by Janet Tanner
But then, hadn’t they always been? Wasn’t it because she had always put the people she cared for first that her life had been so turbulent, so eventful, so disastrous in some ways? Sophia shook her head. For heaven’s sake, why go over it now? What good would it achieve?
She really should put the light on. The dark was closing in now. But Sophia sat transfixed. She did not often think about that terrible night, almost twenty years ago, when Louis had died. Some things are too painful to remember, the mind blocks them out, pretends they never happened. That was how it was with Louis’s death a good deal of the time. Not now. Now a key had unlocked the past and that key was Juliet.
Sophia stared out into the darkening garden remembering how it had been that night. First there had been the gala, glittering social occasion that it was, marred by her anxieties about the business and the family, a dread that would not go away and which was heightened because the root cause of the trouble was Louis – her beloved Louis – and she could not go on making excuses for him any more. Then there had been the drive home with the sick feeling inside her growing, frightening her because she had come to look upon this particular emotion as a portent of something bad to come. Once upon a time she had tried to tell herself she was being stupid, imaginative and over-emotional, but bitter experience had proved that when trouble was coming her own sixth sense invariably knew it and reacted with this awful mounting panic. Why was it so strong, she had wondered as the chauffeur-driven car had whisked her home? The trouble, whatever it was, must be very close indeed.
Clear across the years she remembered the first glimpse that night of La Grange through the trees that lined the drive. In spite of the lateness of the hour lights had still been burning at several of the ground floor windows and the sight had told her that Louis must be home. She had not known whether to be glad or sorry. At least he had not flown off to London as he so often did at the weekends to seek the sort of high life Jersey – staid old-fashioned Jersey – could not offer him. But when Louis was at home these days there were inevitably arguments – or worse.
Again Sophia let her mind drift and into the vacuum came snatches of conversation.
Le Grand, the chauffeur, as he stopped the Mercedes at the front steps: ‘Will there be anything else, Mrs Langlois?’
And her own voice, quite normal in spite of the turmoil within: ‘No thank you. Peter. I’ll see myself in. You get along home.’
She had stood for a moment on the steps, mentally gathering the courage to go in, hoping perhaps Louis might already be in bed. She didn’t want another argument. Not tonight …
‘Grandma! Would you like a nightcap?’ Sophia almost jumped. So lost in her memories had she been that she had not heard Juliet’s tap at the door.
‘A nightcap?’ To her own ears her voice sounded strained and distant.
‘Yes. Cocoa? Ovaltine? Or something stronger?’
‘No. No, I don’t think so.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘Then why are you sitting here in the dark?’
‘I like the dark, darling.’
Blessed dark, soft and cloying all around, concealing ugliness and a multitude of sins.
‘At least have some Ovaltine. It will help you to sleep.’
‘Very well.’ Sophia could not be bothered to argue any more. ‘If you insist. But please don’t put the light on, Juliet. Not yet.’
Juliet went out, pulling the door closed behind her. If only it were so simple, Sophia thought. If only a cup of Ovaltine would take away all the memories that haunt me! But there were some things she could never forget. Some things that would stay with her all her life. And one of them was that terrible night.
The darkness outside the window was full of ghosts now. Sophia closed her eyes, pressing her hands across her face in an effort to shut them out but it was no use. The sight of Louis’s body was imprinted on her mind forever, she could see it now just as she had seen it then, sprawled across the drawing-room carpet. Blood caked in his blond hair and made a great scarlet splash on the white cotton of his dress shirt; a darker patch was spreading across the carpet. She shuddered now as she had shuddered then, her fingers tightening around the gun that she held in her hand – Louis’s own pistol, brought illegally into the island, kept because of vanity and bravado. She had known no good would come of it. Her infallible intuition had warned her. But now it was too late. Louis was dead.
For a few minutes longer she had stood, staring down at his body, numb and shaking. Then she had crossed to the telephone and dialled 999.
‘This is Sophia Langlois at La Grange,’ she had said when the operator answered. ‘ I think I need both an ambulance and the police. I have just shot my son.’
They had questioned her, of course. At least, John Germaine, the centenier, had. The police inspector had seemed only too pleased to accept her story. He had sneered, she remembered – sneered was the only word for it. But quite honestly she had been past caring. Nothing mattered any more except that Louis was dead.
That was one of the reasons she had been so impatient with John Germaine – poor John, dragged out of bed to charge one of his oldest and dearest friends with the murder of her son.
‘For God’s sake why, Sophia?’ he had demanded, facing her across the scrubbed wood table in the police station interview room. ‘Why?’
She had stared into space. Oh, the brightness of the bare bulb above the table! No wonder she loved the soft dark now! She wondered if she should tell him that she had always known, right from the beginning, that one day something like this would happen, but she knew he would think she had gone quite mad. She didn’t want them to think she was mad. That would destroy the last remnants of her pride and her pride was all she had left.
‘Sophia, I am asking you what all this is about,’ John Germaine had insisted.
‘Oh John,’ she said softly. ‘Surely you must know?’
He had frowned. He looked bleary – as if he had been fast asleep when he had been wakened by the telephone. His hair was untidy and one corner of his collar was tucked inside his pullover whilst the other stuck out.
‘No, Sophia, I don’t know,’ he had said crossly.
‘Then, John, I am certainly not going to tell you.’
He was angry. She had known it then and she knew it now. John had never forgiven her for placing him in such a position. But that had been the least of her worries.
I didn’t tell them, she thought. And at least the past was never raked up at my trial. It was possible, of course, that islanders with long memories and suspicious minds had talked amongst themselves and unravelled threads that were best forgotten. But at least it had never been made public. She had spared them that.
And not only the others – herself too. There had been some things she had wanted to forget even then and there were also memories she could not bear to have sullied. Whatever had happened wild horses would not have dragged the story from her. If they had sent her to prison for the rest of her life she would still have refused to speak.
It was the vow she had made to herself then and now, looking into the dark garden, Sophia renewed it.
It would remain her secret that it had all begun with Dieter.
Chapter eight
Jersey, 1938
From the woods at the top of the rise the meadow, its grass almost long enough for its second mowing, swept in an unbroken sea to the ribbon of grey ashphalt lane which wound down the valley below. At the gate two bicycles lay carelessly tossed on top of one another into the hedge; halfway across the field two figures were trekking towards the woods. The boy, tall and athletic, strode out purposefully, his long legs easily ploughing a furrow through the grass. The girl, a little on the plump side, and hampered by a full cotton dirndl skirt and sandals, was struggling to keep up.
‘Dieter!’ she called breathlessly. ‘ Dieter – wait for me!’
He turned, looking back at her over his shoulder.
<
br /> ‘Come on, slowcoach!’
‘I can’t! I’ve got a stitch!’ But she was laughing as she said it. It seemed she laughed a lot these days.
‘We shall be all day at this rate. You can go faster than that!’
‘No! I can’t, I tell you!’
‘Very well. Since I am a gentleman I will wait for you.’
She struggled on towards him, legs aching, heart pounding partly from exertion and partly because of the way he looked standing there, hands thrust into the pockets of his shorts, hair gleaming bright gold in the sunshine, looking at her with a half-smile on his handsome yet rather serious face.
My boyfriend, she thought, pride so sharp it was an almost physical pain eclipsing the stitch in her side. My very own, very first real boyfriend.
When she was within reach he held out his hand to her, pulling her up the last few feet.
‘Dieter, don’t! I can’t! I just can’t, I tell you!’
‘But I am helping you.’
‘No, you’re not. My legs won’t work any more. You are just pulling my arm out of its socket.’
‘Oh poor liebling,’ he teased. ‘Rest then.’
She stopped, hands on hips, turning to look back the way they had come whilst she caught her breath. Beyond the lane were more meadows, flat and golden-green, beyond them the sea, blue as the bluebells that covered the wooded hillsides in spring, meeting and merging with the sky in a band of etherial haze.
Jersey. Forty-five square miles of lush countryside hemmed by a coastline of intricate bays and promontories, beaches, caves, outcrops and cliffs. Jersey – where the wooded valleys ran right down to the sea and the hydrangeas, big as small trees, rioted blue as well as pink through the long flowering season. Jersey, island of granite and shale, the home she loved so much she sometimes felt like throwing herself down full length to embrace the warm fertile earth. A few weeks earlier she had been studying Shakespeare’s Richard II at school and had been intoxicated by the words of John O’Gaunt. ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war,’ might have been written about England, but Sophia Carteret had thought it a perfect description of Jersey.
‘This precious stone set in the silver sea …’ she murmured to herself now, lost for a moment in the total glory of love and life and being thirteen years old with the world at her feet.
‘Better?’ Dieter asked and when she nodded he set off again, heading for the highest point of the field, then throwing himself down full length in the grass, hands behind his head, knees raised.
She looked down at him, her heart twisting again with that bitter-sweet sharpness that she somehow instinctively knew was so fleeting that it had to be grabbed with both hands. No – not grabbed, it was too precious for that, but savoured, and begged to stay, please stay …
‘Dieter,’ she tried to say but she could not speak because somehow she was too happy for words that might break the spell and she sat down beside him, curling her legs up beneath the fullness of her dirndl and feeling the grass tickling her bare skin. After a moment Dieter sat up too, putting his arms around her and pulling her gently towards him. As their lips touched a small shiver ran through her and the sharp sweetness grew and spread in her veins so that every bit of her was awakened to trembling life. Together they fell back into the grass, their bodies touching but not clinging, their lips still seeking one another with the eager tearfulness of chaste youth. As the kisses grew longer and deeper she nestled into him, blissfully unaware of the torrent of lust that was roaring through his strong young body and when, unable to bear the fiery demands of frustrated passion a moment longer, he pushed her away, rolling over onto his back, she was quite hurt.
‘Don’t you like it, Dieter? Don’t you want to kiss me any more?’
‘Of course – but that is not all I want,’ he said gruffly and her cheeks flamed with sudden hot colour as realisation dawned.
‘Oh … I see …’
She eased herself into the crook of his arm, her head lying against his shoulder but the rest of her body carefully avoiding touching his. The sun was warm on her face and she closed her eyes, listening to the rustlings and chirrupings of crickets in the grass and feeling the desire still prickling in her nerve endings and sending little bolts of awareness up her soft inner thighs. She must not encourage Dieter, she knew. That would be very foolish – and very wrong. But oh, she did so want to cuddle close to him again, feel his arms around her, bury her face into his neck and smell the salty tang of his sun-warmed skin, even have his weight on top of her, crushing the grass and the wild flowers, pressing her down into the hard-baked earth. But that would be asking for trouble and trouble was the very last thing Sophia wanted. It wasn’t just that she was very afraid of what Mama and Papa would say if she ever brought disgrace on them, though she suspected there would be hell to pay if Mama knew she was even lying here in the grass kissing Dieter – no, it went far deeper than that. Nicely brought up young ladies simply did not allow boys to do things to them, unless they wanted to be known as fast, and in any case Sophia thought she would die of embarrassment if Dieter so much as touched her under her clothing, no matter how tingly and excited she might feel when he kissed her.
As the disturbing stirrings began to subside a little Sophia opened her eyes a fraction, squinting at Dieter and thinking how lucky she was to have a boyfriend like him and how careful she must be not to spoil things. She was the envy of all her friends, she knew, for their boyfriends – if they had them at all – were mostly spotty schoolboys whom they had known all their lives, whilst Dieter was seventeen years old (four years her senior), so good-looking it took your breath away, and with all the added glamour that came from being foreign. He was a waiter at the guest house Sophia’s parents kept in St Helier and when he had arrived to take up his post at the beginning of the season Sophia had fallen instantly in love with him.
As a rule of thumb Lola Carteret, Sophia’s mother, discouraged friendships between her children and the hired staff and she also harboured a deep suspicion – of which she was slightly ashamed – of the Germans as a race. But she had soon been won over by Dieter’s charming manners and his conscientious attitude to his work. Another point in his favour was the fact that his own father was in the hotel business at home in the Black Forest and had insisted Dieter should gain experience from the bottom up in other establishments in other countries, whilst also improving his already admirable fluency in English and French.
‘He is certainly a cut above the Italian boy we had last year,’ Lola had pronounced. ‘I must say I wasn’t keen to have a foreigner again, especially a German. That horrid little Adolf Hitler is enough to put anyone off them and after fighting them in the war I didn’t like the idea of having one under my roof. But I have to admit I was wrong. Dieter is a very nice boy and if you children want to show him around the island when he is not working, you can.’
The ‘children’ she had in mind were, of course, Sophia’s brothers. Nick at seventeen and Paul, who was fourteen, were much of an age with Dieter. But they were a wild pair who had little time for his serious ways and the restrictive hours he had to work and it was not long before they were leaving him out of their plans. It was then that Sophia had seized her opportunity. School had broken up for the long summer holiday and she had persuaded Paul to lend Dieter his bicycle – ‘So that I can show him around the island,’ she had explained.
A little doubtful about the wisdom of the proposal Lola had suggested that Catherine, the youngest of the four Carteret children, should go along too, but Sophia had bought her sister off with a supply of her favourite sherbet lemons and a promise that she would take her swimming every morning (when Dieter was working) as long as she would make herself scarce in the afternoons (when he was not). Catherine had kept to her side of the bargain, more or less, and Sophia had explained to Lola that she and Dieter would never cover all the lanes of Jersey if they had to do it at the pace of a r
ather plump eight-year-old.
Even when she had engineered all this, however, Sophia had not been confident in her ability to interest Dieter. For one thing she was afraid she was not nearly attractive enough, even though her long brown hair had a permanent wave in it from being braided into plaits for school at Mama’s insistence and her eyes were a highly unusual shade of violet that was invariably commented upon by visitors to the guest house. But like Catherine she tended towards plumpness (because they so often finished up the left-overs in the guest house kitchen, she expected!) and the roundness of her face swamped her neat features – a small straight nose and pretty mouth. Besides this she found herself painfully shy in Dieter’s presence and as they cycled out she was ashamed that she could not think of a single clever or amusing thing to say.
But to her relief Dieter seemed not to notice her silence. He was so genuinely interested in everything around him that she was able to relax, telling him the names of the flowers and the birds and the trees and relating the history of the island and the legends that had been handed down concerning the places they visited. And somehow, almost magically, love had blossomed. One day, stopping to rest on one of the wooden seats that dotted the cliff paths, Sophia had turned unexpectedly to see Dieter looking at her, and that look had been like a reflection of the way she felt – happy for no reason except that he was there, excited, as if she stood on the brink of something unknown, but very wonderful, and strangely tender, all at the same time. Her stomach had contracted and she had looked away quickly, feeling the colour rush to her cheeks, but after a minute Dieter had reached for her hand.
‘May I?’
Sophia had nodded, unable to speak, and she was afraid to take her hand from his in case he was offended or thought she did not like it, even when her fingers prickled with pins-and-needles from remaining still for too long.
