done its damage at the side of the head, not the front.
It was Anne, but he didn’t feel she was there at all. It was her absence that hurt. The dead body made him realize its permanence. He wanted to say he was sorry, to make amends, but Anne was not there to hear his confession, to forgive him his sins. She was gone somewhere he could not follow, and he was left with this empty face wearing an expression that he couldn’t read. There was fear there but also something else; it almost looked like joy.
Peter felt heartbroken. He thought of all the times that he had stayed in London, the gentle reproach with which she had spoken to him so often on the telephone and the way she’d looked up at him from the sofa in the drawing room when he had gotten up to leave the evening before: “Do you have to go so soon, Peter? It’s like you’ve barely arrived.”
That was what she’d said. He couldn’t remember if he’d replied, done more than kiss her lightly on the cheek on his way upstairs to pack.
It was just after he’d bent down to place the last ritual kiss on his wife’s cold brow, just after he’d turned away from her that the memory came floating unbidden into his numbed mind. He thought of it later as Anne’s last gift to him, and he tried to remember it whenever he thought of her afterward.
It was a summer’s morning just like this one that he remembered, but it was fifteen years ago and he was waking in their bed at home. Thomas was two or three months old, and Peter had been up with him in the night. The baby wouldn’t stop crying, and so he’d walked him up and down in the corridor at the top of the stairs singing some silly song that he remembered from his own childhood. Now he reached out toward Anne and found her gone, even though the bed was still warm where she had been sleeping with Thomas beside her in his cot.
Peter opened his eyes, blinking against the sunlight flooding into the room through the high open windows. To the east was the sea breaking blue and white on the sandy beach below the house, and to the south were Annie’s roses, multitudes of them staked out in the gardens and climbing on the old perimeter wall up toward the sun.
Standing in the south window looking out were Peter’s wife and son. Thomas’s hair was curly and golden, and his cheeks were fat and red and round above a little dimpled chin. His unbelievably tiny fingers were twined in his mother’s long, brown hair, and he seemed to gurgle with delight as she held him up to the light. Peter smiled at his son, and just at that moment Anne turned to him with eyes that were liquid blue and sparkling.
“Oh, Peter,” she said. “I am so happy. I can’t tell you how happy I am.”
Peter dropped Greta at the railway station and watched the first train of the morning take her off into the distance. Then he drove the Range Rover slowly back to Flyte and took a room at the Anchor Inn. He was more exhausted than he had ever been in his life, and he fell on the bed without bothering to undress and slept until the afternoon.
He woke because the phone was ringing. It stopped and then began again, on and on until he finally answered. It was Thomas, but his voice sounded different. There was a desperate determination in it that Peter had never heard before.
“I need to speak to you, Dad. Aunt Jane does too.”
“Where are you? Are you all right?”
“We’re in Woodbridge. At Mary’s house.”
“Whose?”
“Aunt Jane’s sister. It’s twenty-eight Harbour Street. Will you come?”
“Yes, of course I will. I’m glad Jane’s taken you there. I should have thought of it myself.” Then, just as Peter was about to replace the receiver, Thomas’s voice came again.
“Has she gone, Dad? You have to be alone. I can’t see you otherwise.”
“Don’t worry, I’m alone,” said Peter, and hung up. He’d said no more than the truth; he’d never felt more alone than he did now.
“What are you going to do, Dad?”
“About what?”
“About Greta. She killed my mother.”
“No, she didn’t. She had nothing to do with it, Thomas. You’ve got this fixation in your mind, and it’s doing neither of us any good.”
They were sitting in the front room of the little house in Harbour Street surrounded by a lifetime’s collection of bric-a-brac. Coronation mugs and ships in bottles jostled for space with china cats and dogs. Their owner, Jane’s sister Mary, had made them cups of milky tea and then left them sitting around a heavy 1930s oak dining table — Jane and Thomas on one side and Peter on the other.
Part of Peter realized that all this was wrong. He should be the one with his arm around his son, not the old housekeeper, but Thomas’s obsession with Greta divided them and Peter felt powerless to do anything about it.
“All right, Dad, listen to what Aunt Jane has got to say,” said Thomas, controlling his impatience with visible difficulty.
“She said bad things about my Lady, Sir Peter,” said the housekeeper.
“When?”
“The day the little dog died. After you left the house. She said she was going to make my Lady pay.”
“A lot of people said bad things that day. The important point is that everyone said they were sorry afterward. Didn’t they, Thomas?”
“She left the window open, and I heard one of the men saying that they were all closed,” said Thomas, ignoring his father’s question.
“She left the window open by mistake. It’s easily done on a warm evening like yesterday was. Why would she have admitted leaving it open if she’d done so deliberately?”
“Because she didn’t know I’d recognized him then.”
“Someone you saw from behind in the street at midnight. She shouldn’t have lied, Thomas, but she had her reasons.”
“Why did she arrange for me to go to Edward’s, then? What about that?”
“I don’t know, Thomas. I haven’t got the answer to everything. I’m sure this is wrong though. I know Greta, and she’d never have had anything to do with something like this.”
“Yes, she did. You know she did. You’re just protecting her because you’re screwing her.”
Thomas pushed his chair away behind him and stood leaning over the table toward his father, resisting Jane Martin’s ineffectual efforts to pull him back.
“You’re screwing her and my mother’s dead because of her. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
Thomas’s voice rose to a hysterical scream, which was suddenly cut off when his father leaned across the table and smacked him hard on the cheek with the back of his hand.
Peter stood up, facing his son. Thomas had a hand over his face, but his father could see the fury in his eyes. It was the sort of rage from which a lifetime of hatred is born.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t done that, but you shouldn’t have said that to me. It’s your decision what you tell the police, but think before you speak. You might regret it otherwise.”
Peter had retreated to the doorway and now stood there, hesitating for a moment. Neither his son nor Mrs. Martin said anything, and he felt as if he had no option but to go. To stay would only enrage the boy more, he told himself, so without another word he turned and let himself out the front door.
Outside he sat in the Range Rover, gazing at the motionless net curtains hung across the front window of the little house. He longed to get out of the car and walk back up the path to the front door, but he didn’t do it. Instead, after a couple of minutes, he started up the engine and drove slowly away. There was no way back.
Four days passed before the police said that the family could return to the House of the Four Winds. Sir Peter remained at the hotel in Flyte making arrangements for the funeral, and Aunt Jane thought that she and Thomas should stay on with her sister in Woodbridge, but he insisted on going home at the first opportunity. The House of the Four Winds had been his mother’s life, and walking in her garden made him feel that she still existed in the world.
He sat on an old bench as the sun set and looked up at the window of his mother’s bedroom through a curtain of white roses imagining that she might appear there at any moment, calling him to come in. Trudging back to the house in the semidarkness brought a renewal of his pain, but these moments in the garden when his mother
