The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue - 1946

  Part One - 1910

  1

  2

  3 - EXTRACT FROM HARRIET’S NOTEBOOK:

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8 - EXTRACT FROM HARRIET’S NOTEBOOK

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  1946

  The screech of metal against metal as the demolition team moved in was excruciating, shattering the peace, setting the teeth on edge, though it was unlikely anyone would complain about it; not when it meant the end of the Anderson shelters which had defaced the sweeping lawns at Charnley House for the last seven years. At last they were surplus to requirements, a wartime necessity that had been accepted without fuss, though in the event not a single bomb had ever fallen within five miles. Unfortunately, a prefabricated module was apparently scheduled to take their place.

  Harriet, watching the activity from inside the house, hardly knew whether to laugh or cry at all this, imagining what Hopper and his under-gardeners would have said to the desecration of that smooth green sward they and their fathers had spent their working lives so jealously nurturing and tending. These were the lawns where the croquet hoops had been set up, where she and her siblings had played as children, where they’d rolled down the grass either side of the steps to the terrace, and Daisy, who was a pickle, had got her starched petticoats all green.

  “Well, here it all is, Miss Jardine. You’re welcome to it.”

  “Thank you.”

  Harriet turned away from the window towards the woman who was indicating a couple of mottled grey cardboard box-files sitting on the nearest desk. The files themselves she regarded with some misgivings. She wasn’t yet by any means convinced that it would be right to bring into the light of day what they contained, or whether the contents would be better left undisturbed. Indeed, she still hadn’t decided whether it had been a good idea to come back to Charnley at all, thirty-seven years after she’d left, swearing never to return. Ladies of a certain age are apt to be resistant to change, however adaptable they might consider themselves. But the papers had been an irresistible carrot, as Guy had known they would be.

  Ruth Standish, a brisk, capable person, an ex-ATS lieutenant as she’d informed Harriet over lunch, known to all as the Admin Assistant, was voicing some concern. “I do hope all this won’t be too distressing for you.”

  It could hardly fail to be otherwise, but that was scarcely the point. “I believe I shall cope. It’s all history now.”

  All the same, that treacherous old sorrow suddenly gripped Harriet by the throat, so that, for a moment, she couldn’t say any more, even though she’d come here prepared for an emotional battering. It was only occasionally now that she was caught unawares like this, transported back in time by glimpses of something half-remembered: her mother’s special rose and lily-of-the-valley scent, warm sunlight on peaches, a snatch of ragtime or a tune from an operetta, the intense blue of someone’s eyes.

  The lid of the top file was half open, the spring clip inside unable to cope with its overflowing contents. The Admin Assistant extracted a bulky envelope from it, enabling it to be closed, and slid both files towards Harriet. Her expression left Harriet in no doubt as to what she was thinking: almost certainly, she’d decided that this was a lady who wouldn’t allow herself to be upset, or not for long – who belonged, after all, to that generation who never gave in to themselves. It was what had got them, and everyone else, through two world wars. Harriet must be at least – what, late fifties? Smart hat and couturier-made classic suit that owed nothing to present day fashion, and still looked marvellous, never mind that it had to be pre-1939. Quality told, and its soft moss green colour suited her brown eyes and dark, silver-threaded hair. She was tall and had kept her figure, and moved gracefully. Well, they were brought up to walk and hold themselves properly, those Edwardian girls, no slouching. Without the need for all that standing stiffly to attention, either, or marching, so inappropriate for women, that had been inflicted on the Admin Assistant herself in her square-bashing days – which was at the same time as Harriet Jardine, she believed, had been working for the Government as some sort of boffin. Before the war, she had been a mathematics don. A daunting combination, all in all. She still had that spark in her eye which said she could be pretty daunting herself.

  “Not to worry,” Harriet was saying briskly. “They won’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”

  It gave her some satisfaction that she could speak so calmly about that old scandal which had catapulted Charnley into sensational headlines nearly four decades ago, and was still remembered as one of the unsolved mysteries of the century. But she was feeling more in control now than when she had stepped through the front door earlier that morning, having schooled herself to cope with the painful memories it would evoke, yet half expecting, half dreading, to discover Charnley exactly as she had left it, as if caught in a time warp. She needn’t have worried. A few of the rooms remained basically the same, but most of the alterations and renovations – some good, most appalling – had turned the house into a different place altogether from the one she remembered. The spirit of the old Charnley had gone for ever, though the shocking events – or perhaps her own perception of them – had left an indelible stain on the air that saddened and depressed her.

  She had been shown around and then given a surprisingly good lunch, created by someone with flair who had cunningly overcome the constraints imposed by post-war rationing and shortages. The new dining hall had been created from the former conservatory, a place once full of green shadows and glancing light, but now made gloomy and unrecognisable, since they had seen fit to put up, against one of the formerly all-glass walls, some sort of temporary extension. In her present hypercritical mood Harriet took a dim view of this excrescence. The meal over, Ruth Standish had brought her here into the library. Which was another matter altogether.

  This spacious room had always been a place of sanctuary for Harriet, at the heart of the house, but its former ambience of peace, stability and continuity had gone for ever. It was the absence of the pictures more than anything else, she decided, that so radically altered it: the self-important portraits of Rodhythes, and later ones of Jardines, heavily gold-framed, that had once hung in alcoves and in the lofty spaces above the bookshelves. Yet even apart from that, the big old room seemed ill at ease with itself, as if rejecting its new role. The space once occupied by the heavy mahogany central desk and, in front of the open fireplace, the comfortable leather armchairs and sofas in which one could curl up and lose oneself, was now filled with functional seating and army surplus desks and tables, complete with typewriters and telephones and comptometers. Like some monstrous cash register, a Burroughs calculating machine loomed in the corner, waiting for a home. The Turkey carpet had been replaced by a sort of drugget. Gone were the impressive rows of old leather tomes, in favour of stacks of files and stationery and serried rows of insurance documents. Worst of all, the chimney opening in the fireplace had been filled in with asbestos, painted over. It scarcely mattered, there would be no one now to tend the enormous coal fires the grate had once held, even supposing the fuel were available.

  Perhaps in an effort to retain traces of the original spirit of the fine old library amongst all this gracelessness, someone had painted the walls a deep ox-blood tone. Surprisingly, that seemed the least of the incongruities, m
aybe because the colour was, by chance or design, almost the same rich, dark red as the old damask wallpaper which had covered them for at least a century, quite possibly for a great deal longer. As children, they’d hated that gloomy old wallpaper, but Harriet now regretted the removal of something which must be irreplaceable. Tastes change as one grows older.

  She opened her crocodile handbag for her gloves and began to draw them on – soft brown suede, elegantly wrinkled at the wrist – snapped the bag’s gold clasp and prepared to go. She’d had enough of this new Charnley, and its owners.

  All the same, she was grateful to Ruth Standish for having recognised immediately that what the builders had come across might be of sentimental value to the Jardines, otherwise the papers would have been thrown out as so much useless junk, like everything else, during the process of adapting the house to its newly designated purposes. Charnley had stood empty for several years before the First World War had brought a final end to any hope of it ever becoming the family home again, but during that war it had been adapted temporarily as a convalescent home, where soldiers in hospital blue had been helped to recreate what was left of their shattered lives. Afterwards, it had again lain largely empty and neglected (except for the two or three years when a couple of women had made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to run it as a girls’ boarding school) during which time it had gathered its quota of superstition and a reputation as a house of ill luck. In 1940 the army had commandeered it as an officers’ billet for the duration.

  World War Two and the Blitz might now be only a wretched memory, but post-war austerity ruled while run-down Britain was picking itself up. Life was still bound by restrictions and shortages of nearly everything, including materials for all but essential rebuilding and rehousing schemes. So, despite the house’s past, and its long period of disuse and neglect, a large City insurance firm which had been bombed out and since housed in temporary premises, had now acquired Charnley as its head office. Its semi-rural situation in the Home Counties was considered not too far out of London and, after months of work, it was almost ready to open. The reconstruction had been done in haste and was regrettable, but then, Charnley had never been the most beautiful of houses. The work still wasn’t entirely complete; they hadn’t yet started on what had come to be known to the family as the Jessamy rooms, in the west wing. On her tour round the house, Harriet hadn’t seen these rooms. She hadn’t wanted to. Everything bad had stemmed from that.

  “Don’t forget the photos.” Ruth Standish picked up the bulging manila envelope, so full indeed that it spilled open and deposited most of its contents on to the floor as she passed it across. “Drat, I should’ve looked for a bigger envelope.”

  “No harm done.”

  The Admin Assistant produced a folded brown paper carrier from her own large tote bag. “Here, better use this.” They both knelt to gather the escaped photographs, but while Ruth proceeded to tip the photos in, Harriet’s gaze was transfixed by one she’d picked out at random.

  “Someone you know on that one?”

  “Myself and my sisters.”

  “Really?” Ruth Standish took a look at it and added, unaware of any irony, “You were lovely, all of you, weren’t you?” Harriet smiled a little. The very young – and sometimes even those not quite so young, as in this case – were always astonished to be reminded that their elders once had faces as smooth and unlined as their own.

  Here they were, the three Jardine girls, nearly forty years ago, youthful and vulnerable when one contemplated the horror that hung so imminently over them: personal loss and sorrow, and the black cloud of that first, terrible, unimaginable war. Posing here in the summer garden at Charnley in fancy dress. Barefoot, wearing robes that were vaguely Grecian, forming a circle with their arms gracefully lifted and disposed, hands linked, fingers artfully intertwined – oh, how they’d agonised over that pose! The scene looked idyllic now, the sepia tones of the old photograph softening the white garments to a golden tint, with the flower-strewn grass and the trees and the folly behind in soft focus. She and Vita, each with their dark hair done up in a classical knot, Daisy with her cascade of shining pale hair, so like their mother’s, rippling down her back. It was still thick, though ashen now, and serviceably short. Daisy led too busy a life to be bothered with such personal vanities.

  Harriet put the photo into the bag with the others. “What alterations were they making to the schoolroom when they found all this?”

  The administrator’s eyes rested curiously on Harriet, who ignored the unspoken question: why, if she’d known the papers were in the schoolroom, hadn’t she claimed them before? But Harriet knew it wouldn’t make much sense if she were to confess that she had, in some instinctive, sentimental move that was totally unlike her, secreted the papers in that old childhood hidey-hole before she’d left for the last time. Nor would she necessarily be believed if she tried to explain that time, and pain, had suppressed even the memory of that particular act until now.

  There were two plans of the house pinned to a large corkboard mounted on the wall: a copy of the original, which had been drawn on oiled silk, and another of the house as it had now been converted, showing most of the spacious, airy rooms made into two, or even three. Using her pen as a pointer, Ruth Standish indicated the turreted gatehouse, a later, and not very felicitous, addition to the main buildings, which stood at the bottom of the drive, where the builders were still working, and therefore, like the Jessamy rooms, hadn’t been included in Harriet’s tour of inspection. “They’re making it into a reception area. The box was under the floorboards. Here, in this room upstairs. And you say it was your old schoolroom?”

  “And playroom. Not always very convenient when the weather was bad, but we loved it. They let us use it because we could be as noisy as we liked there.”

  Harriet looked at the plan again, and followed the orientation of the familiar long view from the gatehouse window towards the point where the Norman tower of the church was just visible above a stretch of woodland, now mature enough to obscure most of the village surrounding it, as well as the housing developments which had later grown up along the valley. Between the house and the trees stretched a Gainsborough landscape. Acres of sweeping parkland, designed by Humphrey Repton to sit within a framework of rolling hills, beech forest and chalk downs. She still had a watercolour of that view, painted by Vita. One of Marcus’s friends who had often visited had famously written about it, later, from the trenches: ‘And in the half-light of remembered days we see the shadows fall …’ Quickly, Harriet stood up.

  She said goodbye to Ruth Standish, clasped her arms around the bulging files, and drove away through the archway, past the shiny new dark green sign with Vigilance Assurance’s name writ large upon it above the company’s logo of two clasped hands.

  The dusk of a cool, early autumn day was just beginning to fall when she arrived at the place she presently called home, the small cottage next to the church in Garvingden, a quiet, grey village above the Thames, about thirty miles away.

  It was really time she found somewhere else to live, she told herself as she walked up the front path, edged with London Pride and a late flush of sweet-smelling Mrs Sinkins. She was becoming too fond of the place, unwisely so, since it wasn’t hers to love. After the war, she had found herself at a loose end, almost at retirement age and, for the short working time left to her, reluctant to return to university teaching. She would find something else to do, she decided. Meanwhile, unused to having time on her hands, she had taken on the admittedly not very interesting but no doubt worthwhile job of marking papers in a correspondence course designed as rehabilitation for demobbed service men and women. But while she had been spending the war years as a decrypter at Bletchley Park, helping to break the enemy’s coded messages, London had become a different place from the one she’d known. Physical landmarks had disappeared for ever, but what mattered more was the absence of people she had known who were no longer there, for one reason or another. The li
ttle house where her friend Frances had lived had vanished from the face of the earth after being hit fairly and squarely by a flying bomb, killing Frances herself. And that street where for a brief time she had known love, and so much unhappiness, was a heap of rubble and bomb craters. Bittersweet memories were the only things that remained. All desire to live permanently in the battle-scarred capital had left Harriet.

  She had taken advantage of Daisy’s generous offer to stay with her and her husband, Guy, in their Maida Vale house until she could find some small place in the country, but accommodation was scarce everywhere, and nothing suitable had turned up. She was beginning to feel she must be outstaying her welcome with Daisy when she’d unexpectedly had the chance to take over the lease of his weekend cottage from a university colleague who, with the return to peace, had taken a three-year sabbatical to do anthropological research in a remote part of South America. It was a former workman’s cottage of two up, two down – a small kitchen-living room at the back, a minuscule front parlour, one of the two bedrooms now a bathroom – but Harriet didn’t complain: the last occupants before Tony Bentham had managed to bring up a family of five children in the house. Furnishings and amenities were basic. Tony wasn’t houseproud, but then, neither was Harriet. Yet lately, she’d found herself buying bits and pieces of her own, whatever took her fancy, that she thought might suit the house, and even plants for the tiny garden plots, back and front. She’d had all the rooms repainted. The result was still a long way from Charnley, but it was full of light and colour, comfortable enough and easily managed. She had to keep reminding herself it would be foolish to become too fond of the place.

  After that very good lunch at Charnley she wasn’t hungry, so she settled for a cup of tea and took it into the front room. She found a place for the box files by removing her correspondence course papers from the table under the window to the floor. Sipping her tea, she looked at them with misgivings, reluctant to open what she was already beginning to think of as Pandora’s box. Could they possibly contain anything forgotten that would add to the sum of what was already known about the actual circumstances of those long-ago events? She doubted it. It was tempting to feel that the situation should be left as it was, the files put away, and leave undisturbed the dust that had eventually settled. On the other hand, by sorting through them, some sort of perspective might be found to reduce the ballyhoo that had always surrounded the business. It had remained one of the most colourful of those society scandals of the twentieth century, kept alive in the public consciousness by the rehashings of the events in which an insatiable public seemed to delight. Mention ‘The Jardine Affair’ to anyone, even now, and they’d soon recall what the papers of the time had said. But there had always been something out of balance about the theories put forward by those who had written about it. It would be enlightening to see how their suppositions and speculations, some of which had been bizarre, would stand up in the light of anything new that might turn up.