After Clare (20 page)

Hugh was looking at her with an expression she couldn't fathom. ‘Is that the answer I've been waiting for? You've decided to go back then?'

‘No . . . well, I'm not sure, Hugh.' And really, she wasn't sure, not at all. For a moment back there, experiencing an astonishing pang of something like homesickness for her island home, she had felt an alien here, a stranger in her own land. More than half a lifetime she had spent longing to be back at Leysmorton, and now that she was, she felt out of place, on edge. The idea upset her . . . she did not want to think she could have become infected by Paddy's wanderlust. She knew, though, that it was far more than that which was unsettling her.

‘If – if I did go back . . . would you . . .' She took a breath. ‘Would you consider going back with me, Hugh?'

‘Ah.' A huge warmth spread through him, as if he'd been offered brandy and had drunk it unwisely, all in one gulp. But he pulled himself up, and as he looked at her troubled face, he added gently, ‘The world is a wonderful place, Emily, but there is only one home.'

‘It was only a suggestion,' she said, looking down at her hands.

‘Yes, my dear, I know that.' He folded his spectacles. ‘But it's something that needs thinking about – for both of us.'

‘Of course. I don't see there's any rush,' she replied, too quickly, because she had expected a different response. ‘And you're right. I do need to think about it myself. Meanwhile, what about these drawings of Clare's? I have to confess, they confuse me.' She smiled faintly. ‘Actually, it's rather more than that. I'm not easily bothered by this sort of thing, but as Rosie would say, they give me the creeps.' An apt enough expression. Gooseflesh crept on her arms whenever she looked at them. Maybe horror.

He shuffled the sketches together, squared them up neatly in his thin, elegant fingers and put them back in the envelope, precise as always in his movements. If he was disappointed that she had changed the subject, he gave no sign. ‘You're thinking they might have something to do with her state of mind before she left?'

‘Don't you think so?'

‘I don't know, but I don't believe one should imbue them with too much significance.'

She had not included that strangely disturbing drawing of the dark goddess Hecate, and was reminded that after all he knew nothing of Clare's obsession with the myth and magic surrounding the ancient tree. ‘That sort of thing's hardly unusual with artists,' he went on. ‘Look at the Monets we saw in Paris –' The pause was so brief that she might have imagined it, imagined the taut wire of shared memory that twanged between them, though she hadn't imagined at all the lurch of her insides that always came whenever Paris was mentioned. He went on, in the same reasonable tone, ‘How many times has Monet painted water lilies, after all? Or the Houses of Parliament, come to that? And he isn't the only one to paint the same thing repeatedly. Who knows how the artistic mind works? A constant search for something that has significance for them but always eludes being captured in paint . . . some idea or truth behind it? One can only speculate.'

‘I don't know, either.' She was pretty sure though, that this compulsive repetition had little, if anything, to do with Clare's artistic aspirations. Emily herself could not for one moment attribute any supernatural powers, evil or otherwise, to the Hecate tree, but Clare, at one time at least, had been utterly convinced of it, which might amount to the same thing: that she had been pursued and haunted by that childish curse and could not forget.

Although he'd been so cautious in giving an opinion, she knew Hugh would continue to think about it – and about that suggestion she had prematurely and perhaps unwisely mentioned. As he refilled her cup, she said, ‘There's something else I'd value your opinion on.'

He raised an amused eyebrow. ‘Not more artistic endeavours, I trust?'

She took the letter from her bag. ‘When I was looking through her things I came across this as well. You may be able to read more into it than I've been able to.'

He put his glasses on again. The thin paper crackled as he unfolded it. ‘French, hmm?' After studying it for a moment or two he said, ‘If you want an exact translation, you've drawn a blank here, too, I'm afraid. My French isn't really up to that standard. I can give you the general gist of it, but the language seems rather – convoluted, not to say the handwriting.'

‘I've got the gist of it: Clare had some sort of problem – she was asking for his help in something or other . . . that much at least I could gather.'

‘So it would seem. Let's have another look.' There was silence again as he carefully reread the letter. ‘Yes. It does appear as though she was asking his advice – should she or shouldn't she? Over what? Well, presumably whether or not she should leave art school. If so, he wasn't helping much, was he? Do you know who this man is?'

‘Yes.' Hugh wouldn't remember the tutor they'd had that summer, she said, he'd been away at school, but Christian Gautier had been engaged to teach Clare and herself drawing and speak French with them. ‘Though Mama was not too pleased with his efforts to improve our French. But it was through him that Clare began to be interested in painting. He left and I never heard of him after that.'

Reading between the lines of this letter, however, it seemed that he and Clare had not only been in the habit of writing to each other, they had also been meeting, in London. And it was clear that Clare had been most anxious – desperate, even – to see him again, and that she had written purposely to ask if he would come to London once more. She had to see him, she must talk to him. If necessary, she would go over to Grenoble.

His reply – this letter – was definitely off-putting, almost smacking of panic. They had already talked, had they not? He was about to be married, he reminded her, to Marie-Laure, his fiancée of two years. The last time they had met, he had advised Clare what steps she should take, though being a man, it was difficult for him to say what would be the right thing. There was no possibility at all that he could come to London and she must certainly not travel to Grenoble. It would be advisable that she did not write to him again, either.
Amicalement. Christian
.

In friendship? ‘He doesn't sound much of a friend to me,' Emily said.

‘Perhaps not, but look at it this way – young chap, about to be married, another young woman turning up from London with – a problem . . . the attitude's understandable, if not to his credit. Your sister was a dark horse, Emily.'

There was a silence. The words flew through her mind with the speed of a bird skimming across the window. Clare?
Clare?

‘If you're thinking what I'm thinking, Hugh, it's no,' she returned coldly at last. ‘No. Not Clare, not ever.'

He stared at her thoughtfully, then shrugged. ‘Probably not.'

But in a moment, the nothing she had known about Clare had become even less. True enough, she had been agitated about what she considered her failure at the Slade, must have desperately needed advice, and yet . . . surely there had been someone other than this young Frenchman, charming as he had been, to give it? Why was it so important that she had been prepared to cross the Channel and follow him across France in order to talk to him? Why him especially?

Maybe she had ignored his reply and gone anyway; maybe that was where she had disappeared to. Only Christian himself would know the answer. Crazy notions of going to Grenoble herself to find him came to her, until her usual common sense reasserted itself. This letter was decades old, there was no address on it. She had nothing but a name – Christian Gautier. There might be a dozen men of that name in the city. It was by no means certain that he still lived there, or that he was even still alive.

Hugh said steadily, ‘Let it go, Emily. Let it go.'

Putting the letter back in her bag, along with the sketches, she said, ‘Before I came back to England, I believed I'd come to terms with what happened to Clare, or at least come to accept that I would never know. I almost thought I was better off remaining in ignorance. But it's different, being here, now I do want to know. I've always wondered, just how hard did they try to find her?'

‘My dear, the police tried everything they could, and when they came up with nothing, your father employed that private detective for three months. He found nothing, either, as you know.'

‘He gave up too soon then. People don't just disappear like that, unless they're dead. And I know she wasn't dead.'

He regarded her sadly. ‘If somebody is determined not to be found, Emily—'

‘Did they try the convent? She used to visit there, you know, to talk with the Mother Superior.'

‘Did she? That old nun? I never knew that. But if she was a regular visitor there, it would have been an obvious place to try, and I assume the detective would have done so.'

Incarcerating herself in a convent was just the sort of thing one might have expected of Clare Vavasour, Hugh thought, and he saw why that would be an evidently more acceptable answer to Emily than the fairly obvious explanation – that she might have been having a child by this man Gautier. He added gently, ‘They are good women at the convent. If she had gone there, they would not have kept it secret.'

‘Mother Mary-Emmanuel would have known, but she can't be alive, she was over seventy, then.'

‘There you are then. It was a long time ago, Emily,' he said gently. ‘A long time ago.'

When she had left, Hugh picked up a manila envelope-folder containing a manuscript from a new author that he had promised Gerald he would deliver to Edmund Sholto for an initial reading. He found his panama and his shooting stick and whistled for his fat old spaniel, Alice.

As he came out of the door, he saw that Emily had stopped to have a few words with the gardener, and he waited until she had finished talking to him and had walked through the wicket gate that led towards Leysmorton. When she disappeared from sight, he walked in the opposite direction, down the drive of Steadings towards the main gates, but halfway there took a path that led through the woods on either side.

Go with her to Madeira, eh? The idea had its attractions. Hugh had from time to time met British expatriates and had no desire to become one of them – but don't waste these last years as we've wasted the rest, his sensible self told him. It's not as if there will be lingering reminders of Emily's marriage there. Her husband never lived with her in that quinta. Paddy Fitzallan's last days had been spent in a sanatorium up in the mountains.

He had tried to conceal from her the great pull of the heart her suggestion had given him. She was willing for them to be together, at last. But as he had told her, it needed thinking about. He had detected a certain hesitancy, which he hoped was due to the thought of abandoning Leysmorton once again. Did she really want to live permanently in Madeira, now that Fitzallan was gone? But for the two of them to live at Leysmorton with that fellow Stronglove and his sister still in occupation wasn't to be thought of . . . and Steadings now belonged to Gerald, and he, Hugh, was an appendage. Leave, and give the boy's marriage a chance? Yes – if things had not already gone too far for that. He slashed hard at some nettles encroaching onto the path with his stick. Damn Stronglove, damn Stella! Gerald deserved better. At the same time, he could pity Stella: so unhappy, so wrapped up in herself, spoiling her looks with her anger at her own unhappiness. Gerald was a good son – good publisher, too, knew how to sell books, especially if he could become less inclined not to take risks. They had had a slight difference of opinion over the novel the Drummond boy had written. The manuscript had been a lot better than this one he was taking to Sholto, against his own judgment. But people liked anything these days, and perhaps Sholto would see something in what Hugh thought of as modern trash, and would recommend it to Gerald, with some editing, as a saleable commodity.

A pity, he had sometimes thought over the years, that his memories of Emily couldn't be so strictly edited. It had not been a thought he had ever entertained for long.

The night she told him she loved Paddy Fitzallan and had consented to marry him, the world had crumbled around Hugh's ears. Bewildered, hurt and stiff, he could not bring himself to argue and plead, but his equable temperament had deserted him and for a few seconds he had astonished and shamed himself by wanting to shake her and shout that she should open her eyes, couldn't she see Fitzallan was taking advantage of her? But rage against Emily was something he couldn't sustain. What he wanted was to punch the fellow on the nose and knock him down – demand of him how such a cad could think himself good enough for such a star as Emily? But he had not sunk so low as to argue with someone for whom he had such contempt.

Instead, he cursed himself for not having seen what was going on under his nose, and then wondered if he had not subconsciously suspected it, and had refused to acknowledge it because next to Fitzallan he had always felt himself stiff-necked and wooden, arousing untenable feelings of inferiority. Beside that jackanapes he must have seemed a very dull dog.

He also despised Anthony Vavasour for being so spineless as to allow the marriage, when he had known she was all but engaged to Hugh, but wisely kept this opinion to himself. Nothing formal had ever been said between him and Emily after all. It was his own pride which had made him believe there was such a rapport between them that there was no need to rush into formalities.

To the devil with it, he'd thought, lashing himself with the raw pain he felt. She was not the only girl in the world. Within a year he had married Lavinia. She had been a good wife, they were as happy as most married couples, the only flaw in their marriage being that after Gerald, there were no more children, something he'd minded more than she had.