CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Holmes recovered his voice first. “You have this diary?”
“Then you weren’t sent to retrieve it?” Hastings said, which sounded more a confirmation of suspicions than a question.
“Why didn’t you tell us you had it in the first place?” I demanded.
“I thought you would ask for it and then leave,” he answered slowly. “When you did not immediately do so, I realised that I wanted you to hear the entire story. Would you have stopped here the afternoon if I’d offered you the diary the minute you arrived? Gabriel deserved having his eulogy delivered once, at least. Thank you for listening.”
With an effort, he pushed himself to his feet and tottered out of the door and up the hallway to the room at the front of the house. We followed, to a book-lined room whose clammy, stale air testified to the fact that its occupation was only occasional, probably in the summer months. Certainly the books looked well read; the desk was tidy but also showed signs of long use. He went around the desk, pulled open a drawer, and took from the top of it a volume about five inches by seven, bound in once-crimson leather, the edges folded in from a lengthy stay in its owner’s pockets or pack. Hastings held it for a moment, then gave it to Holmes, who opened it just long enough to riffle through the pages before placing it in his pocket. Hastings’ gaze followed the object until it had disappeared from view, then he reached down and slid shut the drawer.
Manners—and more, compassion—demanded that we allow Hastings to assert his hospitality by serving us more of his near-Arabic coffee. With pulses racing, we eventually took our leave, thanking him for all he had done, for us and for Gabriel.
“It is I who need to thank you,” he told us. “For years I have longed to speak of that boy. It was good to say his name, even if your coming has meant that his name is now the only possession of his I have left.”
“The family will, I am sure, wish to thank you themselves.”
“They know where to find me.”
We shook hands and turned to go, but I hesitated, and looked back up at the old man.
“Will you be all right?” I asked. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“There is nothing you can do for me,” he answered gently, and the door closed against us, the house again a faceless presence.
“That is not entirely true,” Holmes muttered to himself, and stopped in the high street to send a long and carefully worded telegram to the parish’s bishop, to the effect that one of his flock was in need of episcopy and succour.
We found the next London train to be in slightly less than an hour, and as one side of the waiting area was occupied by a weary woman with three small children and the other by an aged deaf couple, the noise precluded easy conversation. We retired to a nearby public house, ordered food and alcohol to modify the effects of the coffee that was coursing through our veins, and settled into a private corner with the musings of the young second lieutenant.
Both of us gave but a glancing look at the final pages. The agony of those entries demanded an attitude on the part of the reader that neither Holmes nor I felt capable of summoning at the moment; we were seeking facts, and although there were names there, none were immediately informative. Holmes turned to the entries dated February, skimmed through a self-consciously laconic account of battle and a rather more detailed description of the joys of the behind-the-lines delousing baths, and then went back to the front line to the night before a “push.” The next entry was dated sixteen days later, with the notation, “In hospital.”
Here we were introduced to Hélène, but as an introduction it left a great deal to be desired. The young man had spent a mere two weeks away from his journal, but during that time his life had changed so completely, it would seem that he could scarcely remember his previous existence. A good part of that, no doubt, was the consequence of having all but died in what he had so feelingly called “cream-of-man soup.” His nerves were, as the diary put it, “pretty funk,” and the shaky handwriting, which I had seen earlier on the field post-card, reflected the state of his mind.
Gabriel Hughenfort’s brush with death, however, was only a part of his transformation—or perhaps, was only the act of demolition that cleared the way for the next stage. For by the time he set indelible pencil to paper again, his mind and his heart had already grown up anew around the woman whose face he had first seen bent over his stretcher. He wrote:
It makes me smile, to think that at the first sight of Hélène I thought she was a man. Her back was to me, of course—no-one looking into her eyes would ever make that mistake, no matter how scrambled his brains!—and she was wearing a heavy leather jacket with sheepskin at the collar. Then she turned to me, checking that I wasn’t going to be thrown to the floor when we hit a pothole, and thus undo all the work the bearers had gone to. I’ve never seen eyes like that, green as the hills she was raised in. Heaven only knows what she saw. I could’ve been a Chinaman for all she could tell, or old as her father or ugly as sin. I was clotted with France, hair to boot-lace, and stinking of battle.
His description went on, the only references to her identity or appearance so obscured by infatuation as to be useless. She was green-eyed and tall, and strong enough to lift a grown man into the ambulance, but everything else was poetry and song. One could not even be certain that Hélène was her given name and not a lover’s affectionate substitute for an unbearably ordinary, even ugly, true name.
Finding the VAD driver behind “the face that launched a thousand ships” (the young man’s rather hackneyed phrase which had made me suspicious of the woman’s true name) was going to take some doing. I thought I might know where to begin, however, and as Holmes glanced at his watch and made to go, I proposed, “Shall I take Hélène, and you the major?”
“As usual, Russell, you speak the very words on my tongue. And Simpson’s at eight to compare notes?”
I glanced down at my travel-worn dress and the gloves that badly wanted cleaning. “If we must, but I shall have to go by my flat to retrieve some clothes.”
“Give my regards to the Qs” was all he said. He, after all, should have to make a detour to one of his bolt-holes to exchange his own clothing, so I could not complain.
We took our seats on the train and spent the trip with the Hughenfort diary on our knees, but made few notes. We arrived in London, claimed the bags we’d left there, and went our separate ways.
My taxi deposited me in front of the modernistic block of flats in Bloomsbury in which I had taken a furnished suite of rooms several years before, and somehow never bothered to replace with a more permanent pied-à-terre. Or a more comfortable one—I always forgot, when I’d been away for a while, how awful the place actually was, all chrome tubes and glass. It had matched perfectly the persona I was assuming at the time of the original let, but was, I realised suddenly, a ridiculous place to maintain on the off chance I might need to act the social butterfly in the future. Too, the furniture the actual owners had chosen was beginning to look decidedly out of date. Time for a change, I thought, and dropped my bags on the floor.
A gentle knock followed by the rattle of a key in the lock told me the doorman had informed my housekeeping couple of my arrival. I greeted the Quimbys, husband and wife, and apologised for not warning them of my arrival.
“In fact,” I said, “I asked the doorman to let you be. I’m only here for a change of clothing; no need to turn up the radiators and buy milk for that.”
But Mrs Q was already unloading a picnic hamper to make tea, and I submitted to her sense of propriety.
There was hot water for a bath, and the clothes hanging in the large and ornate bedroom were free of moth and must. I sorted through them, mildly grumbling at the change in hem-lengths over the past two years, and noticed that they had been recently gone over with brush and iron. Mrs Q had to be bored, caring for a household of ghosts, but I did not know that I could do much to change that, not with this place. I couldn’t even ask how they spent their days, since both would be offended at my concern. It simply Wasn’t Done.
The next time I passed through the kitchen I put my head around the corner into the portion given over to a butler’s pantry. Q shot to his feet, a polishing cloth in one hand and one of my shoes in the other.
“Does your wife’s cousin Freddy Bell still keep his finger on London properties?” I asked him.
“Well, yes, I believe he does, mum.”
“Good. I’d like to get out of this place, set up an establishment of my own. Maybe you and he could put your heads together—along with Mrs Quimby, of course—and see if there’s anything on the market just now. House or flat, but larger than this, with quarters for you and Mrs Q. We’ll probably decorate it ourselves—and not like this place.”
A whisper of approval slipped past his professional face at my final phrase; I gave him a sympathetic smile and left him to his polishing.
It took me a while on the telephone (an instrument of white and gilt) but I succeeded in locating the woman I sought. She was a dispatch rider in London at the time I had met her, a suffragette doing war service, but she had been a driver in Belgium until a stray shell had hit her ambulance, killing the other VAD attendant and the patients they were transporting. She herself had been made deaf by the explosion, and although a certain amount of hearing had returned, she blithely declared that near-deafness was an advantage to a London driver. Having ridden pillion with her once and been fully aware of the curses on our trail, I could only agree.
Gwyneth Claypool was, her colleague who answered the telephone told me, currently in a meeting with the head teachers of several schools, which was due to finish at four o’clock but would probably go on until closer to five. She gave me the address and rang off. I raided my wardrobe for a dress suitable both for confronting feminists and sitting in the women’s dining room at Simpson’s, had Q ring for a taxi, and left, promising to return for further discussions on the house question as soon as I could.
London was cold and inhospitable, a dreary rain splashing against the taxi’s curtains and dribbling off of the passing hats and umbrellas. At the address I had been given, an assistant guarding the door refused to let me out of the freezing-cold entrance foyer and wouldn’t think of disturbing the meeting with a message. So I took a seat in the least draughty corner I could find, and slowly congealed inside my fur-lined coat.
Gwyneth’s voice half an hour later crackled through the building and rescued me from my icy perch. It had always been loud, I suspect even before her deafness set in, and the silent building quivered in reaction; the tinkle of shattering icicles seemed to follow it. She left the meeting as no doubt she had begun it, commanding action.
“—and I think you’ll find the situation much improved. Girls that age need a goal, or they seek out all kinds of trouble. We’ll meet again in the new year, see how it’s coming along.”
I unfolded myself from my cramped huddle and stumbled forward on numb feet to intercept her. She spotted me, squinted in uncertainty; then her face opened in a wide smile and she boomed a greeting across the echoing space.
“Hello, Gwyn,” I returned.
“Mary! What are you doing here? Looking for me? But why in heaven’s name didn’t you come and find me—you must be in an advanced stage of ice cube–ism. Come along; we’ll find a warm corner with drinks in it and bemoan the state of the world.”
Merely being in Gwyneth Claypool’s presence tended to have a warming effect on a person, even before she thrust into my hand a drink she’d bullied the barman into constructing. It looked like pond scum, smelt of the Indies, and went down with a jolt that tingled the toes and lifted the scalp.
“Lord, Gwyn!” I gasped. “What is this?”
“Rum butter. Does the trick, doesn’t it? Wish I’d known about it in 1914—if we’d issued the men rum in this form, they’d have overrun the Germans by Christmas.”
I loosened my coat and removed my gloves and hat, and set about getting the drink inside me, a quarter-teaspoon at a sip, while Gwyn and I caught each other up on our lives since we’d last met nearly three years earlier.
“Still married?” she shouted, raising the eyebrows of the other customers.
“Indeed I am. And you?”
“No time, no time for all the nonsense.”
So I asked her what she did have time for and she told me of her many projects related to the rights of women, and we talked of that and this and of times past and the feebleness of the present. No, she no longer sped around London on her racing motor-cycle, she’d been run over by a lorry one day when she hadn’t heard it coming and her mother made her stop. And no, she wasn’t hurt, a broken wrist was all but Mum was seventy now and anxious, so the motor-cycle resided in the country—or rather the original machine’s replacement did—where she could roar up and down to her heart’s content.
Eventually our drinks were empty, seconds refused, and she asked me what I’d wanted of her.
“I need to find one of the VAD drivers who was serving in France in 1918, somewhere west of Reims. She might’ve been French, although what she’d have been doing fetching our lot I can’t think. The only name I have for her is Hélène, and even that may be a nick-name. She had green eyes and was tall; that’s all I know.”
“Green eyes sounds like Charlie, but she was a Scottish girl, or was she American?”
“French-Canadian, maybe?”
“She could have been. Yes, I think—no, I’m confusing her with another girl who was killed in an attack. Her name was something like Helen, but she had dark eyes. Pretty thing. Bled to death from a piece of shrapnel in the throat.”
The room cringed in reaction, and two customers beat a hasty retreat. Gwyn noticed, and lowered her voice.
“Sorry. I forget. Why do you need to find this driver?”
“A friend is trying to find what happened to a nephew of his who was killed in ’18, not satisfied with the official story, and the boy’s diary mentions this Hélène in a manner that indicates they knew each other. She drove him out to the first-aid post.”
“Love at first sight, eh?”
“So it seems. But because he changed regiments and moved around, it’s hard to track down fellow soldiers who might have known him well. We thought he might’ve written this Hélène letters that gave an idea of his situation. The family just wants to know.”
“And the next step’s a séance, is that it? Let me ask around, see what I can come up with. She may’ve come after I had to leave—probably did, in fact, or I’d’ve met her. I’ll give my replacement there a ring, see if green eyes mean anything to her.”
“That’s great, Gwyn. Thanks so much.”
“So who’s the family?”
I hesitated, then said, “Can I tell you that after everything’s cleared up? It’s only, sometimes publicity raises dust and makes it hard to finish.”
“Fair enough. If you promise to bring along this mysterious husband of yours. Ought to meet him, now that he seems permanent.”
The image of Holmes and Gwyn Claypool circling each other like a pair of wary dogs flickered through my mind, and I had to laugh.
“No promises, Gwyn, but I’ll see what I can do.”
I glanced at my wrist-watch, then looked more closely in astonishment: We had been at our chat for better than two hours, and if I was to meet Holmes, I would have to scurry. I gave her a card with the flat’s telephone number written on it (an extension of which line rang in the downstairs servants’ quarters) and resumed my outer clothing. We left the building, embraced, and climbed into separate cabs.
Holmes was not at Simpson’s when I arrived, which did not surprise me. I went to their Ladies to tidy my hair-pins, then allowed the maitre d’ to show me to one of Holmes’ preferred tables.
Half an hour later, Holmes had not arrived, and I was glowering in my seat. At forty minutes my embarrassment and irritation began to crumple under concern. At forty-five minutes the maitre d’ came up to the table with a slip of paper in his hand. It read:
KINDLY INFORM MISS RUSSELL THAT HER COMPANION IS AT HIS BROTHER’S. PLEASE TELL HER THAT SHE MUST NOT TAKE THE FIRST AVAILABLE TAXI.
The man before me must have seen my face and feared I was about to succumb to some ladylike vapours, but I brushed away his hand and reached for my possessions.
The only reason to avoid the first convenient taxi was for fear it would be a trap. And the only reason to fear a trap—as well as the explanation for why Holmes was not here—was that an attack had already been attempted.