Borrowed Time (10 page)

Lunch was one of the more uncomfortable experiences of my life. I sat next to Rowena and exchanged few words with her beyond an excruciating discussion of the weather and how best to cook broccoli. Every other subject that came into my head—Christmas, the Cotswolds, her plans, her pastimes, her present, her future—came back to her mother and what had happened to her. Precisely how to talk about that in a casual and reassuring manner over roast beef and burgundy with a girl who could hardly have looked and sounded less like the average nineteen-year-old sophisticate was a task I couldn’t begin to tackle.

Not that my confusion seemed to communicate itself round the table. Sir Keith held awkward silences at bay with practised aplomb, discoursing on wine, medicine and the law with no particular need of an interlocutor. He even seemed to know something about cricket bats, provoking Bella to display greater familiarity with the history of Timariot & Small than I’d ever have credited her with. Well, I knew the game she was playing. And it looked as if Sir Keith did too. But it wasn’t cricket.

I didn’t disapprove. I was in no position to. You have to lose somebody you’ve been physically and mentally close to for more than twenty years before you know what it leaves you needing and yearning and seeking. Keith Paxton had my sympathy on several counts. He’d suffered what I could only imagine. A theft of something precious but also familiar. A deprivation as undeserved as it was unexpected. And in the face of all that, he’d held on.

As had one of his daughters. But not the other. Her voice wavered. Her hand trembled. Her mind froze. I could see and hear it happening. I could sense her grasp growing ever frailer. This very lunch—this cautious venture into limited society—was for her an ordeal. And a trial still lay ahead. Which I, incredibly, was expected to help her face.

How only became apparent after the meal. Bella went into the kitchen to clear up. Sarah went to help her. And Rowena excused herself. Leaving Sir Keith and me alone together in the lounge. Able at last to speak freely. Man to man.

“I gather Bella’s put you in the picture, Robin.” He’d slipped readily into using my Christian name. “About Rowena, I mean.”

“Yes. I was sorry to hear of her difficulties. But they’re perfectly understandable. The loss of a mother must be hard enough for a daughter to come to terms with in any circumstances.”

“But these weren’t just
any
circumstances. Quite so. They certainly weren’t.” He sighed and for a moment looked all and more of his age. “If I could get my hands on Naylor . . . But perhaps it’s just as well I can’t.” He sat forward and pressed his hands together, gazing at the carpet between us as if I were one of his patients he was about to inform of the progress of a terminal disease. “Louise was . . . quite a lot younger than me. And beautiful. Well, you met her, so you’ll know that. I suppose men in my position always half expect they’ll be left in the end. Ditched for some gigolo or other. At the very least betrayed. Cuckolded. Made a fool of. And the worst kind of fool at that. An old one.”

“Are you saying—”

“No. That’s the point, Robin. It didn’t happen. Louise was loving
and
faithful. She’d have gone on being both till my dying day. I’m sure of it. More sure now than ever. But I lost her anyway, didn’t I? She didn’t desert me. She was taken from me. Which would be bad enough without . . . God, I can’t describe how I felt when I heard. I’d been in Madrid for a few days. There was a conference I wanted to attend. When I got back to Biarritz she’d flown to England to buy one of Oscar Bantock’s paintings. I wasn’t surprised. She adored his work. And she was a creature of impulse. That was one of the things I most . . .” He broke off and smiled apologetically at the iceberg-tip of emotion he’d revealed.

“You don’t have to tell me this,” I said. “There’s really no—”

“But there is. I have to explain, you see. The police phoned me with the news. Frightful. Awful. Unbelievable. But true. And worse—a hundred times worse—for Rowena. They’d been unable to contact me at first. And Sarah was in Scotland, exact whereabouts unknown. So they’d had to ask Rowena to identify her mother’s body. Somehow, that seemed even more horrible to me than what had happened to Louise. You’ve seen what sort of girl Rowena is. It was asking too much of her to shrug off the experience. I only wish . . .” He spread his hands helplessly.

“Are you sure it’ll do any good for me to talk to her about it?”

“No. Not sure at all. But her psychiatrist thinks Rowena feels responsible for Louise’s death. Guilty for letting her drive to Kington that afternoon. Ridiculous, I know, but deeply rooted. She’s invented signs, danger signals, she should have spotted. They weren’t there to be spotted, of course. If Louise had foreseen what was going to happen to her in Kington, she wouldn’t have gone there. That stands to reason.” Did it? I wondered. Could we be absolutely certain of that? “I can’t persuade her the signs didn’t exist. I can’t prove it to her. Nor can Sarah. Because we weren’t there. We didn’t see Louise that day. We didn’t get the chance.”

“But I did.”

“Exactly. You met her. Later than Rowena. And there were no . . . signs . . . were there?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, maybe you can convince Rowena of that. At the very least, make her see this guilt she feels isn’t exclusive to her. Others missed the same chance.” Was this an oblique accusation? I asked myself. Was this a glimpse he’d unwittingly given me of a grudge he couldn’t help bearing, however irrationally? If so, he tried to brush it off at once. “Not that there
was
a chance, of course. Not a real one.” He smiled. But the smile didn’t completely reassure me. And then it broadened into something warm and genuine and unstinting. For behind me, in the doorway, Rowena had appeared. And Sir Keith blamed her at least for nothing.

It was Sarah, executing what I took to be a prearranged plan, who proposed a walk in the little daylight that remained to give us an appetite for tea. Rowena said at once she’d go with her. I had the impression her sister’s company was vital to the equilibrium she was just about maintaining. I fell in with the idea, leaving Bella and Sir Keith to invent reasons for staying behind.

The girls donned their Barbours and wellingtons and I drove them the few miles to Frensham, where we joined the hardier set of Sunday afternooners strolling round the Great Pond. We’d nearly completed a circuit before Sarah tired of waiting for me to mention her mother and did so herself. At which Rowena cast me a lingering glance whose meaning was clear. The elaborate manoeuvres hadn’t deceived her for a moment. She knew exactly why we’d been thrown together. The glance, with its flickering hint of sympathy, even implied I was to be pitied for playing my part. Especially since, in her opinion, it couldn’t achieve a thing. Beneath the wide-eyed unworldliness, there was a determination I couldn’t help admiring to mourn her mother in her own particular way.

“Would you like to go to Hergest Ridge one day, Ro? It’s where Robin met Mummy.”

“I know where he met her. And when.”

“It was only a fleeting encounter,” I put in. “We talked for a few minutes, hardly more.”

“And what did you talk about?” Rowena looked round at me as she asked the question.

“Nothing much. The weather. The scenery. The view was . . . magnificent.” I shivered, but not because of the cold. Her eyes wouldn’t release me, wouldn’t give up their hold.
Go on
, they implored me.
Tell me what she really said
. “She seemed . . . very happy.”

“She often did. When she wasn’t.”

“I don’t think it was put on. Her happiness almost amounted to joy. You can’t feign that.”

“No. But joy’s different, isn’t it? I haven’t been happy since . . . the summer. But sometimes I have been joyful.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Sarah says Mummy offered you a lift.”

“Yes. She did. It was kind of her.”

“Why didn’t you accept?”

“I wanted to walk.”

“You didn’t understand, then?”

I stopped. And she stopped too, her gaze fixed calmly on me. Sarah came to a halt a few yards further on along the sandy path. She turned and looked back at us, then said, almost on my behalf: “What was there to understand, Ro?”

“She needed protection.”

“She can’t have known that.”

“Besides,” I said, “if she’d felt in danger, she only had to drive away. There was nothing to stop her.”

Still Rowena stared at me. “Some things you can’t drive away from. Or fly. Or run. Or even crawl. Some things have to be.”

What I said next wasn’t provoked so much by irritation at the opacity of her reasoning as by fear of what she might be beginning to discern: that she and I had both seen—or been shown—some part of the truth about the events of that day. But we hadn’t understood, hadn’t recognized it for what it was; and we still didn’t. “
Can we really change anything, do you think?
” Louise had asked me.
“Can any of us ever stop being what we are and become something else?” “Yes,”
I’d replied.
“Surely. If we want to.”
And then I’d watched her walk away to her transformation. From life to death. From enigma to conundrum. “If you’re right, Rowena, what good would my protection have been?”

She smiled. And looked away at last. “No good at all,” she murmured. “None whatsoever.”

I caught the disappointment turning to anger in Sarah’s face. This wasn’t what she’d hoped I’d achieve. This wasn’t what she’d expected of me. “Your mother’s death wasn’t inevitable,” I went on. “But it wasn’t preventable either. Surely you can see that.”

Rowena gazed past me, past both of us, her eyes scanning the bleak heathland beyond the pond. Dusk was encroaching, gathering like some grey presence at our backs, advancing with the steady tread of something that doesn’t need to hurry—because it’s bound to happen. “Soon it’ll be too dark to see anything,” she said. “I think I want to go home.”

I took care to ensure I was the first to leave The Hurdles that evening. I had no wish to confront Sarah with my failure to dent Rowena’s delusions. Not least because I wasn’t sure they
were
delusions. And that, I knew, was the last thing Sarah wanted to hear. Just as it was the last thing I wanted to admit. “Perhaps it was too soon,” Sir Keith said by way of consolation as he saw me off in the darkness of the driveway. “Perhaps we can try again when she’s more receptive.” I muttered some vague words of concurrence and shook his hand in farewell, not daring to tell him what I’d realized at Frensham. Rowena’s problem wasn’t an inability to face the truth. It was a refusal not to.

A few days later, Sarah phoned me at work to propose a meeting before term ended at the College of Law. I detected in her voice an eagerness to remove any awkwardness between us before it grew into something more serious. It was an eagerness I shared. Probably on account of it, she agreed to let me take her to an expensive French restaurant in Haslemere. And probably for the same reason, she dressed for once as elegantly as her looks and figure deserved.

Rowena’s name cropped up before the canapés, Sarah having no truck with prevarication. “Daddy thinks it was a mistake to spring you on her. After she’s thought about what you said, maybe she’ll see things differently.”

“I wouldn’t bank on it.”

“We have to. If she says any of those bizarre things in court, God knows what the consequences may be.”

“Does she have to be called?”

“It’s not our decision. But, without her, the prosecution can’t be as specific as they’d like to be about Mummy’s movements and intentions. I’d be reluctant to dispense with her testimony if I were them. Apart from anything else, it would look so odd.”

“Your father mentioned a note your mother left for him in Biarritz. Wouldn’t that be sufficient to—”

“Unfortunately, he threw it away before he’d heard about Mummy.”

“Then . . . what about the friend she was supposed to be staying with that night?”

“Sophie Marsden? No good either, I’m afraid. Mummy never contacted her. She must have been planning to surprise her with the picture.”

“I see.” Actually, I saw more than I liked. There was a disturbing vagueness about Louise Paxton’s actions on 17 July. In the hands of a competent barrister, it could be made to amount to legitimate doubt. “So . . . only Rowena . . .”

“Can testify to Mummy’s exact plans on the day in question. Precisely.” Sarah didn’t trouble to hide the concern in her voice. “And it’s vital Rowena
should
testify—if Naylor’s line of defence is to be nipped in the bud.”

“But I can go some way to doing that myself.”

“I know. And I’m grateful. But we don’t want to have to rely on the evidence of a stranger, do we?” She caught my eye and blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean— Well, you were a stranger to Mummy, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, my mind casting back to the glaring brightness—the dazzling unknowingness—of that day on Hergest Ridge. And to some lines of Thomas I’d read only recently. Which Sarah, if I’d spoken them aloud or even referred to the poem they occurred in, would have understood completely. As I couldn’t allow her to—under any circumstances.

The shadow I was growing to love almost,

The phantom, not the creature with bright eye

That I had thought never to see, once lost.

At the end of the meal, over coffee and petits fours, Sarah announced that Sir Keith was taking her and Rowena abroad for Christmas and New Year. It made good sense, with too many reminders of family Christmases past waiting for them in Gloucestershire. Biarritz was ruled out on the same grounds. So it was to be Barbados, where none of them had ever been before. Perhaps the novelty of the location would restore Rowena’s sense of proportion. I endorsed the hope, though with little confidence. We parted on the pavement outside, in the icy splendour of a starlit winter’s night. With a fleeting kiss and an awareness on my part that no recital of seasonal good wishes could strengthen the chances of a happy new year for Sarah or her sister.

Which made me sigh, remembering she was no more,