After Clare

by Marjorie Eccles

‘Perhaps not, but look at it this way – young chap, about to be married, another young woman turning up from London with – a problem . . . the attitude’s understandable, if not to his credit. Your sister was a dark horse, Emily.’

  There was a silence. The words flew through her mind with the speed of a bird skimming across the window. Clare? Clare?

  ‘If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, Hugh, it’s no,’ she returned coldly at last. ‘No. Not Clare, not ever.’

  He stared at her thoughtfully, then shrugged. ‘Probably not.’

  But in a moment, the nothing she had known about Clare had become even less. True enough, she had been agitated about what she considered her failure at the Slade, must have desperately needed advice, and yet . . . surely there had been someone other than this young Frenchman, charming as he had been, to give it? Why was it so important that she had been prepared to cross the Channel and follow him across France in order to talk to him? Why him especially?

  Maybe she had ignored his reply and gone anyway; maybe that was where she had disappeared to. Only Christian himself would know the answer. Crazy notions of going to Grenoble herself to find him came to her, until her usual common sense reasserted itself. This letter was decades old, there was no address on it. She had nothing but a name – Christian Gautier. There might be a dozen men of that name in the city. It was by no means certain that he still lived there, or that he was even still alive.

  Hugh said steadily, ‘Let it go, Emily. Let it go.’

  Putting the letter back in her bag, along with the sketches, she said, ‘Before I came back to England, I believed I’d come to terms with what happened to Clare, or at least come to accept that I would never know. I almost thought I was better off remaining in ignorance. But it’s different, being here, now I do want to know. I’ve always wondered, just how hard did they try to find her?’

  ‘My dear, the police tried everything they could, and when they came up with nothing, your father employed that private detective for three months. He found nothing, either, as you know.’

  ‘He gave up too soon then. People don’t just disappear like that, unless they’re dead. And I know she wasn’t dead.’

  He regarded her sadly. ‘If somebody is determined not to be found, Emily—’

  ‘Did they try the convent? She used to visit there, you know, to talk with the Mother Superior.’

  ‘Did she? That old nun? I never knew that. But if she was a regular visitor there, it would have been an obvious place to try, and I assume the detective would have done so.’

  Incarcerating herself in a convent was just the sort of thing one might have expected of Clare Vavasour, Hugh thought, and he saw why that would be an evidently more acceptable answer to Emily than the fairly obvious explanation – that she might have been having a child by this man Gautier. He added gently, ‘They are good women at the convent. If she had gone there, they would not have kept it secret.’

  ‘Mother Mary-Emmanuel would have known, but she can’t be alive, she was over seventy, then.’

  ‘There you are then. It was a long time ago, Emily,’ he said gently. ‘A long time ago.’

  When she had left, Hugh picked up a manila envelope-folder containing a manuscript from a new author that he had promised Gerald he would deliver to Edmund Sholto for an initial reading. He found his panama and his shooting stick and whistled for his fat old spaniel, Alice.

  As he came out of the door, he saw that Emily had stopped to have a few words with the gardener, and he waited until she had finished talking to him and had walked through the wicket gate that led towards Leysmorton. When she disappeared from sight, he walked in the opposite direction, down the drive of Steadings towards the main gates, but halfway there took a path that led through the woods on either side.

  Go with her to Madeira, eh? The idea had its attractions. Hugh had from time to time met British expatriates and had no desire to become one of them – but don’t waste these last years as we’ve wasted the rest, his sensible self told him. It’s not as if there will be lingering reminders of Emily’s marriage there. Her husband never lived with her in that quinta. Paddy Fitzallan’s last days had been spent in a sanatorium up in the mountains.

  He had tried to conceal from her the great pull of the heart her suggestion had given him. She was willing for them to be together, at last. But as he had told her, it needed thinking about. He had detected a certain hesitancy, which he hoped was due to the thought of abandoning Leysmorton once again. Did she really want to live permanently in Madeira, now that Fitzallan was gone? But for the two of them to live at Leysmorton with that fellow Stronglove and his sister still in occupation wasn’t to be thought of . . . and Steadings now belonged to Gerald, and he, Hugh, was an appendage. Leave, and give the boy’s marriage a chance? Yes – if things had not already gone too far for that. He slashed hard at some nettles encroaching onto the path with his stick. Damn Stronglove, damn Stella! Gerald deserved better. At the same time, he could pity Stella: so unhappy, so wrapped up in herself, spoiling her looks with her anger at her own unhappiness. Gerald was a good son – good publisher, too, knew how to sell books, especially if he could become less inclined not to take risks. They had had a slight difference of opinion over the novel the Drummond boy had written. The manuscript had been a lot better than this one he was taking to Sholto, against his own judgment. But people liked anything these days, and perhaps Sholto would see something in what Hugh thought of as modern trash, and would recommend it to Gerald, with some editing, as a saleable commodity.

  A pity, he had sometimes thought over the years, that his memories of Emily couldn’t be so strictly edited. It had not been a thought he had ever entertained for long.

  The night she told him she loved Paddy Fitzallan and had consented to marry him, the world had crumbled around Hugh’s ears. Bewildered, hurt and stiff, he could not bring himself to argue and plead, but his equable temperament had deserted him and for a few seconds he had astonished and shamed himself by wanting to shake her and shout that she should open her eyes, couldn’t she see Fitzallan was taking advantage of her? But rage against Emily was something he couldn’t sustain. What he wanted was to punch the fellow on the nose and knock him down – demand of him how such a cad could think himself good enough for such a star as Emily? But he had not sunk so low as to argue with someone for whom he had such contempt.

  Instead, he cursed himself for not having seen what was going on under his nose, and then wondered if he had not subconsciously suspected it, and had refused to acknowledge it because next to Fitzallan he had always felt himself stiff-necked and wooden, arousing untenable feelings of inferiority. Beside that jackanapes he must have seemed a very dull dog.

  He also despised Anthony Vavasour for being so spineless as to allow the marriage, when he had known she was all but engaged to Hugh, but wisely kept this opinion to himself. Nothing formal had ever been said between him and Emily after all. It was his own pride which had made him believe there was such a rapport between them that there was no need to rush into formalities.

  To the devil with it, he’d thought, lashing himself with the raw pain he felt. She was not the only girl in the world. Within a year he had married Lavinia. She had been a good wife, they were as happy as most married couples, the only flaw in their marriage being that after Gerald, there were no more children, something he’d minded more than she had.

  After that letter he’d written on Anthony’s behalf, telling Emily that Clare had vanished, he had continued to hear from her at regular though infrequent intervals – firstly, that she and that husband of hers had left India – it wouldn’t do, things had not worked out for him there, his father had died, the tea plantation had been a failure before they got there, the troubled Indians he intended to write about were offended at the idea of a Britisher – even an Irishman – thinking he could sort out their problems, feeling against British rule was still too strong. There had followed Egypt, and the exporting of antiquities, then s
elling Jaffa oranges from Palestine, ostrich farming in South Africa and some God-forsaken scheme in Armenia, where the Turks from across the border were intent on genocide. From all of these places came occasional newspaper articles written by Paddy which Hugh came across from time to time. He supposed they were well-intentioned, but he knew them to be lightweight, written from the fringes of whatever conflict interested him at the time, innocuous in comparison with those written by bona-fide foreign correspondents. He could not have made any profit from it – but that, Hugh thought with a touch of cynicism reserved only for Paddy Fitzallan, would not have mattered, considering the money he had married.

  By now, he had reached the stile that led to the road, with Sholto’s cottage fifty yards away. It was still warm, but this exceptional summer was nearly over; the hedgerows foaming with cow parsley and wild roses were giving way to the dying flame colours of autumn. He took off his panama and mopped his brow, flipped away the flies, and as old Alice flopped down, panting, indicating it was time for a rest, he settled himself on his shooting stick and allowed himself to remember.

  Paris. Notre Dame. A table outside a pavement café near the Pont Neuf on a sunny day. The bouquinistes lining the quays doing their usual leisurely trade, where he had just picked up a translation of the vagabond poet Francois Villon’s ‘Ballade’ and opened at random. Where are the snows of yesteryear? he read, as waiters balancing a row of plates along their arms rushed past him, and the flâneurs sauntered along the pavements, in the nonchalant yet acutely aware manner only Parisians could assume.

  He had been on a walking holiday in the Dolomites, reliving, as he did every year, the time he’d once spent there with two friends just after graduation, this time revelling in being alone for three weeks of long, solitary tramps over the mountains in tweed plus fours, with bread, cheese and a book in his pocket, staying at small, welcoming hotels, sleeping and eating well. Now he was back in civilization, having stopped off for a long overdue meeting with a business associate. The business concluded, he was now sipping coffee and a digestif after lunch and thinking rather half-heartedly of his return to England later that day, once more in a conventional suit and stiff collar, his mind still full of lakes and mountains.

  Lavinia had never shared his enthusiasm for that sort of holiday, saying it was a man’s recreation, but that if he insisted on going, she could always spend a few weeks with her sister in Tunbridge Wells. He was a little ashamed of the relief he’d felt at being able to satisfy his need to be alone for a while, and it had tinged his holidays with a feeling of guilt. But Lavinia had died two years ago and this time he had been unencumbered by any such emotion. He was tanned and fit and for once reluctant to get back to family, work and publishing. As the bells of Notre Dame sounded the hour he realized he would need to move soon to catch his travel connections, but the sun shone, the air smelled of French cigarettes and good food, and from one of the cafés further along came the jaunty, wheezy lilt of accordion music. The heads of several appreciative Frenchmen turned towards a woman walking gracefully towards the river. He debated whether or not to have another pastis.

  The woman had paused to lean on the stone parapet by the river, a small, slim figure in dark blue. He looked at the back of her, the lustrous dark hair, the fashionable hat, then hurriedly threw money onto the table and walked towards the railings. For a moment he, too, stood there and stared across the Seine, then as the woman turned to go he faced her.

  ‘Emily.’

  ‘Hugh!’

  She had been too far away to get home in time for her father’s funeral. So many years since they had last met, but she was just the same, the carnation flush to her cheeks, the wide brown eyes, and this time the smile was only for him.

  He had sent a cable home to say that he was unavoidably detained and let them make of it what they would. She had three weeks earmarked for shopping, sightseeing, amusing herself, while Paddy, refusing to allow his worrying state of health to stop him, had gone off on some hare-brained escapade she was not quite clear about. Of those weeks he remembered only the joy, not the details. Presumably they had eaten and drunk; he knew they had walked the city, visited museums and art galleries, all the things one did in Paris, only he could scarcely remember anything they saw, except for the Monets. He had known, half an hour ago, that she too had remembered them. During those three weeks they hadn’t talked much – really talked, or discussed their future – how could they? They both knew she was not going to leave her husband. His health was deteriorating – and besides, duty, loyalty, promises were not so easily broken in those days, a tenet he upheld then, and still did.

  They parted – something else he had erased from his memory – and afterwards they had continued to write to each other, but still infrequently. Not love letters, but innocuous missives which anyone could have read. And now, when he had ceased to expect it, here was the prospect of being together. His heart began to beat wildly, like a young man’s. Or an old man’s about to have a stroke. Calm down, he told himself as he eased himself off the shooting stick.

  Nothing was without its complications. For now, here was this other damnable business.

  Seventeen

  ‘Don’t think I’m unsympathetic, Novak.’ Superintendent Brownlow sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers and looking sorrowful. ‘You’re playing on a sticky wicket and I understand the difficulties. But we’re not getting on very fast, are we?’

  In the beginning, it had been understood that no one had expected results in this case immediately, or even at all. An unidentified skeleton, lying there for years – the circumstances hadn’t left much room for optimism. Brownlow’s attitude now was irritating, though Novak could understand his anxieties. The man was highly ambitious and it wasn’t all that long since he had stood in Novak’s shoes, a mere inspector, and he was still having to justify to his superiors his elevation to superintendent, acting puffed up yet jittery about his association with the great and the good. Both he and Novak knew that this investigation had to come together soon, or be abandoned, but Novak couldn’t see the latter going down well with Brownlow, much less the powers that be he was so eager to impress, who had yielded to the string-pulling in the first place to bring Scotland Yard to the investigation.

  ‘We’ve had very little to work on, sir.’ Brownlow’s mouth pursed. ‘But I think we can say we’ve moved a few steps forward.’ Briefly, he recounted the details about the money found in Sholto’s workshop, which at least elicited a grunt of interest.

  ‘They’re matters that require careful consideration,’ Brownlow conceded.

  ‘And we’ve also managed to make contact with one of the men Sholto served with.’

  Willard, doggedly working his way through the army demobilization records to which they had eventually been given access, had traced Sean Hennessy, an Irishman now living in Peckham and married to an English girl, and together they had gone to see him. Hennessy remembered Peter Sholto well. In fact, they had been pals, had gone side by side through some of the bloodiest battles of the war, and were together right until the time Peter had disappeared.

  Hennessy had good reason to recall the last conversation he’d had with Sholto, since it was one he’d had to repeat more than once to the military police who had chased up his apparent desertion. Mainly because it had happened on the seventeenth of March, St Patrick’s Day, the first one after the armistice, and the Irish contingent in the regiment had been all set to make a night of it. Sholto had promised to return in time to join in the high jinks and had asked Hennessy to cover for him in the meantime. He’d left camp in the afternoon, hitching a lift to the nearest town in a lorry that delivered supplies to the cookhouse. You could have knocked Hennessy down with a feather when he didn’t return. He was sure the lad had never intended to go AWOL, though like everyone else he had been sick with resentment and impatience for his release from the army.

  Hennessy, however, also told them that Sholto had had a letter that day, which he’d
said made it necessary for him to make an immediate sortie over to Netherley, on the other side of the county. It wasn’t anything that would justify asking for leave on compassionate grounds, but it couldn’t wait. What was the urgency? Hennessy had asked – he would be home for good, sooner or later, wouldn’t he? But no, he had to go there and then. There was something he had to do, something he had to retrieve, straight away. Retrieve? Yes. Hennessy had laughed. Sholto had used words like that – he’d had an education, and his dad had been a schoolmaster, hadn’t he? – though he’d refused to give any further explanation. Well, young Peter had never been one for giving away too much about himself.

  ‘I’ll tell you this for the truth, though. If I was a betting class of man, I’d wager it was something to do with a girl, maybe someone he’d left in the lurch, or something after that manner. He had a photo he always kept with him, like we all had these lucky mascots. I’d me half-crown that saved me from a bullet, still keep it with me.’ He had pulled a battered piece of silver from his pocket to demonstrate. ‘This girl now. Maybe Peter had wakened up to his responsibilities, grown up while he was in the army. I saw it happen. War makes men out of boys, God help us all.’

  Hennessy wouldn’t go further than that. He’d been sick to hear Sholto had been murdered, and he wasn’t prepared to dish any dirt on him. In Willard’s estimation it had been an odd sort of friendship between the young chap and the older Hennessy, but Willard hadn’t been in the war. Novak had seen odder friendships, comradeship forged through having spent terrible years of their lives together. When you’d lived, slept, eaten and fought alongside each other, in the unspeakable conditions of the late war, when you’d stood shoulder to shoulder, up to your waist in mud and blood, facing the enemy, your guts churning, then a bond of loyalty was formed that no one but those with similar experiences could ever understand. In this case, mistaken loyalty might have kept Hennessy’s lips buttoned, but both he and Willard had been inclined to think that he knew no more than he had told them.