44

Time doesn’t heal, it just gives you other things to think about.

‘How are you feeling?’ Henry said, speaking gently so as not to startle me.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Darling, I wish you’d stop treating me like a restive horse.’

He had been like this since we had discovered I was pregnant. I’d never seen him so excited, so happy. I was less certain about my own feelings. Over the years I had grown used to not being pregnant. So the possibility that I might be had been unsettling, like a threatened invasion. And the knowledge that I actually was left me breathless with excitement and fear.

‘Would it be better if I drove?’ Henry asked.

‘If you drive I’ll be holding on to the seat for the whole journey.’ I changed down for a corner and threw a smile at him. ‘I feel much more secure if I’ve got the steering wheel.’

We drove for a moment in silence through the gentle Hampshire countryside. It was September, and the afternoon still had the warmth of summer. I kept the speed down, dawdling along the A31 in our new Ford Consul, because we’d been invited to tea and I didn’t want to be early. Granny Byfield liked punctuality in others.

‘I wish the old hag wasn’t going to be there,’ Henry said. ‘It’ll be bad enough as it is.’

‘Not for you, surely. At least you’ve talked to David on the phone.’

‘It’s not the same. The sooner he gets another job, the better.’

‘And for Rosie.’

I didn’t want to see David, and I wanted to see Rosie even less. They would remind me of Janet.

‘If it’s a girl,’ I said, ‘I’d like to call her Janet.’

Henry touched my hand on the steering wheel. ‘Of course.’ He squeezed my fingers for an instant. ‘Darling, at least we’re making a fresh start now. Everything else is in the past.’

‘Yes, Henry,’ I said, and added silently to myself, They’re all in the past, Francis, Mr Treevor and Janet, and even your Hairy Widow with those wonderfully frivolous navy-blue shoes. You can never really go back to what you once were, not unless you grow senile like Mr Treevor. You can never forget what you and others have done.

Granny Byfield’s flat in Chertsey was in a small block near the centre of the town. David answered the door. I was shocked at the change in him. He had never been fat, but he had lost a lot of weight in the last few months. Suffering had made him less handsome than he had been, but in a strange way more attractive. He brushed my cheek with cold lips.

‘You look fit,’ Henry said.

They shook hands awkwardly.

‘I managed to do quite a lot of walking up in Yorkshire.’ David had spent nearly two months immured in an Anglo-Catholic monastery, a sort of gymnasium for the soul which Canon Hudson had found for him. ‘Mother and Rosie are in the sitting room. By the way, she doesn’t like one to smoke.’

Granny Byfield and Rosie were sitting at a tea table in the bay window. The room was large for a modern flat, but seemed smaller because it was filled with furniture and ornaments, and because the walls were covered with dark, striped paper like the bars of a cage.

Rosie had Angel in her arms. The doll was in her pink outfit, now rather grubby. Rosie seemed unchanged from that time six or seven months ago when I had first seen her in the garden of the Dark Hostelry. She was wearing a different dress, of course. This one was green with white flecks – I remembered Janet making it for her. But she must have grown a little since then, because the dress was getting small for her.

We shook hands with Granny Byfield, who looked us up and down but did not smile. I bent and kissed the top of Rosie’s head.

‘Hello, how are you?’

Rosie looked up at me. She said nothing. I hugged her, and it was like hugging a doll, not a person.

‘You must answer when you’re spoken to, Rosemary,’ Granny Byfield said. ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’

‘Hello, Auntie Wendy,’ Rosie said.

‘How’s Angel?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘Mama!’ said Angel, as if in confirmation.

‘Now sit down and make yourself comfortable,’ Granny Byfield ordered. ‘I’ll make the tea, and David can bring it in.’

The little tea party went on as it had begun. It would have been a difficult meeting at the best of times. But with Granny Byfield there we had no chance of success whatsoever. She could have blighted a field of potatoes just by looking at it.

I tried to talk to Rosie, but on that occasion I didn’t get very far. She answered in monosyllables except when I asked if she was looking forward to going to school.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to go home.’

‘I expect you and Daddy will soon have a new home, and then you –’

‘I want the home we had before.’ She stared at the top of the doll’s head. ‘I want everything to be like before.’

We stayed less than an hour. David came downstairs with us, pulling out a packet of cigarettes as we reached the communal front door of the flats. We left Rosie helping her grandmother clear the tea table, a small, blonde slave poised on the verge of mutiny.

Henry accepted a cigarette and produced his lighter. ‘Any news about a job?’

David shook his head.

‘Is it because of Janet?’ I asked.

His face didn’t change at the name but I felt as if I’d kicked him. ‘I don’t think it helps. But really it’s simply that the right sort of job hasn’t come along yet.’

‘A university chaplaincy, perhaps?’ Henry suggested. ‘You’ll want to carry on with your book and so on, I expect.’

‘I thought I might go into parish work. I’m helping out here.’

I was surprised but didn’t say anything.

‘I did a lot of thinking in Yorkshire,’ David went on, answering our unspoken questions. ‘And praying. I came to the conclusion it was time for a change of direction.’

Henry said, ‘Wendy and I thought – well, if you ever want a job in a prep school, you’ve only got to ask.’

‘I don’t think I’d be very good at teaching small boys. Or small girls, come to that.’

‘But you’ll come and stay, won’t you?’ I said. ‘Come now, if you like. And Rosie. There’s bags of room.’

‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.’

He turned away from me as he spoke because gratitude never came easily to David. I glanced up at the window of the flat and saw Rosie looking down at us.

‘It would be nice for Rosie, of course,’ Henry said. ‘And I expect she’d be a civilizing influence on our little barbarians.’

‘Is she all right?’ I asked. ‘She seemed rather quiet.’

‘She wants her mother.’ David stared at the tip of his cigarette. ‘I think she’d like to be four years old again and stay that way for ever. Of course, there’s not much for her to do here, and that doesn’t help.’ He moistened his lips. ‘It’s not been easy for her. Or for my mother, come to that.’

‘Your mother must seem quite – quite formidable to a small child,’ I said.

‘Mother has very firm ideas about children and how they should behave.’ He glanced at me, and I thought I saw desperation in his face. ‘She thinks Rosie’s very babyish, for example. So she tries to encourage her to be more grown up. Once she took that doll away from her, and there was a terrific fuss.’

‘Rosie told me she wanted to go back home.’

‘She still finds it hard to accept what’s happened.’

‘To accept that it can’t be changed?’ I thought of the Hairy Widow. ‘To know that it’s something she’ll never escape from, for the rest of her life?’

Henry cleared his throat. ‘Poor little kid, eh? Still, time’s a great healer.’

David was still looking at me. ‘Mother’s right, in a way. Rosie is being babyish at present. But that’s only because on some level she thinks it might somehow cancel out what’s happened. You see?’

‘Like a sort of magic?’

‘Yes. But she can’t go on doing that for the rest of her life.’

‘What about clothes?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I couldn’t help noticing that dress was rather small for her. Getting some new clothes might help her start making a break with the past.’

‘When in doubt, go shopping,’ Henry said. ‘It’s every woman’s motto, young and old.’

David rubbed his forehead. ‘I don’t think Rosie’s had anything new since we left Rosington.’

‘Then why don’t I take her up to town? I’m sure she’d enjoy that – it would take her out of herself, give her something new to think about. We could make a day of it.’

‘I couldn’t possibly –’

‘Why not? I’d enjoy it too. It would be nice if we could do it this week. We’ll be pretty busy after that.’

‘I must admit it would be very useful. Mother’s not as mobile as she was. She doesn’t really like shopping. And perhaps you’re right – perhaps it would help Rosie come to terms with things.’

‘That’s settled then.’ I took out my diary. ‘What about Thursday?’

‘Fine, I think. I’ll ring to confirm, shall I?’ He turned to Henry. ‘Are you sure this won’t cause problems? When does term start?’

‘Next week. I’m as nervous as hell, actually.’

‘Teaching’s like riding a bicycle,’ David said. ‘Once learned, never forgotten. Mother’s the same with people. Never forgets a face.’

It wasn’t the teaching that worried Henry. It was the responsibility.

David looked at me. ‘Which reminds me – my mother remembered whom she saw in Rosington.’

I looked at him blankly for a moment, and then nodded as the memories flooded back. I’d just driven Granny Byfield up from the station and she’d seen a woman whose face was familiar going into the Close by the Sacristan’s Gate. Henry and I had seen her lunching at the Crossed Keys a few hours earlier. Also, according to Henry, later that afternoon she’d driven up Rosington High Street in a big black car with Harold Munro beside her.

All this on the last day of Janet’s life. And at this moment I didn’t give a damn who the woman was. The only thing that mattered at present was David, who was trying to mention the day of Janet’s death as if it had been any other day. I wished I could hug him as I’d hugged Rosie.

‘My mother met her last month at a charity lunch in Richmond. It’s Lady Youlgreave.’

‘What on earth was she doing in Rosington?’ Henry said. ‘Did your mother find out?’

‘Oh yes. They had quite a chat once they discovered they had something in common. She’d been on a motoring holiday in East Anglia and she stopped for lunch in Rosington. Apparently Francis Youlgreave was her husband’s uncle.’

I dared not look at Henry. An idea slipped into my mind, as unwelcome as a thief in the night. If Harold Munro had been in Lady Youlgreave’s car, then didn’t that suggest that Simon Martlesham wasn’t Munro’s employer? Didn’t it make it much more likely that Martlesham was Munro’s quarry?