Broken Music (16 page)

In the room which was designated as the nurses' sitting room, Duncan Geddes sat with his legs to the fire, onto which he had thrown another couple of logs. It was a charming room which he had been told had always been known simply as the garden room. It had dark, wood-panelled walls, chintz covers on the chairs, blue and white china, several bookcases and low, wide windows overlooking the drive and the once glorious herbaceous borders. There was no one there tonight except him.

On the small table in front of him was a tray of tea which a flirty little nurse had been delighted to bring him, though obviously rather intrigued by his request for two cups. He hoped Nella would not be held up, or the tea under the cosy would be cold.

He remembered the little quirk she had of liking her tea very hot, scalding almost.

It had been wine they'd drunk, though, not tea, in that little
estaminet
where they'd had their first meal together. She had taken a gulp after he'd been so crass as to bring up the subject of young Foley which had upset her so much, and the wine had gone down the wrong way. He had cursed himself for his blindness: he had realised before that she was fond of Foley, a distant relative of some sort he believed, but he hadn't suspected the extent of her regard, or realised she might be in love with him. Of course. He had been astonished how deeply the thought had hurt him, until she had told him it was her sister that Foley had loved.

It had been impossible to pursue his original concerns about the young man after that conversation, though they were still there. Morale was at rock bottom generally, between men who saw no point in going on, and he had seen the same question in Foley's eyes that he heard being asked more and more: what were they fighting
for
? Why should they obey orders that no longer seemed to have any point to them, allow themselves simply to be used as cannon fodder? And who could blame them? It was something he asked himself, often, operating on mangled flesh, and even in his dreams removing shrapnel, dressing amputations, trying to put together men who would be better off dead, and often were before he had time to finish. But he had so far kept his thoughts to himself; he had no time to waste railing at the blind stupidity of generals and the old men in Westminster, playing their war games.

The embarrassment at the gaffe he'd made with Nella was still, to this day, vivid in his mind, as was the whole scene. The shape of the wine bottle, the candles on the tables, the ubiquitous check cloth, not very clean. The drunken young officers. ‘Roses of Picardy'. Slabs of beef on their plates, more meat than they'd seen for years. Nella having difficulty with it, and finally pushing it away. ‘Aren't you hungry?' he'd asked.

‘I think this is horsemeat.'

He was amused, but she pointed out that he wasn't eating his, either.

‘It does taste as though it's chased many a man up a tree. Or died of old age. How very English we are,' he went on, pleased to see her smile. ‘The Continentals think us mad, preferring to go hungry rather than eat horsemeat. Although there are worse things I've been offered, I can assure you.'

‘McConachie's?' He laughed; the tinned stew was a staple of their rations, like bully beef and biscuits, not like mother made but welcome if you were hungry enough. ‘Any other delicacies you were thinking of I'd rather you kept to yourself, thank you,' she added, with a smile.

‘What would you really like to eat, right now, then, if you had the choice?'

She closed her eyes for a moment. She had thick, dark lashes that lay in soft crescents on her cheeks. In that unguarded instant, he saw the lines of strain, the exhaustion on her face and felt an overwhelming tenderness towards her. He suspected that she had, like many others, added a year or two onto her age in order to be accepted for service overseas, but he knew her to be one of the best of all these young women who had voluntarily come out here, delicately nurtured, sketchily trained, then thrown into this obscene war. They had learnt to flinch at nothing: the most hideous of wounds, the inhuman damage a shell could inflict on a human body, the stench of gas gangrene. He had seen Nella on the point of fainting, many times, but she had held on, gritting her teeth, swabbing festering wounds, hurriedly applying dressings, mopping brows, while all around lay more wounded men on stretchers, groaning in pain or waiting for attention in silent agony.

‘Right now?' she was saying, answering his question. ‘I don't have to think. A fresh, new-laid boiled egg, some brown bread and butter, a pot of tea—'

‘Tea that really tastes of tea, not paraffin, or stew, or the last thing that was cooked in the billycan—'

‘Oh, yes. Tea. Earl Grey, or even Lipton's Breakfast.' Her eyes had lit up, the fleeting, three-cornered smile he had begun to look for widened into a laugh. He had found her to be full of courage and endurance, but now he caught a glimpse of the young woman she might have been, before the war had robbed her of laughter, a woman full of warmth and fun. ‘And very hot, in a china cup, of course.'

‘A china cup? What's that?'

Yes, it was the simple things one had missed most, the simple, honest things.

He had not been honest with her, out there, and it was something he bitterly regretted. He had missed his chance when it was there, failed to take that one step which might have changed his life, and hers; it was far too late now, but he could at least tell her the truth, as soon as it was opportune. There were other things he must tell her, too, that were going to hurt her unbearably, more than he had already hurt her. Moreover, it would not be Nella alone who would suffer. He was by no means a cowardly man, but his heart misgave him at the thought of what he must say, and its inevitable consequences.

One of the logs he had thrown onto the fire had burnt almost through, leaving the other precariously balanced. He stretched out a toe and kicked it into place, then for good measure added another log to keep the blaze going, just as the door opened and Nella came into the room.

She had finished her reports, handed over to Burkin, told her what had happened with Bomber so that she could keep an eye on him, before she came to meet Duncan Geddes. She was glad he couldn't see how wildly her heart was beating under the starched bib of her apron. Immediately, he sprang up and pushed a comfortable chair nearer to the warmth.

‘I see you've made yourself at home,' she said, noting the tea tray and the cup and saucers one of the other nurses must have brought for him; he had always been able to charm people into doing anything for him, men as well as women, nurses and orderlies alike.

‘I am not finding it difficult to get back to this sort of civilisation again. I can't tell you how good this is, Nella.' He took her hand and held it, a small hand, rough-skinned and red with Lysol and hot water. She withdrew it quickly, embarrassed as she had always been at the state of her hands, and reached out to lift the teapot. ‘No, no, I'll pour. You sit back.' She settled herself obediently against the cushions and he handed her a cup of tea.

‘I've only about fifteen minutes.'

‘Sarn't major all right now?'

‘Sleeping like a baby when I left – a rather noisy baby.' She sighed. ‘Poor Bomber.'

‘Difficult night, eh?'

‘Not until he started up. He must have had the whisky bottle in bed with him.'

‘Who's to blame him? I read his notes, poor devil.' She nodded. ‘They'll all be gone soon, and then what? What will you do?'

She shrugged. ‘I don't know. Get a job, I hope, but that won't be easy. There aren't enough jobs even for the men coming home.'

Someone had placed a bowl of hyacinths on the polished, dark oak table – Eunice or Aunt Sybil, no doubt – and their heavy fragrance filled the room. There were two lamps, either side of the fireplace, throwing golden circles of light onto the ceiling. The fire crackled comfortably. She would have liked to close her eyes and sleep.

‘And you? What will you do?'

‘Return to my old practice.'

She said evenly, as lightly as she could, ‘You don't see yourself as a Harley Street surgeon, then?'

‘Not quite,' he smiled, ‘though something of the sort has been suggested.' He might have been tempted, after his time in France, which had gained him more experience in four years than he could have gained in half a lifetime, to specialise, and carve out a lucrative, glamorous and perhaps brilliant career for himself in reconstructive surgery, and indeed this had been put to him several times, but he shrank from it for more reasons than he could explain now. For one thing, he was not ambitious for himself, and certainly not in that direction. And he was certainly not in need of money. ‘No, I shall go back to my miners.'

He had told her a little of his background. The son of a hard-working Presbyterian doctor in a poor district of Glasgow, after leaving medical school in St Andrews he had gone as a junior partner to a practice in the little group of coastal towns and villages in the North-East coalfields, south of the Scottish border. There, in Lillington, he had seen what poverty was. He learnt that miners crawled on their bellies in two-foot-high coal seams, turning to lie on their backs to hew out the rich coal, which was then exported at a profit to the coal owners, while the wages of the miners themselves were cut to the bone. Some of them were forced to live in shanty towns, their children running wild, out of reach of the school-board man, absent because they had no shoes to go to school in. Money for doctors' bills was non-existent. He had been brought up with notions of service, and he intended to go back into the practice, which had been kept going for him by old Dr Hedley, brought out of a comfortable retirement for the duration and not anxious to be kept away from it any longer than was necessary. He hoped, with the money he now had, he might contribute something, however small.

Paris. He ought to mention Paris, prepare her. At that moment a nurse opened the door, then, seeming to sum up the situation, backed out and closed it. No, perhaps now was not the time, with interruptions likely at any time. ‘Nella, I have to speak to you, but I can't say what I have to say when you have to be on duty in a few minutes. Will you let me talk to you, privately, somewhere where we're not likely to be disturbed?'

She said evenly, determined not to read between the lines, ‘There's nowhere here in the hospital that's very private, or anywhere in Broughton, for that matter, unless you go for a walk.'

‘Then how about the one which takes in that famous view from Broughton Hill that Matron's been telling me about?'

‘Very well, if you must,' she said at last, then smiled, the quick smile that had always turned his heart over. ‘But I'll warn you, it's a stiff climb, and unless you're prepared for a fourteen-mile tramp, we shall have to turn round and come back. It's a much better walk in the opposite direction, up to the holy well. That way you can make a circular tour, and besides, it's prettier.'

‘I don't mind turning round. The view never looks the same on the way back.'

For a long moment they looked at each other. ‘We'll see. If we can manage to get time off together.' She lifted the fob watch pinned to her apron. ‘Now I must go.'

Reardon could see it in the distance, the place where the Raffertys lived, as he walked down Hoggins Lane, a little-used track which, until a new road into the works had been built, had been the main entrance to the small brickworks situated a mile further along the lane. Sam Noakes had told him where to find it – ‘It's known as Rafferty's Cottage, but don't expect to find a cottage.'

The building ahead, a large, low-roofed, brick-built edifice, was certainly not a cottage, and whatever it had once been, it had seen better days. Its paintwork was peeling and one of the window shutters was hanging loose, giving it a decidedly lopsided appearance, but it had to be the place he was looking for. Sam had said one half of it used to be the old brickworks' counting house, the other half a storage place for light materials, until the distance of both from the main works came to be seen as a disadvantage by the owner and a newer, more convenient building was erected at the same time as the new entrance to the works was created. Joel Rafferty had rented the disused property when he and his wife arrived from London, had built his kiln in the storage side and converted the counting house to a domestic dwelling. Behind it were several smaller, almost derelict buildings. Again according to Sam, the Raffertys had originally envisaged these as housing for other artisans who might make up his proposed community, but that was a hope destined never to be fulfilled.

Reardon was almost at the end of the lane when he came across a woman, dressed very oddly and gathering what looked like dandelion leaves to add to the watercress already in her basket.

‘Good afternoon. I'm looking for the pottery and Mrs Rafferty.'

‘Well, this is the pottery, or used to be, and I'm Amarantha Rafferty. What can I do for you?'

Despite looking like nothing but a bundle of old clothes, she spoke with a quick, educated accent and looked searchingly at him as she waited for an answer. Sam had warned him she was ‘one o' them bluestockings', and outlandish into the bargain, a term that served for anything or anyone the village didn't understand, but she didn't seem at all intimidating. Rather the opposite: under a bright-orange hat crocheted in chenille, from which wisps of grey hair escaped, she had a humorous mouth and kind eyes; the fact that she wore umpteen layers of clothing of various kinds and a pair of men's boots certainly made her look peculiar in the extreme; on the other hand, it was a cold, raw afternoon and the boots must have been a distinct advantage when scrabbling in streams and ditches for watercress and dandelion leaves. He put her at first at around sixty but that may have been because of her weatherbeaten complexion. She could have been a lot younger.

‘You'd better come into the house,' she said when he told her his business. A trodden path led directly off the lane to what seemed to be the only door, through a vegetable plot almost bare at this season except for a few old Brussels sprouts' stalks. A pump with a water butt next to it stood outside the door, which opened directly into a huge living space, the kitchen being at one end, he saw as they entered. It was magnificently untidy. But the initial impression was immediately superseded by one of life, warmth and colour, from the warm terracotta of the wash on the walls, to the cushions and brightly patterned shawls and covers thrown carelessly over the haphazardly scattered chairs and sofas. Large, vibrantly painted pottery plates (which he assumed were the work of Mrs Rafferty, and about which there seemed to be a great deal of eye-rolling in the village) hung amongst a varied selection of prints and paintings. But above all it was a room of books. He marvelled at the quantity, completely filling the shelves which had been erected on one long wall, and spilling over onto every other available surface, including the floor, much to the detriment of the housekeeping. But what would a bit of dust matter to a person like Mrs Rafferty, with a mind above such mundane things?

As soon as they entered she pulled off her shapeless hat and threw it onto a chair, causing an affronted marmalade cat to jump up and stalk off, tail in air, and a quantity of dishevelled, greying dark hair to tumble around her face. She threw off her outer garments and tossed them over a sofa, revealing underneath them a brown dress decorated with black Assisi work, covered with a long green tabard, fringed at the hem. She lifted a big kettle standing to one side of the great stone fireplace onto the glowing embers at the heart of the fire, where it immediately began to sing. She turned and spoke, and he was disconcerted when she said, looking directly at his face, ‘I take it your injuries are a result of this last disgraceful affair?'

‘They are, ma'am.' He had heard the war referred to in other terms.

‘Then I am sorry for you.' With a brown, work-worn hand she touched his, warmly and unselfconsciously. ‘My husband died in the war. It was not a heroic death, he caught pneumonia during his field training. He was too old to have volunteered to fight in the first place, but he died believing what he had done was right.' For a brief moment she was silent, then she went on briskly, ‘Well, there we are. And now, Mr Reardon, I'm going to offer you tea and some of the cake I've just made. It should be cool enough to cut by now. Will you take some? Don't say no, there's plenty. Much can be contrived,' she observed, fetching tea things and the cake from the kitchen end and cutting a large slice, ‘by the use of carrots for sugar, and fruits from the hedgerows.'

‘Er, quite.'

He tried the cake and found it very good indeed, though the tea was another matter. He preferred not to speculate what it was made from: dried hay, perhaps. He took a long swig to get rid of it. ‘Very good cake.'

He couldn't keep his eye from straying to the books.

‘You like to read?' she asked, noticing his interest.

‘When I have the opportunity, and the wherewithal to get hold of books,' he answered, getting up to read the titles. ‘You have an interesting collection, Mrs Rafferty.'

‘They are here to be borrowed at any time. Which ones interest you most?' He mentioned a few and she nodded approvingly. Suddenly, he knew what it was about her: the way she talked brought to mind Miss Calder, Ellen Calder, the young schoolteacher who had conducted the WEA French classes he had attended in the days before the war, when he had been filled with a burning desire to better himself. She had written warmly to him throughout his time in France. A young lady of serious bent, she had always ended her letters to him with a paragraph or two in French, to which she had expected him to reply likewise. It had made him smile, but it had kept him on his toes, a reminder that there was still something else out there. He hadn't yet found the courage to renew his acquaintance with Miss Calder.

‘I can see you have a questing mind,' Mrs Rafferty went on. ‘What are you searching for?'

‘I don't rightly know.' He rubbed his nose. She had glowing, intelligent brown eyes, and he knew she understood exactly what he meant when he went on, ‘I suppose I've only one question, really, ma'am: why?'

‘We're all asking that. There aren't enough books in the world to answer it.'

Books, and a few generalities, kept them going through another slice of the cake, and the polite refusal of more tea, until he felt able to broach the subject of his visit.

‘I can't tell you anything about what happened, but I can tell you about Marianne herself. She was a strange girl in many ways, not much like the rest of her family. Have they told you she had an ambition to write novels?'

No, he said, that was news to him.

‘Hmm, well. I have been very sorry since she died to think that I might have been unnecessarily unkind to her on the subject.'

‘In what way?' He could not, for the life of him, imagine Mrs Rafferty being unkind to anyone.

She got up to stir the fire and throw on a big log. Flames crackled and sparks flew up the chimney. He found it very agreeable, sitting in this strange room with the old, comfortably worn chairs drawn up to the hearth, with the fire lighting the darkening afternoon and the tea table between them, the old cat reclaiming a place by the blaze. ‘She came to me for instruction. No, I am not a writer myself, not a writer of fiction, at any rate. Pamphlets and so on are more in my line. For the Cause, you know.'

He might have guessed. Votes for Women. Before the war he'd been as much against the idea as anyone, but the work women had unstintingly done during the war, men's work, much of it heavy, had changed his opinion about that – and many other men's, including some in the government. Ellen Calder herself had delivered mail, wearing breeches and riding a two-stroke motorcycle they called the Baby Triumph. At any rate the women had got the vote at last – at least, if they were over thirty, or a property owner.

‘Poor Marianne,' Mrs Rafferty went on. ‘She'd been writing fairy stories and so on since she was a child but she was confused as to how to begin writing what she considered ‘proper stories' and when her father came to me and asked me to help, I told him to send her to college, to learn from people better qualified than I, but she shrank from the idea. Well, I have read a good deal, as you can see, and I studied literature when I was at Oxford, so I agreed. It was not, I fear, a success. She came to me for two or three years and at the end of it we were really not much further. She would not apply herself, you see, and at last, I'm sorry to say, I told her in no uncertain terms that she liked the
idea
of being a writer rather than actually
being
one, if you know what I mean? It was as if she were simply writing out her own daydreams – and we all know where daydreams lead, don't we? In Marianne's case, to a lot of romantic slush,' she said forthrightly. ‘And she was too dreamy or disinclined to work at it and put it together properly, not even into a form where it could be shown to someone else who might well, I admit, have had more encouraging opinions than mine. I lost patience. Those early stories of hers – fairytale romances and so on – had been quite charming, but she had come to be influenced by too many of the sort of books I regard as trash, and for that I blame that silly young woman who is Lady Sybil's maid for lending them to her.' She bent her head over the teapot and her grey tresses fell either side of her face. ‘There now, I've said more than I should.'

A friendship between Marianne Wentworth, who had been, he knew, more or less related to Lady Sybil, and her lady's maid, seemed quite an odd notion to Reardon, and the idea that she should need to borrow books from her even odder, and he said as much to Mrs Rafferty.

‘Oh, but I don't think they were friends at all, or not in the way one usually thinks of friends. I suppose the loan of the books had brought them together, and I don't know how that came about – except that they were unlikely in the extreme to have appeared on her father's bookshelves – but I doubt they could have been much more than acquaintances. I suppose they liked each other well enough, and Lady Sybil is very liberal-minded in that way, but it would never have done for her maid to…well, get ideas. Remember, it was before the war stamped out that sort of thing.'

The war had certainly done a great deal to smooth out social inequalities, but there was a long road to go yet and Mrs Rafferty was a great deal more naive than he had given her credit for, if she believed to the contrary, which he did not think she did. ‘You're being ironic, Mrs Rafferty.' She smiled.

He knew he need not beat about the bush with this lady. ‘Mrs Rafferty. Did you ever entertain the idea that Marianne's death might not have been an accident?'

She gave him a level glance. She knew what he meant. ‘She did not leave a letter behind, as far as I'm aware. Don't suicides always do that?'

‘Usually, but not invariably.'

She thought this over for some time. ‘To be honest, yes, the notion did cross my mind, and that was what made me feel so guilty. But on reflection, I ceased to blame myself. She had not been upset at what I told her, it was almost as if she didn't care. I think the writing itself had come to satisfy her, that it ceased to matter that she might never be published. Poor, dear Marianne! She had such an unrealistic view of life, not at all like the real world we live in. But to answer your question – yes, I believe that given the right circumstances…if, say, she fell in love and it turned out wrongly, she could – well, she could have taken her life.'

‘Is that possible? That she had a disastrous love affair?'

‘I knew little of that side of her life. You'd have to ask my son, Steven. Just before she died, they were both part of a crowd of young people who used to be together all the time. He'll be in shortly, he's gone fishing and I hope he'll bring something back for our supper…He goes back to Cambridge in a couple of days. Will you stay and join us?'

Much as he would have liked to – he had begun to think he might have found a friend in Mrs Rafferty – he declined the offer. It never did to mix work with pleasure. But he would stay until he had seen Steven Rafferty.

Her brisk tone had made him think she wished the subject changed, but it was she, while they were waiting, who returned to it. ‘As I said, after poor Marianne died, I began to question myself, to wonder if I might not have been wrong. None of us is infallible, after all. I asked if they would let me have her notebooks to go through, thinking I might perhaps salvage something, you know, that although it couldn't do her much good, then her hopes might not all have been in vain…' She broke off. ‘No, I am not being altogether truthful. I was more inclined to think there might be some clue in them as to why she had died. I had been rather harsh…' Her face was troubled.

‘And was there?' he asked gently.

‘They could not be found. No one knew what had become of them, or seemed to care particularly. Her family, I think, never understood her ambitions, much as they loved her. In fact, they suggested she must have destroyed them before her…accident.'