Lorna Gray - The Antique Dealer’s Daughter

I imagine the technique had been well used in the London Blitz, but it certainly didn’t work on me now. This man woke me to the disquiet that lurked within and I forgot the stain on my arm and said with a voice made sharp by suspicion, ‘What do you mean ‘presume’? How do you know who I am? And who is he?’

Along the path, I saw that Mr Winstone had managed to sit up and was feeling his head and talking, or possibly cursing, to the younger man, who was resting on one knee beside him amongst the spilling geraniums. Old Mr Winstone spoke in the elongated vowels of the West Country. The younger man had a tanned hand lying easily across the point of his other knee with a finger hooked into the collar of his enthusiastic dog. His manner was intense and restrained to gentleness all at the same time. His accent was softer than the old man’s. He looked and sounded like a working man; rough clothes over strong limbs.

In quite a different tone, the taller man by my side told me calmly, ‘He’s Danny Hannis. Bertie Winstone’s son.’

Briefly, very briefly, my gaze flickered from its watch on the path to this man’s face. His mouth formed a benign acknowledgement of the difference in names. He amended, ‘Stepson. Danny was in town to pick up a part for the tractor, so it made sense to come home with me. He knows I take my car on a Wednesday. I know who you are because we don’t get many visitors to these parts and, besides, I’m a friend of your cousin. She didn’t tell me directly that you were coming, but word gets about. I’m Matthew Croft, by the way. How did you find him like this?’

There, amongst the patient answers to my questions, was the real question of his own.

I stopped trying to goad myself into a distress of helplessness and looked straight at him for the first time. He was older than his friend by a few years in a way that made him too old for me but probably very suitable for my cousin. Since my mind was still clearly struggling to let down its guard and determined to record every detail it could now, I also happened to notice that his hair was fair, his eyes were very dark in this violet sunset, and his clothes and general demeanour made it seem more likely that he was on his way home from a day in the office rather than a day in the fields.

When my mind finally decided after all this that it was time to answer his question before he had to repeat it a third time, I found myself saying on a note of disbelief, ‘There was a man. He went that way.’ I pointed my hand towards the corner of the lane, with a vague bias for the direction it took along the ridgetop past that barn towards the gated section and downhill, perhaps, to the valley bottom. ‘He had a pale jacket …’

I caught Matthew Croft’s expression. It broke through my seriousness and left a rueful smile in its place. I was not, it seemed, destined to be a very valuable witness.

Danny Hannis must have lately arrived at pretty much the same conclusion about his stepfather. Mr Winstone didn’t seem to know who had left him on the floor either. Danny’s swift glance along the path towards his friend was like a brief release of concealed impatience. It came in a blast and then his gaze moved on to me. At this range his eyes looked blue or perhaps green and very clear indeed. And rather too sharp. He saw the blood on me. His look began as a question but it was a shock to see my own suspicion reflected there upon his face.

I heard myself saying quite automatically, ‘You know, since that fellow is presumably not coming back again to pick up Mr Winstone after all, shall we have a go at patching him up ourselves?’

It was for once the right thing to say. Suspicion evaporated for all of us. I saw Matthew Croft’s nod. He beckoned and I heard the creak behind as a youth scrambled out of the car and we all bustled Mr Winstone into the house. Inside, this place was no bigger than the average worker’s terrace in a London slum and if Danny Hannis lived here with his stepfather, it amazed me that there should have been enough space for him. The old man himself was settled into the dipped seat of an armchair and the younger men propped him there while I scurried into the equally diminutive kitchen to scour my skin free of that revolting stain. There was no tap, only a stone sink and a jug of water drawn from the village pump, but there was soap and a good cloth and at last my skin was pink and clean and I could stop acting like a shocked bystander and think of going back and offering help in the other room.

I didn’t stay there for long. I found myself being sent back into the kitchen very smartly on an order from Matthew Croft to do something useful like preparing warm water using the kettle on the stove.

The ancient cooking range was the sort that had to be lit in the morning and kept lit all day if any cooking was to be done, even in summer. It was sweltering in that tiny space and it took about ten minutes to heat the water. I reappeared in the doorway with a basin and a clean cloth in time to make Danny Hannis abandon the question he had been about to ask and rise instead from his crouch before the old man. ‘Come along, Pop,’ he said with that slight slant to the voice that men use to imply considerable care. ‘Bear up. What’s all this you’re saying about water? You didn’t get a good look, I suppose?’ This last was meant as a question for me without so much as turning his head.

I couldn’t tell him anything about any water beyond the basin in my hands. There was no need to say anything about burglary either. I’d overheard them eliminating that much and, besides, both the kitchen and this equally tiny living room were perfectly clear of signs of invasion. I might have still held out some hope that the departed male had merely been an awkward neighbour helping the old man home after a fall. Except that I could see now that my usefulness in the kitchen had the air of being inspired by that all too familiar division based on gender – and therefore presumed fitness to bear the hard truth.

I also believed Matthew Croft had only encouraged Danny to ask me his question in order to pave the way for giving me firm thanks and sending me on my way. I could tell they’d discussed this from the way Danny reacted when I repeated the all too brief description of a male with dark hair and a pale jacket. He hadn’t expected me to have anything to add. I was, in fact, forgotten at the instant I began speaking and Danny Hannis returned to his crouched position before the armchair. His hand went out to Mr Winstone’s where it rested upon the arm of his chair, and he fixed the old man with the most compelling concern I have ever seen and it shook me.

I heard him repeat for what had to be the hundredth time, ‘What happened to you, Pop? What could possibly motivate someone to bash you over the head?’

And if I had ever really felt I might need to stay to defend Mr Winstone from this man, the feeling was dispelled here. There was, beneath the search for information, genuine bewilderment in his voice.

It was at that moment that fresh voices came from the path and the owners of them entered through the front door. And when I say these newcomers brought a sharp return of tension, this feeling was based on Danny’s reaction rather than mine.

The first to come in was a woman in her mid-thirties, who matched Matthew Croft in being rather taller than the norm for her sex. She stopped on the threshold, took in the oddity of a scene where the old man was sitting in his armchair surrounded by his stepson, a friend and a stranger. Then she stepped in and moved Danny aside from his place before his stepfather’s chair with a murmur and a familiar touch to his wrist.

She was the sort of woman who might have posed for any of the propaganda photographs that had proliferated during the war; the sort where capable women in crisply tailored uniforms were caught in the last dramatic moment before setting off on a mad uncharted flight across England in order to deliver a new aircraft to its crew. Now she was asking Danny Hannis to explain how the old man could pass from being well and unharmed at her house a few hours ago, to this. I gathered she was a Mrs Abbey, who lived a short distance away. She was not only an older and decidedly more self-assured woman than I; she was also braver. Her hands went straight to the wound on Mr Winstone’s head.