The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  As the train lurched towards London, and strap-hanging commuters banged against her knees and their wet umbrellas decanted water into her shoes, the events of the previous day still passed cinematographically behind her closed eyes, mixed in with the images of Egypt: the grey stones of Charnley and the now flawed splendour of its painted rooms mingling with visions of hot sand, burning skies, pyramids, temples and ruins.

  She was already so fascinated by what she’d read that she felt she might easily become obsessed with unravelling the mystery of Beatrice Jardine’s life and her appalling death. A forty-year-old murder should by now have lost its horror for someone who had never known the victim. Had the body been nothing but a pile of bleached bones, perhaps Nina could have regarded it more objectively, but knowing that the outstandingly beautiful woman she had seen in those photographs last night had ended up so macabrely dead, as a mummified corpse behind a disused chimney wall, strangled by her own jewelled necklace, only increased the surreal sense of horror. By this morning, she knew she was as committed as Harriet to finding out as much as possible about the events that had led up to the murder.

  It was still all so much in her mind that she thought she must be hallucinating when, just as the train was drawing into the London terminus, she opened her eyes and saw in front of her the headline on the newspaper of the bowler-hatted businessman opposite. The news had already broken. Well, it had been inevitable that the press would sooner or later get hold of it – and there it was, on the front page of one of the national dailies: ‘MUMMY FOUND IN COUNTRY HOUSE’.

  She was able to read no more, the train was drawing to a halt, and the man was folding up his paper and putting it into his briefcase, but the headlines had to concern Charnley. How many other mummified corpses could have turned up yesterday, for goodness’ sake?

  She bought the paper for herself as soon as she left the train and, sinking on to a seat, she read the brief report. The headline was in heavy type, but with only a few column inches on the subject beneath it. There had, after all, scarcely been time to gather a host of gory details, and the police had evidently not yet given out the identity of the body. She was initially relieved to find that it merely said, with an understatement this particular paper was not noted for, that a mummified corpse had been found during restoration work being carried out at Charnley House. But it ended by referring to an inside feature. Turning to that, she found Charnley described, with the paper’s usual hyperbole, as ‘a former stately home, ancestral residence of one of London’s former top lawyers, once noted for its glittering house parties.’ Inevitably, it went on to recall the circumstances nearly half a century ago which had led to the ‘dramatic suicide of Amory Jardine, tipped for a knighthood in the next honours list, following the mysterious disappearances of his wife Beatrice, a notable Edwardian beauty and society hostess of the day, and of one of their guests – an Egyptian gentleman …’ There followed a brief outline of Charnley’s subsequent fortunes until the time it was bought by Vigilance Assurance. The article was, on the whole, more restrained than she’d expected, though the inferences were obvious, given the item on the front page. No doubt they were saving their big guns for when the identity of the corpse was officially identified as that of Beatrice Jardine, and the confirmation that she had been murdered, and how, in all its grisly detail.

  The rain had diminished to a murky drizzle by the time she emerged from the station, no less unpleasant, and the skies still pressed down like a lid. Nina took the crowded tube and then walked from the station to her bed-sit to pick up what she would need by way of sensible clothes and shoes for the country, ration book and other necessities, including her old Remington typewriter – allegedly portable, but weighing a ton - and told her landlady she would be away for a couple of weeks. She rang the bank and spoke to her manager. He was not pleased when she asked permission to take the two weeks’ leave owing to her, at such short notice. She knew he had been hoping she would forego the rest of her holiday entitlement, now that it was getting so late into the year, but she stopped herself from feeling guilty. She’d hitherto done her best to be accommodating on the subject. She didn’t exactly occupy a key position at the bank, and a rescheduling of duties would be all that was needed to take care of her absence – if indeed, they noticed it at all, she thought cynically.

  Guy telephoned her while she was packing up her things, but their conversation was unsatisfactory. She didn’t feel she could say what she wanted to say when the telephone was in the hall, with the dining room door ajar and Mrs Prior inside, one ear cocked, but he didn’t seem to want to chat anyway. He’d spoken to Harriet and knew of the arrangement for Nina to stay at Garvingden. Apart from the Lamb & Flag, the shop, the vicarage and the district nurse, Harriet was the only other in the village with a telephone (the rest considered it an unnecessary expense), but it had proved its worth over the last few days. Now Guy was asking, “Can you leave your belongings in the left luggage at the station, and slip over here before you go back to the cottage? Take a taxi – Daisy’s at home and she wants to talk to you.”

  “What is it? Have you seen the papers?”

  “Yes, darling, we have, but you’ll know what it’s all about when you get here.”

  Nina normally found that sort of exchange irritating, and tried not to sigh. It was one of her father’s little foibles: he rather enjoyed keeping one hanging on, wondering what he had in store. From the tone of his voice, which sounded excited rather than gloomy, she thought it was unlikely there would be more unpleasant revelations, but by the time the taxi drove up outside the tall narrow house and Guy had hurried out to pay the driver, her mind had turned over all sorts of possibilities.

  “Sorry it’s taken me so long, Dad,” she said, kissing him as the taxi disappeared. “It took me ages to find a cab. I thought for a while I was going to have to go and queue for a bus, so I was glad you’d suggested leaving my case and things in the left luggage, but then one came along …”

  “Listen, Nina,” Guy broke in. “There’s someone here Daisy wants you to meet. We’re in the back.”

  “Who is it?”

  But he wouldn’t say.

  In the comfortably shabby room overlooking the long-by-narrow garden, they were drinking coffee, and its aroma mingled with the rich, lingering smell of the tobacco smoke which her father’s pipe had wreathed around. Nina’s entrance into the room caused an immediate uproar: Guy’s fat old fox-terrier skidded across the polished floor to greet her, ruckling the rugs and leaping around her in a frenzy of ecstatic joy, trying to reach Nina’s face to lick it. Nina laughed and bent forward to pat the old dog, incautiously stepping on the displaced rug, which slipped from under her feet. She would have fallen if she hadn’t been caught by the man who had risen awkwardly as she came into the room.

  “Down Phoebe!” Guy commanded above all the hubbub. The dog froze, then simply keeled over on to her side, beat her tail, and immediately went to sleep. In the resulting silence, they all laughed, and Nina turned to look at her rescuer.

  “Phoebe obviously knows who her friends are,” he said, holding out his hand. “You must be Nina.”

  He was a big, athletic-looking man with a craggy face, wearing the uniform of a commander in the Fleet Air Arm. His movements were somewhat awkward; he walked with a slight limp, and it seemed to her that the turn of his head was deliberate, so that she was immediately made aware of the disfigurement of one side of his face: a puckered seam of shiny new skin that ran down from his temple and disappeared under his collar. Someone saying this is what I am, take me or leave me.

  “This is Tom Verrier, Nina.” Daisy didn’t offer any further explanation. Something – the arrival of this man? – seemed to have flustered her. Odd. But then Daisy, who coped with difficult situations every day of the week at Hope House without turning a hair, when faced with them in her own life frequently didn’t quite know what to do. She sought refuge now in insisting that Nina needed a sandwich and took herself off to make
it, bringing it back with fresh coffee.

  The sandwich was typical of Daisy’s attitude to food, made with scraps of cold mutton left over from Sunday. Nothing could help the greyish Government-decreed bread, which was dry, or the taste of margarine predominating over the dabs of mint sauce with which she’d mistakenly tried to enliven it. Still, as always with Daisy, the gesture had been well meant, and Nina, not having had any breakfast and brainwashed by warnings not to waste food, managed to get most of it down, with the help of the coffee, and only then did she find out who this stranger was and why he was here.

  Almost the first thing she learned about Tom Verrier was that he was Rose Jessamy’s son.

  Harriet, amongst her other telephoning, had called Vita first thing that morning, and as soon as she rang off, Vita picked up the phone again and began to dial a well-remembered sequence of numbers. Her hand shook so much she had to make several attempts before she eventually succeeded and heard the ringing tone at the other end. It rang, and rang, and she thought despairingly: He’s not there. But wait! Maybe, in her fumbling haste, she’d dialled the wrong number. Try again. Still no answer. She had the receiver halfway back towards its rest when she heard his voice. “Dr Schulman here.”

  “Oscar! It’s me!”

  “Vita, my dear! What is wrong?” She registered that he could obviously tell that she was upset, simply from the tone of her voice. She made an effort of will to steady it.

  “You don’t know, then?”

  “Not unless you tell me.”

  There was a measurable pause. “Oscar, I must talk to you. Something’s happened. You must come round immediately.”

  “Of course I will come, if you need me, you know that. But - immediately?” The Middle European accent was barely noticeable, except when he was speaking on the telephone, but his beautifully modulated voice, calculated to soothe the most nervous of patients, did little to reduce her sense of panic. “I have several appointments, and business to do before that. I can come to you this afternoon, perhaps–”

  “I really do need you here, now. I simply c-can’t explain over the telephone, and–” Her voice broke on a sob, and she couldn’t go on.

  He was silent for the space of a second then, evidently sensing that this was more urgent than her usual plea for his attention, he said, “Vita, make yourself a cup of tea – tea, I say – and lie down. No gin. And no pills. Do you hear? I will be with you as soon as I can. Ten minutes?”

  “Darling Oscar” – a shake of relief in her voice – “I knew I could rely on you.”

  Oscar Schulman had arrived in England in the spring of 1938, after the Anschluss, the annexation of his homeland, Austria, by Adolf Hitler. No Jew would be safe in Vienna after that. He was thirty-eight at the time, a childless widower. The son of wealthy doctors, he was already a distinguished and prosperous doctor in his own right. Since he had no dependents, and was possessed of the necessary money and influence, he experienced little difficulty in obtaining the requisite exit and entry visas which would allow him to come to England.

  After qualifying, he had specialised in psychiatric medicine, still in its infancy in England and regarded with a certain amount of suspicion, although, as in America, personal analysis was becoming increasingly the thing amongst those who could afford it. He’d been lucky enough to find somewhere almost immediately where he could carry on with his work, at a fashionable London clinic that was rapidly gaining a name for itself. It was here that he met Vita Randolph, Lady Wycombe, when he inherited most of the patients of the colleague he replaced. She had a history of depression which had, in fact, led to a botched attempt at suicide, and had resulted in her eventually being persuaded to attend the clinic for treatment. Her reluctance to do so was matched only by her husband’s scepticism of such mumbo-jumbo, but after a few months in Schulman’s hands her condition improved, though whether the sessions she spent with him had been entirely successful was something he continually asked himself. Be that as it may, she had at last emerged back into the world. Determined, it seemed, to make up for the years she’d missed, incarcerated in self-imposed exile at Stoke Wycombe, by making a complete volte-face in her life, she’d ventured for a brief period into the society of those who had pretensions to literature and art. She spent much of her time, when she wasn’t reclining on a sofa, wearing frocks of a vaguely arty nature, eating chocolates and reading the latest literary offerings of her new acquaintances, in attending their exhibitions at small galleries off Bond Street, joining in their evenings of endless intellectual discussion, conducted in an ambience of wine fumes and cigarette smoke. But the affectations soon palled, and besides, she wasn’t clever, or able to pretend she was, and she felt they rather despised her. After that, for the brief period left before the war, she took up with a set she had known in her youth who were smart, modern, fashionable, joining in the frenetic activity all that implied – the social whirl of cocktail parties, weekend house parties, holidays on the Riviera. Spoiled and indulged in the matter of money and freedom by her elderly husband, who did not seem to mind what sort of life she led, as long as it suited her and did not demand his continued presence, she spent more and more of her time at their London house while Wycombe seemed content to remain as often as not in the country.

  The war soon put an end to all that. Wycombe’s age had precluded any direct involvement in the hostilities, but Vita was ostensibly employed in some sort of secretarial capacity with the Admiralty Board. What it was she did there, Schulman had never quite been able to imagine, Vita and any kind of discipline not being synonymous, but whatever it was, it had sat lightly on her shoulders, and had never interfered in any way with her social life.

  Schulman himself, arbitrarily classed as an enemy alien, had been interned on the Isle of Man for over a year, but doctors were urgently needed, especially doctors of his sort, and he had been released to work with some of the psychologically damaged young men and women who had been in the worst of the fighting. It was not without a certain amount of trepidation that he’d returned to London, and the problem of Vita.

  Schulman had a great charm of manner as well as undoubted expertise in his chosen profession. He couldn’t fail to be aware that this neurotic, attractive woman, young still, and with a husband now well into old age, had been more than half in love with him, but this was an occupational hazard in his profession, and he was too sensible of the impropriety of the doctor-patient relationship, as well as of his delicate position as a refugee emigré, to allow anything other than friendship to develop between them, though he was often sorely tempted, even now. There had in fact been a brief time when he had almost thrown caution to the winds, but he had not allowed himself the indulgence. He had managed to extricate himself with his usual grace and without damaging her self-esteem, by appealing to her sense of the romantic, suspecting that the angst of what she regarded as their impossible love would not be entirely unwelcome. On his release from internment, he saw that had been the right line to take. Her attachment to him had become less intense, and now, several years later, though still inclined to cling too much to him for support, she had gradually come to look on him more in the light of a trusted, reliable friend on whom she could always fall back, he hoped, rather than as an unattainable lover. He regretted this a little, but it was safer.

  The rain had stopped. He found a cab that took him to Embury Crescent, through the muggy, overhung morning where the clouds were struggling to break through.

  The burnt-out shells of several adjoining houses in the crescent, caused by an incendiary which had effectively demolished one and spread to its neighbours, loomed through the murk. God knew how the Wycombes had managed it, but their house, which had in fact escaped serious damage, had already been restored to its pre-war smartness. He ran up the steps and lifted the polished brass knocker on the glossily painted black door, which Vita opened herself, with a speed that told him she had not heeded his advice to lie down.

  “Vita, my dear.” He embraced her
and then, holding her at a distance, scanned her face. He could detect no smell of gin on her breath. “What can have happened?”

  “I’ll tell you, in a moment.” She held out her hands for his outdoor things. He divested himself of his overcoat and his hat, ran his hands through his curly, iron grey hair, still thick, if receding at the temples, and squared his shoulders. But further scrutiny, as she led him into her drawing room, told him that this was going to be more than one of her minor crises des nerfs. She was carefully made up, and dressed as usual in a chic, expensive outfit, midnight blue this time, with long sleeves and a diagonal front fastening, trimmed and piped with matching velvet. Her hair was still thick and dark, perhaps helped by her hairdresser, and she had taken recently to wearing her curls lifted and gathered back behind her ears, revealing the finely sculpted contours of her face. She looked elegant, pin-thin, fine-drawn. But her brown eyes looked huge, and the extent of her pallor, accentuated by the fashionable fuchsia-pink lipstick, alarmed him.

  “Have you seen the papers, Oscar?”

  “Not this morning.” Unusually, he had abandoned his normal practice of scanning the morning papers in favour of a new textbook which he had begun reading the night before, and which was absorbing him so much with its new ideas that he could not put it down.

  Vita indicated a copy of The Times on a table, folded to show an article whose headline he could not read from where he stood. “I think you had better see what that says, and then you can tell me what to do.”