Painting The Darkness (2 page)

‘
I have not come here to antagonize you, nor to shock Constance, merely to seek her support in establishing my identity. There are, you see, those who wish to deny that I am James Davenall
.’

These last words Constance must have heard. She pulled up sharply and frowned towards me in anxious puzzlement. A moment before, she had been the placidly beautiful woman I had married. Now, at the audible mention of that name, there crossed her face that cast of grief I had not seen since the earliest days of our acquaintance
.

‘
What does this mean?’ she said
.

I should have answered, should have prepared her, should have armed her against him. But I hesitated, and in the moment of my hesitation Norton turned and looked directly at her. I could not see his face, but I could see Constance’s and could read
there
, as he must have done, the uncertainty that proclaimed louder than any words: it might be true
.

‘
It’s no ghost you see, Connie,’ he said. ‘It’s me, true enough. I’m so sorry to have deceived you
.’

She moved closer, eyeing him with rigid scrutiny, erasing from her features that initial eloquent moment of doubt. ‘There is no need to apologize,’ she said levelly. ‘You have not deceived me. There has been a mistake. You are not James Davenall
.’

He replied softly, with nerveless conviction. ‘You know that I am
.’

‘
James Davenall took his own life eleven years ago
.’

‘
Until a moment ago, you could believe that. Now you know it isn’t true
.’

I decided it was time to intervene. I stepped forward and took Constance’s arm. There we stood, together against him, we on the grass, he on the gravel, shadows lengthening about us. ‘What do you want of us, Mr Norton?
’

‘
I had hoped that Connie – that your wife – would be prepared to admit that she knows me. I have been turned away by my family and—
’

‘
You have been to them?’ said Constance
.

‘
Yes. I have been to them – and they have set their faces against me.’ He glanced at his feet, as if pained by the thought, then back at us or, rather, at Constance, for I had become a mere observer of their exchanges. ‘Will you join them in their pretence – or listen to my explanation? There is much that I have to tell you
.’

‘
Mr Norton,’ she replied, ‘I do not know what purpose you think will be served by this macabre fiction, but you may take it that I wish to hear no more of it
.’

‘
If only it were as simple as that,’ he said. ‘I tried to pretend myself that James Davenall no longer existed – and I didn’t succeed. Now others are making the same mistake
.’

‘
Excuse me, Mr Norton. There is nothing more to be said.’ She turned and walked back towards the house. As he watched her go, I scanned his face for the deceit or devilry I expected to find there, but found only a questing sadness. Absurdly, it made me feel almost callous in saying what I said next
.

‘
Will you leave now? Or must I summon a constable?
’

He seemed to ignore the question. ‘I’m staying in the hotel at Paddington station. When Connie’s had a chance to think about it …
’

‘
We will not be thinking about you, Mr Norton. We will be doing our best to pretend you never came here, which is what I advise you to do as well. You have heard our last word on the matter
.’

‘
I think not
.’

Before I could say anything else, he turned and walked smartly back through the side-gate and away down the drive. As soon as he was out of sight, I headed for the house
.

I found Constance in the drawing-room. She was standing before the wood-framed mirror that topped the mantelpiece, around which was arranged a selection of family photographs: her parents, mine, her late brother, Patience playing with a bauble at the age of three months. And our wedding: May Day 1875. An assortment of Trenchards and Sumners striking poses in the palm-fringed ballroom of a Wiltshire hotel. A perfect marriage of church and trade and the ghost at the feast still seven years in the future
.

I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘He’s gone now. I’m sorry if he upset you
.’

She shuddered. ‘It’s not that
.’

‘
There’s no possibility, is there, that he could be who he says he is? I know Davenall was supposed to have drowned, but …
’

Her eyes met mine in the mirror. ‘You saw it, too, then?
’

‘
I saw nothing. It’s for you to say. You knew him
.’

She turned and looked at me directly. ‘James died. We all know that. There was … a resemblance. But not enough. And yet …
’

‘
You can’t be absolutely certain?
’

‘
Perhaps I should have listened to him
.’

‘
It would have nailed the lie soon enough if you had. As it is, he can claim we didn’t give him a fair chance to state his case
.’

She fell silent, leaning against me and rocking slightly as she thought. I heard the clock ticking with exaggerated solemnity on the mantelpiece beside us. From above came the patter of
Patience
’s feet in the nursery and a splash of water: it was bath-time for our daughter
.

‘
He’s just a fraudster, Connie. There’s a baronetcy at stake – and an inheritance, too. Missing heirs are meat and drink to these fellows. Remember the Tichborne nonsense?
’

She looked up at me as if she had not heard a word. ‘I need to be sure. It is … just possible. We must speak to his family
.’

‘
Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll see them – tonight if I can. That should settle it
.’

III

A little after six o’clock that evening, William Trenchard picked up a cab in the Wellington Road and bade it take him to Bladeney House, Chester Square, the London residence of Sir Hugo Davenall. He sat well back in the cab and smoked a pipe to calm his nerves while the driver made good time through the sabbath-emptied streets.

Quite why he was so nervous he was not sure. Socially, he and the Davenalls were clearly worlds apart. Had Constance been their daughter, marriage to the son of a shopkeeper, which, making all due allowances for old Lionel Trenchard’s success, William undoubtedly was, would have been out of the question. He had, as a matter of fact, never met any of them. His knowledge of them was entirely confined to what Constance had told him. Perhaps this, after all, was the root of his present insecurity. An unannounced visit on a Sunday evening was certain to be forgiven in view of the compelling circumstances, but the suddenly shifting sands of what had always seemed to him so firmly, if tragically, founded – his wife’s past – were quite another matter. As the cab turned into Baker Street and slowed reverentially at sight of a Salvation Army parade in the Marylebone Road, Trenchard began to review in his mind what little he actually knew.

James Davenall and Constance’s late brother, Roland
Sumner
, had been contemporaries at Oxford. James commenced paying suit to Constance shortly after coming down, and their engagement was announced in the autumn of 1870. Canon Sumner viewed this imminent connection with a titled family as a social triumph – which it was – and arranged for his daughter’s wedding to take place in Salisbury Cathedral. Barely a week before the ceremony was due, in June 1871, Davenall vanished utterly, the only clue to his intentions being a note left at his family’s country residence near Bath, which seemed to allow no room for doubt that he meant to take his life. His movements were traced to London, where a cabby recalled dropping him near the riverside in Wapping. There, it was assumed, he had drowned himself, the Thames bearing his corpse out to sea. No reason for such an act was ever adduced, its total inexplicability serving only to deepen the tragedy.

When Trenchard first met Constance, she was still bowed down by the numb grief of Davenall’s disappearance, followed as it was within five months by her brother Roland’s death in a riding accident. Trenchard never wished to see her again as she was then: habituated to mourning with a pellucid, frozen beauty that only the long absence of happiness could have bred. Theirs had been a difficult but ultimately rewarding road from that day to this, and he had no intention of turning back. The thought stiffened his nerve as the cab passed down Park Lane. If he had his way, nothing from that time – least of all James Davenall – should ever reappear.

What, he wondered, had Sir Hugo Davenall made of Norton? He had inherited the baronetcy in the spring of 1881 – Trenchard remembered reading of it in the newspaper – and could not have welcomed this sudden threat to his position. But was it any real threat at all? No, Trenchard told himself. It was just a cool-nerved attempt at bare-faced fraud, doomed to failure from the outset. If so, his dash to Chester Square might seem to smack of panic. But that could not be helped.

The cab pulled up with a jolt. They were there, before the railed-off balconied frontage of a tall Regency house. Trenchard climbed out, paid off the driver and looked about him. Dusk was settling on the square, pigeons cooing on their nocturnal perches among the pediments and pillars. The cab clopped away and left him, feeling slightly foolish, at a lordly stranger’s door.

IV

At Bladeney House, a stern-faced servant showed me into a tile-flagged hall. I remember light flooding down a curving staircase, silhouetting a figure in evening dress who was slowly descending to meet me. A tall, loose-limbed young man with dark tousled hair, and bloodshot, almost bruised eyes. He was smoking a cigar and did not remove it from his wide, full-lipped mouth as he said to his servant: ‘Visitor, Greenwood?
’

‘
A Mr Trenchard, sir. I have not yet established—
’

‘
Sir Hugo?’ I interrupted
.

‘
The very same.’ He paused on the bottom stair, removed the cigar and essayed a satirical, stiff-shouldered bow
.

‘
Good evening, sir. I’m married to your late brother’s former fiancée, Miss Constance Sumner as was. We’ve met a Mr Norton—
’

‘
Norton?’ He jerked his head upright at the word, scattering cigar ash on the stair-carpet. ‘You’ve seen the blighter, too?
’

‘
Yes. He claims—
’

‘
I know what he damn well claims.’ His lip quivered visibly. ‘Man’s a charlatan
.’

‘
I realize that
.’

‘
Mmm?’ He looked at me. ‘Yes, of course. You would.’ A moment’s thought, a puff on the cigar, then: ‘Come through, Trenchard. I can’t stop long, but long enough, eh?’ He clapped me on the shoulder and ushered me towards a door, tossing back a dismissal to his servant as we went. ‘We’ll be in the music room, Greenwood
.’

We passed through a richly furnished anteroom that looked
out
on to the square, then turned towards open double doors where, beyond, I could see french windows giving on to a garden. Somebody was playing an irreverent ballad on a finely tuned piano
.

‘
Could have done without this nonsense,’ Sir Hugo lisped on his cigar. ‘Just a bloody nuisance as far as I’m concerned
.’

We entered the music room. A young sandy-haired man turned from the piano and beamed in our direction. He, too, was in evening dress. The other occupant of the room, a middle-aged man seated in an armchair by the french windows, was not; he laid aside a newspaper and rose to meet us, smiling amiably
.

‘
The appalling pianist is a friend of mine, Trenchard,’ said Sir Hugo. ‘Freddy Cleveland. If you follow the turf at all, you’ll probably have lost money on one of his nags
.’

For all his boyish good looks, Cleveland was not as young as I had at first thought; there were creases about his eyes when he smiled. I took him for the affected, dim-witted type a youthful baronet might be expected to befriend and felt, all at once, out of my depth amidst their West End quips
.

‘
Mr Trenchard don’t look the race-goin’ type, Hugo,’ Cleveland said as he shook my hand
.

‘
Indeed I’m not
.’

‘
But he is here,’ Sir Hugo put in, ‘about the damned maverick that’s cantered into our paddock.’ He turned to the third man. ‘My cousin, Richard Davenall, also my legal adviser
.’

Richard Davenall was grey-haired and bearded, his face lined with the cares of his profession, sombrely suited and dejectedly slope-shouldered, a wearily tolerant look in his watery sea-blue eyes. He shook my hand with none of the gusto of the other two but with rather more conviction
.

‘
Trenchard?’ he said quizzically. ‘Didn’t you marry Constance Sumner?
’

‘
I had that honour, sir, yes
.’

‘
I was glad to hear she’d settled down … after what happened. Do I take it you’ve heard from Norton?
’

‘
Yes. That’s why I’m here
.’

‘
How did your wife react?
’

‘
She was horrified by his claim. When he said he’d already been to see his family, the real James’s family that is—
’

‘
You thought you’d better check the lie of the land,’ said Sir Hugo. ‘Don’t blame you. Want a drink?
’

‘
No, thank you
.’

‘
Fetch me a Scotch and soda, Freddy, there’s a good fellow. Sure you won’t have one, Trenchard?
’

‘
Quite, thank you
.’

While Cleveland pattered off to the drinks-trolley, Sir Hugo slumped into an armchair and gestured for me to do the same. Richard Davenall resumed his place by the french windows. Cleveland returned with a large glass for Sir Hugo and one for himself, then went back to the piano stool, from where he surveyed us with a child-like grin
.

‘
Freddy finds the situation amusing,’ said Sir Hugo. ‘I suppose I would myself in his shoes
.’