Eleven Pipers Piping (18 page)

“I can’t imagine this snow lasting long.” Tom studied her face, creased with anxiety. “It doesn’t usually. Not in this part of the country.”

“And what does all this mean for the funeral?”

“The weather?”

“Yes, I … why? Is there something else?”

Some look of doubt must have registered in his expression, for he saw consternation in her eyes. “Well,” he began gently, “Will was still a young man, really. I expect there’ll be a …”

“Postmortem? That’s all right, you can say it, Tom. I’m not squeamish. And why don’t you sit? We might stay here. It’s cosier, I think.”

“Sorry.” Tom took a Windsor chair next to an old oak refectory table that was the centrepiece of the room. “For some people, the notion of a postmortem comes as a shock. I suppose it did for me, in a way.”

“Because of your wife.”

“Yes.” How Lisbeth had died had seemed obvious, hardly in need of examination. He had come across her supine, life’s blood drained from her, with a knife, a crude shiv of razor and duct tape, clearly visible, penetrating the flesh that he had adored with all his being. That her body had been thus desecrated had been unbearable at the time. It was hardly less so now. “There could be an inquest, too, Caroline.”

“Inquest?” He noted her body stiffen.

“I’m sure it would only be a formality, but it may mean a delay.”

Her back was to him. He watched one hand reach for a glass canister and remove its top. Then she reached up into an overhead cupboard, where she took a cafetière from a jumble of mugs and
cups. Silently, she spooned coffee into the beaker. Her head was bent, exposing the vulnerability of her neck, with its wisps of untidy blond hairs.

“How …,” she began after a moment, her voice tentative. “How did Will … die?”

Tom let a moment pass. “I’m not sure we properly know.”

“No, I mean, what happened at the supper?”

“Did John say nothing when he fetched you at Noze?”

“When he …? Oh! No. Well, I think you know what a man of few words John is. And Nick couldn’t tell me much. I gather he was very drunk.”

“I’m afraid we’d all had too much—even your priest, who had promised to set a good example. We were fortunate Judith Ingley arrived when she did. She sort of took charge and I think most of us were grateful.” He gnawed at his lip and gave a passing thought to the Last Supper and those obtuse disciples who didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong; surely a woman among the Twelve would have been sensitive to Jesus’s mood. “Caroline,” he said, “I feel very much that we could have done something for Will.”

“What do you mean?” She placed two mugs on the counter and turned to him again.

Tom ran his fingers along the polished edge of the table. “He wasn’t himself, really, much of the evening.” Although, saying it, he could well describe Will as not really being himself the last several months. “He seemed preoccupied, but later he looked—well, I said peaky, but Judith, when she met him in the lobby for the first time, seemed to immediately think something wasn’t right, and said so. She’d trained as a nurse, you see. But Will was adamant that nothing was wrong. ‘Wind,’ he told us. We should have insisted on fetching a doctor or calling an ambulance right then and there. It might have made all the difference.” He found himself wringing his hands. “Caroline, I’m so sorry.”

Caroline seemed to look through him as she held his gaze. “I
don’t think there was anything you could have done,” she responded finally. Her tone gave no clue to her feelings.

“I wish I could be sure.”

“The weather, Tom. It’s not likely anyone could have reached Thornford in time. And with no doctor in the village …”

“Possibly. But you don’t know, do you, until you try.”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Caroline murmured.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just a little joke between Will and me. It was a play on his name, of course. As long as he was around, there was a way.” Tears spurted from the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice thick.

At that moment the kettle’s hiss became a scream, filling the kitchen with its insistence.

“Sit,” Tom commanded, rising. “I can make the coffee.”

Caroline did as bidden, while Tom poured the hot water into the cafetière and placed it on the table.

“I should say,” he said after a moment as he waited for the grounds to settle and for Caroline to compose herself, “because Nick may well tell you in any case, that I happened to overhear a little of your conversation earlier, in the hotel. You said, ‘Where there’s a will,’ et cetera, to Nick. I do apologise.”

“Oh.” Caroline, wiping at her eyes, gave him a wary glance. “Well, I expect it’s nothing that isn’t being gossiped about in the village anyway.”

“As I said, I heard very little. It’s none of my business, and it will go no farther.”

“You really are a bit of a townie, aren’t you?”

Tom laughed, glad to see her smile for the first time. “Yes, I suppose. I do have trouble with the tittletattle that seems endemic to village life.”

“As opposed to the tittletattle that seems endemic to Church life?”

“You may have a point there.” Tom pressed the plunger into the blackening liquid. “But really, Caroline, will you be able to manage?”

“I don’t know … No, that’s not true: I do know. I will manage, and I’ll manage just fine. It’s what Will would expect of me, yes? Now,” she added with a new resolution in her voice, “do you take coffee black or white?”

“Black.”

“I’ll have cream. No, I’ll get it,” she said, rising and moving to the fridge.

Tom brought the mugs to the table and sat down.

“And the tower.” Caroline placed a matching milk jug on the table. “You found Will in Thorn Court’s tower.”

“I’m sorry. You didn’t know?”

“No, I was told, and went up before the mortuary van arrived yesterday.”

“Oh, Caroline—”

“I just …” She shrugged and sat down.

Tom understood the strange hunger for details. He had felt it, too, in the wake of Lisbeth’s death.

“It was Judith who found him, really,” he explained. “She insisted on going up first. To spare us, perhaps, she being a nurse, but, really, there was nothing to spare us from. Will looked simply as if he were resting. Caroline, are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes.” She poured coffee into Tom’s mug. “I do.”

“I suppose,” Tom continued, watching the liquid swirl against the side of the china, “I wondered why he went up the tower, but I can only think now he knew something was fatally wrong, knew we were trapped in snow, and didn’t want to cause concern. It’s remarkable, really.”

“Men.” Caroline’s tone conveyed a world of meaning: the fear of losing face, the felt need to hide pain or suffering.

“It’s the training, I expect. I mean the process of making soft
boys into hard men, but I suppose it’s more acute when you’re an athlete as Will was.”

“Yes.” Caroline poured coffee into her own mug. “I witnessed the pickup match where the cricket ball hit broke his nose. I’d have been shrieking in pain, but not a peep from Will. And of course, it’s not simply physical. I’m told he never complained about the blow fate dealt him when injuries ended his professional career so early, though that was before my time.”

Tom knew the story. Stress fractures in his lower back had sidelined Will; when he completed a long rehabilitation process, he opted to coach the game rather than play it professionally, first in Australia, then in England.

“I adored the tower as a child.” Caroline stared off into the middle distance. “It was my
Secret Garden
—you know the book? Like Archibald Craven, my grandfather had had it closed, sealed off. I was never sure why. Anyway, when I was about eight or nine, I happened to find the key in the back of an old desk in the living room here in the Annex. There’s a modern one now, but then it was a Yale style—ancient—and somehow, with some childish intuition, I knew exactly which lock it fit. I remember it was summer holiday, August, actually a rainy day, which may be why I was poking about indoors, and I remember me waiting for my grandfather to take his nap, which he did religiously in the afternoons when the hotel was at its least busy. After my parents married, he moved out of the Annex and into rooms in the hotel proper—near the stairwell to the tower—so I had to be careful.”

She paused to pour cream into her coffee. “Oh, Tom, it was magical, slipping in the key, opening the door, then going up and being bathed in this glowing light. The clouds had lifted and the rain had stopped by this time and I could look down over the village towards the South Downs and the patchwork fields. I felt like the queen of the castle. I remember I even considered growing my hair so I could be Rapunzel.”

“I sense an instance of all good things coming to an end,” Tom remarked, noticing her expression falter.

“Yes and no. Of course, as you might expect, I couldn’t resist inviting a friend or two up. Soon enough word got back to my grandfather, and he was quite adamant I never go up there again, but after some considerable fuss on my part—really, I think I was quite awful about it—he relented and let me play in the tower whenever I wished, as long as I played alone.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, he died not long after—when I was ten—and my father almost immediately sold Thorn Court and moved us to Australia.

“My grandfather was a wonderful man—at least he was to me. He made my childhood here an idyll. I never knew it as a private residence, as he had—only as a hotel, but I loved it so—all the guests and the activity, eating in the dining room with all the formality, the wonderful gardens, the swimming pool, the elegant wedding parties, the ladies’ lunches, tours to Dartmoor and the coast—all the sorts of things Will and I were trying to restore.” She took a sip of coffee. “I suppose all the activity around the hotel and my grandfather’s skilful intervention were what kept me from the truth: In Australia, with just the three of us, I realised how unsuccessful my parents’ marriage really was. Of course, it didn’t last long after that. My father had a notion of investing in a shooting estate in western Victoria—you can see how Adam might come by his interests—but he really didn’t have the patience—or the interest, really—in the work and so he returned to England after the divorce. My mother, as I said, found Australia very much to her liking, liberating, I suppose—she had been a vicar’s daughter—I must have told you this—and her home life, as she tells it, was repressive. Naturally, in those days, one stayed with one’s mother.”

“You’d rather have been with your father?”

“Oh, no, my mother was the much better parent. I love her dearly, though she’s a bit flighty. I’d rather have been in England, though. I could never quite get used to Australia. Perhaps if we had
moved when I was four or five, but at ten … Australia seemed so alien, like another planet—all the plants and animals are so unlike anything here, the heat can be absolutely scorching, and of course in school, you’re teased unmercifully for being a Pom. Once we moved to Melbourne after the divorce it was better, but my first years were spent in a little village called Edenhope, where we were very much the outsiders.

“However”—she regarded him slyly—“the boys were very attractive. Not quite so … tentative as here.”

Tom smiled. “I recall you saying that at the marriage preparation course in autumn.”

With the Reverend Barbara Boswell, vicar of All Saints in nearby Hamlyn Ferrers, he had invited engaged couples in the area to a Saturday gathering, in the Old School Room, to help them build the foundations of a lasting marriage. Caroline had gamely volunteered herself and Will to join them and be the “old marrieds” and offer the wisdom of their experience. The icebreaker had been for each couple to tell the story of how they met. Tom, though without his better half, volunteered his: A hopeless non-swimmer, he’d been pitched off the punt he’d been guiding down the River Cam by some clever dick grabbing the top of his pole as he passed under Clare College Bridge; an awfully attractive young medical student, possessing a very good senior swimming certificate, reading by the bordering lawn responded to his helpless flopping about and saved him from drowning in the water’s green gloom.

Somewhat less farcical was the meeting of Caroline Stanhope and Will Moir: Will had returned to Australia from England one blazing December to be in a friend’s wedding party. To the wedding rehearsal dinner, he wore shorts and a polo shirt, a coordinated ensemble of brown and maroon he had bought in the hotel men’s store. At the door of the restaurant an attractive woman shot him an amused glance and said, “Are you dressed for supper or are you dressed for Christmas?” To those untroubled by colour-blindness,
such as the attractive woman named Caroline, he was wearing bright red shorts and an electric green shirt. And so it began. Within six months they were married.

As Will had related the story in his twangy accent, Tom had been struck forcefully by a wellspring of tenderness flowing between them. He thought Will possessed by wonder and a kind of irrational pride at having captured the heart of a woman of Caroline’s poise. At the start that morning, he had been fidgety, restless, as if he didn’t really wish to submit to this kind of public inspection, dragged to this event by his wife, but Will had relaxed as Caroline, seated beside him on one of the Old School Room’s dilapidated couches, placed her hand over his and seemed to press it into the chink between cushions with a kind of restrained passion. The set of her features, next to Will’s, was perhaps less decipherable—pleasure and embarrassment at the tribute being paid, yes, but something, too, of regret, a tenderness of pity in her lowered eyes. Perhaps other memories had penetrated her thoughts then, for as the morning progressed, in an exercise on forgiveness that placed the men on the opposite side of the room from the women, Caroline revealed that beds of roses do contain thorns: She and Will had parted company for a time in their marriage, though the details, at least within Tom’s earshot, were not forthcoming.

Now, as they sipped their coffee in silence, Tom wondered what had pushed them apart and what had returned them each to the other.
Married lives are communities in miniature
, the Queen Mother had once said, an observation he had woven into a sermon. Her Majesty hadn’t elaborated, but she had provided him the seed. Marriages had private and public identities, and like communities were marked by constant renegotiation and recommitment.