Chapter Two #2
‘That was because I didn’t believe your side of the story at the time.’
‘But now you do?’
‘Imminent death brings on a will to undo tangled mistakes. Gretel told me what had happened between you both in the weeks before she passed away. She said she had gone unbidden to your townhouse and left when you refused outright her offer of sex so that she might conceive an heir for Elmsworth.’
‘A complete reversal of her lie at the time that held me at fault of attacking her physically?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, I am at least grateful that she told you the truth and I am sorry that it has taken so long for us to speak about it.’
Raising his left hand, Phillip allowed Oliver to see the shake in it. ‘If it’s any consolation at all, when I confronted you I did mean to miss.’
‘I know. After our childhood there is a certain glue that can never be unstuck.’
‘The glue of surviving catastrophe?’
Oliver nodded.
‘You seem to have done that well in the years since I have been away from England.’
‘My wife saved me, from fury and from fracture and from the bloody curse of the Morelands.’
Taking a breath, Phillip looked directly at him. ‘Then you are lucky.’
Phillip limited himself to one glass of cognac that evening after arriving home because he knew he had been drinking too heavily. This was his second bottle in less than ten days and the comfort it had given him a week ago was no longer there.
He had stayed only a little while longer at his brother’s estate after their conversation but he was glad he had spoken with Oliver for there was so much hidden in them both, the regret and anger and lies only just holding back chaos after their brutal childhood.
He wouldn’t go back to Nettleford Park until he could sort his feelings out, his envy and his resentment. Poor emotions that he was ashamed of but there it was. Oliver’s life had turned a corner whilst his was plummeting downhill at an alarming rate.
A letter propped on the mantel then caught his attention, for it had not been there when he’d left in the morning.
Standing up, he walked over and plucked it from its position.
A London postcode, the red wax at the back stamped with the letter W.
His finger traced over the indent and then he opened it.
Dear Lord Elmsworth,
I realise it to be most remiss of me not to have sent you a note immediately after I arrived back in London to say thank you for your generosity in accommodating our party at a difficult time.
If you are in London in the near future, I would like to be able to pay back a little of your hospitality in person.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs Wilhelmina St Claire
Phillip read it three times before putting it down on the table in front of him and then he read it for a fourth time. Her address was written along the bottom of the page.
It was a confounding message. Did ‘I would like to be able to pay back a little of your hospitality in person’ have connotations that suggested something else?
Raking both hands through his hair, he leaned back. Or was this simply a note of thanks that any well-mannered person might send to an acquaintance who had done them an unexpected favour?
Changing position, he took another sip of cognac and looked at the words again. Probably the second option, if he was honest. Bringing the paper to his nose, he sniffed.
Only ink and parchment. No smell at all of gardenias.
His glance then went to the picture on the opposite side of the room, a portrait of himself and Gretel done years ago now. When they were both young and hopeful. Before life had touched them with all the tumbling betrayals.
‘I am sorry,’ he whispered, though in all truth he did not know what he had to apologise for.
Turning the note over, he looked at the same handwriting on the front of the missive.
He could feel Mrs St Claire here before him and remembered the warmth and the welcome of her mouth.
Shaking his head, he closed his eyes, recalling the cleft in her chin, her golden glance, her teasing words, her sensuality.
He wanted to screw the parchment up and throw it away, throw away these feelings which could only cause harm. He needed to recall the distance and the pride he was famous for and remember his mother’s words in the last letter she had left him saying that he was destined to melancholy. Like her.
Gretel had felt it and told him so too, she who had been marked with her own sadness.
Together they had floundered, until the sickness had come and made everything else unimportant.
In the last year together when their time was running out they had found more happiness than in all the preceding ones and he was glad of it.
He lifted his glass up to toast her, the beautiful young Gretel Carmichael as he had first seen her, walking in a white gown down the main staircase of the Westinghouse ballroom, but he wished the portrait were not there, in his library, intruding in the one room that he felt was his.
Past and present and future. All three were here, perfectly balanced in this moment of time, and Phillip wondered which way he might turn. Back into memories or forward to life?
Grasping the letter, he held it tight and thought if it was not a solution it was at least a direction.
He capped the cognac and replaced the bottle in the cabinet before walking to the window to watch the early darkness of the night sky.
Tonight the clouds had rolled back and a million stars twinkled down at him.
Out of the blue he wondered which star Mr Lionel St Claire had discovered and named after his wife. The brightest one, he imagined as his glance fastened on a star low on the eastern horizon.
Needing to calm these thoughts, Phillip then walked upstairs to the second floor, stopping in the suite of rooms where he guessed Mrs Wilhelmina St Claire must have slept on her one night here.
The older ladies would have been grouped together in the larger room, but the smaller alcove overlooking the front of the house perhaps had been hers.
He tried to see it through her eyes: the floral wallpaper, the row of books on a shelf near the window, a carpet that was thick and warm under her feet.
A good choice with the view reaching down to the lake. Had there been a moon that night? He could not remember but hoped there had been as it would have been visible across the soft folds of the countryside to the east.
All the landmarks that he recognised. Nothing foreign or unfamiliar. He knew the trees and the smell of the seasons, he understood the patterns of rain and wind and snow, the soft heat in summer and the colour of the changing leaves in autumn.
My place.
In place.
Home.
It had been so long since he had felt such a belonging.
The silence he’d often hated here was replaced by known sounds, comforting in the way they belonged to no one time, no one person, no one truth.
They were here before him and they would be here after.
The flow of nature and time and earth. It made one’s problems seem smaller and less significant and allowed acceptance and relief to gather.
Even the lake tonight looked silver and calm, all of its uneasy black depths hidden.
The conversation with Oliver today had allowed an easing, though, a way of understanding his wife’s actions and Oliver’s too.
They had all been caught in a tangled web that was now loosening, and communication would allow him a way of moving on from the guilt that always overshadowed any thought of his brother.
He needed a change. He needed to step out of anger, sadness and shame. Looking at the lines on his left hand, he hoped that whatever came next would allow him the strength to live well and with honour.