Untitled (42 page)

   But Mina is gone, and no clue about her whereabouts has ever turned up. His hopes that she would return to ask forgiveness—oh yes, Popham made sure to tell him what he knew of her, he couldn't restrain himself, and Robert had to be pulled off him—those hopes have withered. So he lets himself die, day by day, for what life can there be without her?

        
I
n a small guesthouse in Torquay, Mrs. Edward Knight sits in the kitchen sipping a cup of tea. With one finger she points at the newspaper, says, "Look, Teddy—it's in here."

   He pulls out a chair and sits down opposite her, though the table in front of them is crammed with dirty plates and cutlery. His face has grown thinner in the seven years they have been married. After all, it hasn't been easy—scraping together money, doing so much of the work of running this place themselves. Not so very different from being in service, he's thought at times, not that he would ever tell her so.

   Now he pulls the newspaper towards him and props it against the teapot. She watches him read, the way his lips move slightly, the hunch of his shoulders. Then he sits back and sniffs, says, "Got it wrong, didn't they?"

   "Wrong?" She frowns at him.

   "They make it sound as though I was the one to find him out."

   She tilts her cup to drink the last of her tea. "Maybe you would have, if you'd been the one cleaning his room."

   "Three hundred pounds. All because you thought he was
suspi
cious
and poked around a bit in his things." He gives a smile. "We could retire."

   "We could move to a bigger place and hire a couple of girls to help us out."

   He reaches over the dirty plates and takes her hand. "There's no stopping you, is there? You're going to have us moving up in the world. Next thing you know we'll have a hotel on the promenade. People will be calling us sir and madam and doffing their hats to us."

   She gives a small laugh. "What would be so wrong with that?"

   From upstairs comes a knock at the front door. Teddy gets to his feet. "No rest for the wicked, hey love?" He buttons up his jacket and is about to head up the stairs when he ducks his head towards hers and kisses her cheek.

   The feel of it lingers even after his footsteps have faded up the stairs. From the sink comes the slow drip of the tap into a halfempty pan of water. It intrudes into her thoughts as she reads the story over again. Three hundred pounds. Just in the nick of time. Slowly, she gets to her feet. Her belly is swollen. One more month until their child is born—at last, when they'd long lost hope of having a child at all—and they'll need to have someone helping out.

   From a drawer she takes a pair of scissors and cuts out the story. Something to save. Something to show their child one day. Then she lifts down a wooden box from a high shelf and opens the lid. Papers upon papers pressed in together. She pushes them back and slides in the clipping. She's about to swing the lid closed again when she hesitates. Her fingers travel over the papers crammed against one another. The last letter Teddy's father wrote to him before he died. A portrait of her and Teddy at a photographer's studio, looking stiff-faced and unlike themselves. Packets of papers that came with them from London, hidden in Teddy's pockets. She pulls them out and looks over them again. Love letters from a woman called Nora to Mr. Popham that Mrs. Robert had been willing to pay very generously for. She'd never got them, though. Instead Teddy had left the Bentleys' house with them still in his pocket, and Mrs. Robert had disappeared. It had been in the papers. A mystery. A lingering question for weeks. Yet surely Mrs. Robert had simply run away and not wanted to be found. Surely she was Nora.

   Jane sets down the letters and pulls out another packet. Ornately inscribed certificates for shares in a diamond mine in Rhodesia— Arnold Flyte, prop.—and silver mines in Argentina owned by Arthur Fleet, and gold mines in the United States, and Siam, all in different names that are uncannily similar. She and Teddy have puzzled over them many times. They have even considered cashing them in.

   Now she unfolds one of them. Of course, they might well be worth something. Teddy has told her so, many times. But then again—those names. Flyte. Fleet. Echoes of each other. There is something wrong here, something that spells trouble.

   The baby kicks, and she winces. Her ribs are sore from those feet pushing against her bones, eager to be out in the world. "It's all right," she whispers, and rubs her belly with one hand. With the other she picks it all up—the certificates, the letters. Then she swings open the stove door and throws the whole lot into the flames.

A
gentleman of his acquaintance recommended her—an efficient woman, if cold in a rather British way, one who would keep to herself. A Madame Dumontet, a widow, a respectable lady, even if a foreigner.

   He waves his hand at her to sit down, and she does, perched on the edge of the chair. "So," he says, "you have been with Monsieur Clavier for four years?"

   "Yes," she says. "Four years."

   "But he has not written a character for you?"

   "No, monsieur. He died."

   "Ah." He puts on his glasses and looks over her letter again. "Where are you from?"

   "From Norfolk."

   "In England? I see. Parents?"

   "An orphan."

   "Ah." He takes a cigarette from the box on his desk. "And your husband?"

   "My first husband was a good-for-nothing. My second died just before our fourth anniversary."

   "No children?"

   "No."

   He nods, as though this is good news, though of course it is only good for him. No children invading his home, no requests for time off to visit them. "I live a quiet life, madame. You will have one day off a week, you will cook and supervise the woman who comes in to clean. Occasionally you will be woken in the night if patients need me, or to provide food at odd hours. The wages I can afford won't make you rich, but, if you're careful, they'll give you enough to live on in your old age."

   "Very good."

   He takes off his glasses and lays them on the blotter. "You want to bury yourself here? I have to tell you"—he gives her a long stare— "your chances of finding another husband in a place like this are not good. If that's what you wanted."

   "No," she says.

   "Very well. You may start as soon as you wish."

   Outside she stands in the shadow of the house and shades her eyes. She has had the foresight to arrange for her trunk to come with her as far as the station. Now it only needs to be brought the few miles through the crushing heat of this summer's day. The land seems to tremble. It shakes and ripples as though it will fall apart.

   Of course, that's merely an illusion of the heat, and of her exhaustion.

   A quiet place. Safer than Paris. Safer than Lyon or Nancy. She had worried, in those cities, that he would find her, for her husband was nothing if not a persistent man. He may have assumed that her body was carried out to sea. Or he may have noticed that the wife of Mr. Robert Bentley was never found, drowned or otherwise.

   The air smells sweet. In the garden stands a mirabelle tree, its fruit overripe, plums scattered through the grass. No one has bothered to pick them up. Already some are rotting on the ground. She steps over them, bending down to gather those that are still good, plucking more from the branches overhead.

   In the years to come she'll make jam from them, and tarts. She'll send her favorites amongst Dr. Lambert's patients home with them, and that will make them kinder in their gossip: that it's strange, the doctor and his housekeeper, the two of them living together like that. And hasn't old Beauvais seen her in her underwear at the window—not her own window, but the doctor's—throwing open the shutters?

   Of course, they are right. A man, a woman who is by no means unattractive—despite the sharpness of her face, and the shortness of everything she says, so that one gets the impression she thinks herself superior. Some nights she spends in his bed. It's a comfortable existence, though when she falls asleep it's not him she thinks about. You can't conjure love where it doesn't exist. However, you must live as best you can.

   For now, she wipes her forehead with her sleeve and watches the cart turn up the road, off to fetch her trunk. She takes one of the plums, still warm from the sun, and slides it into her mouth. It bursts with juice, and she shuts her eyes to savor it.