The Shape of Sand (2 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

BOOK: The Shape of Sand
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She said goodbye to Ruth Standish, clasped her arms around the bulging files, and drove away through the archway, past the shiny new dark green sign with Vigilance Assurance's name writ large upon it above the company's logo of two clasped hands.
 
The dusk of a cool, early autumn day was just beginning to fall when she arrived at the place she presently called home, the small cottage next to the church in Garvingden, a quiet, grey village above the Thames, about thirty miles away.
It was really time she found somewhere else to live, she told herself as she walked up the front path, edged with London Pride and a late flush of sweet-smelling Mrs Sinkins. She was becoming too fond of the place, unwisely so, since it wasn't hers to love. After the war, she had found herself at a loose end, almost at retirement age and, for the short working time left to her, reluctant to return to university teaching. She would find something else to do, she decided. Meanwhile, unused to having time on her hands, she had taken on the admittedly not
very interesting but no doubt worthwhile job of marking papers in a correspondence course designed as rehabilitation for demobbed service men and women. But while she had been spending the war years as a decrypter at Bletchley Park, helping to break the enemy's coded messages, London had become a different place from the one she'd known. Physical landmarks had disappeared for ever, but what mattered more was the absence of people she had known who were no longer there, for one reason or another. The little house where her friend Frances had lived had vanished from the face of the earth after being hit fairly and squarely by a flying bomb, killing Frances herself. And that street where for a brief time she had known love, and so much unhappiness, was a heap of rubble and bomb craters. Bittersweet memories were the only things that remained. All desire to live permanently in the battle-scarred capital had left Harriet.
She had taken advantage of Daisy's generous offer to stay with her and her husband, Guy, in their Maida Vale house until she could find some small place in the country, but accommodation was scarce everywhere, and nothing suitable had turned up. She was beginning to feel she must be outstaying her welcome with Daisy when she'd unexpectedly had the chance to take over the lease of his weekend cottage from a university colleague who, with the return to peace, had taken a three-year sabbatical to do anthropological research in a remote part of South America. It was a former workman's cottage of two up, two down – a small kitchen-living room at the back, a minuscule front parlour, one of the two bedrooms now a bathroom – but Harriet didn't complain: the last occupants before Tony Bentham had managed to bring up a family of five children in the house. Furnishings and amenities were basic. Tony wasn't houseproud, but then, neither was Harriet. Yet lately, she'd found herself buying bits and pieces of her own, whatever took her fancy, that she thought might suit the house, and even plants for the tiny garden plots, back and front. She'd had all the rooms repainted. The result was still a long way from Charnley, but it was full of light and colour, comfortable enough and easily managed. She had to keep reminding herself it would be foolish to become too fond of
the place.
After that very good lunch at Charnley she wasn't hungry, so she settled for a cup of tea and took it into the front room. She found a place for the box files by removing her correspondence course papers from the table under the window to the floor. Sipping her tea, she looked at them with misgivings, reluctant to open what she was already beginning to think of as Pandora's box. Could they possibly contain anything forgotten that would add to the sum of what was already known about the actual circumstances of those long-ago events? She doubted it. It was tempting to feel that the situation should be left as it was, the files put away, and leave undisturbed the dust that had eventually settled. On the other hand, by sorting through them, some sort of perspective might be found to reduce the ballyhoo that had always surrounded the business. It had remained one of the most colourful of those society scandals of the twentieth century, kept alive in the public consciousness by the rehashings of the events in which an insatiable public seemed to delight. Mention ‘The Jardine Affair' to anyone, even now, and they'd soon recall what the papers of the time had said. But there had always been something out of balance about the theories put forward by those who had written about it. It would be enlightening to see how their suppositions and speculations, some of which had been bizarre, would stand up in the light of anything new that might turn up.
In the end, unable to resist it, she tipped the papers out on to the table. The shoeboxes into which she'd originally crammed them had long since disintegrated, and the contents had been transferred higgledy-piggledy into the box files. Lord, this was going to take weeks to sort out! At the time, all of this must have meant something to her, but she was dismayed by how much of the stuff there was. A quick skim through revealed sketch-books and some very pretty watercolours of Vita's, various trinkets of one sort or another, old birthday cards, a Valentine, a lace collar, a scent bottle whose lingering echoes of Floris Geranium made her heart skip, a bulky scrapbook which had belonged to Daisy, a few letters and – oh, how could she have forgotten? – that book, picked
up from their mother's bedroom. Elegantly bound in grey suede, the pages gilt-edged, secured with a pretty little brass clasp and a tiny lock that she had never attempted to open. For a few seconds she sat, motionless, reliving that other moment when her younger self, struggling with revulsion, had refused to contemplate what secrets it might contain. In the end, she put the book aside and forced herself to go on, right through to the bundle of yellowed newspaper cuttings and letters, handling them gingerly because they were so friable.
She sat back at last, what she'd suspected confirmed – that it amounted to very little, after all. A few old photos, scraps of this and that. Amongst which it was surely unrealistic to hope she would suddenly find the truth of what had happened in that summer of 1910, when others before her had attempted, people far more qualified than she – the police, reporters, other members of the family who were there at the time – and failed. Old papers could only tell you so much, the rest must be conjecture. Too much water had flowed under the bridge, many of those concerned were dead, and others might well be either untraceable, or too old to be considered as reliable witnesses.
There was more to it than that, of course. If she were honest, she had known from the moment Guy telephoned with the news that the papers had been discovered that she would be faced with this dilemma, whether or not to try and dig out a little more of the truth, all those years after she had hidden this trivia, physically and metaphorically. Whether or not to dive into her subconscious and drag out her own recollections. But memory was, alas, a slippery notion at the best of times, unreliable, coloured by uncertainty …
She pushed away the last of her tea, now cold and bitter. Come on, Harriet! Admit it, you always knew what really happened. No, be more precise – you only
thought
you knew. Simple intuition. And what if you were right? Are you justified in trying to uncover what went on during that hot summer?
 
So there Harriet was, the following day. Having made up her mind at some time during the night that she'd do it – at least try to make some sense of what had gone on by delving into the ragbag of memory and history, and assembling from its
bits and pieces a collage of something that might come near to making a semblance of the true picture.
Still undecided, she'd taken her mother's journal upstairs with her when she went to bed. First, feeling like a criminal, she had prised open with almost ridiculous ease the useless little lock, an indication of privacy rather than a serious security device. In bed, she'd held the book for a long time, still having that inexplicable reluctance to probe into what her mother had obviously not wanted anyone else to see. At length she did open it. On the flyleaf was written: ‘My Egyptian Journal' in Beatrice's familiar, large and rather flamboyant handwriting. She turned the page, and then read the whole journal right through before switching off her light, after which she lay staring into the darkness, thinking about it. Finally, she dropped off into a sort of sleep, having decided she would telephone Guy the next morning and tell him what she proposed to do.
She was fairly certain he'd welcome her decision. He was an acute observer and she knew, without him ever having said it in so many words, that he would be disappointed if she were to shrug off any chance, however remote, to throw some light on the tragedy that had always overshadowed the life of his wife and her sisters.
Her sleep had been uneasy, and she woke feeling not much rested. The church clock, whose proximity had driven her mad when she first came to live here, though it no longer bothered her, tonight had kept rousing her from bouts of half-submerged sleep. It seemed to her that she counted every hour, and at five she got up and made herself tea and toast. She telephoned Guy before eight, then wondered if it was too early. “Have I got you out of bed?”
“I'm always awake by six.”
Harriet pictured him: elderly, bespectacled, deceptively mild, sitting at his desk, fountain pen in hand, already having taken old Phoebe, his smooth-haired fox-terrier bitch, for her sedate walk along the London streets, and tidied the breakfast things away, while Daisy set off for Hope House. She pictured the steadily growing stack of manuscript at his right hand: a monograph which he was writing on the psychological traumas suffered by civilians seriously injured during enemy
attack. As a doctor, too old for military service, he had kept up his busy practice during the war years to deal with the sort of everyday ailments which did not go away simply because there was a war on, while his nights were occupied during enemy air raids with attending to the wounded and dying. It had not been without cost. His own health had suffered, and now that he'd grown older, he was forced to take things more easily. Guy was not, however, a man to be idle, never mind age or infirmity And Harriet suspected this writing he was doing was more than a mere labour of love, it was both a personal catharsis for the terrible things he had witnessed, and a memorial to the unrecorded and unsung acts of courage which he'd seen performed daily during the bombings.
As Daisy's husband, he'd volunteered to look after the Jardine family interests when the business of selling Charnley to Vigilance Assurance arose, an offer the sisters had thankfully accepted, so that it was to him Ruth Standish had written when the discovery of the papers had been made. He had never known Charnley in its glory days, but like everyone who had ever heard its history, it exercised a fascination for him. He had tried not to sound overly intrigued about what the cache might reveal when he first spoke to Harriet about it. “What do you think? Worth looking into?” he'd asked casually. “Or not?”
“We won't know that until we see it, will we? I'll go over and pick up whatever it is they've found at once, if you'd like me to,” she'd replied.
He listened intently now, without interruption, as she told him what that visit had resulted in, and to her description of the house's altered state.
“Shouldn't come as any surprise, but I'm beginning to be sorry I let you in for this, Harriet.”
“Nonsense. I didn't like what they've done, but I think seeing it like that has probably helped to exorcise a few ghosts.” She hoped she sounded more convinced than she felt. “It isn't really Charnley any longer.”
“Have you examined everything you brought home yet? Is there anything new?”
“I haven't read everything yet, and I'd be surprised if anything
actually new turned up, but sorted out and read with a fresh eye, it's bound to be … well, I don't know, of course, but something might come of it.”
There was pause. “Why not do it, then? Put everything into order and write up some sort of an account? As a counterbalance to all that rubbish that was put out, if nothing else.”
Harriet laughed gently. “I'm not the person to do that, Guy But there is someone, isn't there, who might be?”
“Ah. Well, yes, maybe. Not a bad idea at all, in fact.” She heard answering amusement in his voice. They understood each other very well, she and Guy Bringing Nina into it had, of course, been in his mind right from the start, and Harriet was happy enough to collude with him over that. If Nina would consent, of course, which was problematic.
“I'd like to talk to her at any rate, and see what she thinks.”
“As a matter of fact, she's coming for lunch. I managed to wangle a bit of extra pork from the butcher. Why don't you come down and join us?”
“That would be lovely,” she said tranquilly, knowing this was no coincidence, either. “I haven't seen her for several weeks. Someone's given me some late French beans, I'll bring them with me. Show her that's one advantage of living in what she will insist on referring to as the country.”
“Anywhere ten miles out of London is country to Nina,” Guy said.
Nina was his daughter, Daisy's stepdaughter. Harriet knew how worried Guy had been about her lately. It was patently obvious that he was seizing this unexpected happening as a chance to shake her out of – well, self-pity wasn't a word that automatically came to mind in connection with Nina, but might in this case have a smidgeon of truth in it. Nothing distorted the personality more than an unhappy love affair. And Harriet knew what she was talking about there.

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