Pardonable Lie (23 page)

TWENTY-TWO

The boys did not dine with their parents and Maisie that night, though Priscilla was quick to explain that usually they had meals together, a ritual rare among many of their friends and acquaintances, who adhered to the maxim that children should be seen and not heard.

“Of course, there are times when Douglas and I would rather have a meal without looking at a runny nose or having to extol the virtues of greens, but fortunately not only is the food much better here but, on those occasions when we need time away from being Mummy and Daddy, we have a high tea in the playroom around six and then a late supper in peace when they’ve finally fallen asleep.”

Maisie ran a forefinger up and down the long narrow stem of the crystal wineglass in front of her as Priscilla’s nervousness continued to give way to small talk. She was distracted by her determination to forge ahead with her investigations, a need at odds with a desire to return to England, to have the cases closed so she could move on. But to what? She had telephoned Billy again from Paris, and was both pleased and frustrated by his news that there had been little movement on the Avril Jarvis case. Though his current knowledge of the police investigation had been extracted from newspaper reports, he did inform Maisie that he was working on an interesting tip, but their call had been disconnected at the most inopportune moment, as Maisie had to hurry to catch her train.

“Well.” Douglas placed his table napkin alongside his cheese plate and stood up. Taking the cane that had been hooked over the back of his chair, he leaned down to Priscilla, who raised her lips to his. “I’ll leave you two to your after-dinner conversation. Don’t stay up too long; it’s been a wretched day for you both.” He smiled at Maisie. “And you must be thoroughly exhausted by now.” Douglas smiled once more and left the room.

“Douglas seems to be such a good man, Priscilla. You chose well.”

Priscilla leaned forward and picked up her cigarette case, which she then set on the table again. “I’m like a chimney. It’s got to stop.” She sipped the smooth Barolo instead and topped up her glass. She reached to pour more wine for her guest, but Maisie was ready and placed her hand over her glass. Without sitting back in her chair, she turned to Maisie. “As I have said before, he’s my rock, my strength, my anchor in what was—and still is—a very unsettled world.”

Maisie nodded. “And he knows I’m going to unsettle that world even more now, doesn’t he?”

“Yes.” Priscilla tapped the cigarette case. “But I am ready. You have discovered more than I could ever imagine, Maisie. I will help in any way I can; it’s an entirely selfish position: The more you uncover, the more I will find out about Peter and where he died.”

“First of all, you had your own suspicions about his work, didn’t you?”

Priscilla sighed. “How did you know?”

Maisie shook her head. “You aren’t a fool, Priscilla. You knew there was a secret; you said as much in London.”

“I had my suspicions…oh, sod it!” She reached for her cigarette case, flipped it open, and took out a cigarette, which she placed directly in her mouth and lit with the triangular silver table lighter. “It’s no good; I can’t do without them.”

“Pris, I want you to tell me about Biarritz.”

“What do you want to know? You would probably do better speaking to the people at Thomas Cook.”

“That’s not what I meant. I want to know why you chose Biarritz, what caused you to come here.”

“Well, you know what caused me to come here, Maisie, I mean—”

“You could have gone to Madrid, to Cannes, Antibes, to the Bahamas, to anywhere that anyone of a certain sort who had seen too much in the war ran away to. Why Biarritz?”

“Gosh, when you put it like that—I did consider other places, but Biarritz meant something to me.”

Maisie leaned forward, her hands clasped together on the table. She said nothing, waiting for Priscilla to continue.

“We used to come here for the summers as a family. I was about six or so when we first traveled down; it was just after the boys had broken up from school. We couldn’t wait. My father had rented a villa—only about a mile from here, actually, but closer to the beach. And we stayed for six weeks, the whole summer. Of course, it’s changed now; it’s much more of a resort. Then it was more like a sleepy little fishing village. We came every summer after that, right up until 1913, when we were all a bit too old for buckets and spades and were making idiots of ourselves in the local bars with the friends who would descend on us. It was all great fun, wonderful memories….” Priscilla pressed her cigarette into the ashtray and picked up her glass, taking another sip of the deep red wine.

Maisie nodded. “If you could say—in just a few words, perhaps—what Biarritz meant to you, what you were searching for, what would it be?”

“What kind of question is that, one of those airy-fairy ideas of yours?”

“Priscilla….”

Pulling her long legs up so that her bare heels balanced on the edge of the chair, Priscilla rested her chin on her knees. “All right. I think, if anything, it was the sense of freedom. You know, when we were young, the four of us together, we would burst out of school at the end of term—lucky you, never to have suffered through boarding school—and then we were whisked away to this…this oasis of lightness. We were allowed to be wild here, run with no shoes, be young and carefree. And I wanted that back, Maisie. I wanted to get away from the nightmares, from that aching sorrow. I lost them all and I wanted some of it back, if only in the scent on the air, the light as it falls across the floor. I wanted freedom from the grief.”

Maisie swallowed hard, reached for her glass, and took a sip.

“But as you know, I did not find my freedom in the sand but rather at the bottom of a bottle—until Douglas.”

“Did Peter share your feelings about Biarritz?”

“Oh, my goodness, he most certainly did. Peter loved it here more than any of us, if that were possible. He made friends easily—of course it helped that he was absolutely fluent in the language and the dialect, which is so important. In fact, Daddy always said that, by the end of the summer, Peter was more Basque than British!”

“What do you know about what happened in the town during the war?”

“Ah, now it’s on to history!” Priscilla shrugged, then went on. “Of course, we did not come in 1914. Daddy thought that what with one thing and another, it was best to stay at home, so we ended up at Cowes, which was all very well except for the weather. And we all loved the boats. You know, when I first came back to Biarritz—in 1920, I think it was—there were still lots of soldiers here. The Hotel Palais, which was originally built to be the royal palace, had been requisitioned for use as a hospital for the wounded throughout the war. They were shipped here by train—apparently they came in droves—and then afterward even more came to convalesce. Quite a few remained—and some they never could identify, you know. Lost their memories, their minds. I remember meeting a couple in a hotel when I first came here who thought they would find their missing son among the injured. They left disappointed. And they weren’t the only ones.”

“I see.”

Priscilla turned to Maisie. “Why are you interested, Maisie? What has all this got to do with Peter? Rest assured that if he were here I would have found him.”

“No, that’s not it, not at all.” Maisie paused, wondering to what extent she should share her thoughts with her friend. “I was wondering whether Peter might have—”

“I don’t know how you do your job.” Priscilla’s tone was sharp.

“What do you mean?”

“Prodding here and poking there, all the time searching for a reason for this and an explanation for that. It’s a wonder you solve anything.”

Maisie looked at Priscilla intently. “No, it’s not exactly like that. Sometimes it’s as if truth were like a festering wound, ready to break open and be cleansed. It seems as if the information I am seeking is just there, lying in front of me on the path, asking to be discovered, asking for a kind of solution—or absolution. Then again, it can evade me, like a small splinter that escapes under the skin. Then I have to wait, be patient. I have to wait for it to fester.”

“And what do you think of Peter and the other case?”

Maisie leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, aware that her chosen metaphor had revealed something of her personal turmoil. She changed the subject. “Tell me more about your friends here, about your life. We haven’t had this much time together since Girton.”

“Well, seeing as you’ve asked….” Priscilla stood and pushed back the chair, which scraped on the terra-cotta tiles. “Come to my lair. It is time for you to see my rogues’ gallery, and then we must away to our beds. We will be woken by my boys soon enough.”

Maisie followed Priscilla along a tiled hallway to a small staircase at the back of the house.

“These rooms are as far away from the playroom as possible,” said Priscilla, leading Maisie to the foot of the narrow staircase, where she switched on a light. “I’m not sure that you can see very well here, but you will be able to in the morning.”

The stairwell was covered in photographs on both sides, and as Maisie took each step in turn it seemed as if she were caught in a sea of joy, of happy times and, as Priscilla said, of freedom. There were photographs taken before the war, of three boys and a girl, all with the same grin that caused their eyes to appear closed in a mischievous manner. Then the four were older, often joined by friends from school, and there were the parents, on bicycles, leading their brood on a ride close to the sea. Then the Everndens in 1913, the boys now men, Priscilla a stunning young woman, wearing her brother’s trousers even then.
Freedom.
Maisie said nothing as she ascended the staircase. Now Priscilla on her own, in a club, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, those half-closed eyes sad even in the dim light. Then another group, and another. Groups of men and women with smiles not matched by their eyes. As Maisie touched each photograph, Priscilla told the story of the day, the night, the holiday. Soon, Maisie was aware that she was searching for a face in the crowd, a young man who might not resemble any photograph she had already seen. Was this a shot in the dark, this feeling in her gut that Biarritz was not just the place where Priscilla had tried to touch her family again but was a place of refuge for another?

Groups in clubs, parties on white verandas, and gatherings in bars. Then Douglas, at first on the edge of a group, then alongside Priscilla; a year later, walking in the Pyrenees, both shielding their eyes from the sun. There they are with an infant; then with a small boy and a babe in arms. A family. Maisie looked at the photographs on the wall close to the top of the staircase, and as she squinted at the faces she could see life in Priscilla’s eyes again.
And joy.

“What a tribe, eh?”

“It’s your history, Pris.”

“Come along, time for us to go to bed. You can look again tomorrow—and we’ve albums to bore you with too!”

Maisie began to descend the staircase, and as she took each step slowly, a sensation, one she knew so well, seemed to grow in her stomach. At first a tingle, then her heart began beating faster.
Stop here. It is here.
Priscilla was waiting to turn off the light.

“What is it, Maisie? Are you all right?”

Maisie nodded, scanning each photograph, touching each image, each face caught in the lens.
I am close. I am so close.

“Come along, you’re tired, Maisie. You’ll ruin your eyes.”

Maisie was holding her chest to still her now-throbbing heart; with the other hand she fingered the images, some in frames, some pinned haphazardly in place. She turned to Priscilla, her smile warm, revealing nothing.

“This looks like a jolly day out—who are all these people?” Maisie pointed to one photograph in particular, a group of men and women leaning against a motor car with the bonnet up, glasses of champagne in their hands.

Priscilla came to Maisie’s side and peered at the photograph. “Oh, that was a day! A group of us decided to take off for a hidden cove, picnic and all, then halfway along the road,
bang!
Something went in the engine, so we all had to clamber out while it was repaired. Needless to say, out came the champers, the foie gras, cheese, bread, and even more champers!”

“Tell me everyone’s names.” Maisie was aware of some acting on her part, as if she were really interested in each and every person raising a glass to the camera.

“All right.” Priscilla was smiling, happy to speak of the day. “That’s Polly Woods, what a girl! To look at her, you’d have thought butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. There’s Richard—Ricky to his friends—Longman.” Her finger moved along the photograph, pointing to each face in turn. “Thadeus More and his wife Candace…and there’s Douglas, looking serious. Um, this is Julia Thorpe and her fiancé—the first of many—Edmund. And this chappie here, the one you just about see looking up from the engine, is Daniel Roberts.” Priscilla paused and pulled a face. “Heaven knows how we squeezed so many into that motor car, but we did! Mind you, Ricky and Daniel were following us, and thank heavens Danny knew what he was doing, once the bonnet was up.”

Maisie smiled again, and the women turned to continue walking downstairs. “So, do those people all still live here? Do you see them?”

Priscilla flicked the light switch as they reached the bottom of the staircase. “Polly’s heart was broken by a swarthy Spaniard; then she met an American who was here for the summer in ’26—I remember him talking about oil a lot. They’re married now and she seems to spend most of her time dripping in furs, being petted and pampered. The Mores went back to England, now nicely settled with two children in Pangbourne. Julia lives in Paris with husband number three. Daniel Roberts deals in motor cars, not that anyone ever sees him. He started years ago, literally with his own garage where he did all the mechanics himself. No one really knows him—as I said, he’s always kept to himself, rather a recluse. We gave up inviting him to parties years ago. He owns a lovely house about a mile away, the Villa Bleu. Lives there with a manservant, I believe. Paul, I think is his name. Mind you, we all thought that Paul was—”