Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

There was nothing very special about Brenda Ford, nothing that should have tempted me or stirred up the darkness. She wasn’t especially pretty or attractive. She had nice hair, though, I do remember that. I also remember that she looked and moved like a trollop – that’s a word you don’t often hear used nowadays. But when I was much younger it was a word people did use and Brenda Ford would certainly have been marked out as a trollop. It wasn’t so much the way she dressed or used lipstick – she was actually rather modest about that. It was the way she walked, with a kind of swing to the rump, and the way she looked at people with a kind of come-hither expression.

I’d seen her from a distance several times. She worked in one of the village pubs, and I think she probably had a bit of a reputation among the young men of the area. It’s not difficult to spot that: the giggling, the deliberately provocative glances. Twice to my knowledge she saw me. I always wore a deep-brimmed hat to shade my face and turned up the collar of whatever coat I was wearing, but she certainly looked at me at least twice. The second time I felt the excitement start to beat in my mind and I felt the darkness stir. I thought: the next time the darkness comes over me properly, I’ll have you, my dear!

And so I did. It was a remarkably satisfying experience. When I caught her up in the lane along the side of the manor at first she put up a small show of resistance, saying she wouldn’t have any truck with a man who wouldn’t tell her who he was.

‘I’ve seen you watching me,’ she said. ‘Real silent mystery man, aren’t you? Just like on the pictures.’

God knows who she was likening me to. There was a bit of a pretence at coyness – a token protest that she didn’t usually do this kind of thing. Like hell she didn’t. Once down on the grass she writhed against me like a snake, and in the first five seconds it was clear she knew most of the moves in the book. When finally I left her, she giggled and said, ‘Good night, silent mystery man. I hope we meet again.’

Three months later the stupid little bitch came squealing up to the manor in floods of tears, to tell Serena Cadence she was pregnant.

Cadence Manor, Late 1940s

Serena, looking back over the years since Saul’s birth, thought they had managed things as well as anyone could have done. The handful of people who knew the truth about him – Dr Martlet and the trustees, and dear Jamie, of course – said how extremely tragic that none of the treatments had done much to alleviate the disease in him. Serena supposed she should have known that the child born from that mad, angry, darkness – the child who had clung on in the womb despite all her attempts to expel it – would eventually succumb to the madness of his father.

None of them said it was even more tragic that the treatments had not alleviated the disease in Serena herself, though.

‘But we can be thankful for the periods of remission,’ Dr Martlet said.

She had never endured the mercury procedure again. Dr Martlet had suggested it, but Serena shuddered away from it. There had been pills of some kind, which she had swallowed diligently, but little by little the disgusting disease had crept over her. She lived, now, in the same twilit world in which Colm’s wife, Fay, had lived all those years ago. She did not go out and no one came to the house except Jamie and Dr Martlet, growing old and grizzled nowadays, but devoted as ever. He gave her draughts for the pains that racked her bones and soothing lotions for the sores on her skin. As he said, there were times when the disease seemed to withdraw its teeth and she was free of it. Neither of them said, but both knew, that these times became progressively shorter.

Serena often wondered what they would have done without Jamie, so patient with Saul, so trustworthy in every way. Jamie had guarded and safeguarded Saul through all the difficulties, acting as tutor and almost as gaoler in equal measures. He would not let Saul sink into the same darkness as his father, wrote Jamie on the slate he always kept with him. Serena could trust him over that.

The years slid by. The Second World War – the war people said was really a continuation of the Great War – was not very troublesome in the depths of the country, although Mrs Flagg, growing cantankerous with the years, said it was not easy to get food, and if Mr Churchill thought a family could eat a proper nourishing meal on the scrimping rations allowed, Mrs Flagg would just like to see him try it.

But despite wars and shortages and the increasingly shrill tone of the modern world, Serena was able to find a degree of contentment. She need not go beyond the manor’s grounds if she did not want to – and she seldom wanted. Occasionally she and her small household went to St Anselm’s for a service; there had been a very pleasant Christmas service one year, after Jamie arranged for the church to have the new organ. Jamie had become very knowledgeable about music; Serena thought it was something to do with him having been in the East all those years ago with Crispian and Gil Martlet. She knew – she supposed they all knew – that Jamie sometimes went quietly along to St Anselm’s to play the organ when the church was deserted. There was no particular secret about it and one was pleased to think of him having such a hobby. Occasionally it occurred to her that Jamie did not have much of a life, but he always seemed content.

And then, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, came the event that was to knock the placidity of Cadence Manor and Priors Bramley into tumult.

‘A person to see you, madam.’ Flagg, becoming more tottery with every year but determinedly clinging to the old standards, made the announcement while Serena was sipping a cup of afternoon tea. She enjoyed her afternoon tea; it was so nice to be able to obtain good China tea again, and she generally had the small silver flask to hand so that a judicious measure of brandy could be added if she felt unwell.

‘Does this person have a name, Flagg?’

‘Ford, madam. A Miss Ford, I believe.’

The name meant nothing to Serena and she did not want to see this person, this Ford, whom Flagg clearly considered beneath her notice. Despite the Lapsang Souchong with its spike of brandy, today her skin felt as if it was on fire, and there was an ache deep in her bones as if they were being pounded to ground glass. But she said, ‘I can see her for five minutes, I suppose.’

Ford turned out to be a rather pert-looking girl with cheap shiny stockings and a skirt and coat that tried rather unsuccessfully to imitate the current fashion. Serena took this in at a glance; living quietly in the country did not mean she did not take notice of what people in the wider world wore. Fashion magazines were delivered to the house and the accounts at Harrods and Debenham and Freebody were still used.

She sat up very straight in her chair, ignoring the wrench of pain in her spine, and said, ‘Yes, Ford?’

The girl said, ‘I’m here because your…’ A pause as if she might be trying to sort something out in her mind. ‘Your son raped me three months ago,’ she said. ‘And I’ve just found out I’m pregnant because of it.’

Serena stared at her. ‘Nonsense,’ she said crisply.

‘You’ll excuse me, Lady Cadence, but it’s the truth.’

‘You may well be pregnant, but my son can’t have anything to do with it. He’s an invalid. He lives quietly here and seldom goes out.’

‘Your son,’ said the girl, ‘attacked me just outside the walls of this mausoleum one night –’ she paused to cast a disparaging glance around her – ‘and he left me lying on the ground while he scuttled back through the gates.’