Chapter Sixty-One
There was so much to say but it was far too cold to wander the streets of Cambridge so they could talk and with fat flakes of snow falling determinedly and settling thickly on the ground, they went into the nearest restaurant, even though Venetia doubted she would be able to eat a thing.
They were shown to a table by an excessively cheerful young waitress who gave them over-sized laminated menus and pointed to the specials of the day on the blackboard. ‘Anything to drink?’ she asked chirpily.
‘Brandy for me,’ answered Venetia, ‘I need it for the—’ she was going to say shock, but changed her mind. ‘For the cold,’ she said.
‘I’ll have the same,’ muttered Lucien.
‘With ice?’ the girl asked.
‘Certainly not,’ Lucien said, his bushy eyebrows raised as if in disgust.
When they were alone, Venetia said, ‘That girl probably isn’t much older than the age we were when we last saw one another.’
‘I can’t tell how old anyone is these days; I just know that I’m as old as Methuselah and ready for the scrapheap.’
‘We’re the same age, and if you don’t mind, I don’t consider myself ready for the scrapheap.’ Venetia’s voice was light and playful.
He rattled his throat. ‘Maybe you’ve been lucky in life.’
‘Have you not had a happy life, then?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘What does happy even mean?’
She studied his craggy, weatherbeaten face and felt a great surge of tender nostalgia for her old friend.
Despite the many years that had passed, and which had undeniably left their mark on him, she could still discern the boy within, the proud boy she had loved so much and wanted to protect so badly.
‘What a question, Lucien!’ she remarked.
‘Are you saying you’ve never known what it is to be happy? ’
‘Again, it all depends on your definition of happiness.’
How sad, she thought, sensing that maybe, even with all its many ups and downs, her life had been a lot happier than his.
‘But I must say, luxury apartments or not, I was surprised when you said earlier that you’d moved back to Hope Hall.
Of all the places in the world you could have gone!
Why the hell there?’ Not giving her a chance to reply, he rumbled on throatily.
‘And as for recognising me the way you did, I still don’t know how you did that. ’
‘Presumably in the same way you eventually recognised me,’ she said, ‘a sixth sense of just knowing one another. I swear I felt something, a tingling up and down my spine before I’d really looked at you, as though my subconscious had already figured it out.’
‘But was there something in particular that made you know it was me?’
‘It was when I overheard you speaking to that woman who was admiring your painting, it was the gruff offhand way you spoke to her, it took me right back to being a child with you at Hope Hall.’
‘For me,’ he said, ‘it was your eyes which I recognised first. They were always so sharp and alert. You never missed anything and clearly you didn’t this evening.’
Their waitress appeared then with their drinks. Setting them on the table, she asked in her bright chirpy voice if they’d chosen what they wanted to eat.
‘I can recommend the medallions of pork with apple,’ she said, ‘and the lamb shanks are good too.’
Lucien looked askance at Venetia.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the waitress, ‘we haven’t had a chance to look at the menu yet. We’ve been too busy talking.’
‘No problem, I can come back in a few minutes.’
‘I only need something very small,’ Venetia said, thinking that perhaps it would be easier to get the decision over and done with. ‘A starter would be fine for me.’ She ran her gaze over the menu. ‘I’ll have the lentil and sweet potato soup.’
Lucian ordered the lamb shank and a side order of chips and when the waitress had gone, he said, ‘I haven’t eaten all day, I’m starving.’
Venetia smiled. ‘That’s fine, no explanation needed.’
‘That wasn’t what you said back at the gallery after you’d fainted, you said I had a lot of explaining to do.’
‘And so you do. But first, raise your glass.
He did as she said.
‘Here’s to old friends.’
‘Old friends,’ he echoed.
They each took a sip of their brandy.
‘Come on then,’ he said, lowering his glass, ‘let’s start the full interrogation process, shall we?’
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you ever try to contact me?’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the sixty-five million dollar question. I did contact you in the months after I left Hope Hall. A thousand times at the very least. But only in my head.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Shame. Fear. Guilt. Self-loathing. You name it. All I knew was that I needed to cut the tie with Hope Hall, and I’m sorry but that meant you as well.’
She nodded. ‘Self-preservation. I understand. But one small letter would have made all the difference, just so that I knew you were alive and that you were well. That was all I needed. Every day I lived in hope of hearing from you.’
‘I was alive, but as for being well, that might have been a stretch. For a long time, I was in a pretty dark place. Running away does that to you.’
She thought of the disturbingly opaque and austere painting of a moonlit forest she and Cassie had been looking at before she’d realised she was not only standing next to the artist, but that there was something strangely familiar about him.
And then the axis of the world had tilted and uttering his name in shocked amazement – the name she had known for nearly all her life – she had slowly slipped to the floor.
‘Where did you go when you disappeared?’ she asked.
‘London. Obviously. It was where all runaway kids went; it was the easiest place in which to lose myself and start a new life.’
‘That’s what Edie Buckle and I did; we moved to London when Hope Hall had to close.’
‘You did? Just think,’ he said reflectively, ‘our paths could have crossed! Where did you live?’
‘I’ll tell you about that later. For now, I want to know all about you. How did you cope in London on your own? You were so young. Was there anyone to look out for you?’ She thought what a slight boy he’d been, his chest weakened with asthma and his eyesight so dependent on spectacles.
‘I had to grow up fast,’ he said. ‘I slept rough to begin with and then I managed to get a job in the East End working in the docks. Next, I found somewhere to doss down.’
‘But you wanted to do so much more than that. You wanted to be a doctor.’
He took a mouthful of his brandy. ‘Rarely can we have what we dream of. Did you end up doing what you thought you would?’
‘No. But I enjoyed the work I did, and I made a success of it for myself. Just as you have with your art,’ she added, worried that she sounded as if she were boasting.
‘I wouldn’t call my art a success, I merely dabble for my own amusement. I started painting when I moved to Suffolk to be by the sea. I still suffer with asthma and the sea air suits me.’
‘You no longer wear glasses,’ she pointed out.
‘Laser surgery sorted that.’
‘Did you stay in London for very long?’
‘No, I moved around getting cash-in-hand work wherever I could.’ There was a slight softening in his expression.
‘I spent one summer hop-picking in Kent. I would have returned the following year, but the farm had done away with cheap labour and mechanised things. It was the end of an era.’ His expression altered again, resumed its earlier hard edge.
‘I kept moving because there was always a part of me that believed one day there would be a knock on the door and I would be accused of killing Terry Sands.’
‘But you didn’t kill him,’ she said. ‘It was an accident.’
He gave her a long studied look. ‘Is that what you’ve told yourself all these years?’
She was momentarily shocked at his contemptuous tone. ‘It was an accident,’ she repeated, this time more resolutely. ‘And we were only children.’
‘But I planned to kill, I went to that cottage with murder in my mind.’
It was hard to hear him say those words so boldly and with such conviction. ‘But you didn’t actually do it, did you?’ she said. ‘Yes, you pushed him, but I would have done the same. Anyone would have.’
‘I wanted to leave him there to go up in flames, but you didn’t. So don’t try and tell me you would have done the same as I did. You wouldn’t have. You didn’t!’
His tone was suddenly so aggressive and made her feel disagreeably under attack. ‘That’s a futile line of argument, because we’re all capable of murder given the right circumstances.’
‘So you admit it, I did murder Terry Sands?’
‘I said no such thing!’
Once more their cheerful waitress appeared and gaily presented Venetia with her soup and Lucien his lamb shank.
The juxtaposition of the girl’s eternally sunny demeanour was quite at odds with the sombre mood that had now descended on them, and oblivious to it, she expressed her hope that they would enjoy their meal.
Venetia picked up her spoon with a smile, feeling she owed the girl that much at least and thanked her.
‘Whatever you think now, whatever you’ve convinced yourself of,’ Venetia said, after a lengthy pause and while they both ate, ‘you did help me drag Terry out of the burning cottage.’
‘I did it for you, Venetia. Not for me.’
She frowned. ‘It doesn’t matter what your motive was, your heart was in the right place. You knew what was the right thing to do.’
He scoffed at her. ‘You always did want to believe in the myth of good overcoming bad. It’s like believing in fairies. Or God!’
Annoyance flared within her, and Venetia suddenly found, quite uncharitably, that she didn’t much care for the man Lucien had become. He seemed so arrogant, and so sneeringly determined to be miserable. But then hadn’t he so often been that way as a boy?
Hoping to manoeuvre him back onto safer ground, she said, ‘When did you become Saul Bernice? And why that name? What’s the significance? Or maybe there isn’t any and you plucked the name out of the ether.’
He put down his knife and fork and reached for his brandy glass, draining what was left in it in one swallow. ‘You disappoint me. I would have thought you’d have worked it out by now.’
‘Worked what out?’
‘The name. It’s an anagram of Lucien Barnes.’
Mentally she tried to match up the letters and eventually said, ‘It doesn’t work.’
He smiled, scrunching up his eyes within the folds of the deep lines around them. ‘That’s why I always sign my pictures as Saul N. Bernice. I needed to use up the extra N from my real name.’ He seemed exceptionally pleased with himself.
‘When did you change your name?’
He resumed eating. ‘After my eighteenth birthday,’ he replied between mouthfuls.
‘I decided it was time to sort out the necessary paperwork that would enable me to move further afield. So I adopted a new identity. You’d be amazed how easy it is to do that, if you have the money and can find the right people. ’
‘Where did you go?’
‘France, Spain, Morocco, Ireland, then back to England before finally settling in Suffolk. I went wherever the wind took me.’
‘What about marriage?’
‘I tried it once but not surprisingly it didn’t work out.’
‘Children?’
He shook his head of shaggy hair. ‘No. You?’
‘Three marriages but no children. It wasn’t to be.’
‘I always imagined you with a large family,’ he said, leaning back in his chair.
‘Lots of obnoxiously noisy children running amok. Grandchildren too. I pictured you wanting to recreate what you believed Lady Constance had given us at Hope Hall. And I suppose in part you have tried to hang on to that life by moving back there, haven’t you? ’
Something jibbed in the way he was speaking to her. He was patronising her, wasn’t he? ‘What do you mean by believed?’ she demanded.
‘You know, that whole happy family vibe. None of it was real back then. We weren’t a family.
How could we be? We were all so disparate.
We were just commodities to a posh woman who wanted to think she was doing good in the world.
We were nothing but toys to her, accessories in a pathetic fantasy she wanted to live out. ’
This was too much for Venetia. ‘No!’ she protested. ‘That’s not true, Lady Constance genuinely cared about us, she really did! I don’t know how you could twist the past the way you are.’
‘I’m not twisting anything. I’m just telling you how it was.’
‘No you’re not. You’re just a sad, bitter old man and I won’t have you destroy my childhood! And to think I’d thought about you all these years, wondering where you were and how you were, and always hoping for the best for you!’
He flung his knife and fork down, causing a couple on the nearest table to glance over. Although in all probability they had already been having a good gawp at them during Venetia’s outburst.
‘More fool you!’ he retorted. ‘And I suppose you thought this little reunion would result in a stupid happy ending for us, didn’t you?’
What precisely it was she had expected or hoped for when at the gallery Lucien had agreed to go somewhere so they could talk properly, it wasn’t this.
Walking alongside him while resting her arm on his to avoid slipping over in the snow, her heart had been bursting with the wonder of the moment, of finally being able to bring her life full circle.
Fighting against the tears that were threatening to fill her eyes, she stood up and pulled on her coat which had been on the back of her chair and in so doing knocked against the table, sending her brandy glass crashing to the floor.
‘Enjoy the rest of your meal,’ she said. ‘And the rest of your miserable life.’