‘Lena,’ said Alec. Mrs Duffy turned with a start and looked at him, frozen, for what seemed like an age, then without moving her eyes she noticed me standing just behind and to one side of him and she held out her hand.
‘Dandy, my dear, I had completely forgotten you were coming. Have you been down to the cottage?’
‘Oh no,’ I whispered to myself. They did not know. I did not understand how this could be, but somehow, unbelievably, they had not heard, and telling them was to fall to me. I felt Alec begin to tremble beside me, although we were not touching. Perhaps I only saw his coat sleeve moving, or perhaps I felt the floor underneath my feet reverberate with his tremor. I had to speak.
‘Something has happened, Lena,’ I began, and then, my attention caught by a sound in the corner, I turned and saw a police sergeant, squashed discreetly and surely uncomfortably into a small chair, with his cap on one knee and his notebook open on the other. He had half-risen at my words and was regarding me with wide-open eyes. But if the police were here then…?
‘What?’ said Lena Duffy, her voice stretched dry. ‘What do you mean?’ I was utterly lost now. Did she know after all? She must.
‘Cara,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Lena Duffy again. I felt Alec reach out and take hold of my elbow, his fingers still trembling and cold through my sleeve. Lena had risen now but Clemence was shrinking back in her chair, her blank face as unreadable as ever.
‘You know, don’t you, do you?’ I said. ‘About the fire.’ Alec squeezed my arm again and a glance at the police sergeant gave me my answer. He was staring at me, with his mouth open.
‘What about it?’ said Lena. ‘What has happened? What are you talking about? Have they found…’ Her voice faded to a croak and she was silent.
Just then the comfortable landlady of my imagination – long apron, white cap and all – came to the doorway opposite and stood looking at all of us for a moment, before her eyes filled with tears and she retreated, mopping her face with a glass cloth. I felt dizzy, terrified that I should begin to laugh, and I wanted to turn and run, but I forced myself to walk towards Lena and take her hands.
‘We’ve just come from there,’ I said. ‘No one has found anything. It’s burnt to the ground.’ Odd the things one does without thinking. She, whom I should have been comforting, chafed my cold hands in her warm ones as though she were my mother and I a child, such a comfortable, familiar gesture and so wrong just then. I pulled against it and she let go of me. Then returning to her seat, she surveyed the tea-things on the table with another very familiar gesture, a deep breath in and the competent, calculating glance with which a matron decides whether what is left can be stretched or if more must be ordered. I am sure the offer of ‘Tea?’ got almost to her lips before she caught it and, at the gape I could not hide, bowed her head. I heard Alec turn and run out of the room behind me, knocking against the door jamb on his way. His footsteps pounded away down the flagged passageway to the front door and then could be heard disappearing along the pavement outside.
‘I should go and see,’ I said, gesturing vaguely behind me.
‘Would you, my dear?’ said Lena. ‘Poor Alec. If you would.’ I looked at her for a moment longer, then at the quiet policeman, then fearing again that I was about to laugh or scream or shake someone, I too turned and stumbled out.
He had gone quite a way, but was walking back towards me by the time I saw him. He waved, sat down on the broad low wall of a bridge and lit a cigarette, waiting for me to approach.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I began. Then I rubbed my face hard with my two hands, hoping to scrub away the tears before they fell. ‘I’m hopeless at this.’
‘At what?’ said Alec, sounding interested and even faintly amused. Far from trembling now, he too seemed horribly unperturbed.
‘At whatever you choose to name,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine what possessed me, but I got the idea that she didn’t know anything had happened. I only hope she’s too upset to take it in. Clemence too.’
‘Dandy,’ said Alec, gently. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I don’t even know,’ I wailed. ‘I’ve never… I felt so peculiar, that must be shock, is it? I mean, I was rattled already and then the whole atmosphere was so very odd. It’s not like in books and plays – tears for sadness and smiles for joy, is it? And it feels so different, when it’s someone one has only just spoken to and when there’s no battle, no dispatches. Are you all right?’ I asked, finally, feeling ashamed that what I was really asking was if he could drive me right back home again to Bunty and Hugh and away from all of this.
‘Dandy,’ said Alec again. ‘Listen to me very carefully and please believe what I say. I don’t know what is going on in that room.’ He waved his cigarette towards the hotel. ‘But it is not, believe me, it is not a doting mother and a loving sister suffering from shock. Something is very wrong here and you know it.’
I nodded slowly at first and then faster as my thoughts seemed to catch up with the rest of me.
‘I feel…’ I began, and gave up. ‘I’ve been thinking about Sandy Masterton from one of our farms, who died in the retreat from… Well, anyway, I knew him much better than Cara and I couldn’t see why this should be so much worse. But I suppose that’s it, isn’t it? There’s something wrong here.’
‘That’s not quite it,’ said Alec. ‘What you are feeling is exactly what I am feeling. I, unlike you, have felt it before.’ I looked at him, shaking my head slightly to show him that I did not know what he meant. And then all of a sudden I did, and my head began to nod instead.
‘It’s because we should have known, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘We should have guessed and we should have stopped it.’
‘And now it’s too late,’ said Alec, ‘and there is nothing worse than that.’ My moment of inspiration had passed and pedestrian logic seemed to reassert itself in me.
‘There’s no need for you to feel that way,’ I said.
‘Cara was my fiancee,’ said Alec, simply. ‘It’s seldom spoken of, although everyone knows about it. It’s what makes it bearable when one’s parents die, you know. And I’m sure it’s what makes it bearable for women to be widows. Have you never wondered why women make such comfortable widows and men such hopeless widowers?’ He had been gazing at the glowing end of his cigarette as he spoke, but now he raised his head and looked at me. ‘At the front, you know, if a letter came and it was a chap’s older brother? Well, that was bad, but we knew it was bearable. When a chap’s younger brother went, it was horror.’
‘Is that why the officers so much more often…’ I was going to say ‘went to pieces’ but stopped myself in time. This was the first time I had ever spoken to any man about the nuts and bolts of it all. Alec nodded. Then he brought himself back to the present. He took a last deep puff on his cigarette and threw it down into the river.
‘A mother and an elder sister who have just survived the fire that killed the baby?’ His voice grew hard. ‘They would be beside themselves. They would be clawing through the embers with their bare hands, or they would be asleep, unconscious. I’ve seen it countless times. The body just switches off like an electric lamp going out. Sometimes for days. What they would not be doing is sitting in a parlour miles away in fresh clothes, drinking tea, and attuned to the possibility of news.’
‘Couldn’t it be a kind of shock?’ I said, desperate to avoid what he seemed to be suggesting. ‘Couldn’t that be a kind of retreat in itself? Like sleeping? I mean, if there were anything going on, wouldn’t they try to act more as they should?’ I warmed to this idea. ‘Wouldn’t they put on a show of grief if they were hiding something?’ At that, though, I remembered Lena Duffy’s survey of the table and the offer of tea that she suppressed before she could utter it, the flare of panic in her eyes as she almost let it slip. ‘Or even if it did seem like only a show,’ I said, ‘couldn’t it be that their real grief strikes even them as so far from the way it is written in books that they feel they must try to…’ Alec was shaking his head, but before I could begin a fresh assault, he waved me into silence with a discreet gesture. The police sergeant was approaching.