A Place of Secrets (25 page)

On Saturday morning, Jude felt tired, listless and worried. She noticed Gran’s necklace in her top drawer when she pulled out her makeup bag and felt guilty that she hadn’t done anything about Tamsin. Following Claire’s throwaway suggestion, she asked Alexia if she could borrow the Hall’s phone directories and looked up Lovall. As predicted, there were dozens of them. It was likely
that Tamsin, even if she were still alive, had married and changed her name, but to show willing she rang the three “T” Lovalls in the north Norfolk directory, one by one. It wasn’t an edifying experience. The first Lovall who answered was a woman married to a Mr. Timothy Lovall. She thought Jude was trying to sell something and hung up. The second was rather deaf and clearly believed Jude to be
a bit mad, and the third, a gentle-sounding Tom Lovall with a country accent, considered Jude’s question but admitted himself at a loss to answer it. Dispirited, she gave up. Just to see what happened she tapped “Tamsin Lovall” into an Internet search engine and came up with an Australian volleyball star, an unlikely lead for an eighty-five-year-old woman, she thought, giggling to herself. She tried
to broaden her line of inquiry by thinking of who else who might have known Tamsin might still be alive. Gran was the only one of the Bennett children still living. Perhaps there was a school friend who’d be of some use. Gran had mentioned someone the other day—a boy. Who was it?

She dialed Gran’s number. The phone rang and rang, and Jude was about to give up when a shaky, faraway voice answered,
“Hello?”

“Gran, it’s Jude. How are you? You sound a bit faint.”

“No, no, I’m fine.” Gran did sound a little dazed.

“Not still dizzy?”

“I seem to be all right today. What can I do for you?”

“I found your hideaway in the folly. It was behind two bricks, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, clever girl!” Gran sounded delighted. “Was there anything in it?”

“A piece of oilskin.”

“Oh, I remember that. We left it
there.”

“It had an astrological chart in it, Gran, did you know?”

“Did it, dear?”

A piece of oilskin had obviously not seemed interesting to two young girls. Jude changed tack.

“I’m not getting very far with the question of Tamsin.” She explained about the calls she’d made. “Do you know of anyone else still alive who might have known her? Anyone from school for instance?”

There was a short
silence. “I can’t think of anybody. I lost touch with a lot of them, you see, when I married. Betty Morton is dead, and so’s Joan … she was my bridesmaid.”

“There was a boy you started to talk about the other day.”

“Did I? Who might that have been?”

“Yes, someone who’d been unkind.”

There came another pause.

“Dicky Edwards,” Gran whispered. “I don’t think Dicky … I wouldn’t want to meet him,
Judith. I don’t think he’d be any use.”

“Gran?” It was difficult to gauge on the phone, but Jude guessed that she’d touched some nerve. She looked at her watch. It was only eleven o’clock and she wasn’t doing anything much for the rest of the day. “Gran, if you’re not busy this afternoon, would you like me to come over and see you?”

* * *

Gran remained there gripping the receiver long after
Jude had rung off. Dicky. He’d been a sort of dark shadow at the back of her mind for years, not one she’d wanted to give form to or a name. But talking to Jude about Tamsin the other day had brought him back in a flash of memory, and now she saw him clearly in her mind’s eye. He had always been a big lad, tall for his age, and chubby, but when he turned thirteen or fourteen and helped his dad
with the farm work the fat turned to muscle. Farmer Edwards was notorious as a shouter and a swaggerer. No surprises that his wife always looked cowed and fragile, and that his sons became bullies.

She fitted the receiver back into its cradle and sank into the nearest chair. It was all coming back to her now, in a rush of painful images. And the veil between past and present was too thin not
to let them in.

Jessie was in her fourteenth year in 1937 when Tamsin returned to school after months of absence; she just appeared unannounced in the playground one misty February morning, standing shyly by herself. She’d changed. The girl was taller now, graceful as a doe, her liquid brown eyes large in a finely molded face. Jessie, still small and flat-chested, envied her high pointed breasts,
her delicate wrists and ankles. Tamsin was growing up. Jessie’s schoolmates, turning for the most part into gawky adolescents with greasy skin, noticed it, too, and treated her with the respect children often have for beauty. Dicky, already broad-shouldered and with a man’s voice, stared more than anyone, a troubling mixture of dislike and desire in his face.

This time, at the end of the day,
Jessie felt confident enough to allow Tamsin to walk back with her, the pair of them loitering off down the lane together behind Jessie’s brother and sister.

“Tell Ma I’m at a friend’s,” she called to Sarah, swinging her satchel to her sister over the garden gate, then she walked with Tamsin up the hill to the gypsy camp. They didn’t know that they were being followed.

Tamsin’s family gave her
a warm welcome: Nadya and the great-grandmother and the four men, one now with a pregnant wife, Kezia, in tow. Nadya pinched Jessie’s cheek affectionately, and fed the girls tea and cake, and they petted the tethered horses and teased a fox cub that Tamsin’s youngest uncle had caught and tied to a tree, from where it made hungry forays at the scraggy chickens that scratched the ground for insects
just out of reach of the rope.

“What’s he going to do with it?” she asked Tamsin, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know. He says he caught it scavenging. Jacko,” she cried out to the young man, who was whittling a piece of wood, “you must let it go or it’ll draw the vixen, and she’ll kill the channi for sure,” but Jacko merely swiped at the nearest chicken with his foot and gave a careless laugh.

At twilight they all sat down around the fire and shared a rich, dark stew that Nadya ladled from a big billycan, with a kind of flat bread to dunk in it. The men talked of who-knew-what in their guttural accents, and laughed and scowled, and Nadya sang quietly to herself. Nobody asked Jessie anything about her life, but she didn’t mind. She sat close to Tamsin, and they shared her English textbook
together by firelight, whispered to one another and listened to the men, Jessie mesmerized by the strangeness, feeling a part of it all and yet not a part, trying to ignore her conscience, which told her to go home.

Night was falling fast and the fox cub sat down and began to yowl for its mother, a heartrending sound that went on and on, but the men only shouted at it or cajoled. The eldest of
the men fetched a fiddle and attempted to imitate the noise. The fox cub still cried so the fiddler shrugged and started up a dance tune, first tentative, then faster and more rhythmic until toes started tapping and hands clapping and Nadya got up and began to dance. Jessie had never seen a dance so expressive, so wild and carefree. She clapped to the beat and watched the flash of gold jewelry in
the firelight and the sparks flying upward and thought this the most extraordinary experience of her life.

Then out of nowhere came a sharp crack.

The fox cub gave a last yelp, rolled over and lay still. The horses began to buck and screamed with fright.

For the smallest second everyone froze. Then came a frenzy of activity: the men rushing to soothe the horses, the women to hustle each other
into wagons.

Between the whinnying and the shouting could be heard someone crashing about in the undergrowth, then came another gunshot and a man’s laugh, receding into the distance. Jacko and the next uncle, Ted, each snatched up a brand from the fire and ran off in pursuit, but Jessie knew they were already too late.

There was something about that laugh that struck a chord in her, but at the
time she didn’t give the matter a thought.

* * *

“What did you do, Gran?” Jude cried, when Jessie told her all about it that afternoon.

“I was terribly frightened, dear. I simply picked myself up and ran off home without even saying good-bye. I knew the route perfectly, even in the dark. Back along Foxhole Lane, I ran, then all the way down the hill. I was in a fine old state, I can tell
you, when I got back.”

She remembered her face, glimpsed in the bathroom mirror, all sooty and streaked with tears. Her clothes stank of smoke and strange food. Relieved she was safe, her parents were still furious. How dare she go to the woods at night? Especially to “those gypsies.” But she thought they didn’t mind the gypsies. Well there were limits, weren’t there, and she’d crossed them by
a mile. Anything could have happened to her, she might be dead or worse. A gunshot frightened her? Let it be a lesson.

She was banished to bed, weeping.

As she lay awake listening to the vixen’s cries of grief and thinking over the evening’s events, Jessie remembered that laugh.

“It was Dicky,” she told Jude. “He must have seen us go up the hill together. He’d have got the gun off his da.”

“What happened to him, Gran?” Jude asked, enthralled by this dramatic tale. “Was he punished?”

“No, not then. I told no one anything at the time,” Gran said finally. “I knew it was Dicky, and Dicky knew that I knew. I saw it in his eyes at school the next day, a challenging look.
What’re you going to do about it, then?
that look said. I was scared of him. He had his gang, too. They’d lie, say
he was with one of them. And I couldn’t prove anything—no one had actually seen him—so what was the use of telling? I was sorry for my silence later, but it’s easy to forget what it’s like when you’re very young, how weak and foolish you can feel. Things that look rational and easy to grown-ups don’t look that way to children at all.”

“But didn’t Tamsin help…?”

“Tamsin didn’t turn up to school
the next day. Or ever again. I sent my brother Charlie up Foxhole Lane to look for her. He came back and said they’d gone.”

“So that was the last time you saw her?”

“Oh no, the gypsies still came to Foxhole Lane, but not for a while and when they did Tamsin told me she was finished with school.”

“And when did she leave for good and you take the necklace?”

Jessie’s expression hardened suddenly
and Jude wished she hadn’t been so forthright.

“I’ll come to that when I’m ready.” Jessie gave an impatient gesture and Jude knew that the conversation was over for the day.

* * *

Jude returned to Starbrough Hall with “Dicky, presumably Richard, Edwards” scribbled on a piece of paper, but she knew Gran didn’t think it would come to anything. To tell the truth, nor did Jude. If Dicky was
still alive he was unlikely to want to help. She still had so many questions to ask her grandmother, though. Like, when did Tamsin eventually hide the necklace—presumably in the folly—and why? She arranged to visit again on Monday afternoon.

After supper at Starbrough Hall she called Claire, still feeling bad that they’d quarreled.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she told her sister. “I wanted
to ask how you got on at the doctor’s.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Claire said. “You frightened me, that’s all. The doctor thinks Summer’s fine, so I’m trying to believe him.”

“Well, I’m very glad about that,” Jude said, but uncertainty hung somewhere in the ether between them. She didn’t think everything was all right, and she didn’t believe that Claire did, either, but she didn’t want to disturb Claire’s
fragile equilibrium by saying so.

“Oh, I took that astrological chart in and got Linda to look at it when we had a quiet moment,” she told Jude. “She thinks it’s very old, too. She found a book we sell in the shop and looked everything up. It’s not a good horoscope, Jude. There’s a lot about loss and tragedy and strength to overcome difficulty. I’d be worried if a child of mine had one cast like
that. I’ll show you in detail next time you come.”

“Thanks. Though I don’t know what use it will be. We don’t know who it belonged to, do we?”

“Your Esther, you thought?”

“It could be. If we’re saying it’s 1760-something. Your reading doesn’t bode well for a happy ending to her story.”

“I suppose not.”

“Look, I’m not busy tomorrow. I could fetch you both and take you out to lunch somewhere,
what do you say?”

“I’m sorry, we’re busy tomorrow. People are coming to lunch.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Anyone I know?”

“Yeah. Darcey and her parents. Oh, and I’ve asked Euan.”

“Oh.” Jude waited to see whether her sister would invite her, too, but she didn’t and there was a silence between them again. She felt herself blushing and awkward, then managed to say, “Well, some other time, then.”

“How
about the evening?” Claire said in a rush. “Come and fetch the chart then and I’ll show you what Linda’s written.”

“All right,” Jude said coolly. The lunch thing was silly. She felt furious with her sister, but also that she had no right to feel furious. It was as though she and Claire were engaged in some guerrilla warfare in which neither party would quite make their demands clear.

On Sunday morning, Jude woke to the patter of rain on the window and a deep sense of loneliness. She tried reading a crime novel in bed for a while, then dressed and went downstairs to find she really was on her own apart from the dogs, the family having disappeared off to church. There was a note on the breakfast table from Chantal in her neat foreign handwriting explaining it would
be just the two of them for lunch—the twins and their parents had been invited out. Jude breakfasted, catching up with yesterday’s newspapers, then, not having anything else to detain her in the empty house, settled herself in the library and continued to transcribe Esther’s writing. As ever, it was comforting to hide herself in her work.

Thereafter we grew close, my father and I. Often he was the same as he had always been—secret, lonely, alone. He would still disappear into his workshop for long periods, or I would find him in his study deep in a book, his food untouched on its tray. Sometimes he’d seem not to notice me and I’d sit there quietly with him conducting some research of my own, but then suddenly he’d say, ‘Listen to this,’ and read a passage out of some tome about the Via Lacta—our Milky Way—being milk spilt across the sky from the breast of the goddess Hera, or the latest method of calculating the temperature of the sun. The towers of books had grown all around us, and I sometimes felt he was like some alchemist of old, the instruments of his art lying washed up like jetsam on the piles of papers and charts all around.