After the Armistice Ball (13 page)

Life makes sense. One thing is connected to another. And no matter how fastidious we are in turning away from ugliness, or how brazenly we stare down the world to hide our ugliness from others, things are as they are. That maid, poor creature, caught the eye of some man somewhere and so set herself on the path towards her death, each thing connected to the next, no matter how confidently the man responsible might have reassured her at the beginning nor how discreetly Dr Milne handled it all at the end. It was no different with Cara, no matter how we all shrank from it. The theft, Cara’s secret, the broken engagement and her death, coming all on top of one another like that, must be connected. They each had to be a thread in a pattern I could not see, a story whose organizing element was hidden from me. It was a much more complicated story than the tale of the maid, of course, or at least more unusual and therefore much harder to make out from the glimpses of it we had caught so far, but it had to be there. Things are connected. Life makes sense.

‘I think you should read them out,’ I said at last. ‘I wasn’t having a change of heart, you know. Just a failure of nerve. But I’m over it.’

Alec, to my great surprise, shook his head.

‘No, Dandy. You underestimate the power of respectability, I think. If I read these letters out today, then later, once we – you and I – have found out what we need to know, we will come up against a brick wall. I can see us trying to make a policeman listen to us. “But these letters were heard at the inquiry,” he will say, “and it was agreed then that they were not of any significance.” No, much better to keep them up our sleeves until they can do us some good. Accident, commiseration, commendation and safety warning is the order of the day today.’ He took out a black-edged handkerchief and pressed it to his lips, possibly fighting a display of emotion, but more likely wiping away traces of beer, then he set his hat dead straight on his head and gave me a grim smile.

‘Can you wait five minutes for me to change?’ I asked. Bother respectability, bother Hugh and bother the reporters. For Cara’s sake, and somehow, obscurely, for the sake of the servant girl whose name I did not even know, I was going to the court.

Chapter Seven

Like the days before, the inquiry seemed to slip past almost at one remove, as though the witnesses were speaking in a code that only the Procurator Fiscal himself could understand, frustrating the crowd’s desire for details, a desire so keen as to be almost tangible in the stuffy atmosphere, like citric acid spilled somewhere. If ever a witness seemed to be edging towards sensation – as when one of the volunteers described the heat and high leap of the flames – the Fiscal would first stifle the witness into silence, then quell the rustle of pleasure in the room with a look so pained, so superior, that I wanted to shrink down into my seat, slither to the floor and crawl away.

I had expected the Fiscal to be a desiccated, Dickensian character, blinking behind half-spectacles and using Latin where English might do. Had this imagined figure appeared, the chasm between his chill disapproval and the vulgar delight of the crowd might have been put down to his age and unworldliness and I might have been able to feel affronted by him and a little justified in being there. As it was, though, he was a young man of hardly forty with gleaming chestnut hair swept back from a handsome brow and with powerful shoulders which, even though draped in sober blue suiting, looked incongruous above a sheaf of documents. I imagined him summing up and directing the jury, then pulling on a helmet and goggles and, with a sweep of a white silk scarf, stepping back into his Avro and roaring off.

I brought myself back with a jump. Clemence had taken the stand while my mind was wandering and the room had stilled into perfect silence, broken only by a few soft cluckings from some of the more maternal townswomen. The younger females in the audience simply craned and stretched in an effort to see her shoes.

Could she describe what happened on the morning of the fire, in her own words and taking her time? He could hardly have been gentler, but still Clemence’s eyes pinched up in that wary way of hers and her head went back so that she seemed to be looking down her nose. I heard a tut behind me and from somewhere else in the room a scornful noise like a little pff! of gas escaping from a beer bottle, and I knew that poor Clemence was not going down well. But just then, although she could not possibly have heard them, she moved her head slowly, putting her chin down and looking up, her eyes scared and huge. That’s more like it, I thought and there was a confirming murmur of satisfied pity from the tutters and pff-ers around me. Clemence started to speak in a small voice.

Mummy and she had set out for a walk along the cliffs as they did most mornings, leaving Cara alone in the cottage.

Why?

Cara had some letters to write. She did sometimes go walking with them – she took quite as much pleasure as her mother and sister in life at the cottage – just that this morning she had letters to write and elected to stay at home. The fire in the little sitting room was burning and, Clemence expected, the kitchen range must have been lit, but the fires in the bedrooms were not, it being warm spring weather. Cara might have fed the sitting-room fire, although it was well built up when Clemence and her mother left. There were no other fires in the cottage, no wireless or other contraption that might have overheated, and no cellars or windowless rooms which might have necessitated Cara’s lighting a candle. Cara did not smoke, none of the ladies did, and so there were no hot ashtrays for her to overturn. No, she did not use a seal on her envelopes, and so would have had no call to strike a match to melt the wax.

Was Miss Cara in the habit of keeping all her letters?

Clemence hesitated, and then answered that she did not know what proportion of letters Cara kept or discarded. She expected she would keep letters from her family and other loved ones, but might throw away unimportant notes. What exactly did he want to know?

The Fiscal merely wondered whether, as part of dealing with her correspondence that morning, Miss Cara might have had letters she wanted to destroy, in fact, to burn? Clemence hesitated again and moved her head as though to look at Alec. Her eyes stayed on the Fiscal’s face however and at length she answered him in a slightly firmer although no louder voice.

No, Cara did not as a matter of course burn letters, although it was certainly possible that if there was a letter she did not want specially to keep and there was a fire lit in the room, she might throw it on as the easiest way of discarding it. But she tended usually to write letters up in her own room where she had a little table in the window looking out over the sea.

Not in the sitting room where the fire was burning in the grate?

Another long pause, and then – No. At this point, Clemence caught her father’s eye, where he sat black and stiff in the front row of seats, and began to weep into her handkerchief, at which she was released from the stand and joined him, putting her head down against the shoulder of his coat although he kept both hands clamped on his knees and did not move to comfort her.

‘We shall never know for sure,’ said the Fiscal, summing up, ‘the chain of events by which the fire started and took hold before Miss Duffy was able to escape. We can, however, take some comfort in the knowledge that it was so unlikely as to be impossible that she suffered in the slightest way.’ This he directed towards Mr Duffy and Clemence in the front row, still sitting there, one rigid, one huddled and seeming not to hear him. ‘The unfortunate young lady would certainly have been rendered painlessly unconscious through inhaling smoke long before . . . any other part of the tragedy occurred. Indeed, the very fact that she did not escape leads one to suspect that she had fallen asleep when the blaze started and would have known nothing at all.’ He continued in this vein for quite some time, carefully quashing all possible sources of prurience, before pronouncing, as we had expected, upon the courage of the volunteers and the pressing need for constant vigilance in the home. The jury retired and very shortly returned.

‘Let it be recorded, then,’ said the Fiscal, ‘that Miss Cara Duffy met her death by accident. No further investigation is required and I hereby release the remains and grant leave for the funeral to take place.’ He was slightly, just slightly, knocked off his sonorous course by a recollection, visible to the crowd, that the remains were so utterly destroyed that the timing and nature of the funeral were rather by the by as far as evidence was concerned. These grisly thoughts struck all in the room at the same time causing a collective shudder and the Fiscal’s euphemizing, sanitizing efforts were thus completely undermined. We filed out with quite the most unpleasant possible images fixed in our heads.

Had I not known how weakened Mrs Duffy had been a few hours previously, I should have thought she had spent the morning packing, so promptly after our return from Kirkcudbright were she, Clemence and Mr Duffy installed in their motor car and leaving Gatehouse. I barely spoke to either of the ladies, actually not at all to Clemence and only enough to a rather calmer Lena to find out that they were taking Dr Milne’s advice and going away to the house of a friend of theirs at Grasmere, and from there on to Switzerland until they could face coming home. Switzerland I could see and the sooner the better, but Grasmere – if that was the spot where the Wordsworths led their peculiar lives – I had always thought of as dank and joyless, all puddles and forest and likely therefore to have what we used to call ‘bad air’. One does not hear so much about ‘bad air’ as one used although whether because modern science has given it a grander name or has proved its non-existence I could not say for sure.

Alec and I met up in the parlour at tea-time. The public bar had clearly sprung back into full life concurrently with the Duffys’ driving away for we could hear the men’s voices from where we sat. I was glad of it. Mrs McCall would be busy at the other end of the inn and we were that much more likely to have peace for our talk.

‘What did you make of Clemence?’ asked Alec, as an opening. I had been thinking about Clemence’s evidence most of the day and welcomed this indication that my thoughts had been usefully directed.

‘Very interesting,’ I said, washing down a mouthful of rather overly soda-ish scone with a draught of tea. ‘My overall impression was the slanderous one that she was well drilled and therefore not able to think on her feet nimbly enough to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity.’

‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘It was all she could do not to smack the table and say “Damn!”’

‘And do you think that it’s an actual possibility?’

‘That Cara was burning my letters and set the house alight? No, I do not. Ludicrous.’ I waited for him to justify this, hoping there was something more behind the dismissal than his natural wish to avoid even this much responsibility for her death. ‘Try to imagine the scene,’ he went on. ‘Cara sits by the hearth stuffing papers into the grate, and not armloads at that. I’m no great writer of love letters, I can assure you. One falls out, or wafts out or however it may have happened, and the rug starts to burn. The fire spreads despite Cara’s efforts to beat it, forcing her further and further back until she reaches . . .?’

‘The door,’ I said. ‘Yes, I see. Or even if she left the room and then came back to find the fire already going, it wouldn’t be between her and her escape, would it? Unless she tried to get beyond it, to save something. She didn’t have a dog down here with her, did she? I should quite likely have plunged into a fire for Bunty.’ Alec shook his head.

‘She might have tried to beat the fire down and then, when she couldn’t, panicked and fled and tripped and hit her head on something,’ I suggested.

‘Of course,’ said Alec. ‘At any moment of any day a person might suddenly become unconscious by simply tripping and hitting his head, but it tends not to happen. Have you ever fallen down and knocked yourself unconscious? Do you know anyone else who has?’

‘I’ve fallen,’ I said. ‘Mostly on the curling pond. And my younger son once got hit on the head by a low branch running along a riverbank, but you’re quite right. People don’t generally react to tripping by falling headlong like felled trees, do they?’

‘Unless they are very drunk. So let’s discount the letters in the grate, shall we?’

‘One other possibility occurs to me,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘Would it have been at all in character for Cara to have lit the corner of a sheet of paper and held it aloft, watching it burn, before dropping it into an ashtray with a contemptuous curl of her lip and a toss of her head?’ Alec was speechless. ‘I saw Clara Bow do it,’ I said, ‘and I remember thinking what a pity I should probably never get the chance to repeat it. Rather an extreme reaction to an inflated greengrocer’s bill, you know.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought that was Cara’s style at all,’ said Alec drily, and remembering how she had laughed that day at Croys about ‘pining’ for Alex, I agreed. This recollection led me back with a jolt to what I had been all but forgetting. What we were talking about here, the two of us, cosily over our tea, was the death six days ago of the girl Alec had been to marry. I took the opportunity of his being busy buttering a teacake to have a good long look at him. In his expression and demeanour he seemed, and had seemed since this morning, quite different from the creature I had found shaking and pale on the bridge the day it happened. Also, he was displaying only suspicion about what
had
really happened and outrage that it might go undetected; there seemed to be no personal sadness, much less raw new grief. And he had changed his clothes already, out of mourning and into a Norfolk jacket – still with a black tie which looked very peculiar – as though Cara was not worth the discomfort of an afternoon in black cloth as well as a morning. I could think of no way to broach any of this with him, however, indeed no real excuse for doing so beyond curiosity, so I decided to stick to the subject in hand.

‘Very well, then,’ I said. ‘The Fiscal was thorough in dreaming up possible sources of flame, but did he miss anything out?’ We thought in silence for a while.