The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

“Yes,” he said, “I rather thought you did.”

  “Fill me in on the background,” said Tom, “First tell me what happened to everyone, after you left Charnley, during the war?”

  Nina said, “Daisy and Athene – you haven’t met my Aunt Athene, Dad’s sister, yet, that’s a treat in store! – went to France and drove ambulances.”

  “So they did,” said Harriet. “Being suffragettes had made them very intrepid. I was in France, too, but only behind the lines, nursing the wounded. I’d enrolled as a VAD, which was a salutary experience. I don’t believe I’d ever so much as held a duster previously, let alone scrubbed floors, but I ended up doing far worse jobs than that. Vita did some nursing, too, when Stoke Wycombe was used as a convalescent home, but she didn’t last long. They told her, quite nicely, that ‘she wasn’ t born to it’, so she just went back to being the chatelaine.”

  Tom was amused. And – Marcus?”

  Harriet noticed that. Marcus, not ‘my father’. Well, how could a man he had never known be a real father to him? His adoptive father, Michel, though not his biological parent, was the one who had nurtured and loved him all his life, and there was obviously a great deal of affection between them. Physically, apart from his height, Tom bore no definite resemblance to Marcus, though she kept getting fleeting, disconcerting glimpses of that elusive, hard to pin down family look, and that smile which had first told her without question who he was. She thought he might be like her brother in other ways, though.

  “Oh, Marcus had already abandoned the Law and joined the army before the war – not the Guards, where he might have kept up the same sort of social life he’d had before, but the Royal Engineers, of all things. Something seemed to have come over him after we left Charnley. He’d changed. We hardly saw him and when we did, he just wasn’t the same any more. He’d always been so – well, such a contented, settled sort of person. He loved Charnley – not just its way of life, but the whole idea of it as a continuing cycle – more than any of us, I think. Then afterwards, when he came home from Egypt, he joined the army. It was as if he wanted to cut free completely and put his old life, his old friends, even his family, quite behind him.”

  “Perhaps because my mother apparently refused to marry him, even when she found she was pregnant. She was a fiercely independent person, I gather, and she couldn’t wholly commit herself to him – and besides, she knew she wanted to stay in Egypt for the rest of her life, while he could never leave England permanently. It seems as though, from what you say, he might have had hopes of getting Charnley back one day.”

  “Yes,” said Harriet quietly, “for Marcus, Charnley was everything.”

  Another silence fell over the table as they contemplated a life, like so many more, cut tragically short before its promise could be fulfilled, until Nina broke it by asking, “Did he ever know – about you, Tom?”

  “No. She never told him. She married Dad soon after I was born.”

  “I’m sorry he died never knowing that he had a son. It would have meant a lot to him.” Harriet wondered if it had yet occurred to Tom that he was the last of the Jardines, if on the wrong side of the blanket, that Beatrice had been his grandmother, Amory his grandfather. “Perhaps Rose was right, either way he’d have been unhappy – marrying her knowing she didn’t love him, or having a son he couldn’t keep by his side.”

  Drinking Mrs Binns’ regrettable coffee – one day, thought Tom optimistically, this nation might learn to make coffee as well as they made their tea – he decided he’d learned as much about the situation as they could tell him, and what should be done about it was beginning to move on its own trajectory, at least in his mind.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “It seems to me it’d benefit us all if we operated from the same place. I could stay here. I needn’t go back tonight, in fact.”

  “Here? At the Lamb? Tonight?” Harriet’s face was a study. “I don’t think they take visitors. And the privy’s out at the back.”

  He grinned. “I can only ask.” He left the room, and returned within a few minutes. “Yes, I can stay. If I agree to have Grandpa’s old room. I think he might have died there of hypothermia, but Mrs B’s going to light a fire, put a bottle in the bed and give me another eiderdown.” He looked about to say more, considered them both and then changed his mind. “I’ll just hop back to London tomorrow, pick up my belongings and check out at the hotel, and see to one or two other things. Should be back in the afternoon.”

  Harriet raised an eyebrow. “He has a way with him, Nina, this Tom Verrier.”

  There was no such sophistication in Garvingden as street lamps, but as Nina and Harriet left the Lamb to make their way back to her cottage the moon was hard and bright, sailing high in a clear sky, and light spilled from cottage windows. Everyone seemed reluctant to draw their curtains, now that blackout restrictions were a thing of the past, and glimpses of cosy interiors could be seen from the footpath as they walked along, the glow illuminating stiff clumps of michaelmas daisies, and dahlias as yet untouched by frost. From old Tatchell’s garden emanated the sharp scent of his prize chrysanthemums, Brussels sprouts and a ripe compost heap. The intimacy of the half-lit shadows seemed to provide the cover Harriet apparently needed for broaching the subject of her excursion to London that afternoon – or as much, Nina guessed, as she felt she was meant to know. As she began, it was with an unaccustomed hesitancy, seeming to find the subject difficult and sounding surprised and rather annoyed that it was.

  Nina listened in what she hoped was a sympathetic silence after Kit’s name occurred. Having seen those notebooks of Harriet’s, she was in a position to know a little more about him, and his relationship with her, which hadn’t actually ever seemed to make her very happy. She’d been intrigued to know whether the problems between them had ever been sorted out, and had felt that Harriet, in allowing her access to those notebooks, had opened the door to questions, but now here she was, talking about Kit and herself before the opportunity to ask arose.

  Daisy had once or twice hinted at some relationship not to be mentioned in her elder sister’s dim and distant past, but had refused to be drawn as to its exact nature, and Nina had automatically assumed this to mean the usual story of a young man killed in France, leaving an irreconcilable Harriet as one of the spinster generation, unloved, unfulfilled. It was an image that had never really fitted Harriet. Much easier to see her kicking over the traces as she had done – and how brave of her that had been, in those days! – defying convention and living ‘in sin’ with Kit. Even today, when divorce was not quite the stigma it had been, illicit liaisons such as theirs would be frowned upon. At that time, it would have been very shocking. And yet, it had all gone for nothing. The affair had ended disastrously, though perhaps in a way no one could have predicted.

  And Harriet had picked herself up and started again and had seemingly led a full and happy life without Kit. There were gaps in the story, probably things Harriet felt were too painful to repeat. Perhaps it was better so. Nina didn’t much like what she’d heard of this Kit, holy orders or no holy orders.

  16

  The following morning, Nina took Harriet’s old bicycle and rode down to the shop to buy fresh bread for breakfast, using the back road – thereby missing Tom, who was supposed to be on his way to London by then. She’d barely left when the Riley Nine roared into the lane and he breezed into the cottage.

  “Can you be ready tomorrow to go away for a few days, Harriet?”

  “What? Where to?”

  “Egypt.”

  “Egypt?” She lifted an eyebrow. “May one ask how that’s possible?”

  “One may. I’ve been commandeering Mrs Binns’ telephone for the last hour and I’ve managed to hitch lifts for us on an RAF York that’s flying out tomorrow,” he’d replied, as though this were the most natural thing in the world. “Oppo of mine in the RAF wangled it for me. I shot him a line about … well, anyway. Stop overnight at Malta, then on to Fayed. From there we can easily ge
t to Cairo, stay at the flat in Heliopolis and come back by the return flight later in the week.” He made the operation sound as simple as getting a bus from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus. It was probably illegal. Certainly risky.

  She recalled his casual remark of the previous night: “There must have been a reason for Iskander to have left so suddenly like that,” he’d said. “And there’s only one way to find that out - by talking to the old boy himself.” He’d rubbed his nose, looking very thoughtful. She hadn’t taken much notice. It was, after all, a barely feasible proposition for anyone to think of taking ship and actually going out to confront Iskander, not with the restrictions on foreign travel and the permission needed to leave the country and all the other red tape to be dealt with, not to mention getting into Egypt. She’d evidently seriously underestimated him.

  “Come on!” he urged. “It won’t be first class travel, but it’s a great chance. Are you game?”

  Harriet said, after a moment’s reflection, “If you mean to do what I think you do, certainly not.”

  “You disappoint me, Aunt Harriet. I thought you were a gutsy lady.”

  “Guts, as you so elegantly put it, have nothing to do with it.” She busied herself with lighting a cigarette. “I just don’t particularly want to meet Valery Iskander again.”

  “Ah.” He eyed her speculatively. “As a matter of fact, I had a hunch you might say that – though I think you might be pleasantly surprised if you did meet him. Does this mean I’ve expended my considerable charm and powers of persuasion for nothing? There’s not much point in my going to see him alone. Someone else needs to be there to help me along. I might not remember everything he has to say.”

  “So take Inspector Grigsby.”

  He said reproachfully, “Harriet, you’re not taking this seriously. Grigsby! If Grigsby feels the necessity to go, which he doesn’t seem to, he can make his own arrangements.”

  “Sorry. Count me out. Why not take Nina with you?”

  “What a good idea!” That crooked, beguiling smile lit up his face. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Why not, indeed?” she’d answered drily.

  She had almost begun to believe, by the time they’d reached the coffee stage of their meal last night, that it was only too depressingly probable that the true facts about her mother’s murder might never emerge, that they could remain forever silted up in the sands of Egypt. Either that, or the police were on the right track, thinking the murder originated nearer home, something she didn’t want to acknowledge and pushed to the back of her mind with an unaccustomed thrill of superstitious fear, as if merely thinking such things would cause them to happen. Despite the euphoria created by suddenly finding she had a new and very agreeable nephew and ally, she’d been tired, and still rather despondent after her meeting with Kit. But this morning, when Tom arrived with his harebrained plan (so cheeky that it might actually work) it had revitalized her, strengthened her determination to go on.

  Unlike Harriet, Nina had been game, and had instantly agreed to go. Personally, she said airily, she’d never encountered much difficulty with officialdom when she was serving in Egypt, being safely sheltered under the blanket of His Majesty’s government, but added that the little she did know was sufficient for her to see what a tedious task it would be to obtain permission to enter Egypt from the authorities, much less at long distance. She could visualise the willingness to help: yes effendi, no madame; the smiles, the charm; but also the promises that never came to anything, the lethargy that amounted to indolence. To take care of it yourself, yes, that was the best thing. She’d blithely driven off to London with Tom to pick up what she would need, leaving Harriet to contain her impatience to play her own part.

  In the clearer light of another day, Harriet acknowledged that she’d allowed that abortive, wholly unsatisfactory visit to Kit the previous day to sidetrack her, to deflect her from what she instinctively felt to be the root of the matter – or at any rate the branch from which the events that led to the murder had grown. She ought to have trusted her own instincts rather than let her fear for Kit overrule them. Now, she determined to put suspicions that Kit had lied to her to one side and try another tack. Apart from Beatrice herself, and possibly Amory, both of them now dead, there were only three people, as far as she knew – Wycombe, Millie Glendinning (later Kaplan) and Hallam – who’d been in Luxor and presumably knew what had happened there. (And, of course, Iskander, whom Tom and Nina were going to see.) At least, she could talk to those here. Millie first, she thought. Tomorrow, she would go up to London and find Millie.

  Meanwhile, the day outside was bright and blowy, and the little strip of back garden that she called her herbaceous border was crying out for attention. Leaves were blowing in drifts into corners and into the bottoms of the hedges, the clematis had flowered its last and needed to be cut back, and even the indomitable michaelmas daisies were definitely past their best. The opportunity was there, and she was alone. A good day for secateurs and determination, she decided as she went to get her gardening gloves. Then the post arrived with a plop on the doormat and after she’d opened the single letter which lay there, the prospect of gardening faded like the smile on the Cheshire cat.

  By now, she’d read it through three times, each time with a mixture of disbelief, pain and shock. Even so, the shadow that had lain over her for most of her life shifted, just a little. It was very nearly, but not quite, as bad as she had feared.

  ‘You have been gone just over an hour and already I am regretting the things I said, but more importantly did not say, to you,’ Kit wrote. ‘Just because a man puts on a dog collar, it doesn’t make him a saint — or less of a coward. The police will no doubt be coming to see me, and in view of what has now been discovered at Charnley, I see that I’m no longer justified in keeping to myself what I know about the last night of your mother’s life. But before I speak to the police, I have to let you know what I couldn’t bring myself to say to you face to face.’

  By now the next page was indelibly committed to Harriet’s memory. But as she compulsively turned it over to read it yet again, there came the sound of a car drawing up on the road outside the cottage, beyond the few yards of the tiny front plot and the low stone wall that divided the garden from the footpath outside. She dragged herself away from the letter. She hadn’t expected Tom to have brought Nina back so soon, and she wasn’t ready to face them. The letter had left her disorientated. She stuffed it into its envelope and then into the pocket of her skirt, before going to let them in. Outside the front door stood her two sisters. Daisy – and Vita.

  “We’ve come to see Tom,” announced Daisy, her face alight with anticipation, when they were inside. Harriet sighed inwardly. She might have foreseen this after ringing Daisy with the news this morning. “I could hardly take it in – is it really true he’s Marcus’s son – and Rose Jessamy’s? Yes, of course it is – I knew there was something about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it when he came to see us – why didn’ t he say who he was then?”

  “I expect the opportunity didn’t arise.” Or perhaps he hadn’ t been sure how Daisy would take that sort of news. “I’m sorry, but you’ve missed him. He’s gone back up to London with Nina.”

  Disappointment clouded Daisy’s face. “You mean we shan’t see him?”

  “Depends on how long you can stay. An hour, an hour and a half, they should be back by that time.”

  “Well, I dare say we can stay until then,” Vita said. “That isn’t the only reason we’ve come – why I’ve come, anyway.” She hesitated. Daisy’s eyebrows rose.” I had those two policemen interrogating me yesterday and … the truth is, I quite desperately need to talk to someone.”

  Without thinking, Harriet heard herself say, “And I’m the last resort?”

  She refused to meet Daisy’s accusing glance, and when she looked towards Vita she found, unexpectedly, no room left in her for more sarcasms. The acid comment, ‘What’s wrong with your husband or tha
t tame psychiatrist of yours?’ died on her lips. Her predictable responses to Vita were becoming unattractive. This was, after all, her sister. As children, they’d been inseparable, closer together in age to each other than to Daisy, and though they seemed to have lost their way somewhat over the years, she was still Vita, sometimes selfish, frequently neurotic and always obstinate, victim of traumatic events, even if they were often of her own making. At the moment, despite her beautifully cut saxe-blue costume and the little burgundy hat trimmed with a long pheasant’s feather, tilted fetchingly over one eye, she looked terrible, so pale and fragile, at the end of her tether. Harriet did something she hadn’t done for years. She put her arms around her sister. Vita began to weep and Harriet didn’t try to stop her. Daisy said nothing, but went into the kitchen and presently came back with a tray of tea.

  Harriet almost thought her own bitten-back words had been spoken, or conveyed by some process of thought transmission, so apt were Vita’s next words, her voice muffled against Harriet’s shoulder. “Oscar thinks I ought to speak to Myles. But I can’t bring myself to salve my conscience at the expense of–” She broke off abruptly and began to dry her eyes. She took off her hat, patted her hair into place, blew her nose and pulled out her compact.

  “Say what to Myles?” demanded Daisy, busy with sugar and milk.

  Their tea poured, out came the story that Vita had told to the police, all of it news to her two sisters. Committed to being resolutely unshockable, Daisy listened silently, tugging down the sleeves of her faded dusty-pink jumper, which seemed to have shrunk in the wash, but she was obviously shaken: Vita, admitting to lax behaviour not a lot different from that of her own unruly charges at Hope House, and with much less excuse! The revelation came as less of a surprise to Harriet. Bertie Rossiter had never stood high in her estimation. She didn’t exonerate Vita entirely from the mad scheme – it had quite possibly been her idea – but Bertie, who should have known better, would have done nothing to dissuade her. In any case, after that letter Harriet had just received, the contents of which came back to her with a jolt, Vita’s disclosure about slipping out to meet her young man clandestinely came through as a minor indiscretion, though as for what might have followed had they not been interrupted … Vita had, it seemed, been more their mother’s daughter than anyone had realised.