After the Armistice Ball (10 page)

‘Well, you said yourself you thought I knew something,’ I said, huffily. ‘This is what I knew. And you can see at once how it complicates matters, can’t you?’ I decided to focus my attention firmly back on the facts. ‘What Mrs Duffy is doing – for I’m sure it’s her doing it – does not make sense from start to finish. If she were ninety instead of fifty, one would think she was gaga. And Cara’s behaviour makes even less.’

‘But that’s a very good sign,’ said Alec. ‘There are so many inconsistencies already that there’s no way it can stay secret. I’ll bet as soon as we speak to Cara and her mother the whole thing will just dissolve.’

‘I have little hope of getting anything from Lena, although she may well let something slip that she doesn’t know is useful, as she has already,’ I said. ‘But Cara, yes. Cara is altogether different. Why, she said more to me at Croys than a child would, and she will surely yield to you under the slightest pressure.’ I did not trouble to keep the arch note out of my voice and was gratified to see him look discomfited.

‘Yes,’ he said, standing and coming to draw out my chair, talking in a mock grandiose style to meet my archness head-on. ‘By nightfall tonight, it will be laid plain before us.’ He went back to his normal voice. ‘We just need to speak to Cara.’

We were quiet again during the long afternoon’s drive through the forest and down, down towards the sea. I was engaged partly on digesting the weight of my luncheon, partly on planning approaches to Lena and Cara, but also on trying to sort what I knew in patterns, hoping to be the first one to pounce on the answer which had to, simply
had
to, be there.

By the time we were on the coast road, coming round the bay to Kirkandrews in the failing afternoon light, I was even looking forward to it. A few days spent in this soft, fresh breeze making all well for Alec and Cara, for Daisy and Silas, and even somehow I hoped for Mrs Duffy, was a pleasant prospect. My debut as an investigator was almost too easy to be called employment. A gentle word with Cara was all it was going to take, I was sure, to earn my fee.

Alec swung us off the road at the Kirkandrews fingerpost and I sat up in my seat, eager as one always is for one’s first glimpse of the sea. Someone was having a bonfire at the beach and the scent of wood smoke mingled with the salt tang which had just become discernible in the air. It was charming at first – I leaned my head out of the side window to sniff at the memories of Boxing Day picnics it carried – but it threatened to overpower us as we advanced. The smell of it rolled up in plumes, driven no doubt by the on-shore breeze, and soon we had to fasten the car windows against it. There was no visible smoke, just the engulfing smell of it, the stench of it now we were on the track which led right to the sand line. I began to think it could not be a bonfire after all, but something much bigger, out now although perhaps still smouldering. I looked towards Alec and saw that he was grim-faced and pale as he drove the car on, ignoring the bumps and hollows under the wheels and the reach of the gorse on either side of the narrow lane scratching at the paintwork. The growing acrid stink, the protesting rumble of the tyres and the ceaseless grinding of the engine all of a sudden seemed like an outside echo, horribly amplified, of the dread that had been threatening to consume me all week. Alec increased the speed again as we passed the sign for Reiver’s Rest and we jounced over the close-cropped turf faster and faster until the car rounded the last of the gorse into the open and skidded to a slithering halt.

In front of us, was a large plot of clipped grass ringed around with flower beds and edged with a white stick fence. A shell path started from a gate on the side nearest us and led halfway across the garden before it vanished abruptly, obscenely, to be replaced by a ring of scorched earth on which sat the blackened, reeking heap that was all there was left of the Duffys’ cottage. Such a tiny heap, almost all ash, with only a few withered sticks and splinters, unbelievable that it had ever been a building.

I stepped out of the car on shaky legs and had to hold my scarf across my mouth to save from retching at the stink of it. They must have doused the flames in sea-water – of course they had, the sea was a minute’s run from where we stood – and the smell of the wreckage still sizzling and settling now and then was unbearable. Even some of the men who sat slouched beside buckets in the long grass at the edge of the dunes still wore cloths covering their noses and mouths.

A constable in uniform and gumboots was picking his way towards us around the edge of the debris, poking at the settling ash with a charred stick, clearly waiting for someone of greater seniority to arrive. Every so often he looked at a small crowd of sightseers, gathered at a respectful distance, as though daring any of them to advance. When we approached him, he touched his helmet rim and threw the stick down.

‘Where are the ladies?’ Alec asked in a steady voice, showing the strain only in the lack of any words of greeting.

‘Away to the hotel at Gatehouse,’ said the man. I reached out and squeezed Alec’s arm. ‘The two of them,’ he added. ‘The mother and one o’ the lasses.’ He turned towards the remains of the fire and spoke softly. ‘The other lass was in there, God love her.’

Alec and I did not speak or even look at each other as we walked back to the car. There was nothing to say. It would have been ludicrous to voice the certainty that it was Clemence at Gatehouse with her mother, shameful to both of us to allude to the conviction – so strong we would have staked our lives on it – that now we should never be able to speak to Cara.

Chapter Five

Young men had died in their thousands, and I had known dozens and scores of them, sons of friends or lads from the village. I had mourned their deaths individually and collectively in the church Sunday after Sunday, year after year, and had stood in front of memorials – had even unveiled one – singing patriotic hymns and boiling with misery and rage. None of these deaths, however, not even young Sandy Masterton, to whom I had once fed broth when his mother was sick with a fever, stabbed at me like the death of Cara Duffy.

I take no pride in that. I loathe the grading of tragedy and the jostling for pre-eminence amongst the bereaved, that most disgusting example of the disgusting habit of claiming a starring role in any incident that touches one. I do not, therefore, mean to suggest either that my recent conversation with the girl made me peculiarly pained by her death or that one young girl, fair of face and gentle of birth, was materially different from thousands of coarser and plainer young men.

I wonder though. Might it be true that we are not really creatures of any imagination after all and that something, anything, happening under our noses necessarily affects us more deeply than something, anything, we merely hear about? I had hitherto suspected a grosser motive behind our menfolk’s reluctance to talk about the war; a selfishness, or worse a self-important chivalry, and had wondered if that was why they all seemed to disapprove so viscerally of the poets’ trying to make the rest of us understand. Now, I began to see that perhaps there was a gulf that just could not be crossed between those who had been there and seen with their own eyes and those who had waited at home. Why else would this death, sudden and shocking as it was, seem so much worse than what lay behind the names on the cenotaph?

These were the thoughts which occupied me as we drove up to the town of Gatehouse and unremarkably, typically I should almost say, they turned out to be quite wrong.

I expected to find Lena and Clemence installed in a bar parlour, smoky and dishevelled, perhaps even wrapped in blankets, with attendant police and servants talking in hushed voices. I hoped a comfortable landlady was bringing them soup and hot bottles for their feet and I steeled myself to be the one who must bring other kinds of comfort. It was with some initial relief then that Alec and I found the two of them, in the bar parlour at the Murray Arms to be sure, but looking quite fresh and somewhat indecently composed.

‘Lena,’ said Alec. Mrs Duffy turned with a start and looked at him, frozen, for what seemed like an age, then without moving her eyes she noticed me standing just behind and to one side of him and she held out her hand.

‘Dandy, my dear, I had completely forgotten you were coming. Have you been down to the cottage?’

‘Oh no,’ I whispered to myself. They did not
know
. I did not understand how this could be, but somehow, unbelievably, they had not heard, and telling them was to fall to me. I felt Alec begin to tremble beside me, although we were not touching. Perhaps I only saw his coat sleeve moving, or perhaps I felt the floor underneath my feet reverberate with his tremor. I had to speak.

‘Something has happened, Lena,’ I began, and then, my attention caught by a sound in the corner, I turned and saw a police sergeant, squashed discreetly and surely uncomfortably into a small chair, with his cap on one knee and his notebook open on the other. He had half-risen at my words and was regarding me with wide-open eyes. But if the police were here then . . .?

‘What?’ said Lena Duffy, her voice stretched dry. ‘What do you mean?’ I was utterly lost now. Did she know after all? She must.

‘Cara,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Lena Duffy again. I felt Alec reach out and take hold of my elbow, his fingers still trembling and cold through my sleeve. Lena had risen now but Clemence was shrinking back in her chair, her blank face as unreadable as ever.

‘You know, don’t you, do you?’ I said. ‘About the fire.’ Alec squeezed my arm again and a glance at the police sergeant gave me my answer. He was staring at me, with his mouth open.

‘What about it?’ said Lena. ‘What has happened? What are you talking about? Have they found . . .’ Her voice faded to a croak and she was silent.

Just then the comfortable landlady of my imagination – long apron, white cap and all – came to the doorway opposite and stood looking at all of us for a moment, before her eyes filled with tears and she retreated, mopping her face with a glass cloth. I felt dizzy, terrified that I should begin to laugh, and I wanted to turn and run, but I forced myself to walk towards Lena and take her hands.

‘We’ve just come from there,’ I said. ‘No one has found anything. It’s burnt to the ground.’ Odd the things one does without thinking. She, whom I should have been comforting, chafed my cold hands in her warm ones as though she were my mother and I a child, such a comfortable, familiar gesture and so wrong just then. I pulled against it and she let go of me. Then returning to her seat, she surveyed the tea-things on the table with another very familiar gesture, a deep breath in and the competent, calculating glance with which a matron decides whether what is left can be stretched or if more must be ordered. I am sure the offer of ‘Tea?’ got almost to her lips before she caught it and, at the gape I could not hide, bowed her head. I heard Alec turn and run out of the room behind me, knocking against the door jamb on his way. His footsteps pounded away down the flagged passageway to the front door and then could be heard disappearing along the pavement outside.

‘I should go and see,’ I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.

‘Would you, my dear?’ said Lena. ‘Poor Alec. If you would.’ I looked at her for a moment longer, then at the quiet policeman, then fearing again that I was about to laugh or scream or shake someone, I too turned and stumbled out.

He had gone quite a way, but was walking back towards me by the time I saw him. He waved, sat down on the broad low wall of a bridge and lit a cigarette, waiting for me to approach.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I began. Then I rubbed my face hard with my two hands, hoping to scrub away the tears before they fell. ‘I’m hopeless at this.’

‘At what?’ said Alec, sounding interested and even faintly amused. Far from trembling now, he too seemed horribly unperturbed.

‘At whatever you choose to name,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine what possessed me, but I got the idea that she didn’t know anything had happened. I only hope she’s too upset to take it in. Clemence too.’

‘Dandy,’ said Alec, gently. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I don’t even know,’ I wailed. ‘I’ve never . . . I felt so peculiar, that must be shock, is it? I mean, I was rattled already and then the whole atmosphere was so very odd. It’s not like in books and plays – tears for sadness and smiles for joy, is it? And it feels so different, when it’s someone one has only just spoken to and when there’s no battle, no dispatches. Are
you
all right?’ I asked, finally, feeling ashamed that what I was really asking was if he could drive me right back home again to Bunty and Hugh and away from all of this.

‘Dandy,’ said Alec again. ‘Listen to me very carefully and please believe what I say. I don’t know what is going on in that room.’ He waved his cigarette towards the hotel. ‘But it is not, believe me, it is not a doting mother and a loving sister suffering from shock. Something is very wrong here and you know it.’

I nodded slowly at first and then faster as my thoughts seemed to catch up with the rest of me.

‘I feel . . .’ I began, and gave up. ‘I’ve been thinking about Sandy Masterton from one of our farms, who died in the retreat from . . . Well, anyway, I knew him much better than Cara and I couldn’t see why this should be so much worse. But I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? There’s something wrong here.’

‘That’s not quite it,’ said Alec. ‘What you are feeling is exactly what I am feeling. I, unlike you, have felt it before.’ I looked at him, shaking my head slightly to show him that I did not know what he meant. And then all of a sudden I did, and my head began to nod instead.

‘It’s because we should have known, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘We should have guessed and we should have stopped it.’

‘And now it’s too late,’ said Alec, ‘and there is nothing worse than that.’ My moment of inspiration had passed and pedestrian logic seemed to reassert itself in me.

‘There’s no need for you to feel that way,’ I said.

‘Cara was my fiancee,’ said Alec, simply. ‘It’s seldom spoken of, although everyone knows about it. It’s what makes it bearable when one’s parents die, you know. And I’m sure it’s what makes it bearable for women to be widows. Have you never wondered why women make such comfortable widows and men such hopeless widowers?’ He had been gazing at the glowing end of his cigarette as he spoke, but now he raised his head and looked at me. ‘At the front, you know, if a letter came and it was a chap’s older brother? Well, that was bad, but we knew it was bearable. When a chap’s younger brother went, it was horror.’