The Love Letter (74 page)

‘You should go into psychoanalysis,’ he muttered. ‘And your arse is too small for that tattoo.’

‘Never do a job you can’t spell; the same goes for tattoos. How about “take firmly in hand”?’

‘I’m sure Francis will attend to that.’ He turned sharply away.

‘He doesn’t like tattoos.’ She wanted to weep, knowing that fear had made her attack when all she longed to do was throw her arms around him and beg him to take her with him. But he was a wall of defensiveness now, ten brick courses higher than before for her onslaught.

He moved further away. There was a long pause. Then she heard a piece of paper being unfolded.

‘There’s a reply.’

‘What?’

‘To your letter. There was a reply with it. It’s here. I was going to put it in a bottle and throw it out to sea, but I guess it’s quicker to hand-deliver it on his behalf. You two don’t want to wait another year for the post to deliver, after all.’ He handed her the page. ‘He writes beautifully. Better than I ever could.’

‘I can’t read it.’ She thrust it back.

‘Here – use this as a torch.’ He reached through his pockets and pulled out a lighter; as it sparked, she recognised the big Zippo from the charred frock coat.

‘Thanks.’ She took it from him and thrust the paper over it.

‘What are you
doing?’
He whipped it away from her as it caught light, damping out the flames against the wall. ‘What is it with you and setting light to things?’

‘I said I can’t read it.’ The words came through gritted teeth.

‘After I’ve gone, then,’ he snapped, pressing the lighter into her hands followed by the letter. ‘Then burn it for all I care. I almost did. But you must read it first. I’m sorry I misjudged Francis. I had no idea of the strength of feeling you two share. I should have
listened that first night we talked, when you said you still loved him. It’s his ring you should be wearing by now. You were right to cast mine out to sea.’

‘I don’t! You shouldn’t. That is, I – I should really talk to him, yes. He thinks I’m dead, after all. He deserves to know the truth about everything.’

He nodded, turning away.

‘Don’t leave tonight,’ she begged again. ‘Wait until I’ve spoken with him.’

He shook his head. ‘Second thoughts are never as original as first ones.’

‘Of course they are! Like second love and second chances.’ Her throat was so clogged with tears, she gasped out the words as though drowning.

‘You once told me sexual chemistry needs to be built slowly, and you were right. Ours simply blew up in our faces.’

‘It’s more than that.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re right about me too. My canon is pure self-defence, full of self-pitying hubris. I’ve turned love into a punishment. Now I’m about to start my life sentence, so I don’t want visitors.’

‘Can I write to you?’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

Mortified by his coldness, Legs pushed past him out onto the cliff path.

As she disappeared into the night, she passed Fink the basset hound, who had clearly endured a laborious and windy time navigating his way up the steps from the cove. His ears were blown inside-out now, as he rejoined his master with an ecstatically loud greeting, panting from his exertions between happy howls. What Legs couldn’t hear over the wind was the dog letting out a frustrated whine as he was forced to retrace his steps back along the cliff path alongside his anxious master to monitor her precarious, tearful progress back to firm ground.

Ears still flapping, he did as he was told, watching mournfully as she disappeared between the gorse bushes.

Just for a moment, Leg paused in her tracks and listened.

‘
Gráim thú.’
She could have sworn she heard the words on the wind. But as she looked back, she saw Byrne turning away to take the track down to the village without a backward glance.

Legs stumbled along the cliff path, wobbling around on her oversized plastic shoes on the uneven footing with faster steps until she was running, netting skirts flying up into her face, out over the bracken and heather, across the tufty grass tussocks and rock boulders, through the pointed promontories of woodland to the parkland and the caring, professional arms of the emergency services.

Then she ground to a halt. There were no flashing blue lights, no reflective silver stripes or uniformed officers, nor any red and white tape; just a big black sky, white stars, and the lion’s share of a cowardly moon hiding its blushes behind the gathering storm-clouds.

She turned in a slow circle, hearing nothing but the wind and the sea.

The weather was on the turn. The wind and the sea were playing together like tussling boys now, angry waves catching elbows and skins of rocks while the foam smiles grew nastier and the howls and hisses became bullying.

Legs looked across at the hall, its lights beaming once more through those deep set, uneven windows, a landlocked frigate fighting its wars below decks. Were the occupants all lined up in the drawing room being grilled by a West Country police detective with a creamy accent and a wily smile, she wondered, knowing she should go there straight away and declare herself alive and well. Yet she had no desire to offer deliverance to Francis yet. Whatever he had written in his unfinished reply to her eighteen ‘I love yous’ had just stolen Byrne away from her. The letter was still in her hand along with the petrol lighter.

It was far too squally where she stood for flamelit reading. The boisterous sea was still slinging insults up at the wind, blowing raspberries as its tide turned, and getting long wolf whistles through the rocks in return.

She remembered Édith jokingly comparing her to Rebecca, whom Maxim de Winter had let die at sea with such relief. For a moment she longed to see Farcombe engulfed in flames like Manderley, but it remained stubbornly twinkly and fairytale-castle rugged, about as combustible as Battenburg cake.

Legs changed her mind abruptly about going there. In a toss-up between marzipan castles and gingerbread cottages, the latter won all the way. She needed her mother’s sweet refuge.

Kicking off her shoes and picking them up, she diverted off the track onto the mossiest grass to cool her aching feet, and padded into the woods towards Spywood Cottage.

There were cars parked three deep on the track in front of Spywood Cottage’s gate when Legs arrived. She recognised her mother’s runabout, the Farcombe Estate Land Rover and, to her surprise, her sister’s sensible saloon. Lights glowed from all the downstairs windows.

She peered in through the little casement window beside the door. An emotional gathering was taking place at the scuffed table over a pot of tea and a rapidly emptying brandy bottle.

Sitting with Lucy and Ros with his back to her, Francis’s big shoulders were shaking. He rarely betrayed emotion, but he was openly weeping.

She was suddenly reminded of her most self-indulgent, morbid fantasies as an angst-ridden teenager, watching her unappreciative
family and friends mourning penitently at her graveside. The reality was not so satisfying.

Before she went in, she unfolded the letter to read in the spilled light.

‘Oh no no.’ She felt tears bubble up instantly as she took in the pure emotion and poetry. Byrne was right. This was written exquisitely. It was breathtaking. It was a letter to fall in love to, to fall back in love, to stay in love. It was a letter written by a man who understood love.

She reread the first paragraph, brows curling at the familiarity of the words.

Squinting to see, she clicked the petrol lighter alight and reread a few lines in its orange glow.

There wasn’t a single phrase of Francis’s own on the page. It was
all
quotations, mostly from Joyce, cut and patched together like one of the music compilation tapes he’d made in the nineties; some
Dubliners
here,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
there, a splash of
Ulysses
elsewhere amid riffs of Eliot and Donne.

She sagged back against the wall and closed her eyes with a groan. Byrne had no idea what he’d just read, she realised. How could he ever compete with the beauty of Joyce in montage? Joyce was a master; he felt through his pen like others feel through mere mortal nerve endings. Francis, meanwhile, was an emotional parrot. She opened her eyes and looked at it again miserably.

A ball of flames glowed back.

‘Aggh!’

The crackling inferno in her hand made her panic and throw letter and lighter up in the air. While one caught the drooping, parched clematis leaves and ignited them, the other landed heavily at her feet to start flame-throwing its wind-dried roots. Slotting her feet back into the clogs, Legs stamped out the blaze underfoot before hurriedly damping out the other against the porch wall with the doormat.

Amazingly, when she looked back in through the window, nothing had changed. Her mother and sister were still hand-wringing and eye-dabbing; Francis’s shoulders were still shaking. Only the level of the brandy bottle had gone down.

When Legs pushed open the door, the universal intake of breath that greeted her seemed to suck the air from the room. The smoke surrounding her added significantly to the impact, along with her smouldering plastic shoes.

‘Hi.’ She smiled anxiously. ‘I’m here. Really sorry if you were worried.’

Her sister and mother both screamed. Francis just sat with his mouth open, staring at her.

‘I’m not dead,’ Legs said brightly. ‘Isn’t that great?’

Ros screamed again. Lucy burst into tears.

‘Is there any more tea in that pot?’ Legs asked apologetically.

When nobody answered, she made her way to the kitchen to fetch a mug.

Minutes later, everybody was talking at once. Lucy, crying with delight, was arguing with Ros about whether Legs should go to hospital, and so completely muddled up in her excitement that she was trying to make fresh tea by putting bags in the sugar crock and pouring boiling water on top.

Refusing to let go of Legs’ hand, Francis managed to be both defensive and contrite at the same time, expressing loud amazement that his ‘extensive search’ of the cliffs hadn’t found her and then taking all the credit for wrestling Liz Delamere away from her hostage.

‘I fell off onto a ledge,’ she explained.

‘Thank goodness for that.’ He was too busy exonerating himself to really care for practical detail. ‘The police are questioning Liz at the hall now. Kizzy’s there too. They’ll both go away for a bloody good stretch, I’ll hazard.’

‘No! We must go there to explain!’

‘It can wait.’ He knitted his fingers lovingly through hers, raising them to his lips to kiss. Spotting her crustily burnt thumb, he hastily diverted towards her little finger.

Legs snatched her hand away. ‘But Liz really did nothing wrong, Francis. I overreacted.’

‘She broke into the cellar via the sea passage.’

‘I left the key in the lock.’

‘Then she tripped all the lights and locked the door from the inside,’ he pointed out, adding: ‘Why were you down in the cellars by the way?’

‘You know it wasn’t Liz who locked the cellar door,’ Legs cleared her throat, glancing at her mother, but Lucy was distractedly pouring boiling water into the tea caddy now. ‘I’d dropped my ring; she wanted to give it back.’

‘She chased you down to the cliffs!’

‘Yes, and when I fainted, she caught me. She saved my life really.’

‘
I
saved your life. What ring? Not my mother’s I hope?’

‘No. And what d’you mean,
you
saved my life? You thought I was dead just a minute ago,’ her voice was rising uncontrollably. She suddenly felt hysterical, tears mingling with laughter in a giddy, helium mix.

‘You really
must
go to hospital to get checked out,’ Ros was insisting bossily as she waved her phone about in search of a signal. ‘You’re obviously still in shock and might well have been concussed. I’ll call you an ambulance.’

‘I’ll drive her,’ said Francis firmly.

‘You’ve had at least a gill of brandy. So have I.’

‘I’ll take her,’ Lucy was putting teabags in the milk jug.

‘You polished off the rest of the bottle, Mum,’ Ros snapped, holding her phone out of the window, the howling wind knocking all the pot plants from the sill.

‘She needs to stay here with her mother looking after her!’ Lucy bustled up to the table with a teapot brimming with boiling water but no teabags.

‘I’ll be looking after Legs at the hall,’ Francis clutched her hand even more tightly.

‘I’m honestly fine,’ Legs insisted, overwhelmed by weariness. ‘What I could really do with right now is a bath. And somebody really had better tell the police that I’m not dead. Are they searching the cliffs?’

‘They said they were waiting until daylight,’ Francis shook his head. ‘The wind’s just too dangerous to risk launching a boat or flying the chopper, and more storms are forecast.’

‘I’ll get the water running,’ Ros offered, still holding her phone up in hope of a signal as she headed into the little room beneath the stairs.