In the Blood - Philip Loraine

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but Kate knew she was nothing of the sort, or only at certain moments in certain lights. She knew she had good eyes, clear grey-blue, good skin, good hair and, thank God, a good slim figure; but, as she’d learned with some surprise over the years, these attributes were all subject to one other mysterious element: her personality was ‘attractive’, not only to young builders but to almost everybody—male or female—who encountered it. She accepted this as an endowment of providence, not even realizing how much of it was due to the fact that she liked people; was genuinely interested in what they had to say, gave them her whole attention.

      Tea dispensed, she went back to the living-room and found Daniel, reading glasses on the end of his nose, examining what looked like a letter. She said, ‘Nothing really interesting, I bet—there never is.’

      Daniel waved a sheet of creamy, damp-blotched paper. ‘This is interesting. Weird really.’ He pushed it across the table towards her.

      My dear Lydia,

      I’ve asked Sally to read you this letter, and I’ve explained to her that it concerns a very private conversation you and I had last Saturday evening. (I must add, in passing, that you couldn’t possibly have found a nicer, more tactful and loyal companion and/or pair of eyes.)

      Lydia, don’t be angry with me, but I really do feel that somewhere, deep in the subconscious perhaps, this bee in your bonnet is connected with Richard’s death. Yes, I know it happened ten years ago, but you loved him so very, very much and, whatever some people say, one doesn’t ‘get over’ the loss of a beloved son, particularly under such sudden and shocking circumstances.

      The other night you called me a coward. I know I’ve never been as strong-minded as you, but I absolutely believe that in this case I’m talking sense. Whether you’re right or wrong will make very little difference now; either way you’d be opening a disastrous Pandora’s Box, and either way people will just dismiss you as a ‘batty old woman’. Because the fact is, we are both old and one does tend to imagine things.

      By now I’ve probably irritated you quite enough, but I must repeat what I said when we parted. If you do decide to take steps, for God’s sake talk to Andrew first. I know he’s a bore, like most lawyers, but he hasn’t known you for fifty years like old Godfrey, so his advice would at least be unbiased, and perhaps he can convince you to let sleeping (and perhaps dangerous) dogs lie.

      Lastly, Lydia my dear, I must confess how sorry I am that I lost my temper when you said it was all in the blood—and I certainly shouldn’t have used the word ‘snobbish’. I was overwrought and so desperately worried about your state of mind.

      I’ve asked Sally to burn this when she’s read it to you.

      God bless you, my dear,

      as ever yours …

      The signature was not only an illegible scrawl but a brown stain of damp ran across the middle of it; moreover, the writer had put neither a date nor her address at the top of the page.

      Brother and sister regarded each other in silence with identical eyes. Daniel’s hair was also the exact glossy brown of Kate’s; he was two years younger than his sibling, twenty-one, and like her, good-looking, though in his case the looks were pinched and hollowed by the years of pain he’d suffered because of his legs. She would not at the moment consider his legs, she spent too much of her time worrying about them. Besides, they were both disturbed by the letter which had so much of the past, of their own selves, contained in it.

      The Lydia to whom it was written had been their paternal grandmother, and the Richard whom she had loved so very very much had been their own father; moreover his death ‘under such sudden and shocking circumstances’ had been caused by the same car crash which had crippled his eight-year-old son. Kate, in the back seat, had survived unhurt, and their mother happened to have stayed at home that afternoon, making curtains. Twelve, no thirteen years ago. If Kate closed her eyes she could see, in the most exact detail, the blue BMW crumpled against the concrete buttress of the flyover, firemen, ambulance crews, police at work around it, the line of crawling cars from which shocked or merely curious faces contemplated disaster, the angered policeman who was urging them to get a move on. It had been one of those hot white summer days, the trees almost black against a glaring sky: somewhere the distant grumble of combine harvesters. Luckily the car had not caught fire or they would never, they later said, have been able to cut Daniel out of it alive.

      Brother and sister knew that they were sharing, insofar as they could, the same thoughts and memories; they always knew when this was so. Daniel tore them both away by saying, ‘What do you suppose the bee in her bonnet was on that occasion?’

      ‘God knows! She always had one.’ No need to add that they were often eccentric or unreasonable. For instance, she had never really forgiven her grandson and granddaughter for surviving the crash when her darling Richard had not. She knew how unfair this was, being neither stupid nor bigoted, but, as obviously, whenever she thought of them or—worse—whenever her cool grey eyes came to rest on them, she could not stem the surge of anger and grief. In fact, it was some years before she could bring herself to speak to them at all. As for their mother, the widow, Lydia had considered her eventual remarriage to be outright betrayal, even though it came five years after Richard’s death; but then she had naturally never liked her daughter-in-law in the first place.

      Daniel said, ‘I’d almost forgotten Sally.’

      ‘We only met her two or three times.’

      ‘She was marvellous with grandmother, I don’t know how she stuck it.’

      ‘I think she quite loved her in a funny kind of way.’

      ‘I wonder what became of her.’

      Kate considered possibilities and replied, ‘Well, if she’s not married, men must be stupider than I thought.’

      Daniel pulled the letter to his side of the table and stared at it, frowning. ‘“A disastrous Pandora’s Box”! She must have got her teeth into something really nasty. Who’s this lawyer called Andrew?’

      ‘No idea.’

      ‘I suppose Sally put the letter on that useless shelf, and then drove herself around the bend looking for it, wanting to burn it as instructed.’ He peered at the bottom of the page. ‘Looks like an R, doesn’t it? Rosamund?’

      ‘We’re not likely to know, Daniel, we never … really entered into her life, did we?’

      ‘No date either.’ He sounded disapproving. ‘Just what you’d expect of a woman who thinks all lawyers are bores!’ His work, at which he was expert, was research, legal and to a lesser degree historical; dates mattered to him. The university had started him off in this capacity when yet another operation had put paid to his chances of a degree in Law. Research meant frequent visits to various libraries which he managed in a specially converted Mini with automatic transmission; his right leg could operate the pedals … but for how long? Only last week the specialist had told Kate that the leg was deteriorating; she had already sensed this; Daniel made no mention of it, naturally. His bravery, the sight of his brown head bent over the letter, and his glasses sliding down his nose as usual, brought tears to her eyes, tears of pity and of anger—she loved him so very dearly.

      Brushing away any sign of emotion with the back of her hand, and pretending the movement was really made to stifle a yawn (he couldn’t bear to be pitied) she found herself wondering whether this all-absorbing love for him tended to unbalance her feeling for other men. Recent events indicated that it might be the case; she had become embroiled in the kind of emotional trouble for which previous experience had, very evidently, failed to prepare her.

      She was relieved to be jolted out of these thoughts by Daniel saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute!’ The semi-trained legal mind had come to life. ‘I wonder if the envelope’s here.’ He spread out the mess of old bills and shopping lists, and found a matching crumple of cream-coloured paper. ‘Yes. Same writing.’ He smoothed it out carefully and held it nearer to the window. ‘By God, you can actually read the postmark for once. Salisbury.

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