I was in a strange, soft bed in a medicine-smelling room. The air was full of fog. All my body ached. Something was fastened to my head to stop my neck moving. My right eye was gummed shut. In a clear patch in the fog I could see a young woman with a brown face under a sort of cowl. She was leaning over me and holding my hands to stop me tearing at my blanket, but she saw me looking at her and smiled.
‘He couldn’t do it, you see,’ I said. ‘Not with me. Anything else. He’d gamble with anything. Except me.’
‘Hello, Mums,’ said the woman.
‘Are you awake now?’ She had a slightly chi-chi accent to go with her brown skin. I thought she was some kind of nurse, but she had one of those faces you feel you know in dreams. She was there so that I could tell her what I had seen. It was all lucid in my mind, like a book just after you have written it, all the connections and mechanisms linked and sliding in their grooves. I had to get it out before I lost it. I began to gabble. The woman made shushing noises but she couldn’t stop me.
‘It began in Hamburg,’ I said. ‘He was on the Control Commission after the war, getting Jewish property back to its owners. He came across some property, quite a lot of it, which had been very cunningly stolen. I think it must have been a whole group of Nazi officials, covering up for each other. He was in their shoes now, and he saw that if he went on covering up he could have some of the loot. They’d gone to South America, but they’d left a contact behind so he was able to get in touch with them. The property wasn’t worth much then, with everything smashed after the war, but they could afford to wait because they’d taken trouble to see that all the real owners were dead. He was going to sell it for them when it became valuable again, and take a commission. That was his side of the bargain. Their side was that if he cheated them they would send someone to kill him.’
‘Take it easy, Mums,’ said the woman.
‘He did cheat them, of course,’ I said. ‘He took more than his share. He needed the money to help buy Night and Day and things like that, but he thought it would be all right provided he paid them back in time. That’s why he had a deadline. It was always difficult with exchange control. You weren’t allowed to send money out of the sterling area. But he thought he could get round that by selling Halper’s Corner. Barbados was in the sterling area too, of course, but he was going to sell it in two parts. There’d be the sale of the plantation to show the Treasury. Plantations were cheap then. It wouldn’t be much. But he could use it as a cover for what he was doing at the bay, selling the land and joining in a deal to build a holiday hotel. All that would be in dollars, which he could use to pay the people in South America. It was quite safe provided nobody told the Treasury there was something funny going on. They’d find out if they started to investigate, but they didn’t usually. That’s why he was so careful about not spending more than our travel allowance in Paris—he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, the way the Dockers did.
‘It was all going along fine until Mummy found out about him and me and threatened to blackmail him. Then, suddenly, it was more of a risk. It wasn’t because of Mummy knowing anything—it was because of Aunt Minnie being her best friend and Sir Drummond being a Director of the Bank of England. He thought it was probably still all right, but he began to get worried. He was such a coward, you see. When we went to Barbados he was screwing himself up to take the risk .
I saw the woman’s eyes leave me and look with a query in them at somebody on the other side of the bed. I couldn’t turn my head that way to see who it was, but I wasn’t in any case interested. I waited impatiently till she was looking at me again.
‘Then I offered to sell the necklace,’ I said. ‘B jumped at it. I don’t suppose it was worth everything he owed them, but a hundred and fifty thousand pounds was a lot then, almost a million now. It would have been an instalment. The point was it was small, so he could smuggle it out, and the sale wasn’t on anyone’s books, so the Treasury wouldn’t know, and I had the replica to wear, so no one need realise it had gone. He could do the whole Halper’s Corner deal in sterling and use the money to buy the necklace by paying for the roof. He did that because if he hadn’t he would have been cheating me. It wasn’t because of Mummy blackmailing him. She didn’t know anything, not then.
‘Mrs Clarke did, though. She’d picked something up on one of her West Indies tours, keeping her ears open, the way she used to. Isn’t it odd she’s the one who’s gone deaf, and Ronnie’s the one who’s gone blind? She tried to warn me, and I told Jane, and Jane went to see her pretending to be me. Jane said I’d found out about the screaming saint coming from a Jewish collection—he never sold it because he knew it could be traced, you see—and that was why I’d turned against him. So Mrs Clarke told Jane about Halper’s Corner, and Jane told Mummy about both things and Mummy told Aunt Minnie, and so on. Of course there wasn’t anything to find out about Halper’s Corner, not any longer, but now it was the screaming saint and what had happened in Hamburg—that was what really mattered. Our people started to investigate. They must have asked questions in Hamburg, and somebody there guessed why they were asking and told the people in South America, and they sent for B.
‘I wish I knew what I said or did when we said goodbye. He was going to take the sapphires, you see, and suddenly he decided not to. He’d written a letter to me, telling me all about them, in case they turned nasty. He was terribly frightened. But he thought if they knew there was someone he trusted in England who knew about them, they wouldn’t risk hurting him. The letter was in the jigsaw. And then, at the last minute, he changed his mind. They were my sapphires, you see. They were valuable because of that, because of the Mary stone. If he was going to persuade them to take the sapphires as an instalment, he had to explain what they were worth, and that would mean telling them about me. And then they might guess who he’d left the letter with, and send someone to get rid of me. I told you, he wasn’t prepared to risk it. He got in a sort of panic and dashed off, hoping he could talk them into giving him more time.
‘Of course they were going to kill him anyway, whether he took the necklace or not.’
I closed my eyes and tried to sink back into the dark. A fearsome, throbbing pain started at the side of my neck. I wondered whether it hurt as much as that, being shot. Slowly the pain slid away and I opened my eyes again.
‘He wasn’t used to it, you see,’ I said. ‘If you’re going to be that sort of creature and live that sort of life, love is too dangerous. You daren’t love anyone, because then there’s a hostage. You’ve got to stay wild, with the whole world your enemy. You mustn’t let yourself be tame for anybody. It was all my fault, letting him love me. There was only one of him in the whole world, ever. Only one in all the world.’
‘Marge even dreams romantic,’ said Terry’s voice. He was the person I couldn’t see on the other side of the bed.
‘It’s all true,’ I said. ‘Ages ago, but all true.’
‘I keep telling her she wants to stop living in the past,’ he said, ‘The only time is now.’
The woman glanced towards him again. Something characteristic about the slant of her face made me see that it was Sally. My heart leapt.
‘It’s better not to live in time at all,’ she said.
VIII
I have implied that I do my stint of conducting visitors round Cheadle. This is not strictly true, because I don’t have the time. But the fact that I may be acting as guide does encourage more parties to book than otherwise would; members of Women’s Institutes and similar bodies are among my most loyal readers; they come clutching copies of my books for me to sign, a problem I have solved to my satisfaction if not theirs by selling autographed Cheadle book-plates in the souvenir shop, where they can also buy my books. I always buy up remaindered editions and find it immensely satisfying to be taking ninety per cent of the published price instead of the usual minuscule royalty.