just a moment ago. Bletchley-if it had been he who had last used it-might have only a few minutes ago inked in the notes on this score resting on the piano stand. Melrose wondered about him, wondered what the deaths of his children had done to his music. He wondered if the composing was a comfort. He stood by the casement windows and watched the sun going down. The tops of the clouds looked wet with light; the waves were edged in silver.
The position of the windows, the way they seemed to overhang the rocks so that one was looking directly down at the sea, made it, of course, impossible to see what was on the cliff directly beneath him. It had hidden the woman down there from his gaze until she moved on to a spot where the side window, the west-facing window, revealed her.
Melrose was dumbstruck. He had been so much in the company of ghosts, or at least had entertained ghostly thoughts, that a human presence now seemed unreal. It had started to rain since he’d returned, and he found himself looking down through a rain like floating gauze at the crown of this stranger’s light hair. She was wearing a fawn raincoat. He turned the fixture of the casement window, rolling it open. He called, “Hello!”
The woman looked behind her, seeing nothing.
“Up here!” Melrose shouted.
Then she craned her head upward, one hand tented over her eyes.
Melrose recognized her as the woman in the photographs, the mother of the two drowned children.
22
Please come in,” said Melrose, finding her still outside, waiting.
Stepping into the kitchen, she introduced herself as Karen Bletchley and added, “I’ve been seeing Esther Laburnum about the house. You’re Mr. Plant.”
“I am indeed. Are you very wet? Let me have your coat.”
She thanked him as she removed her raincoat and afterward ran her hands through her hair, shaking it a bit, getting out the raindrops. Her expression, which Melrose imagined she meant to make light and transparent, was instead grave and opaque. The smile she mustered was wintry. So were the eyes, their sadness seeming to spill over like tears, but she did not cry. She looked hurt enough to cry, though, as if Melrose had delivered a blow. The look seemed permanently stamped on her face.
He said, “I’m just going to make some tea. You look as if you could do with a cup.”
“I surely could. Thank you.”
“There’s a fire in the library-I mean the smaller one, the one you call a snug. Why don’t you go in and I’ll be along?”
It showed her acceptance of his place in the house- he was now the one living there-that she did not try to take over the tea preparation but was content to sit and wait. She was not a fusser.
He got the tray ready, using the good china, the cream-colored Beleek that always struck him as too delicate to use, as vaporous as breath. When he entered the library, she was looking at the books, replacing one and taking out another.
“I hope you don’t mind?”
“But of course not. They’re your books.”
“Still.” The one she held, she laid on the table as she sat down across from him.
The two easy chairs were drawn up to the small table as if sharing tea were their exclusive purpose. He raised the pot. “Shall I be Mother?”
She laughed. “By all means. I’ve always loved that expression. It’s so antiquated.”
For a fraction of a moment, Melrose could have kicked himself, remembering that the word “mother” would flood her with memories. But she seemed too sensible to go looking for unexploded bombs at her feet. Her eyes moved here and there, taking in the library’s books and furnishings as if it were she rather than he who was the prospective tenant.
“Where have you been living since you left?” He offered her the plate of biscuits he had tumbled from a fresh box he’d bought.
She took one and bit down before she said, “London. We have a house there, too. And one in Majorca. But this house, this house…” She shook her head as her eyes focused on the framed photographs. She took up the one of the two children and herself. “I expect Esther Laburnum told you…”
Melrose leaned toward her across the tea tray. He said, “I’m terribly, terribly sorry. I have no children, so I won’t say I can imagine how you feel. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine the well of sorrow this opens up in you, but it must be bottomless.”
Karen Bletchley looked at him, looked at him deeply, her gray eyes turned on him full force so there could be no mistaking that this was a person barely able to draw back from the precipice she had literally stood on an hour ago. That the feelings she had for her dead children would never, ever, be eased by the passage of time. She had started in to taste her tea, but the cup trembled too much and she replaced it in the saucer. Her hand seemed unable to let the teacup go, as if the very air had taken on a Beleek fragility and might crack if she moved.
She shook her head. “But it’s been four years, after all. I should-”
“No, you shouldn’t, and no, it hasn’t. It was only yesterday.”
She sat back then and picked up her cup with a firmer hand. She drank the tea, set the cup down again. “Thanks for saying that. Truly, thanks. I seem to be surrounded by people who tell me either time will take care of the pain, or that I shouldn’t dwell on it, or not to be morbid. Time does nothing, at least it hasn’t up to now.”
“It doesn’t apply. If you remember it just as clearly, why wouldn’t you feel it just as much? It’s hardly a comfort to be told you
Accepting the fresh cup, Karen Bletchley settled now in the chair as if taking comfort in it and sipped the tea. After a long silence, she began the story. “I don’t know why Noah and Esme went out. When I left sometime around eight o’clock, they were in bed, as usual. Mrs. Hayter, our cook, sometimes took care of the children when we were gone, or we got a sitter in. Mrs. Hayter was beside herself when I came back. Poor woman, she blamed herself for their leaving the house.” She fell silent, coughed, and went on. “Mrs. Hayter said she’d heard a sort of cry, and that’s what woke her up. She got into her robe, found her electric torch, and went downstairs; her room’s on the second floor. It’s really more of a flat I fixed up for her so she’d have more privacy. She came down and there was no one here. She couldn’t understand that and wondered if she’d dreamt the voices. She went to Noah’s room, found he was gone, and then to Esme’s. She was gone too. The woman was in a panic, looking in every room up and down, until finally she went outside. At that point she said she was terrified, just terrified. Of course, she would be.
“The sea was very rough that night and there was a blowing rain, the sort where sounds get lost on the wind. She thought she heard crying but couldn’t be sure and couldn’t determine the direction the sound came from. The last place outside-the last place she wanted to look was over the cliff’s edge. A combination of vertigo and fear kept her from it until she’d searched the grounds as well as she could. But she finally did, she said, and saw them. Down there in their bathrobes, side by side, a little curled up even, as if they were in bed asleep. Waves washed over them; the tide had come in. They drowned. She knew they were dead. She knew it.”
Karen paused, shook her head. “She was afraid we’d think she hadn’t done everything she could in not going down the stone stairs, she said. But she couldn’t, she was too terrified. Then she called the police; I came back first, and later Daniel. I can tell you this, though, I can tell you this.”
She had a way of saying things twice that had the effect of incantation, as if she might charm answers out of the dreadful night’s events. Melrose leaned forward.
“The children meant almost as much to Mrs. Hayter as they did to us. It would have taken colossal fear for her not to go down to them where they lay. Imagine her fright.” Karen stopped.
“And the police?” Melrose prompted.
“Were baffled. It’s odd, you know, to see that look on the face of a policeman.” Here she turned from seeking images in the fire to look at Melrose again, and smiled a little. “If the police hadn’t arrived before we did, probably there’d be two more bodies fallen down those steps. I tried to get down but they wouldn’t let me. That was just before the ambulance attendants brought the-brought the children up. It was hard maneuvering the stretchers-”
