Final Witness (10 page)

    “Jane’s washed your shirts. They’re in the laundry room. And you’ll need to take your blazer for the theater.”

    “The theater? What are we going to see?”

    “
Macbeth
. At the Globe. I’ve got tickets for Thursday night. Just you and me.”

    “
Macbeth!
Oh, Mummy, I love you! It’s the one I’ve always wanted to see.” Thomas ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and hurried to his room to get ready.

    Lady Anne smiled. What a strange boy he was! It was the first time in two weeks that she’d heard real happiness in his voice, and what was it that had caused this change? A tale of ghosts and bloody murder, treachery and treason.

    

    They drove with the top of the Aston Martin down. It was a beautiful car that Lady Anne had had since she was in her twenties. The garage in Flyte that had looked after her father’s Rolls-Royce had done the same for the bright red sports car that he had given her for her twenty-first birthday. Driving it made her feel young again. The world that flew by in a blur of fields and haystacks seemed full of possibility. She was a fool to have shut herself and Thomas up in the house for so long.

    Thomas also felt exhilarated. He loved to watch his mother drive. Her beautiful hands laced themselves around the spokes of the steering wheel, which was small like in a racing car, as she sat back in her tan leather seat and allowed the wind to blow her brown hair over her shoulders. She was wearing a white summer dress with an open neck, and Thomas could see her favorite gold locket glinting in the sun where it lay heart-shaped on her breastbone. His father had given it to his mother on their wedding day, with a picture of them both shut inside.

    On her finger Lady Anne wore a blue, square-cut sapphire ring. The stone had been brought back from India by Thomas’s great-grandfather just before the First World War. There was a family rumor passed down through the generations that old Sir Stephen Sackville had stolen it from its native owner, who had then cursed him and his descendants, but no one believed the story. The jewel seemed so pure and magical, and the portrait of Sir Stephen hanging in the drawing room at the House of the Four Winds was of a kindly old man, saddened by the early death of his daughter, Lady Anne’s mother, in a riding accident. She had only been forty when she died, the same age that Thomas’s mother was now, and Thomas had often come into his mother’s bedroom to find her sitting at her dressing table gazing up at the portrait of her mother hanging on the wall above the fireplace.

    “I’m wearing the ring for you,” said Lady Anne, sensing her son’s attention to the sapphire. “I know it’s your favorite.”

    “Grandmother’s wearing it in the portrait, isn’t she?” asked Thomas, who loved family history. “I was looking at it yesterday.”

    “Yes, she always wore it. Her father gave it to her when she was twenty-one. There’s that old story I told you about it. About where it came from in India. I’ve got a letter about it somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out. The sapphire’s so very beautiful. Wearing it makes me feel close to her. It’s silly, I know.”

    “No, it’s not.”

    “You’re right. It’s not.” Lady Anne smiled at the certainty in her son’s voice.

    “I do so wonder what she was like, Tom,” she went on after a pause. “My father used to say that she was a daredevil. Always getting into scrapes and running up huge debts that old Sir Stephen had to pay off. But everyone forgave her because she was so pretty and full of life. Then suddenly she was dead. Killed by a horse, of all things.”

    “How old were you, Mum?”

    “When it happened? Five. I’d just turned five.”

    “It must’ve been awful. Really awful.” Thomas suddenly wished that he’d not brought up the subject of his grandmother.

    “I don’t know, to be honest,” said Lady Anne. “I mean, yes, it must have completely traumatized me, which is why I can’t remember anything about it except one image, which may have nothing to do with her death except that I feel sure it does. It’s seeing my father sitting on the front stairs. I can’t remember if he was crying or not, but I know that he never sat anywhere except on a chair and there he was sitting on the stairs.”

    “The front stairs?”

    “Yes. And for many years I couldn’t remember anything about my mother at all. I would look at the old photograph albums, but they didn’t mean anything, and curiously it was that painting that you like that gave me the strongest sense of her. It used to hang in the hall, and I’d gaze at it for hours until one day a memory came back to me.

    “I was in a park on a swing. It must’ve been like a children’s playground, and I’ve never been able to work out where it is, although I can see a grove of big green Christmas trees nearby. Anyway, there’s someone pushing the swing, and I go up, up, up in the air so high that my little patent leather black shoes are right above my head.”

    “But where’s your mother?” asked Thomas.

    “She’s pushing the swing. I can’t see her but I know she is. And that’s why I’m so happy. Going so high but feeling so safe because she’s pushing me. That’s my memory of her.”

    Lady Anne stopped talking and wiped a tear from her eye. Unlike many boys his age, Thomas was not repelled by emotion. He had the quality of empathy, and so he leaned across the hand brake and kissed his mother on her wet cheek.

    “Thank you, Tom. You’re a good boy.”

    This did upset Thomas, who didn’t feel he was a boy at all. He moved uncomfortably in his seat, but Lady Anne didn’t seem to notice. She was still thinking of her mother.

    “So anyway, after my father died and I moved into the big room with Peter, I took the portrait up there with me and hung it over the fireplace.”

    “Was the safe already there?” asked Thomas irrelevantly.

    “No, that was your father’s idea. He wanted me to put all the jewelry in a bank vault because it was much too valuable to be left lying around. You know what he’s like. Practical, unlike me.”

    “Yes.” Thomas responded with feeling. Practicality had always been his father’s code word for what he felt was missing in his son.

    “But I wouldn’t have it. What’s the point in having beautiful things if they’re shut away where no one can ever see them? And so we compromised. Your father installed his big, ugly safe, and I hung your grandmother’s portrait over it.”

    “Looking after her jewels,” said Thomas.

    “Yes, in a way; but for me the important thing about having it over the fireplace is that I can see it in the morning when I wake up. The picture makes me feel close to her.”

    “She looks funny in it, I think,” said Thomas, searching for the right words. “Not funny peculiar but two-things-at-once funny. Like she doesn’t care about anything except that she really loves people too.”

    “Yes, you’re right. She seems so free. Unlike me. That’s the result of losing your mother when you’re young, I guess.”

    Lady Anne caught the look of anxiety creasing her son’s brow as she parked the Aston Martin in front of the house in Chelsea.

    “I’m sorry, Thomas. I don’t know what I’m thinking of. I bring you to London to cheer you up and spend half the journey talking about my mother. It’s awful of me.”

    “No, it’s not. I just hate it when people die young. That’s all.”

    “Well, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m as fit as a fiddle.”

    Lady Anne smiled at her son and rummaged in her bag for the key to the house. As she did so, the sun came out from behind a nearby tall building and shone down suddenly on her sapphire ring. The jewel glowed midnight blue and Thomas shivered in the sun.

    

    

    IT HAD BEEN a long time since Thomas had stayed in the house off the King’s Road, and he enjoyed running up and down the staircases and opening the doors to the various rooms.

    Greta had an apartment in the basement, while the ground floor had been converted to a suite of offices where Sir Peter conducted his government business and held important meetings. All the rooms were empty now, however, because both Peter and Greta were away from home on the weekly visit to Peter’s constituency in the Midlands. They were expected back the following evening, so Thomas had the place to himself for more than twenty-four hours.

    The house was tall and narrow, with a small walled garden at the rear. Sir Peter had bought it twelve years before when he was first elected to Parliament, and it had always been very much his house, in contrast to the House of the Four Winds, which bore the stamp of Lady Anne and her Sackville ancestors.

    The rooms were expensively but sparsely furnished, and they contained almost nothing personal. The only two photographs in the house were a studio portrait of Lady Anne and one of Thomas, both displayed in heavy frames on a bookcase in the living room. The books were all biographies of statesmen and treatises on economics and foreign policy. Thomas looked without success for a novel on the shelves.

    Everything was clean and tidy. Decorative objects stood at exact right angles to their neighbors, and the cushions on the armchairs and sofa were plumped up as if nobody had ever sat on them. Thomas noticed that almost every room except his own contained a clock.

    Lady Anne was having a rest after the journey, and the tall house felt cold and unfriendly to Thomas. He unpacked everything in his suitcase and draped his clothes over the furniture in his bedroom on the top floor, but this did nothing to fill the underlying emptiness. It was the sort of place, thought Thomas, where you could die and nothing would happen. Nobody would notice.

    Outside everything was different. It was a warm spring day in Chelsea, and the young and the beautiful vied to fit themselves into outfits that revealed more of their breasts and legs than Thomas would have believed possible. It all filled him with a random lust of which he felt ashamed in the presence of his mother, who took him shopping at Harrods in the afternoon.

    Later they ate dinner on the other side of the river at a little French restaurant with a view of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Thomas thought of his father and felt glad that he was away from home. About Greta his feelings were more ambiguous. Not a day went by that Thomas did not remember the sight of her breasts as she stood half naked in his mother’s bedroom and pulled him toward her. The girls that had passed so close to him on the sidewalks during the afternoon had made the memory more vivid than ever, and yet at the same time he almost hated Greta. He’d seen the way she looked at his mother and his father like she was greedy for something they had, but then he remembered the way she looked at him when she said: “You’re looking at my breasts, Thomas.” The way she laughed when he denied it.

    

    Back at the house in Chelsea Thomas lay awake in bed listening to the passing voices of the late-night revelers. Someone somewhere was playing David Gray’s
White Ladder,
and the songs filled Thomas with a sense of longing for people and places he didn’t yet know.

    Toward midnight he fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed that he was once again in his mother’s bedroom in Flyte watching Greta in the long mirror, but this time she seemed unaware of his presence in the doorway. She stood with her hands on her hips, wearing the same lemon silk dress of his mother’s that she had worn on that day the previous October, but now Greta had brought it in at the waist with a thin black snakeskin belt that matched her raven hair.

    Slowly her hands moved to the buckle of the belt and eased open the fastening. She held the two ends for a moment and then let go. In Thomas’s dream the belt fell slowly to the floor but he didn’t hear it land. It was a dream without sound, but unlike other dreams he’d had, it was full of will. Greta did as she did because he willed it. If he did not will it, then she would stop. No, more than that: she wouldn’t be there at all.

    Slowly her hands moved to an invisible zipper at the back of the dress just below the nape of her neck. She had it in her fingers, and slowly, with exquisite deliberation, she pulled it down. He could feel the movement as if he were tracing the line of her spine with his finger, and he knew that she only did it because he willed her to. The effort made him sway and catch hold of the side of the door, but she didn’t seem to notice. Instead she pulled her arms free of the dress and stepped out of it closer to the mirror. The dress was a discarded pool lying on the floor between them.

    Her body was perfect. Thomas could feel the strength of it, the muscle tone of the thighs below the rounded hills of her buttocks. He imagined running his hands slowly up the inside of her legs, and as if in answer to his thought Greta slowly moved her legs apart, arching herself forward as she did so.

    In his dream Thomas stepped out from the shadow of the doorway and fell to his knees. Groping forward almost blindly, he took hold of Greta’s naked sides, pulling her close so that his fingers soon had hold of her hard nipples as she pushed her breasts down toward him. Almost at the same moment his tongue found the wet softness between her legs and he went forward into a dark, unconscious ecstasy.

    Thomas tossed and turned on the bed, throwing the hot duvet onto the floor as he did so, but he did not wake. The dream would not let him go. He felt Greta’s hands on his shoulders pushing him toward his mother’s bed.

    He staggered to his feet, asking for release, but as his knees landed on the bed and he arched his back ready to thrust himself deep inside her, he looked down and saw his mother’s sapphire ring glowing midnight blue on Greta’s finger, and his mother’s gold locket hanging from her lovely neck.

    He cried out in his sleep, waking as he came, and then lay on the bed like someone pulled half drowned from the sea while the sound of fire engines’ sirens passed the house and then faded into the distance.