A Long Way to Fall #2
“Daddy said to fear was foolish. That we’d do better to draw a lesson.”
“Which lesson was that?” I turned now to face her.
She touched the chair by the window.
“Oh no, I”—another weak smile—“I’m happy to stand.”
Percy blinked slowly and I thought for a moment that she might insist. She didn’t, though, saying only, “The lesson, Miss Burchill, was that when reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.”
My hands were clammy and a spreading heat was climbing up my arms. But surely she had not read my mind. She couldn’t possibly know the monstrous things I’d been imagining since I found the letter, my morbid fantasies of being pushed from the window.
“Goya anticipated Freud by some time, in that respect.”
I smiled somewhat sickly, and then the fever hit my cheeks and I knew that I could stand the suspense, the subterfuge, no longer.
I was not formed for games like these. If Percy Blythe knew what I had found in the muniment room, if she knew that I had taken it with me and that I was bound to investigate further; if this was all an elaborate ploy to have me admit to my deception, and for her to try, by whatever means she could, to prevent me from exposing her father’s lie, then I was ready.
What was more, I was going to strike the first blow.
“Miss Blythe,” I said, “I found something yesterday. In the muniment room.”
A dreadful look came over her, a leaching of color that was instant and absolute. As quickly as it had appeared she managed to conceal it again. She blinked. “Well? I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to guess, Miss Burchill. You’re going to have to tell me what it was.”
I reached into my jacket and retrieved the letter, tried to steady my fingers as I handed it to her.
I watched as she dug reading glasses from her pocket, held them before her eyes, and scanned the page.
Time slowed interminably. She shifted her fingertips lightly over its surface.
“Yes,” she said, “I see.” She seemed almost relieved, as if my discovery was not what she’d feared.
I waited for her to continue, and when it was clear she had no intention of doing so, I said, “I’m rather worried—” It was, without doubt, the most difficult conversation I’d ever had to initiate.
“If there’s any question, you see, that the Mud Man was—” I couldn’t bring myself to say stolen.
“If there’s any chance at all that your father might have read it elsewhere first”—I swallowed; the room was swimming a little before my eyes—“as this letter seems to suggest, the publishers will need to know.”
She was folding the letter very carefully and crisply, and only when she’d finished did she say, “Let me set your mind at ease, Miss Burchill. My father wrote every word of that book.”
“But the letter—are you sure?” I had made a huge mistake in telling her.
What had I expected her to do? Speak honestly with me?
Give me her blessing while I made inquiries that stood to strip her father of his literary credibility?
It was natural, of course, for his daughter to support him, especially a daughter like Percy.
“I am very sure, Miss Burchill,” she said, meeting my gaze. “It was I who wrote that letter.”
“You wrote it?”
A curt nod.
“But why? Why did you write such a thing?” Especially if it was true that every word was his.
There was fresh color in her cheeks and her eyes were bright, her energy much improved, almost as if she were feeding in some way on my confusion.
Enjoying it. She looked at me slyly, a look to which I was becoming accustomed, a look that suggested she had something more to tell me than what I’d thought to ask.
“There comes a time in the lives of all children, I expect, when the shutters are lifted and they become aware that their parents are not immune to the worst of human frailties. That they are not invincible. That sometimes they will do things to suit themselves, to feed their own monsters. We are a selfish species by nature, Miss Burchill.”
My thoughts were swimming in a deep and clouded soup. I wasn’t quite sure how one thing related to the other, but assumed it must have something to do with the distressing consequences that her letter had prophesied. “But the letter—”
“That letter is nothing,” she snapped with a wave of her hand.
“Not anymore. It’s an irrelevance.” She glanced at it briefly and her face seemed to flicker like a projection screen, a film running backwards across seventy-five years.
In a single sudden motion she tossed it onto the fire, where it sizzled and burned and made her flinch.
“As it happens, I was wrong. It was his story to tell.” She smiled then, wryly, a little biliously.
“Even if he didn’t know it at the time.”
I was utterly confused. How could he not know that it was his story, and how could she have thought it otherwise? It made no sense.
“I knew a girl once, in the war.” Percy Blythe had gone to sit on the chair behind her father’s desk and she leaned back into the chair’s arms as she continued.
“She worked in the cabinet rooms, met Churchill a number of times in the corridors. There was a sign they had hanging, one that he’d put there.
It said, ‘Please understand there is no depression in this house, and we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.’ ” She sat for a moment, her chin lifted and her eyes slightly narrowed, her own words hanging still around her.
Through the wash of smoke, with her neat haircut, her fine features, the silk blouse, she almost looked as if she were back in the Second World War. “What do you think of that?”
I do not do well with these sorts of games; I never have, particularly riddles without even the most tenuous link to the rest of the conversation. I shifted my shoulders miserably.
“Miss Burchill?”
A statistic came to me then, something I’d read or heard once about the way suicide rates plummet during times of war; people are too busy trying to survive to give much thought to how miserable they are.
“I think wartime is different,” I said, unable to avoid the rising tone that betrayed my discomfort.
“I think the rules are different. I imagine depression is probably akin to defeat during war. Maybe that’s what Churchill meant. ”
She nodded, a slow smile playing at her lips.
She was making things difficult for me on purpose, and I didn’t understand why.
I’d come to Kent at her behest, but she wouldn’t let me interview her sisters, she wouldn’t answer any of my questions directly, she preferred to play cat-and-mouse games in which I was cast always as the quarry.
She might just as easily have let Adam Gilbert continue with the project.
He’d done his interviews, he needn’t have bothered them again.
You may take it as an indication of my profound discomfort and frustration that I said then, “Why did you ask me to come, Miss Blythe?”
A single scarlike brow shot up like an arrow. “What’s that?”
“Judith Waterman from Pippin Books told me you rang. That you asked specifically for me.”
A twitch at the corner of her mouth and she looked straight at me; you don’t realize how rare that is until someone actually does it.
Stares, unflinchingly, right down deep into your soul.
“Sit,” she said, just as you might instruct a dog or a disobedient child, and the word was so brittle in her mouth that this time I did not argue; I spotted the nearest chair and did precisely as I was told.
She tapped a cigarette on the desk, then lit it. She drew hard, eyeing me as she exhaled. “There’s something different about you,” she said, resting her other wrist across her body, leaning back into the chair. All the better to appraise me.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
She squinted then, dissecting, watery eyes looking me up and down with an intensity that made me shiver. “Yes. You’re less chirpy than you were before. The last time you came.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. “Yes,” I said. My arms were threatening to flail around, so I crossed them. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” said Percy, lifting her cigarette and her chin. “I like you better this way.”
Of course she did. And, happily, before I was faced with the impossibility of formulating a reply, she returned to my initial question: “I asked for you, in the first instance, because my sister wouldn’t tolerate an unknown man in the house.”
“But Mr. Gilbert had already finished his interviews. There was no need for him to come back to Milderhurst if Juniper didn’t like it.”
That sly smile reappeared. “You’re astute. Good. I had hoped you might be. I wasn’t entirely sure after our first meeting and I didn’t fancy dealing with an imbecile.”
I was torn between “Thank you” and “Sod off” and elected to compromise with a cool smile.
“We don’t know many people,” she continued on an exhalation, “not anymore. And then when you came to visit, and that Bird woman told me that you worked in publishing. Well, I began to wonder. Then you told me that you hadn’t any siblings.”
I nodded, trying to follow the logic in her explanation.
“And that’s when I decided.” She drew again on her cigarette, performed a piece of fussy stage business in retrieving an ashtray. “I knew you wouldn’t be biased.”
I was feeling less and less astute by the second. “Biased about what?”
“About us.”
“Miss Blythe, I’m afraid I don’t understand what any of this has to do with the article I’ve been commissioned to write, with your father’s book and your memories of its publication.”
She waved her hand impatiently and ash fell to the floor. “Nothing. Nothing. It has nothing at all to do with any of that. It has to do with what I’m going to tell you.”
Was that when I felt it, the ominous creeping beneath my skin? Perhaps it was only that a gust of autumn chill came then, blustering beneath the door, angering the lock so that the key fell to the floor. Percy ignored it and I tried to do the same. “With what you’re going to tell me?”
“Something that needs to be set right, before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“I’m dying.” She blinked with customary cold frankness.
“I’m so sorry—”
“I’m old. It happens. Please don’t patronize me with unnecessary sympathy.
” A change came over her face, like clouds scudding across the wintry sky, covering the last of the sun’s feeble light.
She looked old, tired. And I saw that what she said was true—she was dying.
“I was dishonest when I telephoned that woman, that publisher, and asked for you. I regret any inconvenience caused to the other fellow. I’ve little doubt he’d have done an excellent job.
He was nothing if not professional. Nonetheless, it was all I could think to do.
I wanted you to come and I didn’t know how else to make that happen. ”
“But why?” There was something new in her manner, an urgency that made my breathing grow shallow. The back of my neck prickled, with cold but with something else, too.
“I have a story. I am the only one who knows it. I am going to tell it to you.”
“Why?” It came out little louder than a whisper and I coughed, then asked again. “Why?”
“Because it needs to be told. Because I value accurate records. Because I cannot carry it further.” Did I imagine that she glanced then at Goya’s monsters?
“But why tell me?”
She blinked. “Because of who you are, of course. Because of who your mother was.” The slightest of smiles and I glimpsed that she was taking certain pleasure from our conversation, from the power, perhaps, that she wielded over my ignorance.
“It was Juniper who picked it up. She called you Meredith. That’s when I realized.
And that’s when I knew you were the one. ”
The blood drained from my face and I felt as shameful as a child caught telling lies to their teacher. “I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything earlier, I only thought—”
“Your reasons don’t interest me. We all have secrets.”
I caught the rest of my apology before it tumbled from my lips.
“You are Meredith’s daughter,” she continued, her pace quickening, “which means you are like family. And this is a family story.”
It was the last thing I’d expected her to say and I was floored; something inside me beat with glad empathy for my mother, who had loved this place and long believed herself so poorly used. “But what do you want me to do?” I said. “With your story, I mean.”
“Do with it?”
“Do you want me to write it down?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Not write it down, just set it right. I need to trust you to do that …” She pointed a sharp finger but the stern gesture was weakened when the face behind it fell to repose. “Can I trust you, Miss Burchill?”
I nodded, even though her manner gave me grave misgivings as to precisely what it was she asked of me.
She seemed relieved, but her guard dropped only for an instant before she picked it up again. “Well then,” she said bluntly, turning her gaze towards the window from which her father had fallen to his death. “I hope you’re able to go without lunch. I haven’t time to waste.”