38

 

 

GWYNN WAS AFRAID Martin wouldn’t be there when she limped down to the bench at the waterside pathway. He had sounded unsure on the telephone, but that might just have been a function of his age, she thought, or his telephone demeanor. When she spoke her great-aunt’s name, however, his voice became stronger, more certain.

“You’ve found out something,” he had said.

“I don’t know.” Because what did she know? “I think so.”

“I’ll be there,” Martin had said. “I don’t have much time. Mary said she’d be by for shopping around four, so I’ve got to be back before she knows I’m gone.”

“Whenever you can,” Gwynn said. An unhappy conspirator.

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

Now she approached the bench to find him seated there in his suit and fedora, staring off toward the horizon. The sound of the murmuring ocean came to her more loudly as she drew closer; it must have disguised her footfalls, for Martin did not look over until she took the seat next to him.

They sat in silence for a few moments. The gray roil of the estuary before them was mesmerizing, an endlessly returning tide. The other Gywnn might have watched it, might have sat on this bench with Martin, all those years ago. Gwynn studied it, unwilling to speak of her great-aunt, now when she was finally here with Martin. He needed to know what she knew; but it would hurt him, the old man, now when it was impossible to fix. She shifted uncomfortably on the green slats.

Martin cleared his throat. He too seemed unwilling to open the conversation, and when he finally spoke, it was not about the elder Gwynn at all. “Young Colin was by this morning to fix a leaky faucet for me.”

Gwynn stiffened. She kept her eyes on the gray line between the gray sky and the gray sea.

“He looks like hell.”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” she said.

Martin tapped the back of her hand with a gnarled finger. “He’s a good lad. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

“I told you—”

“That’s all I’ll say about that.”

Now Martin sighed, his shoulders slumping. He suddenly seemed older, shrunken, almost fearful. “And the more I think about it, the less I want to talk about what you’ve discovered.” Again he sighed, deeply, and Gwynn was reminded of his tears, fiercely held in, when he’d shown her the photographs of the young Gwynn in his scrapbooks. She glanced at him, and saw him blinking against the wind. “I’m afraid of what you’ll tell me.”

His voice had grown so soft that she barely heard him over the breeze and the tide.

“Would you rather I not say?” she asked quietly. “She’s dead, your Gwynn. There’s nothing left to be done for her.”

Martin held out his hands. “I could try to understand her. That much I could do.” He shook his head again, then pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Sorry.”

They fell silent again. A seagull fluttered to a landing a few yards away and took a tentative step toward them, fixing them with its beady eye. Gwynn didn’t have the heart to tell it she had nothing for it; it would have to come to the sad realization by itself. It opened its yellow beak as though to squawk, but made no noise.

“And we saw her,” Martin broke out suddenly, violently. “Both of us. We’ve seen her in the cottage. She had a terrible life, and now she isn’t allowed to have a peaceful death? That’s wrong. Wrong. We have to do something.”

“But I don’t know what to do,” Gwynn protested helplessly. She looked down at her hands, balled in her lap. Useless hands.

“We have to find out what happened. We have to know. She must want us to know.”

Gwynn shook her head. “She had all those years, Martin, to tell you. And she didn’t.”

“Because she couldn’t,” he said roughly.

She looked at him and could see the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, openly, and he did nothing to hide them, nothing to wipe them away.

“I married someone else. There was always a part of me that loved Gwynn—there’s still a part of me that loves Gwynn. But I had made a vow to Mary’s mother, and I had to keep it. Gwynn knew that. She understood me, enough to stay away.”

“And now?”

Martin turned on the bench to look fully into her face, his blue eyes blazing with the strength of whatever emotions were wreaking havoc inside his frail body. “You found out what happened, didn’t you? That’s why you called.”

Gwynn nodded slowly. “I think so.”

Martin grasped her hand. His grip was remarkably strong. “How did you find out? You said there was nothing in the house. No letters. No pictures. Nothing written down. How did you find out?”

Quickly she stood up and limped across the path, to stare down at the roiling tide. It looked like she felt inside, boiling and churning, warning of a storm on its way in. She closed her eyes against it, but felt a sudden wave of vertigo—then the extraordinary pain inside, the one Gwynn had shown her, let her feel.

“She let me know,” was the only thing she could think to say.

“Tell me.” Martin’s words were a command, a throwback to Gwynn’s Martin in uniform. “Tell me.”

Instead she turned to look on his frail form, hunched against the wind on the park bench. “Did you have a brother, Martin?” She shoved her cold hands deep into the pockets of her coat.

He looked up, surprised. “Vern. He died.”

“When?”

Martin stared off again into the distance. He seemed to be waiting for the path of the question to be made clear. “When he was young. I don’t remember. Eight? Nine? Meningitis. One day he was fine, then he complained of a headache, and the next day he was dead.” For a moment Martin looked stricken at the memory, but the expression faded, the pain that of long ago. “Why?”

“You and he—you had racing birds?”

Slowly Martin got to his feet and took the few steps to her side. He stared into her face, intently. “Yes.”

“You wrote to Gwynn about them. When you were off at Bletchley. You told her about them.”

His voice was now deadly quiet. “Yes. I wrote her a letter.”

“She wanted—” Gwynn broke off, for a moment unable to continue. “She wanted to give you a gift. A racing bird. To show she understood. She wanted to get one to give you when you came home on leave.”

“She never told me that. After that letter, she never wrote back again.” His eyes bored into hers. “She never wrote back. And when I got home at Christmas, she was married. To Tommy.” He put out a pleading hand. “Did you find that letter? You said there were none.”

Gwynn shook her head. Looking into the wizened face, she could not speak. Could not say anymore.

“Then how? How could you know this?” That question seemed to lose its importance as the realization broke slowly across his face. “Tommy. The dovecote.” His mouth worked, as though he could not bear to think the thought which now bore down on him, a freight train. “Tommy raised birds.”

They stared at each other for a minute. The pain again, between her legs, the tearing, the blood. “He raped her, Martin,” she whispered, and each word, she saw, hit him like a blow.