Nicola Upson - Angel with Two Faces

‘That’s hardly the same thing.’

‘No, it isn’t. I didn’t ask to be told about your mother and Jasper – Morveth told me out of the blue. From what I gather, though, you didn’t need much encouragement to talk about me behind my back.’

Archie started to answer back, but stopped himself. ‘I won’t compete with you for grievances,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to. You know in your heart that you should have told me. I could have taken it from you. Instead, I had to find out like this.’

He turned and left the room. She made a move to go after him, but William put his hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Let him calm down first,’ he said. ‘If you go after him now, you’ll both end up saying things that are impossible to forget. But will you tell me what Morveth said? I need to understand, just like Archie does.’ Reluctantly, Josephine nodded, wondering yet again how far she should go with the truth.

Chapter Eighteen

‘I’m sorry.’

Josephine looked round, startled. Caught up in her own thoughts, she had not heard Archie come back to the Lodge. He stood hesitantly in the doorway to the sitting room, obviously uncertain of his reception. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, relieved to see him. ‘It’s me who should be apologising. I let you down.’

She started to get up, but he held his hand out and came over to join her by the fire. ‘You were in an impossible position,’ he said, sitting down on the floor next to her. ‘You’ve been burdened with other people’s secrets from the moment you got here, and I started it with Morwenna and Harry’s suicide. I still can’t imagine why Morveth said anything to you about my mother but, whatever her reasons, it’s hardly your fault.’

‘In her defence, she seemed to be trying to protect you from something, but it rather backfired. Look, I really did want to tell you, you know, but this morning wasn’t the right moment and I thought I had plenty of time to wait until you’d finished the investigation. It never occurred to me that you’d find out another way – Morveth wasn’t going to say anything to you, and I could hardly have foreseen that you’d get it from the horse’s mouth. I suppose I shouldn’t have underestimated your professional powers of persuasion.’

He grinned, and added some more coal to the fire to bring the dying embers back to life. ‘You don’t have to explain,’ he said, paying more attention to the selection of a log than was strictly necessary and avoiding her eye. ‘And there was no need for me to start summoning up our ghosts just because I’d found some more of my own. What I said about Jack was unforgivable.’

She took the poker out of his hand and forced him to look at her. ‘You were in shock. Anyway, I doubt there’s anything you could say to me that I wouldn’t forgive you for eventually. But that’s not a challenge,’ she added, as he raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘It’s a bad sign, you know – bringing the bottle over with you,’ he said, lifting the Dalwhinnie which stood in the grate.

She laughed, and stood up to fetch another glass. ‘Well, that is your fault. I was worried about you. Where have you been?’

‘Once I’d calmed down, I had to go back and talk to William. I expected you to be there still.’

‘No. I wasn’t really in the mood for company, so I left soon after you did.’

‘Yes, they told me,’ he said. ‘Obviously, I needed to apologise, but I also wanted to know more about their childhood – to try and understand what relations were like between the three of them when they were growing up.’

‘And has it helped?’

‘A little, I suppose. He couldn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know – what Jasper did to my mother was as much of a shock to him as it was to me. More so, perhaps, because he was there with her at the time. Now he’s having to reinterpret what he thought was happiness – and he feels guilty, of course.’

‘For not being able to protect her?’

‘Partly that, but it’s more complicated. He feels bad about the way he and my mother used to shut Jasper out when they were children. There was no malice in it, but you can never tell what effect you’re having on somebody’s emotions in private, can you?’ He sipped his whisky thoughtfully. ‘I have to say – William’s much more generous than I am. All I can think about is how the bastard must have made her suffer.’

‘Do you know how he is?’

‘William telephoned the hospital. There’s no change.’

‘Trouble seems to come in threes – look at Harry, Morwenna and Loveday. And if I’m honest, there were the same sorts of rivalries in our house when I was growing up. My youngest sister and I got on splendidly – but there was always a sense of duty in any time I spent with my middle sister, and I know she was aware of that. Things have always been rather forced between us. I’m not saying it’s the same thing at all, but it’s all about a balance of power. You’re lucky to be an only child.’

‘I’m beginning to agree with you. I used to think about what good friends William and my mother were as adults, and how Lettice and Ronnie always stuck up for each other no matter how much they argued in private, and I felt like I was missing out on something. Now, I’m not so sure.’

Josephine realised that this was the first time she had ever heard Archie talk about his childhood in any depth. They had regularly discussed the war and their shared past – probably discussed it too much – but he had only ever referred in passing to his life before she knew him. Thinking about it, that was probably because he had always genuinely believed it to be happy and trouble-free: the urge to analyse and reconstruct your past tended to come only with the realisation that things were less than perfect, and she sensed that he would be eager to talk now if she gave him the right encouragement. ‘Morveth said your mother told your father about Jasper,’ she said. ‘He must have been a very special man for her to trust him with what she was most ashamed of. It’s one thing to tell another woman, but trusting a man – especially a man who loves you – not to make things worse by how he reacts must have been quite a risk.’

‘Yes, he was special.’ Archie offered her a cigarette, and lit one for himself.

‘I’ve never asked you about him, and I don’t even know what he did for a living. Was it something on the estate?’

‘I suppose you could say that he shaped the estate – or a lot of it, anyway. He was a plantsman, and he knew everything about the land here. There wasn’t an acre of it that he wasn’t intimately familiar with. It was almost as if he felt he had a duty to it because his family had given it away – like he had to prove it wasn’t personal.’ He looked long into the fire, remembering. ‘When I was young, he took me everywhere with him – through the woods, round the formal gardens, into the hothouses, and he’d tell me the name of every plant that he’d grown and cared for. You’ve seen all the shrubs that screen the outbuildings near the house and the vineries on the walls?’

‘Only in the dark.’

‘I must show them to you – they’re still very much as he created them, although on a much smaller scale. You know, we used to have fourteen acres of apple orchards alone – but I suppose William’s told you how magnificent the estate was before the war?’

‘Not really. He said that the war changed a lot, but some things were on the decline anyway.’

‘Maybe that’s true. I suppose my memories are bound to be different – I was young and I didn’t have the headache of keeping it going – but I think William’s doing himself an injustice. Loe was in its prime back then. He took it over about ten years before the war, and he and my father made it pretty much self-sufficient. Except for coal, it looked after its own community and more besides – we had crops for food, wood for building, even our own brewery at one stage, although I gather it was much safer to buy your ale over the bar.’ He leaned forward and topped up their glasses. ‘Then suddenly there was no one left to run it. We lost more men every month until we were down to a skeleton staff. I was at university by then, and every time I came back the place seemed more deserted. It wasn’t just the men, either – the horses disappeared, even the trees. Teddy wasn’t the only thing that the Royal Navy took from William,’ he added dryly. ‘Acres of oak went to them as well – hundreds of years of growth. It changed the whole character of the landscape in places. I know it’s not the same thing as losing a son, but it broke William’s heart.’