She raised her left hand to her face and covered her mouth, her thumb pressing against one cheekbone, her forefinger against the other. Her engagement ring glittered in the lamplight. Smoke climbed in a gentle plume from the cigarette in her right hand. And in her eyes there was such brilliantly simulated agony that I could almost have believed it was what she truly felt. But when she took her hand away, her mouth was set in a firm determined line. “I have to think of myself now, Robin. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“I’ve always understood that.”
“I have to prepare for an independent future.”
“You’ll ditch Keith, then?”
“It’s not a question of ditching. It’s a matter of necessity.” She saw me raise my eyebrows in doubt, but carried on unabashed. “And it’s not the only one. I shan’t vote with Adrian. I’ll vote with you. But we’ll lose.”
“What do you mean?”
“Adrian’s made me an offer, you see. One that’s too good to refuse. Especially now.”
“What offer?”
“He’s willing to buy five thousand of my shares. At a substantial premium over the Bushranger price.”
I almost smiled in spite of myself. And so, I think, did Bella. Five thousand shares would exactly invert the voting ratio, giving Adrian a 52 1/2 per cent majority in favour of acceptance. Bella would vote on the losing side, but end up even better off than if the offer had gone through unopposed. She’d make a fool of me and Adrian. And then she’d walk away with the money she needed to rid herself of a husband who was about to become an embarrassment to her. Farewell, Timariot & Small. Adieu L’Hivernance. They’d been pleasant enough while they lasted. But Bella had decided it was time to leave. And time for them to go.
We walked out into the mild Bordelaise dusk. Bella looked and sounded genuinely sorry for me as she stood beside me in front of the hotel. But her sorrow came cheaper than her vote. Much cheaper. “I booked a table for two at Le Chapon Fin,” she said. “It’s an excellent restaurant.”
“You’ll have to dine alone. I know I shall prefer to.” It wasn’t meant as bitterly as it may have been taken. But I hadn’t the energy to pull my punches, even the unintentional ones.
“As you please,” said Bella. “I suppose it’s an arrangement I may have to get used to.”
“Not for long, if I know anything about it.”
She frowned slightly, as if struggling to construct an explanation of her motives. I thought I understood them well enough already. And the task was an unfamiliar one for her. With a toss of the head, she abandoned it. “What will you do, Robin?” she asked with amiable curiosity. “Go back to Brussels?”
“Which you said I should never have left? I don’t think so. There’s such a thing as too much security.”
“What, then?”
“I’ll resign from the company, of course. Before Harvey McGraw gets a chance to fire me. Then, well, I don’t know. I’m a free agent. I’ll have three hundred thousand pounds burning a hole in my pocket thanks to you and Adrian. I think I may do some travelling. See the world. Get away from it all. Get a very long way away-before friend Naylor comes out of prison.”
“And Paul goes in?”
“That too, of course.” I raised a hand as a taxi pulled into the hotel lay-by. The driver nodded and drew up beside me. “That too.”
“Good luck,” said Bella.
“I’d wish you the same,” I responded, “but the words might stick in my throat. Besides, you’ve never needed luck to get what you want, have you? I don’t suppose that’s about to change.”
“But it is,” she said, so softly I only half-heard the words as I climbed into the taxi. “Believe me, it is.”
I flew home to England the following morning and was back in the office before the end of the day, dodging Simon’s ever more frantic questions and acting dumb for Adrian’s benefit. He’d made it known in my absence that McGraw had refused to budge on the offer price. This didn’t surprise me, but it worried Simon and Jennifer considerably, since Adrian had said nothing to them about his alternative method of winning the board over. Accordingly, I said nothing either, preferring to let matters take their course. A letter from Bella reached me before the end of the week, appointing me her proxy for the meeting. But it was the key to an empty cage, as Adrian’s smug cat-who’s-dined-on-a-canary expression confirmed. The game was up. But both of us meant to play it to the end.
I contacted Inspector Joyce around the same time and made an appointment to see him in Worcester the day before the board meeting for the purposes of making a new and revised statement about my encounter with Louise Paxton on 17 July 1990. Our telephone conversation, like my exchanges with Adrian, embraced a fair amount of shadow-boxing, since we were both aware how big a climb-down this represented. In an attempt to preserve some self-respect, I put it to him that Naylor’s wife might be the person who’d tipped off Vince Cassidy. And something in his tight-lipped demurral told me Naylor had guessed right. They’d known all along.
I turned to Sarah, as so often before, for sympathy and advice. She was naturally curious about the sour and sudden end my enquiries on Bella’s behalf had come to and suggested we meet at Sapperton, where she had to go on Sunday to do some “clearing out” at The Old Parsonage.
It was the last day of October, mild, dank and breathlessly still. I stopped at the cemetery on my way into the village and visited Rowena’s grave for the first time. It stood beside her mother’s, with fresh flowers in both urns, matching headstones and echoing inscriptions. I remembered Louise’s well enough: First Known When Lost. But now the words seemed dense with bitter unintended irony. Which only heightened the poignancy of the phrase of Thomas’s Sarah had found to commemorate her sister.
ROWENA CLAUDETTE BRYANT,
NÉE PAXTON
23 MAY 1971-17 JUNE 1993
THE SUN USED TO SHINE
In my mind, I was on Hergest Ridge again, turning slowly, like a teetotum about to fall. Take all, half or nothing. The chances were always as slender, the mathematics of unpredictability as unyielding. I walked back to the gate, my shoes crunching in the gravel, an illusion of some fainter step behind me garlanding itself around the surrounding silence. The wrought-iron railings of the gate met my hand as the balustrade of the bridge must have met Rowena’s. For an instant, I could see the abyss and sense its appeal, its strange gaping allure. To jump. And leave it all behind. But I couldn’t. There was only the ground beneath my feet. Only the close grey sky above my head. Only the future to face.
And Sarah, of course. She was the one among us who seemed the most resilient as well as the most perceptive. She didn’t ignore reality or buckle under it. She defied it to do its worst, then retaliated by leading a normal well-balanced life. Not for her Rowena’s despair or Sir Keith’s refusal to recognize the truth or even Bella’s eagerness to subvert it. I knew I could rely on Sarah to do what had to be done. I knew I could look to her for answers as well as questions.
The “clearing out” she’d mentioned on the phone turned out to be rather more than that. She was removing all the family’s personal possessions prior to the arrival of tenants on a six-month lease. As she explained, Sir Keith had only kept the place as a weekend retreat for her and Rowena, then for Rowena and Paul. They had no use for it now. It was time to close another chapter.