The War Widow Page 11

  Only it didn’t. Finally his silence was broken gruffly by, “It wasn’t right to ask you to lie and then leave you stranded while our lively little friend and her sister entertained themselves at your expense. That was all. I’m very sorry for it.”

  He was very stern. Unexpectedly so. It drew my head round only to find myself being gifted a faltering but thoroughly heartfelt smile. It seemed designed to quash any impulse from me to embarrass us both by pursuing his motives further. I felt my breath go out in one long silent easing of tension. My answering grin was shy. Now he turned his attention back to his notebook. He seemed perfectly relaxed. That pencil was now occupied with blocking in a quick plan that showed the relationship between the well and the boundary walls and the gatehouse.

  After some time of standing there watching him work, it made me ask instinctively but entirely inappropriately, “What did she die of?”

  Unsurprisingly, it took him a moment to realise how I might have seized upon this as a suitable topic of conversation given what he’d lately said about the prying ways of strangers. I allowed my gaze to lead his to the engraving on the metal barrel of his pencil. He turned his hand slightly to see the marks better. Then, as surprise passed and he told me – an entirely ordinary, unimaginably cruel car accident – it occurred to me that he’d told me this part too once before. I really should have listened properly at Devil’s Bridge.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said quickly.

  He misunderstood, but it was probably for the best. “Thank you,” he said. “But these things pass.” A quick smile. A light dismissal. Then, in a tone that bordered on a rather hard kind of impatience, he said, “Actually, they don’t pass, do they? That’s such a conventional line we give and yet it falls so short of the truth it’s almost offensive. And it’s all because it feels somehow socially embarrassing to answer the question truthfully.”

  He told me curtly, “June died a little under nine years ago. I’ll admit that the almost clinical process of bereavement followed its natural course in the months afterwards but that doesn’t mean the sense of loss has diminished, does it? You understand don’t you? You must have similar feelings yourself.”

  “I—”

  For a brief, dangerous moment there, I thought his decisive tone was being directed from one widower to another; appealing to the understanding of a woman who had also lately had to grieve for a spouse, even the one she’d divorced. There was a faintly intimidating blaze behind his eyes. It was for a moment an utterly exhilarating glimpse of the deeper mind within. It was like he was daring himself to risk a little of himself and all he seemed to be seeking in return was a genuine piece of understanding.

  He must have seen the debate running behind my own eyes. I saw impatience suppress something; I sensed withdrawal as though he was remembering a harsh lesson temporarily forgotten, presumably where he’d imagined I was the sort of person who would meet the awkward topic with equal honesty. Then he clarified, “I mean you must have grieved for the end of your marriage, naturally?”

  It was a very close escape. Now I agreed hastily and slightly untruthfully while my heart performed one of its acrobatic leaps. “I did, but it passed quickly enough. Compared to your experience my divorce was just a nice simple legal process and a sense of time squandered. I can’t imagine what you must have felt; or must still be feeling.”

  I wasn’t surprised he found this a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer. I was disappointed myself. It was an answer that bore the air of understanding but was really just a means of ensuring that I didn’t actually say anything at all.

  It was the sense of ugliness about it which goaded me into formulating the clearer effort that followed. We weren’t unalike, him and I. We both prized honesty.

  I was looking across the vacant ruins of the castle without really seeing them as I confessed in a firmer voice, “Actually I do understand, Adam. When I divorced my husband, it was a shock and a challenge and it hurt terribly. It took no little time to adjust to the new life and find it better. But it is better. I don’t have to lie when people ask me how I am … Or at least in the main I don’t.” This was a wry concession. He too remembered how I’d brushed off his concern at Devil’s Bridge.

  “But you,” I added. “I imagine you’re in that awful place of still passionately caring for your wife and yet at the same time life has followed its own path in the years since and it is liveable and even pleasant and joyous. But you can’t tell anyone that because either you’re committing the terrible faux-pas of baring your feelings to the world, which is very much not the done thing; or you’re in danger of casting yourself as cold and unfeeling because you’re falling well short of that old romantic ideal of the tragic figure wasting away for the loss of a dear dead love.”

  My summary made him laugh. The almost defiant blaze in his eyes had faded abruptly. And with it my sense of this man’s identity – looks, nature and physical presence – rearranged itself with a fierce little unexpected pang.

  It almost felt like I had never really shared anything of myself with him before. He must have noticed that I had still evaded giving any real glimpse of my own experiences and turned my answer to focus on my appreciation of what his must have been, but he didn’t mind now.

  He added easily, “And there’s a third option too. There’s the one where my widowhood is a point of fascination for people who have about as much tact as a bludgeon.”

  I smiled at him. “Meaning, I suppose, that this is yet another part of your life that is considered public property by people determined to forge a connection with the author in the hope of winning a walk-on part in your next book.”

  “Amongst other things, yes.” It was said blandly.

  Abruptly I knew that ‘tact’ really was the word. It was purely tact that made him pretend that these well wishers were only interested in his work. I’d witnessed Mary’s – or perhaps it was fairer to say Mrs Alderton’s – onslaught. I knew what they wanted from him. I knew how they might want to fix the memory of this very real tragedy as a signpost on the imaginary pathway to his heart. And all of a sudden I was very conscious of how I too had just spoken of the memory.

  It made me wonder how on earth I could justify myself for prying like this, when I knew I’d probably only asked at all because those deep unyielding layers of distrust within me had told me I must probe a little deeper for my own safety’s sake.

  I made amends in the only way I could. I told him rather too urgently, “You can’t control how people think of you, Adam, and you shouldn’t try. In the end you’ll find that the only solution left will be to change yourself to suit them. But you mustn’t. In fact I firmly believe that just so long as your actions are generally harmless—”

  “Harmless.” Now an eyebrow was raised in a different kind of doubt. I think I was mistaking his experiences for my own. He was being lightly teasing.

  I had to work to suppress the answering glimmer as I persevered, “Yes, harmless. You can laugh if you like since it is a pretty meek sort of ambition and it isn’t glorious or noble. But when you know you aren’t doing anything that could harm anyone, you also know that no one has a right to ask you to go against your nature purely to suit them. I can give you an example. There does seem to be an awful lot of expectation these days that as a divorcee I should rant and rage about my marriage just to ensure everyone knows how wronged I was. It’s as if by being too lacklustre to hate that man now, it’s tantamount to confessing that I must have been too wet, too feeble, too insipid to keep my husband entertained back then. Only I won’t do it. I refuse to even when the price is my dignity. I can’t tell you why, but believe me when I say this is a level I’ve set for myself and it matters that I keep it.”

  And here at last I admitted the darker depths of my divorce only I think he missed it because he was remarking gently, “Well in that case I should say you can safely relax. Those aren’t the words of someone who sounds even remotely insipid, just so you know.”

  Reassur
ance was sudden and disorienting. Then he took a uneven little breath, rather like a sigh in reverse, and said in an altogether harder voice that showed, excruciatingly, that he hadn’t missed a thing, “Look, this is going to sound a little odd after what you’ve just said about forging your own path but I’ve got to say it. Take it as a little piece of well-intended concern by way of tit-for-tat if you will. You gave me honest advice just now and now I’m going to give you mine: Don’t you think you would make things a little easier on yourself if you just took things a little more quietly for a while? I mean, if you only said—”

  “Oh I don’t know, I—”

  I didn’t add the rest. The response was cheery enough but he must have read something of the change within in my face because he cut across me to say swiftly, “I’m sorry. You’ve got enough to deal with without adding the weighty opinions of another overbearing male to the mixture. Forget it. Shall we move on?”

  And he folded away his notebook and then we were turning together to make our way towards the crumbling gatehouse.

  For me, the sudden impulse to rebuild the defences came so sharply it was like a headache. I caught my mind trying to decipher if I’d been mistaken for thinking my own curiosity had been leading this conversation, when I had in fact been deliberately steered into betraying myself and my emotion. He couldn’t have known this but it would be a novel kind of manipulation for me, being drawn into sharing my thoughts. Now I had to distract myself from re-running those few endlessly revealing lines about my husband, worrying about whether I’d slipped into calling Rhys by name instead of his usual innocuous title of ‘husband’. I hadn’t. I was sure I hadn’t. And what had Adam learned after all? That I had experienced an unhappy marriage and an equally unhappy divorce? It was hardly dangerous.

  The part of my mind that wasn’t tainted with the memory of that Lancaster shop doorway searched desperately for something, anything to say that was vaguely normal. We were walking side by side across the grassy heart of the keep. I asked, “Are you always fascinated by creepy dark holes in the ground or is it just for this book?”

  “Excuse me?” He looked a little startled for a moment. But then he emerged from the depths of wherever his own thoughts had taken him and said, “Sorry, you mean first the tin mine and now here? No, it’s just for this book. Why do you ask?”

  “It makes me worry for your hero, that’s all.” I negotiated the crumbling step from one level to the next. “It’s going to be tough if he’s got to brave an abandoned tin mine and now a bottomless well, poor man.”

  “Poor man indeed. Believe it or not, he’s afraid of the dark.”

  I laughed. “How very heartless.”

  “Very.”

  He had stopped and turned towards me a little. I blinked and looked up at him, feeling a rush of self-consciousness as it struck me with a little pang that there was in his posture a faint stoop of the sort a person does when they like being near you. For a moment I floundered in that old panic of asking myself why. But then I pulled myself together.

  I said briskly, “What about Nanteos Mansion?”

  “Nanteos?”

  “The Georgian Mansion. Do you know it?”

  I saw him frown a little, considering, as he waited for me to lead the way out of the keep. “I don’t think so. Would you like to go there?”

  “No, well yes, but …” I tackled the ancient planks that spanned the moat. Nanteos Mansion was on the road to Cardigan, about four miles out of Aberystwyth. It was a grand old place with huge columns and a fabulously ostentatious stable yard. I’d visited it when they’d put on an exhibition featuring the famous Nanteos Cup. It was supposed to be the Holy Grail but to me it had just looked like a tatty wooden bowl. I’d had to peer through a crush of invalids wanting to touch it so it must have been the most unhygienic thing in the world, now that I came to think about it, with all those ill people hoping for a cure.

  “Anyway,” I said, having told him all that. “The cup isn’t the only myth about the place …”

  I trailed off. Adam had only made some noise that implied polite interest. As a complete reversal of the moment before, the space between us felt like yards and his posture now indicated complete distraction. I paused, wavering between doubt and scolding myself for always being so blasted ready to discover I was unwanted.

  “Sorry,” said my companion. We were outside the boundary wall now and lingering on the limit of the scrubby woodland. “I am listening. I was just wondering where Jim and Mary have got to. The light’s going and I don’t want to turn this into a protracted night-time adventure.” Adam glanced down and gave me a quick smile. “Let’s wander towards the car in the hope that they’re there. So go on, what other myths are there?”

  Friendship triumphed smugly over dejection. Which typically gave me room to remember that I really had intended to remain aloof from my fellow guests. Ignoring my own wisdom, I walked beside him and told him, “Well there is another myth, one which is probably more relevant to what we were talking about before.”

  “Really?”

  There was something in his tone. It made me cover my mouth with my hand and forget everything else. I laughed. “Heavens, I’m doing it too, aren’t I? Interfering with your ideas. Next thing you know I’ll be suggesting very seriously that I know a good character name beginning with the letter ‘K’.”

  The last of the daylight was casting a rust-coloured gleam across his skin. “Go on,” he prompted. I couldn’t quite tell what he was feeling. Perhaps he thought I was committed now. Perhaps he thought he might as well get it over and done with and let me finish.

  “The present house,” I persevered doggedly, “only dates from the 1700s I think, but there was an earlier, much older building there originally. I heard a story once of a tunnel in the cellars – it was supposed to pass between the house and the coast in fact, so that the resident lord could make his escape in times of strife, or smuggle in his wine or whatever. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone actually using it, or even finding it. It would have to pass beneath at least one river after all. But that needn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Or at least that there isn’t proof enough for the purposes of your novel. The myth is pretty robust at any rate.”

  “Oh,” said Adam in a rather more respectful tone. “I see. And knowing my love of dark creepy holes, you thought I might be interested. Well, well.”

  Thinking of dark places, we were deep in the shadows of the overgrown path and his last remark was because we had a view of the cars and quite clearly neither Mary nor Jim were there.

  Adam turned back to look up the path into the trees before dropping his gaze to me. He turned to face me fully. Those grey eyes were vivid in the shadows. His right hand lifted to rest warmly upon my arm. To him I think it was a natural culmination of the past minutes. To me it brought a conflict of nerves, both exquisite and bleak. “Look,” he said seriously, “why don’t you stay here while I go and retrieve them? There’s no point wearing yourself out; and if any of them come you can stop them from wandering off again.” His hold on me was an easy grip that hardened for a moment and then he let me go. It was a friendly gesture. Bracing. Designed to convey sympathy and nothing more. My never ceasing tiredness must have been showing on my face and in my limbs all the time, which was rather a depressing thought.

  What he did next couldn’t be so easily dismissed as ordinary understanding though. He lifted his other hand; and very briefly, very tenderly laid his palm against my cheek.

  ---

  It was, needless to say, a shock. It was designed to be a deliberate and decisive conclusion to the disagreement that had driven me from the lounge last night. It was a warming assertion that he perceived the way my mind naturally shied towards reserve and it mattered that I had at least tried to overcome it. My skin burned.

  I wasn’t worrying any more that this man might frighten me with allusions to Rhys’s death. Adam was clearly determined to confront the deeper emotional defences created b
y my husband during his life.

  I came out of my shocked daze to find myself making a slow amble, alone, towards the car. It was sheltered here and very peaceful in the dimming daylight, and my cheek was still burning with the evidence of that single, powerfully disorientating touch. It was terrifyingly, exhilaratingly, beautifully near to being wanted. It was fully a minute later that I registered the danger.

  There were no more cars now than there had been before but beyond the Rover, parked neatly between it and the rough farmer’s run-about and looking just as innocent as it had in the hotel car park, was a black Morris Eight.

  I stared at it. A moth, lured out of hibernation by the mild autumn, inspected my hand unnoticed before dancing away again. I could swear the Morris parked here before had been blue.

  A noise behind made me whip round. This place was suddenly not very peaceful at all. There was no sign of anyone, not even a sheep. I made another slow turn, eyes scanning the road ahead and behind, and the path towards the castle, but there was still absolutely no one there.

  Another rustle. This time it came from behind the low hedge that bounded the road and my nerve broke. Emphatically. Without so much as a pause to consider, I turned and bolted back into the dark woodland. There was Adam, walking quickly ahead of me. He was nearly at the limit of the trees. I called his name. I think he heard; he certainly paused, turning to look back along the path in surprise. I think for a brief unnerving moment he thought I was running to him. It certainly would have been a dramatic reaction to the peacefulness of his one simple gesture of some degree of care.

  But distrust was like a sickness in me at the moment. To me he was a man I didn’t know once again, who mustn’t reach out to touch me because then the idea would rush back to the fore that I had to test it against my memory of the force of those two men at that Lancaster bus stop; and then I wouldn’t be able to be near him at all.