The Silent Tide (41 page)

‘He has two children. It doesn’t suit his wife to be divorced. But there’s more to it than that. From what I’ve learned of Penelope, she’s perfectly happy with it being that way.’

‘Is she?’ Isabel asked, interested.

‘You look surprised. Perhaps you don’t know the story of her first marriage. It’s not a deadly secret.’

‘No one’s ever told me,’ Isabel said. ‘I know my parents believe her divorce to be scandalous, that’s all.’

Stephen said quietly, ‘She married young. Jonny Tyler was a drunk and a bully. Your aunt didn’t discover this until it was too late.’

‘She defied her mother to marry him. I know that much.’

‘I think the reason why was very complicated. And in matters of love, we always think we know best. I’m afraid I was the same.’ He suddenly looked immensely sad and Isabel didn’t know what to say, but he immediately went on, ‘I only came to know Penelope well after the marriage had ended. But Jonny, I knew. He was an editor at Ward and Atkins, where I got my first sales job, just before the war, and the stories one heard. He was a mess by then, old Jonny. Missing the mark all over the place. They had to let him go.’

Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, extracted one and lit it. The match fell flaming to the ground. Isabel watched it char a stalk of dry grass and go out.

‘I hardly remember him, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Aunt Penelope and my mother had little to do with one another even before the divorce.’

‘So I gather,’ he said. ‘I first met Penelope at a literary party. She was seeing one of Jonny’s writers by then, which was the last straw for her and Jonny. And then the man died – the writer, I mean – and left her the house in Earl’s Court and a very tidy sum of money. The best thing that ever happened to her, she told me once. It meant she could be independent. So you see, she’s quite happy not to marry Reginald. Nor does she have to be alone. She has the best of all worlds.’

‘Oh.’ This was all new to Isabel, and answered a number of questions that she hadn’t known to ask. It explained something of her aunt’s aloofness, the background of Penelope’s friendship with Stephen and how she came to be connected to the world of literary bohemia. None of this, of course, would make a ha’porth of sense to Isabel’s parents. Close they might have been when young, the abyss that separated Penelope and Pamela now was deep, possibly uncrossable.

‘She’s a very wonderful person, your aunt. She’s helped me so much in a number of ways and, well, all this business with poor Berec . . .’

‘Berec!’ Isabel said at once. ‘Has something happened?’

Stephen wore an odd expression on his face. ‘I’m sorry, I imagined that you’d have heard, that Hugh might have told you.’ He seemed uncertain how to go on. ‘Look, it’s best if you ask Hugh about it. You shouldn’t hear it from me.’

‘Hear what? Stephen, you can’t do this. Tell me. I’ll have to know sometime.’ She remembered the last time she’d seen Berec, after he’d been assaulted. Was it related to that?

‘Perhaps it slipped Hugh’s mind,’ Stephen went on, frowning. ‘Surely not, though. Isabel, Berec has gone to prison.’

She was silent, shocked, trying to absorb this. ‘Why?’ she gasped. ‘Was it to do with money?’

‘No, I wish it were. We might have been able to help him better. I hope this doesn’t shock you, my dear, but it’s for gross indecency. With another man. Apparently Berec and this man were living together and some nosy blighter thought to make something of it. The police raided the flat one night and, well, both of them have been locked up.’

Isabel put her hand to her face. ‘Poor Berec,’ she murmured. ‘I’d simply no idea.’ Then she said, ‘Myra. I had my doubts that Myra existed. We never met her, did we?’

‘Oh, Myra existed all right. Still exists, I mean. It’s just it turned out that she is really a he. Mikhail, the man’s name is. He worked as a waiter in one of the big Hyde Park hotels, I forget which one. They lived on very little, by all accounts. Penelope knew, or rather, she guessed. Penelope never asks questions, you know that.’

‘She’s the only person he allowed to help him,’ she said, and explained to Stephen about visiting the flat in Bethnal Green.

‘I heard about that,’ Stephen said. ‘Penelope said she couldn’t get out of him who was responsible. In my darkest moments I think it might have been Mikhail himself. He’s quite a troubled character from what I hear.’

‘That’s appalling,’ Isabel whispered, hardly able to take all this in. Penelope, Berec. Who else was there? What else had her upbringing sheltered her from? Berec had been such a friend to her, had helped her in so many ways out of pure generosity of spirit. She’d never thought of him as anything but a friend, nor he of her, she acknowledged now, her thoughts racing on. What did men do together? she wondered, and felt her face grow hot, as though Stephen might be able to read her mind. She knew some men were called pansies, but had never given the matter further consideration. Others were obviously not pansies, but didn’t like women or were frightened of them. Like William Ford, the ageing writer, or that man, whatever his name was, at her friend Vivienne’s laboratory, who persecuted her. Vivienne. Someone else she’d neglected. How useless she was to everyone, so wrapped up in her own petty troubles.

‘ISABEL!’ The angry voice cut through her misery. She looked up to see Jacqueline labouring along the promenade towards them, Lorna clamped to her hip, wide-eyed, hair in a fluffy halo, like a baby ape. As they approached, Jacqueline panting heavily, Isabel saw that the make-up on her agitated face was streaked with perspiration.

‘How could you?’ Jacqueline cried as she reached them and Isabel took Lorna from her. The older woman fumbled in a pocket for a handkerchief and dabbed her forehead. ‘You can’t imagine how worried I’ve been. I’ve been looking everywhere. Sent complete strangers up the beach to search for you.’ She barely glanced at Stephen. ‘Poor Lorna was quite beside herself, weren’t you, precious? Isabel, you are simply so selfish.’

The baby didn’t look at all upset and just laid a sleepy head on her mother’s shoulder. ‘This is Mr McKinnon,’ Isabel told Jacqueline. ‘Mrs Wood, Stephen. You probably met at our wedding. Jacqueline, I’m very sorry but—’

‘And this must be Lorna.’ Stephen was smiling at the baby. ‘She’s very sweet, and very like you, Isabel.’ He then looked straight at Jacqueline. ‘I think we do know one another already, don’t we?’ he told her in a soft, dangerous voice. ‘We’ve certainly met in London.’

Jacqueline examined him more closely, an expression of puzzlement on her face and then recognition. And Isabel, astonished, saw the woman’s face colour up.

‘We might have been to the same party once,’ she said in a dull voice. ‘I don’t properly recall.’

Stephen opened his mouth to speak again, but Jacqueline ignored him and spoke to Isabel instead. ‘Come along, I’ve left everything on the beach and the tide’s coming in. Good afternoon, Mr McKinnon.’ She turned and walked away.

‘Goodbye, Stephen,’ Isabel said. ‘Come and see us. Please do come.’

Stephen merely nodded. He seems sad, Isabel thought as she followed Jacqueline’s angry figure. When she looked over her shoulder for one last sight of him, he was still standing watching her, turning his cigarette packet in his hands.

‘Did you enjoy yourselves?’ Hugh asked later, coming into the breakfast room where afternoon tea was laid out.

‘Yes, we did,’ Isabel said firmly, glancing at Jacqueline, who was making goldfish faces at Lorna in the high chair as she fed her gloop from a bowl.

‘Lorna had a lovely paddle, didn’t you, precious?’ was all Jacqueline said.

‘Jolly good.’ Hugh smiled at Lorna, sat down and started to pile up a tea plate with sandwiches and cake.

‘We saw Stephen McKinnon,’ Isabel said, sipping her tea. Jacqueline shot her a look of dislike, which gave Isabel a sense of satisfaction. They’d hardly spoken on the drive home. Jacqueline was furious at Isabel’s disappearance and Isabel was cross at being humiliated in front of Stephen. There was something else swirling around, too, something darker that neither of them could even begin to broach.

‘Did you now?’ Hugh said mildly, taking a bite out of a scone. He could be impossible to read, Isabel thought with annoyance.

‘He was staying in Reginald’s chalet,’ she said.

‘Oh really? Did you tell him I’d finished the book?’

‘No.’ She felt angry with him, for reasons too numerous to mention.

Hugh looked surprised. ‘Well, what did you talk about then?’

‘Just general matters.’ She didn’t want Jacqueline to hear about Penelope and Berec and everyone. On a wicked impulse she added, ‘I didn’t know you knew Stephen, Jacqueline. Apart from meeting him at the wedding, I mean.’

‘I don’t know what he was implying . . .’ Jacqueline started to say.

The door opened and Hugh’s mother came in.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the travellers return. Jacqueline, dear, I think you’ve caught a touch of the sun.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Berec?’ Isabel asked Hugh later, viewing him in the dressing-table mirror as she brushed her hair. He was already in bed, reading. ‘He’s in prison. That’s simply dreadful.’

‘Oh, Stephen let that cat out of the bag, I suppose,’ Hugh said, pencilling a note in the margin of his book. ‘I wish he hadn’t.’

‘Hugh, I needed to know,’ she said, putting down the brush. She studied her reflection, her face drawn and thin, the dark shadows under her eyes exacerbated by the poor light. ‘He was my friend. Is my friend,’ she amended.

‘It’s all exceptionally sordid. I don’t like the idea of you knowing about that sort of thing.’

‘I shouldn’t worry, I’m pretty ignorant. What I do know is that Berec is a good person. He helped me and I want to help him.’

‘Well, you can’t. He’s beyond anyone’s help. That type have to face the consequences of their actions.’

Isabel was astonished. She hadn’t known he held such strong views on the subject. ‘That’s harsh, don’t you think?’ she gasped.

‘I don’t feel it is. Now can we leave this unpleasant subject.’ He sounded quite angry, and Isabel’s eyes prickled with tears. She hadn’t stopped thinking about Berec since she heard the news of his arrest, and Hugh was dismissing him as if he didn’t matter. She wondered where he was in prison and whether it was possible to visit him, but she had no concept of how to find out. The whole thing was like another world to her. Anyway, if she did try to visit Berec, Hugh, obviously, would be furious. Probably try to stop her. What should she do?

In the end she pursued the obvious path and telephoned Penelope, to discover that Berec was in Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London. Penelope told her that she had been to see him and found him outwardly cheerful, but thin and hollow-eyed, which worried her. After thinking about it for a day or two, Isabel packed up a parcel of essentials and sent it to him with a newsy letter. She hoped he received it safely for she didn’t hear back.

By the end of October 1952, Hugh had finished the revisions to his novel and typed it up. The top copy he sent to his agent, Digby Lane, the carbon he kept.

Isabel again offered to read it.

‘All in good time,’ Hugh replied. ‘I want to know what Lane and McKinnon think about it first.’ He did not sound enthusiastic and for a while Isabel did not ask again.

He went up to London for a few days and when he came back he brought with him a bottle of particularly good wine and wore an expression of smugness, Isabel knew before he said anything that the news was good.

‘Lane is worried that one of the saucier scenes will attract the attention of the Lord Chancellor’s Office, but more importantly, the words “work of genius” have been mentioned,’ he told them all proudly when his mother enquired at dinner if there had been a response. ‘If only in Stephen McKinnon’s reader’s report. We must wait and see what McKinnon has in his company piggy bank. I’ve told Lane he mustn’t take less than five hundred for it, but he doesn’t seem to think the money’s there. “Five hundred,” I said, “or you can take it to another publisher.”’

Isabel thought this was an extraordinarily ambitious sum of money but didn’t like to puncture the exuberant atmosphere by saying so. She drank a large mouthful of the very fine wine and looked down at her food, suddenly unable to eat.

After dinner she took one of her lonely walks in the dusk, past the donkeys and through the marshes to the estuary where she stood for a long time, watching the light disappear from the sky and listening to the cries of the birds. The tide was running now and the river swirled silently past, on to the sea as it always had.

And when she returned home and no one asked her where she’d been, she found some paper in Hugh’s study and crept upstairs like a ghost. There she sat on the bed and started to write. Her thoughts tumbled out on the page.

I feel that I’m fading, becoming transparent – that soon I’ll disappear altogether.
In the circle of light from her bedside lamp, her hand moved across the paper. Once she began, she found it impossible to stop. She covered one page then another and another. Only when she heard someone coming up the stairs did she put down her pen and hide the pages in the bedside drawer. Across the landing, she heard the distinctive creak of the nursery door. It must only be Jacqueline looking in on Lorna.

She felt sleepy now. It seemed too much effort to get out of bed to go downstairs and say goodnight to the others. Too much effort even to get up and close the curtains. She took off most of her clothes in bed and snuggled down under the bedclothes, curling up in the warm space she’d made. And there she fell asleep.

She woke briefly when Hugh came to bed, and was aware of the odd disparate noises he made, moving about the room, but the next time she wakened, the room was dark and she was cold without her nightdress. She shuffled herself towards Hugh, for warmth, and realised with surprise that he wasn’t there. She gathered the bedclothes about herself and waited, but it was a long time before he returned.

‘Are you all right?’ she whispered when he got into bed. His heart was racing away and he seemed a little agitated.