No sooner had I hung up the earpiece before the telephone rang again and the same aggrieved voice – I should like to box that girl’s ears – told me I had another caller. It was Alec.
‘I’m in Edinburgh,’ he said. He had gone home to Dorset, I think to quiet his mother (understandably rattled by the news of yet another death in the family he had been to join). ‘But I’m just about to start for Dunelgar to meet Gregory. Can I pick you up on the way?’
‘Have you decided to tell him more?’ I asked. ‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘I’ve been summoned,’ said Alec. ‘And I can’t make up my mind, much less make it up and then change it. I’ll see what he has to say, but I need an ally.’
I had to agree, of course, but I felt very little enthusiasm for the visit because I had been trying my best to keep Gregory Duffy out of my thoughts. The daughter who had so clearly been his favourite was dead, his wife was dead, and as for his other daughter, the mystifyingly dispreferred Clemence – and it really did mystify me any time I considered it – his current treatment of her was a puzzle I could not begin to solve.
I had always been more taken with Cara myself and I expect the same was true of most people who knew them both. There had been something so fresh and sweet about her little monkey face that had to be found charming and Clemence’s beautiful mask and cold elegance could not compete. I should have thought, however, that a parent could love them both and love their difference more than any sameness. But Clemence was off to Canada after all. I had learned this from Mary, who had thrown up the area window and called to me as I descended the steps of the Drummond Place house after leaving a card of condolence on the day of Lena’s funeral.
‘I couldn’t think for the life of me what the noise was,’ she said, looking more than ever like Mrs Tiggywinkle as she leaned out over the sill above a frothing tub of washing. ‘I thought wee boys were whacking the railings.’ Sure enough, the best that could be said about the sound of the wooden clog strapped on to my plaster, the steel tip of my cane and my one proper shoe was that it was percussive. Grant was all for keeping me in the house for six weeks, such pain did it give her to see an outfit of hers wrecked by the white lump sticking out from the bottom of my skirt.
‘How are things?’ I called down to Mary, with a glance up and down the pavement to check that I was unobserved. (Drysdale, agog at the wheel of the motor car, would have to make of it what he would.)
‘An earthquake would be peace perfect peace compared to this place,’ she said. ‘Miss Clemence left from Leith two nights ago, gone to meet the liner at Gibraltar. She didn’t even stay for her mother’s funeral and if you know why, madam, don’t tell me. The less I know about any of this the better. I’m off at the start of the week. Down the other end of the street there, to a lawyer and his wife and three wee ones and another one coming, and I’ll be well shut of it.’ She looked over her shoulder as if at a sudden noise and then with a wiggle of her eyebrows she thumped the window down and was gone.
So Clemence was already started on her long journey and would miss her mother’s funeral. I doubted if even Mr Duffy would go and there was something dreadful, I thought, about a funeral with only the minister and the other officials, even for Lena. I only thought that for a moment, mind you, before I shook myself with disgust at my mawkishness. That kind of flabby sentiment – thinking that there is good in everyone – is responsible for a great deal of harm.
Why then, I wondered, after Alec’s telephone call, was I trembling at the thought of telling Mr Duffy the truth?
Had I seen him at any time in the weeks since Lena’s death, I should have had a convenient answer. No one with an ounce of compassion could have piled more pain on to the shrunken shoulders of the old man who opened the door to Alec and me later that day. I gasped at the sight of him, and instinctively went forward to take his cold, papery hands in my own. He squeezed them and gave a nod to Alec.
‘Osborne,’ he said, and I was relieved to hear some of his old self in the curt, barely polite, masculine greeting.
The shutters were open today, but otherwise the hall looked as it had the last time, with the rug still rolled and the furniture still sheeted. He led us to the back of the house, and I was glad not to have to climb the stairs with my cane, and even gladder not to have to pass the exact spot. We went through the baize door to the servants’ quarters and I suddenly knew where we were going. I did not follow them up the narrow stairs, but waited in the ground floor passageway resting my foot, listening to them walk along the stone flags above my head and then stop. They stood still for five minutes and more, perhaps talking although I could not hear their voices, and then they moved again, slowly, back to the head of the stairs and down to join me.
‘You look cold, my dear,’ said Mr Duffy. ‘Come out and sit in the orangery and we shall have some whisky. I’m afraid I can’t rise to tea.’ He smiled, holding out his arm, and led us through another maze of passages then out into the light of a conservatory, empty of anything but a few tough-looking palms. It was dusty and neglected, but comfortable in the warmth of the afternoon sunlight.
‘What made you go along that passage, sir?’ said Alec, once he had fussed me into a comfortable chair and lifted my legs on to another. Mr Duffy handed me a beautiful old glass one-third full of whisky and sat down with his own, gesturing Alec to go and fetch one from the decanter.
‘I was searching the house,’ he said, ‘looking for the diamonds.’ Alec looked around, startled.
‘And did you find them?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Duffy, taking an appreciative though dainty sip, an old man kind of sip, from his tumbler. ‘I knew she wouldn’t have sold them. She loved them, you know. Really loved them. The Duffy diamonds. I think they were the only reason she married me.’
I took a gulp from my glass. I abhor whisky, and can usually only choke it down with a great deal of very cold water. In fact, I think it’s best to do what the Americans do – ice, lemon and soda – but Hugh will not hear of it. I shuddered as it spread through me, the liquid setting me on fire all the way to my stomach and the fumes rising up and coming out of my nose. I can well believe cars can go for miles on the stuff if the petrol runs out.
From the table beside him, Mr Duffy lifted a small stout chest and passed it to me. It was plain mahogany with silver hasps and a silver crest worn with polishing in the middle of the lid. He waved at me to open it. Inside, bedded snugly in velvet nests, were more cases, lizard skin this time I thought, six lizard skin cases from a huge bulbous one in the middle, to a tiny one like a bread bun, almost too small to support the elaborate hinges. I noticed the scuff marks and the snags in the soft silver of the locks. One by one, I opened the lids.
The stone in the centre of the necklace caught the sunlight and made me blink. People called it pear-shaped; ‘a pear-shaped blue-white diamond’ was how it was always described in the society pages when it was worn at Court, but I thought it looked like a quail’s egg. It was blue-white, even against the faded pinkish silk of its case, and the light skipping off it was as cold and as sharp as icicles. Two more of the same stones in the earrings, three in the headdress, then the small ones in rings and bracelets, all looking like little nubs and chips and crystals of ice. They were mesmerizing, quite breath-taking the way they seemed to hum and shimmer with light. But hard on that thought a voice in my head said: two lives lost. Pink cheeks, brown eyes, red blood, all lost while these blue-white stones glittered on and on.
‘She loved them so much,’ said Mr Duffy. I closed the cases and shut the lid of the chest. ‘I should have been warned right then. No one who can feel real love for something as useless as a diamond could possibly be a wife. Or a mother. You only have to look at Clemence to see that a mother with that kind of flaw is a dangerous thing. She passes it on in the blood and then she teaches the child that there is nothing wrong with it and so any check that there might have been is missing.’ He swirled his glass around and stared down into it.