Page 38 of Last Letter Home
‘I’ve never seen anything, but I’m showing you this because it’ll help you understand the Kellings. This is where it happened, you see. They had a son, little Henry, their firstborn. He drowned here when he was four or five. Ran away from his nanny, so the story goes. He liked to come and watch the fish. I suppose he leaned too far trying to catch one. Anyway, they were devastated, as you may imagine. The son and heir. So now there’s no boy to inherit the title or the estate and it’s said they blame each other. Sad, isn’t it?’
‘Dreadful,’ Sarah breathed. ‘Simply dreadful.’ Up from the depths of her mind a memory came unbidden. A curtain of white toile rising and falling in a draught, and the sound of a woman sobbing and wailing. And suddenly the pressing weight of sadness felt so great that it was hard to keep back tears. She swung away from the pond and Ivor, the panic rising inside. Why was he doing this? How could he be so cruel?
‘Sarah? Sarah, are you all right?’ His hands gripped her shoulders. She pushed them off and, stumbling back to the path, began to hurry away. His voice came from behind, panicky, pleading. ‘Sarah, what’s wrong?’
She snapped, ‘Nothing, Ivor. Nothing. I’ll be all right if you let me be.’ Her pace quickened into a run.
‘But what have I said?’ He hurried in her wake.
She spun round to confront his puzzled face. ‘Don’t you remember?’ she hissed. For a moment she wondered with puzzlement if anyone had ever told him, but surely they had. ‘Peter. You must know about Peter.’
She saw the horror dawn on Ivor’s face. ‘Oh God yes, yes. Sarah, I’m sorry, I’d completely forgotten. I shouldn’t have . . . I didn’t mean to . . . Sarah!’
Walking faster, fists clenched in anguish, she reached the shadow of the garden wall, turned its corner towards the road and bumped into the all too solid figure of Paul, who was emerging from the kitchen garden, a hoe across one shoulder.
‘Whoa! Sarah!’ He held her steady. She stood panting, confused, just as Ivor barrelled round the corner. Seeing Sarah with Paul, he pulled up short, his expression of distress darkening to anger.
‘Let her go, Hartmann. The situation is perfectly under control.’
‘If you say so.’ Paul withdrew his hand from Sarah’s arm, giving Ivor a shrewd look that belied the mildness of his words. ‘Are you all right, Sarah? I’m sorry, I didn’t see you coming.’
‘I’m completely fine, thank you. Thank you, both of you,’ Sarah managed to say with a catch in her voice. ‘I really ought to go home now. Ivor, it’s been a splendid afternoon, but we’ll say goodbye here.’
‘Let me walk with you down to the gate.’
‘No, I’ll find my own way. Really.’ All she knew was that she wanted to be by herself. As she set off down the hill, she was aware of the two men staring after her.
Her feet took her home automatically. She certainly didn’t notice her surroundings, for her thoughts were too agitated. The fluttering curtain and the woman crying were all she could remember now of the day her little brother died, but the sorrow the memory evoked was deep. She’d managed not to think about it for years and years, but the silent pond, the host of midges hovering over its surface and Ivor’s tragic tale had brought back the sadness and bewilderment, of waking in bed and watching the toile curtain billow and sway and hearing the commotion beyond her bedroom door. The baby had simply not woken up that morning. The ayah’s wailing had filled the bungalow.
All those years and she did not remember Peter’s name being spoken. She did not remember the funeral, and thought perhaps that she didn’t attend. Their father had sat her down and, with Diane on his knee, had told them Peter had gone to heaven to be with the angels. For a long while she’d carried the happy image in her mind of her little brother with his dreaming eyes lying smiling in the grass surrounded by tumbling winged cherubs. Perhaps her mother had spoken to her when it happened, but if so she had no memory of it. Once, at school in England she had read Peter Pan and to the puzzlement of the other girls had sobbed uncontrollably when she’d reached the scene where Peter returns to the house but finds himself shut out by his mother, who had forgotten him.
How her mother had borne this sadness she did not know. Mrs Bailey’s response to life’s troubles was essentially a practical one, to lose herself in daily tasks. Admirable, some people thought. Hence she had declined to be an Indian widow, waiting in seclusion in hope of another husband in India – and there was no doubt in Sarah’s mind that she’d have found one; she was much admired. Instead, she’d sized up the dangers of the international situation and taken the sensible decision to return with the girls at once to England.
When Sarah reached Flint Cottage it was to find welcome tranquillity, her mother and sister sitting lazily in the garden with Ruby setting the dining room table for supper.
‘Where did you disappear to?’ Mrs Bailey asked, stubbing out her cigarette.
Sarah dropped her hat onto the table and sank down in an empty chair. ‘Oh, just for a walk with Ivor,’ she said, suspicious of the glint of interest in her mother’s eye.
‘My godson has turned out well, I think, and his prospects are good. I daresay many young women would regard him as quite a catch.’
Sarah glanced at her mother with annoyance. ‘I expect you’re right,’ was all she said. She had never confided in her mother on such matters and wasn’t going to start now. Beside her, Diane cast her magazine aside with a deep sigh and went indoors.
Ivor Richards. Was she interested in him or was she not, Briony asked herself as she weeded the rose bed after supper. She breathed in the sweet fragrance of the huge white blooms and considered the matter. He was attractive and she was drawn to him because of that, but aspects of him irritated her. She did not like the way he treated Paul Hartmann – as though the German man were inferior – and she feared that something, his disappointed father’s expectations maybe, had wounded his sense of himself.
She wondered sometimes at her cold response to most men. She had had several suitors in India – of course she had, the place was full of red-blooded bachelors desperate for an English bride – but the only man she’d fallen in love with, ten years older than her, a fascinating but cynical type, had not felt as strongly about her. She’d let him make love to her, then bravely brooded over her hurt feelings in secret. Perhaps he’d spoiled her for good.
In the garden, the light was beginning to fade. She batted at a cloud of gnats and looked up to see Diane close by, watching her, a woollen shawl drawn tightly over her slender shoulders.
‘Do come in and play bezique, Saire.’ Diane loved playing cards and board games.
‘In a moment. Why don’t you set up the card table?’
‘All right. I say, aren’t they beautiful, so pure.’ Diane reached out a hand and touched a full-blown rose. ‘Oh,’ she cried, as its petals floated to the earth. ‘Did I do that?’
Her voice was so anguished it tore at her sister’s heart. ‘Don’t worry, Diane. It was ready to go, that’s all.’
Her sister’s sensitivity as usual alarmed Sarah. What would happen when she went away to college? How would Diane survive? A common-sense part of her asserted itself. Of course she’d be all right. Diane had friends – Jennifer and Bob Bulldock and their circle. Still, there was something very childlike about Diane. Her pale, delicate beauty had attracted one or two of the wrong sort in India, bullies or effetes. Her father, as ever her defender, had caused one to be posted a thousand miles away, simply to rid Diane of the man’s boorish attentions. Diane was another reason for Mrs Bailey’s decision to return to England. At least one knew the kind of families who lived in Norfolk.
