The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  After doing what she’d come to London for, Harriet found herself with time to spare before the next train back that would make a connection in Oxford with the Garvingden bus. She’d been lucky enough to find a cab, but on impulse she’d paid it off at Green Park, weighing up the advantages of half an hour spent there rather than one in the racket of Paddington station. The weather had confounded predictions and after its early morning gloom had steadily improved throughout the day. Now, mid-afternoon, the sun touched the falling leaves of the plane trees with gold, its light flashed from the windows of red London buses as they trundled down Piccadilly. She drank in the warmth and sunlight like someone who has been deprived of either for months. A couple of hours ago, she had thought she might never be warm again.

  A young woman passed, wheeling a Silver Cross perambulator, with a reluctant five-year-old beside her, dragging his feet and struggling with a yo-yo he hadn’t yet got the hang of. The little boy wore a smart school uniform, maroon cap and a blazer with a very new badge; his grey flannel shorts were well-pressed, and his socks straight. The pram was shiny, high-sprung and expensive, and something about the young woman, though she wasn’t in uniform, made Harriet think she might be one of that lost, but possibly returning breed – a nanny. Oh yes, London was very slowly but definitely licking its wounds and coming back to normality. There were signs of rejuvenation all over the West End: boarded-up windows being replaced, paintwork smartened up, bombsites being cleared, the War Damage Commission doing a wonderful job. In the end nothing, she reminded herself, stayed unbearable forever. For the first time since she’d left the city, she found herself unexpectedly happy to be back there, in her natural environment.

  Restoration, however, hadn’t yet reached the dusty square she’d recently walked away from, set in the midst of a run-down area comprising working-class terraced housing alongside homes which had once been for the well-to-do. St Peter’s Square itself, with the church in the middle of one side, towering over all like a grim watchdog, standing next to its dilapidated vicarage, was a mixture of styles and periods, sooty Victorian London brick predominating. Occasionally, peeling Georgian stucco made its appearance. Most of the houses still bore their wartime legacy, a slightly desperate, backs-to-the-wall look, though nearly all seemed to have survived more or less intact, except for what might have been a couple of houses in the corner, victims of a direct hit. Someone had recently broken through the boarding erected to shield the resulting crater and its rubble-strewn surroundings, thereby opening up a convenient short cut to the main road beyond. It hadn’t been mended, and through the gap could be glimpsed a busy stream of passing traffic, and a street market in full swing.

  He had said he would wait for her in the church, where they were less likely to be disturbed. The vicarage, he informed her, was like Clapham Junction, what with the phone constantly ringing, and all the comings and goings of the various homeless people the diocese saw fit to foist upon an unmarried parson with empty rooms in his vicarage. At least there were no telephones in the church – nor, he’d added with some irony, would they be likely to disturb many worshippers.

  The inside of the church proved to be as bleak, draughty and as uncared for as Harriet had expected from Daisy’s description of it, redolent with the smell of varnished pitch pine, old dirt and a faint underlying whiff of what might possibly be incense. Some sort of scaffolding and building materials were piled around the entrance to the Lady Chapel, blocking the light. Here by the west door however, the interior was curiously light, where some fine stained glass windows remained, but where others, presumably shattered by blast, had been replaced by clear panes. Towards the altar it grew dim but even at this distance it was impossible not to remark on the difference, as if a line of demarcation had been drawn. A red sanctuary lamp winked above polished candlesticks and an elaborate silver cross on a spotless, lace-trimmed altar cloth. There were flowers. Votive candles flickered to one side. The smell she’d detected earlier was almost certainly incense. It came as no surprise. Apparently, he preferred to be called Father Christopher.

  “Harriet, here you are.”

  “Kit.”

  She swung round to face him. He hesitated slightly before kissing her lightly on the cheek. “How good to see you. And looking as smart as ever.”

  “Thank you.” It was a stilted sort of greeting after all this time. She acknowledged it with a slight smile but eyed him warily, though perhaps there’d been no irony meant. She’d taken care to look her best, after all. The old green suit had turned up trumps, as usual, and a hat had seemed to be appropriate to wear for a meeting in church, but compliments were not what she was here for. And she was quite thankful there were to be no preliminaries, no small talk, no how are you?

  Silently, they regarded each other across the space of twenty-eight years. And she still felt as she always had in Kit’s presence – no match for him, even now: lean and slightly gaunt, but striking, tall as a Mannerist painting in his dark cassock and cloak, which could romanticise even the most commonplace clergyman. His nose, always large, had become beaky, but there was no slackness in his face and the years had hollowed and sculpted his cheeks, giving him an ascetic look. His dark hair, though streaked with grey, was more disciplined, cut shorter, and the wayward, boyish lock had been brushed into temporary submission, a concession to his priesthood. It would soon fall forward again. His eyes still drew one. As blue as ever, and now with a lustrous sort of burning look to them. A saint or a sinner, Nanny Byfield had said, a long time ago – which? Probably neither, just the same old charm at work. His lady parishioners were probably falling over themselves to knit him scarves and pullovers – very likely the same small, select band of followers who cleaned the brasses and silver, starched the altar cloths, put out fresh flowers and ran jumble sales.

  It was hard, even yet, to accept the idea of Kit as a priest.

  “So what’s all this I’ve been reading in the papers? All this nonsense about a body being found at Charnley?”

  “Kit, it’s far from nonsense. I’m afraid it’s all too true.”

  She thought he blanched a little, but his look remained steady. “It was – your mother, then? My paper didn’t go into details.”

  Deciding that to try and spare him might be thought a condescension, she said that yes, it was Beatrice. She described the condition in which her mother’s body had been found. He closed his eyes briefly and crossed himself. He had always had a sense of the theatrical. And yet, his response seemed spontaneous and genuine. He had subtly changed, in ways she found difficult to define, as yet. She added abruptly, “You see what this means, don’t you? We shall all have to face questioning as to what we were doing that night.”

  “Decidedly unpleasant, for those who were there. Fortunately, it won’t affect me, since I wasn’t.”

  “Of course you were!” she reminded him sharply, “it was the night of the birthday, you must remember that!”

  She, at least, had never forgotten that night. Kit, a young Kit, looking wild and dangerous, a little drunk. Devouring Beatrice with his eyes, risking une petite scandale, should anyone notice. But if anyone else had, it had never been remarked upon.

  “Well, yes, I was there for the supper, of course. And for your delightful entertainment. But I went back to London later, if you recall. The Lansburys offered me a lift in their motor, and I took it.”

  No, that was a recollection which had escaped her, nor could the Lansburys confirm it, seeing as they were both dead, an old, autocratic couple who had refused to run for shelter during an air raid and were killed when their house received a direct hit. Certainly she hadn’t seen Kit the day after the birthday celebrations, nor for very much later – and how she’d longed for him then! – but she’d been under the impression that he, like Iskander, had left by an early train the following morning. In the mood he’d been in the previous night, it would not have been out of character for him to leave abruptly, perhaps saying only a casual goodbye and a than
k-you to one or other of her parents before legging it out to the station. She couldn’t actually swear that he’d stayed the night, though she’d always assumed he had. The years had blurred many memories.

  If what he’d said was true, he could not have had any part in Beatrice’s murder, and though there was no way of proving it, part of the heavy weight of suspicion she’d carried around for so long lifted. Previously, she’d always known when he was lying, or trying to get himself out of trouble, but now, she couldn’t tell whether she had lost that facility, if it was he who had got better at lying or if he was actually telling the truth.

  “Thank you for coming to tell me about this, Harriet. It was a kind thought.”

  Kindness wasn’t what had brought her here. She had come determined, once and for all, to get to the heart of the matter, but even yet she balked at asking outright the question to which she so desperately needed an explanation.

  How was it they had never before talked about her mother’s disappearance, except in the most superficial way, without any real discussion? There had been opportunity enough later, God knows. Looking at Kit now, she knew that the answer was because they had, both of them, always been too afraid of the truth.

  They were still standing awkwardly in the aisle where they had met. “It’s not very warm by the door, but it’s such a mess further in, I think we’d better sit here,” he said suddenly. “Incendiary through the roof, no money for repairs yet.” He gestured towards the muddle of planks and supports around the Lady Chapel, and then led her to a dusty pew near to where they stood. He didn’t appear to notice the dirt, or to see the dangerously worn places in the strip of matting down the centre of the aisle, the mouldy pile of tattered hymn books and the Mothers’ Union banner leaning drunkenly on its pole in one corner. Or the kneelers at their feet which were losing their stuffing at the edges. All of it a startling contrast with that so immaculately kept sanctuary. Yet the church might once have been one of some distinction, she thought, her eye taken for a moment by a beautifully carved marble memorial wall tablet which still remained intact, dedicated to some eminent worthy of the parish, his virtues and his benevolence.

  She came back to hear him saying, “And what else, Harriet?” and with an effort went on with her story. When it came to the point where she and Daisy had had to identify the black silk kimono, Kit put his head in his hands. She kept silent. He might have been praying. At last he raised a ravaged face, and when he spoke she was completely taken aback. “Why did you leave me, Harriet? We might have had a good life together. You could have saved me.”

  Whatever he might have said, that was the last thing she expected to hear from him. Had he forgotten the misery of that time, and the violence of their final disagreement? And had he not, after all, found his own salvation?

  Their short life together – what had it been?

  1918. Rooms in a grey house, in a grey, north London street, a few weeks before the Armistice. Kit home from France on leave, for the moment safe, though with a wound stripe on his sleeve and his nerves shot to pieces.

  The wound had not been life-threatening and his body healed quickly, though it took long enough to save him from being sent back to France. She too had been sent home from working behind the lines as a VAD, her constitution weakened after a bad bout of ‘flu. When Kit, nearly a decade after Beatrice’s disappearance, had suddenly reappeared in her life, she’d given in to what she’d formerly resisted, and agreed to live with him. He had seemed so pitifully in need of her, and she’d told herself there was no one she cared enough about who would be shocked over that impropriety Neither of them mentioned marriage. Which was just as well, since their relationship turned out to be every bit as unsatisfactory as she had feared it would be, all those years ago. But how could she have left him? Never – not when those dark and dangerous forces, which she’d always sensed in him, had turned, frighteningly, to threats of self-destruction. Not with the memory of her father’s self-inflicted death. Nor even when she was asked to leave the post she’d obtained as deputy head of a women’s teacher training college. She had left Oxford with the highest qualifications, the training college was lucky to get her, but they had rules: lady teachers were forbidden to keep on their positions when they married, and as for cohabitation! Harriet had kept her private life a closed book from her colleagues at the school, which had inevitably fuelled the rumours, a mistake she saw too late. She was asked, very politely, to resign.

  Fortunately, Kit had enough money for this at least not to matter, and anyway, it was of little account compared to the continual worry about his state of mind. From their flat high above the street, he stared out day after day at the area railings three storeys below. He had talked wildly of shooting himself. She had been forced to take charge of his pills and sleeping draughts. He had terrible nightmares, and she never knew how much he remembered of what he had revealed to her during his ramblings. He disliked talking of the time before the war, at Charnley, and he never spoke of Beatrice or Amory, if he could help it, except in his sleep. He saw doctors and psychiatrists, to no avail.

  And then, deliverance had come in the form of a chance meeting with an old army friend, a young padre named Rupert Fleetwood, who had himself served in France, who understood, in a way Harriet was only partly able to do, the crisis Kit was going through, the terrors that had caused it, and the horrors of trench life, which he had shared. He was patient, and listened. He and Kit had long discussions, deep into the night, and gradually, the wild dreams abated, and the threats of suicide were no more. But instead, a general apathy and aimlessness took their place. He took offence and sulked when Harriet tried to persuade him to do anything constructive, pointing out that he didn’t try to run her life for her, which was true, but enraged her. Reluctantly, from time to time, he agreed to try various occupations, none of which, unfortunately, lasted … he did not have to stick to anything which turned out to be uncongenial, he did not have to work in order to earn his living. It was what she’d always feared – that the fortune left to him by his rich relative would be a millstone around his neck. The fact that she was right was no comfort to either of them. She had to face the fact that they were tearing each other to bits, and the passion she had always felt in herself was slowly dying.

  Until, out of the blue, had come the announcement that he was going to enter the Church. A decision not only incredible, unbelievable, unconvincing, unnecessary, but stupid, and totally wrong, Harriet raged. He had chosen to do this in exactly the same mad, impulsively thoughtless way he had chosen the equally unsuitable profession of civil engineer – and look where that had got him: the idea rejected and thrown away when he finally admitted he would never be successful - or have the necessary application to enable him to make himself so.

  She had appealed to Rupert Fleetwood.

  “I can’t help, Harriet. This decision is none of my doing. I can’t help because I don’t know what it is that’s troubling him.”

  “Surely … what he’s just been through – in the trenches?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not that. Not entirely.” But what it was had never been vouchsafed. And she was now oppressed by the thought of what the answer might be.

  She realised Kit was still waiting for her to reply. ‘Why did you leave me?’ he’d asked, which was unanswerable now, all these years later. The urge to spare them both further embarrassment almost made her say lightly that she hadn’t been able to see herself in the role of parson’s wife, but innate honesty rejected such flippancy. She said quietly, over his bowed head, almost to herself, not knowing whether he would hear: “We weren’t any good for each other, you and I. We never were.” They had always travelled along parallel lines which would not meet at infinity or elsewhere. His decision to enter the Church had been the last straw: she’d been able to take no more and had walked away, albeit leaving a piece of her heart with him, gone to live with her friend Frances, and begun to concentrate in earnest on her career. She had, to her shame
, believed more in her own rightness than in him.

  For it seemed she’d been wrong. Here Kit still was, nearly thirty years later, still in holy orders. That he worked hard and unstintingly among his mainly poor parishioners, that he thought little of himself and was even loved, she knew from Daisy, the only one who had resolutely kept in touch. She might even come to believe that, thinking of the overcrowded vicarage he’d mentioned, noticing that his cassock was shabby, green and shiny with age and frayed a little around the cuffs and hem.

  Reaching out, he took hold of her unresisting hand, holding it with a firm, dry clasp.

  “What did go wrong between us, Harriet?”

  This time, she couldn’t look away from his compelling eyes, she couldn’t pretend not to understand. She had resolutely refused to see him from the day they had last parted, knowing he could still persuade her to return to him, but unable to face the whole merry-go-round of emotions starting up again. It was a path she didn’t want to go down now but she knew she must if she was to know what she dreaded, yet had to hear.

  She forced herself to speak, to be honest. “It was my mother, always between us, wasn’t it?”

  He froze. “I don’t understand.”

  She looked at him, long and hard, searching for a better answer than that in those blue eyes. “It’s no good,” she said forcefully, “I must know, Kit. The truth.”

  He was taken aback by her look, for a moment unable to think of an acceptable answer. “I’ve been punished,” he said at last, obliquely, “but I’ve made my peace with God and allowed myself to be forgiven. Can’t you forgive me, too?”

  He hadn’t, after all, changed as much as she’d hoped. He was still capable of avoiding issues. About Kit’s conversion there had always hovered the question: why? She had eventually settled for guilt that needed to be absolved. But guilt related to what? A near-incestuous relationship with Beatrice? Or worse? “You might at least do me the honour of answering me honestly now,” she said. Then, when he didn’t speak, taking a deep breath, she asked, “Kit, were you having an affair with my mother?”