”
“Eve no idea what an Italian church register looks like,” said Arthur.
“Please check,” said the young man amiably.
“Emily Parsons?” said Nell. “Your mother was English, then?”
