After the Armistice Ball (18 page)

I was still gazing at the angel-on-the stairs picture, when Clemence came back into the room and I saw a flare of something on her face as she caught sight of me bent studiously over the album. Aha! I thought. You didn’t mean to leave me alone with this for quite that long, did you?

‘This one is simply divine,’ I said, and showed her. I expected some kind of reaction, naturally, but not what came. She winced and then to get control of herself she made a sudden gesture which drew the corners of her mouth down and made the tendons of her neck leap out briefly. I tried to behave as though I had not seen this curiously unsettling little show but at the same time I tried to fix everything about it in my mind to pore over later.

‘You know, Clemence dear,’ I said, ‘you are very talented. I should love to see what you would be capable of in a studio if these snaps are anything to go by. Have you ever thought of it?’ Having thus praised her, I thought, into malleability, I went on: ‘And how about making another copy of this album for Alec Osborne? He would be utterly – well, I daresay enchanted is not quite the right word, is it? But I think it’s an idea you should consider.’ What I wanted, of course, was a copy I could study at leisure and I thought I could chance laying it on a bit thick; the worst that could come would be that she would think me a dreadful Victorian and this she probably did already. ‘After all they
were
engaged, and it would be a great shame if she just slipped out of his life completely. Even if it is too painful for him to look through just now, it would be something for him to treasure in years to come.’

Clemence stared at me, chewing her lip, and I thought I could imagine at least some of the conflict that fluttered inside her. She could not think of a single good reason why she should not make an album for Alec, but she could not agree to something so far outside her mother’s plan without at least asking Mrs Duffy first. And although she was sure that Mama’s answer would be the firmest possible ‘no’, Clemence’s own pride in her pictures made her want to say ‘yes’. Despairing of her ever answering, I took pity and said goodbye.

Alec was staying at the George. We had planned to meet there for luncheon if our allotted jobs were finished on time and for tea if not, but since I left Clemence at a quarter past two I could not be quite sure which it was to be. Luncheon at the George does not have quite the ring of sobriety and respectability that ‘tea at the George’ evokes. Tea at the George goes along in the imagination with pantomimes, stiff taffeta petticoats and the smell of mothballs from Nanny’s best winter coat and so I was torn between a desire to share my morning’s gleanings as soon as I could and a desire to be too late, so that it was tea blameless tea that we shared. I supposed, irrationally, that our lunching together would bring Renée Gordon-Strathmurdle to town, to the George, and to the adjoining table as though on a pulley. And what if it did? Luncheon was hardly breakfast in bed. The only explanation for these twinges of conscience was that spying and snooping on those who thought me their friend – and doing it for a fee! – was interfering with my judgement regarding all kinds of innocence and guilt.

Confirming, as always, that the world operates quite independent of my desires, the waiter assured me that ‘my party’ was still there and led me to a quiet table at the back of the dining room where Alec sat, not quite concealed behind a parlour palm, but with that general idea.

‘I’ve lunched already,’ I said as I sat, waving away a menu. Then I turned to Alec. ‘And I’ll bet you can’t guess where?’

‘Two mugs of soup in the back shop of the jeweller’s?’ said Alec, playing along. He could see that I was bubbling over with something.

‘Tell me yours first,’ I said firmly, determined that my meeting with Clemence should be the finale.

Alec had made no progress at all.

‘I dined at Posso last night,’ he began. ‘Dalrymple’s place, you know, down in the Borders, but Chrissie Dalrymple had nothing to offer. She hasn’t seen or spoken to Cara since Christmastime. A little coolness, I imagine, arising from not being asked to be a bridesmaid.’

‘Well, what does she expect?’ I said. Chrissie Dalrymple towered over Cara and was stones heavier, with a round pink face and bright yellow hair that stood out all around like a thatched roof. I should not have wanted her in my wedding photographs either.

‘Yes,’ said Alec, clearly not following. ‘They were school friends, though, and as thick as thieves, united in their dislike of Clemence, Cara always said. Clemence was just a year above and fearfully haughty as a result, I gather. Anyway, I had thought if Cara had anything she didn’t want to get around her current set, but which was pressing too heavily on her to be kept quite secret, an old school friend would be just the thing. As it was, I achieved nothing except indigestion from too much high game and sympathy.’

I could well imagine. Chrissie Dalrymple would have been cock-a-hoop to have Alec, newly eligible, descend.

‘She told me not to feel that I had to answer her letter of condolence when it arrived, if I preferred instead to come back to Posso and chat again in person.’ Alec spoke with the bleak panic of a man accidentally drifting closer than he cares to towards a girl of greater determination and less politeness than himself. I tried to hide my smile as I answered.

‘That’s a thought, though, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Letters of condolence? I mean, one always is quite desperate for something different to say, isn’t one? And the last conversation one had with the – in this case temporarily – departed would be a natural source of material.’

Alec summoned a waiter and asked if any letters had arrived for him during the morning.

‘Of course, my mother might not be sending them on at all,’ he said. ‘I might have them to look forward to whenever I go back to Dorset. Anyway, while we’re waiting – this morning I had coffee with three very good friends of Cara’s whom I have met upwards of half a dozen times but whom I still think of interchangeably as Boo, Koo and Shoo. Do you know who I mean?’

‘Booty, Koo and Sha-Sha,’ I said, laughing again. ‘Yes, I know them very well, but how spine-chilling for you, darling.’ Alec nodded fervently.

‘I
had
thought that grief might have tempered them somewhat, and they are very shaken, but all it meant was that they were even more inclined to throw their arms around me and each other and had lost all sense of conversational restraint. If I hadn’t known she was going riding afterwards, I should have said the tall, dark one was drunk.’ The waiter, approaching with a large stack of letters, caught this most unfortunate snippet, and put them down on the tablecloth with rather a smack.

‘Good old Mother,’ said Alec. ‘I paid extremely close attention to their outpourings, Boo-boo and Co-co I mean, and was on the lookout for any sign that one might have something to say to me she might not want the others to hear, but I’m fairly certain there’s nothing. I went as near as I dared to asking. So, neither Cara’s oldest chum nor any of the current gang seem to suspect a thing.’

He picked up the pile of letters and began to leaf through them absently, then suddenly stopped and sat very upright staring at one of the envelopes. He let the others fall to the table and held this one up in front of his face.

‘It’s from Cara,’ he said and turned it towards me. There was his name and address written in the same, rather faint, rather loopy hand, familiar now from the two letters we had both pored over at the gallery and again in Gatehouse. Without another word, Alec slit open the seal with a table knife and began to read out loud.

‘“Dear Alec, I hardly know how to begin to say how sorry I am.”’ He gave a high-pitched exhalation of breath that was almost laughter. ‘Dated the day before yesterday,’ he said, and I felt my eyes fill with tears.

‘“I hardly know how to begin to say how sorry I am,”’ he read again. ‘“I am almost too shocked and bewildered to know how to write this letter and I hope you will forgive me if I am clumsy as a result. Your suffering is without a doubt fathoms deeper than mine, but believe me when I say that I loved Cara . . . enough . . . to understand –”’ He broke off and stared at the letter, frowning. ‘“I loved Cara enough to understand what you must be feeling in these first days of your loss and grief.”’ He turned the letter over and looked at the back of the last sheet. ‘“With my deepest sympathy, Christine Dalrymple.”’

I hied the waiter and demanded that some brandy be brought. Alec’s face was the colour of gutter snow under his freckles, and his hand scrabbled around his lapel for several seconds before he managed to extract Cara’s two letters from his pocket and shove them towards me.

It was remarkable, so much so that I considered for a moment whether Chrissie’s letter of condolence might be from Cara after all and be in some kind of code. A further moment’s examination, however, showed me that only the handwriting was identical, the brains behind the two had little in common. Were Chrissie Dalrymple ever in a position to break off an engagement the recipient would be lucky to get away with fewer than ten pages.

The brandy, to which the waiter had added a measure of port off his own bat, quickly brought Alec back to a more usual colour. He shook his head over the letters again and again, and I had cause once more to wonder about his feelings for Cara and also whether he believed in his heart that she was safe, for all the conviction that logic had put in his head.

‘But it’s not really so peculiar,’ I said. ‘Girls’ schools are notorious for jamming one and all into the same mould. Well, no more than boys’ schools I daresay. In fact, you know, my own boys are much more like each other after three terms at school together than when they were just two brothers. Last hols Hugh had occasion to slipper them both for –’ I broke off, confused. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘This can hardly be of any interest.’

‘Tell me,’ said Alec. ‘Tales from the nursery are just what I need for a minute while I try to stop shaking.’ I went on reluctantly, tales from the nursery not being what I liked to think of as my forte.

‘Donald had gone off shooting rabbits after being expressly forbidden to do so, since there was a real shoot that day with several inexperienced guns and we didn’t want the boys getting peppered. Well, they were suspiciously quiet all morning but when Hugh bellowed up the nursery stairs demanding to know if they were there, they answered one after the other that yes they were but they were in a ticklish spot with a recalcitrant engine and couldn’t come down. Imagine our surprise, then, an hour later when Donald arrived in a neighbour’s motor car wrapped in a blanket, having fallen in the burn trying to get home without being seen. Little Teddy had answered for both, you see. “What is it, Daddy, we’re dashed busy.” And then “Yes, Dad, we’re almost there with this blasted engine. Must we come down?”

‘This wouldn’t have been possible before they went off to school. One spoke like Hugh and one spoke like his hero Angus, the cook’s son. Now they both just sound like schoolboys, like every schoolboy, as though they were turned out of a press in the dormitory at the beginning of their first term to be fostered on us.’

Alec looked quite calm again now, even managed a laugh, and I thought it was safe to turn the talk to my eventful morning. The failure of the visit to the jeweller was dealt with first and then I settled with some relish to what came after. I told him, without editorializing in the least, about Clemence being at home with Nanny to ‘take care of things’, and my puzzlement got its corroboration from his.

‘However,’ I said, ‘all that is nothing.’ I hunched forward over the table on my elbows and told him all about the photograph album, my idea about its original purpose, my disquiet about its contents and Clemence’s start of alarm at finding me poring over it.

‘You’re quite right,’ said Alec. ‘There is a strong smell of fish here.’

‘And,’ I said, becoming more sure with the warmth of his agreement, ‘I can’t help but wonder about such a painstaking record of what is ostensibly a very ordinary week in the country
en famille.
And then the chumminess in the pictures – it’s absolutely at odds with what we’ve heard about the frosty atmosphere.’

‘But what exactly have we heard about the atmosphere?’ said Alec. ‘Remind me what you were told.’

I cast my mind back over the Mrs Marshalls’ accounts and came to a rueful conclusion that I had made a great deal out of very little, merely that Cara and Clemence seemed not to want to be companions to one another and that Clemence was grumpy. Even added to the strange decision to all but dispense with a housekeeper, it did not amount to much. I fell silent, disappointed.

‘But tell me some more about these feelings you had about the photographs,’ said Alec. ‘What did you think was wrong with them?’

‘That’s just it,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. Only that there was something off. Not just the fact of their existence; we agree on that. But something about the photographs themselves just wasn’t right.’

‘Say again what they were,’ said Alec. ‘As much as you can remember.’ To my surprise he got out a pencil and a pad of paper and poised himself to make notes.

‘Well, there were the two portraits of Cara in the crêpe-de-Chine fr –’ I broke off. ‘The two portraits taken inside the cottage, I mean. And some of Clemence and of Lena in the same room, although these were not portraits exactly, more like snaps. So it’s almost as though they knew that the pictures of Cara were the ones that mattered and that’s not right, is it? Then there were some taken in the garden which were very pretty. Everyone under a tree in blossom with the french windows open to the house. Really very happy pictures, except that Cara got cross with Clemence for telling her what to do and flounced off, spoiling one. The only other I remember is of Lena and Cara on a cliff-top with their dresses blowing about in the wind. Clemence must have scrambled down and taken it from the beach, unless Lena and Cara climbed the cliff to have it taken. Oh, Alec, I don’t know. I need to have another look at them.’

‘Hmm. Hard to see how you could do that without making Clemence’s whiskers twitch,’ said Alec.