The Shortest Journey (20 page)

‘No,’ I said warmly. ‘It sounds splendid.’

He smiled. ‘Olive and I travelled quite a bit – never
to England, I couldn’t face that. And last year – now here’s a very
strange thing – last year, when we were in Paris in some café, I
picked up a copy of The Times and there, what should catch my eye
but an announcement of his death. “Colonel Julian Rossiter, The
Manor House, Stone Down, Somerset”.’

I remembered Thelma had taken over all the
arrangements. It was she who had decided on cremation and on the
precise charity to which donations should be sent.

Christian Vanderlinden continued, ‘I wrote to Edie,
quite a formal letter, just saying that I’d seen the announcement
and asking how she was. They forwarded the letter to that Home.’
There was a world of scorn in the last word. ‘Fancy putting Edie in
a Home, as if she was an old woman!’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘it shouldn’t have happened.’

‘That bitch of a daughter.’

His vehemence shocked me and then I thought for a
moment and said, ‘Yes, you’re right. Thelma is a bitch, she always
has been. I’m so used to thinking about her as a comic sort of
character – Horrible Thelma, which is what my friend Rosemary and I
always used to call her when we were young. But one should really
look at her dispassionately and see just what a vilely manipulative
person she is. She fools so many people with that saccharine manner
... And Alan’s not much better.’

He gave me a grateful look and said, ‘Edie said that
she didn’t know how she would have got through, if it hadn’t been
for you and your mother.’

‘She asked for so little,’ I said, ‘just someone to
love and be loved by.’

‘Is that so little?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps, sometimes,
it is a lot to ask. Certainly it is the greatest gift that anyone
can give – I know that.’

‘Did she reply to your letter?’

‘Oh, yes. We wrote to each other several times. Then
I went down to see her. I left Olive in London and went on my own.
It was wonderful. After all she’d been through she was still my
Edie, just as sweet and loving as she’d been all those years ago. I
wanted her to leave that place there and then, but she wouldn’t.
She was afraid that daughter of hers would come after us ... So I
made a little plan. She would pretend to go shopping, let them
think that she’d be back, and then meet me and Olive and we’d come
down here, where no one would find her. So that’s what we did. She
felt badly, though, about you, knowing that you’d worry, but she
didn’t tell you because she knew her daughter would be on to you
straight away and she didn’t want you to have to lie for her.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘If I’d known, I might have broken
under Thelma’s cross-examination! But,’ I asked, ‘why here? I mean,
I know it’s remote, but why this particular spot?’

‘You’ll laugh. It was a silly, sentimental sort of
thing. When we were young, back in Durban, we used to read poetry
together – Wordsworth in particular – and one of our favourites was
his poem written near Tintern Abbey. We always said that one day
we’d go to England and read the poem there, where he wrote it.’

‘And did you?’

‘Yes, just before…

‘I’m so glad. “Little, nameless, unremembered acts of
kindness and of love” – yes, that was dear Mrs Rossiter. So what
happened? Was it a heart attack?’

‘Yes. Quite sudden – thank God. The doctor came at
once but it was all over.’

‘I’m sorry...’

‘These last few months have been wonderful. She’s ...
she felt it too, she said so over and over. It could never make up
for all the years we lost, but we found something at the
end...’

‘And now you’re going back to Canada, you and your
sister?’

‘Yes, next week. I’m sorry Olive can’t meet you – she
would have liked to very much, after hearing all the things that
Edie told her. They got on so well, almost like sisters. But she’s
not very well at the moment, some sort of virus, the doctor says,
and she’s stuck in bed. Not a good patient.’

‘I’m so sorry – and I’m very sorry to miss seeing
her.’

We chatted for a little while longer and then, as I
gathered up my bag and prepared to go, he asked, ‘How did you find
me?’

I explained about Michael seeing the name of the
solicitor in the
London Gazette
and how I’d come upon the
old man in the graveyard.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘that you had that dreadful
shock. It must have been really bad. But I’m so glad that you came
here and that we’ve had this talk. I was going to write to you when
I got back to Ontario, but this is so much better.’

He came with me to the door and, as we stood
looking out over the valley, he quoted, smiling,

“These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild.”

‘I’ll never forget this place.”

I held out my hand. ‘Goodbye, and thank you
for giving her those last months.’

He took my hand in both of his and clasped it
warmly. As I went down the path I could feel his eyes upon me, but
when I got to the car and turned to wave goodbye he had closed the
door and was gone.

I drove across the Meend and took a winding road that
led me down to the river. I went on, through Llandogo until, across
the Wye, I could see the outline of the abbey ruins silhouetted
against a pink and gold sky. It was breathtakingly beautiful and I
hoped that Mrs Rossiter and Christian Vanderlinden had seen it at
such a moment. I pulled into a lay-by and sat for a while looking
across at Wordsworth’s steep woods and lofty cliffs and hearing his
words echoing in my head:

For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue.

And there I said a last goodbye to my old friend.
Then, as I started on the long drive home, I put the car radio on
and tried to lose myself in the ordinary, commonplace things that
make up our real life.

Next morning I went to see Mrs Jankiewicz. As I told
her about my journey and what I had discovered she sat silently,
her hands in her lap. She was so unresponsive that I suddenly
looked at her and exclaimed, ‘You knew! You knew where she’d gone
all the time! That’s why you would never talk about it!’

She leaned forward and took my hand in a rare gesture
of affection.

‘I’m sorry, Sheila, but I could tell no one. I
promise not to tell anyone, even you. She would not have told me,
but I go into her room that day he was there and she have to
explain who he is, and, well, I am not a stupid. I can see how
happy she is, she has to go with him. Was a miracle.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But oh, how I wish she’d had just a
little longer.’

‘The length of time, it does not matter. Enough that
it came.’

‘You’re right, I suppose. It’s just that I’m greedy
for her...’

‘Her time had come. Time to make that final journey –
is the shortest one we make, from this world to the next. Soon, I
too will make it.’

‘No,’ I protested, ‘not you. You’re so strong, you
won’t leave us all yet!’

But, as I looked at her, I saw that she too was frail
and old.

Life went on. I began research on another book and,
with the horrid imminence of the festive season, found myself
submerged in arrangements about Christmas Fayres, baking endless
trays of mince pies for the freezer against the day when they would
be demanded of me by the organisers of events for various good
causes. I had just returned from a morning of pricing Fancy Goods
for one of the stalls – always a delicate matter when the maker of
the object to be priced is standing at one’s elbow, ready to take
offence if she (it is usually a she) considers it has been
undervalued. Rosemary and I had also been putting up the trestle
tables, borrowed from the boy scouts and always a source of
friction.

‘Honestly,’ Rosemary said, ‘you’d think they were
inlaid with gold leaf the way George Hood goes on about them.
Anyone would think we were going to dance on them, not just cover
them with woolly bedsocks and matinee coats. “You will take care of
them, won’t you?’” She mimicked the Scoutmaster’s voice. ‘He
really is a terrible old woman.’

‘Well, he does have a mother,’ I said.

Rosemary sighed. ‘Haven’t we all!’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘What’s she up to now?’

‘It’s Christmas. Jilly wants Jack and me to go to
them for the baby’s first Christmas – you know how silly one is – a
tree and all those little presents – although Delia is far too
young to know what’s going on. Do you know, Roger’s making her a
doll’s house?’

‘Bless him,’ I said. ‘Peter bought Michael a train
set for his first Christmas. So what’s the problem?’

‘Well, Jilly and Roger have very sweetly invited
Mother too – though goodness knows she’d only cast a blight on the
proceedings – and she won’t go. What she wants is for me to do the
whole thing for everyone, as I do it every year, so that she can
criticise everything. She couldn’t do that if we went to Jilly’s
because she’s just a little in awe of Roger. It’s something to do
with him being the son of a bishop.’

‘Oh, but you must go to Jilly’s,’ I said. ‘Apart from
everything else, you really do deserve to have your Christmas
dinner cooked by someone else for a change!’

‘Jack agrees with you, says we must go. But what can
I do about Mother? I can’t leave her to have Christmas on her
own.’

‘Serve her right. Anyway, she’s got Elsie to look
after her.’

‘Oh I know, but still ... She keeps saying that this
might be her last Christmas.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, she’s as strong as a
horse!’

‘Yes, well ... but she is old and you never know. I’d
feel so awful. Anyway, what would people think!’

I imagined Mrs Dudley’s plaintive voice: ‘No, never
mind me, I shall do very well on my own – I do feel that young
people like to lead their own lives ... Ah well, they’ll be old
themselves one day...’

‘You mustn’t let her blackmail you like this,’ I
said. But I knew that it was a lost cause and that Rosemary and
Jack would be having Mrs Dudley for Christmas as they had always
done. Blessed are the meek, I suppose, but it seems to me that they
have an awfully long time to wait for their inheritance.

‘Perhaps we might go to see Jilly and Roger at New
Year.’ Rosemary said tentatively.

It was quite a tiring morning and I was glad to get
home. I fed the animals and made myself a mushroom omelet. I had
just slid it, all warm and buttery, on to the plate when the phone
rang. For a moment I thought of ignoring it, but then, as I always
do, I thought it might be Michael with some problem, so I
resignedly put the omelet into the Aga warming oven and picked up
the receiver.

‘Sheila?’ It was Thelma. ‘I’ve just got back from New
York last week, actually – to find this
appalling
news about
Mother.’

So she knew that her mother was dead. I supposed the
solicitor had written.

‘This wicked business about the will!’

‘The will?’

It occurred to me that I had forgotten all about the
new will and the solicitor in Coleford. Somehow, what I had found
out that day in the cottage on the Meend made it seem
irrelevant.

‘Yes, this new will of my mother’s. She’s dead. Heart
attack – there was a doctor’s certificate. I always told you that
she wasn’t well enough to live on her own. Now, perhaps, you will
all see that I was right. But just before she died she made this
new will. Quite preposterous. Of course she couldn’t break the
Trust, thank God. I shall get Grandfather’s money, but all the rest
– her own money...’

Here she broke off, possibly to draw breath, possibly
from emotion.

‘Yes?’ I prompted her.

‘Well, there are a few bequests. You get that Regency
desk, by the way. It’s quite a nice piece – I had it valued – but
it’s been restored and wouldn’t fetch more than about seven hundred
and fifty pounds at auction. That mad Polish woman gets the rest of
the things in her room at West Lodge. Alan’ – here her voice became
shriller – ‘he gets a very large sum for that ridiculous expedition
with that scheming American woman. By the way, did I tell you that
he’s turned up again? He was in America with her all the time! The
rest of her fortune – and it’s well over a million – goes to this
man, Christian Vanderlinden.’

‘What!’

‘Yes. I’d never heard of him either. No address, just
the Bank of Canada in London. It seems he was someone she knew in
Durban when she was a girl. He went to see her at West Lodge – what
Mrs Wilmot was thinking of to let in a person like that! – and
persuaded her to go off with him and his sister. Did you ever hear
of such a thing! Well, there could only be one reason for that!
Especially since he wouldn’t let her tell anyone where she was. She
always was a fool, she’d do whatever anyone asked without
question.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she was very biddable.’

‘Exactly,
biddable
,’ Thelma repeated the word
with relish. ‘A biddable fool. Well. I wanted to fight the will –
undue influence and so forth – but Simon says that the costs would
be horrendous, even if he was acting for me. It would drag on and
on and there’d be precious little left.’

‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce,’ I murmured.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. So what will you do?’

‘Simon and I are going to South Africa next week to
sort out the details of the Trust relating to the property there. I
think we must get the money out of there if we can. Simon says the
situation isn’t as stable as he’d like.’

‘I see.’

‘Well, I thought I must just let you know what’s
happened and what a dreadful mess she’s made of things. Oh, by the
way, she’s buried in some peculiar place in Gloucestershire. I
forget the name, I’ll get my secretary to let you have it. I know
you have a
thing
about graves and so forth. I’ll be in
touch.’