She had spent a miserable year in London, renting a tiny flat in Bayswater and watching her savings run out. In the end, she had become a governess. What choice was there for a single woman who spoke passable French, who played the piano and who could recite works of all the major poets but who had no other discernible skills? In a spirit of adventure she had gone to America; first to Boston, then to Washington. Both the families she had worked for had been quite ghastly and of course they had treated her like dirt even though she was in every respect more experienced and (although she would never have said it herself), more refined. And the children! It was clear to her that American children were the worst in the world with no manners, no breeding and very little intelligence. She had, however, been well paid and she had saved every penny – every cent – that she had earned and when she could stand it no more, after ten long years she had returned home.
Home was Saxby-on-Avon. In a way it was the last place she wanted to be but it was where she had been born and where she had been brought up. Where else could she go? Did she want to spend the rest of her life in a bedsit in Bayswater? Fortunately, a job had come up at the local school and with all the money she had saved, she had just about been able to afford a mortgage. Magnus hadn’t helped her, of course. Not that she would have dreamed of asking. At first it had galled her, seeing him driving in and out of the big house where the two of them had once played. She still had a key – her own key – to the front door! She had never returned it and never would. The key was a symbol of everything she had lost but at the same time it reminded her that she had every right to stay. Her presence here was almost certainly a source of embarrassment for her brother. There was some solace in that.
Bitterness and anger swept through Clarissa Pye as she stood on her own in her kitchen, the kettle already hissing at her with a rising pitch. She had always been the clever one, her not Magnus. He had come bottom of the class and received dreadful reports while the teachers had been all over her. He had been lazy because he knew he could be. He had nothing to worry about. She was the one who’d had to go out and find work, any work, to support herself from day to day. He had everything and – worse – she was nothing to him. Why was she even going to this funeral? It suddenly struck her that her brother had been closer to Mary Blakiston than he had ever been to her. A common housekeeper, for heaven’s sake!
She turned and gazed at the cross, contemplating the little figure nailed into the wood. The Bible made it perfectly clear: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.’ She tried so hard to apply the words of Exodus, Chapter 20, Verse 17 to her life and, in many ways, she had almost succeeded. Of course she would like to be richer. She would like to have the heating on in the winter and not worry about the bills. That was only human. When she went to church, she often tried to remind herself that what had happened was not Magnus’s fault and even if he was not the kindest or the gentlest of brothers – not, actually by a long way – she must still try to forgive him. ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.’
It wasn’t working.
He’d invited her up for dinner now and then. The last time had been just a month ago, and sitting down to dinner in the grand hall with its family portraits and minstrel gallery, one of a dozen guests being served food and wine on fine plates and in crystal glasses, that was when the thought had first wormed itself into her head. It had remained there ever since. It was there now. She had tried to ignore it. She had prayed for it to go away. But in the end she’d had to accept that she was seriously contemplating a sin much more terrible than covetousness and, worse, she had taken the first step towards putting it into action. It was madness. Despite herself, she glanced upwards, thinking about what she had taken and what was hiding in her bathroom cabinet.
Thou shalt not kill.
She whispered the words but no sound came out. Behind her, the kettle began to scream. She snatched it up, forgetting that the handle would be hot, then slammed it down again with a little cry of pain. Tearfully, she washed her hand under the cold tap. It was nothing more than she deserved.
A few minutes later, forgetting her tea, she swept the hat off the table and left for the funeral.
6
The hearse had reached the outskirts of Saxby-on-Avon and, inevitably, its route took it past the entrance to Pye Hall with its stone griffins and now silent Lodge House. There was only one main road from Bath and to have approached the village any other way would have involved too much of a detour. Was there something unfortunate about carrying the dead woman past the very home where she had once lived? Had anyone asked them, the undertakers, Geoffrey Lanner and Martin Crane (both descended from the original founders) would have said quite the opposite. On the contrary, they would have insisted, is there not a certain symbolism in the coincidence, a sense even of closure? It was as if Mary Blakiston had come full circle.
Sitting in the back seat, and feeling sick and empty with the coffin lying behind him, Robert Blakiston glanced at his old house as if he had never seen it before. He did not turn his head to keep it in sight as they drove past. He did not even think about it. His mother had lived there. His mother was now dead, stretched out behind him. Robert was twenty-eight years old, pale and slender, with black hair cut short in a straight line that tracked across his forehead and continued in two perfect curves around each ear. He looked uncomfortable in the suit he was wearing, which was hardly surprising as it wasn’t his. It had been lent to him for the funeral. Robert did have a suit but his fiancée, Joy, had insisted that it wasn’t smart enough. She had managed to borrow a new suit from her father, which had been the cause of one argument, and had then persuaded him to wear it, which had led to another.
Joy was sitting next to him in the hearse. The two of them had barely spoken since they’d left Bath. Both of them were lost in their thoughts. Both of them were worried.
It sometimes seemed to Robert that he had been trying to escape from his mother almost from the day he had been born. He had actually grown up in the Lodge House, just the two of them living on top of each other, each of them dependent on the other but in different ways. He had nothing without her. She was nothing without him. Robert had gone to the local school where he had been considered a bright child, one that would do well if he could only set his mind to his studies a little more. He had few friends. It often worried the teachers to see him, standing on his own in the noisy playground, ignored by the other children. At the same time, it was completely understandable. There had been a tragedy when he was very young. His younger brother had died – a terrible accident – and his father had left the family soon afterwards, blaming himself. The sadness of it still clung to him and the other children avoided it as if they were afraid of becoming contaminated.
Robert never did very well in class. His teachers tried to make allowances for his poor behaviour and lack of progress, taking account of his circumstances, but even so they were secretly relieved when he reached sixteen and left. This, incidentally, had been in 1945, at the end of a war in which he had been too young to fight but which had taken his father away for long stretches of time. There were many children whose education had suffered and in that sense he was just another casualty. There was no question of his going to university. Even so, the year that followed was a disappointing one. He continued living with his mother, doing occasional odd jobs around the village. Everyone who knew him agreed that he was underselling himself. Despite everything, he was much too intelligent for that sort of life.