Sins of the Fathers (26 page)

He let his eyes linger on Irene Kershaw for a brief moment with painful compassion. They had reached a point in this telling where she must, unless he could save her, touch on that which would humiliate her most.

"You were going to be married," he said.

Perhaps she was afraid to hear the words he might choose. "We never did anything wrong but the once," she cried. "Afterwards—well, he wasn't nasty like other boys, and he was just as ashamed as me." Justifying herself, her head turned from him, she whispered, "I've had two husbands and then there was John, but I've never been much for that side of things." Her head swung back and her face was aflame. "We were engaged, we were going to be married..."

Archery knew he must rush on with his conjectures. "After he was killed you knew you were going to have a child?" She nodded, silent now with the enormity of her embarrassment. "You had nowhere to go, you were afraid so you married Painter. Let me see, John Grace was killed in February 1945 and Painter got home from Burma at the end of March. You must have known him before," he said, guessing, improvising. "Perhaps he was stationed at Forby before he went to the far East?' A tiny nod rewarded him and he was prepared to go on drawing someone else's story out of an inspired imagination, out of a letter from Kendal, a photographed face, the bruises on a woman's arm. He lifted his eyes from her and clasped his hands tightly to stop the sound that might have been no more than a sigh. Even a sigh would tell her. At the open french window, against the blaze of red petals, Kershaw was standing, silent, still and powerfully alert. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? Archery, transfixed, sought momentarily in his expression for suffering or anger and saw a sweetness that brought a sudden strength to his heart.

Perhaps he was betraying this woman, perhaps he was doing the unforgivable. It was too late for such recriminations.

"Let me try to finish," he said, and he had no idea whether he kept his voice on the same level he had used before. "You were married and you let him think he was Tess's father. But he suspected and that was why he never loved her as a father loves his child? Why didn't you tell Mr. Kershaw?"

She leant forward and he could tell she had not heard the man behind her move almost soundlessly into the room. "He never asked me about my life with Bert," she said. "But I was so ashamed of it, of being married to a man like that. Mr. Kershaw's so good—you don't know him—he never asked me, but I had to tell him some of it, didn't I?" She was suddenly eloquent. "Think what I had to tell him, think what I had to bring him—nothing! People used to point to me out in the streets like I was a freak. He had to take that on his shoulders—Mr. Kershaw who'd never touched dirt in all his life. He said he'd take me away and give me a new life where no one'd know, he said I wasn't to blame, I was innocent. D'you think I was going to give up the one chance I'd ever had by telling him Tess was—was illegitimate?"

Archery gasped and staggered to his feet. By the power of his eyes and his will he had been trying to force the man behind her chair to retreat the way he had come. But Kershaw remained where he was, still, a man apparently without breath or heartbeats. His wife had been rapt, her own story dulling all outer stimuli, but now she seemed to sense the atmosphere in the room, the soundless passion of two other people whose sole desire was to help her. She twisted in her chair, sketched a strange little gesture of pleading and rose to confront her husband.

The scream Archery expected never came. She lurched a little, but whatever she was trying to gasp out was lost and muffled by Kershaw's strong embrace. He heard her say only, "Oh, Tom, Oh, Tom!" but his energy was so drained that his brain was filled with just one foolish thought. It was the first time he had ever heard Kershaw's Christian name.
 

She did not come downstairs again for that time. Archery supposed that he would not see her again until they all met among flowers and bridesmaids and wedding cake. Tess sat palefaced and almost shy, her hand clasped in that of Charles, the manuscript on her knees.

"I feel so strange," she said. "I feel I have a new identity. It's as if I had three fathers and the most remote of them was really my father..."

Charles said tactlessly, "Well, wouldn't you choose to have had this one, a man who could write like this?" But Tess lifted her eyes momentarily to the man Archery would have to learn to call Tom and he knew she had made her choice.

Then she thrust the heavy stack of paper towards Archery. "What can we do with them?"

"I could show them to a publisher I know. I once wrote part of a book myself..." He smiled. "On Abyssinian cats. I do know someone who might be interested. Something I can do to make amends," he said.

"You? You've got nothing to reproach yourself with." Kershaw moved to stand between him and the lovers. Only marred one marriage to make another, Archery thought. "Listen," said Kershaw, his face scored with the lines of effort to make himself understood. "You did nothing but what I should have done years ago, talked to her. I couldn't, you see. I wanted to get off on the right foot. Now I can see you can be too tactful, too damned diplomatic. Oh, there were a thousand little things, how she'd never cared for Painter but he'd been pestering her to marry him. I never asked her what made her change her mind when he came home from Burma. God help me, I thought it wasn't my business! She didn't want me to tell Tess about Painter and I went through agony trying to put that across to a kid of twelve." Here, unafraid of sentimentality, he caught his stepdaughter's free hand and held it briefly. "I remember I even got mad at Rene because she seemed to be contradicting every blessed word I said."

Tess quoted softly. " 'Never mind what Daddy says. Your father was no murderer.' "

"And she was right but I turned a deaf ear. She'll talk to me now as she's never talked in all these years. She'll talk to you, Tess, if you'll go up to her now."

Like a child she hesitated and her lips trembled into a nervous smile of indecision. But obedience—happy, reasonable obedience—was natural in that house. Archery had seen an instance of it before.

"I don't know what to say, how to begin," she said, getting slowly to her feet. "I'm so desperately afraid of hurting her."

"Begin with your wedding, then," Kershaw said robustly. Archery watched him stoop to the floor where the magazines had fallen. "Show her this and let her dream of seeing you in something like it."

Tess was in jeans and a white shirt, an Olivia or a Rosalind finding her lost birthright and with it a new womanhood. She took the magazine from Kershaw and glanced at the cover picture, the hat that was a pyramid of flowers crowning the most photographed face in Britain.

"That's not for me," she said, but she took it with her and Archery watched them depart together, Charles's flesh and blood love and his own, a paper fantasy. Not for me, not for me...

"We must go soon," he said to his own. "It's time we shared all this with your mother."

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