After the strangeness of our visit and the endless waiting that must surely have irritated him no matter how well he hid the feeling, I had expected to find, somehow, that the Captain was angry with me. But there was no temper in the way he steered the car in an arc around the crumbling wall of the well and then up the short rise onto the trackway above the farmyard. The car went with a smooth acceleration that was admittedly quite fast, but really implied only readiness to get on with the next job in hand.
There wasn’t even any temper in the way he spoke as we approached the heavy dark of the chestnuts that marked the turning onto the lane. He asked me as if it were only a matter for idle curiosity, ‘What were you and Mrs Abbey talking about so intently just before we left?’
‘Her children,’ I replied promptly, biting my lip. ‘I promised I would keep an eye on them.’ And found suddenly that anger was lurking in me instead. I couldn’t fully tell what he’d meant by the question. I didn’t know if he now disliked the promise I’d given or he disbelieved me when I implied that this was all we’d said. I only knew that I had become so bewildered by all the contradictory questions that had crowded in through the course of my various exchanges in that rotten farmhouse that my mind was abandoning the lot and simply answering the injustice of having to feel like I’d done something wrong.
In an effort to disguise my rising frustration, I said shortly, ‘Wherever did you get this monster of a car anyway?’
‘It’s a Lagonda and I didn’t get it anywhere. My brother did.’
I saw his grimace. He knew that his answer had carried a sting. His foot eased its pressure upon the pedal and allowed the car to slow a little for the curve ahead. Over the deafening rattle of the rough trackway, he told me quite blandly, ‘Technically, it’s my father’s car now. Luckily for us, Bertie’s been religiously topping up the tank and a few spare cans with his petrol allowance over the past months, so I’ve got enough fuel to run about the countryside on Father’s errands, and then that’s it. It’ll have to be sold. My father doesn’t want it and I don’t need a car in London. I couldn’t run a thirsty beast like this anyway since I’m not yet in the habit of exploiting my position in the army to claim more than my basic petrol ration under the guise of having official duties.’
I was watching him, so I caught the swift sideways glance as the dark beneath the trees enfolded us in its shroud. And, in that last second before the brakes bit ready for the junction onto the lane, I saw the truth about his mood.
I saw that his restraint was as much about control as Mrs Abbey’s drama had been. She wasn’t unique in being disturbed by the private conversation they had shared and it wasn’t for her alone to feel the shock of our visit. But while her distress was all put into nerves and slander, here was withdrawal and a hard control of a different kind that was presently focused very firmly on keeping his worry contained and well shielded from me.
He still didn’t believe me or my part in this. But while I digested that unpleasant reality and all its implications in terms of what it said about how my general nature must be perceived, I saw something else. I saw his reserve and caught a brief, devastating glimpse of what true loneliness was. I saw the deep, dark isolation of a mind used to facing battle alone.
Concern welled so fiercely that I forgot myself. For him there was something here more grave than even I knew. A hand reached for his sleeve. ‘Richard!’
I surprised myself. I certainly surprised him. A quick drift of his eyes ran left to the touch I had laid upon his arm, and then on towards me. Then again and a curse as they widened and made my own eyes forget embarrassment, forget the impulse to snatch my hand away again; to instead tighten my fingers compulsively and wrench round to follow his gaze to the glass in my doorframe. Everything exploded in the rush as something large and black and metal plunged out of a piece of undergrowth beside me.
There was a jolt through the leather seat as the brakes engaged. They gripped, only I didn’t slow with the car and I slid as the wheel flung us into a swerve that sent me crashing into a parallel arc with our roaring neighbour. We took the inner turn. Brakes screamed. So did I, probably. Black metal veered and became instead the trunk of an enormous tree that had previously been on my right. The bellow of dirt and rubber and gravel smothered the frantic plea that formed around the hold I still had on his sleeve, either before, during, or shortly after we hit.
Then silence.
I think at some point during the tossing I might have raised my left arm so that it connected with the roof of the vehicle in place of my head. There was a blazing pain in my elbow. Now everything was still, even the engine, and there was a fearsome pressure on my hip too. I was crumpled horribly into the corner where my seat met the hard barrier of the door with my eyes tightly shut and half my body in the footwell. Now I blinked and saw that my left hand was rammed against the dashboard. I remember being very glad that the hand had snatched for that and not the door handle. It was painfully easy in this sort of car to be flung out onto the road because the hinge was at the rear of the door, meaning that the opening acted as a kind of funnel in an accident. Unluckier people had been thrown out and killed.
In this instance, however, the door remained safely closed. My other hand had abandoned his sleeve to find instead the sheer leather of the seat back. Fingers unclenched. The hand moved and moved again in an adjustment of its grip and slowly I eased myself out of my painful heap.
Beside me I heard the squeak as my driver adjusted his own position in his seat. With my eyes inescapably drawn to the rough bark of the trunk barely inches away from the glass of my passenger-side window, I murmured slightly hoarsely, ‘At least you needn’t disbelieve me any more about the existence of that man.’
I heard him give a short, dry laugh. There was a wealth of relief in it. I straightened a little more and went through the practical process of looking for that other car. It was long gone. I found it a little surprising that I was thinking so calmly instead of giving way to shock. Then I saw the way my hands were shaking and felt an overwhelming urge to be active, to get out of the car and walk about a little, perhaps under the guise of examining the tracks left by the black Ford. Only I couldn’t get out because that tree was there.
The Captain had no such trouble. His door was already open and he was coming around to examine the damage that the tree might have done to his car. I took the chance to slither across and out myself. I walked a jerky little turn, feeling the cool of the shade like ice on my fingers and finding no sign even of our skid that had saved us from colliding with that man. There were the trunks of tall trees here and the mottled shade of their canopy, just as innocent as it had been before we’d seen his car. The stillness of it all made me suddenly afraid that the burglar was a master at watching from the shaded places. I found that my turn abruptly ended just behind the Captain where he was bending by the wheel arch to peer at the flank of his car.
‘Any damage?’ My voice was rapid.
His voice was not. He straightened beside me. I was a touch close but he didn’t move away. He probably couldn’t with the tree roots just behind his feet. He told me, ‘I don’t think so. I hope not. Presumably you’ve heard by now some whisper of the state of the family finances.’
He had said that quite plainly and certainly without rancour but I flinched because it was true. It really was cold here. A turn of my head showed me the space behind scrubby undergrowth where the Ford had been concealed. I was a coward because I was protected on three sides by the car, this man’s presence and that tree and yet I was still finding it a struggle to speak slowly. I asked, ‘Do you think he was waiting there to do that?’
The Captain turned to me. His hand met my elbow, the one that wasn’t bruised, briefly in a gesture of reassurance. His skin was warm where mine was not. The hand dropped and then he moved past me back around the nose of the car to the open driver’s door. I stayed there, dithering by the tree as he said, ‘If you mean to ask whether he intended to run us into a tree, then no, I don’t think so. I think he was watching from afar and he got a nasty fright when our car burst out of the farmstead like that. I think we caught him at the end of a short sprint on foot and a panicked dive into his car. In a way this was my fault for driving like a fool.’
I said without thinking, ‘If you’d driven like a fool, we’d have hit him.’
He was standing now with one hand resting easily upon the rim of the open car door and the other upon the frame. Then he surprised me by drumming his thumb a little impatiently upon the car roof as a worry preyed on him and he asked seriously, ‘Did you get hurt back there?’
There was an intensity in his voice that shook almost more than the accident had. He was ready to feel responsible. Whereas for me, the question abruptly gave shock the excuse to work its way out of restraint and I didn’t want it. I blinked rapidly and mustered a smile, only to notice suddenly, unexpectedly, that he was looking as pale as I felt. Somehow the steady competence of his examination of the car had made me think he was impervious to such things as fright after a near miss.
My heart was suddenly beating and my own hand was flat upon the warm metal of the bonnet. The touch of that solid support was the only thing that was stopping the energy that was burning within me from finding release. If I had given way to it, I didn’t think I’d have ever stopped the mindless movement. ‘Are you hurt?’
The reflection of his concern back at him startled him, I think. I suppose it was a little strong. It betrayed how truly I was shaken and just how much I had been trying to hide it. It made him straighten from his easy stance in the open doorway as he absorbed it. He already knew I wasn’t particularly skilled at dealing with distress because I’d confessed it when I’d ranted about pacifism. Now I thought he was guessing that it wasn’t the risk of collision that was unnerving me here, but fear from the continued presence of that man. Because I knew that this was my third encounter with that other car now and it was inescapably frightening when the common theme was me. The grim thought was followed by the twist of suspecting that the Captain was thinking that too and moving on towards considering whether I might have known the man would be here and this ongoing unsteady attempt at concealing my fear was a mark of my guilt.
I couldn’t be sure what the Captain was thinking, but I could trace the thoughts running behind his eyes; the calculations and reassessments. There was certainly a glimpse of that deliberate restraint, the checking of a fuller honesty for a concealment of his own as he chose the simplest route towards managing this. He chose to diminish my part by ignoring my concern completely. He asked instead in a decidedly matter-of-fact voice, ‘Will you get in or do you want to wait while I bring the car forwards?’
As an act of declaring my self-control, I waited out there alone while he eased the car onto level ground. Then I climbed in. Back in the confines of the car, it brought a fresh shock to suddenly realise the body beside me was alive with the restrained intent that had driven him to set the car at just so much speed on this trackway in the first place. The vast engine added its own impatient throb to the tension, ready for the release of motion. It made me ask on a breathless note of intense disbelief, ‘Are you intending to go after him?’
My voice threatened to stray into plain revulsion. From him I got a brief flickering glance that felt like a challenge. And also amusement. ‘Do you want me to?’
He knew I didn’t. He was teasing me – not for the sake of argument but for the purpose of calming my alarm. He knew I wasn’t prepared for this. I had the sudden doubt of considering whether that small sympathy and that alone was the extent of his effort to exclude me. Not hateful suspicion, not allied to that man or the odd insinuations of Mrs Abbey; but purely because I was, in fact, too much of a coward to handle the rest. I said rather too firmly for such a small space within a car, ‘No! I think we need to go back down there and tell that woman that a known thief was spying on her.’
My fierce assertion at last of every idea I had of my own responsibility surprised him, I think. It also made the corner of his mouth curve a little again, like the amusement that went with a faint awakening of respect, only to be wiped away by the older unease that came from our recent departure from that house. And suddenly, absurdly, I was miserable. There really was guardedness here and the heavy sense of alienation.
I’d thought this had been set to be one of those moments where my unsteady but determined declaration of my mutual concern in this crisis would disperse the earlier tension – the tension where I felt trapped into worrying about the alarm this man seemed to have unleashed in that woman, and we both despised the part she seemed to be making me play in working to make this man feel his isolation. But now it was my turn to feel alone because I felt so small.
The car inched forwards, not to speed away down to the track but out into the sunshine where it settled, humming to itself, while the Captain beside me eased the gear into neutral and decided after all to broach the awful subject. He repeated himself by asking gently, ‘What did she say to you? She obviously frightened you.’
The real guilt jerked my head around again. I couldn’t bear to recount her unpleasant chatter to this man because surely it would be utterly idiotic to tell the Captain all that. And yet he was probing for something; forcing me to lurch into thinking again that he was perhaps waiting to see if I would explain my distress by confessing some connection to that man after all.
‘She didn’t frighten me,’ I said with a shade too much denial and perhaps that old irritation of injured pride. ‘She told me about the theft of your accounts ledgers. She told me that you will have to visit each and every one of your tenants to warn them that this fellow might turn up at their door. And for good reason, it seems, since presumably he’s lately attempted to do just that. Why didn’t you tell me this was your purpose from the start? Why did you bring me along on this? To act the part of camouflage while you found a quiet moment in which to frighten Mrs Abbey about your ledgers?’
It came out like a justification of the idea that he really should be treating me like a child. The sense of being utterly small felt infinitely worse when the Captain was only determinedly patient.
He replied reasonably, ‘It wasn’t me she was afraid of.’
The implication it was me made me give a bitter laugh. But he was right, though. There had been triumph on her face when she had teased the Captain by ignoring him, whereas her greeting of me had been very different. It steadied me. It told me why I was building up to railing at him – it was that timeworn defence of being ready to hurl blame at him, blame at anyone but myself.
Only what blame here was due to any of us anyway? I said rather more calmly, ‘I don’t think she was really afraid of me. I just surprised her by turning up on her doorstep with you when she’d thought I’d packed my bags to run away.’
After an uncomfortable silence, I asked tentatively in that more honest version of myself that was less wracked by nerves, ‘Why did you bring me along?’
‘Why do you think?’
I confessed unhappily, ‘Because you were never going to willingly leave me alone at the cottage after learning that your burglar had paid me a private visit.’
It was why he’d created a convenient excuse for both of us by asking me to come along to help. I knew he’d done it, but I’d still played along. And it was why, too, he’d kept the real purpose of his visit from me and why he’d capitalised on the chance of speaking to Mrs Abbey alone. It was because I’d made him think he had to protect me.
One of my hands had wrapped across my body, hugging myself defensively while my eyes roamed over the landscape outside the glass by my side. In this cramped, expensive car I felt my ridiculousness. The expanse out there of grassland before the distant treeline was huge and alien.
Very unexpectedly, the engine was suddenly, ominously, urged into motion. But we were only cruising gently back down the trackway into the farmyard. The wide hard-standing within that high boundary wall was empty and all the buildings were deserted. It didn’t need the sudden heat of climbing out to watch while he rapped on the house door to tell me that Mrs Abbey and her children had gone. I stayed by the car while he probed the depths of the dilapidated barn. It was open-fronted at this end and I could make out the navy gleam of a battered but beloved old Austin Seven, propped up on blocks like any number of other cars up and down the country whose owners couldn’t afford the petrol ration.
In the brief peace, the Captain appeared to come to a decision. He settled on direct delivery of everything that he had formerly tried to keep from me. Out of the gloom I heard him say, ‘Very well, Emily. I’m sorry if this now turns into a forced confrontation with everything you hate, but since the alternative seems to be just as upsetting, I really will have to simply tell you the rest. The truth is, I recovered some of the contents of your suitcase in my father’s library, where apparently they’d been tipped out to make room for the theft of the account ledgers. I have a bundle of your clothes in the boot of my car. I didn’t tell you before because it was impossible to do so without telling you all this when you’d quite clearly asked me not to. I’m sorry. I was going to return them to you later, when I thought we might have safely established that your part in this was over. Unfortunately, we’ve now had another run-in with that man and my belief that you were irrelevant lasted just as long as it took me to notice that for a newcomer to the area, you seem to have taken remarkably quickly to having whispered conversations with Mrs Abbey.’
I baulked. His apology had just been a foil for working in this insinuation. I was mortified and I was sickened by his idea of the need for a trap. Restless energy brought me away from the car and a step or two closer to him and the heart of the yard as I retorted angrily, ‘You still don’t believe me. I don’t know that man. I don’t remotely know that woman.’
‘Do you know,’ the Captain remarked, emerging from the gloom of that barn at last and dusting off his hands. He looked absolutely nothing like I thought he did. I’d braced myself to be confronted by a soldier who was focused and determinedly seizing this chance to pursue a few painful truths. The Captain was in fact a normal man in regular city clothes who was presently saying in quite an ordinary way, ‘I think it’s fairer to say that you don’t believe me.’
He drew off his jacket and moved past me to lay it over the hot metal roof of the car. The heat in this enclosed yard was painful after the cool of the trees. He returned to the bright blaze of the ground before me, stopping there to roll his shirtsleeves. He said, ‘I’m not accusing you of anything any more. I told you that. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of what that woman said to you. What is it that you don’t want to tell me?’
I saw, suddenly, the masquerade I was sustaining here. He wasn’t testing my involvement with any of these people. But I was working myself into the role of the frightened and fragile female so that I might rant and storm and now claim my clothes from his boot before leaving him there just so that I didn’t have to tell him any of the rest. I suppose, after all, it stemmed from protectiveness rather than defensiveness. From his point of view it must have seemed as though Mrs Abbey had said something to me that was very terrible indeed. Now all that remained for him was to gauge just how responsible he needed to feel for my welfare.
I was appalled and ashamed of myself. That and nothing else made me gasp out, ‘I don’t want to tell you because it’s silly and embarrassing. She hasn’t said anything to frighten me. She isn’t threatening me. She just talked about you and your brother and it’s nonsense and it doesn’t have any part in this, I swear.’
‘So she mentioned my brother.’
The calm observation shook me. I found that somehow I had scurried past him to the side of his car as if my subconscious intended to make its getaway even while my conscious mind dismissed the idea of retreat as ridiculous. As I dithered to a halt near the passenger door, still a long way from speaking, I heard him add on a quietly measured tone, ‘May I ask you a different question? I need an honest answer.’
I turned to face him properly. Grit crunched beneath my shoe. I was very close to the car and the black metal of its flank was radiating heat against my back.
‘Do you think anything about this – the attack on Bertie; this man; Mrs Abbey’s peculiar state of agitation – truly has anything to do with John?’
In the air around us was the shadow of that woman’s whisper of his name. Langton.
I took in an unhappy breath. With it I inhaled one compelling sense of his own need here. My feet took a step backwards and my body claimed the support of the overheated side of the car. I lifted my head.
I told him plainly, ‘Mrs Abbey has succeeded in bringing your brother’s name into every conversation we’ve had. But truly, if anything she says is a clue to what is happening here, I don’t believe it means John Langton’s recent … um, business activities have anything to do with the burglary of your house; or even the assault on Mr Winstone. My reason for thinking this is that I’ve noticed Mrs Abbey becomes strangely offensive just as soon as I attempt to ask her how she is and yet she’s absolutely delighted to dissect the apparently inexhaustible topic of your brother’s demise. Something is driving her to behave very strangely but I don’t believe it has any true connection to your brother. Speaking his name to me is her sanctuary, not her threat.’
I saw the Captain’s eyebrows rise a fraction. Suddenly, I suppose I’d been speaking as myself and not the frightened girl I’d tried to make him think I was.
I observed gently, ‘You think I’m mistaken?’
‘They were John’s ledgers that were stolen. Just as they list the names and addresses of his tenants, they also list every income and expenditure he’d made on behalf of the Manor in the last few years of his life.’
Ah. I confirmed the suspicion by saying, ‘Yesterday, I was supposed to agree that Mr Winstone’s attacker was tall and dark with fearsomely blue eyes.’
‘Like John.’ He was very quick.
‘Like your brother. But today she introduced the subject by telling me that I was supposed to remember that Mr Winstone’s attacker was short and the opposite of athletic, like your burglar. Did you describe him to her when you told her about the accounts books?’
There was a faint tip of his head in confirmation. I drew a tentative breath. Then I confessed what had been haunting me since last night and had grown again when the Captain had irritated Mrs Abbey earlier by questioning her reasons for visiting the farthermost of two village shops at precisely the time that Mrs Winstone herself should have conveniently been near by. I told him, ‘Mrs Abbey is trying to steer me into adjusting my description of Mr Winstone’s attacker, but she doesn’t seem to have a particularly clear idea of the direction she should take. I honestly can’t quite tell if she really means to hint that our burglar today is connected to it, or connected to her, or if she’s even afraid of him. I’m beginning to suspect she’s actually just worried that we’ll discover her part in yesterday’s assault on your driver. Which, by the way, would explain her disappointment when she found I hadn’t left. Because you should know that, while I certainly don’t suspect her of actually doing the deed or even wishing it done, I am absolutely convinced beyond all shadow of a doubt that Mrs Abbey knew Bertie Winstone had been injured in an attack. And she cared so much that she went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his wife was met and hurried home to find him.’
The hold his eyes had on mine was electric. I said quietly, ‘Before you ask, I haven’t any proof. I’m no threat to her and she will know that.’
Then I added regretfully, ‘There’s concealment in all of it, isn’t there?’
‘Yes.’ In him it was a reference to that question that remained unanswered. And I knew, of course, that my reply must still involve his brother. Only I knew that it wasn’t anything criminal.
The Captain moved forwards, to pass me and reclaim his car I thought, but he stopped when I clumsily put out a hand, palm towards him, as a sign of submission. I had to put his mind at rest. ‘I’m sorry, Captain, you ought to know that everything else she said to me in that house was simply a variation of the usual salacious gossip. She was talking about your brother, but not about his business activities. Today she was distracting herself by talking about his romantic habits … and yours … and warning me—’ I stumbled. I was too sensible to say the rest. Instead I repeated lamely, ‘Sorry, Captain, but you should know I wouldn’t go by what she said about you, I really wouldn’t. I wouldn’t presume … I mean, I don’t know you, but I know I wouldn’t judge you on that.’
He was closer than he had been. I had the sudden absurd suspicion that he’d been approaching me and not his car. To tell me something that would lay my own unease at rest once and for all, perhaps, because he still felt responsible for my distress. Now he took the time to draw his car keys out of a pocket. Suddenly he was bemused and nothing more. My embarrassment was a relief to him. He observed dryly, ‘So we come to it at last. What is this terrible slander she’s made against me?’
Oh heavens, I thought. He was actually going to make me say it; every word of it. Of course he was, purely because we’d already said so much. He kept leading me into blindly telling him things and I didn’t know how to stop it.
I said exasperatedly, ‘Surely, you must know what she will have said. She told me about your brother and his …’ The Captain’s eyebrow lifted by way of encouragement. I continued stolidly, ‘… his efforts at courtship that tended to get a little complicated along the way. She said that you were … well, you know, the same; only the fuss over his death had ruined your chances in good society and so I—’ I took an impatient breath and had to look away. He would regret making me say this. ‘She said that unless I wanted to join the ranks of the … the idle distractions that are a temporary comfort, I—I should be careful too.’
I thought I’d offended him. I hadn’t. Instead he said so easily that it was almost an insult, ‘That’s hardly something you need to worry about. And what did she say then?’
I risked a glance at him and then shook my head. ‘Nothing. That’s it.’
His silence disconcerted me. Suspicion was there in him again, more like wariness now in case a pitfall lay ahead, and I liked it even less than before. The car keys were in his hand now. They were cupped in his left hand and it was hanging free by his side. The other was loosely hooked into a trouser pocket. It was the first time I’d noticed that his hair was cut in the military style, cropped much closer at the sides than Danny’s sandy mess, and dark, without the ordinary working man’s flop over the brow. It might have made him look hard around the edges, but in truth it served to reinforce the peculiar experience I was having of the contradiction of what I thought he was and how he might superficially be described. I suppose I meant to observe that the cut of his hair only mattered in that it suited him.
In the same way, he defied the standard inhibition that should have made this none of my business and told me briskly and quite unnecessarily, ‘You might as well know that I was set to marry a woman late last year who would have kept the scandal-mongers busy for months dissecting our comparative wealth and titles, and finding both of hers superior to mine. But I think we were neither of us as the other thought we were and so we parted company instead. It was around the time I spent my spell in a London hospital trying to remember how to walk and long before John’s death, so that’s another thing I really can’t blame him for. I may have courted here and there, but John and I have very different tastes, and he certainly isn’t responsible for ruining my ‘chances’.’
It was said startlingly dryly and was more proof of the superiority of his idea of honesty over mine. I was still leaning there propped against the side of his car, almost tasting the reek of impending isolation in the air of this place, when he brought me round to the point he’d meant to make all along. He observed, ‘But you aren’t the sort of woman to go by rumours anyway, are you? Because, as you told me just now, you don’t judge me on that.’
I couldn’t look at him again. I said quietly in the pause he left, ‘Please, Captain. I don’t want to hurt you.’
I thought for a moment he had accepted my caution. But then he was adding thoughtfully, ‘I think you are aware of the bar held over my head by pretty much anyone who has ever heard the name Langton – the bar that is occasionally used to give me a stern reminder of my place in this world. Mrs Abbey’s recent efforts are, I think, a good example. But you tell me you don’t set much store by anything she says and so, since you still patently don’t believe me when I say that I’m not about to start treating you of all people as my next enemy, I can only presume that you’ve found your own way of measuring me. I can’t help wondering what that is?’
I knew he had identified the feeling as distrust. It stung me because it was a hard enough judgement to contemplate and I thought he was probing for something deeper; something else within my feelings that I couldn’t even guess at.
Suddenly the other me, the one who was shy of unpleasantness, was back in the fore. I was saying desperately, ‘I do believe you. Really I do. And surely it doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t have anything to do with Mrs Abbey or that man. Can’t we just leave it at that and get on?’
I believe I was ready to throw it all away, even to the extent of abandoning this trip and heading for home, all for the sake of not having to face this single thing. What I didn’t expect was what my sudden plea betrayed to him. His feet shifted. Not with the design of making me flinch, although it certainly did. But to abruptly join me in my lean against the side of the car. I felt the tilt as the springs took his weight. I saw comprehension hit him almost with what looked like relief – to the point that compared to whatever else he had been dreading, this ranked as better – and then the moment that relief faded into reality and the jerk of his head as it turned aside to suppress a laugh.
I heard him say softly to the distant base of the boundary wall on a tone that must have been absolute disbelief, ‘It isn’t what I thought. The clue has been there all along in the way you use my name, hasn’t it, and it belongs to a woman who craves peace. Captain …’
My eyes drifted left to him. His head was still turned away but I could see his heartbeat racing in the turn of his throat at the point where his skin met the collar and both ran away into the line of his shoulder beneath his shirt. He was used to being called to account for his brother’s choice of career, and perhaps even for his family’s as a whole, but I thought this was the first time he’d ever been criticised for his own. His head turned back a little to catch me watching. I raced to explain and made it worse.
‘Believe me,’ I said urgently. ‘Whatever else you think, I am very aware of the gift people like you have given to people like me, who never had to go abroad, never had to do anything except take your sacrifice and grow up and live.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘The war is over, most of the uniforms have been put away and we’re meant to believe the biggest danger that persists from that time is likely to be a petty criminal touting the long-lost contents of some poor old lady’s cupboards that they’d retrieved from the rubble during the Blitz.’ I was watching him. I couldn’t help it. He was very still. He was simply leaning there beside me with his back against the sun-warmed metal of his car while the slanting daylight cast his body into living relief, and frowning a little at the ground before our feet. I’d forgotten that any reference to looting must touch upon his brother.
It took some nerve for me to add, ‘Personally, I find it remains very hard to accept this simplified summary of the way things are now, when I can’t help knowing that a good number of the men I will meet in perfectly civilised surroundings will have lately taken human life.’
I felt his response to that. It conveyed itself through the metal at my back as a miniscule quiver. After a time he let out the tension in a long, measured breath. ‘That,’ he told me, ‘is a very odd way to put it.’
‘It is,’ I replied, ‘a very odd experience.’
And most of the men I’d met had only served as conscripts. This man had chosen do to it, and still did.
He still didn’t move. I felt empowered and feeble all at the same time. If I’d ever wanted to bolster my sense of importance by proving another person’s confidence in their value was a bitter sham, this was my moment.
Only if I had, I could have never forgiven myself and, in truth, with this man it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. So instead, eventually and on a painfully humble note, I added my last meagre crumb of honesty. ‘I truly am sorry. If it’s any consolation, you’re nothing like how I expected you to be.’
His head turned at last. The depth of my apology startled him even more than the rest. Falteringly, I met his gaze. Then I dropped mine to the metalwork of the car between us. He knew I couldn’t help how I felt, but he also knew that I really did care that I’d wounded him. He could read it on my face. I forced myself to bear the scrutiny of those eyes, even though doing it made my heart ache. I was conscious of the way the faintest touch of doubt was lingering at the corners of that mouth as he tried to understand what he saw. Then the puzzlement grew into the quick gleam of amusement. He’d wanted the truth from me. I didn’t think he’d ever anticipated receiving anything quite as honest as this.
Affection grew there. And I, having braced myself for the shame of completing this man’s alienation, suddenly found we were tipping into friendship.
And closeness. We were leaning side by side against that car once more and I was experiencing a shy thrill of comfort in this man’s company; and discovering the sunlight and restfulness that for me must come from the unexpected release of finding that the workings of my mind – now that I had formulated the words to share them – were not to be argued out of existence or into humility. Right or wrong, they were being ranked equally beside those of an alert mind like his.
He was, I suppose, being protective of me again but it was in a different way and for once I didn’t feel like I should resist it.
He claimed my first true smile. Then he said briskly, ‘Shall we get on? I think it’s safe to say neither Mrs Abbey nor that man are coming back again.’
We left a note for Mrs Abbey. It was impossible to know what her intentions were or, indeed, if we really ought to be put on guard by her repeated references to the Captain’s brother, but we could hardly leave the woman unaided. The note told her that we’d seen the man on her trackway, that the police would be told and she and her children could come to the Manor if she was worried.