A Dark and Distant Shore (115 page)

He left her then, and the next day she was almost too weak to talk.

Four days after that, she died, and it was Francis, not Gideon, who was with her at the end.

‘Take your nose out of that book, Steven,’ Amy said, ‘and come and have your lemonade. There’s a biscuit for that idle dog, too, if you’d like to poke him in the ribs.’

It was a summer afternoon in 1879, and the sun cast a sleepy glow over the garden of the house in Clifton Hill, bleaching the colour out of the herbaceous flowers and annuals Amy was so clever with, and whose names Gideon could never remember. It was an English garden, and yet not an English garden, for there was a touch of tidied-up Chinese wilderness about it, and there was one part that was undiluted Colonial Williamsburg. The lawn was a disgrace. Twelve-year-old Steven was mad about cricket, and Gideon and the dog had worn the grass down to bare earth, the one bowling and the other fielding to the boy’s bat, which wasn’t as straight as it might have been. It was a friendly, human kind of garden.

The tea table was set out under the old pear tree, and Gideon flopped down in one of the chairs and held out a hand for his cup. He had stopped slaving for the
Times-Graphic
years ago. Fanshawe had died with his boots on – or, to be more precise, sitting at his desk with proofs before him and a pen in his hand – and the paper had been taken over by someone Gideon didn’t much care for. So Gideon had retired and begun to write books again. The public had an insatiable appetite for good substantial works of popularization, and Gideon had a talent for those. He was meditating one now, about the Nile, because there was trouble brewing there and it was always good to be first in the field. Writing books was just as hard work as reporting had been, but at least he was master of his own time and could take tea in the garden when he wanted to.

He was just opening his mouth to ask, lazily, what Steven was reading, when the second parlourmaid came tripping across the grass, primly capped and aproned, and said, ‘Please sir, there’s a gentleman to see you. A messenger from’ – she stumbled over the name, and Gideon didn’t entirely blame her – ‘from Taggart and Meiklejohn. He said I was to tell you it was Taggart and Meiklejohn
WS.
’

WS? Writers to the Signet, which meant a firm of Edinburgh lawyers. He raised his brows. ‘Bring him out, Polly, and you’d better bring an extra cup as well.’

But the gentleman who appeared was not the kind to sit in wicker chairs and eat cucumber sandwiches with an inquisitive mongrel sniffing round his trouser legs.

He had come only to deliver, and ask a receipt for a box that had been deposited with his firm fifty years ago. Gideon signed dutifully, and said, ‘Who was the depositor?’

‘Mr Telfer, sir.’

He didn’t have to ask which Mr Telfer. Was it really fifty years since Luke had died?

The man was scarcely out of earshot when Amy exclaimed, ‘What is it? I am just dying of curiosity. Fifty years ago! What can it be? Stop teasing me, Gideon!’

‘Can’t you guess? Luke Telfer’s chapters of the family chronicle. Old Mungo wanted to be sure that no cats were let out of bags until – what was the phrase Shona told me he had used? – until everyone involved was either “snibbed in a mortsafe, or past the age of caring”. He didn’t reckon on Vilia, did he?’

‘But surely he can’t have known that Vilia would ever be involved? She didn’t marry Magnus until years after the old man died, did she?’

Fingering the dark green leather that covered the box, Gideon murmured, ‘No, she didn’t, of course. I wonder what he’d have thought about that? What a long time ago it all was.’

He didn’t open the box until late that evening, when he was alone in his study. He felt a little like Pandora. It was a handsome box – measuring about fifteen inches by ten, and roughly six inches deep, its flat top hinged like the cover of a book – and beautifully bound, the leather scarcely even faded. On the front was a label. ‘Confidential’, it said, and underneath, in smaller letters, ‘In the event of my death, this box is to be consigned, unopened, to the care of Taggart and Meiklejohn WS of Edinburgh, or their successors or assigns, in whose care it is to remain for a period of fifty years.’ There was a lock on the side, an old-fashioned coded one, for which the law clerk had supplied Gideon with both code and key. Gideon would have been prepared to bet that the box had been old Mungo’s idea; it sounded just like what he knew of the old man. A trifle guiltily, he thought of his own notes, lying about where anyone could read them.

Although he had a sense of expectancy when he began reading, he didn’t really expect anything in particular. He thought he knew most of the facts, and Luke, as far as he remembered, hadn’t been exactly perceptive.

My father, Magnus Telfer, has no literary inclinations and the most awe-inspiring lack of interest in anyone other than himself, his wife Lucy, and me, his son Luke. And I would hesitate about going to the stake for my beliefs in the last name on that list.

As a result, when my grandfather took the notion of a family chronicle into his head, he decided to saddle me with the task of writing it. I didn’t want it in the least. I thought, in the finical way one does at sixteen, that the prying into people’s lives that would be involved would not be quite... ‘honourable’ was the word I think I used at the time. But the old man was set on the idea, and that was that. He was a shrewd and powerful personality and I was terrified of him, even while I was fond of, and admired him. So I would have done as I was bid, even if he had not sweetened the demand with the honest, and very persuasive bribery of an independent income.

Gideon went on reading into the small hours that night, and on the two nights that followed. There was, after all, a great deal he hadn’t known, but he was at a loss to evaluate it. Time after time he stopped reading, striving for a clearer memory of the young man who had died when he himself was only fourteen. He could still catch an impression of the face, and the manner, and the atmosphere of him. He could remember not liking him very much, because he had been so self-centred, and his interest in Vilia’s boys had always struck Gideon as false. What had his judgement been like? What the
hell
had his judgement been like? His story struck Gideon as unbalanced, but in a way that it was hard to put a finger on until Gideon reminded himself that this wasn’t straight reporting, but reporting complicated by hindsight. He grinned to himself, remembering that this must have been Luke’s one and only venture into authorship. He had probably read significance into a great many events that weren’t significant at all. Like Vilia’s outburst on her first day at St James’s Square, and Lucy Telfer’s accident with the marbles.

That explained a lot, and Gideon went back to the manuscript in a less critical frame of mind. There was a good deal about people he didn’t know, of course, but he was interested to discover the tale of Perry Randall’s last few months before he had sailed for the New World. All he had ever heard before was casual references to gambling debts. He hadn’t known about Magnus’s part in calling them in, or about Perry’s months in sanctuary. No wonder Perry had always been reticent about that period of his life, even, Gideon had discovered, with his son Francis.

From Francis, who idolized his father, Gideon had learned a good deal about Perry, and about his affaire with Vilia. None of it would ever have emerged, he thought, if he and Francis hadn’t felt the need to grasp at any subject of conversation that would divert their minds from the pale, wasted figure who lay dying in the room across the hall; the shade of the Juliana they both loved. Francis had been asking about Vilia, for he had been quite unable to see in the arrogant old lady of Christmas 1867 the warm, passionate, loving Vilia Cameron who had possessed his father’s heart for fifty bitter-sweet years, and of whom he had spoken so much during his last days. He had been haunted, Francis said, by how beautiful their love had been when it existed in its own crystal bubble, isolated from the world, but sad and almost tragic when he talked of how pride and circumstances and misunderstanding could so easily bring the most perfect love to ruin. Gideon, who had thought he knew, or suspected, all there was to know about Vilia and Perry, had been both astounded and fascinated to discover how lasting and obsessive the relationship had really been. Not just a moment of madness in 1815, and one other meeting and a quarrel twenty years later. He had found himself wondering how much Theo knew, or had guessed, of all this.

That had been eight years ago, and he had never found out. When Juliana died, he had been forced to telegraph Theo, but he had known Theo couldn’t reach Paris in time for the funeral. He had no need to search his conscience over what should be done. The moment it was over, he had packed Francis Randall off to the coast with little Christy and a nursemaid, and instructions to sail on the first ship for America. He had said, ‘I don’t intend to tell Theo anything about the child. He might just insist on taking her home and bringing her up as his own. And that would be an unthinkable betrayal of Juliana’s memory. So you must go before he arrives.’

‘You’ll stay?’

‘Of course. I’ll convey the impression that this apartment was Juliana’s, though I’m damned if I know how I’m going to explain where she found the money for its upkeep. But I’ll think of something.’

As it transpired, Theo had been so angry when he arrived that no explanations were necessary. There was ice-cold fury in his eyes when he demanded to know how Gideon had dared to take matters into his own hands when he learned that Juliana was in Paris. And how
had
he learned?

Lying stoutly, Gideon had spoken of the
Times-Graphic’s
man in the besieged city, and an accidental meeting with Juliana, and a message out about her.

‘I see. And it didn’t occur to you to let me know what had happened to my
wife
?
I don’t believe you. I believe you have been aiding and abetting her ever since she left me. In fact, I believe you have been cuckolding me, brother dear! Why else were you here so soon after the siege was lifted? Where else did she find the money for a place like this? Why didn’t you telegraph me the moment you arrived and discovered what state she was in? Did you want to clutch her death-bed to your lying, cheating, necrophiliac little heart? You disgust me. If this was my wife’s apartment, then it is mine now. So take your things and get out.’

Stunned by the viciousness of the attack, Gideon stared at his brother. After fifty-six years of knowing him, he didn’t really know him at all. But what was worse than that, what struck him with an almost physical impact, was the recognition that although Theo was wrong on the level of reality, he was right on the level of dreams.

His face like stone, he said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Theo.’

Then he had walked out and, coming back to London, had told Amy everything. It had hurt and shamed him to discover that she had already guessed most of it, and didn’t love him less. He hadn’t seen Theo since.

With a sigh, he went back to Luke’s manuscript. Where he discovered how his grandfather, Duncan Lauriston, had died. And discovered, too, that Vilia had once thought of marrying Luke Telfer himself.

It was a long time since he had been so surprised by anything. She couldn’t have loved him; she hadn’t even liked him very much. Could it have been for Kinveil, as early as that? It was only in recent years that he had become conscious that she was more than just extravagantly fond of the place, despite her talk on that long-ago day about her ‘dark and distant shore’. To live with people for so long, to pride oneself on one’s understanding, and then to discover how little one knew of them after all!

After a while, he let out a little gust of breath and began putting all the papers back in their box. It didn’t matter now. Mungo Telfer had been right, and most of the people Luke had written about were safely underground, even if it was no longer necessary for their coffins to be locked in iron frames to foil the bodysnatchers. Everyone except Vilia, who was eighty-three years old and past the age of caring.

He wondered, again, how much Theo had known or guessed of all this. Inquisitive, perceptive Theo. Perhaps it was time for them to make their peace. Next spring, Gideon thought, he would take Amy and Steven up to Kinveil when Theo would be there.

He snapped the lock on the box, and it sounded like the death knell of a past world. Irrelevant now. So irrelevant, all of it.

He was quite wrong about that, although he didn’t know until he was told.

In November, Polly brought him a letter that had just been delivered by hand. Fearful of losing track of a rather complicated piece of syntax, he finished his sentence before he opened it. There was a single sheet of paper inside, with a newspaper clipping attached; not from one of the nationals, his practised eye told him. He glanced at the signature on the letter.

It was a moment before he placed the name, but it woke him up abruptly. Dominic Harvey. Lavinia’s first husband, and Theo’s ‘friend’.

Dear Lauriston – Although we have never met, you may recall that I was for some time married to your niece Lavinia, and that I have been acquainted with your brother for many years. I am writing to you now because I have always understood you to have a generous disposition, and I find myself temporarily embarrassed. That sounds misleading. In fact, I ask not for myself, but for a young connection of yours, Jay Barber, who urgently needs assistance. I imagine you may not have seen the enclosed item from one of the suburban papers. The nationals have not yet got hold of it, or else may have been silenced; the latter, possibly, since I understand that a minor member of the royal family is involved. But it is imperative for Jay to leave the country until the fuss dies down. I would, of course, have applied to your brother for funds, if time had permitted. As it is, if you should have fifty pounds about you, that would suffice to see Jay across the Channel. May I say again that the matter is urgent. I imagine that your first instinct might be to come here yourself, but I beg you will not. Jay is in a highly nervous state, and in no condition to face someone whom he is convinced must disapprove unequivocally of the whole unfortunate affair. Yours &c – Dominic Harvey.