Every Secret Thing (3 page)

The great house rose out of the landscape to greet me as though it had stood there for ever, a sprawling thing, solid, of weathered red brick that seemed one with the hedges and trees that surrounded it. The approach from the gate, up a long gravelled drive with a pond to one side, gave a leisurely view of the magnificent façade – the gabled wings, the angled chimneys, and the rows of
stone-silled
windows with their glinting small glass panes.

I turned my small rental car onto the broad gravel curve to the east of the main door, and crunched to a stop.

There were two other cars here, but neither was Patrick’s. I looked at my watch. Six o’clock, he’d said, give or take, and I’d deliberately timed my own arrival for nearer six-thirty, to be certain he’d be here before me. Not that there was anything to do but ring the doorbell – I couldn’t very well sit in my car in the driveway all evening, waiting for Patrick.

With a house of this size I’d expected a butler to answer the door, but the woman who came to welcome me was clearly not the hired help. She was, for one thing, too well dressed, in a sort of traditional twinset and pearls way. Besides which she had the same brilliant blue eyes as her son.

‘You must be Kate,’ she said. ‘I’m Anthea. We’re so pleased you were able to come.’ Patrick’s mother held wide the front door, stepping back to let me enter. Her smile was quick and genuine, lending her small face a beauty that transcended age. She’d have been in her fifties, I guessed, though she had kept her figure well and if you’d seen her from a distance you would probably have put her some years younger. She gave the impression of someone who wasn’t too eager to age – there was no trace of grey in her soft upswept hairstyle, and her make-up, while not overdone, was nonetheless the kind that took some time to put on properly.

She looked, to me, as carefully preserved and polished as some of the decorative objects that lined the front entrance hall – the scrolled wooden mirror with its hooks for hanging coats on, and the marble-topped table beneath it, and the large Japanese-looking blue and white porcelain floor vase filled with canes and umbrellas.

Beyond the entry I could see a higher-ceilinged, brighter hall, with doors that opened onto rooms as elegant as those I’d seen in British
House & Garden
magazines.

Patrick or no Patrick, I thought, I was going to enjoy having dinner here.

‘My son’s not with you, then, I take it? No?’ She smiled. ‘Well, that’s a man for you. I don’t imagine he’ll be long. Please, do come through. My husband’s been longing to meet you. He does so enjoy having pretty young girls come to visit.’ She said that with fondness, but the statement itself tended to reinforce my earlier suspicion that I was one in a long line of women Patrick had brought down here for a weekend.

Still, the Colonel, to his credit, tried to make me feel I was the first and only one.

He was old, and in a wheelchair, but those details ceased to register the minute he came forward from the windows in the library to take my hand in both of his. ‘My dear girl,’ he said warmly, ‘you are much too beautiful for Patrick. He doesn’t deserve you.’

He was decidedly Patrick’s father. In his youth he would have been a very handsome man, a womaniser probably. His smile was very like his son’s, and so I didn’t fall for it. I did, though, from politeness, let him play the part of charming host, and show me round.

We didn’t see the whole house – just a few rooms on the main floor, but the brief tour was enough to let me know that Patrick’s family was as wealthy as he’d hinted. The giant portraits hanging on the panelled walls weren’t copies, and the rooms were thickly furnished with high-quality antiques, with rich veneers and chintz and mirrors and the sort of Persian carpets that you almost hated stepping on. My favourite room of all was the Colonel’s study, lined with books on shelves with doors of leaded glass, and quiet light and well-worn armchairs and a writing desk, behind which heavy draperies framed a pair of tall french windows slanting sunlight on the floor.

More wonderful than that, the windows opened onto a broad terrace looking over clipped green lawns and gardens to the tennis courts.

The Colonel, having got me on the terrace, seemed content to keep me there awhile, inviting me to have a seat on one curved stone bench while he wheeled his chair round till he faced me. ‘A marvellous view,’ he remarked, gazing over it with clear appreciation. ‘I always enjoy coming out here, it gives me great pleasure. Especially when I have someone as lovely as yourself to keep me company.’

I smiled, as I was meant to, and wondered whether men like him ever fully realised they were old; that they had aged beyond the point where their good looks and words of charm would bring the women running. It was rather sad, I thought, and for a moment I felt sympathy for Patrick, who would come to this as well, in time, and like his father, probably not know it.

‘So tell me, my dear,’ said the Colonel, ‘is this your first visit to London?’

‘Oh, no, I’ve been here quite a few times.’

‘Then how is it my son failed to notice you before this? I should think a face as beautiful as yours would stand out in any courtroom.’

I thanked him for the compliment, and said that my path simply hadn’t crossed Patrick’s till now. ‘I don’t usually cover trials.’

‘Well, you got rather an interesting one this time,’ was his comment. ‘Did you think the chap was guilty?’

‘The jury thought he was.’

‘A diplomatic answer.’ It apparently amused him, and he gave me an appreciative once-over before going on, ‘I read that he’d had twenty-two identities…is that a fact?’

I nodded. ‘That they know of.’

‘Twenty-two.’ He shook his head. ‘Imagine. Keeping all the details straight…’

‘He didn’t keep the details of the last one straight. That’s how they caught him.’

‘Ah, quite right. It’s all the little things that trip a person up. I remember my elder son, John, when he first got his licence, he took Patrick out for a drive round the lanes. They were going too fast, you know – reckless, the pair of them. One of our local policemen, a new lad, he pulled the boys over, and Patrick, he thought he’d be clever, and he said his first name was Tom, and the officer asked how he spelt that and Patrick said, “P-A-T-R-I-C-K”.’

My smile at
that
was genuine.

The Colonel said, ‘Never the sharpest pencil in the box, our Patrick, though he tried. John did so love reminding him of that day, when the young policeman pulled them over.’

I didn’t catch his use of the past tense, and so I asked him, ‘What does John do?’

‘John?’ He looked across at me. ‘We lost him, I’m afraid. A plane crash. Liked to fly his own planes, John did. Reckless, as I said.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, well, it was years ago. Time heals, they say. I’m not sure that they’re altogether right in that, but it at least forgives, does time.’ He looked across the wide lawns and the tennis courts with eyes that seemed to see a great deal further. Conversational, he said, ‘I think Venetia took it hardest. She was always sure that John would make prime minister.’ And then he stopped, and brought his gaze back guardedly, as though he’d strayed too far into things personal. The practised smile returned. ‘I do apologise, my dear. I didn’t mean—’

‘I might have known,’ said Patrick, coming through the tall French doors behind us, ‘that you’d try to steal my date.’

His father took the reprimand in stride. ‘My boy, you ought to be more of a gentleman and not leave such a lovely lady unattended. I was merely seeing she was entertained.’

‘I’ll bet you were. You know,’ he said, to me, ‘he’s not as harmless as he looks, despite the wheelchair.’ It was faintly unsettling having both those faces, Patrick’s and the Colonel’s, turned upon me with the same slick smile.

Patrick’s kiss, I thought, was for our audience as much as me. He said, ‘Sorry I’m late.’

‘Not to worry,’ I told him. ‘I’ve been well looked after.’

‘So I see.’ He put a half-proprietary arm around my shoulders, so that I felt like property reclaimed. ‘Mother sent me out to look for you two, actually. The other guests are mostly here; I gather we’re to come inside for drinks.’

‘And Venetia?’ asked the Colonel, as he turned his wheelchair with an effort, ‘is she here as well?’

‘Her car was coming up the drive as I came in.’

Which was, despite the view, enough incentive to propel me from the terrace.

Venetia Radburn in person looked smaller than she did on television. Not smaller in the sense of less significant, but physically smaller, more delicate, more feminine, and yet when I was introduced I felt intimidated. During her time in the Commons she’d gained a reputation for not losing her debates, and having met her now in person, I knew why. Like a medieval queen, she moved with a natural aura of power, and gave you the sense she could have you beheaded at will.

‘You’re a redhead,’ she told me approvingly. ‘So was I, once.’

There was still a faint tint of it left in her whitened hair, though whether it was natural or not I couldn’t tell. She’d aged well – she was striking, and her strong face showed few wrinkles save the crow’s feet round her eyes, those eyes that now were trained on mine with such unwavering intensity.

She said, ‘You’re a reporter.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You know I don’t give interviews.’

‘I’ve heard that, yes.’

‘You’d like to change that, I suppose.’

Patrick interrupted with, ‘Aunt V, be fair. Kate’s only here because I asked her. She hasn’t got any hidden agenda.’

‘Of course she hasn’t,’ said Venetia Radburn, though I can’t imagine she believed it. Still, she didn’t seem to mind. She even insisted I sit at her end of the table at dinner.

It was an incredibly wonderful dinner, with all the right wines served in all the right glasses, and candlelight catching the gleaming gold rims of the bone-china dishes that came and went with every course. The dining room was wonderful as well. It smelt of panelling and polish and the dust that settles into velvet curtains, and above our heads a chandelier of perfect crystal teardrops trapped the light and spun it out again against the golden walls in little rainbow arcs that wavered with the slightest breath of movement.

The guests glittered, too…some literally, with jewels, as well as figuratively. There was the dashing white-haired actor whom I recognised from British television; the young woman in the diamonds who had come with the tall bearded man from the House of Lords; and the high-flying stockbroker wearing a suit that I guessed was Armani. I sat across from a very smart middle-aged woman whose plain name – Anne Wood – masked a not-so-plain intellect. She was a lawyer, as well, though her scope was a little bit broader than Patrick’s. Next month, I was told, she’d be busy defending an African general on trial for war crimes at the International Court in the Hague.

‘It’s a difficult thing, war,’ Venetia agreed, in a guarded defence of the African general. ‘Most people these days haven’t lived through one, they wouldn’t know. The things one does in wartime…it’s like living in a different world.’ Her eyes grew reminiscent. ‘I got bombed out twice during the Blitz. Twice,’ she emphasised. ‘Quite an experience. We had Morrison shelters, great steel things on four legs, with mesh round the sides. You put your bed on top, or used them in your dining room to eat on, and when the raids came you crawled under. Remember?’ she asked the Colonel, down the length of the table.

He smiled. ‘I did my service overseas. We didn’t have Morrison shelters.’

‘Well, my point is,’ she said, ‘that the rules of society change in a war. Look how all of us women were called up to work in the factories and whatnot, in place of the men who had gone off to fight. We had freedoms we’d never enjoyed up to then. The rules of behaviour by which we’d been raised disappeared for those few years.’

Patrick, according to the British rule of seating couples separately at dinner, was a few chairs further down the table, next to the wife of the stockbroker. Looking at his great-aunt with a grin, he asked, ‘Did
you
work in a factory?’

‘I did many things,’ she told him. ‘One went where one was told to go, with war work. For a time I even drove an ambulance – I adored that. And then, of course, the war ended and the boys came back, and we women had to give up our jobs, and that was terrible. For me, at least. I’d had a taste, you see, of what life could be like, of independence. Couldn’t fit myself into the mould again, not after that. I suppose that’s what propelled me into politics.’ She looked my way and smiled. ‘So there you are, then. The beginnings of my biography.’

Anne Wood glanced up, intrigued. ‘Are you a writer, Kate?’

Venetia answered for me. ‘She’s a journalist.’

I saw the heads turn all down the length of the table and remembered what Margot had said about Venetia being ‘famously allergic’ to journalists. Evidently Venetia’s friends were wondering how someone like me had sneaked onto the guest list.

The Colonel – very gallantly, I thought – explained to everyone I’d been in London for the trial. ‘She was unfortunate enough to fall in league,’ he said, ‘with Patrick.’

Patrick’s mother, midway down the table, smiled, and then said, ‘Patrick mentioned you’d had quite a nasty shock the other day…I do hope you’ve recovered?’

Not quite sure, I looked to Patrick, who explained, ‘She means that accident, the hit-and-run. I did get it right, didn’t I…it
was
a family friend of yours that died?’

Anne Wood said, ‘You don’t mean that poor man who was struck and killed on Wednesday morning, at St Paul’s? I saw the aftermath…the ambulance. You knew him?’

‘Well…’

‘I read about that in the paper,’ someone else put in. ‘They haven’t found the car yet, have they?’

Patrick said, ‘I shouldn’t think they ever will, unless the driver develops a conscience.’