Motherland (55 page)

The plaque is dated October 16th 1949.

He reads, and gives a small wry smile, and moves on. He follows
the cliff edge to a point where the chalkland forms a jagged projection. He stands here for a moment looking down at the red and white lighthouse. The breakers splash softly at its concrete base. The tide is in, the sea pushing against the foot of the great white cliffs five hundred feet below. He looks up, over the sea to the hazy horizon. Somewhere over there is Dieppe, and the beach where he thought he would die, but did not die.

Beachy Head is once more in peace.

He has been happy today for the first time in months; perhaps years. That’s something.

There’s a light wind blowing off the sea. He breathes in the salt air. He feels young again, and strong. The late afternoon sunlight gleams on the water, forming a bright broken road to the horizon.

Live like an arrow in flight. How he must be laughing, Rex Mundi, the king of the world. Only a few short steps to freedom.

He walks briskly towards the edge and jumps. As he falls, accelerating all the time, his arms reach out as if to slow his descent. Halfway down his body strikes the cliff, lacerating his side, tumbling him over. Near the bottom his flailing body hits the cliff again. So he hurtles on down to meet the yielding water and the unyielding rocks.

*

The letter to Larry reads:

The letter to Kitty reads:

Larry stays on at River Farm, taking charge of all the necessary arrangements. Ed’s body is recovered by the coastguards. After a short service in Edenfield church, throughout which Kitty remains silent and dry-eyed, the body is buried in the churchyard. The obituary notice in
The Times
is entirely taken up by the events of one day in August eight years ago that won Edward Avenell the Victoria Cross.

Pamela cries in her mother’s arms, but Kitty hardly cries at all. Grief has paralysed her. At the same time she finds she can’t forgive Ed for what he’s done to them. She’s angry that he believed what he was doing was best for her. Alone in bed at night she speaks to him, not shouting, bitter in her insistence.

‘What gave you the right to walk away? What makes your suffering so much greater than everyone else’s? How can you not see the damage you’ve done? You have oblivion. What about us? We have a sorrow that won’t end. We have our failure to love you enough. We have your example before us for the rest of our lives, that unhappiness wins in the end.’

Larry makes no attempt to console Kitty, nor she him. He concentrates his energies on securing the family’s finances, and helping Hugo with the wine import business. By the time Hugo asks him to become a legal partner in the firm he has already made himself indispensable.

‘So now Ed’s got what he wanted,’ says Kitty. ‘You’re obliged to look after us, whether you want to or not.’

She doesn’t refer to Ed’s other bequest to them. Kitty feels numbed, trapped by Ed’s final act, rendered powerless. The thought of profiting from his death is repugnant to her. Such a hurtful wasteful denial of life can have no good consequences.

Elizabeth, three years old, placid and good-tempered, cries for a while and then returns to her daily concerns. Her father had always been away for such long periods that little in the daily routine changes. Pamela moves on from grief to incomprehension. Neither of the girls has been told the truth about their father’s death. He was out walking, they’ve been told, and he had an accident, perhaps a heart attack, and fell to his death.

‘How is it an accident?’ says Pamela. ‘Why was he so close to the edge? I don’t understand.’

There are no answers.

‘We just don’t know,’ Larry tells her. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened. All we can do is help each other.’

‘How?’ says Pamela. ‘How are we to help each other?’

‘By loving each other,’ says Larry.

‘Will you love me and Elizabeth? Will you love Mummy?’

‘Yes,’ says Larry.

‘Will you marry Mummy?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Larry.

‘I don’t want you to,’ says Pamela. ‘I’m waiting till I’m grown up, then you can marry me.’

‘All right,’ says Larry.

*

Larry makes a pilgrimage of sorts to Beachy Head. He goes on his own. He has no way of knowing where Ed stood in that last moment of his life, but this seems to be the closest he can get to him now.

There are other walkers out on the bald grass. They throw him furtive looks. He knows what they’re thinking. Is he a jumper? Will it happen now, the unstoppable unforgivable act of self-termination?

I could do it. They could do it. That’s what grips the imagination. Just a few steps, and then a few more, and the story ends.

But for us the story hasn’t ended.

My best and oldest friend. I dream of running after you, of arriving here on the cliff top just in time. There you stand, the deed not yet done, and I shout out to you, ‘Wait!’ You turn and see me, and you wait for me. I take you by one arm, I hold you tight, I say, ‘Come home.’ You smile that half smile of yours and step away from the cliff edge and we walk home together, you pushing your bike. There are two letters in your jacket pocket that will never be delivered.

I’ve loved you for so long. How could you leave me?

*

Larry has a visit from Rupert Blundell. He seems uncomfortable, which is to be expected, since they haven’t met since the break-up of Larry’s marriage to Geraldine. It turns out he’s seen Ed’s obituary.

‘I was so shocked,’ he says. ‘I don’t quite know why, but he always seemed to me to be immortal.’

‘I sometimes felt that too.’

‘He was’ – Rupert reaches for the right word – ‘debonair.’

‘Some of the time,’ says Larry.

‘I suppose he meant to do it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Dear God. The poor boy.’

There seems to be nothing more to say.

‘How’s Geraldine?’ asks Larry.

‘Geraldine?’ Rupert takes his glasses off and cleans them with one end of his tie. ‘She’s as you’d expect. Miserable. Angry.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘She says there’s another woman in the case.’

‘Yes.’

Rupert puts his glasses back on and looks up at Larry.

‘She feels what you’ve done is breaking one of the fundamental laws of the Church,’ he says.

‘I don’t want to duck my share of the blame,’ says Larry. ‘But if you go by the laws of the Church you could say I have grounds for annulment.’

‘Right.’ Rupert passes one hand across his eyes. ‘There was something of that sort before.’

‘So I gather.’

‘Just to be clear,’ Rupert says after a pause. ‘You’re saying the marriage was never consummated.’

‘Yes,’ says Larry.

Rupert bows his head as if in prayer.

‘’Tis a consummation,’ he murmurs, ‘devoutly to be wished.’
He shakes his head. ‘Hamlet’s talking about death, of course. Ed Avenell, of all people.’

He looks up and meets Larry’s puzzled gaze.

‘People always turn out to be so much more complicated than we imagine.’

He rises.

‘Well, I’d better be off.’

Larry walks with him to his car.

‘One question. I ask because it rather obsesses my sister. What’s become of your faith?’

‘It seems to have fallen off the back of the truck,’ says Larry. ‘It’s been a bumpy ride.’

*

Larry tells Kitty about Rupert Blundell’s visit, and how Geraldine said there was another woman in the case. For the first time since Ed’s death she bursts into laughter.

‘Another woman in the case? Meaning me?’

‘Who else?’

‘Oh, Larry. I’ve never been the other woman before.’

‘I’ve no idea where Geraldine got the idea from. I never said a thing to her.’

‘Things don’t need to be said.’

‘Yes, they do,’ says Larry.

Kitty smiles for him, and he knows then that the sadness will pass.

‘I love you,’ he says. ‘All I want is to be with you. I want to go to sleep with you at night, and I want to wake up with you in the morning.’

She takes his hand and raises it to her lips and kisses it. Such
an odd old-fashioned gesture, that speaks of her humility, her sadness, her gratitude.

‘Here I am,’ she says.

He folds her into his arms and they kiss, a true lovers’ kiss that doesn’t have to end, the kiss that has been waiting for so long. Then she remains warm and close in his arms, and lets herself cry. It’s the first time she’s cried since Ed died.

‘I really did love him,’ she says.

‘So did I,’ says Larry.

Alice comes down on the morning of her last day to find the house silent, bathed in sunlight. Breakfast is laid on the terrace. Gustave appears with coffee and fresh bread. Alice eats and drinks alone. She wonders where her grandmother is.

When she’s had her breakfast she gets up and walks across the grass to the trees, as she did on her first day at La Grande Heuze. Ahead of her stretches the forest, as far as the eye can see. There are no paths, or many paths. She walks a little way between the smooth trunks over the crunching ground. Her mind is lost in the past, haunted by ghosts.

Alone now among the trees, seeing only the same patterns of light and shade in every direction, it seems to her that with her new deeper past has come a deeper future. Her life extends infinitely backwards, but also forwards. The story her grandmother has told has shown her, as if from a great height, her own place in time. This immensity is consoling. One life can contain so much.

She returns to the house, and finds Pamela taking her breakfast on the terrace. She joins her, and drinks another cup of coffee.

‘I was thinking,’ her grandmother says, ‘before you go home maybe we should visit the graves.’

‘The graves?’

‘They’re buried here, in Bellencombre. My mother, and Larry. Larry made it to eighty-four, not such a bad age. I was with him when he died.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes, here. This was his house. This is where they lived in their later years.’

Somehow this comes as a surprise. After the long story of the distant past, it brings them shockingly close. I could have met them, Alice thinks. I could have known them.

‘I adored Larry,’ says Pamela. ‘Really he was the one I wanted to marry.’

‘But you married Hugo.’

‘Yes. Poor Hugo. All frightfully Freudian, I suppose. Except I can’t help thinking Freud got it all wrong. I was never in competition with my mother. I loved her far too much for that. No, it was all the other way about. I wanted to
be
my mother.’

*

They drive in to Bellencombre and visit the graveyard by the side of the church of St Martin. Here Kitty and Larry lie buried in the same grave. The headstone, looking disconcertingly new, bears only their names and dates. Kitty is named as Katherine Avenell.

‘They were together for just over fifty years,’ says Pamela.

‘Were they happy together?’ says Alice.

‘Yes, they were very happy.’

‘They deserved to be happy.’

‘Why do you say that? Because Larry had waited for so long?’

‘I suppose so,’ says Alice.

‘He wasn’t just a sweet patient man waiting in the wings, you know. His love was the biggest thing in all our lives. It was like a blazing fire in the room. Love can be so ruthless, can’t it?’

They walk back between the headstones to the waiting car. Alice is silent, thinking.

‘Has any of that helped you?’

’In a way,’ says Alice.

*