Before the Poison (36 page)

‘And after that?’

‘We can do it again. I’ve never been one to tremble in the jaws of disaster.’

I ran my hand over her bare arm and shoulder, so smooth, so warm. She had freckles there, too. ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I almost hate to say it, but I’m glad we’re not having an affair. I mean, technically.’

‘Me too,’ she said, turning to prop herself up on one elbow and face me. ‘Far too sordid and messy.’ She pushed her hair out of her face. ‘Chris, I’m not stupid. I know you’re not looking for commitment. Neither am I. Can’t we just let it be what it is?’

I stroked her hair. ‘Of course. Whatever it is. I’m not making any demands. I’m not running away, either.’ It was silly talk, the kind of thing you say to justify what you’ve just done, when you realise you’ve fallen off the edge of a cliff and your legs and arms are spinning useless circles in the air. Call me a fatalist, but we had as little choice about where we went now as we had when we first met. But somehow it helps to say things like ‘Let’s see where it leads us’ or ‘Let it be what it is’. It gives the illusion of control, or at least of understanding. There were only two things we could do: one was stop seeing each other, and we obviously weren’t going to do that, and the other was to continue to let ourselves get more and more entangled up in one another’s needs and desires until one of us had had enough. To fall in love. Oh, we could play it cool, see each other only on Wednesdays, see other people, all the usual evasions, but that was really what it came down to for me. Love or flight.

Heather lay on her back and put her hands behind her head. ‘It’s been so strange these past few days. I’ve been mostly on my own for the first time in years, and enjoying it. No dinner to get ready. No household responsibilities. I’m afraid the convent flat is already a tip. I haven’t done anything in the way of housework. No vacuuming, no dishes, no washing. I’m down to my last pair of knickers and I’m not sure I even know where they are right now.’

I laughed. ‘I think you’re entitled to let things go. For a while, at least. Till you can’t find your way around the place any more for the piles of old newspapers.’

She slapped my chest. ‘It won’t get that bad. I couldn’t live like that. I don’t even read newspapers at the flat. And I can always wash out a pair of knickers. But you know what I mean. Really. I’d forgotten how much I used to enjoy watching what I wanted on TV, not doing something if I didn’t feel like it, or just sitting and reading with my legs curled up and no distractions. I read my first whole book in years, Christina Jones, a real guilty pleasure, and I even had a pizza delivered the other night. I ate most of it, too.’

‘Ah, the joys of single life. Is it official yet?’

‘It is as far as I’m concerned. Charlotte’s handling the legal details. I haven’t been out telling the world, though, yet, if that’s what you mean. Not even my closest friends. It’s not exactly something I’d want to employ a skywriter to advertise. They’ll find out soon enough, anyway, and the sympathetic phone calls will start coming in, even though I don’t want sympathy. Derek and I were finished a long time ago, long before I even met you, so you needn’t even think of getting big headed enough to blame yourself for any of this. It turns out he’s been having this affair for a couple of years, made quite a fool of me, really, and it’ll be all over town soon enough. Last week was my honeymoon period with myself, and I think I’ll be happy with me. I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls. I wanted to. I thought about you a lot. But somehow I knew we’d end up like this. Who did we think we were fooling? It’s not that I didn’t want it, but it just seemed too soon, and I . . . Besides, there was too much turmoil, so much to organise. Does that sound weird?’

‘Not at all. I’m just glad you’re here now.’

She smiled. ‘Unlike you, I do have one demand, though.’ Her hand started to move down under the sheet. ‘I know you’re an old man and all that, but do you think you could manage to get it up just one more time, then we can go downstairs, and you can make me dinner, pour me another large glass of wine and tell me everything about Louise King and Grace Fox’s box of goodies?’

‘I might be able to manage all that, despite my advanced years,’ I said, and leaned over towards her.

‘So let me get this straight,’ Heather said much later, almost lost in the folds of my dressing gown, back by the fireside with another glass of wine, her legs curled under her. ‘You’ve got Grace Fox’s granddaughter running around the country trying to find out whether Grace had an illegitimate child who would be . . . what would he be?’

‘Louise’s uncle.’

‘That’s creepy.’

‘A bit.’

‘And this is because . . .?’

‘It could have something to do with the murder. If it was a boy. If he was the one in uniform she was seen talking with the week before it happened.’

‘That’s a lot of ifs. Why should it be him, and what could it have to do with the murder?’

‘I don’t know. One thing at a time.’

‘Gee,’ she said. ‘You detectives. I don’t know how you do it. Have you heard anything from her yet?’

‘No. These things take time. Besides, she’s got her new job to deal with.’ I poured myself more Shiraz. The pasta sauce was simmering in the kitchen and I had just put the penne on. We were both starving. David Fray was playing Schubert in the background.

‘You really
don’t
believe Grace did it, do you?’ Heather said.

I shook my head.

‘And what if you find out she did?’

‘Then I hope I’ll accept the truth if I have to. But at least, by then, I’ll have made damn sure I know it
is
the truth. Right now, I don’t believe it.’

Heather looked at me as one might regard an exasperating child. ‘Come here,’ she said eventually, smiling and reaching out her hand.

I went. As I bent to kiss her, she ducked sideways and whispered in my ear. ‘Is that bloody pasta you promised ready yet? My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’

‘Message received loud and clear,’ I said, and went through to the kitchen.

Heather didn’t stay the night. I think she was still enjoying her new home and her own company, and I was certainly getting used to mine. Let things develop as they would, I thought, wincing at my own clichés, at their own pace. I liked Heather a lot, enjoyed her company, and she had also turned out to be good in bed, but neither of us wanted to give up our freedom or our solitude yet. And both of us were still carrying too much pain around with us, however we might try to mask it.

I felt that I was only just getting over losing Laura. The first few months I had been far too consumed by grief and guilt to think in terms of being ‘single’ or enjoying my ‘freedom’, but over my time at Kilnsgate, I was coming to see what these things meant, that there was a future without Laura. It didn’t mean that I loved her memory any the less, or that I didn’t miss her as much, but she had told me herself that my life had to go on without her and move in new directions, and of course, it did. Laura was right, as usual.

I cleared away the dinner plates, put the dishes in the dishwasher, poured another glass of Shiraz and went back to Grace’s journal, the fire crackling, the wind rattling the panes, bare branches scraping against the upstairs windows. I angled the standing light as best I could and put on my drugstore glasses. Grace’s handwriting, tiny as it was, was neat and for the most part legible, though I stumbled over one or two of the place names. She certainly had hit all the high spots.

The bare details of her account said very little about the terrible ordeal she had been through. That was the stuff of nightmares. She described most events, however terrible, in a straightforward style, showing about as much emotion as she had at her trial, simply detailing what happened, what she did and what she saw – though I could tell how affected she was by the horror of it all. I will admit without shame that, at several points in her narrative, I had to pause to wipe away my tears, and perhaps that was due all the more to her sense of restraint and lack of graphic detail. For someone gifted, or cursed, with an imagination like mine, it wasn’t too difficult to fill in the spaces between the lines with pictures. My movie-obsessed mind couldn’t help but flesh out the brief, fleeting images, search for the structure, the narrative arc, the musical score, even.

To say that I was stunned and surprised by Grace’s account of her wartime experiences is a grave understatement. Like most people, I suppose I knew there were nurses in the war, but I never really thought about the horrors of their job, what they experienced. I never gave them much thought at all. Grace’s story made me realise how we have simply overlooked the courage and suffering of women during wartime. There are exceptions, celebrated heroines, such as Florence Nightingale, Gladys Aylward and Edith Cavell, but on the whole they are a forgotten army. They suffered many of the same hardships as their male counterparts, the same fears of being blown to bits by a stray shell or a bomb, or hit by a sniper’s bullet, the same fear of capture and imprisonment, a fate that many suffered. And, for women, there was also the deep-rooted fear of what traditionally happens at the hands of male conquerors. Grace had seen it all, horrors I could barely begin to imagine, and throughout it all she had kept her humanity.

No wonder she never spoke of it to anyone. No wonder she hid her Royal Red Cross. No wonder she often seemed distracted and haunted. No wonder she liked to ride her motorbike like the clappers down the country lanes and make love in the open air with a penniless young artist.

But where did Ernest Fox come into all this? Did he know about it? Did Grace ever tell him or show him her journal? And if so, what did he do or say? Did he offer her comfort and sympathy? Was he jealous of Stephen’s kiss? It was my opinion that she hadn’t told him the details because she couldn’t, and that he hadn’t read the journal, that no one had except Grace, her sister, Louise and me. Grace had kept it hidden in the secret drawer in her escritoire until she handed it over to Felicity.

It remained my strong impression from everything I had heard about him from Wilf and Sam that Ernest Fox was something of a cold fish, and that Grace knew she could find no solace or sympathy in his arms. His coldness, his preoccupation with his job and his status in the eyes of the community had driven Grace to Sam Porter as surely as anything. It was my guess that Ernest wouldn’t want a woman who had the stink of the battlefield on her hands. He wanted a pretty, elegant companion in a fine hat hanging on his arm, who could be brought out and admired at functions and balls, but not heard. Never heard. Grace had tried to be that person, but it hadn’t worked for her. Nature has a way of making itself known.

The journal kept me up most of the night. I read and reread pages, turned to my favourite composers for relief – to Schubert, Elgar, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Brahms. At one time, I remember getting up and opening a second bottle of Shiraz, which went the way of the first, and slowly my eyes grew heavy from reading and crying behind the inadequate spectacles. I hadn’t found any of the answers I’d been looking for in Grace’s words – there was little or nothing of a personal nature – only a record of great courage and suffering told with incredible forbearance and self-possession. I knew that I could never have borne a fraction of what Grace had seen, touched and tried to heal, and it made me think how easy my own life had been, apart from Laura’s death, of course. But I had found no answers. Or at least, if I had, I couldn’t interpret them.

I finished my wine, took off my glasses and settled back in the armchair, almost imagining I could hear Grace’s laughter as she splashed with her friends on a rare day off in the waves of the South China Sea, while chaos reigned all around. I massaged the bridge of my nose. Fischer-Dieskau was singing ‘Irrlicht’ from Schubert’s
Winterreise.
Had it been summer, rosy-fingered dawn would have been spreading her array of colour across the morning sky when I finally fell asleep, but it was bleak midwinter, and there was nothing outside but the darkness of the night and the coldness of the stars as the last charred log dimmed in the grate and the fire died.

19

Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), February, 1942. Pompong Island

Sunday, 15th February, 1942

Monday, 16th February, 1942