grounds of the Gutteridge house on the night he died. You were both there?”
“Yes, I was there,” Susan said. “I’d come up to visit my father, Bryn was there too, I don’t remember why. Anyway, we stayed for a meal and then I felt a bit ill. I stayed the night, so did Bryn.”
“Why? Was that unusual?”
“No, we did it fairly often. Mark liked us to stay and see him at breakfast before he went to work. Plenty of room in the house of course.”
“Bryn got drunk that night,” said Ailsa.
I was surprised. “He seemed a pretty careful drinker to me.”
“He was,” Ailsa replied. She looked at Susan for confirmation and got a slight nod. “So was Mark, but they both went at it a bit that night. After dinner they got on the whisky. I don’t drink so I went to bed.”
“To read?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What, what did you read?”
She played with the ties on her nightgown. The cigarette had gone out, she hadn’t enjoyed it so maybe she was on the way to beating them.
“I can’t remember,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Now, I want you to write down on the pads the names of all the people you recollect as being on the spot that night. Include yourselves.”
“Oh Hardy,” Susan said, “this is so corny.”
“Just do it please, you’ll be surprised.”
“What are you paying him to set up this nonsense, Ailsa?” Susan asked. Ailsa smiled, stubbed out the half- smoked dead butt and took up her pencil. The two of them switched on their recall apparatus. I pulled my pad towards me and started doodling and writing words that had nothing to do with the matter in hand. I looked up at them a couple of times over the next couple of minutes. Susan looked relaxed, as if the writing exercise was therapeutic for her. Ailsa sucked on the pencil, substituting it for a cigarette. She probably hadn’t written anything without smoking in the last twenty years. I wrote down my version of those present
I had only four names and one unnamed servant. I was going on the newspaper reports. The two women looked up more or less simultaneously.
“OK,” I said, “let’s have a look.”
I got up and collected the leaves torn off their pads. Ailsa’s sheet read: Ailsa G., Mark G., Susan G., Bryn G., Mrs Berry, Verna, Henry, Willis. Susan’s read: Gutteridge — Mark, Bryn, Susan, Ailsa. Cook (Mrs Berry), maid (Verna), driver (Willis), gardener (Henry), assistant.
“Good,” I said, “pretty close, one discrepancy. Susan says the assistant gardener was there, Ailsa doesn’t list him. Was he or wasn’t he, and what was his name?”
“He was around all right,” Susan said, “I remember because he was sick, he lived in quarters behind the garage. The light was on there and Bryn mentioned it to Mark. He said the young gardener was sick.”
“What else do you know about him?”
“He wasn’t interviewed by the police in the house. I suppose they saw him in his room.”
Ailsa nodded. “That would be why I didn’t list him,” she said. “I was going on the order of the police interviews.”
“What was his name, Ailsa?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Do you, Susan?”
The thing was drawing them together a bit which was good.
“No, he was fairly new, I don’t think I ever heard his name.”
“What did he look like? He was young?”
Susan thought about it. It was obviously difficult for her to think about servants other than in the abstract.
“He was young I think,” she said, “hard to tell, he had a beard.”
“That makes sense,” said Ailsa. “All men with beards look the same to me, the driver had a beard.”
“But Willis had a small beard, a gingery one, pepper and salt sort of. The gardener’s beard was fuller and darker, like, like…” she giggled, “like Fidel Castro.”
Finding Castro funny was just her style, it explained a lot about how the rich are able to carry on merrily being rich. But she’d hit the right note and things came together in my brain and clinched and paid off like a perfectly executed piece of football play. It must have showed in my face because they both straightened themselves up in their beds and took on expectant looks. Ailsa said it.
“He’s important, isn’t he Cliff, the gardener? And you know who he is. Come on, tell us.”
I took a deep breath and pushed the things I’d been fiddling with away. It’s a strange feeling when you’ve worked it out or got close enough, you become reluctant to surrender it. I went to a lecture once given by a guy who was an expert on the Tasmanian Aborigines; his expertise was mostly a matter of word of mouth, he hadn’t published very much. He said practically nothing in the lecture, he couldn’t bear to yield it up. It’s like that.
“I told you it’d get harder,” I said. I looked at the woman with her lank hair, the bright eyes and the vast hump where her legs should be, “Where were you in May 1953, Susan?” I said.
24
She took it pretty well, she didn’t turn green or any other colour and she didn’t scream. Her hands gripped the bed cover a bit harder, but the main expression on her face was that of relief. She’d lived with it a long time until it had become a part of her, but never a comfortable part, never something that augmented her. It was more like a demon to be exorcised except that the exorcism might be too painful, and the hole left by its departure might be too great to bear. There was probably an associated fear, a fear that didn’t matter and had never really mattered to anyone but her. A fear that her innermost personal experience didn’t matter a damn to the rest of the world. At least now, at whatever the cost, it looked as if it did matter somehow and she felt relief.
She looked at me and spoke through a smile so thin you could slip it through a bank vault door.
“You know where I was, don’t you?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Then you tell it. I’d like to hear someone else talk about it. No one has ever referred to it but me for over twenty years and I talk to myself about it every day.”
“You’re sure you want me to say it? I might get something important wrong.”
“That won’t matter, go on.”
“You were in Adelaide. You gave birth to a child, a boy. He was healthy. You were fifteen or sixteen. The baby went to an orphanage.”
“No, he was adopted!”
“Maybe it didn’t take, I don’t know. He grew up in an orphanage though.”
She was crying softly now and speaking through the sobs.
“What could I do? What could I do? I couldn’t keep him. They sent me away and arranged it all. I kept his birthday every year.”
“What do you mean?” I said quickly, then something like an understanding hit me, “no, you don’t have to explain, Susan.”
“I want to, it’s not much to tell. Every year I buy a birthday card and write something on it and seal it in a plain envelope. I post it, just like that.”
“Oh Susan.” Ailsa stretched out her arms to her, ten feet away across the table.
I got up and went round to her. Her shoulders were heaving and tears were streaming down her face. I tried to touch her hands and put an arm around her but she rejected me with savage, jerky movements of her arms and head. Her mouth was working convulsively and she had her eyes shut tight as if she wanted to blind herself.
“She’s had enough Cliff,” Ailsa said softly. “Ring for the doctor.”
I picked up one of the telephones in the room and got an immediate line to an action point of some kind. I spoke quickly describing Susan’s condition, and a doctor and two nurses were in the room within seconds of my
