The Third Angel (11 page)

T
HE CEMETERY WAS
a mile down the road from Lilac House. Everyone in the Rice and Lewis families had been buried there. It was possible to see the fields of yellow rapeseed and the low hills where Frieda and her father had walked until the week of his death. Frieda felt comforted that Paul's grave would be right next to his grandfather's. Odd the strange things that could console you.

“Listen to that,” Frieda said to Allie, who was now her daughter-in-law. There was the low cooing of doves in the trees. “He would have loved that.”

Allie was wearing a black dress she'd borrowed from Georgia. She'd lost so much weight she had to pin it together on the inside, along the back seam. Allie and the Rices had agreed upon a small ceremony held at the graveside. Allie stood between her parents. She had told her friends and Paul's not to come up from London and she'd sent a note to Maddy explaining that the ceremony would be private. Paul had been so discreet about his illness; she wanted to give him that still. There was one family friend, Daisy Ridge, along with her companion, a nurse who helped her navigate the hilly ground. Because Mrs. Ridge had no heirs, she'd thought of Paul as her grandchild. It was a terrible day for her; halfway through the service she had to compose herself on a nearby bench.

“We shouldn't have let Daisy come,” Bill Rice said. “It's too much for her.”

Allie went to sit beside the old woman. They held hands and listened to the minister and the doves in the trees.

“Lovely, lovely boy,” Mrs. Ridge said. “The light of his mother's life.”

Allie bowed her head. She was such a fool; she had wasted so much time.

There were two drivers waiting to take the families back to the house. Mrs. Ridge went up to the guest room to have a nap before she was driven back to London. Paul's football trophies were still on the bookshelf. There were several photographs of him with the various teams on which he'd played. Allie helped the nurse, whose name was Bernadette. They both looped their arms under Mrs. Ridge's and guided her into bed.

“He never let me pay when we went out for lunch,” Mrs. Ridge said. “He phoned me twice a week. He used to say, Guess who this is? like a little boy, as if I didn't know his voice.”

Allie stayed there while Mrs. Ridge fell asleep so the nurse could go and have a bite to eat. It was a long day. It was hot and muggy. The trip from London had been tiring and the trip back would be worse. By then evening would be falling and the road would seem endless and dark. Allie looked at the photographs of Paul when he was a boy. He had the same smile he'd always had, a bit sneaky and very charming. She stood by the window and looked at the fields he used to see in the mornings when he got out of bed.

Mrs. Ridge was asleep. She had willed her entire estate to Paul and now she would have to change it. She would leave it to the girls' school the women in her family had always attended. She would have gardens planted and the names of all the women in the Ridge family would be engraved on a bronze plaque mounted on a stone wall. She would also have a garden in memory of Paul, one that was filled with plants that birds were drawn to: sunflowers, gooseberry, plum trees.

Mrs. Ridge was so quiet Allie leaned down to make sure she was still breathing. She was, only very softly. Her skin was paper-thin and she looked so pale against the blue blanket. Mrs. Ridge needed her rest. Allie went downstairs, but she couldn't bring herself to go into the parlor where everyone was having lunch. She went outside, then walked down the road. She felt as though she could go for miles. Maybe if she did she'd walk backward in time, the way her book could go backward if you started on the very last page. That was the way a reader could wind up with a happy ending. It had been a secret, although most of her readers knew about it now. She walked and she walked, but it was still the same road, the same trees and sky and yellow fields.

After a while, Allie started back. Nothing had changed. She was still in the here and now. A passing car honked its horn and someone waved at her, but Allie didn't know anyone but the Rices in Reading.

Her mother was waiting at the turn into Lilac House.

“It's a beautiful spot,” Lucy said. “Did you know there's a house out back? A little place called The Hedges where Frieda and Bill lived when they were first married.”

“Paul wanted us to move there.” Allie had come to stand beside her mother. “He said it would be the perfect place to write. I told him he was crazy. I could never live all the way out here.”

They walked across the lawn to The Hedges and peeked in the windows. It was a darling place. They went around the house to where there was a twisted pear tree.

“I should have been a better mother,” Lucy said.

“Mother, nothing you did would have pleased Maddy. She has a contrary nature.”

“I don't mean to Maddy. To you. I didn't want you to need me and then be destroyed the way I was when I lost my mother. You became too independent. You were so capable. She was always so jealous of that. She was just like me. Vulnerable. Unable to show how hurt she was.”

“You want me to forgive her?” Allie said. “Do you know what she did?”

“Does it matter?” Lucy said. “My guess is that she hurt herself more than she could ever hurt you. She's holed up in that hotel room of hers, devastated. She needs you to need her. That's what she's always wanted.”

They went to look into the kitchen window. There was an old soapstone sink. The floors were made of planed chestnut, the planks worn down by so many years of footsteps. Allie thought Paul was right; they could have been happy here.

“You are a good mother,” Allie said.

Lucy slipped her arm around her daughter's waist. She hadn't been, but she had tried. “I would have done anything for you.”

“I knew that,” Allie said.

“Maddy didn't.”

Allie turned away from the kitchen window. She could see their life inside, the way it might have been. She understood regret. There were birds in the hedges; she couldn't see them, but she could hear them chattering. This is what happened when you fell in love with someone. You stood in the garden and listened to birdsongs. You looked through the window.

“Frieda will be wondering where we've gone off to,” Lucy said.

They walked over the grass, arms linked.

“I could have lived here,” Allie said.

Frieda was standing at the back door of Lilac House. She waved to them and they waved back. She wore a blue apron over her black mourning dress. She'd stayed up all night to make a roast so that no one would go hungry.

“How do I do this?” Allie asked her mother.

“You do the best you can,” Lucy said. “There's nothing more than that.”

E
VERYONE LEFT BEFORE
dark, including Allie's parents, who rode back to London with Mrs. Ridge and her nurse in a chauffeured car. Allie was in the garden, where the lilacs were so tall it was impossible to see the road. The leaves were dusty, the way they always were in August when the weather turned hot. Bill had gone off to bed, but Allie and Frieda didn't want to go inside; they sat on wooden chairs, listening to the birds call. There were still patches of blue sky, even though it was nearly ten o'clock. The air was so heavy and thick that every second seemed to linger.

“My father told me there were three angels,” Frieda said. “He was a very serious, lovely, practical man. He was always on time. He was someone you could depend upon. He said there was the Angel of Life, the Angel of Death, and then there was the Third Angel.”

“I've heard of the two,” Allie said.

“It was either the Angel of Life or the Angel of Death who would ride in the back of the car when my father went on house calls, but he never knew which one it was until he arrived at his destination. Even then he said he was often surprised. It was hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes.”

They were drinking iced tea that Frieda had fixed. Allie could see the chimney of The Hedges, the house she and Paul should have been living in right now.

“And the third one?”

“Well, he's the most curious. You can't even tell if he's an angel or not. You think you're doing him a kindness, you think you're the one taking care of him, while all the while, he's the one who's saving your life.”

Allie began to cry. She wished she was in the kitchen of The Hedges, trying her best to make a plum pie or cutting up apples for a tart. She wished Paul was on the couch, calling to her, making fun of her baking.

“We can't imagine the half of it,” Frieda said. “The way he'll find us when we least expect it. The way he'll change our life.”

“No, we can't,” Allie said.

“I'm glad you decided to stay the night.”

They went inside together; they washed the dishes, dried them, then put them away. Allie waited until she heard Frieda go up to her bedroom, then she turned off the lights. The birds were still singing at this late hour, confused by the long summer days. Allie waited at the window, hoping he would walk past on his way to wherever he was going. But she fell asleep in the chair, and when she woke the next morning and looked out across the yellow fields across the road, he was gone.

S
HE STOOD ON
the steps to the Orangery. It was her wedding day, the one they should have had. The gates to Kensington Palace had been opened, but the restaurant was still closed. Allie was wearing the white silk suit. There were some robins on the grass. The hedges were so green they looked black. The sky was a pale summer blue with only a few high clouds. Their wedding day had seemed so distant once; now it was here. She had never canceled the reservations at the Ritz in Paris. They had train tickets for that afternoon. The tickets were in Allie's purse, along with her passport. Despite what she'd said and what she'd told herself, she'd been hopeful till the very end, just like the heron bride in the marsh, waiting for her beloved, convinced he would come back. Allie couldn't stop thinking of the way he'd looked in the hospital bed, curled up, so thin, under a white sheet and a hospital blanket. Today, the air was still and humid. The day would be brighter later on, but that didn't seem to matter. She was a widow.

Tourists had begun to arrive at the palace. There was a display of Diana's dresses, all of those beautiful clothes she'd worn. The inky blue silk dress she had danced in one night with a movie star as her partner. The pink bolero jacket covered with little mirrored charms that she'd worn to India. A groundskeeper collecting trash stared rudely at Allie, puzzled to find her sitting on the patio of the shuttered restaurant in her silk suit, but he didn't say anything. Allie was trying to decide what to do next. The door to her life had closed. She was in her own future, alone. Nothing had turned out as she had expected.

She looked behind the hedges to the lawn. There was a woman walking toward her. Allie had telephoned and left a message at the desk of the Lion Park. She'd said she wanted her sister to come to the Orangery wearing her maid of honor dress. It was a good choice. It was the perfect dress. Maddy had walked all the way through the park. She sat down beside Allie. She didn't know what to say. She was shivering in the blue silk dress that she felt she had no right to wear.

“The view from here is beautiful, isn't it?” Allie said. They looked out over the lawn. At the end of her story, the heron was shot by poachers who thought he was nothing but a crow. His heron wife and his wife on earth mourned their husband together. Neither one could bear to be alone.

“I'm sorry,” Maddy said. Tears were falling on her dress; she knew that once silk was wet it was ruined, but there was nothing she could do. “I'm so sorry. I did everything wrong.”

There was a line forming at the entrance to Kensington Palace. The hedges gave off a peppery scent. Allie thought about the roses she had bought for Diana on the morning she met Paul, how perfect they'd been even in the summer heat. She thought of the day when she and Maddy tried to break the curse that was upon their mother. She'd never told Maddy that her secret word had been her sister's name.

“How do people go on living?” Allie said. “That's what I can't figure out.”

“You're the one with courage.”

“Me? Don't be an idiot. It was you. You were the one who climbed into that nest up in the tree. You were the one who did as you pleased. You telephoned that woman Dad was living with. I always did what I thought I was supposed to. Until it was too late.”

“We should go look at Diana's dresses,” Maddy suggested. “That would be a distraction.”

“I've seen them,” Allie said. “I know what they look like. I have a better idea.”

They would visit Paris instead. Allie couldn't be talked out of it. They stopped at Maddy's hotel so she could get her passport and luggage, then went directly to Waterloo. In the taxi, Allie leaned her head back. She would buy clothes in Paris. Nothing that belonged to her seemed irreplaceable. If it was indeed true that you could read something backward or forward, she had chosen her direction. Both her mother and Paul's would understand.

“Are you sure you don't want to change your mind?” Maddy said when they got to the station. “I wouldn't blame you.”

Allie remembered what the doctor in the hospital had told her. Love had nothing to do with the here and now. That's what Frieda meant when she said it was simple to love Paul, no matter how complicated he might be. You didn't have to think about it, you just did it.

“You're the only one who understands how I feel,” she told her sister.

At Waterloo, Allie settled herself on a bench while Maddy went to call her parents' hotel. They were leaving that afternoon and Maddy had planned to travel home with them. She'd bought her ticket to New York and it was nonrefundable. She'd never get her money back now. Not that it mattered.

“Do you know how frightened we've been?” Lucy said when she answered. “We've been beside ourselves. We're supposed to leave for the airport in an hour and we couldn't find either one of you girls. We phoned the police.”