Every Secret Thing (4 page)

I was keen to change the subject, and it must have altered something in my face because Venetia seemed to think I needed bolstering. She took the nearest bottle and began to fill my wineglass.

‘Oh, no,’ I said, ‘I really can’t. I have to drive.’

She held the bottle poised, surprised. ‘You’re not thinking of driving all that way back up to London tonight, are you? Not at this hour, on your own?’

The Colonel wouldn’t hear of it. ‘No, no, we have plenty of rooms, my dear girl. Take your pick.’

‘I really couldn’t…’

‘Nonsense,’ said the Colonel. ‘Have some wine, enjoy yourself. We don’t let our guests get away so easily.’

To be honest, I wasn’t really struggling to get away. And while I hadn’t followed Patrick’s earlier instructions to bring along my negligée, I did, from habit, have a toothbrush with me, and it wouldn’t be the first time that I’d worn the same clothes two days running.

‘Of course she’s staying,’ said Venetia Radburn. So it was decided.

The room they showed me to was lovely, very spacious and high-ceilinged, with large windows that at daybreak, I’d been promised, gave a view across the garden to the walnut grove.

I had expected Patrick, being Patrick, might at least attempt to make a pass, but to my great relief he didn’t. He didn’t even follow me upstairs. Long after the other guests had gone, and I had changed into my borrowed nightgown, having carefully smoothed out my simple black dress at the foot of the bed so that it would be wearable in the morning, I still could hear the timbre of his voice in conversation with his family in the drawing room below. I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, only that it sounded like a very keen discussion or debate that would be going on awhile.

But then again, you couldn’t be too sure, I thought, with Patrick. And, remembering my grandmother’s advice that you could never trust a lawyer, I made sure to lock my door.

The Colonel saw me out next morning, to my car. It can’t have been an easy thing to do, to wheel his chair across that gravel, but he managed it, a holdout from the days when men’s behaviour had been bound by rules of chivalry. His parting smile convinced me once again that in his youth he would have been at least as handsome as his son. He said, ‘You’re sure that you won’t change your mind, and stay to lunch?’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have to be somewhere this afternoon.’

‘Ah, well, I had to ask. I do hate losing all my company at once.’

Patrick had left half an hour ago, and Venetia had gone, too, though not before I’d had the chance to spend some time in conversation with her, just us two. I’d risen early; so had she. Her allergy to journalists apparently did not apply at breakfast. For a long time we had been the only people round the table, and our talk had been wide-ranging, from our favourite Paris restaurants to the state of the economy. She had such a quick intelligence, and such a way with language, that I could have stayed the whole day in that room with her, just talking. But the highlight of it all, for me, had been when she had asked me for my card. ‘You never know,’ she’d said. ‘Perhaps one day I
will
write my biography.’

I hadn’t really thought that she’d been serious, but I would have been an idiot to let the pitch go by, and so I’d given her my business card. ‘My number’s on the back, and Patrick has my address in Toronto, at my grandmother’s.’

‘Of course.’ And then, the icing on the cake, ‘Perhaps, if you come back to London sometime in the spring, when I’m not travelling so much, you could have Patrick bring you by my flat for tea.’

And so it seemed I’d scored a minor coup, achieving everything I could have hoped from coming here to dinner. I was smiling now, because of that, and the Colonel, not knowing the source of my happiness, appeared to put it down to his own charms.

He smiled. ‘A shame that Patrick couldn’t stay to see you off.’

‘Oh, well. He works a lot.’

With steady eyes, the old man shook my hand. ‘My son’s a fool. And you’re a lovely girl,’ he said. ‘Drive carefully.’

He waved me off, a lonely figure growing ever smaller in the rear view as I rumbled down the drive.

It was easily the warmest day we’d had yet in September, and I drove with the car windows open, purposely leaving the motorway early and taking the scenic route down into Hampshire. Tall trees arched up over me, making a tunnel of green that cast cool dappled shadows across my car’s windshield, with here and there flickers of sunlight that caught on the late-blooming wildflowers lining the verge. The day and the drive lulled me into a pleasantly semi-hypnotic state, so that I nearly missed seeing the signpost for Elderwel pointing away to the right.

I turned the car sharply, just missing the hedge at the side of the road.

Seen from the crest of a low hill as I approached, Elderwel looked like a tiny toy village of little square houses and small tidy gardens that ran in a line down each side of the narrow main street, with a church in the middle. Drawing closer, I could see more detail – clustered shops, and a
one-storey
school, and a half-timbered pub, and beside the pub, something that caught my attention: an old greystone house with a neat painted sign at the gate that read simply, ‘
The Laurels
’.

I pulled up across from it, looking more closely. This had been the house where Andrew Deacon lived. In a street of unremarkable houses, it was the most unremarkable. With its quietly ordinary walls and the windows with blinds behind, looking like half-asleep eyes, it stood rather deliberately back from the road, not expecting or wanting attention. No one would give it a second glance, I thought. Just like its owner.

Taking a last look I slipped the car back into gear and moved on up the long street towards the grey church of St Stephen’s.

‘
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
.’ The vicar, a young man, mid-thirties or so, with laugh-lines deeply carved around his eyes, was reading from Ecclesiastes in a pleasant voice that sounded not the slightest bit funereal. ‘
A time to be born, and a time to die
…’

In the yew tree at the vicar’s back a wren had taken shelter and was watching me with disconcerting steadiness, as though it knew I didn’t quite belong. I’d been afraid there wouldn’t be many at the funeral, and that I as a stranger would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb, but this corner of the churchyard was thick with people. Keeping discreetly to the edge of the crowd, I manoeuvred myself into a spot from where I had a clear view of the coffin and those closest to it.

‘
A time to kill, and a time to heal
…’

I let my gaze wander the men standing nearest the grave, a monochromatic assembly of dark suits, virtually indistinguishable from each other. Trying to pick out which was Andrew Deacon’s nephew, I studied the faces.

‘
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak
…’

The wren in the yew tree tipped its head as though studying
me
, its bead-like eyes betraying nothing of its thoughts. Ignoring it, I narrowed my focus to the three men standing to the right side of the vicar, all of whom looked to be something like sixty or seventy, just the right age.

‘
A time of war, and a time of peace
…’

Watching the three men, it struck me that they were among the oldest people here. I only saw two women and one man who would have been near Andrew Deacon’s age. Not many old friends come to see him off. Perhaps, I thought, when you got to be Andrew Deacon’s age there weren’t too many old friends left.

I couldn’t help but feel I’d done the right thing, coming here in Grandma’s place, to say goodbye. Though I had to admit it appeared Andrew Deacon had not been too lonely – there were some thirty people gathered round his plain wood coffin, and it didn’t take a journalist to see this was a man who had been well liked and respected, and was missed.

It shamed me to remember just how blithely I had brushed him off; considered him a nuisance…

‘For God shall bring every work into judgement,
’ the vicar was saying,
‘and every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’

A sharp wind stirred the scattering of flowers on the coffin, and the wren shot from the yew tree like a bullet, madly twittering. One of the three men that I had been watching reached forward to straighten a small wreath of rosebuds, then stood back and lowered his gaze to his black-gloved clasped hands.

The nephew, I decided, and felt even more sure of it at the ceremony’s end, when the vicar shook his hand first and some others from the crowd stepped up to offer words of comfort. I didn’t attempt to speak to him then, not just yet. Instead I followed along to the reception, mingling with genuine mourners amid the plates of sandwiches and polished urns of coffee.

I knew I wasn’t one of them – I hadn’t known the man as they had; I could claim no real acquaintance that would justify my being here, in what had until recently been Andrew Deacon’s home. But I was, as Andrew Deacon himself had pointed out, an observer of other people’s lives. It was a trait that I’d been born with and I earned my living from it and I couldn’t ever switch it off completely. I was curious to see inside the house where he had lived, to study his possessions and the people who had known him and to judge from them what sort of man he’d been.

I had learnt much in the ten minutes that I’d been inside The Laurels. I’d learnt, for example, that its owner had been a great gardener. In contrast to the bland, colourless face that the house showed the street, the high-walled back garden was filled with a startling and lovingly tended assortment of flowers and shrubberies, artistically arranged in beds that curved around the property in such a way they left only enough room for one trimmed green circle of lawn at the centre, with space for a bench and a birdbath.

I stood at the dining room window and looked at that garden, and tried to imagine the work that had gone into making it – the never-ending daily round of weeding, trimming, watering…of tying off the branches of the vines so that they grew just so against the sun-warmed wall…of digging up perennials, dividing up the roots, and then replanting them…a task for every season. And I tried to picture Andrew Deacon sitting on his bench beside the birdbath, lost in thought, as old men sometimes are, and looking at his flowers, at the beds of tea roses that grew close against the lawn.

He had liked to look at things of beauty. That I knew, from standing in this long room that had served as both a living room and dining room, its walls a pale golden peach colour that warmed in the light and set off the mahogany dining room suite to advantage. He’d hung paintings – not prints, but real paintings – wherever he could. Mostly landscapes, and street scenes, and one I particularly liked, of a little round windmill with wood-and-cloth sails. It didn’t look Dutch, I thought. Greek, maybe. Mediterranean.

Andrew Deacon had been to Greece, I knew, because above one low cabinet he’d hung a collection of photographs, all of them black and white, all of them good, all displaying the same eye – his own, I guessed – for light and composition. At least one was from Greece, looking down on the ruined remains of the open-air theatre at Delphi. I’d stood in almost the same spot myself, on my only trip to Greece, and it was strange to see the view again through someone else’s eyes; to know that Andrew Deacon had once stood there, too, and seen what I had seen.

The other photographs showed places that I didn’t know. Like the paintings, they were mostly landscapes: an avenue of plane trees, deep in shadow, that looked French; a sweep of barren desert underneath a cloudless sky; a curve of coastline backed by jagged mountains wreathed in mist, that felt distinctly Oriental. And there, unexpected, the little squat windmill again, with its round stone walls, backed by the sun with a man’s silhouette standing just to one side.

I was leaning in for a better look when a pleasant male voice said behind me, ‘They’re lovely, those photographs, aren’t they? He had a great talent.’

Turning, I found myself facing the vicar. He looked even younger close up – early thirties, perhaps, with dark hair and dark eyes and a warm, relaxed smile. He offered me his hand. ‘Hello. I’m sorry, I don’t know all Andrew’s friends.’

‘Kate Murray,’ I introduced myself above the handshake, and his eyebrows lifted.

‘You’re American.’

I didn’t correct him. My grandmother always said that there were certain categories of people who shouldn’t be corrected, for the sake of politeness, and I was fairly certain men of God fell into one such category. ‘I’ve been working in London,’ was all that I said, and then into the short pause that followed I added, ‘That’s where I met Mr Deacon.’

‘Ah.’ He didn’t ask for details, but then why would he? I thought. I was the only one who felt a need to justify my presence.

I shifted the talk from myself. ‘That was a lovely service, Reverend…’

‘Beckett. Tom Beckett.’

I nearly made some remark about his name being well suited to his profession, but I stopped myself, figuring that he probably got it all the time, so I said nothing, and the Reverend Thomas Beckett grinned.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he told me. ‘My mother’s way of making sure I chose the right sort of career, I think. And I’m glad you liked the service.’ With his hands in his pockets, he studied the frames on the wall. ‘I always think they’re rather sad things, photographs, when someone dies. One is left with the pictures, but none of the stories.’

I hadn’t really thought of that before, but he was right. I looked at the pictures with new eyes, wondering when he’d taken them, and why. They were a record of a man who’d travelled widely in his life. I looked for pictures of a wife, a family, but found only one small portrait, framed and sitting on a table, of a young man robed for graduation. Intrigued, I took a step to study it more closely. ‘Is that Mr Deacon?’

‘No, that’s his nephew, James,’ the vicar told me, with a reminiscent smile. ‘Andrew loathed having his picture taken. Went to great lengths to avoid it, if possible.’

I took stock of the room again – a quiet room, a man’s room, with its trappings of a solitary life. ‘He was a bachelor?’

‘A widower. His wife died long ago, I understand. They had no children.’

‘Oh.’

‘Here’s James.’ The vicar stopped a man who would have passed us by, and, putting a hand on my shoulder, brought me forward. ‘James, I’d like to introduce Kate Murray, one of Andrew’s friends from London. James Cavender,’ he told me, and smiled an apology at both of us. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m meant to be helping my wife with the coffee.’

It
was
the man I’d noticed at the funeral. He’d be somewhere in his seventies, I judged, with a determined mouth, a longish nose, and pale blue eyes. Kind eyes.

James Cavender had kept hold of my hand from the handshake, and gave it back now as he looked once again at me, the kind eyes making a visible effort. ‘You’re from London?’

‘I’ve been working there, yes. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am—’

‘You’re Canadian.’

That stopped me, in spite of myself. James Cavender, I thought, had a good ear for accents. ‘I am, yes. But how…?’

‘You’re the journalist.’

I paused at that, frowning myself as I wondered just how…

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Miss Murray.’ James Cavender’s long face had hardened. ‘My uncle gave you everything; I’ve nothing else to add. And now, if you’ll excuse me,’ he said, in a flat voice, and pointedly turning his back he walked off.