Eleven

It had turned very warm for the time of year and the heat rose from the pavements in the stuffy London streets. All over the city, the parks were blossoming, and on the Embankment the planes with their silvery flaking bark were thrusting out new green leaves. Everyone was rushing and hurrying along as usual, as if they had a train to catch, even though it was Saturday, but there were smiles on people’s faces, somewhere an organ grinder played and the flower sellers were doing a brisk trade in bunches of tulips and mimosa.

Laura felt hot and bothered in the saxe-blue tweed travelling costume, and the brown velour-felt hat was anathema to her amongst all the frothy spring hats other women were wearing. Despite this, she was fully attuned to what she had to do. Philip was destined for an acutely uncomfortable half-hour, if she had anything to do with it.

‘Now, Philip,’ she began in a very severe voice, as they reached an empty seat on the Embankment. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Philip sat down beside her and looked across the river. A Thames steamer hooted, trams clanged behind them, a sandwich-board man advertised boots for four shillings a pair. ‘What do you want to know, Laura?’

‘Oh,’ said Laura, with a sigh, ‘I just want to know the truth, Philip. Why has Mr Beaumont left me that enormous amount of money?’

She did not ask him why Ainsley Beaumont had sent for her. That was now quite obvious to her: the work on the library had been a smokescreen, a ridiculous reason for getting her to Wainthorpe and Farr Clough, where no doubt he could look her over and decide whether she was worthy of his bequest. ‘You’ll do, Laura Harcourt,’ he had said. You’ll do. Not to fulfil the non-existent need to catalogue his library, but to be the recipient of his . . . his charity! That was the word which had burned in her brain ever since she had heard the solicitor, Broomhead, read out the will. The word choked her. Charity. But why? Yet she knew where her thoughts were inevitably leading, perhaps towards the answers to questions which had plagued her all her life, though she suspected the truth might not be as palatable as she might have wished.

Philip was staring down at his gleaming polished boots, looking mightily as if he wished himself elsewhere. Ever since he had dealt with Ainsley Beaumont’s request, he had been only too aware that he might well have overstepped the boundaries of his temporary responsibilities and it had given him uncomfortable moments. But whenever he thought of why he had done it, he had felt better – until yesterday, when it became very evident that he might have made a grave mistake. He was not, however, about to make another. He remained silent until he could find the diplomatic answer to her question. But the truth, not diplomacy, was what she wanted. And who was he to know what that was?

‘Laura, I am not the person to tell you.’

‘Then who is – your father?’ He shook his head. ‘Oh, really, Philip, someone must know!’

He looked very downcast at the accusing way she was speaking to him, and she began to feel a little guilty, and was glad as she watched him to see a firmer resolution come to him, more like the old Philip. She was sorry that she had hurt his feelings – he had, as usual, meant well.

‘I wouldn’t have upset you for the world, you know – you, of all people, Laura.’

She leaned over and kissed his cheek gently. ‘Forget me, Philip. I’ve told you before, we can never be anything to one another. I mean it.’

‘You’ve met someone else,’ he said flatly, sensing a difference in her.

She couldn’t answer that. Instead, she said, ‘Well, Philip? What’s it all about?’

‘Look.’ He felt desperate. ‘I’ll tell you all I know, but I warn you, it isn’t much.’ He reached out for her hand, more to reassure himself than her, and she didn’t draw it away. It was white again now, the oval nails smooth and rounded with delicate half-moons. ‘There’s no compulsion on anyone,’ he began, ‘to give the reasons for why and where they want to leave their money. So . . .’

Laura’s unexpected arrival home a couple of hours later caused a great stir of excitement in Chetwyn Square. It was five o’clock and Lillian arrived five minutes after Laura, pulling off her light chiffon scarf and wafting waves of Floris ‘Bouquet’. Screaming with delight when she saw Laura, she embraced her with joy and stood back to examine her, with a look on her face that fought not to say ‘I told you so’, which was quickly replaced by one of dismay when she learned that this was to be only a flying visit.

‘Are you going out this evening?’ Laura asked, though the question was rhetorical. Lillian considered an evening at home as the mark of social failure.

‘Well, the Endicott’s have reserved theatre seats . . . but my dear, it’s Julius Caesar! I must confess I will not be entirely sorry of an excuse to miss that.’

‘I wouldn’t ask, but I have something very particular I want to talk to you and Uncle George about, and I’m going back to Wainthorpe by an early train tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow! Then we certainly cannot forego this evening with you. I’ll see what Mrs Denning can do for us in the way of something nice. I know there’s a chicken . . .’

‘Oh, pot luck will do.’

‘It won’t do for me, or your uncle. I’ll see about it now.’

It was good to see him again, her Uncle George, a spare, careful man, deceptively unassuming, and the rock of her childhood. She was grateful that neither he nor her aunt seemed to notice her reticence amidst Lillian’s ceaseless chatter about mutual friends and acquaintances, accounts of the social whirl she lived in, which kept the conversation going throughout dinner, during which she fended off difficult questions about the Beaumont family and her work in the library, and concentrated on telling them about the wonderful scenery of the moors, the air like wine, the water like silk . . .

George, too, talked about his two latest acquisitions and invited her comments on them: a spare Japanese print he had hung above the copper-tiled fireplace, and the delicate Satsuma porcelain jar with fu-dog handles which now stood on the mantel. But it was not until they were settled in the drawing room with their coffee that he said directly, ‘Now then, what’s all this, Laura? What’s gone wrong, that makes you come back so unexpectedly?’

It had not occurred to Laura that the flow of conversation might have been covering worry on their part, until she saw the concern with which they were now both regarding her.

‘Mr Beaumont is dead. He wasn’t a young man, but he had been told he had a brain tumour and it seems he might have taken his own life, though his grandchildren refuse to believe it was anything other than an accident.’

‘Oh dear,’ Lillian said, inadequately, adding hurriedly, ‘How shocking! I’m very sorry indeed to hear it. Frightfully difficult for the family, of course, but will you have any need to go back, now?’ Despite herself, she was flushed with pleasure at the possibility and smiled at Laura who was sitting stiffly in her chair.

‘I haven’t finished the work I went up there to do, yet.’ Laura bent to put her coffee cup, the thinnest of Japanese eggshell china which you could see right through, carefully on to the low table next to her chair. ‘He has left me fifteen thousand pounds.’

This time there was a stunned silence.

‘Fif– Fifteen thousand pounds! But why?’

‘You might well ask, Aunt.’ Laura had not meant to show resentment so plainly, but she had been controlling herself too long and now it welled up inside her. She transferred her gaze from Lillian to George. ‘I think you should have told me long before this what my connections with Mr Beaumont were.’

‘Oh, but—’ Lillian began, hands fluttering, patting her hair, smoothing her corded silk skirt, thoughts chasing themselves across her face.

George hushed her with a touch on her arm. ‘Laura, my dear, we knew of no connection.’

‘Well then, of the circumstances of my adoption.’ It sounded too formal and hard, but she could not help it. Then the questions came tumbling out. ‘Why was I never legally adopted, why did I not take your name? Who were my parents? Who were Mr and Mrs Harcourt?’

George looked as though he might be more comfortable with a desk between them, explaining as if to one of his clients some complicated part of their money affairs. He went to stand with his back to the fire, a hand under his coat tails, looking unusually troubled. ‘You want the truth?’ he asked gravely. ‘The truth, my dear Laura, is that we don’t know. You should ask Philip’s father, you should ask William Carfax. It was he who arranged that you should come to us, and the conditions.’

‘Philip has already told me that.’

George raised his brows. ‘And what else has Philip told you?’

‘Only that his father, on the instructions of Ainsley Beaumont, negotiated the adoption of an eighteen-month-old child, and that he was instructed to do no more than to arrange for someone to take her in.’

Lillian made a little sound of distress. ‘Take you in? Oh, Laura, how can you say that? We so wanted a child, and you were like a gift from God. We didn’t take you in like a bundle of washing! We loved you from the start.’

‘I know that. Of course I know! How could I ever have doubted it? But why did you not tell me?’ It was this which hurt her more than she could say . . . that other people had known, while she, the one it concerned most, had been kept in the dark.

George said, ‘Dear child, that was the agreement. That we should not seek to adopt you legally, that we should not make enquiries as to who your parents were. Would you have been any happier had you known this? William Carfax once let slip to me that your parents were from Yorkshire, but more than that he would not say. I have always believed he did not know more, in any case.’

‘That is what Philip believes. But what about me – am I then never to know, either?’

‘Is it so important?’ Lillian said in a low voice. She was having difficulty in fending off tears and George went to sit on the sofa beside her.

‘It is important to me,’ Laura said, ‘of course it is. Who were they, the man and woman in the photograph? The ones you let me believe were my parents?’

Lillian’s face crumpled. She bent her head. The soft lamplight struck gleams from her bracelets, the silver in her hair. ‘That was my idea, but it doesn’t signify . . . they were just people I used to know, and they were killed in that train crash. Their name was Harcourt. I thought it better . . .’

‘How could you?’

There seemed nothing more to say, and in the end Laura crossed the room and knelt on the carpet in front of them, taking hold of her aunt’s trembling hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so awfully sorry, but don’t you see how much it means to me to know who I am?’ It was she who was on the verge of tears now, she who had determined to remain unemotional throughout.

‘You are our daughter, that’s who you are,’ Lillian said, with a barely suppressed sob. ‘Or so we have always regarded you.’

‘And I have never wanted anything more. Except to know who I am, where I’ve sprung from.’ She could see their hurt, that they felt it a betrayal she might want to be something other than their beloved daughter, when it wasn’t like that at all. ‘You have to understand that I desperately need to know just what Ainsley Beaumont has to do with me. He must always have known about me, but he left me alone all my life and only sent for me, knowing he had not long to live, wanting to see what sort of person I was, before he left me any money. Why?’

‘Oh, money!’ Lillian said, recovering. ‘So easy to give. Is it meant to make up for neglecting you all these years? Well, you don’t need it.’

‘No, but I shall take it, all the same. And use it. I know exactly what to do with it.’ She watched her aunt warily.

George took a cigarette from a box. Lillian closed her eyes. ‘Oh, I might have known! That house in Stepney I suppose.’

The reaction was what Laura had expected, but her hackles rose. ‘Please don’t try to persuade me otherwise. I’ve made the decision and I don’t change my mind once it’s made up, or not very often.’

‘Well, Laura, I haven’t lived with you for nigh on twenty years without learning that!’

‘I’m a disappointment to you. I see I should not have opinions of my own.’

George paused in the act of lighting his cigarette. ‘Now then, you two. If that is how it stands, and Laura’s mind is made up . . . Lillian, my dear, it wouldn’t be our Laura if she contemplated doing anything else with it, would it? Why don’t we take a glass of something to celebrate the Settlement’s good fortune?’

For a moment neither his wife nor Laura said anything. Lillian sat twisting the little lace handkerchief that was now no more than a damp scrap.

‘Oh, George! Oh, Laura!’ she said at last. She rose and tearfully kissed Laura, and then laughed shakily. ‘What am I to do with you both?’

The tension in the room eased. George held up the brandy. ‘But – see here, Laura – you must not, I repeat not, worry yourself over this situation, do you hear? Leave it with me. I’ll see Carfax and get the truth of it, if there is any truth to be known.’

Laura shook her head. ‘No, you just told me you’ve always believed he didn’t know any more than he told you, and from what Philip has said, that seems likely. I don’t think there’s anything more to be found there. I’ve gained nothing by rushing down here. The answer to all this lies in Yorkshire, with the Beaumonts.’

With the Beaumonts, and in their past, she thought. Somehow, who I am, who my parents really were, is all tied up with that past.

In Wainthorpe, Whiteley Hirst tossed in his bed, bathed in the sweat of a nightmare, consumed by terror. He could smell smoke and hear fire crackling on the other side of his bedroom door. It was shut tight but any moment now the flames would burst through and he would be trapped. Nothing could withstand the inferno that was behind it. He tried to move but his bonds became tighter; he was tied to the bed with an invisible criss-cross of threads, a helpless Gulliver. He made an almighty effort but his limbs refused to obey him. He had to get to the window and smash it, jump out. Too late, the flames were here, roaring in like dragons and tigers, the flames of Hell and retribution. He would burn in Hell. His body was already on fire, his blood boiling . . . he shouted for water, for someone for God’s sake to throw him into the dam and quench the flames . . .

He woke, and for several minutes lay as motionless as if he had been tied down, totally unable to move. He felt weaker than a kitten. His nightshirt was as soaked as if someone had tried to douse his burning body. He hadn’t had this dream for years.