The Crimson Rooms (58 page)

I drew a long breath. “What difference would it make?”

“Perhaps none, I don’t know. At least you’d have the full picture.”

“You want me to keep quiet. This is just an attempt to win my sympathy.”

“Think that if you must. But perhaps it will give you more evidence. After all, wouldn’t it help to check the records at the nursing home and find out what time Hardynge visited on the day of Stella Wheeler’s murder?”

Of course I couldn’t object after that. Besides, anywhere in Nicholas’s company still seemed to me the only bearable place to be. It was well past eight o’clock and the lanes were dusky, though the sky in open countryside was luminous. I sat very neatly, not allowing my elbow to touch his as I watched the occasional flicker of light of an oil lamp in a cottage window, a passing car, a cluster of houses.

T
he Grove, to the north of Princes Risborough,
was reached by a narrow lane and our way was eventually blocked by wrought-iron gates. Nicholas had to knock at the door of the lodge until a bent little man in an oversized cap and jacket emerged.

“It’s late to come visiting,” he said, but having recognized Nicholas, let us in. Beyond, because shrubs and trees were in full leaf, the house, a rather beautiful, white-painted mansion with a colonnaded porch, only came into view when we were a few hundred feet away. As I got out of the car at the foot of a short flight of curved steps, I stumbled, unable for a moment to remember what I was doing there.

The door was opened by a nurse, Sister Phelan, who wore a flowing white apron and complicated headdress and was as surprised as the gatekeeper to see us. “We never usually allow visitors so late in the evening. It’s too disruptive. Our men are nearly ready to go to bed.” She had a strong, southern Irish accent, and eyes made staring by the fierceness with which her hair was dragged back from her forehead. However, she too remembered Nicholas, shook him by the hand, and exclaimed: “Don’t tell me there’s bad news in the family.”

“We were in the area on business,” Nicholas said. “Miss Gifford is also a lawyer. We thought we’d call on the off chance that Donald was still up. He won’t want to see me, I’m sure, but I thought he might appreciate a young lady visitor.”

“It’s true he has a softness for the girls. Are you a family friend, Miss Gifford?”

“An acquaintance, rather.”

“My goodness, but you look all in,” said Sister Phelan. “I can’t imagine what possesses you to come calling so late. Shall I be getting you a cup of tea? Shame on you, Mr. Thorne, for asking so much of your young lady friend.” But she asked no further questions as she bustled away to order tea. Meanwhile, Nicholas and I avoided each other’s eye as he picked up the visitors’ book from an occasional table, leafed through, and found the entry for Saturday, May 17, with Sir David’s name and signature. Hardynge had arrived at four thirty, left just after six.

In my trancelike state, I thought, how easily the world molds itself for Nicholas. Everything he wants, he gets. Even me.

“Does Donald Hardynge have many visitors?” he asked Sister Phelan when she was pouring the tea.

“Just the family. His father is a wonderful man, never misses a Saturday, though he must be in such demand elsewhere. And as you say, Sylvia is a very popular visitor here, with all our men.”

A few sips of tea revived me a little, and afterward Sister Phelan led me through room after room along one highly polished set of floorboards after another, deeper into the house. Glass doors divided the old house with its elaborate plasterwork and graciously proportioned rooms from a much newer wing consisting of long, low corridors with closed doors on either side. Turkish rugs dotted the floor, semicircular tables held floral displays, and the walls were adorned with photographs of the staff arranged in blurred ranks so that I could scarcely make out their faces, and delicately tinted prints of botanical specimens. The house, said Sister Phelan, had until the war belonged to a private family and was not ideally suited to its present function; food had to be carried too far and the rooms in the old house were not secure and therefore good for little except meetings and staff accommodation. Occasionally, we passed a deferential nurse who fell back against the wall, but we never saw a patient, and I watched the floating wings on our guide’s headdress, heard the rustle of her starched uniform, and wondered at the profundity of the silence beyond.

Donald Hardynge was seated on an upright ladder-back chair in a glassed-in veranda overlooking a garden graced by a cedar and S-shaped flower beds, exactly as Nicholas had once described him. Perfect lawns were edged by shrubs and crossed by gravel paths. A couple of other men, young and crisply turned out, with sleeked-down hair and spotless shirt collars, sat tranquilly reading their newspapers. Donald Hardynge, who was not doing anything, was also dressed smartly in a buttoned-up waistcoat over his shirt and tie, well-pressed trousers, and gleaming shoes, as if he were about to stride off and meet a client.

All three men leaped to their feet and I was introduced to each as a friend of Sylvia Hardynge. One had a dreadful facial wound, across which skin had been grafted, but the corner of his mouth and eye were dragged down and his right ear gone. Donald’s grip was firm but cursory. He was very thin with a tick at the hinge of his jaw and had the looks of a fashion plate: high cheekbones, cleft chin, lightly curling hair. I saw the echo of his father and sister in the shape of his bones; I saw nothing in his eye.

Once we were both seated, we stared at the garden and he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Sister Phelan said she would return in ten minutes. At the far end of the veranda, a nurse was knitting a garment in pale blue wool.

“It’s getting dark,” I said, sensing that the banal words seeped into Donald’s mind as if it were a sponge spreading and spreading them out until they didn’t fit together at all.

After a pause, his cultured voice, like his father’s, said: “I have not been out all day.” The next moment he got up and offered me his arm.

The young nurse in the corner set aside her knitting. “He wants you to go out with him. He always wants to go out. But he won’t stay long, just a few minutes.”

She slid open the glass door, and Donald Hardynge and I stepped first onto a gravel path, then a lawn. His arm was rigid under my hand. I tried to imagine him in another, prewar life; the tennis-playing schoolboy with his future mapped out by an ambitious father; and later as a young man bolting across a desolate French landscape in the company of a frightened boy soldier. Meanwhile, I was being guided in a very straight line across the lawn, under the cedar and beyond, toward the shrubbery.

At the edge of the lawn, Donald stopped. From here we could see both the front of the house and the bedroom block with its glassed-in verandas, where his two companions sat exactly as we had left them. “Have we walked far enough?” asked Donald.

“I should say so.” The last of the sun had sunk away and the shrubbery was very dark. We did not go back across the lawn but walked on around its edge in what I assumed was a well-worn ritual. I glanced up into Donald’s face but he was staring straight ahead and did not acknowledge me at all.

So this was why Stella had died, this long-dead boy. I leaned on his unyielding arm and thought how fruitless it had all been, Donald’s attempt to escape the war, his father’s efforts to save him. And as we circled the lawn, I could not help giving thanks that it was Donald Hardynge’s and not James’s arm that lay under my hand, Sylvia’s brother and not mine, who marched sightlessly along the gravel paths leading one to another in the garden of an old mansion.

Nicholas and I drove back to London
in near silence. Occasionally, his fingers drummed the wheel or he sighed deeply and shifted his weight on the seat. When we reached the corner of Clivedon Hall Gardens, I moved to open the door, and for the first time in over an hour he spoke. “Evelyn, I’ve been thinking. There’s something else you should know. I remember the weekend of the murder very clearly because of course on the Tuesday of the following week, I met you. That Saturday I played tennis as usual with Sylvia in the garden of her house. You say Hardynge’s alibi is that he was at home. I saw him at twelve when I first arrived, he greeted me very effusively, but I didn’t see him again.”

“He could have been anywhere in the house, surely.”

“I don’t think so. Lady Margaret was there with a luncheon party—they were having a committee meeting or some such and in the early afternoon they all came spilling down the garden to watch us. There was no sign of Sir David.”

I couldn’t take in either the implications of what he said or the fact that he seemed to be offering this information as a kind of plea, or pledge.

He said, “Can you forgive me?”

But you are a stranger, I thought. What I knew of him was that if I lifted his hand to my lips, his wrist would smell of soap and, very faintly, the leather of his watch strap, and that if I were to lean my head on his shoulder, I would see the pulse in his throat and how the soft hair above his ear sprang a little sparsely so that I might actually have counted the follicles, one by one. I would try again to puzzle out what it was about his face, his mouth, his eyes that quickened my pulse, why I found so beautiful the fall of a lock of hair on his brow and the sweep of his fingers thrusting it aside. But the inside of him, what enthused and inspired or disgusted and deadened him, what kept him awake at night, I did not know at all.

“How can I forgive you,” I said, “when I have no idea now whose side you are on?”

I got out of the automobile and was about to close the door behind me when I thought I heard him say: “Yours. I love you.”

A light was burning in the hall where Edmund’s little blazer was hung carelessly on the stand, his satchel tossed alongside. My brother’s hat, I noticed, had been shuffled to a less prominent hook. Perhaps soon someone would take it upstairs and put it away.

I crept to the kitchen, fumbled for the light switch, went to the scullery for bread. But I could not escape Meredith, who came pattering down in pale green silk pajamas. “Evelyn. For heaven’s sake, where were you? You missed everything that happened in court today. Your Mr. Breen was so concerned he kept looking at the doors hoping you’d come in. He says you’re to telephone him when you get back, no matter how late it is. But in the Lord’s name, what are you doing with that knife? Give it to me.”

The knife clattered off the board and onto the floor. She pushed me into a chair and held my cold hands as a tidal wave of exhaustion overcame me. When the wrenching sobs came, she held my face against her stomach, stroked my hair, and would not let me go.

Later she revived the fire in the range, boiled an egg, heated milk. She talked about the trial, how the defense had done his best to persuade the jury that Wheeler should not be found guilty; there was too much doubt, evidence of another man in Stella’s life, evidence that she had planned the picnic, above all overwhelming evidence that Wheeler loved her so much that the idea he might have killed her was quite absurd.

Mr. Breen (
your
Mr. Breen, as Meredith said) was pessimistic, however. She watched me eat, nudging the plate closer, as she did with Edmund, to remind me to take another mouthful, then went to telephone Breen and tell him I was safe home and would speak in the morning. Not once did she ask what had happened, though she must have longed to know. Instead she switched off the lights and urged me upstairs, where she turned back the quilt of my bed and plumped the pillow.

And I discovered, as I lay down at last, that beneath the pain there was a spark of hope, because this time, when I’d lost my love, I’d been given a hand to hold.