The Dead Hand of History (25 page)

Beresford was not at all surprised by the comment. He had done his research on Sylvia Hope-Gore, and was well aware that while most of the people in Whitebridge who knew about her would have been happy enough to describe her as a local celebrity, there was a substantial minority who would only have used the term if they could have added the word ‘notorious' to it.

Miss
Hope-Gore – she'd never married – had been born into minor landed aristocracy, but had rejected both her family and her class in the 1920s, when she'd become a communist. Since then, she'd attempted – with greater or lesser success – to be a constant thorn in the side of the local establishment. She'd been active in industrial strikes during the Depression, had organized rent boycotts after the war and had been a staunch champion of the rights of hippies to get (as she'd once put it), ‘as much free love as they can afford'.

The old woman returned carrying a tray on which there was a teapot, two cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits.

‘I'll help you with that,' Beresford offered.

‘You most certainly will
not
help me,' Sylvia Hope-Gore replied fiercely. ‘Doddering I may well be, but I'm not yet quite so doddering that I can't handle a tea tray.'

‘No, of course not,' Beresford agreed, as he watched the old woman's progress across the room with some anxiety.

Sylvia Hope-Gore carefully laid the tray down on the cane coffee table, which lay between two cane chairs.

‘For goodness' sake, sit down,' she said. ‘You're making the place look untidy, standing there like that.'

Beresford sat. ‘I was noticing your plants,' he said. ‘I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like them before. What are they called?'

‘Oh, I don't know the scientific name for them,' Sylvia Hope-Gore said airily. ‘I just call them
ganja
. Does that name mean anything to you?'

‘No, I don't think it does,' Beresford admitted.

Sylvia Hope-Gore nodded. ‘I suppose that's just as well,' she said. She indicated the tray. ‘There's Rich Tea or Garibaldi biscuits. The choice is yours. Or if you'd prefer it, I've just baked some hash . . .' She stopped herself just in time. ‘No, that probably wouldn't be a good idea,' she admitted.

She poured the tea and passed Beresford a cup. He took a sip, and tried not to grimace.

‘Very nice,' he said.

‘It's an acquired taste,' Miss Hope-Gore told him. She gave Beresford a hard stare. ‘When you said earlier that you liked herbal tea, you were just humouring an old woman, weren't you?'

‘No . . . I . . .'

‘
Weren't you?
'

‘I'm sorry,' Beresford said abjectly.

‘There's no need to apologize,' Miss Hope-Gore said. ‘It was rather
sweet
of you to pretend.' She sipped at her own tea with obvious relish. ‘I used to be something of a radical, you know.'

‘So I've heard.'

‘Of course, I've slowed down a bit since my heyday, but when the need arises, I can still man the barricades with the best of them.'

‘I believe you,' Beresford said.

And so he did.

‘But we all change, whether we want to or not,' Miss Hope-Gore continued, a little wistfully. ‘There was a time – and not
so
long ago – when I'd rather have pulled off my own arm than talk to the police.'

‘But not any more?'

‘No, not any more,' Miss Hope-Gore said wistfully. ‘I don't get many visitors these days – it must be a week since I've talked to anyone but the milkman – so even a representative of the forces of fascist repression is welcome.' She smiled, almost coquettishly. ‘Besides, you are a very
good-looking
boy.'

Beresford returned it with a smile of his own, which he hoped acknowledged the compliment without also issuing an invitation to pursue this line of conversation any further.

‘If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a few questions about Stanislaw Szymborska,' he said.

Miss Hope-Gore smiled fondly.

‘Stan,' she said softly. ‘I haven't seen him for years. But why would
you
be interested in
him
?'

‘Haven't you read the papers?' Beresford asked.

Miss Hope-Gore shook her head. ‘Not since the Labour Party sold us all down the river in '64. Is Stan in trouble?'

‘That will depend on whether or not he's done anything wrong,' Beresford said cunningly. ‘When did you first meet him?'

‘It must have been just after the war. I was trying to get Polish refugees re-housed at the time – it was just awful the way the council treated them – and Stan was involved in it, too. As a war hero, of course, he could have been said to have already done his bit and simply rested on his laurels. But that wasn't his way. He was never the sort of man to just sit back and take whatever fate threw at him – he made things
happen
.'

But had he
made things happen
two nights earlier, when he may just possibly have learned of his wife's affair? Beresford wondered.

‘How well did you know him?' he asked.

‘It depends what you mean by
well
. Are you asking me, in your sweet boyish way, if we were lovers?'

‘No, I . . .'

‘Because if you are, then the answer is most definitely yes.' Miss Hope-Gore took another genteel sip of her tea. ‘Have I shocked you?'

‘No, of course not,' Beresford said.

He was lying. He already knew that Miss Hope-Gore was rumoured to have had affairs – her more salacious critics often claimed she'd had more pricks in her than a second-hand dartboard – but she must have been at least twenty years older than Szymborska.

‘A man reaches his sexual prime when he's eighteen, but a woman has to wait until her forties,' Miss Hope-Gore said, reading his mind. ‘And I wasn't always the wrinkled old hag you see before you now – you should have seen me before my tits dropped.'

‘How long were you . . . were you together?' Beresford asked, wondering why the conservatory had suddenly become so hot.

‘You mean, how long were we rutting like goats in heat?' Miss Hope-Gore asked, obviously enjoying his discomfort. ‘How long were we making the beast with two backs? About three years, on and off. It was the most amazing sex I've ever known, and when we did split up, it certainly wasn't because we'd stopped enjoying each other in bed.'

‘Then why?'

‘It was purely for political reasons.'

‘Political reasons?' Beresford asked, grasping at the words – so wonderfully free of sexual connotations – as a drowning man might grasp at a straw.

‘Stan said that what the Russians were doing in Poland was wrong, while I, of course, claimed quite the opposite was true, because it was all being done in Comrade Stalin's name and Comrade Stalin simply could never
be
wrong. We were never going to agree on the subject, and so we went our separate ways. It was a very amicable parting, but then, you see, apart from the fury of the bedroom, our relationship had
always
been very amicable.'

‘Fury of the bedroom,' Beresford repeated, accepting that, as much as he'd rather avoid the topic of their sex life, he wasn't going to be able to. ‘Was he
violent
in bed?'

An amused smile played on Miss Hope-Gore's cracked old lips. ‘Why do you ask?' she said. ‘Hoping to pick up a few tips?'

‘No, I . . .'

‘Stan was energetic, rather than violent. In fact, I don't think I ever saw him
really
lose total control of himself, even in the height of passion. Of course, that hadn't always been the case. There'd been a time when violence played a
central
part of his life.'

‘You mean while he was serving as a fighter pilot in the Polish Air Force?' Beresford asked.

‘Well, yes, I suppose I do mean that as well,' Miss Hope-Gore said.

‘As well?'

‘But I was actually thinking more of the time when he was in the prisoner-of-war camp. He had some terrible experiences then – so terrible that I don't think he's ever talked about them to another living soul.'

‘Except to you,' Beresford said, wondering if she was just spinning him a line to make herself seem more important.

‘No, he didn't talk about them even to me,' Miss Hope-Gore said.

‘Then how do you
know
about them?'

‘I don't really. Not in any detail. But I got a
flavour
of them, shall we say, from hearing what he said during his nightmares.'

‘So he had nightmares, did he?'

‘Haven't I just said that he did?'

‘How often?'

‘Fairly regularly. Not every night, by any means, but certainly at least once a week.'

‘And these nightmares of his were
always
about his time as a prisoner of war?'

‘Yes.'

‘How can you be sure of that?'

Miss Hope-Gore smiled again. ‘I think it was probably the fact that he kept repeating the words “German guards” and “camp commandant” that really gave it away,' she said.

‘And he said that in English, did he?'

‘He'd have to have done, or I'd never have had a bloody clue what he was going on about, would I?' Miss Hope-Gore asked, the smile still in place. ‘He once told me that since he'd decided his future was to be in England, he always made an effort to try and
think
in English – and he seems to have succeeded to the extent that he dreamed in it, too.'

‘So he got very agitated when he was dreaming about these prison-camp guards, did he?' Beresford asked.

‘No, not at all. While he was mumbling on about
them
, he was quite calm. It was only when he got on to the subject of the hand that he started to become really distressed.'

‘The hand?'

‘That's right. He cut it off. Or he helped someone else to cut it off. I was never quite clear which.'

‘Can you remember exactly what it was that he said about it?' Beresford asked.

‘Shouldn't think so,' Miss Hope-Gore said cheerfully. ‘At best, he was hardly coherent at the time, and that time
was
nearly twenty-five years ago.'

‘Could you try?' Beresford pleaded.

‘All right,' Miss Hope-Gore agreed. She closed her eyes. ‘I got the impression he was arguing with someone called Stefan. Stefan wanted to cut the hand off, and Stan didn't. But in the end, Stefan talked him round, because Stan said, “It is the right thing to do. It is just.” That sounds a bit melodramatic when
I
say it, doesn't it? But hearing it the way
Stan
said it – and picturing the circumstances in which he must have
originally
said it – I can assure you it didn't sound melodramatic at all.'

‘I'm sure it didn't,' Beresford agreed.

Miss Hope-Gore opened her eyes again. ‘And now I think about it, there was one word he kept saying over and over, especially as the nightmare was drawing to a close.'

‘And what word was that?' Beresford asked.

‘Betrayal,' Miss Hope-Gore said. ‘Does that make any sense to you?'

‘Yes,' Beresford said. ‘It makes
a lot
of sense.'

Jenny Brunskill walked up the cobbled street in one of the older parts of Whitebridge like a woman on a mission. And that was exactly what she was on, she told herself – a mission.

She had never done anything like this before – never even
thought
of launching a commando raid into what could prove to be enemy territory.

In the past, Linda would have handled something like this, she thought, and she herself would have been quite content – even quite relieved – to
let
Linda handle it. But now Linda was gone, and so it was up to her.

She had reached her objective – a corner shop which was located on the junction of two streets of terraced houses, and had windows looking out onto both of them.

She stepped out in the street to get a better look at it. There was a long metal sign over the door, and though the name of the shop – Handley's General Store and Off Licence – was clearly visible in the middle, it was dwarfed by the much larger advertisements for Embassy Filter Cigarettes which flanked it. On the pavement was a long trestle table, holding wicker baskets of fruit and vegetables, and a hand-written sign had been pinned to the corner of it, which asked customers to serve themselves and pay inside.

This was just the kind of shop which had been the backbone of the bakery's business for so long, she thought, as she opened the door and heard a brass bell ring in the back room. And though she and Linda had expanded the selling base in the years since their father had so tragically passed away, it was
still
business they could not afford to lose.

And yet they
had
been losing it. A five per cent drop in sales here, a ten per cent drop there. Only a few loaves, when you looked at it one way, but a symptom of a serious problem when you looked at it in another.

Her initial plan had been to approach the shopkeepers directly.

‘
How can you let us down like this?
' she'd imagined herself saying. ‘
After all the years we've worked together, how can you betray us now?
'

But that wouldn't work, she'd quickly realized. Not for
her
.

If her father had said something like that, the shopkeepers would have hung their heads in shame and almost begged him for his forgiveness. If Linda had said it, they would have at least looked sheepish, and then begun to toe the line again. But she was not her wonderful father, nor her strong sister. She was only Jenny – and they would just have laughed at her.