Frank nodded absently. It seemed to me that every move Francis Dunbar made was a little absent, as if he were preoccupied with a burden of work and worry that constantly pressed on his brain like concussion. I hated to give him more to think about.
And all the time I was fearfully aware of how striking was his silhouette against the long midsummer evening’s warm light in the open window.
He turned to look at me at last.
‘Canny and kind,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a word with Mr Munro.’
‘Kind yourself,’ I said. And because he was perched there on the edge of the desk, closer to my level than when he was on his feet, I dared, spontaneously, to give him a little kiss on the cheek. ‘Thank you.’
He didn’t move or say a thing. When I stood back we looked at each other eye to eye.
What’s your proper work, Julie? I would like to be a theatrical escape artist, I think, like Houdini, or a circus owner like Bertram Mills. I want to dazzle people and be applauded for it. I am good at it, and it is thrilling. Walking a tightrope when you’ve had too much to drink – dangerous and wonderful.
So I gave him another kiss, on the mouth this time, and he let me. I could feel his lips moving beneath mine as he responded very gently, just for a moment.
Then I felt myself reddening.
So I stopped.
I really shouldn’t have done it.
But … but I felt I’d restored both my authority and my feminine charm. How powerful it made me feel. It reminded me, actually, of my very first driving lesson in Mother’s sports car – the thrill of holding all that energy in my feet, of knowing that my small person was harnessing all that magnificent strength – that is how I felt now. How quick-witted and alluring and powerful!
‘You’d better go,’ he said gently.
‘So I had.’
He didn’t tell me I shouldn’t have done it though.
Our suppers were all cold now unless it was soup or we dined out, because it was so much easier to prepare and tidy up a cold meal ourselves from the distant kitchen. Solange had been doing the running, as the youngest of the grown-ups, but now that I was better I was able to help. In a couple of the overstuffed Queen Anne chairs ruined by jubilant Victorian upholstery, Mémère and Jamie sat tight doing nothing – Mémère because she is the Dowager Countess of Strathfearn and Jamie because he is a boy. But as the morning room faces east and is dull in the evening, even during the long light of midsummer with the tall windows open, Jamie got up to switch on a lamp.
It was just as I was coming back into the room after a trip made to sweep away the remains of our supper. When the light went on as I crossed the threshold, I noticed a corner of brown paper peeping out from under the edge of the faded Persian carpet close to the door to the passage.
I set down the tea tray I’d been carrying and slid the paper out from under the carpet. For a moment I found myself staring in bewilderment at what I thought was the same brown envelope that had been haunting me ever since I arrived at Strathfearn House: there on the back was the engraved name and address, Dr Hugh Housman of the Ashmolean Museum.
But this was a different envelope. It was sealed and had never been opened.
I turned it over. It was addressed to ‘Mlle Solange Lavergne’.
He must have pushed it underneath the door while it had been closed, but hadn’t realised that his note had slipped beneath the carpet on the other side. If it hadn’t been for the switched-on lamp suddenly spotlighting it as I walked in, we might never have seen the corner peeking out.
But now everyone saw me kneeling there staring at it. So there wasn’t anything to do apart from hand it over to Solange.
I think we all felt the same feeling of dread in our stomachs as we watched her open it. Jamie actually shoved one of the chairs behind her to act as a sort of aerial artiste’s safety net, expecting a collapse when she got to the end of whatever she was reading.
It came as expected.
‘Mon dieu!’ Solange exclaimed, and fell into the chair in tears with her face in her hands, the crumpled letter pressed against her cheek as if it were a handkerchief.
Mother leaped to her side.
‘Solange, darling, whatever is it?’
‘It’s my fault,’ Solange sobbed in French. ‘All my fault.’
‘What’s your fault?’ Mother gasped.
‘Monsieur Housman has taken his own life, killed himself! I-I told you we fought, but not – not how we fought. I struggled with him – I struck him in the face, I broke his spectacles.’
Well. Solange confessing to the broken spectacles explained and confirmed a great deal.
She didn’t give anyone a chance to respond though; just tore on with guilty and miserable sobs. ‘And because I was sulking upstairs I was not here to meet Julia when she came home from school, so perhaps it is my fault she was hurt as well – oh! I should be arrested.’
Needless to say, the rest of us were now quite helpless with astonishment.
My nanny raised large and beautiful dark tear-filled eyes, despairing, and I tried desperately to comfort her.
‘You know I saw him, Solange,’ I said. ‘I saw him standing in the burn and his glasses were broken, but he was fine. So you had already struck him then …’ I remembered his swollen eye – yes, it had had time to swell, some time must have passed between when she hit him and when I saw him. But not much, because he hadn’t cleaned the blood from his upper lip … or maybe his nose had started to bleed afresh. At any rate … ‘He wasn’t trying to kill himself! He was fishing for pearls. Whatever happened to him after that, it couldn’t have been your fault!’
‘He was not himself – he might have been passing the time until the Tay tide came up, waiting to let the river take him! He says so right here! He says the river is more constant than any lover – that he is returning to the river because …’ She bent her head, sobbing, and then read aloud: ‘“The river’s gifts are more eternal than the fleeting gifts of the flesh –”’ Another sob. ‘He begs me to forgive him.’
I wanted very much to twitch the letter out of her hand and read it myself, but I didn’t dare.
‘Nanny.’ I put my arms around her.
I don’t know if I was more shocked at her confession that she’d struck a man, or that she’d been so entangled with a man that she’d had to strike him. Dear Solange? A man who’d then been so distraught he’d gone and drowned himself?
Mother was not so sympathetic as I might have expected.
‘Suicides must be reported properly to the police. The Procurator Fiscal must be notified; he’s supposed to investigate sudden deaths. There may be an inquiry. It won’t be a matter of poking about on the riverbank or writing to the man’s colleagues and family. There will be proper police interviews all round – yourself included. Are you sure, Solange?’