Читать книгу House of the Hanged - Mark Mills - Страница 7
ОглавлениеChapter Two
Toulon, France. July 1935. Sixteen years later.
The porters were already in place, ranged along the platform like a guard of honour, when the train pulled into Toulon station. The heat was oppressive, and they fidgeted in their brass-buttoned tunics. A few of them crushed their cigarettes underfoot as the train shuddered to a halt and the carriage doors swung open.
Lucy was one of the last to descend. She had cut her hair short, and Tom might not even have recognized her had she not spotted him and waved.
Seeing her at a distance lent a new perspective. He realized, with a touch of sadness, that although she had lost none of her coltish grace she was no longer a girl. She had become a woman. It wasn’t just her new coiffure, or even her elegant organdie summer frock, it was the way she carried herself, the easy manner in which she proffered her hand to the guard who helped her down to the platform, the casual comment which set the fellow smiling.
Tom fought his way through the throng, arriving as her Morocco travelling bags were being loaded from the luggage car on to a trolley.
She might have changed, but she was still happy to launch herself at him and hug him tight, limpet-like, as they had always done. She smelled of roses.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘For what?’
She tilted her head up at him. ‘For the nice man at Victoria station who showed me to the first-class carriage, and the other nice man in Paris who showed me to my own sleeping compartment.’
‘An early birthday present. Don’t assume I’m setting a precedent.’
Releasing him, she looked around her. ‘Where’s Mr H?’
It was her name for Hector, his flat-coated retriever, his shadow for the past four years.
‘Missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘Since yesterday.’
‘Oh, Tom . . .’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ he replied with as much non chalance as he could muster. ‘Maybe he needs a holiday too.’
But it wasn’t like Hector to go off for more than an hour or so, and only then to scrounge scraps from the customers at the bar in Le Rayol. Hector was a big coward at heart, although like all the best cowards he cloaked his fears in bold and boisterous behaviour.
‘It’s not the first time he’s done a disappearing act. I’m sure he’ll turn up as soon as he knows you’re here.’
Lucy looked unconvinced but was happy to play along if it spared them both the discomfort of any further discussion.
‘So, what do you think?’ she said brightly, flicking her fingers through her cropped hair and throwing in a theatrical little pout for effect.
‘I think your mother’s going to need a very stiff drink.’
‘That wasn’t the question.’
‘I think,’ Tom intoned with deliberation, ‘that you are more beautiful than ever.’
Lucy smiled. ‘Spoken like a true godfather.’
Tom’s car was parked out front in the shade of a tall palm. The porter set about loading the bags into the boot.
‘A new car,’ Lucy observed.
‘Not new, just different.’
‘It’s a lot smaller than the last.’
‘Ah, but this one doesn’t break down.’
‘Where’s the fun in that?’
She was referring to the previous summer and the day-trip with her family which had turned into a two-day-trip when the big Citroën had resolutely refused to start, stranding them as the sun was going down at a remote beach on the headland beyond Gigaro. There had been just enough food left in the picnic hamper to cobble together a simple supper and they had hunkered down for the night. Lucy’s half-brothers, George and Harry, had slept in the car, the rest of them under the stars around a driftwood fire, cocooned in Persian rugs. Leonard had embraced the setback with his usual sunny good humour, and even Venetia, who relished her creature comforts, had entered into the spirit of the occasion, leading them in a repertoire of Gilbert and Sullivan numbers, which had set Hector howling in protest. Remarkably, Leonard and Venetia had gone a whole evening without arguing, although they had bickered like a couple of old fishwives during the long and dusty march back to Gigaro the following morning.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tom, ‘I’ve already planned another night at the same beach. It’s on the itinerary.’
‘Ahhh, the famous Thomas Nash itinerary.’
‘Would you have it any other way?’
‘Of course not,’ said Lucy, hugging him again. ‘I need someone to take command of my miserable existence.’
‘Oh dear, are the hardships of student life taking their toll on poor little Lucy?’
She pinched his arm and recoiled. ‘Well obviously you’re too old to remember, but Oxford’s not all honey and roses.’
‘Okay, what’s his name?’ asked Tom wearily.
Lucy looked convincingly aghast for all of a second before her face fell. ‘Hugo Atkinson . . . although I now have a whole bunch of other names for him.’
‘Didn’t he like your hair?’
‘This wasn’t done for him!’ she protested, a touch too vehemently.
Tom was suddenly aware of the porter regarding their little theatre with curiosity. He paid the man off handsomely and opened the passenger door for Lucy.
‘You can tell me all about the bounder over lunch, but I think I might have found just the thing to help you get over him.’
‘Oh God, please, not another Italian lawyer.’
‘Francesco, I admit, proved to be something of a disappointment.’
They both laughed at the memory of the disastrous dinner last summer. Two cocktails on the terrace at Les Roches had revealed Francesco to be a pompous and pugnacious bigot, and even before their entrées had arrived he’d been making eyes at one of the waiters.
In the ordinary course of events Tom would have driven directly from the station to the old port, where a stroll along the bustling waterfront would have been followed by lunch at the Brasserie Cronstadt. That was his customary routine when guests arrived on the late-morning sleeper from Paris. But he had others plans for Lucy, and they involved driving straight to Le Lavandou, skirting the hilltop town of Hyères before dropping down through the pine forests towards the coast.
They chatted lightly about the string of parties which had kept Lucy back in London, sparing her the long drive south through France with Leonard and her mother.
‘I can’t say I missed it. All those detours to cathedrals that Leonard insists on making, the lectures on the transition from Romanesque to Gothic architecture . . .’
‘Is that the real reason George and Harry can’t make it this year?’
‘No, Grandfather really is taking them to Portsmouth for Navy Week.’
‘And you weren’t tempted?’
‘I’d rather gnaw through my arm.’
Tom laughed. ‘Well, I’m sorry they won’t be here.’
‘I’m not. They’ve become insufferable lately.’
‘You mean big sister can’t boss them around any more?’
‘Exactly! The wilful little brutes.’
Le Lavandou, with its palm-fringed promenade and its port backed by a huddle of old buildings, still felt like a frontier town to Tom. Although he visited it often, it lay at the western limits of his ordinary beat and he rarely ventured beyond it. Whenever he did so, returning there was like returning home, even if home still lay a good few miles to the east along the twisting shoreline of the Côte des Maures.
The table was waiting for them under the awning at the Café du Centre, and Pascal appeared within moments of their arrival bearing a bottle of white Burgundy on ice. Nothing had been left to chance. The table, the wine, even the fish they would eat, all had been chosen in advance by Tom when he’d passed through earlier that morning. He wanted the build-up to the big surprise to be perfect.
Pascal was one of the few people in on the secret and he was obviously determined to play his part to perfection. Like a child sworn to silence, though, the burden proved almost too much to bear.
As soon as he had disappeared back inside, Lucy lit a cigarette and enquired, ‘What’s wrong with Pascal? He keeps looking at you in a funny way.’
‘Really?’
‘All weird and wide-eyed.’
‘Maybe it’s lack of sleep. Their new baby’s only a few weeks old.’
This seemed to satisfy her; besides, they had better things to discuss. It was almost six months since they’d last seen each other – during one of Tom’s rare visits to England – and on that occasion there’d been little opportunity to talk openly. In fact, there’d been little opportunity to talk at all, because Lucy’s great friend, Stella, had muscled in on their lunch at the Randolph Hotel. Like Lucy, Stella was a second-year Modern History undergraduate at St Hugh’s College. Unlike Lucy, she seemed to think this entitled her to hold forth at length on any subject that happened to pop into her head. And there was certainly no shortage of those: everything from the worrying rise of Fascism to the latest fashions in women’s shoes. In her defence, Stella was well informed and extremely amusing with it, but Tom could still recall the delightful silence of the long drive back to London from Oxford.
‘How’s the irrepressible Stella bearing up?’
‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Lucy. ‘Poor Stella . . .’
‘What? She’s developed lockjaw?’
‘Worse. She’s gone totally potty on an Irish labourer.’
‘You’re joking!’
Apparently not. St Hugh’s was in the process of putting up a new library, and the college had been crawling with brawny workmen for much of the year, one of whom had caught Stella’s eye.
‘Nothing’s happened,’ Lucy explained. ‘I mean, I’m not sure he even knows she exists, but she spent most of last term moping around her rooms like a sick cat. It’s all very Lady Chatterley and Mellors.’
‘What would you know about Lady Chatterley and Mellors? That’s a banned book.’
‘Which is precisely the reason there are so many copies doing the rounds at university.’
‘As the man who took an oath before God to lead you towards a life of exemplary purpose, I’m disappointed.’
‘As the man who had Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer lying around his house last summer, don’t be.’
‘Ah, it’s not banned in France.’
‘Well, it should be.’
‘Oh God, you didn’t read it, did you?’
‘Of course I did, the day you all went off to St Tropez.’
‘Ah yes . . .’ said Tom, remembering now, ‘the day you were struck down with a bad headache.’
‘A little trick I learnt from Mother.’ Lucy tapped the ash from her cigarette on to the cobbles at their feet. ‘How is she, by the way?’
‘Eager to see you.’
‘You really must learn to lie more convincingly.’
‘Well, I now know who to turn to for lessons, don’t I?’
They had been sparring partners for as long as he could remember, ever since Lucy was a small child. With the passage of time, the tickling and romping and mock fights of those early years had been replaced by a battle of wits and a war of words. Tom had always encouraged the playful cut-and-thrust of their relationship, if only because there had never been much of that sort of thing at home for Lucy. Venetia, for all her ‘modern ways’, was a mother cast in a traditional mould, somewhat cold and remote. As for Leonard, when not submerged in his work at the Foreign Office he leaned far more naturally towards his two sons than to the dead man’s daughter whom Venetia had brought with her into the marriage.
Tom no longer feared for Lucy’s emotional well-being. She had blossomed into something quite extraordinary: a beautiful, intelligent and amusing young woman who seemed genuinely oblivious of her manifest charms. And if he still sought out her company whenever he could, it was as much for his own benefit as hers, for what she somehow managed to bring out in him. As the conversation continued to coil effortlessly around them over lunch, she was, it occurred to him, one of the few true friends he had in the world.
When the coffee arrived they carried their cups with them to a wooden bench just across the cobbles from their table. Here, in the drowsy shade of the plane trees, they sat and watched in reverential silence as four old men, tanned to the colour of teak, played boules.
‘Let’s go for a wander,’ suggested Tom, the moment the match was over.
He led her across the road to the port. On one side of the central quay were moored colourful wooden fishing yawls, one of which had landed their lunch much earlier that day, while the rest of the world was still sleeping. Being a fanatical sailor, Lucy was far more interested in the array of yachts and dinghies bobbing on the gentle swell across the way. They came in all shapes and sizes – there was even an ostentatious gentle-man’s cabin launch amongst them – but her eye was drawn to one sailboat in particular.
‘Oh my goodness, look at that!’
‘What?’
‘That racing sloop.’
‘Yes, pleasing on the eye.’
‘I bet she flies.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Tom. ‘She looks like she’s sitting a little too low in the water.’
‘That’s to fool idiots like you. I’m telling you, she flies.’
‘Well, let’s find out, shall we?’
He leapt from the quayside on to the varnished fore-deck, turning in time to see Lucy’s look of incredulity give way to realization.
‘Don’t tell me, the royalties on your last book came through.’
Tom was on the point of revealing all – this was exactly as he had imagined it happening – but he held himself in check. ‘Something like that.’
Lucy kicked off her shoes and joined him on the foredeck, barely able to contain her excitement. ‘She’s not French. Where’s she from? Where did you find her? What’s she called?’
‘No . . . Sweden . . . Marseilles . . . Albatross.’
‘Albatross – I told you she flies! What is she, thirty feet?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Her skinny lines make her look longer.’
Lucy dropped into the deep cockpit, running her hand along one of the benches before gripping the tiller and staring up at the tall mast. ‘Oh, Tom, you’re a lucky man.’
‘I thought we’d sail the rest of the way to Le Rayol.’
‘What about the car? My luggage?’
‘Pascal’s going to drive it over.’
She smiled, aware now that she’d been set up. ‘I’ll have to change my clothes first. I can hardly go to sea dressed like this.’
‘There’s a shirt and some shorts down below. No standing headroom in the cabin, I’m afraid, so you’ll have to crouch.’
The mainsail was already rigged, and while Lucy changed, Tom rigged the jib.
‘Good work,’ came a voice from behind him as he was finishing up. Lucy was barefoot and wearing an old cap tilted at a rakish angle.
‘Thanks, Skipper.’
Her face lit up. ‘Really?’
‘Take her away. There are winches for both halyards, so any half-decent sailor should be able to handle her solo, even in a blow.’
Her eyes narrowed at the challenge.
They slipped the lines and backed the sloop out between the pilings into the harbour. Tom made to paddle the stern around.
‘Stand down, bosun, if you know what’s good for you.’
Lucy raised the tall jib so that the wind brought the nose around and the boat began to make gentle headway.
‘So, tell me more about your antidote to Hugo Atkinson,’ she demanded.
‘Well, he’s American, and he’s a painter.’
‘A good one?’
‘Good enough for Yevgeny and Fanya to take him on.’
‘That sounds suspiciously like a no.’
‘He’s of the wilfully modern school. You know the sort of thing . . . a bowl of fruit can’t be allowed to actually look like a bowl of fruit, it has to look like it’s been hurled to the floor, trampled by a battalion of the Welsh Guards, scooped up with a shovel and dumped back on the table.’
Lucy laughed. ‘Well, obviously Yevgeny and Fanya see something you don’t.’
‘Large profits, I suspect.’
Yevgeny and Fanya Martynov were an eccentric couple, White Russian émigrés who ran a thriving Left Bank art gallery in Paris devoted to the avant garde. They had summered in Le Rayol for the past four years, following their purchase of a pseudo-Palladian villa up on the headland towards Le Canadel. They operated an open-house policy for artists of all kinds, and the steady stream of painters, sculptors and photographers passing through La Quercia was always a welcome source of entertainment.
‘They’ve put Walter in the cottage so that he can work in peace.’
‘Walter?’
‘He’s not as stuffy as he sounds, and he knows how to swing a tennis racquet.’
‘Have you played him?’
‘Four times now.’
‘Vital statistics?’
‘Won three, lost one.’
Lucy threw him a look.
‘Mid-twenties, although he looks older, probably because he’s on the portly side.’
‘Portly?’ said Lucy, unable to mask her disappointment.
‘Pleasingly so. Well-fed rather than fat. What else? He’s not tall, but you wouldn’t describe him as short . . . well, some might. And he still has most of his hair, which is dark and rather wiry.’
‘He sounds . . . intriguing.’
‘No he doesn’t, but he is. I’ve got to know him rather well over the past couple of weeks.’
Lucy brought the sloop about, falling in behind a forty-foot cruising ketch motoring towards the harbour mouth.
Beyond the breakwater, the wind piped up nicely, but Lucy seemed in no hurry to run up the mainsail. Her gaze was fixed on the ketch beating to windward at a fair lick, under full sail now.
‘I think that’s enough of a head start, don’t you?’
She cranked the winch, raising the mainsail.
The moment the ketch’s skipper saw them coming he began barking commands, not that it made any difference. The Albatross cut through the chop as if it didn’t exist, her big canvas sheets sucking every available ounce of energy out of the air. While the crew of the ketch scrambled about her topsides, trying to trim up properly, Lucy barely moved a muscle. When she finally did, it was only to offer a demure little salute to the skipper as she overhauled him.
‘Judging from his expression, I would say he hates you.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ grinned Lucy, her flushed face a picture of pure contentment. ‘The helm’s so balanced I could have tied off the tiller and taken a nap.’
They fell off, running dead before the wind to the eastward, making for Le Rayol. While Lucy put the sloop through its paces, getting to know its limits, Tom sat back and enjoyed the view.
There were any number of spots along the Riviera where the mountains collided with the sea, but for a short stretch east of Le Lavandou it seemed almost as if the two elements had struck some secret pact, Earth and Water conspiring together to create a place of wild, primitive beauty. The high hills backing the coast fell away sharply in a tumble of tree-shrouded spurs and valleys which were transformed on impact with the sea into a run of rocky headlands separated by looping bays. Dubbed the Côte des Maures – a reminder of a time when the Saracens had held sway over this small patch of France – the exoticism of the title seemed entirely appropriate. The beaches strung out along the shoreline, like pearls on a necklace, were of a sand so fine and white, the waters that washed them so unnaturally blue, that they might well have been transported here from some far-flung corner of the tropics.
‘Stand by to gybe!’ called Lucy.
‘Ready.’
‘Gybe ho!’
They both ducked the swinging boom as the stern moved through the wind, bringing them round on to a port tack run. Lucy steadied up the Albatross. ‘She feels like a big boat but responds like a small one. How’s that possible?’
It was a rhetorical question, and Tom smiled at her wonderment.
Only one thing was missing from the moment: Hector. He should have been there with them in the cockpit, or, as he often liked to do, standing steadfastly at the bow, snout into the wind like some canine figurehead.
Tom had spent the previous evening walking the twisting coast road either side of Le Rayol, checking the verges and ditches, sick with fear at what he might find. He pushed the memory from him, steering his thoughts towards a far more pleasing prospect: that Hector had finally found his way home, and that as they sailed into the cove below the villa he would come bounding out of the trees behind the boathouse on to the little crescent moon beach, barking delightedly.
It didn’t happen.
They tied up at the buoy where the rowboat was already tethered and waiting for them. The Scylla, Tom’s old knockabout dinghy, lay at her anchor nearby.
‘So,’ he asked, ‘what do you make of her?’
‘What do you think I make of her! She’s the closest thing to perfection I’ve ever helmed.’
‘That’s good, because she’s yours.’
Lucy stared, unsure if she’d heard him correctly.
‘Your twenty-first birthday present. A week early, I know, but I couldn’t wait.’
Lucy was speechless.
‘She comes with free transport to England . . . I might even sail her back myself. Should ruffle a few feathers down at the Lymington Yacht Club,’ he added with a smile.
Lucy didn’t smile. In fact, her face creased suddenly and tears filled her eyes.
‘Hey . . .’ Tom moved to take a seat beside her, slipping a tentative arm around her shoulders. ‘What’s the matter?’
She shook her head as if to say that she couldn’t explain. He thought perhaps he’d made a big error, wildly misjudging the appropriateness of such a gift.
‘I don’t understand,’ choked Lucy. ‘Why me?’
‘Because I love you, of course.’
This set her off again, worse than before, and it was a while before she composed herself enough to ask, ‘How can you say that so easily?’
She was wrong. He had only ever spoken those words to one other person, a long time ago.
‘Does Mother . . .?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tom. ‘She knows.’
‘But she doesn’t approve.’
‘She thinks I spoil you.’
Lucy wiped at the tears with the back of her hand. ‘She’s right, you do.’
‘Godfather’s prerogative. Besides, I don’t have anyone else to spoil.’
He hadn’t intended it to sound so self-pitying, and her response threw him.
‘What about your lady friend?’
‘My lady friend?’
‘The one who lives in Hyères.’ He glimpsed the familiar spark of mischief behind the watery sheen of her eyes. ‘Leonard told me about her.’
‘That’s not like him.’
‘He was defending you. Someone at dinner said he thought you were a homosexual.’
‘Oh?’
‘Leonard put him straight.’
‘So to speak.’
Lucy smiled weakly at the joke. ‘Do you buy your lady friend boats?’
‘She has other admirers for that sort of thing.’
Lucy looked at him askance. ‘You mean you share her?’
Tom hesitated. ‘That’s not how I think of it.’
‘How can you share her?’
‘Get to my age then see if you ask the same question.’
‘You’re only thirty-nine.’
‘It feels older than it sounds.’
It was a few moments before Lucy replied. ‘Well, I hope I’m still asking the same question when I’m thirty-nine.’
‘So do I,’ said Tom softly. ‘So do I.’
Lucy laid her head against his shoulder, sobbed a couple more times then said, ‘Thank you for my beautiful present.’
He kissed her on the forehead. ‘It’s my pleasure. Now pull yourself together, Captain – whatever will the crew think?’
They parted company just behind the boathouse, where the path bifurcated.
‘Are we seeing you later?’ Lucy asked. ‘Not tonight. You have house guests.’
‘Really? Who?’
‘I’m not sure you know them. They’re friends of your mother’s psychoanalyst.’
‘Oh God . . .’
‘They’re not so bad. I had them over for dinner last night. She speaks as much nonsense as the time allows her, and he perks up no end if you get him on to Phoenician pottery.’
‘Thanks for the tip,’ groaned Lucy.
‘Until tomorrow.’
Lucy set off up the steep pathway through the trees, making for the house that her parents rented every July. Standing proud on the promontory, just back from the bluff, it was so hemmed in on its three other sides by Tom’s land as to make it almost part of his property. With any luck, by the end of the summer it would officially become so. He was deep in negotiations with the owner, a retired thoracic surgeon from Avignon eager to convert his holiday home into hard currency which he planned to fritter away before he died; anything to prevent it falling into the hands of his two feckless sons.
He was a charming old boy, but he drove a hard bargain. He knew that the British pound went considerably further in France than it did back home, and he understood the notion that something could amount to more than the sum of its parts.
Tom might already own a substantial patch of the coastline directly east of Le Rayol, but the last remaining parcel at the heart of his kingdom must surely be a thorn in his proprietorial side, and therefore worth considerably more to him than the marketplace might suggest.
That was Docteur Manevy’s thinking, and Tom couldn’t fault it, or even begrudge the old fellow for it. If he’d learned anything during his five years in the country it was that no Frenchman could abide the idea of being taken for a ride. ‘Ne pas être dupe’ was the inviolable code by which they led their lives, and Tom had grown to embrace the theatre that accompanied most negotiations.
He would continue to play up his role as the impecunious author of travel books, Manevy would bleat on about the scandalously small government pension he received, and eventually they would arrive at an agreement satisfactory to both of them. That was the way of things. One had to remain patient.
As for the house itself, Venetia referred to the place affectionately as ‘the Art Nouveau eyesore’. Like the castle in Irene Iddesleigh it was ‘of a style of architecture seldom if ever attempted’: a clumpy, three-floored structure devoid of any obvious charm, and which the architect, for reasons known only to himself and his original client, had chosen to orientate facing inland, turning a dumb mask to the stunning sea-view. Tom’s own house – an imposing Art Deco villa verging on the ostentatious – dominated the other headland flanking the cove, and together they stood like two watch-towers guarding against a seaborne invasion.
A crease in the rising ground ran north from the cove, deepening as it went, bisecting Tom’s land from the water’s edge almost to the railway line. This was the route he now took after parting company with Lucy.
While most of the fifteen-acre plot was carpeted in cork oaks, pines and palms, the narrow gulley was a shady world bristling with ferns, hostas, petasites and other plants that favoured the dark and the damp. In summer, the ground was dry and firm underfoot, but for much of the year it was positively boggy with spring water. Le Rayol was known for its springs, a rare asset along this parched stretch of coast, and – miraculously, like the widow’s cruse – his well never ran dry. It stood at the centre of a deep dell near the head of the gulley, where the rocks rose sheer on three sides and the inter-locking branches of the trees overhead provided a welcome canopy against the sunlight.
‘Hector . . . Hector . . . Come on, boy . . .’
The words echoed back at him, hollow, futile.
Hector would often come here to cool off when the mercury was nudging ninety degrees, but he wasn’t here now.
The donkey engine and the water pump were housed in a wooden shed beside the well. Tom cranked the wheel, amazed, as always, when the faithful old Lister phut-phutted into life. The water in the big holding tank up top was running low. It would take a couple of hours to fill – more than enough time to complete his task.
He started in the northeast corner, right up by the railway cutting, where the ground vanished in a sheer drop of some thirty feet to the steel tracks below. From here he made his way back towards the sea, working methodically, taking each patch of land between the latticework of pathways in turn and searching it thoroughly, delving deep into the tangled underbrush.
