Final Witness (4 page)

    Greta looked up toward him smiling through her tears, and he found himself staring down at the swell of her breasts beneath her simple white blouse. He felt a surge of sexual excitement.

    “Thank you, Peter. I’m sorry I was so silly. You’re so – ”

    But Greta didn’t finish her sentence. Sir Peter pulled himself away quite violently and stood half swaying by the wall. Across the room a portrait of Lady Anne’s father looked down at him with an expression of aristocratic contempt. It was a bad picture but a good likeness, painted in an era when family portraits were no longer in fashion. The artist had caught the aristocratic curl of his sitter’s lip and the distant look in the half-closed eyes. Sir Peter remembered the old man’s cool disapproval when he had come asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

    “Going places, Anne says. But which ones? That’s the question, isn’t it, young man? Which ones?”

    “All right, you old bastard,” Sir Peter whispered to himself as he stared up at the portrait. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

    “What did you say, Peter?” asked Greta.

    “Nothing. Nothing except that you’re not the only one who’s felt out of place in this damned house. I’ve got to go now. See if Anne’s all right. You understand.”

    “Yes, of course,” said Greta, wiping her eyes with her napkin.

    

    

    PETER TOOK the stairs two at a time but at the top he found his bedroom door locked. There was no reply when he knocked and called out his wife’s name.

    After a minute or two he walked despondently down the corridor to an infrequently used spare bedroom. The still heavy air of the evening persisted into the night, making it hard to sleep. Peter stripped himself naked, but still he felt his skin prickling and his heart beating too fast.

    Getting up, he opened the old leaded windows as wide as they would go. Outside, the six thin yew trees at the front of the house stood completely still. Black clouds scurried across the sky, shutting out the pale crescent moon, and in the north over toward Carmouth jagged white lines of lightning rent the sky and were gone. There was a distant sound of thunder but no rain.

    Peter remembered staying in this room when he and Anne had come to visit her father before their marriage. He’d lain on this bed listening to the sea, feeling the same anxiety mixed up with sexual frustration. Down the hall Sir Edward had lain snoring. Anne was in her room across the corridor, shut in with the stuffed bears and embroidery of her childhood.

    “Got everything you want, young man?” had been his host’s last words before they went upstairs. Said in a tone that implied he wasn’t going to get anything more – like Sir Edward’s daughter, for instance. But he had. And now the old bastard was under the sod up in the Flyte churchyard and Peter was the knight of the house.

    He was a knight because of what he’d done in his life. Not like his father-in-law, who had inherited his title. Peter’s father had fought to defend his country and had instilled in his son a belief in duty and service. But all this counted for nothing with Sir Edward. The old man had lost no opportunity to make his feelings known. Peter wasn’t the right class. He was a self-made man, a nouveau riche. Not what Sir Edward had in mind for his aristocratic daughter.

    But perhaps the old man had been right to oppose the marriage, thought Peter bitterly. He and Anne had less and less in common now. Before there had been her beauty and his determination to win her against the odds, to make her choose him over her father. Peter was always most fulfilled when he was overcoming obstacles.

    He had thought that he would be delivering her from a tyrannical father and a boring rural life, but as it turned out, that was the life she really wanted. She had an inner contentment entirely foreign to her husband. She was happiest growing her roses and listening to her son’s stories. Far away from London and everything that mattered to Peter.

    Thomas, of course, had driven his parents even further apart. He had made his father redundant, turned him into a visitor in the house, and in the last year, Peter had come to rely more and more upon his personal assistant for companionship.

    The sound of the thunder came closer, answered by the crash of the waves on the shore. Outside in the corridor Peter heard footsteps. He pulled on his shirt and opened the door just in time to see a figure standing outside the master bedroom at the end of the corridor. The next moment his wife stood framed in the suddenly illuminated doorway before she reached forward and pulled Thomas inside.

    His son hated thunder and lightning, and Peter had been woken many times on stormy nights to find Thomas in the bed curled up on the far side of his wife.

    “He’s got to learn to cope with it on his own, Annie,” Peter would say. “He’ll be frightened all his life if you carry on mollycoddling him like this.” But his wife would not listen.

    “You don’t understand, Peter. You haven’t got an imagination like Thomas or I have. I remember how frightened I was by the Suffolk storms when I was young. They made me think that the world was going to end.”

    The door of the master bedroom closed, and the corridor was plunged back into semidarkness. Peter felt a sudden stab of jealousy. His son was now lying in the bed where he should be. They made him feel like an intruder in his own home. They didn’t want him and they didn’t understand him. Only Greta did.

    Peter remembered their first meeting. It had been at the time of the Somali crisis in late 1996, when the prime minister had sent in the SAS to rescue the British diplomats held hostage there. The mission had been a disaster. Most of the hostages were killed, and so were several of their would-be rescuers. The newspapers called it a national humiliation, and everyone blamed the prime minister. People said that the hostages would still have been alive if he hadn’t been so impetuous. He should have tried harder to negotiate their release. But Peter didn’t agree. He’d been to Somalia. The revolutionary government there had no concept of negotiation or compromise. There had been no alternative but to act.

    In the aftermath, however, Peter had felt unable to do anything himself. He was paralyzed by the rumor and division swirling all around him. Every day the media talked openly about the prime minister as yesterday’s man and speculated about his successor. Senior ministers smelled blood and jockeyed for position. The government’s approval rating was the lowest in ten years.

    Then one day everything had changed. Peter had agreed to be interviewed by a local newspaper about a hospital closure in his Midlands constituency, and a young reporter called Greta Grahame turned up to ask him questions. She was pretty and enthusiastic, and Peter took her out to lunch as a way of distracting himself from the political mess down in London. But the wine loosened his tongue, and he ended up telling her everything he thought and felt about the crisis. She listened while he drank the best part of two bottles of wine, and then she told him what to do. Her advice was so simple, but it hit him like a bombshell. “Speak out,” she said. “Do what you think is right. Don’t worry about other people or the future. If the prime minister was right, then he deserves your support.”

    Later in the afternoon, Greta interviewed Peter about the crisis, and by the end of the week the story had been taken up by all the networks. It was as if everyone had been waiting for someone to say what Peter had said. The political tide turned, and in the reshuffle that followed the prime minister’s election victory three months later, Peter was made minister of defense. The conduct of future military rescue missions would be his responsibility.

    Peter did not forget the young reporter in his moment of triumph. He gave her a job as his personal assistant, and he had never for a moment regretted his decision. She was always there for him. Not like Anne, who found politics boring and got a migraine every time she left Suffolk. Greta stayed up with him into the small hours drafting and typing his speeches. She encouraged him through the bad times, and she shared in his successes. Greta. Where would he be without her?

    Peter thought of his personal assistant sleeping now on the other side of the corridor. It was extraordinary how she’d carried on coming down here even after what had happened with the dresses, particularly as Anne hadn’t made it any easier for her. She came because he needed her. And Anne wouldn’t even come to London for the opening of Parliament. She was too busy with her garden. With all those bloody roses.

    Peter turned out the light, leaving the windows open in the vain hope of a breath of wind to circulate the fetid air in the room. Outside the thunder persisted but there was still no rain. He twisted and turned, and the wet heat made the sheet cling to his body.

    Toward two o’clock he fell into an uneasy sleep. He dreamed that he was standing naked at the foot of his own bed here in the House of the Four Winds. The room was dark, but he could see by the light of the full moon, which hung outside the high open windows like a witness. In front of him a woman was lying facedown on the soft white eiderdown. She was wearing a white silk skirt with the hemline ending just below the knee. It was the same skirt that his wife had worn at dinner that evening. Above the waist the woman was naked, and she lay with her invisible face and forearms supported on a mass of white pillows. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping, and so he leaned forward and slowly traced two lines with the tips of his fingers down the back of the woman’s calves, feeling the strength of the tightening muscles underneath.

    As he reached her ankles, she drew herself forward, away from him, and raised her body up into a kneeling position. The skirt gathered up onto her thighs, and Peter followed her, kneeling at the end of the bed. Reaching out with both hands, he took hold of the skirt and folded it up onto the woman’s waist, exposing her perfectly shaped buttocks.

    And then it was as if time and movement were suspended. He knelt above the woman’s body with every fiber of his being willing him forward to take hold of her. Yet nothing could happen unless she gave some indication of her consent.

    It was a tiny wisp of wind that broke the moment. Some stealthy movement in the still air elicited a scarcely audible sigh from the naked figure beneath him. She pulled her knees forward and apart, raising herself up on her forearms so that Peter could see the swell of her breasts hanging down onto the white eiderdown. Everything was revealed to him, and with a cry of fulfillment he thrust himself forward and deep into the very center of the woman beneath him.

    As he pulled himself back from the brink of orgasm and prepared to enter her again, Peter called out the name of this woman that he loved so much.

    “Anne. Anne. I love you, Anne.”

    But the woman, who half turned her head toward him out of a mass of white pillows, did not have his wife’s blue eyes. These eyes were green. Glittering green. How could he have mistaken that raven hair for the brown tresses of his wife? It was Greta beneath him on the bed. And someone was beating on the door trying to get in.

    Peter woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in the strange bed with his body covered in sweat. It was not a knocking on the door that had woken him but the crash of the old leaded window against the casement. It had broken free of its catch and was swinging madly to and fro in the great storm that had burst over the house while he was asleep. A gray light showed that it was past dawn, although no sunlight penetrated the cloudy sky.

    As Peter watched, the window crashed against the casement again and two of its leaded panes broke. The sill was awash with rain and shattered glass. Peter leapt from the bed and tugged at the window, forcing it back onto its latch but catching his elbow as he did so on a shard of broken glass. Blood dripped on his feet and on the apple-green carpet. Looking down, Peter saw that his penis was only now beginning to wilt. He stood still for a moment regarding himself with disgust tinged with a sense of ridicule before he crossed to the bed and wrapped the sweat-soaked pillowcase around his arm.

    Outside, the previously statuesque yews were being blown in all directions by a screaming wind while the great rain beat against the House of the Four Winds with an unappeased fury. Beyond the yews the black gates stood open and Peter could see a small figure struggling up the drive toward the house.

    Peter pulled on his clothes as fast as he could and ran down the wide curving staircase to the front door. Dropping the pillowcase tourniquet from his arm, he turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Mrs. Marsh from the cottage across the road was dimly recognizable beneath her raincoat as she struggled to make her way up the steep steps to the yew-tree terrace. Sir Peter hurried forward and pulled her into the house.

    “What is it, Grace? You look white as a sheet. Has something happened?”

    “No, it’s all right, Sir Peter. It’s just that my Christopher’s a volunteer on the lifeboat and they got called out just before midnight. He usually keeps in touch with the shore by radio when the boat’s out and so I can phone them to see that everything’s all right, but our telephone line’s gone down and so – ”

    “You can’t. And so you need to use ours. Come into my study, and you can take your coat off.”

    “Thank you, Sir Peter. I’m sorry if I got you up.”

    “You didn’t. The storm woke me. Broke the window upstairs. It seems like quite a gale.”

    “It is. I haven’t felt the wind like this since the storm we had here ten years ago. I just hope that Christopher’s all right. I don’t know what I’d do – ”

    “It’s all right, Grace, everything’s going to be fine,” said Sir Peter with a conviction that he did not feel as he picked up the telephone on his desk. He had heard the underlying panic in her voice.