The Crimson Rooms (23 page)

“We think this is the way they must have come,” said the policeman as we approached a coppice. “It’s the most direct, though again we’ve found no evidence. But there’s a number of routes Wheeler could have taken, once he’d killed her, to cut back to the picnic spot and then on down to the town. We think he must have done it before he had his drink—there’s no sign of a revolver in the pub and why would any girl hang about for an hour or more on a hillside waiting for her husband to drag her farther away from town and shoot her? Which means he was sitting in the Queen’s Head, sipping his pint in full view of other customers even though he’d just killed his wife. See, there’s a matter of nearly three hours between when they were sighted walking up to the picnic spot and when Wheeler had his pint. Definitely time for all kinds of murders to be committed. And of course Wheeler knew this area well, on account of his being a bit of a fisherman and coming out here to fish in the Chess since he were a young boy. It goes without saying, by the way, that neither the Wheelers nor the woman who found the body, come to that, should have been in these woods, strictly speaking. They’re private.”

Stella had been discovered deep inside a pheasant covert with a picket fence all around to contain the birds. The gate had been padlocked by the police. Inside, the woods were cool and dim, the tracks thick with leaf-mold and quiet except for the pheasants, who occasionally clattered shockingly among the trees. We came to a clearing pungent with the smell of cut bracken, where there were more signs of much heavy-booted trampling.

The policeman spoke lower and lower as we drew closer to where Stella had been found: “We think it’s likely he prepared the ground in advance. Shallow as it was, two feet, if that, the grave was a neat affair, probably all ready and waiting for her.”

What had induced Stella to enter these woods? I felt a soft lurch, as if a bird had taken flight within me, because I thought it could only have been sex. There will be shadows, she must have been told, and a bed among the bracken. No one will see us, only the pheasants. Perhaps she had lain down willingly on her green mattress, all unknowing of the fact that a few feet away a trench had been dug to receive her body. And perhaps, after the shot had been fired, she had time to stare up through a blood-red haze to the glittering leaf canopy and to hear, after the affront of gunfire, the hush of the breeze through young birch leaves. Perhaps she had thought of the old days in the tea shop with its tariff cards and tin trays and hideous caps as her memories unwound from their spool until she was a child again in Acton. Perhaps, if I stared hard enough, I might see a trace of her, a wisp of Stella Wheeler. But no, there was nothing.

My father and I visited
my brother’s grave in 1921, on Valentine’s Day. As we approached the graveyard near Arras, the sun came out so that the landscape which had hitherto been shades of gray, like in all the photographs, was tinged with pale green and yellow. New buds simmered under the surface of bare twigs. At first we saw farmland and villages clustered around unbroken churches, but gradually the landscape sickened; no hedges or trees, the ground pitted and deeply furrowed though furred with early spring growth. Rusty heaps of metal and wire littered the edge of the road. Houses were under construction amid heaps of rubble.

We were members of a group of mourners invited by the regiment, who deemed the graveyard just fit to be visited, though only temporary wooden markers had been placed at the heads of the graves and the entire field, as far as the eye could see, was crisscrossed by duckboards. Once there, Father and I walked in single file. Throughout the journey, I had avoided touching him, because I knew that instead of comforting me he would expose me to his grief, obscenely raw so that his face was a mask of suffering and his eyes refused to recognize me. He repeated “My son, my son, my son” as if he were in a movie and the titles had to be kept simple.

As I studied the impossible field of graves, I could not fathom that each represented a man or that a place so orderly had been the scene of thousands of violent deaths. The symmetry of it made me recoil, as if the air were still poisoned. How dare you take more care of the dead, I thought, than of the living? I despised the live soldiers who accompanied us and even the men who lay dead under earth. It is men, I thought, with their unassailable conviction that half the population is more stupid than they, who have done this.

Stretching out my gloved hands to the sunshine, I tried to reach my brother, who was lying under the soil of this plot 386 and who had died, we were assured, yards from here. Of course I wanted to know details. Where exactly had he climbed from the trench? What about the boy stranded on no-man’s-land, where would that have been? The officer, embarrassed, answered vaguely and edged away. So the only true image I had was the mud. The duckboards lay over acres of mud. One of our party lost his footing, floundered, and only by grasping another man’s arm was able to drag his foot free. I realized then that we had sent my brother to live and die in mud, like an animal.

Still I thought I must surely be able to pass through time to him, that it was only time, that wretchedly impenetrable fourth dimension, that held me back, because here I was, on the very spot where he had last been alive. But he seemed farther from me than ever in that French place, on French farmland, a few feet under the new-sown lawn of the cemetery. I had no sense of him at all as I looked at his name on the plaque, LIEUTENANT JAMES CARTWRIGHT GIFFORD, 13642, 15TH LONDON REGIMENT, or the date relating to his curtailed life, NOVEMBER 20, 1917, AGED 20. These digits had nothing to do with him.

But later we passed out of the temporary gate, walked down a lane edged on either side with broken ditches, and came to the remnants of a stone barn with walls three foot thick, which must have stood for centuries before it was mown down in an hour by shell and rocket fire. Only a corner was left, but the resourceful farmer was once more using the building for straw and had erected a tarpaulin to protect it from the rain. I felt a little consoled, to see the building thus reclaimed for its proper use.

And I knew, as I laid my hand on the stone and closed my eyes to the glare of the low sun, that my brother had sheltered here. I felt it as a shock to the arm. Meanwhile, Father walked on, all unknowing, absorbed with the dead, and without regard for me, his living girl.

T
hat evening I was again
greeted by music on my return to Clivedon Hall Gardens and the entrance hall was an altogether unfamiliar place. Sunlight had got in through the open door of the drawing room, and I saw our commonplace red tiles as color traps, their little yellow scrolls like tender signatures. The smell of cake-baking wafted from the kitchen so that it was as if the house had been sprayed with an essence called Home. Meredith was throwing a birthday party for Prudence.

“My goodness,” she had cried, “don’t tell me you never even celebrate birthdays properly in this house. We can’t have that, can we, Edmund? Edmund and I are very fond of birthdays. In fact we are
experts
at birthdays. You shall have a party, Prudence, whether you like it or not.”

Normally, birthdays in Clivedon Hall Gardens were marked by an opening of cards at breakfast and presents after dinner. Before the meal, we drank a small glass of sherry. We called our gifts
tokens
; I had bought a posy of anemones for Prudence from a florist near the station and a pincushion with felt petals, like a rose, from a shop in Amersham. Neither of these offerings seemed sufficiently openhanded in the light of Meredith’s celebration.

In the first place, Rose had been induced to bake a special cake, which was now being served in the drawing room even though it was six o’clock and barely an hour before supper, thereby putting everyone’s (but especially Edmund’s) appetite at risk. Then every surface was bedecked by shop-bought flowers, roses and freesia spilling out of vases and nodding in the breeze from the open French window. There was—surely not—
champagne—
and there were candles on the cake. “Just five, Prudence, I’m guessing one per decade?” Prudence, flattered despite herself, put her hand to her breast and tried to look fifty.

Meanwhile, Marcia Freer and Henry Burr crooned, “What’ll I do, when you are far away, and I am blue . . .” from the gramophone. Prudence’s cheeks were very pink but then she’d spent the day in Buckinghamshire and had caught the sun while in the garden of her friend Miss Lord, who had provided a generous lunch consisting of chicken in some kind of jelly and shaped into a loaf (“It sounds very unusual but I can assure you was delicious, Miss Lord’s girl is a very imaginative cook”) and strawberries. All four of Prudence’s intimate circle had been present and emphasized, as always, that their lives just weren’t the same without her.

So perhaps she was mellower than usual, because she’d had a dose of church gossip—the organist was the chief concern, being too arthritic to hit all the right notes reliably, particularly distressing at funerals. Furthermore, Prudence had taken the opportunity to visit her old cottage, though here a slight shadow had been cast. The current tenants were keen to keep the cottage on but had traveled to Scotland for the summer, which meant that the rooms were vulnerable to
damp
. “Miss Lord says she will go in to air it regularly but I feel it’s a great imposition.”

Or perhaps Prudence was rosy-cheeked because even she could not resist the pleasures of a party, despite the fact that Rose had been exceptionally heavy-handed with the cochineal in icing the cake, which was the color of beetroot stain. Prudence took a delicate sip of wine before turning to the small pile of presents, which included one from Miss Lord,
The Essays of Elia
, bound in calfskin and rewrapped in its tissue paper so that Prudence could have the pleasure of opening it again in front of us.

Mother was wearing her second-best blouse and attempting to participate wholeheartedly in the festivities, although I could tell from her frequent glances at the flowers that she was wondering how on earth all this had been paid for. She took angry little sips of champagne, as if by drinking it faster she would make it cost less. Fortunately, I provided an outlet for her irritation. “What’s that dirt on the hem of your skirt, Evelyn? Could you not make some small effort?”

So I fled to my room, threw off my work clothes, and stood for a moment in a slip as the draft from the open window fluffed my skin.
What’ll I do, when you are far away . . .
Then I dressed in my one summer frock, bought a year ago, in unexceptional cotton voile with what Mother called a
hideous
line; it had a broad sash tied at the hip and a pleated skirt. Glancing in the mirror, I thought of Nicholas Thorne as he stood on the pavement and asked me about Saint Joan. Of course now I scrutinized my reflection for signs that I was like her, or her theatrical representation, because surely that had been his message. I too had caught the sun, even though I’d worn a hat, and my eyes were unusually bright. But perhaps Thorne, noticing what James used to call my
furious
jaw, saw me as a fanatical trailblazer rather than a passionate, utterly compelling girl-saint.

I smiled at myself and there I was, simply a no-longer-young-enough woman in a pale frock and with a touch of wistful excitement in the eyes, God help me.

“At last,” said Meredith when I reappeared downstairs. “Now the party can begin.”

We sang “Happy Birthday” lustily, especially Grandmother, who was tone-deaf, and Edmund, who had an enthusiastic treble. Then Prudence blew out all five candles in one breath.

“Did you wish?” cried Meredith.

“Of course.” What would Prudence have wished for? A return to her cottage, money, a man (even this might be possible to a devotee of Ethel M.), a resolution to the Meredith problem?

Then the presents were opened. Mother had bought a novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, titled
Whose Body?
, which Prudence set hastily aside, because she was not used to murder stories and was probably unsure whether they should be cast in the forbidden category of
light
fiction. My pincushion was received with restrained enthusiasm. Grandmother had crocheted a set of mats for Prudence’s dressing table (I seemed to remember a similar gift being offered the previous year), and Edmund’s present was also homemade, a representation of Aunt Prudence herself with stuck-on buttons for eyes and nose (one of which fell off as Prudence presented the picture to us for inspection). Fortunately, Prudence’s good manners never failed and she thanked him gravely.