The Stranger House (49 page)

Sam sat at the bottom end, facing Dunstan. Behind him she could see Mrs Collipepper making coffee. It was hotter here than out in the autumn sunshine.

All this was down to Dunstan.

In response to Sam’s aggressive flippancy he had said, “My life? Excellent. But that may take some little time and the atmosphere in here is a touch crepuscular and rather too chilly for my old bones. So why don’t we descend to the kitchen, which the Aga always maintains at a nice temperature? The kitchen is the heart of a well-run household, don’t you agree, Sam? May I call you Sam? How are you enjoying your visit to our little backwater? How do you like our valley? Do you feel any connection with it? I should be interested to know.”

By God, he was a cool customer, thought Mig. Set the tone, keep it well mannered and English, put a proper distance between yourself and this strident little colonial! He waited with interest and some concern to see how Sam would reply.

“I feel like I’ve stepped through a north-facing door and met the devil,” she said quietly.

It took Mig’s breath away. It even disconcerted the old man for a moment.

Then he smiled and said, “Ah yes. You’ve done the church tour, I see. Or has Frek been treating you to those old legends she values so much? But, as I always say to her, it’s all a matter of approach. It’s possible to step through a north-facing door and find yourself facing south. Let’s go down, shall we? Frek, my dear, your arm, if I may.”

Downstairs in the hall, Mig had offered to leave.

The old man said, “No, no. I have Frek to support me, and it would be unfair if Sam didn’t have a near and dear friend by her side.”

Once at the kitchen table, Sam sat in silence, waiting to see if the housekeeper was to be included in the permitted audience. Mrs Collipepper set the coffee down in front of Frek, said, “I’ll see to your fire, Mr Dunny. It’ll need banking,” then left.

Sam, recalling Mig’s laughing reference to the old goat’s midday “nap,” wondered if this was some kind of code.

“Now, my dear,” said Dunstan to Sam, “The floor is yours.”

Keep it simple, thought Sam. And keep it cool and controlled.

“I’ve been talking to Pete Swinebank,” she said, “He tells me that in January 1961 he was present on Mecklin Moor when your son, Gerald, raped my grandmother, Pamela Galley, who was eleven at the time. I believe that not long after this happened your son confessed to you what he’d done.”

Mig could hardly believe what he was hearing, hardly begin to take in its implications. It was less than two hours since he and Sam had parted. Where had this devastating information come from? More importantly, what had it done to her and where was it leading? He looked at her with love and concern. She didn’t even glance at him. Her gaze was fixed on the old man, challenging him to deny it.

Frek continued pouring coffee as if nothing remarkable had been said.

Dunstan nodded vigorously, like an old tutor confirming the accuracy of a point well made in a seminar.

“Yes, that’s right, he did. But I was not the first to hear the sad tale. He told it first to his confessor, who urged him to make a clean breast to me. I reproved him, I punished him, and I removed him from Illthwaite lest his continued presence should cause the injured child more pain. But I knew my responsibilities did not end there. I took advice. Finally, feeling a deep obligation to take care of the poor girl’s long-term welfare, I made what seemed then the best possible arrangements to guarantee her future.”

He sat back with the look of a man who’d fought his corner for virtue in an unresponsive world and Sam felt her vow of control under early threat.

“Her future?” she echoed, “Yeah, you guaranteed that all right. All miserable eight months of it which she spent in pain and terror a world away from home among a bunch of insensitive and psychopathically cruel strangers.”

Her voice spiralled upwards but she managed to hold it down beneath those near-ultrasonic levels it could reach at times of untrammelled emotion.

He leaned towards her a little, his face expressing concern, his eyes warm with compassion and sincerity.

“My dear, I do not doubt the truth of what you say for one moment,” he assured her, “What I have learned since—what we have all learned since—demonstrates how wrong we were, all of us at this end of the process, in our estimate that any short-term pain would be more than compensated by the long-term benefits. If anyone here knew the truth of what was going to happen to so many of these children when they reached your shores, do you think we would have permitted it to happen? I certainly had no idea. As to the fact that the child was pregnant, you must believe I was utterly ignorant here. She was carrying my grandchild, for God’s sake! Do you think I would have permitted my own blood to be born twelve thousand miles away and left in the care of strangers?”

The old bastard’s doing indignation! thought Sam. How the hell is it happening that I’m sitting here all calm and this slippery sod’s getting indignant?

To hell with control! Now’s the time to start screaming!

But before she could begin, Mig spoke in a mild but measured tone. He found he was looking at Dunstan Woollass from a new and unflattering angle. Removing historic documents to protect your family name was a venial sin, harming no one. But protecting your family name at the expense of an innocent child was very different.

He said, “I think we may accept that you didn’t know the girl was pregnant, Mr Woollass, but that’s hardly the point. Surely if you were as concerned for her future as you claim, you would have made arrangements for regular reports on her welfare to reach you. Even if not detailed, I don’t see how they could have
avoided mentioning the fact that the girl died in childbirth within a very few months of arrival in Australia.”

The response came not from Dunstan but from Frek.

She said, “All my grandfather would require was a general affirmation that all was proceeding according to plan. If at some point, early or late, someone saw fit to dilute the truth, then that’s hardly my grandfather’s fault, is it?”

“You mean, not mention the baby’s birth and the mother’s death?” said Mig incredulously, “That’s not dilution of the truth, that’s criminal misrepresentation!”

Sam had had enough. She wasn’t here as a spectator in some debating chamber.

“Shut up, both of you!” she yelled, “You’re here to listen, not to join in.”

“Quite right, my dear. This is between you and me,” said Dunstan, glaring reprovingly at his granddaughter.

Oh, but he’s good! thought Mig, observing the ease with which the old man lined himself up with Sam. What must he have been like in his prime!

For a moment Sam looked a touch disconcerted to find herself allied with Dunstan, but she had a directness to match his dexterity.

“Anyway, all this crap about who told who what is irrelevant. As soon as Pam Galley’s boat sailed, that was it for you, wasn’t it? End of story. Happy-ever-after or dead-in-a-ditch, didn’t matter. You just didn’t want to know. You’d got things tidied up here. The Gowders must have been easy once you’d spelled it out in words of one syllable. Big trouble if they blabbed, an easy ride if they kept quiet. As for Pete Swinebank, you probably worked out he’d be too scared to talk to his dad. You didn’t foresee that what they’d done would eat away inside him till finally he spilled it all out to the curate.
But even that fell right for you when the poor sod took himself off the board. And there you were when Pete got the news, a sympathetic authority figure telling him what he wanted to hear, that the best thing he could do now was keep his mouth shut.”

Dunstan was nodding vigorously again.

“You put things very clearly, my dear. Your mathematical training, I suppose. Except that you have not brought motivation into the equation. I wished to protect my son. He was a child too. Back then we did not have the complex network of counsellors and child psychiatrists we have today. What we did have was the Church, and it was to the Church’s care in the form of a Catholic boarding school that I committed Gerry in the hope and belief they would steer him right, and enable him to mature into a decent and moral man, which all the evidence suggests they have done.”

He paused as if to invite comment on his argument. There was the noise of an engine outside and through the window Mig saw a pick-up arrive. On it, supported by the Gowder twins, lay the Other Wolf-Head Cross. Its huge eye seemed to leer into the kitchen, as if deriding what was happening there. Thor Winander was driving. He swung the wheel till the vehicle faced the kitchen. Catching Mig’s eye through the window, he gave a cheerful wave, then began backing the pick-up up the slope to the scooped-out niche which Mig had noticed as he walked down from the Moss. So, no marble Venus but something equally pagan.

No one else in the room seemed to have noticed. Dunstan resumed talking.

“As for the girl, little Pam, I did exactly the same for her as I did for Gerry. I committed her to the Church’s
care, in the honest belief that removing her from the scene of so much distress and helping her start a new life under the tutelage of the Church’s officers and agencies would bring her to a healthy and prosperous womanhood.”

This was breathtaking stuff, thought Mig. Hadn’t the man said he’d read Law at Cambridge? What an advocate was lost when he opted not to practise!

“You really fucking got it wrong then, didn’t you?” exclaimed Sam.

“Yes, I really fucking did,” said Dunstan.

The echo of her profanity came across not as reproof or parody but as another strut in the bridge he was trying to build between himself and his accuser. And the process continued as, with his unblinking gaze fixed on Sam, he repeated his pleas in a low, urgent voice, discarding flowing periods and fancy turns of phrase.

“I admit my first priority was always my own family. I had no idea the child was pregnant. It never crossed my mind. But I don’t need to tell you this, do I? Your own powers of reasoning will have got you there. I put my family first, and if I’d thought for one moment Pam Galley might be carrying Gerry’s child, then she would have been family too. As you are, my dear. As you are. And, hard though it will be for you to believe it at this moment, I cannot tell you how much that knowledge delights me.”

This beat all. And it wasn’t mere advocacy, thought Mig. He means it! He loves Frek, but when he looks at her, he sees a dead end. Now he sees those same unblinking Woollass eyes looking back at him from the face of a woman whose sexuality he knows, courtesy of my schoolboy blushes, is not in doubt. And he doesn’t just want to defend himself, he wants to conquer.

He glanced across the table at Frek and read in her face that this was how she understood the situation too. Did she care? That he couldn’t read.

Behind her through the window he saw that Thor had got out of the cab and was supervising the Gowders as they man oeuvred the Wolf-Head off the pick-up. Still no one else at the table seemed to have noticed what was happening outside. In Sam’s case this was probably as well. Sight of the twins could only be a distraction, and she had plenty on her plate dealing with Dunstan.

He could see that the old man’s response had to some extent wrong-footed her. He guessed there was a lot of her priest-decking father in her. In a tight spot he didn’t doubt Sam could throw a damaging hook too. But neither violence nor math ematics was going to see her through this present situation.

He wanted to speak to her, but knew it would be a mistake. Later perhaps there would be a time for words of comfort and advice, when they were alone and close …

His heart swooned at the prospect.

Dunstan had bowed his head as if in prayer. Now he sat up straight. His eyes bright, his voice firm, he did not look a man in his eighties.

He said, “You will want to think about what you’ve discovered, what I have said. And from what I’ve learned of you in the short time of our acquaintance, you’ll want to confront Gerry. My son. Your grandfather.”

“Too true I will!” snapped Sam, “He can run but he can’t hide.”

Mig saw Dunstan wince slightly at the banality, but all he said was, “I don’t believe he’s doing either. I know for a fact that after your revelations in the Stranger, he
suffered a great perturbation of spirit. He spent much of last night in prayer with Sister Angelica. In our faith only a priest can administer the sacraments, but there are times when a troubled soul needs the ministrations of a wise and spiritual woman.”

“You mean he screws nuns as well as little girls?” snapped Sam.

Mig was shocked, but mingled with the shock was a degree of admiration and pride. She is indomitable! he thought.

Dunstan, however, threw back his head and snorted a short laugh.

“I don’t believe that is a habit he has got into, if you’ll forgive the tasteless pun.”

Unexpectedly he stood up and moved round the table as if he wanted to take a closer look at Sam. She rose too and, head tipped back to compensate for the disparity of height, met his gaze unflinchingly, diamond striking against diamond.

“Do not take it amiss, great-granddaughter, if I say that in you I see something of myself,” he said softly, “You will pursue an end no matter what gets in the way. You will not rest till you have worked everything out, no matter where it takes you, or how long.”

“Right to the last decimal point,” she said.

“And if it is one of those what I believe you mathematicians call irrational numbers which have no last decimal point?”

“Then I’ll keep going till what I believe you call God says it’s time to stop.”

“That’s a voice we all need to listen out for,” he said gravely, “I am truly sorry for everything that has happened, and for all of its consequences. Except for
yourself. I cannot say I am sorry for that. I do believe that’s Gerry arriving now.”

The transition from intense emotion to casual comment was perfect, denying Sam the chance to offer any sharp, puncturing response. Instead she turned as they all did to look out of the window.

The Range Rover was drawing up alongside the house. Gerry Woollass got out. He didn’t look into the kitchen. All his attention was concentrated on the activity up the slope. He walked towards the three men who had managed to slide the Wolf-Head off the pick-up. Presumably its base was now over the prepared site and all that remained was to raise it into position. This was no easy task even for three strong men. There was only room for one of the twins to stand at the front and push while Winander and the other hauled at the ends of a canvas sling wrapped around the huge bole.