by Rosie Thomas
Darcy slowly retraced his steps into the house. He came straight to Helen, put his arms around her and kissed her hair.
‘I’m sorry to have to leave you,’ he said. ‘But I must go straight to Montcalm. You understand, don’t you?’ She nodded mutely. ‘Try to sleep a little,’ he said gently.
One by one the others went away. Helen thought that she was alone with Tom at last in the bleak, empty hall. Then she looked up and saw Gerry. He half smiled, bitter with grief, and once again there was the cruel flash of his resemblance to Oliver.
‘He often said that he didn’t want to end up like me. He won’t now, will he?’ He shrugged his shoulders and then walked away.
They were left to themselves.
Tom was still shaking, long uncontrollable shivers that set his teeth chattering. Slowly Helen went to him and took his hands in hers.
‘You must get dry.’ The inadequacy made her wonder how she could ever again say anything to fill the silence between them.
She might not have spoken at all.
Tom said, ‘I shouldn’t have let him go. It’s my fault.’ The words came out as if they had been circling inside his head for hours. Helen’s hands tightened on his.
‘You can’t blame yourself.’
Tom lifted his head and the misery in his eyes struck into her.
‘Can’t I?’
‘Oliver wasn’t stoppable. We both know that.’
Heavily Tom stood up and they looked at each other. A restraint was growing between them, bred out of the horror of the night and the fear that it had changed everything.
‘What now?’ he asked her, almost whispering.
She believed that there was nothing else for her to say, but it sounded like a knell as she spoke. ‘I can’t leave Darcy now.’ Stiff, cold little words. ‘Not now. Because he needs me.’
‘And you think I don’t?’
Tom looked utterly changed. His shoulders were hunched and the assurance had drained out of his face, leaving it grey and exhausted. Helen made a move towards him, longing to comfort him, but he fended her off.
‘Well?’ There was to be no kindly pretence. Tom wouldn’t have that.
‘I don’t think that you need me as much.’ The truth hurt her physically as if she was being ripped in half. Sympathy, respect, tenderness, she thought, versus love. Painful, inescapable, real love.
But how can I hurt Darcy now? And if not now, whenever?
Bewilderment and hurt seethed around her. She saw that Tom was leaving her. He walked away, in a wide circle around where the red stretcher had lain.
Panic gripped Helen.
‘Wait,’ she called after him. ‘Tom. I love you.’
He didn’t stop, or even look around. ‘I don’t think so.’ The door opened, and shut with finality.
‘Tom?’ she shouted. ‘Tom!’
But the silence was unbroken and she felt the weight of the house around her, sombre and stricken with tragedy. Somewhere, Oliver was lying dead. He was alone, among strangers. He was gone, and the little conflicts of their world went on without him. As if it mattered, as if it mattered. Pity for him washed through her like a river.
Helen went upstairs through the brooding house. She lay down and let the tears for her friend come, breaking in long waves until the first tide of grief subsided and she sank into the sleep of exhaustion.
Later in the day Darcy came back. He was calm, and very gentle to her, almost as if it was Helen’s brother who had died instead of his own. She watched him as he stood by the window with the curtains looped back in one hand so that he could see the sun-golden front of Christ Church. The brightness of the day was in bitter contrast to the darkness they carried with them. The curtains had been drawn, and the high room was airless.
They spoke very little. Helen was not even sure that she knew this different Darcy, white-faced with shock but still with all his diffidence gone. The burden of making – and she recoiled from the horrible word – arrangements seemed to have fallen squarely on him, and he was meeting it capably.
There would have to be a post-mortem and an inquest, he told her, but he had already spoken to the coroner and there was no doubt that the verdict would be accidental death. There would be no delay to the funeral.
‘It will be in the church, at Mere,’ he told her. ‘Do you suppose that many of Oliver’s friends will want to come?’
‘I think they all will,’ she answered him. We all loved him, she thought again, in our own ways.
‘Darcy,’ she ventured, ‘how are your parents?’ Her dislike of Lord and Lady Montcalm was forgotten in her sympathy for them.
‘Broken. Especially my mother.’ Helen saw it clearly. The beloved, intriguing and wayward Oliver, focus of all those silver-framed photographs, was gone. She understood that for all his difficulty he had been idolised. And she saw Darcy’s homely face and self-effacing bearing, remembering how often anger had possessed her at his parents’ coldness.
Now, in the midst of this tragedy, Darcy was somehow proving himself. Respect took its place with liking in the complication of her feelings for him.
He came and sat beside her, taking her fingers in his firm clasp.
‘I didn’t know him very well,’ he said sadly. ‘We never understood each other. But lately, just lately, I felt that we liked one another better. Like brothers in any family.’ His smile was wistful, with a trace of hunger in it. He wanted her to talk about Oliver. ‘You were probably closer to him than I ever was.’
‘Perhaps.’ She couldn’t do it, without uncovering truths that were too close to pain to face today.
The silence settled around them again. Darcy was so close, solid beside her, but Helen felt as alone as she had ever done in her life.
How isolated we are, she thought. And how tenuous the strongest links turn out to be. She had the vertiginous sense that Darcy was a total stranger, and that all the strength of her feelings for Tom had been hallucination. But no. That wasn’t true. She knew that she loved Tom with every fibre of herself. And yet she had turned him away so that she could go on sitting here beside Darcy because she believed that it was the right thing for her to do.
The right thing?
With the irony of fate, it had turned out to be Darcy who possessed all the strength. She felt that the tragedy had stripped her of all hers, stripped her of everything except the potential to hurt. And what had it done to Tom? She thought of him, aching with longing, and knew that she couldn’t go to him now. Perhaps he would come back. Perhaps he would give her another chance. And perhaps this wasn’t all that there was left, sitting in silence beside a Darcy she didn’t know, and comparing. The endless, unwanted comparisons ran on inside her head. Even the hand that held hers. Heavy and blunt after Tom’s expressive hands with the quick fingers. Stop it. Oh, stop.
Darcy was watching her with the new decisive expression intensifying behind his eyes.
‘Would you like me to take you out for something to eat?’
‘I don’t think I could eat anything,’ she answered him lifelessly.
With unbearable gentleness he replaced her hand in her lap. ‘I’ll go back to Montcalm, then,’ he said. ‘To be with my mother for a while.’
Helen nodded, and then again to hide the tears that gathered in her eyes. In case Darcy saw them, and stayed. It was much easier to be alone.
Did Tom feel that?
He never came, although she waited for him all through the stifling days before the funeral. The air stagnated in Follies House until she felt that it was almost unfit to breathe. Helen and Chloe saw no-one except Darcy. If Pansy was grieving she did it alone and away from the house, because her room stayed dark and locked. They drew closer together in their isolation, reaching the point of friendship beyond secrets.
‘You don’t want to marry him, do you?’ Chloe asked her in the small hours of one sleepless night. She felt rather than saw the shake of Helen’s head. ‘It’s Tom, isn’t it?’
‘Is it so very
obvious?’ Helen’s voice was muffled. Her face was buried against her drawn-up knees. ‘Darcy mustn’t know. Must never know.’
‘Oh, Helen. Are you so very certain that he doesn’t know?’
I was certain, Helen thought. Now I don’t think I know anything, any more.
The melancholy sense of things coming to an end possessed them all. Helen began to pack her things. The books went back into the cardboard boxes that Oliver had carried up the stairs for her, and her clothes into the shabby suitcases. The little white room took on its bare, uninhabited look again, but she left Tom’s sea picture in its place over the mantelpiece. She still thought that she could smell the fresh salt air.
Helen’s feeling of being cast adrift was heightened by realising that she had no idea where she was going, now. She could go back to her mother’s house, and begin to look for a job all over again. Or if Darcy wanted her at Mere, she would go with him. That was what her promise meant and she had chosen to keep it. But in the times that she spent with Darcy, they were painstakingly gentle with each other, and almost formal. Neither of them mentioned it.
Downstairs Chloe was packing too. She would be coming back to Oxford after the summer, but not to Follies House. Too much had happened there.
‘I’ve got my London flat,’ she told Helen. ‘Come and stay with me until you get your bearings again. I’d love you to be there.’ Chloe was going back to do a freelance job, but London seemed to belong to a forgotten part of her life now. Helen’s company would be a precious link with reality.
Helen thanked her, but she hadn’t said that she would come. She was clinging to Oxford because she knew that Tom was still there.
The day of the funeral came.
In the morning Pansy materialised again. She came with Hobbs who parked Masefield’s white Rolls up on the bridge.
When Chloe and Helen found her, she was stuffing belongings into her bags. Hobbs was ferrying suitcases out of the diminishing chaos in her room.
Pansy straightened up from her task and smiled at them. Her plain grey dress showed that she was thinner, and her lovely face looked a little older. The maturity suited her. They hugged each other in turn, wordlessly acknowledging the sadness of their reunion.
‘The funeral’s today,’ they told her.
‘Yes. That’s why I’m here. May I come with you? I could get Hobbs to take me, but …’ She gestured out to the ostentatious car with a flash of the old, merry, irreverent Pansy.
‘We’ll all go together,’ Chloe said quietly. Instinctively they turned the talk, if not their thoughts, away from the black tribute of the afternoon.
‘Where have you been?’ Chloe asked her.
‘London. On my own, mostly. Thinking about Oliver quite a lot, as it happens.’ Pansy had indeed done her own mourning for him, and it was part of her that she should have done it alone, and in secret. Helen found herself wondering, as she had done often before, about how much more Pansy there was submerged, iceberg like, beneath the frivolous surface. Lightly, Pansy went on, ‘I did a bit of work with Scot. Reading the Moll Flanders script with him.’ An un-Pansy-like flush of enthusiastic colour came into her face. ‘He’s a brilliant director. I’m so proud that he’s asked me to work with him. It’s not just getting into films, and Hollywood and all that, that I’m excited about. But working for Scot. And you know the best thing of all? I did it myself, without any of Masefield’s string-pulling or demanding of favours to be returned. Just me, on my own. What d’you think of that?’
They smiled at her.
‘I think you’ll be a huge success, and far too famous to have anything to do with Helen and me any more.’
‘Oh no.’ Pansy was serious at once. She put an arm around their shoulders. ‘I won’t ever forget this year. Or the way that somehow our friendship has survived, in spite of all the things that I did. Whatever happens to us all, I shall still think of you as the best friends I’ll ever have.’ For Pansy it was a long, serious speech, and they believed her.
It stirred up the muddy waters of memory, and brought them back to Oliver.
When the time came, they made themselves ready to go, feeling the heat of the house in their dark clothes.
As they filed down the shallow stairs, Rose came out to them. They hadn’t seen her for days because she had been locked in her room with her grief. Now they were shocked to see how terrible she looked. Her huge face was blotched with purple and her little eyes were almost invisible. Her ragged hair appeared to be falling out, leaving grey patches of skin. She was squeezed into a heavy black coat, and she stared mutely up as they came down towards her.
Chloe put a hand on her arm. ‘Would you like to come with us?’ she asked.
Rose shook her head. There was a glimmer of the old, defensive malice. ‘Gerry is taking me. As family, we are going in a suitable car, even if they have chosen to ignore us.’
Helen felt a flash of surprise that Darcy hadn’t made arrangements for them to be driven to the funeral. She doubted, too, whether Gerry would be capable. He had been drunk for a week.
Yet when they came out into the unwelcome sunlight, they saw a big black car with a black-suited driver waiting on the bridge. Gerry was half leaning against it. As they reached him, they saw that he was practically sober. His black suit was too tight for him, and cut in the style of ten years ago, but it was clean and pressed. He nodded to each of them as they stepped past, and they realised that he was in tears. ‘Oliver would be pleased that you are going to say goodbye,’ he mumbled, with the drinker’s sentimentality.
When they were past, Pansy murmured through tight lips, ‘I think Oliver would simply laugh at the whole thing.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Helen answered wearily. The sadness of the day was choking.
What did Tom feel? she wondered. Why was she being such a fool as not to be with him? His face flushed in front of her with the vividness of a hallucination.
Because of her loyalty to Darcy.
And Darcy didn’t need her after all.
The familiar drive to Mere took them through the luxuriant, high-summer splendour of the countryside. The broad fields were golden yellow or lush green, fringed with the heavy-leaved shade of oaks and elms. Cows moved through the pastureland, up to their bellies in the rich grass. Through the opened windows Helen caught the scent of cow-parsley, and the dog-roses that rambled over the hedges. She turned her eyes away and looked down at the black hem of her skirt. The beauty of the day and the tranquil thought of the seasons’ slow succession was too painful to contemplate, because it was over for Oliver.
They drove slowly through Mere village, and Helen saw that the curtains in many of the cottage windows were drawn. At the Mortimore Arms, a black pall was hanging over the swinging sign board that bore the family coat of arms. At the end of the village was the square tower of the little Saxon church. Beyond it was the low grey line of Mere House, enclosed by its yew hedges against the sunny hillside.
No-one spoke as they walked from the car to the lych-gate. The road was lined with silent villagers, many of them farm-labourers with ruddy faces and pale foreheads left startlingly bare by the removal of their caps. From the church tower a single bell tolled, the reverberations dying on the still, scented air and then gathering again.
As the cool shadow of the lych-gate passed over her face, Helen looked to the south door of the church and saw Darcy standing in the porch. He had a brief word for each of the dark figures that came slowly past him. She walked heavily on up the path, past the ancient yew tree at the gate and the mossed headstones of long-forgotten Mortimore tenants.
When he saw her, he smiled his grave smile, and his lips brushed her cheek. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, and then he turned to Pansy and Chloe. A word for each of them as they passed into the dimness of the church.
It was packed. Two vergers came forward, and Helen found to her bewilderment that she was separated from Pansy and Chloe. The old man led her down the aisle, past line after line of m
ourners. At the very front, it felt like a mile away, was a high, carved pew with a twisted red rope across the step up to it. The verger bent to unclasp the brass hook from its round eye, and stood aside to let her in.
The family pew.
Darcy’s fiancée in the family pew. Helen knelt down in the empty, carved box and felt the loneliness gathering around her.
When she looked up again she saw the faded rose pinks and violets of the east window, the brass crucifix glowing in the dimness, and the banks of waxy white lilies on either side. Slowly she turned her head. At the foot of the chancel steps was the bier, with white candles in tall holders at each corner. On the big dark coffin there was a single wreath of lilies.
Helen looked away again, and up at the light filtering through the medieval stained glass. None of this, the pervasive smell of lilies or the muted organ music, was anything to do with Oliver. He was nowhere here.
The organ music died away with a single, long chord. There was a moment of whispering silence and then Lady Montcalm came down the aisle supported by her husband and son. She was moving slowly, suddenly aged, and her hand on her husband’s black sleeve looked knobbed and stiff. Her face was half hidden by a black net veil. As they came into the pew Lord Montcalm looked at Helen from under his white eyebrows. Grief seemed to have rubbed out the autocratic stare. Darcy came in after his mother, half lifting her into her place. Helen bent her head, saddened to see how tragedy had diminished them. Had she once been so afraid of them?
The rector of Montcalm was at the chancel steps. He began to read the old, magnificent words of the burial service. Helen bent her head and prayed that they would comfort Oliver’s family.
After the brief service, Darcy walked out into the aisle again and stood at the head of the coffin. At once five other men joined him, bracing themselves in readiness to lift the weight on to their shoulders. Helen saw that two of them had the unmistakable Mortimore head. Cousins, perhaps. Two more were from the boisterous company of upper-class young men who had filled one part of Oliver’s life since early childhood.
The sixth was Tom. It was Darcy’s graceful gesture to include him in the tight phalanx.
