Part Four

One

 

Woodyatt’s heart had sunk to his feet. Surely to God he hadn’t gone to all this trouble for the wrong man! ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Darby ran his hand across his face. ‘No, I’m not sure. Just doesn’t look like him, that’s all. But how can I tell? When I last saw him he was a man in his forties: young, virile, upright. He’s an old man now. Voice is different. But old men’s voices are different. Head seems to be a different shape, too, from what I remember. But heads change also, don’t they? Skull stays the same but the flesh falls away and you can see bone structure you couldn’t see before. Looked at his hand, too. Couldn’t see any scar. I don’t think it’s him.’

Woodyatt was angry and began to outline all of what he considered had been attempts to destroy Redmond. Darby wasn’t interested. Woodyatt suspected that at the last minute he had lost his nerve and hadn’t the courage to condemn someone he wasn’t sure about. As a result he was frowning heavily when Dominique appeared to say the old man was tired and was asking if he might lie down.

Darby turned, his expression worried. ‘I’ll show you his bed,’ he said. He seemed to be in a hurry and anxious to be out of the room.

Daphne Darby appeared a moment later, with glasses and a brandy bottle. ‘Have you arrested him?’ she asked.

‘Who?’

‘Redmond. It is Redmond.’

Woodyatt was bewildered. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘The way he stands. The way he talks. The shape of his head.’

‘Frank says it isn’t him.’

‘Frank didn’t know him as I knew him.’

‘How well did you know him?’

She eyed Woodyatt coolly. ‘I was in love with him,’ she said.

 

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Woodyatt demanded.

She shrugged. ‘You didn’t ask. It is something I’m vaguely ashamed of now. And it’s hurtful to Frank. He doesn’t like to hear it.’

There was a long silence. ‘No matter what Frank says,’ Mrs Darby went on, ‘it is him. I know. I was in love with him and love makes you clear-sighted. Not about character. God, no! But about the shape and colour of your beloved. Ask that girl you brought with you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s in love with you. It’s obvious.’

She gave him a shrewd look as if she knew exactly what their relationship was. ‘Hers, of course, is different. It might get somewhere. Mine never did. But I had a terrible crush on him and I found it heartbreaking that no matter what I did he never noticed me.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘I know why now, after all that happened.’ She paused, ‘Frank and I weren’t married then, of course, though I’d known him all my life. We grew up in the same village.’

‘How did you get to know Redmond?’

She sat back in her chair, her eyes faraway as if she were looking at things she’d long since forgotten. ‘I met him in Cape Town during the Boer War. I was eighteen. He was a good-looking man and women couldn’t take their eyes off him. I know. I was one of them. The war was going badly at the time but there were a lot of handsome men about. Redmond was known as “Gorgeous George”. And he was gorgeous. He really was – tall, strong, with a matinee idol profile. I was after a husband and I watched him a lot because he seemed a likely candidate.’ She gestured towards the sitting room. ‘What you’ve got there is Redmond.’

She paused then went on slowly. ‘If he’d asked me to run away with him I’d have gone like a shot.’ She gave a brittle laugh. ‘Some hope! Thank God he didn’t.’ She laughed again. ‘But then, he wouldn’t have, would he?’ She poured a brandy for herself and pushed the bottle towards Woodyatt. ‘My father was a soldier, too,’ she went on. ‘When he was posted to the Cape garrison in 1898 he naturally took his family with him. I was seventeen when we left England and Cape Town was a good place to be. Garden parties. Races. Everything a young girl could want. I was having the time of my life.’

She paused. ‘Frank was in Cape Town, too,’ she said. ‘On the staff. He had his eye on me even then but I’d grown up like a lot of girls in those days did, on a diet of romantic novels. He didn’t seem handsome enough or dashing enough or sufficiently powerful and wealthy. I’d been spoiled. Then the war started and as you probably know, there was a series of disasters. Colenso. Magersfontein. Spion Kop. Ladysmith. Kimberley and Mafeking were besieged, and all the men they’d said were our best generals were defeated. They were all sacked and replaced.’

She gave another little laugh as if she were facing up to old terrors that didn’t frighten her any more, terrors that in the present situation seemed only trivial.

‘It doesn’t sound much now,’ she admitted. ‘But it seemed important at the time. The Empire was in danger. Actually, the Boers could never really have kicked us out. There weren’t enough of them. But a lot of people were scared stiff. Then the reinforcements arrived, George Redmond with them. He was working in Intelligence at the time. He was all I wanted. Good-looking, already famous. Older, of course. But in all the books I’d read the heroines always married brave, famous older men who came as a relief after the irresponsible youngsters they’d first fallen in love with. He didn’t look his age, mind you, and what was more he was unmarried. She paused. ‘Or so we all believed at the time. Since he seemed to be free, I made a set at him. He totally ignored me. I couldn’t make out why because I was pretty. Even generals usually managed to give me a smile. The fact that he didn’t almost broke my heart. Until he moved north after the Boers, he was often at my father’s house. He sometimes came uninvited and I thought it was to see me. Later – much later – I realised it wasn’t me he was interested in. It was the gardener’s boy. He was a Malay of about seventeen. It didn’t mean a thing to me at the time, of course. It was only later I understood.’

‘Did you ever meet him again?’ Woodyatt was clinging to her words.

She lifted her glass. ‘Chin chin,’ she said, taking a swallow. ‘Of course I did. In 1902, after we came home, I bumped into him at Ascot. But again he ignored me. It puzzled me because nobody treated me like that. He was with a man and a few days later I saw a picture of that man in a magazine. His name was Henry Cazalet. He was an actor. Then one day the following year I happened to go to Richmond to see an old nanny who’d gone to live there, and as I arrived I saw Redmond leaving a house further down the street. He got into a cab and vanished and I wondered whom he’d been visiting. And, of course, I jumped to conclusions because in those days men with money often set up women in discreet little villas. I was jealous enough to want to find out. I noted the name of the house and looked up the name of the occupier. It was Henry Cazalet.’

Mrs Darby became silent, her eyes far away again, the lines of disillusionment etched on her face. ‘I was still young and silly, I suppose,’ she went on slowly. ‘And very innocent. By that time he was Chief of Staff to the reserve army and I saw him more than once in the area. With men. But while they might have been types who might have interested him when he was working in Intelligence, they hardly seemed to be the sort he would associate with as Chief of Staff to an army corps.’

Her face hardened. ‘Then we read of his suicide in Paris. I was heartbroken. About two years later I read that Henry Cazalet had been arrested for gross indecency with another man. For the first time I began to get a glimpse of what it had all been about.’

She became silent again. Finishing her drink, she sloshed fresh brandy into her glass without asking Woodyatt if he wished to join her.

‘Actually,’ she continued, ‘I didn’t even know what “gross indecency” was. I made my brother tell me. I remember he went red and told me it was something I didn’t need to know about. But I made him explain.’

‘And Frank?’ Woodyatt asked.

‘He hates this part of the story.’ Daphne Darby smiled. ‘Eventually I married,’ she went on. ‘As I was expected to, and as I wanted to. A man called Marlowe. He was handsome, dashing and quite magnificent, and he killed himself hunting within a year. I married again quite soon afterwards. A nice man called Julian Winterton. Handsome again, of course, wealthy, all I wanted. Like my brother, he was one of the first to be killed in France in 1914.’

Daphne Darby’s face wore a lost, bitter look as she continued. ‘Then, late in 1916, Frank turned up again, minus a leg. He’d also married but his wife had gone off with another man. We fell into each other’s arms. I needed comfort and he needed someone to lean on.

God! Woodyatt thought, it happens all the time. In every generation, in every war, people needed comfort.

Mrs Darby was toying with her glass. ‘I was eternally grateful to him,’ she said slowly. ‘And always will be. I think he’s grateful to me, too, though I’m not sure I’ve been good for him, or he for me. But that’s the way things happen, isn’t it? The Redmond affair ruined his career, of course, and he started to go for the bottle. He still does. Come to that, so do I. You’ll have noticed. Two bad lots in the soup together, who didn’t fit in with the old snobbish attitudes that started again after the war ended. Finally we saw this house and decided to chuck it all up and live here. It’s not a very romantic story, but it explains why I know so much about Redmond.’

She shrugged. ‘You have to remember,’ she said, ‘that, while to Frank he’s someone he was intimately concerned with, he was still only someone he’d seen now and again. To me as a girl he was a dream, and I watched him like a hawk. I knew the cadence of his voice, every twitch of his eyebrows, every flicker of expression. I was in love with him. I knew what he looked like, the way he behaved, the way he moved, the way he stood, the way he held his head. The man you’ve got is Redmond.’