Page 95 of Last Letter Home
‘And Aruna?’
Now Briony had surprised him. He looked at her warily.
‘I know you spoke to my friend,’ Briony said. ‘It was you I saw here with her, wasn’t it, in the café?’
‘I wasn’t going to bring her into our discussion,’ he growled, ‘but since you have, yes, she caught on. She met someone during your holiday in Tuana who told her about the British soldiers’ war crime, and then Robyn Clare alerted me after you visited her that first time.’
‘Oh, but why?’ Briony felt a lump of dismay in her throat. It wasn’t only Aruna who’d gone behind her back. She’d somehow trusted Robyn.
‘You’d better ask her. Anyway, your friend Miss Patel is a journalist of some sort, isn’t she? She believed she was interviewing me, but the truth is, it was the other way round. I wanted to find out what she knew, to put her off the track a bit while Greg dealt with you.’
‘This is all ridiculous,’ Briony whispered almost to herself.
‘It may seem so to you, but this is my side of the family whose reputation is at stake.’ His eyes flashed dangerously and Briony felt with a chill how important this matter was to him.
‘And what about mine?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Don’t they count in this?’
For a moment his smooth face was like granite, then he pressed his lips together and gripped the table edge as he leaned forward in a deliberate manner. ‘It would be best for both of us, don’t you agree, to let the matter lie now?’
Briony’s mind whirled with confusion. The instinct to tell the truth was strong in her, but could he possibly be right? ‘I don’t know,’ she said, drawing back in her chair. ‘I’d have to think about it.’
He nodded, but his expression remained grim.
‘Will there be anything else? Dessert? Coffee?’ The motherly waitress cleared their empty glasses.
Briony shook her head. ‘Just the bill, thank you.’
‘No, I insist,’ he told Briony. ‘We are, after all, family.’
She shrugged and let him pay.
Family, Briony thought, as she drove away through the bleak countryside towards London. What did that actually involve? Tom Richards meant nothing to her, she couldn’t say she even liked him, but still there was a link between them that meant they were bound together in some ancient, crooked way, the hidden ties of blood. Diane had been his mother, after all, strange, enigmatic Diane, whom she only knew from her grandparents’ letters. How unhappy Diane must have been as a girl, soaking up the tensions of her parents’ marriage, traumatized by the death of her baby brother, the responsibility she’d mistakenly felt for her father’s death, then giving birth to a stillborn baby during the war. Yes, she had some sympathy for Diane, and for why she should have wanted to hide the truth about her husband.
The trouble was that the secrecy, the unhappiness, had been passed down the generations. Her cousin Tom was not an easy man, close, defensive, and Greg, a different sort, had used his charm to deceive. He’d also stolen from her. Briony squeezed the steering wheel in anger at the memory of how he’d tricked her out of the letters.
Still, she didn’t have much other family and she couldn’t wait to tell her father about it all. She’d ask his advice, she decided, as she took the slip road up to the dual carriageway, into the dazzle of the westering sun. What she was less certain about was Aruna. Why had her friend betrayed her in this way? Was she right, that the journalist in Aruna had caught the scent of a story, or was it merely that strange, manipulative side of her friend revealing itself again? She remembered how Aruna used to take things of hers without asking. That it had been Aruna, too, who had set her up for that television show with Jolyon Gunn, where Briony had found herself out of her depth. Briony had always given Aruna the benefit of the doubt, but she couldn’t do that on this occasion. And perhaps Aruna had always felt vulnerable about Luke.
She wondered if their friendship would ever recover from this, whether the bonds between them were strong enough to hold. They’d always assured one another that they’d never let a man, any man, come between them, but this was before they’d met Luke.
Luke. Briony felt the strength drain out of her at the thought of him. Perhaps the whole struggle with Aruna was for nothing and neither of them would hear from him again.
Forty-five
Briony drove down to Birchmere to see her father and stepmother the very next evening, taking all the letters with her and Paul’s final note sent via Harry and, after supper, spread them out on the floor of the living room. It took a long time to explain everything clearly. The faded pictures of the young Harry in Westbury, when placed beside the face of the men on the scrap of film on her laptop, were incontrovertible evidence. Briony’s brother Will did not look like Harry. It was, rather, the wary, dark young man who shared Will’s features and that man must have been Paul Hartmann.
‘Is it really possible,’ Martin Wood asked unhappily, ‘that Paul was, um, your mother’s father? I’m simply trying to think all round the question. The whole thing seems so . . . dramatic.’
‘Look.’ Briony opened the old family album and together they studied the photographs. The face of the man who called himself Harry Andrews was almost definitely Paul’s. ‘I’ve seen a photograph of Sarah’s sister Diane, too, and she does remind me of Granny.’ She pointed to a black and white photograph of Jean’s christening. There was her grandmother with an expression of joy, holding the bundle that had grown up to become Briony’s mother.
‘But your Granny’s name was Molly.’ Briony’s father was having difficulties coming to terms with this.
‘I don’t understand how someone official didn’t find out what they’d done.’ Lavender, who had said very little so far, spoke gently.
‘If there wasn’t a photograph on Harry’s identity card then it must have been easy,’ Briony told her. ‘Or perhaps Grandpa managed to change it. And there was general confusion at the time anyway. People must have had to ask for replacement cards for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Who is this?’ Briony’s father was looking at the christening photograph and pointed to a woman standing close behind Briony’s grandmother.
Briony screwed up her eyes. Lavender rose and opened a drawer in her writing desk in the corner and brought back a magnifying glass. ‘I use it to read small print. The leaflets that come with my medication are awful.’
