Bones of the Buried (3 page)

The dream could not last. Six months after Amy had flung herself into his arms in her dressing-room at the Alvin Theatre, they had regretfully come to the conclusion that they were not, after
all, in love with one another. There had been nothing so tacky as his finding her
in flagrante delicto
with her leading man, but he was wise enough to see that she was indeed on the point of
falling for a wealthy sprig of New York society. Better to bow out gracefully than be ejected from her apartment after some slanging match in which both parties said things they did not mean but
which left genuine hurt. No, Edward had kissed her, told her she would always have a place in his heart – that they would share some very special memories. She, for her part, had wept,
whispered tender regrets in his ear but, in the end, had not tried to shake him in his resolve to return to England and find something to do which might stretch him.

‘I’m not cut out to be a lotus-eater, darling,’ he had told Amy. ‘I’m getting lazy and that turns me into a dull dog. You are already a great star, but you still
have a world to conquer and it wouldn’t be right for me to hang on your coat-tails like some stage-door johnny until we hated the sight of each other.’

‘Never that!’ she exclaimed. ‘You and I discovered each other before any of this . . .’ She waved her arms vaguely at the bed with its pink silk sheets, the champagne
bobbing in the silver ice bucket, the vases of flowers that bedecked every available surface – the evidence of a glorious ‘first night’ when she had glittered in a Gershwin
musical which looked set to run as long as she was prepared to star in it. ‘You and I will always be . . . a part of one another.’

But she had not begged him to stay and so they had parted, still a little in love with one another, basking in a relationship from which both had drawn strength. Though Amy would not have said
it or even thought it out with cold, deliberate logic, it had helped her career to be seen with the wealthy, good-looking brother of an English duke. It had given her glamour and status –
made her invulnerable to the sneers of society matrons and eased her passage into the centre of what Edward called ‘Vanderbilt City’. She acknowledged in her heart that he gave her much
more than status: he was older than she, for one thing – almost thirty-five – and absolutely at ease with his own place in society. She had been brought up by two elderly aunts on
Canada’s new frontier and seen nothing of the world until she had come to London to meet the father who had abandoned her almost at birth. A few months later, she had been whisked off to New
York by a theatrical agent who had been taken to see her singing in a Soho night-club and had recognised star-quality when he saw it.

It could be lonely on the Great White Way, even frightening. So much was expected of her and, when she delivered, they expected more and, inevitably, success brought enemies. The society gossip
columnists had interspersed adulation with little spiteful dagger-thrusts of speculation and rumour. She was the daughter of the Canadian press lord, Joseph Weaver, but there was something
mysterious there. She had appeared from nowhere. Was she his illegitimate child by a mistress he had turned away when he was quite a young man? There was certainly no word of any mother. Amy was
able to brush off the innuendoes and the spite but there were evenings when she would read some lie about herself and run and bury her face in Edward’s shoulder and sob as if she were still a
lonely, abandoned child.

Now, back in London, lying in his bath in his spacious if rather spartan rooms, Edward hummed contentedly to himself one of his favourite songs from
Girl Crazy
: ‘Boy! What Love Has
Done To Me!’ Amy had sung it in the show and it still sent shivers down his spine. He could hear Fenton in the little kitchen preparing his breakfast. Unexpectedly, Fenton had adored New York
and had been reluctant to leave it. Edward had heard that he had been offered a position as butler to one of the city’s ‘royal families’ and had been touched that he had in the
end decided to stay as his gentleman’s personal gentleman. Nothing was ever said between the two of them about the temptation which had been resisted but Edward noticed that Fenton would on
occasion drop American phrases into his conversation and his breakfast eggs might be offered him ‘easy-over’ or ‘sunny-side up’.

Edward resurfaced and made a determined effort not to think of Amy. He was content to be back in London. Or rather he was not content yet, but he was determined to find a cure for his
restlessness. While he had been in New York, he had received a letter from an old Eton and Cambridge friend with a high, if ill-defined, position in the Foreign Office, offering him what sounded
very much like a job. Basil Thoroughgood was too canny to commit to paper a form of words which might be construed as anything quite as definite but there was certainly the offer of lunch and
‘a chat’. Edward had cabled that he expected to be in London on February 18th and had been surprised to receive a ‘wireless’ half-way across the Atlantic which set one
o’clock at Brooks’s – the club of which they were both members – on the 19th, only his second day back in the metropolis. It hinted at urgency on Thoroughgood’s part
but Edward could scarcely believe it. Unless Thoroughgood was a different young man from the slouching, half-asleep character he remembered from the university, he would have laid odds on
‘urgent’ not being a word in his vocabulary.

His musings were interrupted by the muffled sound of knocking and then the noise of Fenton opening the door to the apartment and exchanging some sort of greeting. Edward stopped soaping himself
and tried to make out who this unreasonably early visitor could possibly be. Confound it all, he thought irritably, couldn’t he even get dressed and have his breakfast in peace? In any case,
as far as he was aware, no one, except Thoroughgood, knew he was back in London, and none of his friends – if they had, in some magical way, discovered he was back in town – would have
dreamed of calling on him before ten o’clock at the earliest and he knew for a fact that it was only a little after nine.

After a few more moments of puzzlement, he heard Fenton’s respectful knock on the bathroom door.

‘What is it? Did I hear someone at the door, Fenton?’

‘Yes, my lord, there is a lady who wishes to speak with you.’

‘A lady? But I am in my bath. Did you tell her I was in my bath, Fenton?’

‘I did, my lord, and she said she would wait.’

Edward splashed angrily and yanked at the chain with the plug attached to it. All the pleasure of the bath leaked away with the water and, as he towelled himself, he called, ‘You
haven’t told me who it is, Fenton, who breaks in upon my ablutions at this ridiculously early hour.’

There was something cold and wet in the pit of his stomach – not the sponge lying abandoned on the wooden bath mat – which warned that he knew perfectly well the identity of his
unexpected guest. There was only one among his many female friends and acquaintances who would have the nerve to visit a young man in his rooms without prior appointment and before that young man
had got outside eggs and bacon, and that was a girl who ought to be in Spain.

‘It is Miss Browne, my lord.’

‘Verity! I knew it!’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Edward was almost sure he heard Fenton add under his breath, ‘I am afraid to say.’ Fenton did not approve of Verity. It wasn’t just that she exhibited a contempt for the tried
and tested conventions of good society which he held to be sacred. It wasn’t even because she had a job – she was a journalist, a foreign correspondent no less, for Lord Weaver’s
New Gazette
– when she should have been content with a husband, babies and a string of pearls. What shocked Fenton to the core of his being was that Verity Browne was an avowed
communist, communism being a political philosophy of which Fenton had the greatest suspicion. What right had girls – that is to say nicely brought-up young ladies and Verity Browne was
certainly one of these – to have political opinions at all? In short, in Fenton’s view, Verity Browne, though in many ways a charming young lady, was not someone whom he could ever
esteem. She was pretty – he could admit that. She was plucky – he had direct evidence of her fighting spirit. She had money; she dressed and spoke like a lady, so it made it all the
more inexcusable that she did not behave like one.

‘Tell her I will be out in a jiffy,’ Edward called as he stropped his razor and stirred up a storm in his soap tin with his badger-hair shaving brush.

‘Very good, my lord,’ said Fenton gloomily.

‘Oh, and ply her with coffee and kippers, will you.’

When Edward burst into the dining-room ten minutes later – partially clothed, his tow-coloured hair not yet laid low by his ivory-backed hairbrushes – he was full of questions and
complaints but these died on his lips unuttered. He was brought up short by Verity’s appearance. The merry, plump-faced child he had sparred with six months earlier had become a woman. She
had cut her hair short as a boy’s. Her face, if not actually gaunt, was thin and spoke of poor food and too little of it. Her skin was pale and the smudges under her eyes indicated that she
was under considerable strain and not sleeping properly. He hesitated – for only a moment – before going over and kissing her on the cheek but she had seen his surprise – no doubt
had anticipated it – and said, with a wry smile, ‘As bad as that?’

‘No! I mean, of course not, Verity. It is splendid to see you after so long. I just thought . . . I just thought you looked too thin. How long are you going to be in London? Have I got
time and permission to fatten you up?’

Verity smiled and put her head on one side and was once again the light-hearted bird of a girl he had . . . he had almost . . . no, damn it! the girl he
had
loved the previous summer when
they had joined forces to discover the killer of one of the Duke of Mersham’s guests – the Duke being Edward’s elder brother.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘At least, not here. I have to be back in Madrid the day after tomorrow.’

‘So I won’t see you again?’

‘Well, that was why I came here. I was hoping you would come with me.’

‘To Spain!’ he said in amazement. ‘Why? What has happened?’

Verity laughed – a little guiltily, he thought. ‘Maybe I just wanted your company . . . but no,’ she said, her face clouding over. ‘You’re right. Something has
happened.’

‘To David?’ inquired Edward with a flash of understanding.

‘How did you guess?’ said Verity rather bitterly. ‘Yes, something has happened to David.’

Edward drew Verity down into a chair and watched her closely as Fenton provided her with black coffee. She waved away his offer of eggs and bacon but asked for a cigarette. Edward proffered his
gold cigarette case and was concerned to see her hand was shaking so much that she had some difficulty in extracting one. He lit it for her and she inhaled gratefully. ‘That’s good.
It’s hard to get American cigarettes in Madrid.’

‘I didn’t even know you smoked.’

‘I do now,’ she said shortly.

‘Tell me what has happened and how I can help,’ he said calmly, studiously avoiding any hint of ‘lean-on-my-shoulder-little-woman’, which he knew she would detest.

‘You’ve not seen anything in the papers then?’

‘The English papers? No, what have I missed? You see, I only returned from New York yesterday and . . .’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Verity drily. ‘And how is Amy? I gather she is quite a star now.’

There was something so sour about the way Verity said this that Edward gazed at her with surprise and hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Verity, seeing the look on his face. She put out a hand and timidly laid it on his. ‘I mean, I am delighted . . . really pleased . . . for you
both.’

‘Oh, as for that, there’s no “both” about it. We’re just chums, don’t you know.’ Edward got up and went over to the coffee tray on the table and
refilled his cup, anxious that Verity should not see his face and guess at his real feelings. He felt something on his cheek and rubbed at it with his fingers. He was surprised to see it was a
fleck of blood. He must have nicked himself shaving. He turned to Verity and showed her his hand. ‘Love lies bleeding.’ If it was a joke, neither of them laughed. ‘Tell me about
David,’ he said more firmly. ‘Is he in danger or what?’

David Griffiths-Jones was the man Verity respected most in the world. He had been her lover – Edward knew that for a fact – and still was as far as he was aware, but he was a cold
fish and Verity certainly did not have the look of a woman in the middle of a love affair. He and Griffiths-Jones were natural enemies; they had been at Cambridge together but while Griffiths-Jones
had become a committed Communist Party worker, Edward had come to hate everything the Party stood for and not just because ‘social justice’ seemed to involve hanging people like him
from lamp-posts or at least curtailing their personal liberty ‘in the interests of the proletariat’.

Edward believed passionately in personal liberty, although he accepted it did not mean much if one were a slave to poverty. He regarded with suspicion any political party – on the right or
the left – which claimed to be acting in the interests of the working class. Everything he had seen of Fascism disgusted him but he was convinced that one did not have to espouse communism to
be anti-Fascist. He had listened to David Griffiths-Jones and Verity go on about ‘the proletariat’ and ‘the working classes’ as though working people were little better than
sheep needing a shepherd. If the shepherds were going to be of Griffiths-Jones’ persuasion, he foresaw they would ‘fold’ their charges into the abattoir.

He distinguished, however, between genuinely good-hearted idealists such as Verity, misguided though they might be, and cold, calculating ideologues, such as Griffiths-Jones, obsessed with
‘the masses’, a meaningless class definition in his view. But, if Edward were honest with himself, his political differences with David Griffiths-Jones were exacerbated by their locking
of horns over Verity. No word of love had ever been spoken between Verity and himself, but there was some sort of understanding between them which probably neither of them would have been able or
indeed willing to define. As far as Edward could see, Verity was completely in the other man’s thrall. He had commanded her to go to Spain with him and she had obeyed. She was to promote the
communist cause by writing for Lord Weaver’s
New Gazette
, and for the
Daily Worker
, the official organ of the Communist Party, describing the political struggle in Spain in
terms of communism – good – against Fascism – evil – when even Edward knew it was something much more complicated. To be fair to Verity, the three or four reports of hers he
had read in the
New Gazette
had seemed honest attempts to report the truth of the situation, so maybe she had too much integrity to toe the Party line as closely as Griffiths-Jones would
like.