‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think so at all.’ I almost said that I doubted Hugh would approve, but felt a reluctance to show any such wifeliness to Alec. ‘So I shall want to hear all about it.’
‘I should be very surprised if there were much to tell,’ said Alec. ‘I foresee accidental death, much commiseration, a word for the volunteers with the buckets and a sermon on fire safety.’ He lifted his almost empty glass, and drained it. ‘Is it my imagination, Dandy, or have you been avoiding me? Have you had a change of heart?’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘Witness me seeking you out now. I have a message from Mr and Mrs Duffy.’
‘Exactly,’ said Alec. ‘You have a message for me, otherwise I shouldn’t have seen hide nor hair of you. Quite.’
I ignored this and pressed on.
‘They wanted you to know that they do not expect you to tell the Fiscal about Cara’s letters. And I must say, Alec, I agree with them. Apart from anything else, there will be press reporters there.’
‘Quite,’ said Alec again.
‘And it would serve no purpose,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’m sure you would come to regret it in the end. One often does, after all, come to regret the confidences one bestows in moments of heightened emotion.’
‘It would serve no purpose?’ said Alec. ‘You don’t see a difference between a happily engaged young girl dying in a fire or an extremely unhappy young girl with a secret breaking off her engagement and dying in a fire, evidently unable to smell smoke, raise the alarm, or leave the cottage by any one of the many doors or windows?’
‘You make it sound so sordid,’ I said. ‘Think what the pressmen would do with that.’
‘You’re right,’ said Alec. ‘One tale is much more sordid than the other. And you say her parents would prefer the less sordid version to be entered into the public record?’
He sounded as angry as I had been an hour before comparing Cara and the unfortunate maid, and I squirmed as much as Dr Milne had. Suddenly I felt no better than Dr Milne. After all both girls, if one got right down to it, were being more or less tidied away, the main thing seeming to be to avoid a scandal. What hypocrites we were, all of us. How eager I had been to believe that Alec and I had made something out of nothing. And, if I were honest, it was not because the matter had actually resolved itself into plain view, but just because it was unthinkable that I should make a fuss, and make a spectacle of myself and my friends.
Alec reached into the pocket of his coat, drew out two envelopes, extracted the letter from each and spread them on the bar. I read them again over his shoulder.
Dear Alec,
Mummy, Clemence and I have come away to the beach cottage for a few days but I should like it so much if you were to come and visit us here. There is something momentous I need to tell you. Please, when you arrive if you could pretend to Mummy that you came in search of me off your own bat that would help enormously. I think she’s being perfectly ridiculous but I don’t want to make her any crosser than she already is. Sorry to be so mysterious, Alec dear, but I do think it would be best told not written. I trust completely in your affection for me and hope that I am right to do so. All my best love, Cara.
Dear Alec,
I cannot marry you. I am very sorry for the hurt and trouble I know this will cause, but it is much better this than what would come to pass if I were to keep quiet and go along with it. I cannot explain my reasons, except to say that I am convinced I could never make you happy, and that knowing that, I should be miserable myself. Yours sincerely, C.
I had forgotten, I think, what the letters contained. Or rather, having read them that day in Edinburgh sitting in the gallery, when all that faced us was a puzzle with a happy ending around the corner, they had seemed very different from what lay before me now. Unthinkable, unthinkable, not to admit that something quite horrid had happened in the day that separated them. I wondered which one Mrs Duffy considered to be the silly one – ‘a silly letter’, she had said. Presumably the one which broke off the engagement, although it was the other, the first, which touched unflatteringly on Mrs Duffy herself, and I have found one is more likely to brush off as silly something which shows oneself in a bad light, than something which is hurtful to others.
Life makes sense. One thing is connected to another. And no matter how fastidious we are in turning away from ugliness, or how brazenly we stare down the world to hide our ugliness from others, things are as they are. That maid, poor creature, caught the eye of some man somewhere and so set herself on the path towards her death, each thing connected to the next, no matter how confidently the man responsible might have reassured her at the beginning nor how discreetly Dr Milne handled it all at the end. It was no different with Cara, no matter how we all shrank from it. The theft, Cara’s secret, the broken engagement and her death, coming all on top of one another like that, must be connected. They each had to be a thread in a pattern I could not see, a story whose organizing element was hidden from me. It was a much more complicated story than the tale of the maid, of course, or at least more unusual and therefore much harder to make out from the glimpses of it we had caught so far, but it had to be there. Things are connected. Life makes sense.
‘I think you should read them out,’ I said at last. ‘I wasn’t having a change of heart, you know. Just a failure of nerve. But I’m over it.’
Alec, to my great surprise, shook his head.
‘No, Dandy. You underestimate the power of respectability, I think. If I read these letters out today, then later, once we – you and I – have found out what we need to know, we will come up against a brick wall. I can see us trying to make a policeman listen to us. “But these letters were heard at the inquiry,” he will say, “and it was agreed then that they were not of any significance.” No, much better to keep them up our sleeves until they can do us some good. Accident, commiseration, commendation and safety warning is the order of the day today.’ He took out a black-edged handkerchief and pressed it to his lips, possibly fighting a display of emotion, but more likely wiping away traces of beer, then he set his hat dead straight on his head and gave me a grim smile.
‘Can you wait five minutes for me to change?’ I asked. Bother respectability, bother Hugh and bother the reporters. For Cara’s sake, and somehow, obscurely, for the sake of the servant girl whose name I did not even know, I was going to the court.
Chapter Seven
Like the days before, the inquiry seemed to slip past almost at one remove, as though the witnesses were speaking in a code that only the Procurator Fiscal himself could understand, frustrating the crowd’s desire for details, a desire so keen as to be almost tangible in the stuffy atmosphere, like citric acid spilled somewhere. If ever a witness seemed to be edging towards sensation – as when one of the volunteers described the heat and high leap of the flames – the Fiscal would first stifle the witness into silence, then quell the rustle of pleasure in the room with a look so pained, so superior, that I wanted to shrink down into my seat, slither to the floor and crawl away.
I had expected the Fiscal to be a desiccated, Dickensian character, blinking behind half-spectacles and using Latin where English might do. Had this imagined figure appeared, the chasm between his chill disapproval and the vulgar delight of the crowd might have been put down to his age and unworldliness and I might have been able to feel affronted by him and a little justified in being there. As it was, though, he was a young man of hardly forty with gleaming chestnut hair swept back from a handsome brow and with powerful shoulders which, even though draped in sober blue suiting, looked incongruous above a sheaf of documents. I imagined him summing up and directing the jury, then pulling on a helmet and goggles and, with a sweep of a white silk scarf, stepping back into his Avro and roaring off.