The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  In the end, unable to resist it, she tipped the papers out on to the table. The shoeboxes into which she’d originally crammed them had long since disintegrated, and the contents had been transferred higgledy-piggledy into the box files. Lord, this was going to take weeks to sort out! At the time, all of this must have meant something to her, but she was dismayed by how much of the stuff there was. A quick skim through revealed sketch-books and some very pretty watercolours of Vita’s, various trinkets of one sort or another, old birthday cards, a Valentine, a lace collar, a scent bottle whose lingering echoes of Floris Geranium made her heart skip, a bulky scrapbook which had belonged to Daisy, a few letters and – oh, how could she have forgotten? – that book, picked up from their mother’s bedroom. Elegantly bound in grey suede, the pages gilt-edged, secured with a pretty little brass clasp and a tiny lock that she had never attempted to open. For a few seconds she sat, motionless, reliving that other moment when her younger self, struggling with revulsion, had refused to contemplate what secrets it might contain. In the end, she put the book aside and forced herself to go on, right through to the bundle of yellowed newspaper cuttings and letters, handling them gingerly because they were so friable.

  She sat back at last, what she’d suspected confirmed – that it amounted to very little, after all. A few old photos, scraps of this and that. Amongst which it was surely unrealistic to hope she would suddenly find the truth of what had happened in that summer of 1910, when others before her had attempted, people far more qualified than she – the police, reporters, other members of the family who were there at the time – and failed. Old papers could only tell you so much, the rest must be conjecture. Too much water had flowed under the bridge, many of those concerned were dead, and others might well be either untraceable, or too old to be considered as reliable witnesses.

  There was more to it than that, of course. If she were honest, she had known from the moment Guy telephoned with the news that the papers had been discovered that she would be faced with this dilemma, whether or not to try and dig out a little more of the truth, all those years after she had hidden this trivia, physically and metaphorically. Whether or not to dive into her subconscious and drag out her own recollections. But memory was, alas, a slippery notion at the best of times, unreliable, coloured by uncertainty …

  She pushed away the last of her tea, now cold and bitter. Come on, Harriet! Admit it, you always knew what really happened. No, be more precise – you only thought you knew. Simple intuition. And what if you were right? Are you justified in trying to uncover what went on during that hot summer?

  So there Harriet was, the following day. Having made up her mind at some time during the night that she’d do it – at least try to make some sense of what had gone on by delving into the ragbag of memory and history, and assembling from its bits and pieces a collage of something that might come near to making a semblance of the true picture.

  Still undecided, she’d taken her mother’s journal upstairs with her when she went to bed. First, feeling like a criminal, she had prised open with almost ridiculous ease the useless little lock, an indication of privacy rather than a serious security device. In bed, she’d held the book for a long time, still having that inexplicable reluctance to probe into what her mother had obviously not wanted anyone else to see. At length she did open it. On the flyleaf was written: ‘My Egyptian Journal’ in Beatrice’s familiar, large and rather flamboyant handwriting. She turned the page, and then read the whole journal right through before switching off her light, after which she lay staring into the darkness, thinking about it. Finally, she dropped off into a sort of sleep, having decided she would telephone Guy the next morning and tell him what she proposed to do.

  She was fairly certain he’d welcome her decision. He was an acute observer and she knew, without him ever having said it in so many words, that he would be disappointed if she were to shrug off any chance, however remote, to throw some light on the tragedy that had always overshadowed the life of his wife and her sisters.

  Her sleep had been uneasy, and she woke feeling not much rested. The church clock, whose proximity had driven her mad when she first came to live here, though it no longer bothered her, tonight had kept rousing her from bouts of half-submerged sleep. It seemed to her that she counted every hour, and at five she got up and made herself tea and toast. She telephoned Guy before eight, then wondered if it was too early. “Have I got you out of bed?”

  “I’m always awake by six.”

  Harriet pictured him: elderly, bespectacled, deceptively mild, sitting at his desk, fountain pen in hand, already having taken old Phoebe, his smooth-haired fox-terrier bitch, for her sedate walk along the London streets, and tidied the breakfast things away, while Daisy set off for Hope House. She pictured the steadily growing stack of manuscript at his right hand: a monograph which he was writing on the psychological traumas suffered by civilians seriously injured during enemy attack. As a doctor, too old for military service, he had kept up his busy practice during the war years to deal with the sort of everyday ailments which did not go away simply because there was a war on, while his nights were occupied during enemy air raids with attending to the wounded and dying. It had not been without cost. His own health had suffered, and now that he’d grown older, he was forced to take things more easily. Guy was not, however, a man to be idle, never mind age or infirmity And Harriet suspected this writing he was doing was more than a mere labour of love, it was both a personal catharsis for the terrible things he had witnessed, and a memorial to the unrecorded and unsung acts of courage which he’d seen performed daily during the bombings.

  As Daisy’s husband, he’d volunteered to look after the Jardine family interests when the business of selling Charnley to Vigilance Assurance arose, an offer the sisters had thankfully accepted, so that it was to him Ruth Standish had written when the discovery of the papers had been made. He had never known Charnley in its glory days, but like everyone who had ever heard its history, it exercised a fascination for him. He had tried not to sound overly intrigued about what the cache might reveal when he first spoke to Harriet about it. “What do you think? Worth looking into?” he’d asked casually. “Or not?”

  “We won’t know that until we see it, will we? I’ll go over and pick up whatever it is they’ve found at once, if you’d like me to,” she’d replied.

  He listened intently now, without interruption, as she told him what that visit had resulted in, and to her description of the house’s altered state.

  “Shouldn’t come as any surprise, but I’m beginning to be sorry I let you in for this, Harriet.”

  “Nonsense. I didn’t like what they’ve done, but I think seeing it like that has probably helped to exorcise a few ghosts.” She hoped she sounded more convinced than she felt. “It isn’t really Charnley any longer.”

  “Have you examined everything you brought home yet? Is there anything new?”

  “I haven’t read everything yet, and I’d be surprised if anything actually new turned up, but sorted out and read with a fresh eye, it’s bound to be … well, I don’t know, of course, but something might come of it.”

  There was pause. “Why not do it, then? Put everything into order and write up some sort of an account? As a counterbalance to all that rubbish that was put out, if nothing else.”

  Harriet laughed gently. “I’m not the person to do that, Guy But there is someone, isn’t there, who might be?”

  “Ah. Well, yes, maybe. Not a bad idea at all, in fact.” She heard answering amusement in his voice. They understood each other very well, she and Guy Bringing Nina into it had, of course, been in his mind right from the start, and Harriet was happy enough to collude with him over that. If Nina would consent, of course, which was problematic.

  “I’d like to talk to her at any rate, and see what she thinks.”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s coming for lunch. I managed to wangle a bit of extra pork from the butcher. Why don’t you come down and jo
in us?”

  “That would be lovely,” she said tranquilly, knowing this was no coincidence, either. “I haven’t seen her for several weeks. Someone’s given me some late French beans, I’ll bring them with me. Show her that’s one advantage of living in what she will insist on referring to as the country.”

  “Anywhere ten miles out of London is country to Nina,” Guy said.

  Nina was his daughter, Daisy’s stepdaughter. Harriet knew how worried Guy had been about her lately. It was patently obvious that he was seizing this unexpected happening as a chance to shake her out of – well, self-pity wasn’t a word that automatically came to mind in connection with Nina, but might in this case have a smidgeon of truth in it. Nothing distorted the personality more than an unhappy love affair. And Harriet knew what she was talking about there.

  “I’d better take the train, my petrol’s almost done.”

  But before Harriet could leave the cottage to join them both for lunch, there was Guy on the telephone again. He sounded shaken. “Harriet. Harriet, my dear, prepare yourself for a shock.” He spoke hesitantly, unusually for him. “The builders at Charnley have found – something.”

  “Something else? What is it?”

  “I think you and Daisy will have to go down there. The police need to see you both.”

  Part One

  1910

  1

  1910. The summer when King Edward died, and the new King George was proclaimed. When – except in Court circles, where everyone wore black – the women’s hats were as frivolous and silly as usual, when the sun shone endlessly, or so it seemed in retrospect, and the Jardines and their friends played tennis in long skirts, when one could bear to play at all in the heat. When there was tea every day on the lawn under the cedar, with strawberries, sharp and sweet, dipped in sugar. Charnley’s grey stones rising solidly, immutably, against the dark green background of the woods behind. The water playing delicately into the basin of the fountain on the terrace, where the stone Laocoon and his twin sons writhed futilely and everlastingly in the coils of a pair of sea serpents, sent to crush them to death and exact vengeance for the god Apollo.

  There hadn’t always been Jardines at Charnley. They had arrived there a mere sixty or so years ago, when the Rodhythes, minor aristocracy who had previously owned the house for centuries, having ruined themselves through an incurable inherited addiction to gambling and an indifference to property management, had been forced to sell their ancestral home, since it was in imminent danger of tumbling about their ears. Joseph Jardine, grandfather of the present owner, Amory Jardine, had stepped in and snapped up the house and most of its contents, with new money accumulated through his Scottish and Lancashire textile mills. Thereafter, abandoning his cotton empire, he sank an immense amount of money into repairs and renovations, made some neo-Gothic additions by way of towers and a mock-medieval gatehouse to the original Tudor wings and the later Georgian façade, played with his stocks and shares to recoup his expenses, buried his origins and began to live the life of a country gentleman. Three generations later, it had almost been forgotten that the house had ever been owned by anyone else but Jardines, and there seemed no reason why they should not continue to live there for ever.

  So it seemed to Daisy, at any rate, cooling off in the shade of the weeping ash after a hot bicycle ride back from the village, whence she’d been bidden by her mother to take horrid old Mrs Drake a jar of calves’ foot jelly. Unmarried as she was determined to remain, she could see herself taking root here at Charnley, in the same way as that ancient old crone, Mrs Drake, with whiskers on her chin and her nature soured, had grown into the very fabric of her tumbledown cottage, refusing stubbornly to move into one of the recently improved almshouses. Silly old besom! thought Daisy. (The old woman had not been suitably grateful for the largesse from the big house, though her daughter-in-law had cried shame on her, and Daisy had ridden home the long way round, to punish herself for expecting Mrs Drake’s gratitude, and for being mortified when it hadn’t come.) But on arriving home, she’d flung her bicycle down in the stable yard and rushed into the kitchen for a glass of lemonade, by now feeling that her penance had been excessive – though she could never help the guilt feelings induced by comparison of her own comfortable living conditions to those of even the best-off villagers.

  “Well, I never, Miss Daisy, bursting in like that, what a turn you gave me!” declared the cook, jumping up in a fluster from an afternoon doze in a chair by the window, her apron over her face. “I’m sorry, but my lemonade’s all been taken down to the tennis court, and I’ve only some barley water I’ve made for old Nurse. I can squeeze you a lemon into some of that, though,” she added, relenting, for Daisy was spoilt by all the staff, who liked her unaffected manners and happy nature.

  “Oh, bliss, Mrs Heslop, you’re a brick!”

  “I can be,” returned Mrs Heslop drily, “when it do take me that way.”

  Daisy had downed the drink, cool from the dark pantry, in unladylike gulps, and then begged another, which she carried outside, into the shade of the ash. Still scarlet-faced, the blood beating under her fair skin, she sat leaning against the trunk, her slippery, unmanageable hair escaping from under her boater and sticking to her forehead in unattractive wisps, like wet straw. She removed the hat and flung it to the ground, wishing she could do the same with the offending hair. Oh, why couldn’t she have been blessed with hair like Vita’s – dark, glossy and wavy, framing her pretty face even more beautifully now that it was up? Or like her mother’s pale and shining, supremely elegant coiffures, which stayed in place exactly as she wished them to stay? But then, nothing, not even a stray hair, was allowed to interfere with Beatrice’s calm intentions. Things always happened just as she wished, in the recognisable, organised pattern that defined her well-conducted, irreproachable life. Impossible to imagine Beatrice breaking out of the mould, as Daisy so longed to do. She was so effortlessly good.

  As for Daisy – nothing seemed right to her, that summer, half adult, half child as she was, lingering in the awkward hiatus between schoolroom and coming out. She had no one to talk to: Vita was too busy with her Bertie and their wedding preparations to have time to amuse a younger sister, and Harriet, as usual, contrived to bury herself in the library as much as possible in order to avoid the tennis- and tea-parties, picnics and other entertainments devised by their mother as a guise for match-making. Beatrice’s admirable devotion to the onerous duty of marrying off three daughters was unswerving. But Harriet, Daisy thought, might already have made up her mind where her affections lay. There was a sort of tension between her and Kit whenever he was here, they were already linked in everyone else’s eyes, though Harriet hadn’t yet given her word to him. Perhaps, knowing him so intimately since childhood, she knew it wasn’t wise to give in to him too easily. Or that was what Miss Tempest had shrewdly suggested.

  Positively the worst thing of all about this summer to Daisy was that her governess, Miss Tempest, had astonished everyone (except Daisy herself) by departing to become a suffragette. Leaving Daisy, without her, to face the awfulness of her approaching season, which would not begin until next year, but already loomed as large in her mind as it did in her mother’s. There would be her coming out ball to launch her upon the London social scene, followed by an endless round of events, with her mother or dread Great-aunt Edina acting as chaperone to see that she behaved herself, the sort of events Miss Tempest scornfully dismissed as light-minded: Ascot and Henley Regatta and all the rest of it, dances and balls – house parties, dinner parties, after-theatre suppers, all simply in order to snare a young man like Bertie. Oh, misery, no, not like Bertie, please not, harmless though he was! Harmless and amiable - but such a ninny! Rich, however, and well-connected, already supervising the building of a lovely house across the valley where he would take Vita to live after their wedding, where they would have three or four children and live predictably ever after. Whereas what Daisy wanted – no, what she most passionately desired
in the world at this moment – was to join Athene Tempest in that other London, far removed from the world of parties and dances and frivolities like that, and do great and worthy and wonderfully thrilling things by working for women’s suffrage. Distribute leaflets demanding votes for women, sew banners (though alas, they would certainly be crooked if she had anything to do with the making of them!). Break windows and chain oneself to railings, perhaps go to prison for it. Throw bombs, even.

  Frustrated, Daisy contemplated the impossibility of running away to do any of these things, finished Nanny Byfield’s barley water and sat inelegantly, since no one was around to see, with her black-stockinged knees to her chin, and her skirts above them for coolness, showing her drawers; and trying to keep her thoughts from turning to the dreaded arrival of Miss Jessamy, who was to replace Miss Tempest. It was shady under the weeping ash, and though small insects constantly dropped from the canopy, and the roots made for uncomfortable sitting, she stayed where she was. The sounds of tennis being played drifted across to her, and she was far too hot to want to be drawn into a game. But then, as the clock over the stable struck four, came the agreeable realisation that it was too late for that. There would be tea in a quarter of an hour.