Bleeding Heart Square

‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Lydia said, though in a sense she had seen a ghost: Marcus had been hovering in Bleeding Heart Square and had tried to speak to her. She had turned her face away and walked resolutely past him. She followed Mr Wentwood up the stairs. ‘How’s the job-hunting?’

‘No luck yet.’ He paused on the landing, as if ready to talk. ‘Still, I’m having a day off tomorrow. I’ve got to run down to the country.’

‘Lucky you.’ Lydia nodded goodbye, wondering if he would be taking that girl with him tomorrow. She went into the flat’s sitting room. Her father was dozing in the armchair in front of the fire.

Without opening his eyes he said, ‘There’s something for you on the table. A parcel.’

Lydia’s stomach lurched. For a split second she glimpsed the possibility that someone might have sent her an uncooked heart. But this parcel looked very different from Serridge’s — it was about the shape and size of a brick and it hadn’t come in the post. She examined the superscription — only her name, no address — and recognized the large, square handwriting.

‘Marcus,’ she said. ‘Has he been in the house again? I saw him outside.’

‘I happened to bump into him in the Crozier,’ Captain Ingleby-Lewis said, his eyes still closed. ‘He asked me to give it to you.’

She stripped off her gloves and took off her hat. It was too cold to remove her coat. A car drew up outside the house.

The parcel had been professionally wrapped. Marcus could no more wrap a parcel than he could have performed an appendectomy. She undid the string and peeled back first the brown paper and then a second layer of tissue paper beneath. Finally she found what she was expecting, a box of chocolates from Charbonnel et Walker. Marcus was convinced that the road to a woman’s heart was paved with expensive chocolates. There was also an envelope with her name on it. Inside was a sheet of paper with the address of his club at the top.

My dear Lydia,

I don’t want to pester you but I do miss you frightfully. I do wish you’d come back. Everyone goes through these sticky patches. I’m awfully sorry about what happened, and swear it won’t happen again. We ought to give it another try, don’t you think?

I couldn’t stand rattling around in Frogmore Place all by myself. So I’ve shut up the house for the time being and I’m living at the club.

The only other bit of news is that I had a long chat with Rex Fisher, and he arranged a private meeting with Mosley himself. Sir Oswald isn’t at all what I’d expected — and, by the way, he says I have to call him Tom now; all his friends do — I’ve never met anyone like him, in fact. He’s a real leader. The sort you feel you could follow to hell and back. Anyway, old thing, the long and the short of it is that I’ve decided to join the Party. I wanted you to be one of the first to know. I’m going to work directly with Rex. He’s got a special role in mind. All rather hush-hush.

Do thinkabout what I said. It’s just not the same without you, old girl.

With my best love,

Marcus

A car door slammed in the square below. Lydia crumpled the letter and dropped it in the waste-paper basket. She threw the box of chocolates after it. The noise made her father stir in his chair but he kept his eyes resolutely closed.

Lydia went into her bedroom, where she hung up her coat and put away her hat. She stared at her pale, set face in the damp-stained mirror over the washstand.

‘Damn it,’ she said aloud. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

She returned to the sitting room. Mr Serridge was in the hall, shouting for Mrs Renton. She retrieved the chocolates from the waste-paper basket, ripped off the pink ribbon that fastened the box and removed the lid. The smell of good chocolate rose to meet her. Her mouth watered. She began to eat.

8

Until you read Philippa Penhow’s diary with the benefit of more than four years’ hindsight, you don’t realize what a methodical man Serridge was. He always gave the impression of being impulsive, and somehow this impression was reinforced by the untidiness of his appearance. He was the sort of man whose hair always needs brushing. Who apparently needs mothering.

Sunday, 16 February 1930

We walked in Kensington Gardens this afternoon. I could not help watching the nurses and their charges. If I had married Vernon all those years ago, one of those little children might have been my grandchild. What an extraordinary thought! All that is impossible now, of course. I have made my bed and I must lie on it.

It seemed surprisingly mild for the time of year and Major Serridge was in high spirits. He protected me from the attentions of an overenthusiastic Labrador in the kindest way possible. I think he is particularly fond of animals, and they instinctively trust him.

We watched the children sailing their boats on the Round Pond and then walked over towards the statue of Peter Pan near the Long Water. He said the statue was charming, and that it made him wish that he could be a child again.

As we were strolling back, he told me something that rather disturbed me. He said he was a little concerned about Mr Orburn, and how he was managing Bleeding Heart Square on my behalf. He thinks he may be overcharging me. ‘I don’t say he’s a crook, of course, that wouldn’t be fair. But he’s a lawyer, and he’s always got his eye on his fee.’ (How like the dear Major: always bending over backwards to be fair to everyone.)

I pointed out that Aunt and I had always used Mr Orburn, and before him his father, for all our legal business. The Major said that perhaps that was the problem — that Mr Orburn had become a little too used to my trusting him.

You may have read somewhere that that’s how lions catch an elephant — they isolate it from the rest of its herd: they separate it from its natural protectors.

As the crow flew, the village of Rawling was hardly more than forty miles from Bleeding Heart Square. If you were an earth-bound mortal, however, the distance was longer, and seemed far longer still. The village was six or seven miles north of Bishop’s Stortford in a bleak and sparsely populated area of country where lanes meandered from hamlet to hamlet.

The railway did not pass through Rawling itself so Rory was obliged to travel to the nearest station at Mavering. The journey took him the better part of the morning — the bus to Liverpool Street Station, a train to Bishop’s Stortford, another train on the branch line passing through Saffron Walden, where he changed again to a small, almost empty train that took him slowly to Mavering itself.

There was too much time to think. At Liverpool Street Rory found a window seat in a third-class smoker. As the scruffy suburbs gave way to the equally scruffy countryside, he found himself thinking not so much about what lay before him as about Fenella.

He had telephoned her the previous evening. She had been in too much of a hurry to talk for long — she was on the verge of going out to another of her political meetings. This one was going to be a smaller affair than the last but the same speaker, Julian Dawlish, would be there. There was talk of founding a committee, Fenella said, and Rory had heard the note of excitement in her voice without altogether understanding it. He had come back from India to find Fenella had grown into a familiar stranger.

He was glad to leave the last of the trains. Mavering turned out to be a thin, uncertain village, little more than a scattering of agricultural cottages linking two substantial farms. Only two other passengers joined him on