I suppose Pale Joe must have met a woman at one of those dances, a fine lady with whom he fell in love as completely as I did with Edward, and who perhaps did not reciprocate, because his words that night were perfect.
He never did have the chance to tell me who she was. The last time that I saw Pale Joe, we were eighteen years old. I had come to his window to let him know that I’d agreed to go with Edward to Birchwood Manor for the summer. I revealed nothing of my plans beyond; I didn’t even say a proper farewell. I didn’t think I had to, not then. I thought that there would be more time. I suppose people always do.
Jack is back in the malt house and my house is calm again, catching its breath after a day of unusual activity. It has been a long time since anyone ventured inside the hiding hole.
He is dispirited, but not because he failed to find the stone. Its absence will involve another telephone call to Rosalind Wheeler, which will not be pleasant, for she will not be happy. But the search for the Radcliffe Blue is just a job for Jack; he has no personal connection other than human curiosity driving his quest. His mood is related, I am certain, to his meeting yesterday with Sarah regarding the two little girls.
I long to know what happened between them. It gives me something to focus on besides my own memories and the endless, aimless stretch of time.
He has put aside Mrs Wheeler’s notes and floor plan and picked up his camera. I have noticed a pattern with Jack. When something upsets him, he takes out his camera and looks through the lens, pointing it at things – anything, it seems – fiddling with the aperture and the focus, and bringing the zoom in close before retracting it again. Sometimes he takes the shot; more often than not, he doesn’t. By and by, his equilibrium is restored and the camera goes away.
Today, however, he is not so easily mended. He returns the camera to its bag and then hangs the strap over his shoulder. He intends to go outside to take more photographs.
I am going to wait for him in my favourite corner at the turn of the stairs. I like to look at the Thames between the trees beyond the meadow. The river is quiet up here; only the canal boats go back and forth, dragging after them the faint plume of coal smoke. One can hear the plink of a fishing line being sunk, the skid of a duck coming in to land on the surface, laughter sometimes in the summer if the day is warm enough to swim.
What I said earlier was not entirely truthful, that I have never managed to go as far as the river. There was one time, and one time only. I did not mention it because I still cannot explain it. But on the afternoon that Ada Lovegrove fell from the boat, I was there, in the river, watching as she sank to the bottom.
Edward used to say that the river possessed a primeval memory of everything that had ever happened. It occurs to me that this house is like that, too. It remembers, just as I do. It remembers everything.
Such thoughts bring me back to Leonard.
He had been a soldier but was a student by the time he arrived at Birchwood Manor, working on a dissertation about Edward, his papers spread across the desk in the Mulberry Room downstairs. It was from him that I learned much of what happened after Fanny died. Amongst his research notes were letters and newspaper articles and eventually the police reports, too. What a strange feeling it was to read the name ‘Lily Millington’ there amongst the others. Thurston Holmes, Felix and Adele Bernard, Frances Brown, Edward, Clare and Lucy Radcliffe.
I saw the policemen as they carried out their investigation into Fanny’s death. I watched as they searched the rooms, raking through Adele’s clothing and stripping the walls of Felix’s darkroom. I was there when the shorter of the two men pocketed a photograph of Clare in her lace slip, tucking it inside his straining coat. I was there, too, when they cleared out Edward’s studio, taking from it everything they could find that might shed light on me …
Leonard had a dog that would sleep on the armchair as he worked; a great big shaggy animal with muddy paws and a long-suffering expression. I like animals: they are often aware of me when people are not; they make me feel appreciated. It is amazing how far a little acknowledgement will go when one has become used to being ignored.
He brought a record player with him and used to play songs late at night, and he kept a glass pipe on the table beside his bed, an object I recognised from the time of my father’s nights in the Chinese den in the Limehouse. Occasionally a woman, Kitty, came to visit and he would hide the pipe away.
I watched him sometimes when he slept, just as I watch Jack now. He had military habits, like the old major who was known to Mrs Mack and the Captain, who could beat a young girl where she stood but wouldn’t countenance falling into bed without polishing his boots and lining them up carefully for the next day.
Leonard wasn’t violent, but his nightmares were bleak. Neat as a pin, quiet and polite by day, but with dreams of the darkest kind. He would shake in his sleep, and wince, and call out in a voice made raw with fear. ‘Tom,’ he used to call, ‘Tommy.’
I used to wonder about Tommy. Leonard cried for him as one might for a lost child.
On the nights when he smoked through the glass pipe and fell into a languorous sleep where Tommy couldn’t find him, I sat in the still of the dark house and thought of my father, of how long I waited for him to come back for me.
And when Leonard didn’t use the pipe, I stayed with him. I understand despair; and so, on those nights, I knelt and whispered in that young man’s ear, ‘It is all right. Be at peace. Tommy says that he is well.’
Tom … Tommy … I still hear his name on nights when the wind blows strong down the river and the floorboards quiver.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Summer, 1928
It was the hottest day so far and Leonard had determined when he woke that he would swim. He’d taken to strolling along the towpath in the early mornings, and sometimes again in the hovering afternoons that burned on and on before fading suddenly like a limelight being snuffed.
The Thames here had a vastly different character to the wide, muddy tyrant that seethed through London. It was graceful and deft and remarkably light of heart. It skipped over stones and skimmed its banks, water so clear that one could see the reeds swaying deep down on her narrow bed. The river here was a she, he’d decided. For all its sunlit transparency, there were certain spots in which it was suddenly unfathomable.
A long, dry stretch through June had given him ample opportunity to explore, and Leonard had discovered a particularly inviting bend a mile or two upstream before the Lechlade Halfpenny Bridge. A co-op of scrappy children had set up camp for the summer in a field just beyond, but a coppice of birch trees gave the bend its privacy.
He was sitting now with his back against the trunk of a willow, wishing he’d finished the repairs he was planning to make to the old wooden rowing boat he’d found in the barn behind the house. The day was perfectly still, and Leonard couldn’t think of anything more pleasant than lying in that boat and letting it carry him downstream.
In the distance, a boy of about eleven, with long, skinny legs and knobbly knees, ran from beneath the shadows of one tree towards the trunk of another. He streaked across the sunny clearing circling his arms like a windmill, just for the hell of it, a wide grin lighting his face.
For a split second Leonard could remember the fluid joy of being young and fast and free. ‘Run with me, Lenny, run!’ He still heard it sometimes, when the wind blew a certain way or a bird sailed overhead. ‘Run with me, Lenny.’