The Widow's Confession (11 page)

Delphine felt a trifle embarrassed. Alba seemed sincere enough, but there was too much intensity in her voice. She smiled, to indicate that the thanks had been accepted, and putting her hand to
her brow to shield her eyes, watched the figures on the beach.

‘I also wished to say,’ said Alba, taking a breath, ‘that I would very much like it, Mrs Beck, if you would be my friend.’

Delphine did not know what to say. She looked at the girl, but Alba was in earnest, and was watching her with the same hungry, eager look that she had fixed her with in the saloon of the Albion
Hotel. She felt flattered, but also wary, before she told herself: She is just a child.

‘What a sweet thing to ask,’ she said. ‘But I understand there are many girls your own age here at Broadstairs. I am sure you will not need to bother with a stuffy widow like
me.’

Alba’s violet eyes clouded. ‘Oh, I do not like people my own age, Mrs Beck. But, if you will be my friend, then I am very glad.’ She came closer. ‘I heard you saw the
body on the beach,’ she said in a low voice, glancing back to check that her aunt was not listening. ‘Was it very terrible?’

Delphine had to stop herself from drawing away. ‘I do not wish to speak of it,’ she said. ‘Your aunt says you are easily frightened, and I would not wish to give you
nightmares.’

Alba tempered her obvious disappointment with a small smile. ‘You are so kind,’ she said and, unperturbed, bobbed a curtsey and went back to her aunt.

They all went down to the sand. Julia was the best at collecting shells, moving easily over slippery rocks. Delphine saw that Mr Steele’s eyes hardly ever left her cousin; he seemed
delighted when she laughed, though he said only one or two words to her, and stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

Alba refused to go onto the rocks, and there was a general sense of approval that she was keeping away from undignified scrambling. Still she bent forwards, peering at shells and rocks in the
sand, and picking up a pebble or two.

Delphine preferred watching them from a distance, this group, which now and then moved into the perfect composition, and she wished she had some way of capturing them and framing them in her
mind just as she saw them now: the elegant ladies, bonneted, dressed in their summer dresses and ribbons; the gentlemen slim, curious, clad in white and black apart from Mr Steele in his burgundy
coat; the crumbling white cliffs; the wet, muddy-brown sand; the slippery rocks, dense green with seaweed as though they were made of them. And she noticed that the painter was the same, though he
was not at her distance. He had gone out onto the rocks, taken out a small sketchbook and was drawing them. When Mrs Quillian called and asked him what he was doing – ‘for you know, Mr
Benedict, as an old lady I have the licence to ask whatever I wish’ – he had replied that he was making notes of the landscape, of this beautiful gap and its wide, rock-strewn beach. He
said this with a broad smile. But Delphine knew he was lying.

She knew he was drawing the people.

The afternoon drew on, but the women’s thirst for shells was inexhaustible. Hooked on Alba’s arm was a basket, and the shells were piling up, a kind of central bank that she and
Julia had agreed upon – although Delphine suspected that in fact Julia did not really care about the shells, and would forget them the moment they returned home, whereas Alba was careful,
inspecting each and every shell minutely, as though she was trying to decide whether they were beautiful or not. After a while, so as not to appear churlish, Delphine ventured closer to them. But
she had no taste for pebbles, for she had banned any desire in herself to collect, on the principle that its pretended permanence was only another way of being cheated. Instead, she left Julia and
Alba under the indulgent gaze of Miss Waring and Mrs Quillian, who were speaking to Mr Hallam. She found Mr Steele, at a decent distance, looking out to sea.

As she approached him, he glanced at her and smiled, a smile almost of familiarity. ‘I think there is a sea mist coming,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

Delphine looked. Sure enough, at the blue-green limits of the many-layered sea there was a faint, slim band where the air looked slightly milky; a ghost-line at the horizon.

‘It’s skilled of you to spot it,’ she said. ‘Are you an old cove, Mr Steele, like Solomon on the pier?’

He threw his head back and laughed with real pleasure, and Delphine could not help but laugh too. As she glanced back at the group, she saw Mr Hallam looking at them. To their left, Mr Benedict
was sketching furiously.

‘What a strange group we are,’ she said. ‘If you do not mind me saying it.’

‘I do not mind, and I suspect you know that,’ he said.

‘I had to check,’ she said. ‘I know that being American gives me some licence: I am able to say some things without them thinking that I know what I do. I don’t think I
can get away with that with you.’

‘Your cousin won’t speak to me with such openness,’ he said, and she saw disappointment in his gaze.

‘She is not as hard and battle-worn as I,’ said Delphine. ‘She still keeps the notions we were raised with – gentility, delicacy and concealment. Give her some time, and
she will speak frankly.’

He looked back at the horizon, his expression not softening.

‘Forgive me for asking,’ she said, fixing her eyes on the horizon too, ‘but have you had a disappointment, Mr Steele?’

She knew he was looking at her, and as he did so, she thought she presented the perfect façade of hardness, the brittle glitter that she had perfected in the looking glass. What she did
not realize was what he saw: a face wide open to the light, and a fellow-traveller in disappointment. He had opened his mouth to be bluff, for he had wavered between bluffness and truthfulness his
whole life. Then he decided to speak to the face that he saw so clearly in the light.

‘I left London quickly,’ he said. ‘I was hoping that being here would make me see things anew. Yet I find I cannot be certain about anything. I had hoped to be a family man,
Mrs Beck. But I have never been married, and I think I may have left behind my last chance at life.’

Delphine felt a brief shock, and knew that he had spoken the truth.

‘What a sad thing to say.’

They both turned. It was Alba, standing several feet away from them, her basket of shells on her arm. Her voice – young, soft, a note or two too high – was full of expression, but
her face was not: it was just its same, remorseless loveliness. Delphine felt chilled, the kind of chill one feels when a cloud moves across the sun – and it was apparent from the look on Mr
Steele’s face that he had not meant his words to be heard by anyone but Delphine.

‘I do not believe it,’ Alba went on, with perfect confidence. ‘I think we all have a thousand chances – another and another and another.’ She smiled. ‘We have
found the most perfect rock pool, with a hundred beautiful shells. Please come and see, before Miss Mardell pulls them all up and ruins the picture.’

‘Al-baah!’ It was Miss Waring, her deep voice reaching surprisingly far. Alba bobbed them a curtsey and walked off towards her aunt.

When he was sure she was at a safe distance, Edmund glanced at Delphine again. ‘What do you think, Mrs Beck?’ he said. ‘Do we all have a thousand chances, as Miss Peters
says?’

Delphine kept her eyes on the line of sea mist. It seemed to be getting closer.

‘The American spirit in me will not reassure you,’ she said. ‘I trust the individual. If you think it was your last chance, perhaps it was. I am convinced of my fate, and no
power on earth could convince me otherwise, unless I witnessed some miracle, and it changed me. If you can live, content with your situation, then that is what matters. We have, at least, the
chance to live, unlike that poor young girl we saw the other morning, whose face will not leave my mind.’

The waves seemed to be moving steadily in one direction; now and then the white of a breaker showed itself, then was gone.

The excited voices of the women were growing in volume.

‘We had best go and look in that rock pool,’ said Edmund, ‘lest we miss something spectacular.’

They walked, quietly together, and Mr Benedict, drawn too by the voices, was picking his way across the rocks. They found Julia, Delphine, Alba and Mrs Quillian staring at a particularly deep
rock pool. Alba was now picking shells off, and naming them, with the kind of precocious pleasure that a young child repeating its times tables to the class would show.

‘That is a cockleshell, and that is a – oh, look at that one!’ she said. ‘It is so beautiful. I would like that one. Aunt, I could decorate a box for you, and that would
be the central shell.’

‘Would it, my dear?’ Miss Waring was standing several steps away, too far for her to see what Alba was talking about, but looking in her niece’s direction with an indulgent yet
tense glance that flitted about. Delphine wondered what was making her so nervous.

Alba held up the shell and Mr Hallam examined it. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a fine specimen. The local people call it “the beauty shell”.’ And he moved aside as the
others came forwards to inspect it.

They were all peering over the girls’ shoulders; it was only Mr Hallam who noticed Miss Waring falter suddenly. ‘Miss Waring?’ he said. ‘Are you well?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, I am very sorry, but . . . I am not.’ She swayed as though she would faint; Theo caught her.

‘Aunt!’ cried Alba.

Mr Steele went to Miss Waring’s other side, and along with Mr Hallam he helped her to a large rock, where she could sit down.

‘Silly me,’ said Miss Waring. She sat, rod straight on the rock; the only difference was the pallor of her face. ‘I have been standing up too long.’ She rifled in the
large bag she carried with her – its size had caused Julia much hilarity when she first saw it – and gave her niece a small silver-mounted bottle which Delphine recognized from their
first meeting. Alba unscrewed it and held it under her nose; her white face jerked up. ‘Thank you – oh dear, oh dear.’ They all gathered around her, quiet and embarrassed, not
sure of what to do or say. There was a general feeling of relief when, after a moment or two, Miss Waring pronounced herself mended.

‘My dear lady,’ said Mrs Quillian. ‘Please forgive me, we have been too long in the sun. We must go now, for there will be tea at the Albion Hotel. Tea for all of us –
ladies, gentlemen!’ She walked on, speaking the words tea-tea-tea as though it was a summoning bell, chiming out and gathering her followers.

‘It is no wonder Aunt is feeling a little delicate,’ said Alba, swinging the basket of shells as she passed Delphine and caught up with Mrs Quillian. Ahead of her, Miss Waring was
leaning on Theo’s arm as they approached the Gap. ‘It was so shocking to hear of that young girl being found dead on the beach. What must it be like to drown?’

‘Please, Miss Peters,’ said Mrs Quillian. She spoke agreeably, but with firmness in her voice. ‘This is not a subject to be pursued in company – or to be pursued at all
by you. Let us have tea, and look at your shells.’

The group climbed the Gap again, this time Julia and Delphine walking together, their backs to the group, gripping each other’s hands tightly as the slope steepened.

On arrival at the Albion Hotel, Mr Gorsey directed his tired visitors to the gallery which ran along the back of the building where, he said, tea would be served shortly.
Delphine thought to herself that the summer had really started, for Gorsey’s daughter Polly had put aside her drab clothes and was well-dressed and glossy, like a bird with freshly grown
plumage, directing people with neat little gestures and smiles.

‘You were industrious today,’ said Edmund to Mr Benedict.

The painter’s mood seem to catch on his words, and he brushed his black hair away from his face with a violent gesture. ‘It is no good,’ he said. ‘My drawing today has
been hopeless. I keep thinking about that poor girl on the beach. I cannot help but think it should have been looked into more. How petty our amusements seem in the shadow of death.’

Edmund put his cup down. His day, too, had been veiled over with sadness, Amy Phelps’s face recurring to him every so often. ‘It is natural that we should feel upset over what has
happened,’ he said. ‘But we should do our best to protect our fellows from it, and to try and recover, for nothing can be done about it now.’ He spoke carefully, not wanting to
encourage drama in the other man, who seemed to be spoiling for it.

‘I am only grateful that Mrs Beck was not out sketching that day; it freezes my blood, the thought that she might have found her, and been put through the ordeal of seeking help,’
said Benedict. ‘And it was the attitude of Crisp which so infuriated me. As though the girl was nothing, to be buried and forgotten as soon as possible.’

And yet, thought Edmund, you did not come to the inquest.

‘Mr Benedict,’ said Miss Waring, a little severely, for she was seated several feet from him, her fingers playing over the pretty cameo brooch she had pinned at her neck.
‘Pray, we do not wish to converse about such a disagreeable thing.’

‘My dear Miss Waring,’ said Benedict, pushing his chair back and leaning forwards, as though he had something of urgency to say to the lady. ‘Are we so divided from our fellow
creatures that we can refer to their suffering as something merely disagreeable? She had a name; she may have been poor, but she was a person with a life that has been extinguished. Her name was
Miss Amy Phelps, God rest her soul. Her name was – is, in the sight of heaven – Amy.’

Edmund saw movement in the corner of his eye before he heard the thump of a cup on the carpeted floor; he sprang to his feet and caught Julia as she stumbled. He thought she was about to faint,
in the pattern of Miss Waring, but instead she righted herself against his arm.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘You must think all of us ladies poor creatures.’ He could only shake his head gently at her words.

‘It’s the heat,’ said Delphine. ‘Sit down, my love. Thank you, Mr Steele.’ She nodded at him as she carefully disentangled Julia’s arm from his hands.