The Old Vengeful

east, unserved even then by any traceable public transport.

'Or maybe 'wasted',' murmured Paul.

But they had been on the list; or Steeple Horley had, for its gem of a church, complete with recumbent stone crusader and the re-used Roman bricks it shared with the much-decayed manor house built on the site of a Saxon hall mentioned in the Domesday Book—

Paul's last murmur registered suddenly, breaking her concentration. ' 'Wasted'? What d'you mean —'wasted'?'

'Ah . . . well, you haven't exactly spread your wings for long flights since you came down from Oxford, have you, Elizabeth?' He raised one hand off the wheel defensively before she could reply. 'Just an observation, that's all.'

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'I don't see that it's any of your business.' She felt herself bristling, but then the bleak truth submerged her anger as another signpost pointed them to the Horleys, in preference for a No Through Road to some unnamed farm.

'Someone had to look after my father.'

'Sure. And a house-keeper did that perfectly well when you were at school and at Oxford . . . Mrs Carver, No. 3, Church Row. And she's still hale and hearty—don't tell me he couldn't have afforded her, because we both know bloody well that he could have done.'

'I didn't know that. I thought we were . . . not exactly poor, but not rich.'

'Doesn't matter—forget it—' he shook his head '— he wasn't an invalid, your esteemed father, that's what I mean. He may have had a heart condition, but he didn't need a First-Class honours graduate to . . . to—how did you put it so graphically?

—to 'type his bloody books, and cook his bloody meals, and wash his bloody laundry'—eh?'

He knew too much—too bloody much—about Father, and Mrs Carver, as well as about the foolish Miss Loftus, who had let slip far too much under the combined pressures of fear and self-pity and brandy.

'But I suppose you thought it was your duty—right?' He slashed the word at her, almost contemptuously. 'You had to do your duty by him?'

Another signpost: Upper Horley left, Steeple Horley right—

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and it would have to be left here, because there was only the church and the 'much-decayed' manor the other way, the book had said.

Pride came to her aid. 'So what if it was—my duty?'

'Then do your duty now!' He fed the wheel to the right, to Steeple Horley and another No Through Road which had to end in half-a-mile under the steeple and the shoulder of the high downs curving above them. 'Stretch yourself for us, Elizabeth.'

It wasn't the thought of duty which stretched her—she had never even thought of duty in relation to Father: he had been there, sitting at his chair in the study, when she had come down from Oxford for the last time, and Mrs Carver had already been given her notice, and everything had been taken for granted, herself included . . . but perhaps that was what duty was—the thing that happened, and the state of mind which made it happen, without any conscious thought on either side, the giving and the taking being equally automatic.

But it wasn't that which stretched her now, it was the certainty that Mrs Audley was waiting for her half-a-mile ahead, or less—and that she needed Paul to help her—

God! What a mess I am— hair, clothes, face— !

The Vengeful—Father had gone back to France, to re-write the chapter—

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But not back to France . . . that first writing had been just routine— just as she had been just routine when she'd first glimpsed Paul in the mirror, and he had seen her—

The car was slowing down—it was turning past a little cottage, into a gravel drive—past the cottage garden, with its apple trees already heavy with fruit, and the runner-beans, bright with their harvest to come, festooned over their bean-poles—and banks of blackberry bushes now, on either side—

but Father had gone to France to re-write the chapter—

'It has to do with the survivors. The Fortune sank somewhere off the Horse Sands, but that was at night, and no one knows where exactly, and there were only four survivors. But there were also survivors from the Vengeful—

they came ashore on the Normandy coast—he had a footnote about them . . . But . . .'

'Good girl!' He braked, slowing from his snail's-pace to stop altogether between the blackberry bushes, with the curve of the drive still ahead. 'But what?'

'They all died. Or the French shot them when they were trying to escape—there was a scandal, anyway . . . But—I don't know . . .'

'Don't know what?'

'Just. . . don't know. But that's the only reason he could have had for going to France—the survivors who died in France—

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or how they died.'

'That's my good girl!' The car began to crawl forward again.