Last Nocturne (11 page)

‘Mother, what are you doing here, all alone? Is anything wrong?’

‘It’s been an exhausting evening, nothing more, and I was so very tired.’

‘Then should you not be in bed? I’ll get Manners—’

‘No.’ She held up a hand to stop him as he reached for the bell. ‘I’m not ready for sleep yet. I’ll go up presently, when I am.’

‘Mother?’

‘Yes?’ She barely turned, but the soft light of the silk-shaded lamp fell on her rigid face. He was shocked, and then absolutely astonished when he caught the glint of a tear in her eye corner. Never in his life had he seen his mother cry – and nor did he now. She blinked angrily and the treacherous betrayal disappeared. But when he pulled up a stool, sat by her knee and took her hand in his, she, who never welcomed personal contact, even from her children, left it there for the moment, unresisting. It was cold as ice.

‘Tell me. What is the matter?’

‘I’ve told you, nothing. It’s simply been such a very long day and I’m desperately tired.’

‘As an explanation, that leaves something to be desired, you know,’ he said with a half smile. ‘Wait a moment.’

He left the room and returned with two fat-bellied crystal glasses and a cognac decanter. He poured out two measures and sat by her while she lifted her glass and sipped. ‘Now, what’s all this? Something’s evidently wrong and I warn you, I don’t intend to leave you until you tell me what it is.’ Gradually a little colour came back into her face, but she still sat as if turned to stone. ‘Come, tell me.’

The Martagons were not a demonstrative family. She had certainly never exchanged confidences with either of her children, given or asked for understanding. Perhaps she suddenly realised this; perhaps it was simply the cognac which loosened her tongue. ‘Oh, very well. I see no harm in telling you. It’s only a small problem regarding some letters which I – which I found in your father’s desk after he died…and which I kept, God knows why, and hid away. And that is all there is to it, so there is no need to look so fierce, Guy.’

‘What kind of problem?’

‘Nothing that need concern you, I assure you.’

‘My dear mother, seeing you like this is every reason for my concern. Doesn’t it occur to you that I might be of some assistance?’ Never had she asked him for help, and he couldn’t keep the edge of bitterness from his voice, but it did nothing to move her. ‘Why should these letters only now cause you so much distress? What kind of letters? Hmm? Were they love letters?’ he asked bluntly when she didn’t answer.

She turned angrily away. ‘I suppose you might call them that. At any rate, they were from a woman.’

‘To my father?’

‘It would appear so.’ Two spots of colour appeared on her cheeks.

‘What do you mean – appear so?’

‘They began only with an endearment – and were unsigned. Oh, really – it quite demeans me even to think of them. I should never have mentioned them to you. Please, forget what I’ve said, and leave me now.’

With a smothered exclamation, he rose and fed the fire with a few small pieces of coal, then tossed the tongs back into the scuttle, dusted his hands together and rested his elbow on the mantel, thinking. Finally, as flames curled around the coal, and the room began to come to rich life in the firelight, he turned round. ‘How can you expect me to forget what is obviously causing you so much distress? There’s something you haven’t yet told me and’, he added in a low voice, having now begun to see where this conversation was leading, ‘I can’t help feeling it must concern me, too.’

She didn’t answer.

‘You’ve had those letters all this time, and only now are they upsetting you like this. I wonder why?’

‘You’re asking too many questions. I’ve told you all you need to know.’

‘I think not, Mother. But very well, if you won’t answer, let me guess. There was mention in these letters, was there not, of a child?’

The effect on her was electric. ‘You’ve known all the time! You, too!’

‘On the contrary. It was only recently that I came across the copy of a letter Father had sent to Hardisty, instructing him to invest a substantial sum for the support of some child or other.’ He paused. ‘Mother, I’m so sorry, I know how much this must pain you.’

She sprang to her feet, knocking over the empty cognac glass which she had placed on the small table beside her chair. The expensive cut glass fell onto the polished steel fender, splintered on the hearth and lay there, disregarded. She began to pace the room, driving one fist into the palm of the other hand. ‘I knew it!’ she cried. ‘He was deceiving me! All the time, he pretended to be so – so upright! All the time he was abroad, he was leading a double life!’

And that had shocked her, he saw – and understood why. He, too, had felt an almost physical pain when he’d discovered the arrangement his father had made. ‘Do nothing, my boy,’ the solicitor had advised, urbane and worldly, hands beneath the tails of his frock coat. ‘Your father didn’t want anything to be known of this – that was why the provision was made before he died. He was a prudent, far-seeing man who wished to leave no loose ends if he were to die suddenly – think what it would do to your mother if she were to learn of it now.’

Well, she did know now. She had found out in a way that Eliot Martagon, for all his caution, hadn’t been astute enough to prevent. Or was the situation as obvious as it appeared?

Ambrose Hardisty had looked after the Martagon family affairs for years. He was a man of probity whose judgement Guy felt he could trust, but he was not so sure the old man was right in his assumptions – the same natural assumptions in fact that his mother was making now: that the child Eliot had made such careful arrangements for was one he had fathered. Admittedly, this was a more than likely possibility, in fact almost a certainty, but in what must have been an initial letter of instruction there had been no mention of the child’s mother. Guy had decided that perhaps she was dead, or at least, in no need of financial assistance. Had she been one of those wealthy women in his mother’s set to whose indiscretions society was more than willing to look away?

Guy’s strong sense of filial duty and affection didn’t blind him to the faults of either of his parents. He was well aware of the sort of marriage they had had. A pained acceptance on his father’s part, perhaps; indifference on his mother’s, certainly. Surely they had once loved each other, but for as long as Guy had been of an age to notice such things, it had seemed to him they had settled into a laissez-faire relationship while outwardly putting up a united front when the occasion demanded it. It was not an unusual situation, but when Guy had faced the unbelievable possibility that Eliot might have taken his own life, he had briefly wondered, in the absence of any other credible reason, whether the disillusionment of an unsatisfactory marriage had caused him to do so. Almost at once he had rejected the idea. A man like his father, even if he had known the importance of Bernard Aubrey in his wife’s life, would have found a more satisfactory way of dealing with the circumstances.

Edwina was still pacing the carpet. ‘Mother, it isn’t the end of the world, you know.’

‘Not the end of the world? No, perhaps not for you,’ she said through tight lips.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, but please do try not to upset yourself so.’

‘Upset? Upset? If you think I am
upset
then you don’t recognise anger when you see it!’

And fear, he thought. There was fear behind this, too. His mother? She was the most fearless person he had ever met. ‘You said ‘when he was abroad’ – why did you say that?’

‘The letters mention Vienna, time after time. I think they came from there.’ Suddenly, her voice was less assured. ‘Guy, they also mention something which happened there, some sort of scandal – which seems to have concerned Eliot.’

‘Let me see them, Mother.’

‘You cannot. I – no longer have them. They are lost, fallen into unscrupulous hands.’

‘What?’

‘It’s true.’ A great shudder went through her. ‘And I received a letter by this evening’s post demanding money for their return.’

‘Good God. Look here, don’t you think you had better tell me plainly what has happened, right from the very first?’

Her anger had done her a power of good. No longer was she the frozen woman he had barely recognised when he entered the room. She was in control of herself, his mother once more, the formidable presence with whom, despite everything, he was more comfortable. She went to sit once more in her chair, drumming the fingers of one hand on its arm, while the other fiddled with the small objects on the table, moving them aimlessly with a series of small clicks across the polished marquetry surface. Photographs, a modern, bejewelled silver cigarette box, an enamelled clock, a small, copper vase looking strangled by the sinuous trails of silver curving around it…every time he walked into this room it seemed some familiar article had disappeared and some new, modern trifle had taken its place. The room both stifled and irritated him, old and new crammed together without regard for style, only acquisition. Potted ferns, heavy picture frames, Japanese prints, antique rugs, modern-style vases and lacquered cabinets. As he waited for her reply, a thousand eyes watched them from the peacock-feather design of the new draperies from Liberty’s, put up only last week at considerable expense.

She said at last, ‘My first instinct was to burn those wretched letters when I found them.’ Knowing his mother, this was exactly what Guy would have expected. ‘I bitterly regret it now, but I didn’t, and there it is. I had a feeling, an instinct, I don’t know what, which told me to keep them. What a dangerous thing instinct can be! But at least I kept them hidden away where no one would ever find them. And then, I discovered they were gone.’

The heavy scent from some branches of white blossom in a big, black lacquer vase in the corner, brought out by the warmth of the fire, seemed suddenly overpowering. ‘Go on.’

‘They were not where I’ve kept them, all this time. I thought at first someone must have – misappropriated them. Then I remembered that I took them with me when I went down to the Cornleighs in Cambridgeshire, silly as the notion sounds, under some impression they would be safer with me than left here. But if they had turned up there, in a drawer or somewhere, you know, Fanny Cornleigh would have known they were mine and would have returned them. I kept them in a little red silk purse, tied round and round with ribbon. While I was there, someone must have taken them from my room. One never knows,’ she finished with a return of her old haughtiness, ‘who one might not meet in the country – other people’s servants and so on.’

Lady Cornleigh would surely have returned them. On the other hand, she was a notorious gossip and it would have been obvious to the meanest intelligence that something so carefully wrapped might well contain something – interesting. Might she not have been tempted by such delicious bait? The suspicion was unworthy, Guy reprimanded himself. She might have peeped, but he wouldn’t believe her capable of worse. ‘It seems more likely they could have been thrown away, by some servant who didn’t realise that a scrap of silk was important.’

‘My dear, you have a very idealised view of human nature if you think that. Besides, the package was quite evidently
not
rubbish. It looked what it was, a pretty, personal possession. It was expensive silk damask, embroidered with silver, and the velvet ribbons were neatly tied in a bow.’

‘Making someone curious enough to want to know what it contained, if they found it lying around?’

‘Guy, I repeat. I did not leave it lying around at any time. On the occasions when I couldn’t carry a bag without being too obvious, I kept those letters directly on my person.’

Of that Edwina had at first been absolutely certain. Now she was only
almost
sure. Her memory was never, at the best of times, at all reliable, and Bernard had also been spending the weekend with the Cornleighs, so that she had perhaps not been as wholly concentrated as she might have been. For three days, she had been certain he was on the brink of proposing, and she had been in such a feverish state of expectation that maybe, once or twice, the letters
could
have slipped her mind, though surely only for a moment or two. She had meant to be so careful. Not even Manners had ever been allowed to know she had them, which had meant a good deal of vigilance and subterfuge while at the Cornleighs. She slept with them under her pillow, and during the day slipped them into whatever bag she was carrying, or when that wasn’t possible, pushed them inside her whaleboned stays, despite the discomfort, though it was a slim enough package: there had been only five letters.

And it had all been for nothing. Bernard had not proposed after all. And the fact remained that the letters were gone

‘So now, what?’ Guy asked.

‘
Now
, if you please, the thief wants to sell me my own property back! I have been instructed to put
two hundred pounds
into an attaché case and leave it beside my chair after I’ve taken some refreshment in the ladies’ waiting room at the St Pancras station hotel. What an unheard of thing! I have never been to St Pancras. I shall send Manners.’

‘You will send no one if you are wise. You will tell the police.’

‘No! The police will
not
be brought into this, Guy, do you hear me? I know this is – what is the term? Blackmail? But as for telling the police…have you forgotten those references to what happened in Vienna? The child? Not for the world, my dear Guy! In any case, the despicable person who is doing this already knows what is in the letters and could make a scandal if they wished, simply by spreading rumour and gossip.’

‘Then what do you mean to do?’

‘I shall find some way, never fear.’

He was silent for so long she thought he had not understood. ‘I mean it, Guy,’

‘Yes, Mother, I can see that you do.’

There was a doctor when Isobel lived in Vienna – a mad-doctor, as Bruno had called him – a Jew named Sigmund Freud, who used the term ‘fugue’, not as a musical term, but to mean a dreamlike state of consciousness, during which a person loses his memory of his previous life and wanders away from home, possibly due to some powerful shock. It was true that the events of that winter night more than two years ago had been shocking, and deeply distressing, and that she’d left Vienna as soon as she could afterwards; but it was a conscious flight, nothing to do with wandering aimlessly. And it was certainly not true that she had forgotten – or was ever likely to forget – any of the harrowing details. But she had passionately repeated to herself, almost as an article of faith, that no purpose could be served in continually reliving them, and until now she’d been able to cling, however tenuously, to the belief that such horrors should be banished into oblivion, where they belonged.