Broken Music (6 page)

And now, here was his eldest daughter, the quiet, dreamy one, the one he understood least of all, asking for books.

‘What sort of book were you thinking of?' he repeated cautiously.

‘I don't really know. One that…one that…well, as a matter of fact, Papa, I really want to study how books are written,' she admitted shyly, struggling with her own confusion.

‘Doesn't Miss – er – at Oaklands teach you?' he asked, taken further aback.

‘Not enough,' Marianne said, quite firmly this time. In fact, Miss Osgood, Eunice's governess, whom she and Nella shared, had little notion of education as such but had taught them all she had been taught herself, which meant just enough to be useful to them in the social milieu in which they would find themselves when they grew up, and no more. Mostly, this meant being taught how to write polite letters, read the few novels she considered suitable, and learn a smattering of schoolgirl French and the basics of what she called pianoforte.

‘Maybe you could teach me, Papa.'

‘I?'

‘You teach Steven Rafferty,' she pointed out, referring to the boy he had been persuaded to coach for Common Entrance. This was something instigated by Eleanor, part of her ongoing campaign to induce Francis to take up what she considered some useful occupation, and something, moreover, which would bring in a little extra, and certainly not unwelcome, addition to the small private income which was growing less adequate as his children grew up. She had regarded his acceptance of her idea as a major triumph.

‘Well. Well,' said Francis, endeavouring to digest the notion that he might have fathered a bluestocking, ‘that's a little different, child. Unless you'd like to learn Latin and Greek, like Steven?'

‘Oh no, no, that wouldn't be any use to me.'

‘It will if you want to get into Oxford, or Cambridge – and if you want to learn, I assume that's your aim.' He had no objection to women being educated, as long as they didn't expect to be allowed to take a degree, as the boy Steven's mother, Mrs Rafferty, seemed to think they should.

‘No, Papa, I don't want that. I thought if I read what other people write, I may find out how to write properly, myself,' she explained. ‘I've decided, you see, that it would be a good thing if I became a writer, and I want to learn how to do it.'

If she had said she wanted to become prime minister, Francis could not have been more astonished. ‘My dear child.'

He found himself in a dilemma. What was he expected to offer her, then, if not the classics and other subjects dear to his heart? All this was quite beyond him. And then, he had an excellent idea. ‘Why don't we ask Mrs Rafferty?'

 

Steven Rafferty was a brilliant boy, despite the slightly goofy appearance caused by the bottle-bottomed spectacles which constantly slid down his nose, to be pushed back with an absent forefinger, his unruly hair and the peculiar clothes his mother made him wear, but which Steven himself never noticed.

‘She hasn't an atom of sense, that woman, look at her own clothes,' declared an exasperated Mrs Villiers, who liked yet despaired of clever, opinionated, high-thinking, eccentric Mrs Rafferty, who worked with her husband – making pottery, of all things. Nothing of any use, mind, just odd-shaped vases and bowls which Joel Rafferty threw on his wheel and put into the big kiln and Amarantha decorated with slip in funny patterns, though village rumour had it they sold for a fortune in London. If this last were true, which Mrs Villiers doubted, then it certainly wasn't reflected in the way they lived – in a tumbledown, higgledy-piggledy cottage down Hoggins Lane, near the brickworks.

But the house, where kindly Mrs Rafferty, in an embroidered velvet tabard over a linen smock, made lovely soups and scones and other delicious food with her droopy sleeves dangling messily over the mixing bowl, was a magnet for Steven's friends, as fascinating as the pottery itself, with its dominant kiln, the heavy, magically malleable clay, and the big wheel. Mrs Rafferty never minded what you did: she let you eat bread hot from the oven, or made big jugs of lemonade which she generously dispensed with chunky squares of sticky gingerbread, and when she wasn't working in the pottery with her husband, or cooking, was usually too busy reading to mind what Steven or any of his friends got up to. She let it be known that she had studied for three years at St Hilda's College in Oxford, and had the university allowed her to take a degree, who knows where she might have been by now? But she had married Mr Rafferty (a silent man who had once been something in the City and had given it up to be a latter-day William Morris, with the idea of founding an artists' colony, though so far they hadn't been able to persuade anyone else to join them) and life had brought her to where she was, and she would make the best of it. She was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union and from the moment she arrived in Broughton she had harassed the village women to join in the struggle for the vote. Not for them? Nonsense, even the mill girls in the north were joining in, some of them actually making speeches. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. She had only one ally in the village: Miss Bertha Dorkings, the schoolmistress, the rector's niece, who wore tweed costumes, sensible felt hats and a collar and tie.

His parents' liberal views had meant that Steven had been educated by her at the village school until a worried Amarantha told Mrs Villiers that her friend Miss Dorkings had been reluctantly forced to admit Steven had outstripped her ability to teach him anything further. And that was when Mrs Villiers had suggested Steven might come to Francis for coaching for his Common Entrance, something Francis had occasionally done in his Worcester days.

‘But Mrs Villiers, the expense…'

‘My son-in-law would not overcharge you, I am sure, but of course, I realise there would be the school fees afterwards…'

That problem was solved by Miss Dorkings confidently asserting that she would eat her bally hat if Steven didn't get a scholarship, which would take care of the fees. In view of Miss Dorkings's hats, one hoped that would not be necessary, and of course, Steven had disappointed no one, taking the exam and passing it with ease.

After the surprises and shocks of the previous day – the arrival of William's letter, the possibility of Duncan Geddes again shooting into her life like an arrow from the past, and not least her father joining them for supper and afterwards round the fire in the parlour (not in one of his silent moods but joining in a game of cribbage and even suggesting opening a bottle of wine as a celebration of William's homecoming) – Nella had slept rather late, perhaps as a consequence of the unaccustomed wine. But more likely because of the thoughts that would not let her sleep for ages. People, and places. Ghosts. The years in France. The Somme massacre, when the killing turned to slaughter, when the dead numbered not thousands but tens of thousands. The hospital where she'd met Duncan Geddes, a Scot with a relaxed and humorous approach that came like a breath of fresh air into the hitherto unimaginable horror that the war had fast become.

‘A humorous Scot? Are there any, darling?' laughed her friend, Daisy. She made a joke of everything. There was, after all, no call to lose one's sense of humour, even if being a VAD volunteer had turned out to be less a matter of mopping the fevered brows of handsome young subalterns than finding oneself up to the elbows in blood, guts and other unmentionables, working until you dropped and every day witnessing mutilation, agony and death.

But like everyone else, Daisy, too, was charmed by Dr Geddes, though the lazy, casual attitude of the handsome, dark-haired doctor with the laughing blue eyes (who turned out to be only half Scottish anyway) was misleading. It was too easy to misinterpret the way he never appeared to hurry, as anyone who worked with him soon found out; then, the blue eyes acquired a direct, searching look which on occasions could be distinctly intimidating. Operating on the wounded, he became a different person: taut, his hands quick and sure, entirely focused, compassionate, as Nella discovered, working hours and hours at a stretch with him, as convoy after convoy of casualties from the latest front-line battle were brought in. Working mechanically, efficiently, in the primitive operating theatres, swabbing, dressing, stitching the stumps of amputated limbs and torn flesh. Afterwards, his stint finished, lines of deep fatigue etched on his face, he would stretch his arms, yawn, crack a joke and let his smile conceal his feelings again.

And later Nella, weary to the very marrow of her bones, would crawl under the blankets with those images of him in her mind and, felled by exhaustion, drop immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep, until she was awakened for yet another endless repeat of the whole appalling, nightmare performance.

Last night, she had again fallen asleep to the sight and sounds of star shells bursting like fireworks in the night sky, the crump and thud of big guns. She woke late, dragged herself out of bed and made a quick breakfast before leaving for Oaklands, where there was likely to be a heavy day ahead, after which she was due for a spell of night duty. Although some of the men were now almost ready to go home and make what best they could of their lives, the running down of the hospital and the gradual transfer of patients when places could be found for them in other, permanent hospitals, certainly didn't mean that day-to-day nursing could be neglected. There were still many who faced months, perhaps years, of care, and needed careful nursing.

Leaving the house, she drew her cloak warmly together as she shut the rectory gate and hurried through the churchyard. It was no warmer than yesterday but the wind had died down in the night and the morning gave promise of a lovely day, fresh, cold and sunny. Frost had crisped the grass at the edges of the path and between the graves, and the tight-budded stems of the thousands of daffodils which had naturalised themselves under the trees stood to attention, a hard and frozen battalion. They would only need a few days of sunshine before bursting into flower and giving the dull churchyard its few brief weeks of glory.

A movement at the church door drew her glance. Early service at St Ethelfleda's didn't start until eight o'clock and the church door would still be locked – Amy said the Gypsies were back again – so surely it was far too early for anyone, however devout, even Miss Aspinall, to be waiting in the porch. It was not Miss Aspinall, but a man who was standing there. When he saw her, he began walking towards her; at the point where the two paths converged he stopped, saluting her as she drew near, drawing off the close-fitting smooth leather motorcycle helmet he wore.

With a shock that left her cold and bewildered, she realised who it was. ‘Sergeant Reardon!' The policeman.

‘Miss Wentworth. So you recognise me after all this time. Not many people do, nowadays.' His tone was challenging, as it always had been, but it held a new edge of defiance.

‘Of course I do.' Recognition had come to her, in fact, mainly by the way he walked – dogged, hands behind his back, and by something familiar in his shape and the Cock Robin tilt of his head, as if permanently on the lookout. She might not have known him otherwise. Burns, she thought. The mutilation was horribly familiar to her, as was the surge of pity and outrage such sights still brought. One side of his face was puckered with scars, pink and shiny, made the more shocking by comparison with the other side, which was almost normal, apart from a slight tautening of the skin. He had been a good-looking young man. He was lucky he hadn't been blinded. She knew better than to sympathise, however; that was the very last thing any of the wounded men wanted, something she well understood.
‘Don't dare be nice to me,'
she used to declare fiercely as a child,
‘or you'll make me cry.'

‘What brings you here, Sergeant?'

‘What better place to stay, for a few days' walking? I intend to book in at the Greville Arms, if they can accommodate me.'

‘Walking?' She stared at him. ‘Really?'

‘Yes, really. I do actually enjoy walking, Miss Wentworth. But let's say there's also a matter of unfinished business, while I'm here, as it were. Loose ends.'

The only business he had been concerned with here had no loose ends. A verdict had been given, the police had withdrawn, case closed. But she didn't pretend not to understand him. Conflicting emotions chased each other through her mind: bewilderment that the police were apparently ready to reopen a hurried investigation they had patently never had enthusiasm for in the first place, and a kind of dread, which she couldn't explain.

‘I see you're not pleased at the idea. Well, I didn't expect you would be, any of you.' He was an alien figure in his motorcycle gear, a heavy coat and breeches, the helmet and big leather gauntlets in one hand and a pair of goggles dangling from his wrist.

‘None of us could be delighted at the prospect, Sergeant. It's been four and a half years, and we're still trying to come to terms with what happened.' (But never to accept it, she thought.)

‘Not Sergeant any longer, or not for the moment, at any rate, just plain mister. I'm out of the police now. Maybe for good. I haven't quite decided whether to take up my old job again yet – it would be my own choice if I did,' he added, as if to dispel the notion that the police would be unwilling to inflict his disfigurement on the general public.

‘I'm afraid I don't understand why you're here, then.'

Herbert Reardon, ex-police detective sergeant, ex-army sergeant, had found himself strangely unable to forget that last case he had worked on before joining the army. It had come back to him, haunted him to be more precise, at odd, unexpected and mostly inopportune moments throughout the war: in those tense, nerve-wracked silences in the front-line trenches while they waited for the heavy shelling to start again from the other side; when he was wading thigh-deep through the disgusting black hell of thick mud, parts of other men's corpses and the huge bloated rats that fed on them; during brief, temporary lulls in the fighting when he was lying, half awake, almost too exhausted, mentally and physically, to grab a few hours' sleep; and latterly, between operations in the hospital when they were doing what they could with his mutilated face. It was the unutterable waste of lives – sons and brothers, husbands and fathers, boys barely out of the schoolroom – which invariably led him back to that other untimely death. That lovely young girl, before the war, found dead in the far-off, by then almost unimaginable beauty of a sweet English summer morning. Though she hadn't been lovely anymore when he'd first seen her. By that time, twelve hours in the water had robbed her red-gold hair of its lustrous shine, her skin of its pale radiance, her body of life. He had, however, seen the photographs her distraught family had produced. In life she had been beautiful, a remote, pre-Raphaelite maiden, in death a Millais
Ophelia
.

It was indeed partly because it wasn't in him to leave anything unfinished that he had decided to come back here, but also because he felt that she, the victim, did at least have the right to have her pointless death explained, a basic human right denied the men who had died, equally pointlessly, for nothing, during the insane war that had for so long held the world in its fist. He had never been satisfied about Marianne Wentworth's death.

Reardon was a loner, with problems of his own to sort out. As yet, he hadn't much idea what his future was to be. The only child of elderly parents, he now had no relatives or dependents, his father, the owner of a small printing works, having died while he was at the front, leaving him a tidy little sum which would last him until he made his mind up what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He was still not much above thirty, and if he did not in the end rejoin the police, he thought he might travel: to India maybe, China, take the golden road to Samarkand, explore unknown continents. A passionate self-improver, he wanted to study other peoples, other religions, see if he might begin to make sense of what the world had come to, and why. He had first suspected the non-existence of God when, as a young boy, he had seen his mother die agonisingly of cancer, a suspicion reinforced later in his police career, when he'd seen how men were brought to dishonesty, brutality and violence through poverty and ignorance. Had there been a God, He would surely never have allowed that. Nothing in the futile and inhuman slaughter of the last years had made him revise his opinions, but maybe, somewhere, there might be some sort of an answer.

He knew that there was no question of the police reopening what it had suited them to write off as an open-and-shut case. Even supposing – and there was in his mind no certainty about this, yet – supposing he did take his old job back, he would not be allowed to resume enquiries. He was sailing close to the wind even now, in taking this on himself. And in any case, he admitted in the privacy of his own thoughts, finding answers might prove an impossible task. But he was damned if he wasn't going to try.

‘If you are not back in the police, do they know what you are doing?' Nella Wentworth asked suddenly, very sharp, seeming to have followed his thoughts with an accuracy which for a moment disconcerted him.

‘No,' he answered honestly. ‘It's a matter of personal satisfaction, wiping the slate clean. For you and your family, as well as for me.' And perhaps a feeling that he had been spared, when so many others had not, to have the chance to right a wrong, he added to himself. It was on the cards that he might have come anyway, in the police again or not, just for that last. It was wrong that a young woman whose life had barely begun should lie in her grave with her death unexplained. It had officially been recorded as an accident, but did anyone actually believe that? Not many, if he was any judge. The circumstances of her going to that remote spot, alone, at night, when her family believed her to have been safely tucked up in bed, then accidentally falling into the water, were too bizarre for anyone, let alone Herbert Reardon, to believe. Most of the people he had spoken to during the all too brief investigation seemed to be of the same opinion. They were certain she must have gone there deliberately in order to take her own life, to drown herself in the lake…and what else would make a young girl take such a step but that tired old cliché…a man, disgrace? But the doctor who had been called in to examine her had pronounced her
virgo intacta
, no doubt mightily relieved that he would be spared having to pass anything else on to her grieving parents.

There had been one parent only, he recalled, Francis Wentworth. The Reverend Francis Wentworth. Not a man to like the idea of suicide, which was a mortal sin, his daughter dying with a total loss of grace. An accident had been far more acceptable than suicide. It was not the right time, yet, to put forward darker possibilities.

The sister was looking at him oddly and for a moment he thought he had her. ‘Won't you help, Miss Wentworth?'

Nella huddled into her cloak. She felt frozen to the marrow of her bones. She said wearily, ‘I don't see how you can possibly ask that – and I don't in any case see how I or anyone else could help, after all this time.'

‘You can talk to me. That's going to be my problem, getting people to talk, to remember.'

‘We all talked to you, four years ago. Told you everything you wanted – or needed – to know. I think you'll find you won't be welcome here.'

It might have been a smile that crossed his face. ‘I'm well used to that.'

She said suddenly, ‘Look, I can't stay. I'm going on duty. I shall have to run as it is, or I'll have Matron on my tracks.' To emphasise the point, she threw a glance at the church clock; it was true, but that wasn't why she didn't intend to stand here talking pointlessly to Reardon. The truth was that this going back into the past was more than she could bear. ‘I've no more to say. Goodbye, Mr Reardon.'

He fell into step beside her, slapping the big gauntlets hard against his thigh, and then laid a hand on her arm to detain her. ‘Please. Don't go just yet.' His eyes, in that ruined face, wore the bright, piercing look she remembered from before. They gave her the same queer feeling she'd had on first encountering him four years ago, when she'd been reminded of the time they had come across a fox terrier pulling a screaming rabbit from its burrow where he'd chased it. She had thought then that this was a man, terrier-like, who would hang on like grim death until he arrived at a conclusion that satisfied him. That he would try to force them to admit the truth, however unpalatable. Now she saw something else in his eyes and for a strange moment thought it might be compassion. She shook off his hand and began to walk rapidly on.