The Shape of Sand (28 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

BOOK: The Shape of Sand
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“Myles? Are you sure it was him and not Papa?” Daisy was incredulous.
“Of course I'm sure! I'd hardly be saying this if not. I saw him quite clearly. And in any case, Papa would have used the connecting door between their rooms.”
“But it could have meant something quite innocuous!”
“Innocuous, Daisy? At that time in the morning?”
Harriet said carefully, “But you saw Hallam saying goodnight to her, later–”
“I know, that's what's so odd.”
“Very odd, if you're implying what I think you are.”
There are few secrets between a lady and her maid, and the word that sprang to mind was connivance. Difficult to believe of holier-than-thou Hallam. Besides which, set against any mistaken loyalty she might have had for Beatrice, there was the high regard in which she'd always held their father; indeed, as girls, they'd decided she'd had a crush on him and laughed rather unkindly. It was more likely, Harriet thought now, that she'd simply been grateful to Amory for employing that renegade brother of hers.
The more Harriet thought about it, the more it seemed probable that what Vita had seen was not innocuous at all. She found she was holding her breath as phrases she didn't care to think about came back to her from Kit's letter. Something felt to twist in her heart. She managed to say feebly, “But can you imagine Mama sending for Hallam afterwards, if there'd been
anything scandalous going on?”
“If that was all it was – scandal!”
“Vita! What are you saying?” That was Daisy.
“When they were dancing together earlier that evening, they didn't look like lovers to me.”
It seemed that Harriet had wrongly thought Vita entirely absorbed by her own concerns that night, though she'd noticed the same thing herself, been oddly disturbed by it; she'd recorded it in her notebook at the time, hadn't she? She hadn't understood then, but she was somewhat wiser now and realised that love – or sexual attraction – could take many forms. “In fact,” Vita went on, “they were always cool with one another when you think about it.”
“There are two ways of looking at that,” Harriet said. In the ensuing silence, one could almost hear the soft fall of flower petals being shed by one of the tawny chrysanthemums.
“Vita, why didn't you mention all this at the time she disappeared?” Daisy asked, at last.
“I suppose then I
did
just think he'd probably had some quite innocent reason for slipping into her room for a moment or two. And anyway, the next day, when we thought she'd gone off with Iskander, whatever the explanation was, it didn' t seem to matter. Oh God, I was so ashamed of what she'd done, running off with that man, what it would mean to all of us …”
Harriet looked sharply at her. “Is that why you cut those pages from Mama's journal? To prevent anyone ever reading them?”
“What journal?” Vita looked blank. “I don't remember any journal.”
“You must! That grey suede-covered one.”
But memory was selective. Vita insisted she certainly hadn' t removed pages from anything resembling a journal and moreover didn't remember one of any sort. This was endorsed by Daisy, who was suddenly very critical. “Anyway, what does a thing like that matter? Let's not forget,” she said bluntly, “it isn't only Myles we're talking about here. We're talking about Mama as if she were nothing more than a – a tart.”
They had strayed into muddy waters. A few days ago Harriet wouldn't have believed all this either, of either her mother or Wycombe, who would never in any circumstances behave dishonourably – and, moreover, with the wife of his best friend. Now, however– “You don't seem very surprised about all this, Harriet,” remarked Vita abruptly.
After reading that letter, how could she be?
 
‘I lied to you, yes,' Kit had gone on, ‘but in my own justification, I must make clear that your mother and I did no wrong – at least I was saved from that, which I came to be thankful about later, though emphatically not then. Yes, I was in love with her – as painfully in love as only a young man can be with an older woman. My feelings towards her had always been ambivalent, throughout my childhood and beyond she had been mother and yet no mother. I couldn't – wouldn't – admit that my love for her was hardly that of a son. Until she began to let me know that she felt the same. Every time our eyes met, every teasing word, every light gesture, told me how she felt. I knew it was wrong, incestuous by implication if not in fact, but she must have known that, too, I told myself. Until that night, the night of her birthday, when I found out how wrongly I had read the signals she was sending out – that she had merely been flirting with me, enjoying the admiration and the effect her presence had on me. On reflection, afterwards, I saw that I hadn't, in fact, been mistaken. I don't seek to excuse myself. I wasn't a boy, I was experienced enough to know what was what. I had simply allowed myself to be blind and deaf to reason, to give in to my own desires.
‘Everyone had either gone home or to bed that night, and I sat on the seat under the deodar, smoking and waiting for her lights to go out, savouring over and over again in my mind the exchanges between us that day. The lights in Amory's study, where he was likely to remain at his desk for hours, stayed on, and so did those in Beatrice's room. Eventually, she came out on to her balcony. I hesitated for a while and then, just when I'd gathered enough courage to go up, someone followed her out there. At first I thought it must be Amory, after all – then I realised that it was not him, but
Wycombe!
‘I simply wouldn't, at first, allow myself to believe that of him, but there was no mistaking that embrace, or its fervour. There
they were, the two people Amory loved best in the world, deceiving him. I had thought better of Wycombe than that. Moreover, I had always, until then, thought him of a different persuasion. I knew how fond he was of me, as I was of him, too, though not in the way I loved and honoured Amory, Amory who had done so much for me, been my father in all but name. The irony of that did not escape me, it only added to my guilt – that in fact my own situation, my own intended acts, were perhaps even more reprehensible than Wycombe's. As for Beatrice, his wife and the mother of his children, the woman who, until then, I had thought that I truly loved … The scales fell from my eyes. I saw what a fool she'd made of me, I felt like a callow youth, and I could not bear it.'
More than that, it would have made you smart, humiliated you in a way you never could endure, Harriet had immediately thought on reading that … so much that you later killed her, and then, afterwards …?
‘You were right, of course. 'I didn't go home that night with the Lansburys. I went to my room in the guest wing and though I didn't think I could possibly sleep, emotion and the amount I'd had to drink put me out for the count for several hours. I slept like one felled, until I awoke at first light and legged it out cross country for the main line station. And then later, when I heard – about her disappearance and the assumed cause – I simply could not have come back. I could face none of you – you, and Amory who was suffering so much, and Wycombe least of all, though it eventually seemed that he had been deceived as much as I had been. Later, when you and I, Harriet … well, there were many times when I nearly told you, but couldn't. I always put it off until it became impossible to say anything at all.
‘That poor devil Iskander, she had him on a string, too. There is no need for the police, or anyone else, to know about her involvement with either him or me, but you must see that I must tell them about seeing Wycombe. If he is innocent, he will have the chance to clear his own name.'
 
Perhaps, Harriet had at first thought on reading this, grasping at straws, he was mistaken – or lying – about having seen Wycombe, though she couldn't see why – but now, independently of Kit, here was Vita confessing to having seen him going into Beatrice's room too, and she had no reason to lie – quite
the contrary. Nor about seeing Hallam bidding Beatrice goodnight afterwards – when Wycombe must already have left her.
There seemed no getting away from the fact that Wycombe was guilty of adultery with Beatrice, but on Vita's evidence he was exonerated from having killed her – unless he had returned, later, which Harriet supposed was possible. Yet there was something almost ludicrous in the thought that he might, actually, have stolen back and strangled her, in the idea of those long, fastidious fingers twisting and tightening that jewelled necklace around her white throat; as if such an act would have offended his stiff sense of propriety and correctness. To kill a lady was not the act of an officer and a gentleman. But neither was betrayal of his friend, and there were many reasons why men lost control and killed the women they loved – Oscar Schulman would know about that – and who knew what had passed between them in that bedroom? Harriet suddenly recalled those telling words Beatrice had recorded:
‘A
fierce excitement beats in me, tinged with shame, when I think what might happen, what I want to happen; then I hear the echo of a still small voice which says this was not precisely the sort of advice that had guided my infant teaching.'
Without doubt, she had been harbouring some very unladylike desires – but it was clear now who she'd been writing about. Not Iskander, but Wycombe. And Harriet reminded herself that she had also written:
‘He intrigues, but sometimes frightens me.'
“What should I do?” Vita asked.
Why should she do anything? Now, after all this time? No doubt Schulman had advised her to speak to Wycombe on the grounds that confession was good for the soul. Or to lance that boil of suspicion before it festered and burst. But what would confrontation, at this stage, do to both of them? Harriet liked Schulman well enough but he was a mind doctor, and after her dealings with them during Kit's mental crisis, she wasn't enamoured of psychiatrists as a race. On the other hand, he was also a professional, no doubt he knew what he was doing. “Oscar may be right, but I can't see it. What good is telling Myles what you saw going to do at this stage?”
“You could go to the police, and let them sort it out,” Daisy
remarked.
“I couldn't do that!” cried Vita, stricken. “Grigsby would immediately assume he'd something to do with the murder!”
“Isn't that what you're afraid of?” her sister said bluntly.
“Of course not!” But Vita's frightened eyes said otherwise.
Harriet felt bound to point out that if Myles was already a police suspect – as anyone there that night was bound to be – then this would be in his favour, but Vita still shook her head.
“Well then, forget it,” Daisy averred stoutly. “Better in any case for the lot of us to forget the whole thing, in my opinion. Let sleeping dogs lie.”
Was Daisy right? Harriet contemplated the blurred edges of what was right and what was wrong, what should or should not be done. Would it not be better for all concerned to let the truth lie at the bottom of the deep well where it had lain for forty years? No. Emphatically no. Whatever came of it, it was always better to know the truth. For years, Harriet had harboured a nasty, lingering suspicion about Kit and her mother and occasionally, in bleak moments, had been convinced that his avoidance of her meant that he had somehow been involved in Beatrice's death. His letter had at least lifted some of that doubt. Some inner caution, however, warned her to think twice before revealing the letter's contents, even now. Not yet, until she was more sure. They might all, especially Vita, have to face the fact, sooner or later, that Wycombe had had feet of clay, that Beatrice had not been the faithful, loyal wife they had all imagined her to be. That their long-held perceptions of the untroubled, happy life at Charnley were wrong - that it had, in fact, probably been falling apart for a long time. Yet, how could this have justified her murder? “Doing all this for her – you must have loved her very much,” Nina had remarked when Harriet had first announced her intentions. But Harriet feared it was because she had not loved her enough — or not enough to recognise how much. For the bottom had fallen out of all their lives when she had disappeared.
It was only a feeling, one that could never be substantiated, but without a shadow of doubt Harriet felt that Amory could not have been unaware that his wife was carrying on an affair beneath his very nose. Which led to the conclusion she had
been afraid of from the very instant that she had heard of the discovery of Beatrice's body. Harriet was quite certain the police must have thought of it, too. Grigsby wasn't tripping over his feet in his haste to find the person responsible for their mother's death, but she was sure he had his theories, including this one, the one Harriet feared most of all.
The sun had by now moved away from the front of the house and inside it was growing dark. Harriet switched on a lamp, glanced at the clock. “They should be back any time.”
“Perhaps we ought to come back another day,” Vita said.
“Well, you'll have to make it soon. He's off to Egypt the day after tomorrow.”

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