House of the Hanged (16 page)

It was a bouncing little tune, a duet between a clarinet and a piano, but nothing remarkable, not for the first minute. Then the voice kicked in – a female voice, raw and worldly, yet somehow innocent, perfectly suited to the intriguing lyrics, which told the tale of one Emily Brown, an alluring young woman about to blow into some nameless town.

She sang just behind the beat, but in control, almost as if she were teasing the musicians accompanying her. When she fell silent and the band took up again at the end, they played too vigorously, eager to assert themselves, but even they must have known that the battle had already been lost. It was her song and hers alone.

The record ended with a click and scrape.

‘We have to hear that again,' said Barnaby. ‘Immediately.'

‘Who is she?' asked Tom.

‘Her name's Billie Holiday. Hard to believe she's only twenty, just a kid.'

As a fellow twenty-year-old, Lucy's instinct was to take issue with this last statement. She decided against it, though, not wishing to sour the mood with yet more friction. The voice had enchanted everyone, banishing the awkward business between Tom and Yevgeny.

They all lay there on the scattering of raffia mats and threadbare Turkish rugs, transfigured by the sun, and listened three more times to the story of the mysterious Miss Emily Brown coming to town, before Leonard requested some Al Bowlly.

It was Tom who reminded Lucy of her promise over dinner to take Walter for a spin in the
Albatross
, and it was Tom who offered to row them out to the sailboat. It seemed almost as though he was trying to get rid of them, to spare the youngsters any more adult nastiness that might be about to unfold. She voiced this suspicion to him while they were dragging the rowboat into the shallows and Walter was gathering together his things.

‘Don't be silly,' Tom replied brightly. ‘You're imagining it.'

‘So what's going on between you and Yevgeny? I didn't imagine that.'

‘Maybe I've travelled more widely than Yevgeny. Maybe I don't think it's funny to make demeaning jokes about people based on the colour of their skin.' He held out his hand so that she could steady herself as she climbed into the rowboat. ‘Would you prefer it if I laughed along with that sort of nonsense?'

‘No, of course not,' replied Lucy. ‘But it's not like you to be so . . .'

‘Vocal?'

‘Aggressive.'

Tom glanced over at Walter, who was approaching across the sand, almost within earshot now. ‘I'm sorry if I upset you,' he said quietly. ‘Next time I'll find a more subtle way to make my point.'

Tom helped them rig the
Albatross
before rowing off with a mock salute and a cry of ‘
Bon route et bon vent
.'

‘Where do you want to go?' Lucy asked as the
Albatross
picked up headway.

Walter reached into his pocket and pulled out a tatty cotton sun hat which looked like it had been fought over by two dogs. He tugged it over his unruly locks. ‘How about the islands?'

‘We'll be late for lunch. We might even miss it altogether.'

‘I've got a hunch there'll be others we won't miss.' He leaned back on the bench, elbows on the deck, his long legs stretched out in the cockpit. ‘Nice ride.'

‘This is nothing. Wait till the wind picks up in the channel.'

‘Are you going to let me drive it?'

‘You
drive
a motor boat. This is a sailboat.'

‘Oh.'

‘I might,' said Lucy. ‘If you promise not to crash it.' Walter threw back his head and laughed.

There were any number of reasons why she loved sailing, but up there near the top of the list was the intimacy of the conversations which seemed to flow so effortlessly while out at sea. Maybe it was the abstraction from quotidian realities, or simply the cry of the elements, but people seemed inclined to a free exchange of confidences – like two strangers thrown together in a train compartment who end up baring their souls to each other.

She and Walter were, after all, little more than strangers. The fate of Lucy's real father certainly hadn't come up as a topic of discussion between them the previous evening, although it soon emerged that Walter knew the story.

‘Tom told me,' he explained.

‘What exactly did he say?'

‘Only that he died in France towards the beginning of the war. And that your mother doesn't like to talk about it.'

‘No, she doesn't. She was very young. I think it almost destroyed her. I mean, it comes up, of course. It can't be avoided. We still own the house where he grew up. Mother wanted to sell it, but Leonard persuaded her not to. We go there in the summer for weekends. It's on the coast, just across from the Isle of Wight – Lymington. It's where I learned to sail. He loved sailing.'

She was rambling now, as she often found herself doing when speaking about her father.

‘You didn't know him, did you?'

‘No, he died just after I was born.'

‘That must be tough.'

‘I don't know,' shrugged Lucy. ‘Maybe not as tough as knowing him and then losing him.'

‘No, I guess not,' replied Walter. He stared up at the mast before looking back at her. ‘I lost two uncles in France – later, of course, towards the end of the war – one to a firing squad, one to influenza. Not very heroic.'

‘A firing squad?'

‘Uncle Freddie turned out to be a coward. At least, that's what they told us at the time. Others came home with a different story. Seems he suffered some kind of nervous collapse under fire. Whatever it was, it was enough to get him shot by his own people.'

‘That's awful.'

‘That's war,' Walter shrugged. ‘An officer must set a shining example to the ranks at all times.' There was a sardonic edge to his words.

Lucy was seized with a sudden urge to tell him how her father had died. She had never told anyone before, but she was even able to describe the field of battle to him, the lazy rise and fall of the land around the small village near the Belgian border, with its canal and its sturdy little church and its narrow high street fringed with old lime trees. She was able to render the place in such detail because Tom had paid a visit there a few years ago. It had been his gift to her – a secret pilgrimage on her behalf – knowing that the subject was strictly off-limits at home, and suspecting that she might be curious to hear more about the exact circumstances of her father's end.

‘Only, I didn't want to hear it, not at first. It was almost a year before I let him tell me.'

A sudden German advance had seen the Royal Fusiliers fighting a rear-guard action, and her father had been shot four times while firing a machine-gun near the swing-bridge over the canal. It was the fifth bullet that killed him.

‘Tom even found his grave. One day we're going to visit it together.'

Walter shifted on the bench. ‘Your mother should be there too.'

‘That's never going to happen. She'd murder Tom if she knew what he'd done.'

‘What he did for you,' said Walter with quiet deliberation, ‘was a wonderful thing.'

‘He's a wonderful man.'

‘He is. Even if he doesn't like my paintings,' he added with a wry grin.

‘He told you that?'

‘He didn't have to.'

‘You were working this morning, weren't you? The paint on your hands . . .'

Walter glanced down at his hands. ‘Up with the sun. Yevgeny's a tough task master.'

But he didn't want to talk about himself, or painting, or even Yevgeny; he nudged the conversation back to Tom. ‘There's something mysterious about him.'

‘Mysterious?'

‘Don't you find?'

‘It's hard for me to judge. For as long as I've known him he's always been coming and going, disappearing off to exotic places. The only difference now is that he does it for himself, his writing, instead of the government.'

‘Yevgeny says he used to work for Leonard.'

‘That's right, but they've always been friends, right from the first. He even came to live with us once, when I was very young, soon after Leonard and Mother were married. He's still about the only colleague of Leonard's Mother will have in the house.'

‘Somehow I can't see it – Tom in an official capacity. I mean, I've hardly ever seen the guy in shoes, let alone a tuxedo.'

Lucy smiled. ‘I don't think embassy life abroad is all dinner parties.'

‘It is in the trashy novels I read.'

‘You'll get over the disappointment.'

Walter kept up the conversation about Tom with a string of casual questions, which after a while began to feel more and more like an interrogation, as if he was casting about for some secret to which only she held the key. At a certain point, she'd had enough and batted one of his questions straight back at him.

‘
You
tell
me
,' she insisted. ‘Why
does
a man suddenly up sticks and move to France?'

‘Because he's running from something. Or searching for something. Probably a bit of both.'

She wasn't sure if he was speaking of Tom or of himself, so she left him no choice.

‘And what are you searching for?'

Walter hesitated. ‘A better way of life.'

‘And have you found it?'

‘What day is it today? Thursday? Yes. By rights I should be sat at a desk in the family brokerage firm on Wall Street, wearing pressed trousers, a stiff collar and a suitable necktie. That office is where my life was headed for as long as I can remember. Instead, I'm here – skimming across the waves with a beautiful girl.' He paused. ‘Yes, I think I've found it.'

She registered the compliment, but ignored it. ‘What happened?'

‘My father would say that I lost my marbles, or that I fell in with the wrong crowd at Harvard, or that he always knew I didn't have the backbone for “real” work. But in the end, Mark Twain's to blame.'

‘The author?'

‘He's always been a hero of mine, ever since I was a kid. Then in my sophomore year I read something he wrote, an observation, just a few lines.'

‘Come on – out with it.'

‘He said:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
'

‘A fitting metaphor, under the circumstances.'

He smiled. ‘It changed everything. Not immediately. But it got lodged in my head. I couldn't shake it off. I saw the rest of my life laid out in front of me, mapped out for me by others. I mean, no one had even bothered to ask me. Not once. Then here was Twain, my hero, telling me that I didn't have to do it, not any of it. And if I didn't do it, I'd be happier for it. Well, he's right – I am. The sun's shining, the wind's in my face, I've got paint on my hands. I'll take those three simple things any day over stocks and shares and bonds.'

It was quite a speech, and she wasn't sure how to follow it, so she said, rather inanely, ‘I can't imagine Wall Street's the place to be right now.'

‘Don't you believe it. My father made a mint anticipating the Crash. And since the market bottomed out in '32, it's been business as usual for him and his kind. My cousin assures me there's a fortune to be made in defaulted railroad bonds, which seems rather unnecessary as he already has several fortunes. New York Central's the hot tip, by the way.'

‘I'll be sure to cable my stockbroker the moment we make landfall.'

Walter laughed. ‘Here,' she said, handing over the tiller and switching places with him. ‘In the spirit of Mark Twain – explore, dream, discover.'

He teased the tiller.

‘If you start heading over there,' Lucy warned, ‘you're going to have to come about on to a starboard tack.'

‘Ready about.'

‘
Ready
,' she replied. ‘Just remember to release the jib sheet –'

She didn't get a chance to finish as Walter pushed the tiller away from him with a call of ‘Hard alee!'

That's odd
, she thought, as the bow moved through the eye of the wind. The term she'd been using was ‘Helms alee'. They both ducked the boom, crossing to the other side of the boat. Walter was already trimming the jib by the time she was settled.

‘That's good,' she said encouragingly.

It was more than good; the trim was perfect, and when he nonchalantly sheeted in the mainsail she realized he'd been having her on all along.

‘Beginner's luck.'

Walter grinned. ‘Must be.'

He looked so completely at home helming her boat that it was almost irritating. No – it was extremely irritating.

‘She handles like the Herreshoff S-Class I used to race when I was younger. That's another sloop with acres of canvas.' He stared admiringly up at the pregnant mainsheet.

‘Where did you learn to sail?'

‘Cape Cod. We have a summer place there. One of the privileges of being a Poor Little Rich Boy.' He paused, thoughtful. ‘That house is one of the few things I'll miss. You can't begin to imagine how beautiful it is.'

‘I doubt it's going anywhere.'

‘No. But I won't be visiting.' He hesitated. ‘My father cut me off without a cent and swore never to speak to me again.'

‘That seems a little . . . extreme.'

‘He thought it quite reasonable.'

‘I'm sure he'll come round.'

‘You don't know my father.' He visibly brightened. ‘Enough of that. Tell me where to point this thing before I drown us both in self-pity.'

‘Have you ever been to Héliopolis?'

‘Sounds Greek.'

‘Put it this way, the people there wear about as many clothes as your average Greek statue.'