12

SUMMER RAIN, GENTLE but insistent, smeared the world grey and green. Charlotte stood at her bedroom window, watching it fall and wishing it would continue for ever, listening to its peck and patter against the glass, wanting the stain of every sunny day washed from her memory.

Hope Cove, at the dawn of her childhood recollection: the sand between her toes; the tiny crabs scuttling in the rock pools; her mother warmly scented and ever smiling: her father boisterous and laughing; and Maurice in his late teens, self-conscious and wary, uncertain whether he wanted to join the game on the beach or stand apart and scoff. It had been sunny then, the whole fortnight. And already the lie had begun.

Charlotte lowered her chin to meet the soothing coolness of the bathrobe and closed her eyes, prising apart the tangled undergrowth of long-ago incidents in search of the discrepancies she should have noticed, the inconsistencies and contradictions which must have formed the fabric of the lie. But there were none. They had remained loyal to each other. They had let nothing slip, nothing show, nothing reveal the falsehood upon which they were set. ‘This is a photograph of Tristram Abberley, Charlie.’ ‘This is a book of his poems.’ ‘These are the verses that feed and clothe you, Charlie.’ ‘These are the secret we will never tell.’

She turned and walked into the bathroom, where already the water was halfway up the tub. She looked in the mirror and cursed the weakness that showed in the brimming redness of her eyes. She could not free her throat of the constricted urge to sob, to weep and surrender to the bitterness she felt. A night had passed since Emerson McKitrick had forced her to confront the possibility that everything alleged against Maurice might be true, a night since Maurice had telephoned her in a fluent yet flawed attempt to set her mind at rest.

‘It’s possible you might hear from McKitrick, Charlie. He’s in a vindictive mood and I wanted to warn you not to take what he says seriously.’

‘What might he say, Maurice?’

‘That I told him about the letters. I couldn’t have done, of course, because I didn’t know they existed. But he’ll try anything to wriggle out of admitting how he found out about them.’

‘You didn’t learn who put him up to it, then?’

‘My bet is he put himself up to it. My bet is he stole the letters and destroyed them and is prepared to blacken anybody’s name if he thinks it’ll help to cover his tracks.’

‘Blacken your name, you mean?’

‘Exactly. He might even be able to persuade some people to believe his story.’

Maurice had paused, waiting, it seemed, for Charlotte to assure him that she would not place a scrap of faith in anything McKitrick said. She stepped back from the mirror and turned off the taps remembering the momentary silence with which she had tortured him.

‘Charlie?’

‘I’m still here, Maurice. And don’t worry. If Emerson McKitrick contacts me, I shall know how to deal with him.’

‘Well, these Americans are great ones for conspiracy theories. They can only thrive if people want to believe them.’

‘Quite. I do understand, believe me.’

‘That’s all I wanted to be sure of.’

‘Then I’ll say good night. It’s late and I’m very tired.’

But she had not been tired. Her mind had teemed with competing thoughts, scrabbling and scrambling towards the truth. Fatigue, which dragged now at her every bone, had seemed then a condition she would never again experience. After bidding Maurice good night, she had scoured the house for records of her family’s past: snapshots, postcards, letters, greetings, books, papers, cuttings, jottings; the scraps and remainders left behind and overlooked wherein she had hoped to find, but had not, the answer she was still bound to seek.

Charlotte let her robe fall to the floor and lowered herself into the consoling warmth of the bath, closing her eyes and stretching back as the heat relaxed her muscles and the steam invaded her senses. There was no alternative to the course she had decided upon. They had left her none, with their lifetime of deceptions and evasions. Her lifetime, built on their lie. Now she had to know. She had to be certain. In her own mind, this one issue demanded to be settled.

An hour later, cleansed and utterly calm, she descended to the hall, checked the time, then picked up the telephone and dialled Swans’ Meadow.

‘’Ello?’

‘Aliki, this is Charlie. Is Ursula there?’

‘Oh, ’ello Charlie. Yes, Meesus Abberley is ’ere. I put you through.’

A lengthy pause. Charlotte looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was a model of self-possession. So far, so good.

‘Hello, Charlie. This is a surprise.’ Only the choice of phrase, not its tone, hinted at irony on Ursula’s part. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘You can have lunch with me.’

‘Today?’ Shortage of notice, it seemed, was a greater obstacle than Charlotte having overheard her having sex with Emerson McKitrick. ‘I’m afraid I can’t. I have too much on.’

‘You had nothing on last time I was at Swans’ Meadow. Unless you want me to tell Maurice exactly what I witnessed on that occasion, you will have lunch with me.’

Several seconds passed before Ursula replied. ‘Lunch it is then, Charlie. Such an unexpected pleasure.’