‘Yes, they told me,’ he said. ‘Obviously, I needed to apologise, but I also wanted to know more about their childhood – to try and understand what relations were like between the three of them when they were growing up.’
‘And has it helped?’
‘A little, I suppose. He couldn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know – what Jasper did to my mother was as much of a shock to him as it was to me. More so, perhaps, because he was there with her at the time. Now he’s having to reinterpret what he thought was happiness – and he feels guilty, of course.’
‘For not being able to protect her?’
‘Partly that, but it’s more complicated. He feels bad about the way he and my mother used to shut Jasper out when they were children. There was no malice in it, but you can never tell what effect you’re having on somebody’s emotions in private, can you?’ He sipped his whisky thoughtfully. ‘I have to say – William’s much more generous than I am. All I can think about is how the bastard must have made her suffer.’
‘Do you know how he is?’
‘William telephoned the hospital. There’s no change.’
‘Trouble seems to come in threes – look at Harry, Morwenna and Loveday. And if I’m honest, there were the same sorts of rivalries in our house when I was growing up. My youngest sister and I got on splendidly – but there was always a sense of duty in any time I spent with my middle sister, and I know she was aware of that. Things have always been rather forced between us. I’m not saying it’s the same thing at all, but it’s all about a balance of power. You’re lucky to be an only child.’
‘I’m beginning to agree with you. I used to think about what good friends William and my mother were as adults, and how Lettice and Ronnie always stuck up for each other no matter how much they argued in private, and I felt like I was missing out on something. Now, I’m not so sure.’
Josephine realised that this was the first time she had ever heard Archie talk about his childhood in any depth. They had regularly discussed the war and their shared past – probably discussed it too much – but he had only ever referred in passing to his life before she knew him. Thinking about it, that was probably because he had always genuinely believed it to be happy and trouble-free: the urge to analyse and reconstruct your past tended to come only with the realisation that things were less than perfect, and she sensed that he would be eager to talk now if she gave him the right encouragement. ‘Morveth said your mother told your father about Jasper,’ she said. ‘He must have been a very special man for her to trust him with what she was most ashamed of. It’s one thing to tell another woman, but trusting a man – especially a man who loves you – not to make things worse by how he reacts must have been quite a risk.’
‘Yes, he was special.’ Archie offered her a cigarette, and lit one for himself.
‘I’ve never asked you about him, and I don’t even know what he did for a living. Was it something on the estate?’
‘I suppose you could say that he shaped the estate – or a lot of it, anyway. He was a plantsman, and he knew everything about the land here. There wasn’t an acre of it that he wasn’t intimately familiar with. It was almost as if he felt he had a duty to it because his family had given it away – like he had to prove it wasn’t personal.’ He looked long into the fire, remembering. ‘When I was young, he took me everywhere with him – through the woods, round the formal gardens, into the hothouses, and he’d tell me the name of every plant that he’d grown and cared for. You’ve seen all the shrubs that screen the outbuildings near the house and the vineries on the walls?’
‘Only in the dark.’
‘I must show them to you – they’re still very much as he created them, although on a much smaller scale. You know, we used to have fourteen acres of apple orchards alone – but I suppose William’s told you how magnificent the estate was before the war?’
‘Not really. He said that the war changed a lot, but some things were on the decline anyway.’
‘Maybe that’s true. I suppose my memories are bound to be different – I was young and I didn’t have the headache of keeping it going – but I think William’s doing himself an injustice. Loe was in its prime back then. He took it over about ten years before the war, and he and my father made it pretty much self-sufficient. Except for coal, it looked after its own community and more besides – we had crops for food, wood for building, even our own brewery at one stage, although I gather it was much safer to buy your ale over the bar.’ He leaned forward and topped up their glasses. ‘Then suddenly there was no one left to run it. We lost more men every month until we were down to a skeleton staff. I was at university by then, and every time I came back the place seemed more deserted. It wasn’t just the men, either – the horses disappeared, even the trees. Teddy wasn’t the only thing that the Royal Navy took from William,’ he added dryly. ‘Acres of oak went to them as well – hundreds of years of growth. It changed the whole character of the landscape in places. I know it’s not the same thing as losing a son, but it broke William’s heart.’
‘So he threw himself into the war effort instead. He told me that much.’
‘Yes, and my father was ill by that time, so there was really no one left to stand Loe’s corner. She suffered along with the rest of us.’
Like Ronnie, he spoke of the estate as a woman, she noticed. As interested as she was in this new aspect of the war’s impact, though, she tried to steer Archie back to a more personal history. ‘It’s a tribute to what your father achieved that anything managed to survive that,’ she said. ‘He must have had an extraordinary vision.’
‘He did. The sort of vision that comes from respecting the past, I suppose. He had hundreds of opportunities to move on – people were always coming to him for advice, offering him work on country estates that were a lot grander than this one. He could have been a rich man, but there was never any question of his leaving Loe. He was tied to it by something very powerful – so was my mother. But you’re right – he did look to the future. He was always experimenting, and his knowledge was extraordinary. Even in later life, I can remember him sitting by the fire, exclaiming with delight over some new discovery he’d made. He never lost that childlike excitement.’
‘You have that, you know – when you let yourself forget about work for long enough.’
‘Once or twice a year, then,’ he said glibly, but she could tell he was pleased.
‘And that explains the books. I’ve been having a look through, trying to guess what belongs to whom. Who’s the Trollope fan?’
‘That was my father. The Lodge was always crammed with books. I’ve kept his favourites, but lots of the more specialist volumes have gone to a library in Penzance. It seemed a shame to keep them here, unused. My mother had lots, too, but her interests were less scientific.’
Josephine looked at him. ‘Less scientific? In what way?’
He smiled. ‘Morveth’s not the only person round here who put her faith in unconventional remedies – at least, she wasn’t when my mother was alive.’
‘You knew?’ she asked before she could stop herself.
‘Was that another secret I’m supposed to be oblivious to?’ Josephine blushed, but he made light of it. ‘It was never an issue for her – just another way of looking at things. And she did share things with me,’ he added, more seriously. ‘That was one of the things I loved most about her – and why I was so shocked this afternoon. I thought I knew her inside out, but I suppose some things were outside that understanding – and I have no choice now but to accept that. Her belief in folklore wasn’t one of them, though.’
‘But you were so dismissive of Morveth the other night at dinner.’
‘No, not at all. I was – I am – dismissive of the idea that people have certain powers that are beyond our understanding – for good or evil. I don’t like it whether it comes under the name of religion or magic or quackery. But as far as healing is concerned – people have managed for hundreds of years without some of the things we know now, and who’s to say that their ways are no longer valid? Both Morveth and my mother chose to put a spiritual importance on their learning which I can’t accept, but that doesn’t detract from the facts. It’s knowledge, just like my father’s, and when I chose to study medicine, it was down to both of them – the healing and the science. But it wasn’t to be.’
‘The war again,’ Josephine said bitterly. She knew the reasons for Archie’s change of career but – privately – had always believed it to be a change for the better, the one precious thing to have come out of the sadness. Now, though, she was not so sure, and felt for the first time the loss of direction which Archie must have experienced on leaving that tribute to his parents behind.
He hesitated. ‘The war was part of it, but it really only confirmed what I knew. In my heart, I’d already decided that medicine wasn’t for me. Or rather, that I wasn’t for medicine.’
