Justice Hall (18 page)

“‘The Science of Deduction’—do you mean, when people in the Bible work things out? Like Susannah and the Elders?”

Full points for Iris Sutherland, I thought. “Exactly. Or psychological deduction such as Joseph used in interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams.”

We turned this topic over for a while, with Marsh listening and the Darlings frowning, until I thought that we had inflicted the room with enough theology, and I asked Iris what she found of interest in Paris. (In other words: And what do
you
do?)

“The immense wealth of its artistic life. Writers and painters are coming back, now that the worst of the damage is patched up, and musicians. Music somehow sounds better in Paris, don’t you think?”

This was no rhetorical question; she expected an answer. I had to disappoint her.

“My husband would no doubt have an opinion, but I’m afraid that I have what could only be called a tin ear.”

“Ah.” She looked down at her plate, a smile tugging at her lips. “I, on the other hand, teach music.”

Our eyes met in shared recognition of a brick wall. I could only spread both hands in a rueful admission of inadequacy; she laughed aloud, a rich, deep sound that seemed to startle the painted figures on the walls.

“Well,” she said. “That puts paid to any discussion of modern composers.”

“I met Debussy once,” I offered. “When I was a child.”

“I said ‘modern.’?”

“Under what circumstances did you meet Debussy?” This from Darling, who either suspected me of prevarication or simply did not wish to be left out of the conversation. I gave the room a version of the encounter which seemed to satisfy him, particularly because at the end of my narrative the door stood open to his own tale of an episode involving Jean Sibelius.

Marsh was silent and watchful; he drank but a single glass of wine with his meal.

   In the morning when I came into the breakfast room, I thought for a moment the first of the week-end guests had arrived: A slim young man in an attractive herring-bone suit sat with his back to me, chatting amiably with Marsh and Alistair. Then “he” turned at my entrance, and I was looking at Iris Sutherland, yesterday’s skirt exchanged for trousers.

“Good morning, Mary,” she said. “May I call you Mary, by the way? I feel as if I’ve known you for years.”

“Do, please.” This morning I helped myself to coffee, and settled into a chair without assistance.

“I’m trying to talk these two males into a walk to The Circles, but they’d rather sit by the fire and do needlework.”

“It is six miles away and I have a morning full of appointments,” Marsh answered.

“What are The Circles?” I asked.

“Prehistoric stone circles, concentric, and one simply cannot cheat and motor over there. Part of the experience is the effort.”

“If you’re looking for a companion, I’d be willing,” I told her. The sky was grey but not actually raining, and it was cold enough that perhaps it would stay dry.

“Lovely! And,” she added, “if one walks, one is justified in indulging in a nice, stodgy luncheon in the village. To strengthen one for the return trip.”

“Sounds excellent,” I agreed, helping myself to a second breakfast—to strengthen me for the trip out. Fortunately, among the clothing I had brought were some old but comfortable woollen trousers, which looked to be the uniform of the day. Before I had finished, Phillida bustled in, a sheaf of notes in one hand.

“Marsh,” she said without preamble, “I need to go over the day’s schedule with you. I’ve sent Lenore and Walter off to the Cowleys’; no spots there and they owe me a favour. They’ll stop there until Sunday, let Miss Paul have a rest. Now, about the rooms. I need to see if—”

I escaped before she could put me to work. As I went upstairs to change into my trousers, I was aware that the house was humming with energy, the final, manic spurt of preparation before the London trains began to pull into Arley Holt. Not even Marsh would dare venture into Mrs Butter’s realm today. With luck, Iris and I would be gone until tea-time.

Thoroughly bundled from hat to boots, I presented myself at the library door, received Iris’s critical but approving glance, and followed her out into the cold air.

I half wondered if Marsh and Alistair had chosen to occupy themselves elsewhere in order to give Iris and me a chance to speak, at length and undisturbed, and so it proved. After the first mile we no longer felt the house looking over our shoulders, we had each other’s pace for walking, and we could settle into the morning.

“You must be curious,” Iris opened. “About me and Marsh.”

“It is not the usual situation,” I agreed, deliberately vague—although by this time there was not much left to speculate about, other than the degree of amity in the so-called marriage.

“I’m a lesbian,” she said bluntly. After a few steps she looked out of the corner of her eye at me; when she saw that I was not shrinking away in horror or even particularly surprised, she went on. “I’ve always known it, from the time I was a girl, and I dreaded marriage. Not the physical side necessarily, but the sense of bondage, a thing that ate at my mother until—no, let’s not go into that. Suffice to say that I was left with something of what we might now term a ‘phobia’ about marriage. And because I was my parents’ only child, it was going to be very difficult not to marry. These days, it might be easier; then, and especially with my parents, a spinster daughter would have been cause for a family war.

“I’d known Marsh since we were both eight or ten—our mothers were second cousins. I always liked him, always recognised in him a kindred streak of unconventionality. When he went off to the Middle East after university, we kept in touch, exchanged letters every few weeks. I used him as a sounding-board—you know how it is, it’s easier sometimes to speak of things on paper than in person, so Marsh knew all about my situation.

“His parents dragged him back home after a few months off of the leash. This would have been in the autumn of ’98, because I’d just turned twenty-one. I’d gone to live in London; he came down to see me, took me for a long walk on Hampstead Heath, and he proposed.

“It was, quite simply, a business proposition. He, too, was being pressured to marry, particularly because after ten years of marriage, the heir’s wife—Henry and Sarah were living in Italy—showed no signs of a successful pregnancy, and the old duke was getting nervous. Marriage with Marsh would be a sham, of course, but it would take away a lot of pressure, and make both our parents happier. It would also give us considerably more independence, being married people. And, I had an inheritance riding on getting married.

“So we married, in a very quiet ceremony in the Justice chapel. It was so quiet, in fact, that nobody knew about it. Marsh couldn’t bear the thought of engagement announcements and photographs in
The Times
and the long, drawn-out accounts in the society pages—all the nonsense. And since his mother was dead, and his stepmother didn’t give a fig, and I was a legal adult, I just told my own parents after it was done.”

“You even managed to slip it past Debrett’s,” I commented.

“I know. That was very clever of Marsh, wasn’t it? And then as luck would have it, Henry’s wife got pregnant. Personally, I think having the family’s intense scrutiny off of Sarah’s reproductive cycle for a while was what did it, although Sarah claimed it was the warmer climate agreeing with her. Marsh and I moved to Paris—well away from my family, and an easy trip for Marsh to Cairo and Jerusalem. Gradually his trips lengthened, and I met Dan—Danella is her name; I’m still with her—and things settled down into what they have remained for twenty years now. I’ve seen Marsh half a dozen times over the years, I like him, he likes Dan, and there you have it. The portrait of a marriage.”

It explained a lot, including the brother/sister sort of affection between the two conspirators. I’d be happy to see someone, too, if my freedom had been won through her.

“Thank you for telling me.”

“Marsh thought you should know. You and your husband.”

“You know who my husband is?”

“Marsh explained. He also tried to explain what you were doing in Palestine, five years ago.”

“That would have taken some doing, since we were none too sure ourselves, at the time.”

She laughed. “But you stumbled into something important, which seems to be what Marsh does there generally—poke his nose into things until something bites back.”

She did indeed know everything of importance about her husband, this sham wife.

Seldom have I enjoyed myself more with another person than on that long day’s hike across the hills with the lesbian wife of the seventh Duke of Beauville. We would talk for a while—about Oxford, academics, and the life of an Oxford scholar-cum-detective, Paris, the art world, and the life of a frustrated pianist—and then we would drift into an easy silence, listening only to the day, each of us deep in our own thoughts. I felt the restless exhaustion that had come on me in Sussex, which Alistair’s arrival had interrupted but not displaced, shrink and fade, to be replaced by a degree of serenity rare in me.

Two hours later we were standing in front of a small forest of jagged, lichen-encrusted granite chunks thrusting up from the pasture land, and I couldn’t think at first why we had stopped. Then I remembered: The Circles. The reason for our excursion.

Prehistoric monuments are invariably lonely, if for no other reason than a group of standing stones near habitations will not last long before being hauled away and incorporated in someone’s wall. Their solitude, and their combination of crude workmanship with clear deliberation, make objects such as The Circles puzzling and evocative; they seem to occupy a portion of the universe apart from daily life, and appear to have been fashioned by hands other than ordinary human ones. The breath of God—or perhaps of the gods—has brushed these sites, and changed the very ground from which they rise.

“Extraordinary place, isn’t it?” Iris was circumnavigating the outer stones, her right hand tapping each one as she passed.

“I was just thinking how other-worldly these sites are. Have you seen Stonehenge?”

“Once, briefly.”

“I spent the night there, one winter solstice.”

“The cold must have been excruciating.”

“It was that,” I agreed, with feeling. “But the sunrise on the stones was glorious.”

“The three of us came out here to see the summer solstice one year. Marsh had some theory that this was orientated towards the sun, too. Either it isn’t, or else too many of the stones are worn away. It was a nice sunrise, though—warmer than yours, I don’t doubt. He caught hell for keeping Alistair out all night. We were, oh, thirteen maybe. Ali would have been seven or eight.”

Ali, his childhood nick-name—it took me aback to hear Iris use what I thought of as Alistair’s real name. I watched Iris complete her circuit of the outer circle, then step inside to perform the same touching ritual with the inner stones. These were in better condition—either that, or had started out taller—because she did not have to stoop as often to reach them. When the second round was fulfilled, she walked straight up-hill from the monument, then stopped, turned, and sat down on a low boulder overgrown with grass and dead nettles.

There were three stones in a row—placed there, I thought, not buried in the ground by ancient Britons. I envisioned these three childhood friends, of disparate ages and peculiarly entwined futures, laboriously hauling the river-smoothed boulders here for viewing. I sat on the end rock, then looked at the one between us.

“Who generally sat in the middle?” I asked her.

“Marsh. Marsh was always in the centre.”

“He still is.”

“Do you know how he came by that scar?” she asked abruptly. “He fingers it, when he’s troubled—I’m sure you’ve noticed. I don’t know why.”

To feel his shame,
I thought, but bit my tongue hard against the words. When Mahmoud’s finger-tips traced that shiny brown welt, they had been recalling the shame of capture and torture, the abject humiliation of a proud spirit at the hands of a Turkish madman. Marsh’s fingers, I thought, were reminding him that he was a Hughenfort for whom righteousness had not been strength enough.

“War injury,” I merely told her.

“It changed him,” she said. “When first he came to France with it, he was not the same man.” She sighed. “Poor, poor man. He’s going to be so unhappy if he stays.”

“Will it affect you?”

“I’ll not move here, if that’s what you’re asking. But I should think it will require regular visits from Paris, in order to keep up appearances.”

It was peaceful in that lonely place populated only by a stand of gnarled stones and abandoned trees. I thought perhaps the reason Marsh had excused himself from the outing was not the pressure of work, but his unwillingness to encounter these mute reminders of uncomplicated youth and its long, free days beneath the summer sun.

“You haven’t met this boy Thomas who’s coming over on Wednesday? Lionel’s son?”

“I haven’t. The mother lives in France—Lyons, isn’t it? During the War, I could never see a reason to go out of my way and introduce myself, and since then, no-one seems to know where she lives.”