“Presumably.”
“And it was late September when my daddy first came to the farm.”
“True.” At least there were some facts we could agree on. I took a fish bone from my mouth and parked it at the edge of my plate. I had a glimmer of where this was leading but only a glimmer. A man isn’t so habituated to counting weeks and months.
She added, “If I got it right from you, they didn’t spend any time together until the Columbus Day concert.”
She’d fanned the glimmer into a spark.
“Columbus Day is October twelfth. These days we observe it on the second Monday in the month, but in the war it was always the same.” She watched me without emotion as she repeated, “October twelfth, Theo.”
I stared at her blankly. Why hadn’t I worked it out for myself? I took a deep breath and admitted with as much dignity as I could salvage, “Duke couldn’t have been the father of her child.”
“Thank you.” She looked over her glasses. “But somebody must have been.”
I said with loathing, “That bastard Morton. He did rape her in the apple orchard.”
Pointedly, she commented, “You told me just now it doesn’t fit the facts.”
“It has to,” I blustered. “I was mistaken.”
“No,” said Alice. “You were right. You’re not going to like this, Theo, but Barbara and Cliff were sweethearts.” She put up a restraining hand. “Before you hit the roof, will you answer me this? When was the first time you noticed Cliff?”
“That morning in the orchard, I suppose.”
“Would you try to recall it precisely, please?”
I gave a sharp sigh of impatience. The way she was addressing me was strikingly reminiscent of the cross-examination she’d made of Harry Ashenfelter. Well, if she wanted me on the witness stand, she’d find that I had a poor regard for her latest theory. I reminded her coolly, “I think I told you this before. It was during the break when Mrs. Lock-wood brought out the tea. Quite a few of the people there were strangers to me, but I noticed Morton because he collected a mug of tea for Barbara and sat beside her. It proves nothing.”
“You were just a little put out because it cut across your plans as a matchmaker. That’s why you noticed him, isn’t that so?”
I wasn’t letting that pass unchallenged. “A matchmaker, no. I never actively promoted the friendship between Duke and Barbara.”
She rephrased it. “They were both special people in your eyes, and you hoped they would link up.”
I accepted that.
Alice said, “Let’s move on to that afternoon. If I understood you right, Barbara quietly went missing in some remote part of the orchard.”
“Quietly?” I objected. “That puts a whole different emphasis on what happened, as if it were furtive.”
“Was she dragged screaming into the woods, then?”
“Well, no, but…”
“And you heard no screams later? Isn’t it possible that she slipped away of her own volition to meet Cliff?”
“Possible,” I conceded, making it plain that the possibility was extremely remote,
She was undeterred. “You’re pretty sure the Lockwoods didn’t like Cliff?”
“On the couple of occasions he was mentioned, they spoke disparagingly of him.”
“So if Barbara took a shine to him, they wouldn’t have been over the moon about it?”
I frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“A plausible explanation of what happened that afternoon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this how you described it? Mrs. Lockwood noticed Barbara was missing in the tea break and sent her husband to the other side of the orchard to look for her. Some time after, Cliff emerged from there and marched off-sorry, cycled off-into the sunset without speaking to anyone. Then you saw Barbara in tears and with her hair unfastened, coming from the same direction, with her father following. She ran right past her mother to the farmhouse.” Alice paused. “Wouldn’t you agree that Barbara’s behavior was more indicative of someone caught out than someone who was the victim of an attack?”
I was unable to reply. As Alice had pointed out, I’d said myself that rape didn’t fit the facts. Her explanation did-if you could swallow the grotesque suggestion that Morton was Barbara’s lover.
The manager came back to collect our plates and see if we wanted the peach melba. We opted for coffee. I needed that moment’s distraction.
“Out of a bottle, no doubt,” I remarked to Alice.
She nodded automatically, impatient to press on. Her eyes were dilated-I suppose with the excitement of defending her daddy. “Now let’s talk about that remark of Sally’s that we’d got it all wrong about Barbara and the apple pip. Sally was Barbara’s closest friend, yes?”
“Yes.”
“So if anyone knew about Barbara’s love life, it was Sally. If I understand it right about the business with the apple, the girls believed that the number of pips would tell them what kind of man they would marry. Now, when Barbara cut the apple in half, she got two pips: tinker, tailor. She cut one of the halves and got no more pips, so she cut the second half and found one: soldier. Will you listen, Theo? The soldier pip was severed and Barbara was pretty upset, because it was a bad omen. I think you said someone actually saw her crying in the afternoon.”
“It’s understandable,” I said. “They take their superstitions seriously in Somerset. Strangely enough, it could have been a premonition of tragedy if you believe that Duke was already a doomed man.”
“Not Duke,” said Alice.
I stared at her without understanding.
She said, “Cliff Morton.”
I gaped.
She said, “Cliff was the doomed man.”
I shook my head. “Duke was the soldier.”
“Not the one Barbara had in mind. Cliff had just received his call-up papers. She was thinking of him. She was about to lose him to the draft. Her lover. And when the apple pip was cut, she took it as a sign that he’d be killed in combat. Don’t you see, Theo? She wouldn’t shed tears over my daddy. She hardly knew him yet.”
I couldn’t fault her logic. If you assumed a relationship between Barbara and Cliff, it was a convincing explanation. Looking down, I found that I’d torn the plastic tablecloth.
“Do you see now why Sally told us we got it all wrong?” said Alice to underline the point.
“All right,” I said, switching to the offensive, “but if Barbara was so attached to Morton, how do you account for her going to the concert with Duke?”
“Bluff. She used it as a decoy, to reassure her parents. They disapproved of Cliff. They may even have banned her from seeing him after the incident in the orchard. So she pretended she was taking up with one of the GIs.”
I had her now. She had a good brain, and up to this point she’d concocted a plausible version of events, but I knew she was wrong over this.
I said with mild irony, “Pretended?”
‘That’s right, Theo. Like Harry said, there was never anything serious between them.”
“Barbara didn’t confide in Harry. She confided in me. That evening you were talking about, her first evening out with Duke, she came to my room afterwards and talked to me about it.”
She sighed and looked at her fingernails. “You told me.”
I wasn’t having it brushed aside. “She was radiant with excitement.”
“Okay, she had a good time at the concert. I figure a girl didn’t get much entertainment in wartime.”
I said in the hectoring voice I sometimes used with difficult students, “Alice, I’ve done you the courtesy of listening to you. Now you can do likewise. She wasn’t simply talking about the concert. She confided her thoughts about Duke. She said she was bursting with pride when he went on the stage to sing. She liked him: the way he treated her, his quiet manner, so different from the expectation she had of an American soldier. He was shy but with a gentle sense of humor. She told me she’d be seeing him again.”
“She was using you,” said Alice tersely.
“Come off it, that’s unfair.”