Borrowed Time (34 page)

“What I want is the truth about Louise Paxton.”

“No it isn’t. It’s the exact reverse. You want me to validate your fantasies about her. To say ‘Yes, what you wish she’d been is what she truly was.’ Well, I can do that.” She crossed her legs, artfully judging just how much thigh the bathrobe would fall open to reveal. “If you think it’ll add to the excitement.”

“I’m not here for excitement.”

“Really? All this way for a dry debate about verity and falsity? You disappoint me. You also fail to convince me.”

“Why did you make up that story about Louise meeting a man on Hergest Ridge and planning to run away with him?”

“I didn’t. I’d hardly have suggested you were the secret man in her life if I’d invented him in the first place, would I? That would have been absurd.”

So it would. Which left room for only one conclusion. That there had indeed been such a man. And Sophie had mistaken me for him. “It wasn’t me, Sophie. As God’s my witness, it wasn’t me.”

“No?” Her frown softened. “Well, perhaps not. Even I can make mistakes. Though one I never make is to regret them. But if it wasn’t you . . .”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. I felt so sure at first. I felt so certain the mystery of her death would draw him out. That’s why half of me still suspects you, Robin. Still fears you could be cleverer than you seem. There’s something about you. Some impression she left on you, that’s too strong and enduring to explain. Unless you
were
her lover.”

“I wasn’t.”

“So you say. So you say.” She rose, moved to the window and gazed out for a moment. I saw her flex her shoulders and arch her neck. She tightened the sash around her waist, then turned and walked slowly across to where I stood. “But I don’t quite believe it. And neither do you.”

“It was somebody else.”

“Or nobody else.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Just like the man who was so . . . insatiable . . . that afternoon in Bayswater . . . wasn’t you?” Her eyes took their measure of me. As the mind behind them judged whether the distance between us could or should be bridged. “Is that what you mean?”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Then why do you keep coming back?”

“I won’t. This will be the last time.”

“I don’t think so. I’m the closest you can get to Louise now. And you just can’t leave her alone, can you? Even in death. Now why should that be? Unless I was right all along.”

“I don’t know. But you’re
not
right.”

“And not entirely wrong?” She moved closer, smiled and raised one hand to her mouth, slipping first one finger, then two, between her teeth. She bit down gently, then slowly removed them. “Do you want to stay? Or go?”

I wanted to do both, of course. But I knew I couldn’t. If I succumbed a second time, there’d be a third and a fourth and a fifth. Her claws would sink into me, deeper and deeper. Her lies would become mine, her husband my victim as well as hers. How like her had Louise really been? I wondered. Much more so than I could bring myself to admit? Or much less than Sophie cared to pretend? There had to be an answer. But I’d never find it in Sophie’s arms. “I must go,” I said, taking half a step backwards.

“Must and will aren’t the same.”

“This time they are.”

“And next time?”

“Like I told you. There won’t be one.”

But she didn’t believe me. Or perhaps she just wasn’t prepared to let me have the last word. As I walked from the room, she flung a parting remark at me with the conviction of a prophetess. “Be seeing you, Robin.”

I drove south down the A49 to Leominster. As far as Leominster, I could tell myself I meant to keep to the homeward route. But must and will, as Sophie had said, aren’t the same. From Leominster I took the Kington road and saw the hills I’d walked along more than three years before rising slowly on the horizon, darkened by shower-cloud and the massing of memories. Always I was drawn back, it seemed. To the point of intersection. The place of meeting and parting. The ridge of no return. But swifter now than before. For now I had a quarry as well as a quest.

I travelled fast, in hopes I should

Outrun that other. What to do

When caught, I planned not. I pursued

To prove the likeness, and, if true,

To watch until myself I knew.

Who was he? There was no way to tell. He wasn’t waiting at the Harp Inn, where I lunched alone and watched a rainbow form beyond the squall-line over Radnor Forest. He didn’t tap me on the shoulder as I stood by the cairn on Hergest Ridge where Louise and I had sat together that lost summer’s evening of long ago. I came and I went. But nobody joined me. The sun shone feebly as the wind honed its solitary edge. And the rain came in hastening gusts, blurring the edges of sight, smearing the margins of perception. There was nothing to give him a name. Or to deny him mine. There was only the doubt, as there had always been. And the still unanswered question.
“Can we really change anything, do you think? Can any of us ever stop being what we are and become something else?”
Or some
one
else. Perhaps that’s what she’d really meant. Perhaps that’s what she’d been trying to tell me. All along.

I’m not sure what stopped me driving up to Whistler’s Cot. Stealth? Caution? A touch of dread? Something of all three, perhaps. Something, at all events, that made me park at the bottom of the lane and walk up from there.

Rainwater draining from the fields ran in curling rivulets down to meet me as I went. Sunlight glistened on moisture-beaded leaves and wet slate roofs. The truth, I sensed, retreated ahead of me, out of sight though never far off. Over the hedge, perhaps, where Paul had hidden that day. Or round the corner. Always just beyond the next encounter. Like the one awaiting me at Whistler’s Cot.

A car stood half in and half out of the garage, its boot raised on several box-loads of mops, brushes, soapflake cartons, polish tins and aerosol cans. Just about every window in the house was open, red-and-white check curtains billowing out in the breeze. And the frantic whirr of a washing machine in its spin cycle could be heard from within above the growl of a vacuum cleaner.

If I’d realized what all this activity implied, I think I’d have turned and fled. But I was so distracted by the half-grasped meanings of other less commonplace occurrences that I simply stared in bemusement. And then it was too late. Because Henley Bantock had emerged from the rear of the house clutching a well-filled black plastic refuse sack—and pulled up at the sight of me.

“Mr. Timariot!” He peered at me round the tuft his fastening of the sack had created. “Good heavens, it
is
you. What an unexpected pleasure.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know . . . That is . . .”

“Don’t be sorry. This is just the excuse Muriel and I need to take a break. You find us in the midst of the end-of-season clear-out. The last of the holidaymakers left at the weekend. But they didn’t take all their rubbish with them.” He grinned and plonked the sack down in front of him. “Why don’t you step in and have a cup of tea?”

Tea with the Bantocks in a sitting-room smelling of beeswax and air freshener was a salutary if depressing experience. Muriel was a twitteringly attentive hostess full of apologies for her housekeeping kit of tennis shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She was also an alarmingly affectionate wife, given to squeezing Henley’s knee in mid-conversation and casting him long and loving looks. Henley, meanwhile, coped with the antagonism he must have detected in me by pretending we were the most civilized of rival theorists, who’d simply agreed to disagree. It was as if the angry letter I’d sent him after the publication of
Fakes and Ale
and his sarcastic reply to it had never been written.

It might have been different if Whistler’s Cot had still resembled Oscar Bantock’s home in anything more than the dimensions of its rooms. But it didn’t. Everything from those years had been swept away. Along with any ghosts that might have lingered. In the studio, where Oscar had lain dead beneath his easels, a pool table stood, flanked by conservatory chairs. The walls around us, where his pictures had hung thick and vibrantly, were filled with insipid hunting prints and reproduction maps of Olde Herefordshire. While in the bedroom . . . I didn’t like to ask. But even there, I felt sure, the process would have been the same. It was exorcism by disinfection. And its effectiveness was undeniable.

“
Fakes and Ale
will be coming out in paperback next spring,” Henley announced through a mouthful of custard cream. “We’re very pleased, of course.” For some reason he seemed to think I’d also be pleased. “And the hardback should do well over Christmas, I think, don’t you, Muriel?”

“Oh yes, dear.”

“What happens,” I couldn’t stop myself saying, “if it’s overtaken by events?”

Henley frowned. “How do you mean?”

“Well, the book follows a certain line about the murders, doesn’t it? Ties them in with your uncle’s art fraud. What would you do if that was shown to be incorrect?”

“But it’s not incorrect, Mr. Timariot. It’s clearly what happened.”

“Mr. Maitland went into it very thoroughly,” said Muriel in a tone of deep awe.

“No doubt he did. But it doesn’t amount to proof positive, does it?”

“Not legally, perhaps,” said Henley. “But we can’t expect it to, can we? Not at this late date.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. You never know what might come to light.”

My persistence was beginning to worry Henley—as it was meant to. “You have . . . something specific in mind?”

“No, no. Just . . . stray thoughts. For instance . . . have you ever wondered whether there might have been something between Oscar and Lady Paxton?”

It was a question designed as much to mislead as to goad. I never expected any useful information to come my way as a result. But, as so often, my expectations were to be confounded. “No need to wonder,” said Henley with a chortle. “I can absolutely rule it out.”

“But your uncle’s reputation as a ladies’ man surely—”

“Led me to assume something of the kind long ago. But when I was rash enough to hint at it to Uncle Oscar, he nearly boxed my ears for my trouble. ‘She’s far too good for me, boy,’ I remember him saying. ‘And far too good a patron to risk losing for half a chance of some slap and tickle.’ ”

“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to admit it, would you?”

“Oh, but I would. Uncle Oscar never stopped boasting about his conquests. If Lady Paxton had been one of them, I’d have heard about it, you can be sure.”

“It was purely a business relationship, then?”

“I didn’t say that. He relied on her support. What she asked for in return may not have been so businesslike. I believe she brought Naylor here that night. So do Barnaby Maitland and Nick Seymour, for that matter. The question is: why? In its way, it’s an ideal place . . . for what she seems to have planned. And perhaps the night of the murders wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Perhaps Uncle Oscar regularly absented himself when she required him to. He may have thought it was a price worth paying.”

Yes. That was what they
would
say. It was what Seymour had implied in his TV programme. And it fitted the facts. Better than Seymour or Henley yet knew.

“Unless you think that theory too might be . . . overtaken by events?”

“No,” I said, resisting the impulse to tell him that very soon it would not be overtaken but vindicated by events. Events that would nevertheless scupper the paperback edition of
Fakes and Ale
. But it seemed only fair
not
to forewarn him of his modest share in the disaster to come. After all, he’d done as much as I had to bring it about. “I shouldn’t think so,” I concluded with a smile. “Like you say, it’s probably too late for anything of the kind.”

“More tea, Mr. Timariot?” asked Muriel.

“Thank you, but no. I think it’s probably too late for that as well.”

“Off so soon?” said Henley as I rose from my chair.

“I’m afraid I must be.”

“But you haven’t explained yet what brought you here.”

“Goodbye,” I said, smiling broadly and ignoring Henley’s remark too brazenly for him to protest. “It’s been a pleasure.”

The showers blew themselves out as I drove east. Hergest Ridge and its surrounding peaks fell away behind in the rear-view mirror. The truth drew back to watch me from its hidden vantage-ground. The stranger merged with the twilight. His unseen face dissolved into the dusk. And only my reflection looked back at me. I travelled alone. But in company.

I reached Bristol at nightfall, diverted to Clifton and found Sarah at home. It was a relief to have someone to share my unguarded thoughts with. A friend to see and set them in proportion. I was beginning to curse Bella for starting me down this road. The road back into a mystery I’d walked away from. But couldn’t escape.

“It seems Howard Marsden harboured an unrequited passion for your mother for many years,” I explained. “She and Sophie both knew that. It’s what Sophie most keenly resented: the fact that it
was
unrequited.”

“Hence her eagerness to blacken Mummy’s character.” Sarah shook her head in dismal recognition of Sophie’s motives. “What a sad petty-minded woman she must be. To think I’ve known her all these years without realizing that. I can’t help feeling sorry for Howard. She must make his life hell.”

“Yes,” I said, careful not to imply I had any specific knowledge of the subject. “I think she may do.”

“But you believe her about this . . . other man . . . in Mummy’s life?”

“It sounded like the truth. The question is . . .”

“Who was he?”

“Who
is
he?”

“I don’t know.” Sarah rose and crossed to the mantelpiece, returning with the framed photograph of her and Rowena with their mother. “Taken on her fortieth birthday. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?”

“She certainly was.” Louise Paxton smiled delphically at me from the faintly blurred snapshot. Her beauty was preserved in the developer’s emulsion, but something else was lost. Like the sepia smear left by a moving figure on an early Victorian photograph, the secret of her soul had bequeathed an unfocused ambiguity to her gaze, a perpetual uncertainty about what or who beyond the camera she was really looking at.