there, the two of them. The grief, it’s inside the soil.
I hear the sound of squishing footsteps an instant before the brisk Scotch voice. “You ought not to be out like this, Mrs. Thorpe.”
“Annie! You startled me.”
“You ought to be inside, where it’s warm.”
“I don’t mind the cold. It makes me feel closer to him.”
“Won’t do him a bit of good, though. Nor his babe.”
I nod toward the thicket. “Is that where they’re buried?”
She hesitates. “Who, ma’am?”
“Margaret said they’re buried here. Her mother and—well, not her father, but his kit bag. You buried it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she says, but there’s a note to her voice that sets something stirring in me. You know how it is when you’ve been reporting on people’s tittle-tattle for the past two years. You recognize the sound of someone wanting to unburden herself. I turn my head. She’s wearing a worn raincoat, worn rubber boots that must be several sizes too big for her, a strange floppy oilskin hat like something a fisherman would wear in a gale. Her hands fret about inside her pockets.
“Something the matter, Annie?” I ask.
“Poor Master Benedict. Poor lad. Just like his father. And you! Expecting a wee babe, just like his mother.”
“I’m not anything like his mother.”
“Oh, but you are. There’s only a few who love like that. Only a few that can bear it.”
“But she didn’t bear it, did she? When he died, she couldn’t bear it.” I gesture to the thicket. “She made you bury his things.”
“That was just the darkness in her, ma’am. I knew she didn’t mean it. She had a darkness in her, like my mum had. Came on when she had her babes. Poor wee thing. I knew she didn’t mean it.”
She’s looking off into the thicket now, as if she sees something inside it. I turn to face her, and still she doesn’t regard me, so I reach out to take her elbow. I left my gloves behind, and my hands are wet and raw, and her raincoat is about the same.
“What does that mean, Annie? What are you trying to say?”
“I did keep it safe, ma’am. All these years. The poor dear major. It wasn’t right to bury his things in the dirt.”
Lulu
July 1943
(The Bahamas)
I woke to the sound of a ringing telephone, sometime past eight o’clock in the morning. At first I thought it must be Thorpe, but then I remembered how, a few hours earlier, I had settled in the dark sand and watched the sun crawl over the edge of the world, until the drone of the Liberators merged into the noise of the ocean and Thorpe was gone, my husband was gone, and I had staggered back to bed.
The telephone persisted shrilly. There was no closing your ears to a sound like that, repeated over and over by a person who evidently meant to get his point across, one way or another. I raised my head from the pillow. My brain ached with champagne and sorrow. I lifted my hand to the sun that splintered through the shutters and saw the ring on my finger like an exotic object, a thing never before seen in human history, a band of gold clamped above my knuckle. I rolled over and fell from the bed, aching in every joint and sinew, each tendon screaming with its own particular anguish. Like the telephone, over and over. I stumbled naked out of the room and found the receiver in the parlor. The shutters were still closed, the room streaked with bands of light.
“Hello?” I said.
A man’s voice. “Mrs. Randolph.”
“Who’s this?”
A rush of static came over the line, like the fellow at the other end was simply breathing into the mouthpiece, considering his words. “Mrs. Randolph, it’s Jack,” he said at last.
“Jack! Jack from the Prince George?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re up awfully early. Say, I’ve got a little news for you—”
“Listen, Mrs. Randolph. It’s important. You got a minute?”
“Sure I do. But it’s not Mrs. Randolph anymore, you know. It’s—”
“I know, I know.” He made a sound of impatience, a grunt. “Listen up. You heard the news about Oakes?”
“Sir Harry? What about him? Has he left town already?”
“He’s left town, all right,” said Jack. “He’s dead. Murdered last night in his own bed.”
Jack wanted to meet me all the way out at Lyford Cay, an odd and awfully inconvenient location, because he had something important to tell me, and you couldn’t trust a telephone line not to have an operator listening at the other end.