“I did. By accident. Once or twice—in the woods. They used to meet in the woods. I saw them there, and I ran away. And once on the stairs—they were coming down the stairs. Yes, that’s it. I remember it….”
Freddie began to cry. The tears spouted suddenly from his eyes, although it was years since he had cried. He saw his mother in the garden, calling to him; saw her come into his bedroom and kiss him goodnight; saw his mother in a thousand guises, yet always the same: gentle, kind, devout, growing a little shortsighted now, so he teased her. His mother, and—blotting out the sense of her touch, the tranquility of her skin, the sureness of her care—another image, gross and grotesque.
“Connie, please …” He groped for her hand. “Look, I’m crying too. It’s—”
“Don’t touch me, Freddie.” Constance backed away from him. She backed up against the wall, backed farther, into the corner of the room. She huddled there, and then, as Freddie stepped forward, she sank to her knees.
“I want to die.” She said it in a small flat voice. “Yes. That’s it. That’s it. I want to die.”
From the journals
Park Street,
January 10, 1915
A
MEMORY OF MY
father:
When he wrote it was on quires of white paper, which he cut himself with a silver knife. He wrote in ink; his inkwell was glass, with a brass lid. The pens he used scratched. The script was copperplate, all the hooks and loops perfectly formed, the lines marching straight across the page like soldiers going into battle.
It was easy to read his writing, but not so easy to read my father.
The pomade he used on his beard smelled of lemons.
The soap he liked best was carnation.
Sometimes he chewed cachous, so his breath smelled of cloves.
His cheroots came from Cuba.
He changed his shirt twice a day, like a gentleman.
He polished his own shoes, then spat on the toecaps to make them shine.
I liked his blue suit the best
—
it made his eyes blue.
Once he let me help him steam the jacket, to bring the pile up. There was an accident. The steam scalded my hand.
His voice was melodious. At Winterscombe he was careful with his accent; at home, less so. At Winterscombe he could sound affected. Acland thought he was affected. And common. I heard him mimic him once.
He was short. His books were short.
If he hadn’t died, he would have loved me.
Constance can hear his pen scratch. She can hear him rustle with her nurse.
She can smell the carnations and the lemons and the cloves.
She can see the blue suit and the gold pin in his tie and the brown shoes; she can see his hands, which are as white as lilies. A lily-white man. One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
Constance can see her father. She can. She can. He is very close. He is at his black desk on his black chair with his white paper.
No, he isn’t. He is closer than that. He is as close as close can be. He does love her. He says he loves her. But he only says it when they are all alone.
Then.
How my mind cracks. I don’t understand. I ask and ask. I say
—
who put the trap there. I say
—
who pushed you, Papa. He never answers. I don’t understand why he never answers.
Where is he?
When I came to this entry of Constance’s (it was about a week after I had supper with Wexton in London) I could see that she was ill.
It was not simply
what
she wrote; it was the handwriting itself. It was becoming smaller and smaller and increasingly difficult to decipher. The slope of the letters, always consistent before, was now wildly uneven, slanting first to the right, then to the left. I turned the page, then the page after that. What followed was a series of lists.
Constance had used lists before, as you have seen; now lists seemed to have taken her over. There were more and more of them, crammed upon the page: lists of random things—colors, shapes, words, names, birds, countries, rivers, mountains, cities, battles. It was as if Constance, sensing mental breakdown, had been frantic to impose an order, or a geography.
I pitied her deeply. It was impossible not to pity her, no matter what she might have done to Freddie. She had witnessed the appalling injuries to her father; she had made the terrible mistake of reading his journals. To see her, five years after his death, trying to ward off the delayed effects of trauma with a series of schoolroom lists, with those sad small details of her father, was like watching a small child armed with a stick warding off attack from a flame thrower.
I was puzzled, though, that the breakdown had been delayed so long; I was also puzzled because, in all the years I lived with her, Constance had never once referred to this illness of hers. Had she been ashamed? That seemed likely, for Constance hated to admit weakness. She had never, for instance, given any indication to me that her childhood had been anything but happy. She had loved her father; she had loved my family. Of the accident that separated those two periods of her life she rarely spoke. I wondered now: Had she been shielding me from something?
That thought made me uneasy. If Constance had protected me in the past, and had now decided to impart some hidden truth, then that truth hinged on her father’s death, on the possibility of murder. To that theme Constance returned, again and again. She juggled the names of possible culprits; she put forward, at different times, different theories as to method and motive; she reexamined the events of the day on which Shawcross died, who had been where, and when. Her final short list of suspects was brief and homogenous: everyone on it was a member of my family.
If it had been Constance alone who expressed these suspicions, they might have been easier to dismiss, particularly in view of the mental stress I saw in the pages of these diaries. But it was not just Constance. There were other hints, from other, much cooler witnesses. If Constance had shielded me from the truth about Shawcross’s death, so, it seemed, had others equally close to me.
There were cryptic remarks in a letter from my aunt Maud to my grandfather Denton; Boy wrote to Acland from the front, referring to his missing Purdey shotguns in a way I found incomprehensible. Finally (and this perturbed me most of all) I found, among a mass of Steenie’s drawings and papers, a letter begun to Wexton and never sent. It was dated the year of my own christening.
I know what you said,
Steenie wrote,
but the more I think about it, Wexton dear, the more convinced I am that we were wrong. Too Grand Guignol for words! Sorry, Wexton, but we’re no good at playing Holmes and Watson. It may be dull, but I think the inquest was right: an accident.
I thought so too. I wanted to think that. I might want to know what Wexton’s theory had been (why had he never mentioned it?) and I intended to find out—but whatever his solution was, he had been mistaken. Doubt is like a disease, I told myself, and Constance’s doubts had infected other people. If shock and memory contributed to Constance’s illness, so did an overactive imagination. Once Constance recovered from this breakdown, the references to murder would surely cease.
How and when had she been cured? I wondered when I went to bed that night. I would find out the next day, if not in Constance’s journals, then elsewhere. I fell asleep, half-aware of some incident nudging at my memory. Constance might never have spoken of this illness of hers, but someone else had, though I could not remember who it was, or the circumstances.
The next morning there was no opportunity to return to the past; the present intruded. It intruded in the form of a Prince of Wales check suit, a Turnbull and Asser shirt, tasseled Gucci loafers, all transported from London in a low-slung, dramatic sports car: Mr. Garstang-Nott, the real-estate agent.
It was his fourth visit in eight days. Garstang-Nott, aged about forty, possessed of excessive good looks, retained his alarming sangfroid but was beginning to exhibit the occasional flicker of interest (in the house, I hoped, though it was difficult to be certain).
On his first visit of inspection, his attitude had been one of guarded pessimism. On his second (longer) he grew more expansive: He told me that his father had been at Eton with my father, and with my uncle Freddie, to whom he sent his regards. On the third (longer still) he told me that my client Molly Dorset was his aunt; he admired the work I had done on her house, in particular her red drawing room.
The flattering photographs of Winterscombe had now been taken; the measurements and details of rooms were complete; every outbuilding had been itemized; plans of the garden, grounds, and farmland (now rented) had been finalized. All that remained, on this fourth visit, was to go over the draft of the sales particulars. I had expected it to take, at most, an hour. Two hours and one glass of sherry later, Garstang-Nott still lingered.
He told me that he might (he stressed the
might
) have located a potential buyer.
A millionaire, it seemed—in this case not an eccentric one. The man concerned (Garstang-Nott was not yet at liberty to divulge the name) was in the market, specifically, for a property in Wiltshire. A
large
property, with a certain status attached to it, since the man in question was newly rich, having made a fortune in those sixties’ careers, development and corporate raiding. There had to be room to entertain clients; there had to be stables and land; a suitable site for a helipad would be advantageous.
This seemed too good to be true.
“You mean, if he was interested, he wouldn’t want to pull it down, or build?”
“Absolutely not. He has a place in Spain and another in Switzerland. But this is his first English country house. He wants
gravitas.
”
“Not Queen Anne?”
“Frankly, I don’t think he’d know the difference.”
We were, by this time, out of the house, approaching Garstang-Nott’s dramatic Aston-Martin. He patted the bulge on its hood.
“Hit a hundred and ten on the way down. Just outside Reading. I don’t suppose you’re free for dinner tonight? We could discuss it then.”
“The Aston?”
He smiled narrowly. “No. The house. Obviously.”
“I’m afraid I’m not free.”
“Oh, well. Some other time perhaps.” He paused. “Well, I’ll be in touch.”
“This potential buyer—you’ll be sending him the details?”
“Oh, Lord, we’ll
send
them. We’ll see if he bites. I’m afraid I don’t hold out a lot of hope.”
I felt he might have held out more hope had I agreed to have dinner with him. He climbed into the car, sped off down the drive with a spurt of gravel. I returned to my house, which no one but me seemed to care for, and to Constance’s journals.
Sad pages of lists, followed by several pages left blank, followed by a page with only one word:
Floss.
Then it came back to me—where I had been, when and with whom, the first and only time this illness of Constance’s had ever been mentioned.
Thirty years before. My parents were recently dead. I was waiting to be shipped off to America. One day, about a week before I sailed, I went to tea in London with my uncle Freddie. He must have been summoning his nerve, I think, for on that occasion he did raise the forbidden topic of my godmother. Then, I had been disappointed by his revelations. Now, with thirty years’ hindsight, I could see I had been wrong. What Freddie had told me that day (and what he had
not
told me) was interesting.
“I expect,” he had begun, “I expect you’ll be wanting to know about Constance.”
We were having tea in Uncle Freddie’s rented house, a large house with crumbling white stucco, which overlooked the canal basin in that district of London known, because of the waterways, as Little Venice. It is a smart district now, but it was not then. I had never been there before. The first thing Uncle Freddie did when I arrived was apologize for the disorder of his sitting room.
I could not see why: I liked the room. It was stuffed with the spoils of Uncle Freddie’s past. Uncle Freddie often described himself as a rolling stone; the term suited him—he was by then very stout. This rolling stone, it seemed, had gathered plenty of moss: There was a brass table, brought back from India, supported by a rearing brass cobra base. There were many rickety tables and lacquer screens acquired in Japan; a stuffed otter in a case—that came from Winterscombe. There were masks from Peru, puppets from Bali, a Tiffany lamp, and many bright posters from German cabarets in which angular women wore top hats and smoked cigarettes in long holders.
Before he raised the topic of Constance, Freddie—to my great relief—talked nonstop. I can see now that he was perhaps nervous. He put off the topic of my godmother and, prompted by the objects in the room, launched himself on long reminiscences. He told me all about flying mail planes in South America. He told me about his spell in Chicago, selling encyclopedias. We had the tale of the Berlin zoo, where Uncle Freddie had been in charge of the bears, and the period—more recent this—when he had had a half share in a nightclub, now defunct, called the Pink Flamingo.
En passant,
we also had Uncle Freddie’s numerous past enthusiasms: We had the stamp-collecting period, the crossword period, the Irish greyhound period. These, like their predecessors, had now decisively
fizzled
—I could tell that. They had been returned to Ireland. Uncle Freddie had a new enthusiasm. It was this which had been occupying him in the library all that summer at Winterscombe, while Franz-Jacob and I walked the dogs.
It was, Uncle Freddie said with a flourish,
detective novels.
Freddie, always a fan of that particular genre, had now decided: if he could read them, why not write them? With this enthusiasm Uncle Freddie was, in fact, to find his métier: Later, after the war, he was to enjoy considerable success with his detective fiction. Then, however, he was still refining his methods, which he explained at length.