Page 3 of The Tuscan Child
She picked up the phone on her desk and dialled. I watched her drum long red fingernails impatiently before she spoke: “Ah, Alice. Good. You’re still here. I’ve Miss Langley here and we’d like some tea. Yes, in my office. Splendid.” She put the receiver down and looked up at me with a smile as if she had done something rather clever.
“Where were we?”
“My father,” I said. “You said you found him lying in the grounds?”
“I did. Quite a shock, I must admit. I was out with Bertie, my cocker spaniel, and he ran ahead and started barking. Well, he has a knack for finding disgusting things like dead birds so I shouted at him to leave it, and when I got there I saw it was a man lying face down in the grass. I turned him over tentatively and it was your father. Quite dead. Cold and stiff. So I ran back to the house and dialled 999. They’ve taken him off to the morgue and I expect they’ll conduct an autopsy.”
“So you don’t know what he died of?” I asked tentatively. “He wasn’t...I mean...” I couldn’t say the word “murdered.”
She looked horrified. “Oh no. Nothing like that, I’m sure. There wasn’t a mark on him. Natural causes, I’m sure. In fact, if he hadn’t been so cold and white, you’d have thought he was sleeping. Heart, it must have been. Did he have a weak heart, do you know?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “You must yourself know that my father was a very private person. He never discussed anything that might be in the least personal. And I have to confess that I haven’t spoken to him for some time. If he had been in poor health, he would never have told anybody.”
“I had noticed he was rather more remote than usual recently,” Miss Honeywell said. “Depressed, maybe.” She paused. “I always thought of him as an unhappy man. He never quite got over the loss of his status and property, did he?”
“Would you?” I asked, my hackles rising on his behalf. “How would you feel if you had to live in the lodge of your former home and watch schoolgirls trooping through the rooms where you had grown up?”
“He need not have stayed,” she said. “There were plenty of things he could have done. I gather he was a talented artist before the war. Up and coming.”
“My father? An up-and-coming artist?”
“Oh yes.” She nodded. “One gathers he exhibited at the Royal Academy. But I’ve never actually seen one of his paintings, other than posters he did for school events and scenery for our plays. Competent, clearly a trained artist, but certainly not unusual.”
“I had no idea that he ever painted,” I said. “I knew he had studied art, but I never realised he had been a real artist. I wonder why...” I was going to add that I wondered why he stopped, but I answered my own question before I said the words—because his world had come crashing down around him.
“They say artists are temperamental, don’t they?” Miss Honeywell said. “Highly strung. And of course he was from a high-born family, too. Inbreeding among the aristocracy does make for instability.”
“You don’t think he took his own life?” I asked sharply, the anger that she was suggesting my father had been somehow mentally unstable fighting with my own feelings of guilt that were threatening to engulf me.
She gave me a sad little smile. “If he had wanted to end his life, he would have had no reason to walk into the middle of the woods to do it. He could just as well have finished it at home. No one would have been there to stop him. Besides, as I mentioned, there was no sign of distress about him. Nothing like poison or a gunshot wound.” She paused, looking out of the window to where a starling had landed on a rose bush. “Of course, I rather suspect he had been drinking more heavily lately.” She turned her attention back to me. “Oh, I’m not implying that he was drunk on the job or anything, but the groundskeeper did report that empty bottles went out with the rubbish, and Miss Pritchard, the history mistress, did bump into him in the off-licence buying Scotch.”
I was tempted to ask what Miss Pritchard had been doing in the off-licence, but wisely stayed silent. “I expect we’ll find out the cause from the doctor who conducts the autopsy,” I said. “Not that it matters, does it? He’s dead. Nothing can bring him back.”
“I’m so sorry, my dear,” she said, sounding almost human. “It must have been a great shock to you. He wasn’t old.”
“Sixty-four,” I said mechanically. “Not old at all.”
“He was very proud of you, you know.”
I reacted to this with surprise. “Proud of me?”
“Oh yes. He talked about you often. How well you had done at university and how you were soon to be called to the bar.”
This was completely unexpected. My father had resisted my desire to go to university. His attitude toward women belonged to the prewar era, to a time when he was the son of Sir Toby Langley of Langley Hall and life consisted of house parties and dances and fox hunts. A good match was made for girls, and they became mistresses of their own fine country houses. He refused to see that in the post-war era, girls like me had to make their own way in the world and could expect no help from their families. A good career was essential. And so quite without his help I had sat the entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge and, as a backup, to University College London. I had been shattered with disappointment when I hadn’t secured a place at either Oxford or Cambridge, but I had got into UCL. A good second best, I suppose. It had never occurred to me at the time that a headmistress’s recommendation would have helped get me into an Oxbridge college, and I’m sure Miss Honeywell hadn’t been flattering in her letter about me, if she even wrote one at all.
A government scholarship paid for my tuition, and I worked all summer at a seaside hotel as a chambermaid to pay for my room and board. While others of my generation had held protest marches, love-ins, and sit-ins, and chanted, “Make peace, not war,” I had worked diligently. And so I had graduated with an upper second degree—not the first I wanted, but still pretty good. I then hoped to become a barrister.
Miss Honeywell must have been reading my thoughts.
“You are presumably working for the firm of solicitors to which I sent the telegram?”
“That’s right.” I saw no reason to tell her that I wasn’t working there at the moment, nor the reason for my leave of absence. “I have been articled there and hoped to take the bar exam this summer, but it will now have to be in the winter. They haven’t said whether they’d like me to stay on once I’m fully qualified.”
“An interesting practice?”
“Not particularly. A lot of conveyancing and wills and the sort of routine stuff one gives to juniors.”
“I should have thought a barrister was more your style,” she said, staring at me keenly with those little bird-like black eyes of hers. “You always did like to plead your case, and you could be quite persuasive.”
