Nicola Upson - Angel with Two Faces

That might have been true until recently, Archie thought, but just now Nathaniel looked as though his whole world had been shaken. More convinced than ever that Morwenna was holding something back, he tried again. ‘Did Nathaniel say or do something to make Harry take his own life?’ Just for a moment, he thought he saw fear flicker across her face, and she seemed to wrestle with her conscience, trying to decide whether or not to say more.

‘Loveday’s looking for you, Morwenna. She shouldn’t be left on her own for long – not today.’

Morveth had come up to them so softly that neither Archie nor Morwenna had seen her arrive. How much had she heard, he wondered? In any case, the moment for confidences was lost, and they stood up. Morwenna smiled apologetically at him, but seemed relieved to go in search of her sister, and he was left alone with Morveth.

‘We don’t see you down here often enough, Archie,’ she said warmly, reaching up to give him a hug.

Archie smiled, genuinely pleased to see her, even if he would have chosen a different moment. He had known Morveth all his life, first as his parents’ closest friend and then as the person to whom he had turned in his own moments of crisis. She was one of the few people who played a full part in the life of the Loe estate – bringing in its babies, teaching its children, laying out its dead – yet who managed to keep her distance from it, living alone in a small, thatched cottage on the outskirts of the village. When Archie had come home to Cornwall after the war, still grieving for the loss of his closest friend and believing Jack’s death to be entirely his fault, he had gone to that cottage to heal. The feeling of peace which he found in those afternoon visits was hard to describe and, for someone who had trained in science and whose career relied on logic and analysis, hard to understand, but Morveth’s wisdom – her ability to make good, for want of a better phrase – was one of the very few things in life which he had never questioned.

‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m well,’ he said, marvelling at how little she had changed in all those years, ‘but I wish we hadn’t had to meet here like this.’

Morveth watched Morwenna as she walked back towards the house. ‘You’ll have noticed quite a change in her, I expect?’ she said, and Archie nodded. ‘It was the waiting that nearly killed her. It nearly killed us all, to tell you the truth – watching the two of them by the water’s edge every day, pale as death themselves and praying he’d be found. Loveday thought it was some sort of game, I think – best that she didn’t understand, perhaps – but Morwenna had to be half dragged away each night. First thing the next morning, though, she’d be back. She couldn’t rest until they’d got his body. The lake played a cruel trick in keeping him for so long.’

Not for the first time, Archie thought about the darkness that was masked by the beauty of Cornwall. He busied himself with violence on a daily basis in London, but the close proximity to death in which people lived their lives here still had a way of unsettling him. ‘Why do you think Harry let go of the reins, Morveth?’ he asked.

She looked at him for a long time before speaking. ‘Don’t search for things that aren’t there, Archie,’ she said at last. ‘It will only bring unhappiness.’

Archie had searched often enough to acknowledge privately how right she was, but he was reluctant to let the subject drop so easily. ‘Unhappiness for whom?’ he asked urgently, aware that Jago Snipe was on his way over to join them.

‘For people you care about,’ she said, then added more quietly, ‘perhaps even for you.’

There was no time to press her any further. He nodded at the undertaker, whose greeting – or so Archie fancied – was uncharacteristically suspicious, and they talked for a few minutes about the weather before Christopher Snipe excused them both from the effort of finding something else to say.

‘Dad, I need to talk to you,’ he said, and his earnestness made him look even younger than he was.

‘Not now, Christopher – I’m talking to Mr Penrose.’

Archie was surprised at the response. His conversation with the undertaker was hardly too important to be interrupted, and he knew how close father and son were; their relationship had been Jago’s only solace after his wife died in childbirth.

The boy seemed reluctant to be dismissed so easily. ‘But it’s urgent,’ he said.

‘Even so, this isn’t the time or the place,’ Jago snapped. ‘You’ve already done enough for one day.’

The boy blushed and walked away. Feeling sorry for him, Archie said: ‘Loveday must be glad to have Christopher around at a time like this.’

‘What makes you say that?’ the undertaker asked sharply.

‘Nothing, really, except I noticed that he was kind to her at the funeral. With everything that’s happened, having a friend near her own age must help.’

‘They’re not friends, particularly, and being kind is what we do. If Christopher spent any time with her today, he was just doing his job.’

Archie apologised without really understanding what he had said to cause such offence. Feeling more like an outsider than ever, he excused himself to go and find Lettice and her father.

Jago and Morveth watched him walk back up the lawn. ‘Did she tell him anything, do you think?’ Jago asked.

‘I don’t know. He asked about the accident, but then he would, wouldn’t he? That’s only natural. I’ll find out what he knows, though. Leave it to me.’

‘Don’t get sucked in, Morveth,’ Jago warned. ‘I know you were close to the family and Penrose is a good man, but he’s not one of us any more. If it comes to loyalties, I know which side he’ll be on. Just be careful.’

‘One of us?’ The scorn in Morveth’s voice was out of character and took Jago by surprise. ‘Don’t be so naive. Harry was one of us, and look how he behaved. He went too far, but if we’d thought more carefully about what we were doing, he’d still be alive and none of this would have happened.’

‘It has, though,’ Jago said, regaining his composure and, with it, his authority. ‘Now we just need to make sure that we keep it to ourselves.’

Christopher hung around outside the cottage, trying to find the courage to talk to his father again and waiting for a moment when he might get him on his own. It was vital that he got to speak to him soon, before some do-gooder like Shoebridge found out what was going on and tried to interfere. It had to be Christopher who broke the news. He had sat by the church for a long time after the funeral, wondering what words he should use and watching Loveday, who had slipped back to the graveside while everyone else drifted off to the wake. She was beautiful, even there. Her white-blonde hair fell forward over her face as she looked down into the grave, taking some of the flowers from the netting around the side and dropping them gently on to her brother’s coffin. Intent on her task, she hadn’t noticed him at first, but a smile lit her face when she glanced up and saw him and, in that second, he was overwhelmed with relief that Harry was dead and buried. He wouldn’t have stood a chance with Loveday otherwise; the undertaker’s son would never have been good enough for Harry Pinching’s little sister. He remembered the time he had seen Harry coming out of the Commercial Inn with a bunch of his friends; buoyed up by beer and bravado, he had taunted Christopher and told him to keep away from Loveday, saying that his hands were only fit to play with the dead. It had made him so angry, and he smiled to himself now to think that his tormentor was suddenly a lot less free with his mouth.

Christopher had grown up in a house that lived with death and had never known anything else, so he found people like Harry – who covered their fear with mockery or superstition – difficult to understand. When he talked to girls in the village, he knew that they always had half a mind on what he did for a living; he might as well have worn his mourning suit all the time because it hovered around the edges of even the most inconsequential conversations. Loveday was different, though. She could see beyond the black. The first time they were together – properly together – she had sensed his hesitation and gently kissed his fingers one by one, letting him know that she didn’t mind, telling him without words that he should be proud of his work, that the dead deserved to be cared for as tenderly as the living.