CHAPTER
27
H
ERVE TELEPHONED THAT
Thursday evening and enquired so contritely after Sara’s health and general well-being that she told him the truth. She was fine of course in a way, but feeling very bad about what she did not call their row, but the ‘last time we met’. To call it a row would beg the question of who had started it, and she had no wish to go into it.
‘Oh, me also,’ he said, a little breathily. There was a pause, during which neither of them filled the silence that each was giving the other in which to apologise, nor did either of them mention Helene.
Just before the silence became embarrassing, Sara said, ‘So, when do we rehearse? Monday?’
‘Hmm, well, of course yes, but I wonder if we should meet tonight—not for playing anything, just to be friendly? But you are busy, perhaps?’
She wasn’t, much to her own annoyance. Presumably Andrew was, since he had not answered the message she had left him at work, but she refused to speculate about what might be occupying him.
‘No, I’m not busy. And yes, we should meet. Good idea.’
‘So, good! So, you will come for me at half past six and then we go to Iford. Fine, good!’
‘Iford?’
‘Iford, yes. For Helene, for her opera. Tonight they have an extra rehearsal. They go to sing with the little boys, the Scouts. Thursday is their meeting night. The boys are to be part of opera also. And Helene asks me to go. And I have no car, of course, but you can drive me, yes? And you will enjoy, too. Andrew, Valerie, all the group are your friends too, says Helene.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Sara capitulated, sighing, guessing Helene had arranged for their reconciliation in the bosom of the opera group. ‘Yes, my friends too. See you later.’
That evening Sara slowed down in Camden Crescent behind a parked transit van that was indicating to pull out. As soon as it drew away Sara nipped into the space and parked. As she locked her car she saw Dotty retreating from the top of the area steps back down to the basement flat.
She called out, ‘Dotty, wait!’
Dotty turned on the steps and looked up, her arms folded tightly in front of her. ‘Oh! I, er . . . Well, er, hello.’ She seemed embarrassed.
‘Was that your van leaving just now? Is the flat empty, then? Did you find what you were looking for in the end?’ Sara clattered down the steps and stood beside her. ‘It wasn’t an earring, was it?’
‘No, I . . . Yes, that was the van. The last of Imogen’s things; they’re going into a sale on Saturday. General household.’ Dotty lifted a weary arm in the direction the van had taken.
‘I don’t think you were looking for an earring at all.’
Dotty looked at her. ‘No, no I wasn’t. It wasn’t an earring. It was just me being silly, I suppose.’ She paused. ‘I won’t keep you. I suppose you’re on your way upstairs to see your friend.’
‘Yep. I’m in no hurry, though. We fell out, and now we’re supposed to be nice to each other again.’ Sara lowered her voice. ‘I’m still curious to know what you were looking for. Call me nosy, if you like.’
‘Yes, falling out’s unpleasant, isn’t it? People can be difficult. People can be so difficult and disappointing. Look, you’ve been very kind over all this. I didn’t like misleading you. Come in for a minute.’
Sitting side by side on the bottom stair, Sara listened and Dotty spoke, her voice booming in the empty flat. ‘I do always try to be honest. The truth is, I’ve been looking for some letters.’
Sara waited.
‘Oh, it’s no good, I’m hopeless at this,’ Dotty went on. ‘I’ve never talked about this, ever.’
‘What is it, Dotty? Can I help?’
‘No. No one can help now, it’s much too late. I’ve known that for years; it’s so silly that it still upsets me now.’
Dotty seemed aware that this could make no sense to Sara. ‘I was just looking for some letters. Some letters that I thought Imogen had, that were really mine. Oh, it was all years ago. And now I don’t really think she did have them after all, she was just stringing me along.’ She sniffed. ‘No point going into it.’ It was a brave attempt to sound sensible but Dotty could not sustain it. She sank her face into her hands and wailed. ‘Oh, God, all these years! Oh, God, I feel so let
down
!’ Sara placed a hand gently on her back and held it there until the crying subsided. Dotty raised her head, gave a more determined sniff. ‘Look,’ she said stoutly, ‘I must seem like some neurotic old spinster to you, but I’m not, or at any rate I might not have been. What I mean is I’m sorry to have burdened you, but I’m fine now. It’s been a rather emotional time, and I’m sorry.’
Sara nodded kindly. ‘Are you sure I can’t do anything? Do you, I mean, is it something to do with her death? Should the police be involved?’
‘No! No, absolutely not, it’s got nothing whatever to do with it!’
Dotty seemed to realise that she had made Sara too curious to drop the matter now. ‘Look, it’s nothing to do with that.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Remember I told you I met Imogen by chance about six years ago, after she’d retired?’
Sara nodded.
‘I should go back a bit. When I first went to Combe Down Academy there was a young geography teacher there, Adam Hart-Browne. Canon now. I mentioned him, he took Imogen’s service. He taught geography and religious studies then. We were close. Not
lovers
or anything like that, we were both Christians. Anyway, people didn’t then.’ Dotty’s eyelids drooped a little. ‘I was so in love with him. Then almost out of the blue he got the chance to go to Africa for a year. It was a teaching mission and he wanted me to go with him. Only at that time Combe Down was smaller and it would have been hard to replace us both at short notice and only for a year, and Miss Bevan was furious. She called me in and gave me such a talking-to, it got me convinced I would be mad to give up a good job and go with him, at least just then. Give him a few months, she said. Let him prove himself, men need that. You can write, and then later if he still wants you to, you can go and you’ll both be better for the separation. She made it sound as if it was all for our own good.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘He went. He didn’t know exactly where he’d be at first, either in Botswana or Lesotho, and he said he’d write with the address. He never did. I never heard from him.’
‘Weren’t you worried? In case something had happened to him?’
Dotty nodded. Now she looked angry. ‘Of course I was. Until after about six months he wrote a chatty postcard to all the staff, saying he was doing fine. I can still remember Imogen Bevan coming into the staffroom waving it about, all pleased.’
Sara did not know what to say except that the rejection must have been devastating.
‘But he
didn’t
reject me! Don’t you see?’ Dotty said. ‘It was her!’ Sara was getting rather lost. Dotty said, more calmly, ‘Of course that was what I thought at the time. Adam had just forgotten all about me, or changed his mind or even—’ She shook her head. ‘I even began to think he’d never had any intention of writing to me. I was so hurt, I didn’t even try to contact him. I just tried to forget him.’
‘So, you forgot him?’ Sara asked gently.
Dorothy shook her head. ‘No, I never did, although I tried. There was never anyone else. And then six years ago he came back to Bath. I read about it in the diocesan magazine. He was in his fifties, a canon, and married, of course. I went to hear him preach.’ Her face lit up. ‘I was hardly expecting him to remember me. But the first time he looked up from the pulpit, it was as if I was the only one in the congregation.’ She smiled happily. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Sara, from that moment, it was a terrible performance. He kept losing his place, getting things wrong. I just sat there, feeling
wicked
. For the first and only time in my life.’
Sara smiled, well able to imagine it. ‘He hadn’t forgotten you, then.’
Dotty’s face grew sad again. ‘No. We met, of course. Over tea. And he told me he wrote to me for a year, at least sixty letters. He’d sent them to school, because I was living in, you see, as an assistant boarding mistress. Well, I knew at once what had happened. Imogen Bevan had kept them from me. All the post went to the office first, you see. So Adam never heard back from me, of course. He got ordained and then married, eventually. Well, a clergyman needs a wife. I don’t blame him. They’re not very happy, never were. He’s still in love with me. Fifty-eight and fifty-three we are, grey-haired and past it now, and we never had our chance.’
‘Oh, Dotty, Imogen kept his letters from you? What an awful thing to do.’
‘I didn’t meet her in Waitrose,’ Dotty went on quietly, ‘after she retired. When Adam told me all this I came straight round here and confronted her. I was so angry. She was old and I was very aggressive, but I didn’t care. I was quite ready to strike her, to tell you the truth. She couldn’t deny it. It would have been “extremely inconvenient and potentially destabilising”, she said, to lose two key members of staff at once, after all the effort she’d made to appoint and train us. Inconvenient! She did it for the school, she said, she was building up the school and it was in desperate need of “administrative stability”. And if faint-hearted Adam Hart-Browne had had anything about him, he’d have come straight back to marry me. Or I’d have gone off to Africa and demand that he did.’
‘I suppose that’s what she’d have done in the circumstances.’
‘Probably. Adam and I are weaker souls.’
‘Gentler, perhaps.’
‘Anyway, after that Imogen kept dropping hints that I’d “get what was mine” eventually. She led me to believe that she still had the letters somewhere. That’s why I kept coming to visit her. I wanted to see them so much, even though it was all too late. So much. Just to read what he’d said to me.’
‘You didn’t find them, then?’
‘No. She can’t have kept them. Heaven knows I’ve looked. No, she hadn’t even had the decency to keep them. It probably amused her to think I was hoping she had.’
‘The spiteful old witch.’ But it did not help to malign the departed Imogen Bevan. Something in the air of the silent flat seemed still to taunt Dorothy’s bowed head. ‘Let’s get you out of here,’ Sara said, standing up. ‘It can only hurt you, being here. At least—at least Adam’s back in Bath,’ she said, wondering if that did not make it worse. ‘You can at least see each other, be friends. At
least
friends.’
‘Yes,’ Dotty said, rising. ‘Yes, we are friends. We’re tempted to be more than that, and we wouldn’t be the first. We know that, but we never would. He’s a married Christian priest.’
She made her way, exhausted, up the uncarpeted stairs. Sara followed. Near the top Dotty turned and paused. ‘And I aspire to be a Christian woman, but do you know, Sara’—her eyes travelled for the last time over Imogen Bevan’s empty home—‘I hope she’s roasting in hell.’
A
NDREW WAS
grateful to have Phil in the back of the car because it made listening to Valerie unnecessary. While he drove, she sat with her right arm slung over the back of her seat, talking at Phil in an older-than-you yet coy tone of voice.
‘Don’t ever be stuck for a lift, will you now, Phil? If I can help at all, you’re to get on the phone, all right? You’ve got the number now. I’ve got boys of my own, you know. Not quite as big as you of course! Only little, but they’re a big handful! Though I’ll bet you were never a handful, were you? Don’t you miss your family?’
She didn’t give a damn about Phil, Andrew knew that. Only two hours ago, the moment she had put the telephone down in the kitchen, she had started moaning about being put upon.
‘That was Phil on a payphone. He wants a lift out to Iford, so he rang Helene. There’s no room in Jim’s car so she gave him our number. Cheek! I’m sure there’s a bus.’
Andrew had replied mildly that it would hardly be a straightforward journey by bus and they were going anyway.
‘That’s not the point.’ Valerie began to serve the children’s supper, stabbing with distaste at an oven tray full of sausages, hacking them up on three little plates and pushing the pieces into defeated lumps of mashed, no,
mugged
potato. He’d noticed it before, the way she cooked with hatred, handling food as if it would do something awful to her unless she kept the upper hand. ‘When I was his age I made my own way everywhere. You’d think he’d want to be independent. Well, I’ve told him to be at the bottom of North Road by twenty to seven. If he’s not we’ll just have to go on without him. We can’t stop.’
Andrew did not bother pointing out that when Valerie was Phil’s age she had made her dad run her everywhere and, about a year after that, Andrew himself. ‘You’re all heart, you are,’ he said, swiping up the last unmutilated sausage from the tray, stuffing it in his mouth and leaving the room.
Valerie had turned back round to the front of the car now and was staring out of the passenger window, considering what she called ‘doing the social bit’ as done. Phil sat silently in the back, exuding all the personality of a traffic cone. Andrew allowed himself to lapse into thoughts of Sara, taking care that the expression on his face did not lift into anything approaching cheerfulness. Valerie would be on to that at once. Thinking about it, Sara really was all heart, all heart and passion, including sometimes rage, and quite unreasonable rage at that. But he loved even her anger, whether righteous or not, because it was rich and real. Valerie was too sparse in spirit ever to feel anger like that, but she was annoyed practically all the time in some baseless, unfocused way. Andrew had never heard her claim to be happy. Valerie’s emotions were a sort of surface irritant, an affliction like eczema, to be lived with or scratched at.
He drove on past the hill with the herd of deer, towards the set of lights at the viaduct, taking the bends gently. He did not want to have his train of thought interrupted by her voice complaining about his driving. And when he thought about it, he did not think that he himself had spoken once since his remark on leaving the kitchen. This was not because there had been nothing he wanted to say, but because he did not want to encourage any reply from her. He did not want to hear her voice at all. Automatically he cleared his throat as if to check that his voice still worked, and suddenly had a blood-freezing recollection of his own father. It was what he had always done. They’d be driving along somewhere with Andrew in the back. He knew every pit and wrinkle on the back of his father’s neck, and every straight short stick of hair, just touching his mother’s mauve or beige turtleneck, which had escaped the perms that whipped the rest up into the standard suburban fright-wig hairstyle that all the mums had. Going places, coming back from places, his parents in the same seats, always in complete silence. And in the silence, his father would periodically clear his throat. Andrew had always found it annoying because it was so obviously unnecessary. But Dad had just been chucking modest, experimental little pebbles of sound into his silent, stagnant marriage and now he, just past his fortieth birthday, had started doing it too. Not until this moment had Andrew realised what his father’s little coughs had been for. Now that he did, it chilled him to his heart.