‘It’s just that she’s more vulnerable than she seems to be: I just want to say that. She’s really a very vulnerable girl.’
The decanter was again moved in my direction. The tone of voice closed the subject of Dr Lysarth’s daughter. We returned to archaeological matters.
I spent that night at Wistaria Lodge and noticed at breakfast-time how right Dr Lysarth had been when he’d said that the family was a tightly bound one. Conversation drifted from one Lysarth to the next in a way that was almost artificial, as though the domestic scenes I witnessed belonged in the theatre. I formed the impression that the Lysarths invariably knew what was coming next, as though their lines had been learnt. My presence was accommodated through a telepathy that was certainly as impressive, another piece of practised theatre.
‘Yes, we’re like that,’ Dorothea said in the garden after breakfast. ‘We never seem to quarrel.’
She taught me how to play croquet and when we’d finished one game we were joined by her brothers. Adam was the best of the three and he, partnering Dorothea, easily beat Jonathan and myself. Mrs Lysarth brought a tray of drinks to a white table beside the lawn and we sat and sipped in the sunshine, while I was told of other games of croquet there had been, famous occasions when the tempers of visitors had become a little ragged.
‘It’s a perfect training for life,’ Mrs Lysarth said, ‘the game of croquet.’
‘Cunning pays,’ Adam continued. ‘Generosity must know its place.’
‘Not that we are against generosity, Terris,’ Adam said. ‘Not that we’re on the side of cunning.’
‘What a family poor Terris is marrying into!’ Dorothea cried, and on cue her mother smiled and added:
‘Terris is a natural croquet-player. He will one day put you all to shame.’
‘I doubt that very much.’ And as I spoke I felt I said precisely what was expected of me.
‘You must teach the Scandinavians, Dorothea,’ Adam said. ‘Whatever else, you must flatten out a lawn in your little Scandinavian garden.’
‘Oh yes, of course we shall. So there.’
After lunch Dorothea and I went for a walk. We had to say goodbye because the next day I was to go away; when I returned it would almost be the day we’d set for our wedding. We walked slowly through the village and out into the country. We left the road and passed along a track by the side of a cornfield. We rested by a stream which Dorothea had often told me about, a place she’d come to with her brothers as a child. We sat there, our backs against the same ivy-covered tree-stump. We talked about being married, of beginning our life together in Copenhagen. I made love to Dorothea by her stream, and it was afterwards that she told me the story of Agnes Kemp. She began it as we lay there, and continued while we washed and tidied ourselves and began the journey back to Wistaria Lodge.
‘She was twelve at the time, staying with us while her parents were abroad. She fell from the beech tree. Her neck was broken.’
I only nodded because there isn’t much anyone can say when a fact like that is related.
‘I had always wanted to climb that tree, I had been told I never must. “I dare you,” she said. “I dare you, Dorothea.” I was frightened, but when no one was looking we climbed it together, racing one another to the top.’
She spoke of the funeral of Agnes Kemp, how the dead child’s parents had not been present because it had been impossible to contact them in time. ‘We don’t much hear of them now,’ Dorothea said. ‘A card at Christmas. Agnes was an only child.’
We walked a little in silence. Then I said:
‘What was she like?’
‘Oh, she was really awfully spoilt. The kind of person who made you furious.’
I suppose it was that last remark that started everything off, that and the feeling that Wistaria Lodge was a kind of theatre. The remark passed unnoticed at the time, for even as she made it Dorothea turned round, and smiled and kissed me. ‘It’s all forgotten now,’ she said when that was over, ‘but of course I had to tell you.’
It was certainly forgotten, for when we arrived in the garden the white table had been moved beneath the beech tree out of the glare of the sun, and tea with scones and sandwiches and cake was spread all over it. I felt a dryness in my mouth that was not dispelled when I drank. I found it hard to eat, or even to smile in unison with the smiling faces around me. I kept seeing the spoilt child on the grass and Dr Lysarth bending over her, saying she was dead, as no doubt he must have. I kept thinking that the beech tree should have been cut down years ago, no matter how beautiful it was.
‘You’re mad,’ Felicity shouted at me more than once. ‘You’re actually mad.’ Her voice in its endless repetition is always a reminder of my parents’ faces, that worry in their eyes. All I had wanted to know was the truth about ourselves: why did the offices and the warehouses still bear our name, what had my grandfather done? ‘Best just left,’ my mother said. ‘Best not bothered with.’ But in the end they told me because naturally I persisted – at eight and twelve and eighteen: naturally I persisted. My grandfather had been a criminal and that was that: a drunkard and an embezzler, a gambler who had run through a fortune in a handful of years: I’d guessed, of course, by the time they told me. I didn’t know why they’d been so reluctant, or why they’d displayed concern when I persisted about Miss Batchelor: why did she weep when she walked along the promenade? I had to guess again, because all my childhood Miss Batchelor’s tears possessed me so: she wept for the music teacher, who was married arid had a family, and I did not forgive my parents for wishing to keep that covered up. Passionately I did not forgive them, although my mother begged me, saying I made myself unhappy. ‘You sound so noble,’ Felicity snapped at me. ‘Yet what’s so marvellous about exposing a brothel-keeper for peddling drugs? Or a grimy pederast and a government minister?’ Felicity’s mother called her ‘a tricky kind of customer’. Arid tricky was just the word. Tricky, no doubt, with bank tellers and men met idly in bars. Tricky in beds all over the place, when I was so often away, having to be away.
I crossed the bedroom to the window. The beech tree was lit by moonlight now. Gazing at it, I heard the voices that had haunted me ever since Dorothea told me the story.
‘Then I dare you to,’ Dorothea angrily shouts, stopping suddenly and confronting the other girl.
‘You’re frightened of it, Dorothea. You’re frightened of a tree.’
‘Of course I’m not.’
‘Then I dare you to.’
In the garden the boys, delighted, listen. Their sister’s cheeks have reddened. Agnes Kemp is standing on one foot and then the other, balancing in a way she has, a way that infuriates Dorothea.
‘You’re a horrid person,’ Dorothea says. ‘You aren’t even pretty. You’re stupid and spoilt arid greedy. You always have two helpings. There’s something the matter with your eyes.’
‘There isn’t, Dorothea Lysarth. You’re jealous, that’s all.’
‘They’re pig’s eyes.’
‘You’re just afraid of a tree, Dorothea.’
They climb it, both at the same time, from different sides. There’s a forked branch near the top, a sprawling knobbly crutch, easily distinguishable from the ground: they race to that.
The boys watch, expecting any moment that an adult voice will cry out in horror from the house, but no voice does. The blue dress of Agnes Kemp and the white one of Dorothea disappear into a mass of leaves, the boys stand further back, the dresses reappear. Agnes Kemp is in front, but their sister has chosen a different route to the top, a shorter one it seems. The boys long for their sister to win because if she does Agnes Kemp will at least be quiet for a day or two. They don’t call out, although they want to: they want to advise Dorothea that in a moment she will have overtaken her challenger; they don’t because their voices might attract attention from the house. From where they stand they can hear the grandfather clock in the hall striking ten. Most of the windows are open.