She hoped she was not making a fool of herself.
9
An Awkward Lie
The telephone call she had received at half-past nine that morning had been from Mrs Cathcart, Colonel Haslett’s archivist friend, and it concerned the Gresham papers. Mrs Cathcart was going to collect the papers in person; she was coming later in the day, if that would be convenient. She had spoken in a high precise voice. In a cab, she had added with an odd emphasis – she might as well have said she was coming in a chariot. Would Miss Darcy be good enough to have the Gresham papers ready for her? Well packed? Antonia had assured her that she would.
The Gresham papers formed a correspondence dating back to the late 1890s, and were contained in two wooden boxes painted periwinkle blue, stashed away under Antonia’s table. The letters she had examined lay on a side table in sorted heaps according to sender. The idea had been for her to read gradually through the whole lot and organize and catalogue it, so that the contents could clearly be seen and assessed, and anything of importance noted. Then they could decide what to do with it. Except now it was Mrs Cathcart who was going to decide.
It was fair, Antonia supposed, to give the Gresham papers out for assessment. It wasn’t strictly a library matter. The boxes had been found in the club smoking room, of all places, when the building was renovated a couple of years back, and so the librarian had been asked to take care of them. A proper archivist could do a better job in all probability. It was just that it had been very interesting, to read the sort of letters people wrote then, in that more leisured age, in their beautiful copperplate handwriting, and using elaborately correct grammar and punctuation.
Antonia picked up the letters from the side table and began to place them carefully inside one of the boxes. She looked towards Major Payne and saw him produce a pen and draw a vertical line on the page he had been reading. Had he found something? She couldn’t tell from his inscrutable expression though she thought he gave a very slight nod over his coffee cup, denoting satisfaction. (Major Nagle – she couldn’t get Major Nagle out of her mind now, for some reason – that still, menacing figure at the window.) Discovering she still held one of the letters, she took it out of its envelope and glanced down at it absently.
My dear Gresham, the letter began. What followed was some not particularly amusing anecdote, told in meticulous detail, about a social evening the writer had spent with some acquaintances known also to the letter’s recipient. There was the mention of somebody called Holling- bourne and of a Mrs Duppa, who told fortunes ‘rather inaccurately’. Vague scandals were referred to. At one point the writer enquired after the health of Lady Gresham, who, it appeared, had been indisposed for quite a while, and expressed optimism about the invalid’s progress. There were bits that were unintentionally funny, Antonia reflected, in a Diary of a Nobody kind of way.
As she replaced the letter inside its envelope and back in the box, her mind registered the word ‘Nepal’. It had been written in pencil across another envelope in big block capitals. NEPAL. It didn’t seem likely that the letters contained correspondence from Nepal, though perhaps someone had travelled there and written to Gresham about it. I’ll just have a quick look, Antonia thought. It might contain some interesting traveller’s story, and she could tell her last enquirer about it, the old boy who had reminded her of Lawrence Dufrette, if he put in another appearance, that was.
She opened the envelope.
My dear Gresham, the letter began as before. This time the writing was in pencil, and seemed less assured somehow. I have something to tell you, which I believe to be of great importance, but I hardly know where to commence…
No, no more mysteries. I have enough on my plate already, she thought decisively and, resisting her curiosity, put the letter back into the envelope and replaced it in the box.
‘Well, I believe I’ve got it,’ she heard Major Payne say. She turned round. He had left the armchair and was walking towards her. ‘You are absolutely right,’ he went on. ‘There’s something, or rather two things that are wrong.’
Antonia felt her pulse quicken. ‘What things?’
He leant across the desk towards her, his hand lightly touching hers. She smelled his aftershave, a blend of citrus, cedar wood and tobacco, but the latter could be coming from his pipe. Funny that she had objected strongly to her former husband smoking cigarettes, but she didn’t mind a pipe one bit.
‘When you first hear of Lena Dufrette, it is from Lady Mortlock. This is what you say.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Then in 1960 Dufrette married for the second time, an exiled Russian countess or, as Lady Mortlock had put it, “a woman who claimed to be one”. This rather suggests, doesn’t it, that Lady Mortlock only met Lena after she married Lawrence Dufrette? She talked of Lena as of a stranger, right?’
‘Yes. That was the impression she gave. I remember our conversation very well.’
‘Indeed. Yet you, clearly without realizing it, also provide unequivocal evidence to the contrary, namely that Lady Mortlock had known Lena before her marriage to Dufrette. This is what Lena tells you when the two of you meet in the garden. I have been bad, oh so bad, you can’t imagine how bad. Ask Hermione Mortlock. She knows me well – better than anybody. She will tell you. She has no illusions about me.’
‘Better than anybody…’
‘She might have been lying, mind – or imagining things, if she had been “cranked up”, as Veronica Vorodin suggested.’
‘No, she didn’t lie.’ Antonia’s eyes were suddenly very bright. ‘Something else happened. I never wrote it down, but I’ve suddenly remembered. Soon after the Dufrettes arrived on the 28th, we had tea in the drawing room, and somebody mentioned a play they had seen. Lena started giggling and she turned to Lady Mortlock and said, ’Do you remember when we went to see the first night of -‘ She mentioned some title, which no one seemed to have heard of – can’t remember what it was, but Lena’s tone suggested that it had been something… I don’t know. She gave a quick lift of her eyebrows -’
‘Outre? Naughty? Scandalous?’
‘That was what I thought, yes. To which Lady Mortlock replied rather crossly that she didn’t know what Lena was talking about. She then said, “I’m sure you are mistaken. The play we went to see was The Reluctant Debutante.”’
Major Payne cocked an eyebrow. ‘A perfectly innocent drawing-room comedy by William Douglas-Home. One of the big West End hits of the mid-fifties… First night, eh?’
‘Yes. I didn’t notice the implications at the time, but it does indicate that Lady Mortlock had known Lena in the mid-fifties – well before her marriage to Lawrence Dufrette in 1960. They went to see a play together. Lady Mortlock did give herself away… Now let me see. In the mid-fifties Lena was a young girl of seventeen or eighteen
… How curious. I wonder if -’
‘I suggest we don’t delve too deeply into that one yet. Let’s look at contradiction number two. It’s to do with Miss Haywood, the Dufrette nanny, and, again, as it happens, with Lady Mortlock. This is what you wrote on first meeting the nanny on 28th July. Miss Haywood struck me as extremely tense and preoccupied-looking. Lady Mortlock later told me that her mother was gravely ill, in hospital. Lady Mortlock said she had great admiration for the poor girl, whom she described as “having the patience of a saint – wonderfully suited to the care of a backward child.”
‘However!’ Major Payne put up his forefinger. ‘Only a few pages later you report the servant who brought you your early morning tea on the 29th as telling you that Miss Haywood’s mother had been rushed to the hospital with suspected kidney failure and what a shock it had been to the poor girl. They phoned her from the hospital. Came as a shock to the poor girl. Apparently her mother was fit as a fiddle the last time she saw her. Today of all days. Terrible!’