The Ashford Affair Page 35

  “No.” Addie found her voice. She clutched at Frederick’s hand, squeezing it as hard as she could. “No, you didn’t! Bea wouldn’t have—Bea would never—” What did she know about what Bea would or wouldn’t? She was beginning to think she hadn’t known her cousin at all. But she couldn’t say that to Frederick, not now. “This was an accident, a horrible, awful accident. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “The things I said to her—” He looked up at Addie, his face haggard. “Do you know the worst of it? I meant every word. I can’t even say I didn’t mean it. I did.”

  Addie’s hand tightened around his. She felt so feeble in the face of his grief, so incapable of doing anything at all. “Frederick—”

  “All I wanted was to be rid of her. But not like this! Never like this.” Frederick’s eyes were bloodshot, his face haunted. “I didn’t love her, but I didn’t want her dead.”

  “I know,” said Addie brokenly. “I know.”

  It had been eating away at her for the past month, the same horrible guilt. She’d wanted Frederick, but she’d never wanted Bea gone, not gone gone.

  “I wanted us to be together, but not like this. It’s all ruined. After this—you must despise me.” Frederick grasped both of her hands with feverish strength. “Go back to England. It’s the only thing for you. Take the girls. Don’t let me drag you down.”

  “Stop being an idiot!” Addie’s voice cracked through the room. In a low, earnest voice she said, “I let you drive me away once before, and look what happened. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll see this through together.”

  Frederick made a strange noise deep in his throat. He shook his head, murmuring something indistinct.

  “Frederick?” His head was bowed, his shoulders shaking.

  It took Addie a moment to realize that he was crying, in gut-wrenched, soundless sobs that shook his whole body.

  “Oh, darling.” Addie slid off her chair, wrapping her arms around him, pressing his head against her breast. She could feel his tears soaking through the thin fabric of her wrap. “It will be all right, I promise. We’ll all be all right.”

  Except Bea. It tore at her, the idea that there would never again be a Bea flitting in with that impish smile of hers, dispensing charm and worldly wisdom, making everything brighter just by walking into the room.

  She pushed the thought away, wrapping her arms more tightly around her cousin’s husband. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  She stroked his head, where the dark hair was beginning to thin. There were silver stands in the candlelight, gray that hadn’t been there before. Her eyes were damp with tears, but she tried to keep her own voice steady. She had to be strong for both of them, for all of them, for Marjorie and Anna, too. She might have failed Bea in everything else, but she’d take care of her girls.

  “I’m staying right here with you. For as long as you need me.”

  Frederick looked up, his eyes red, his face ravaged with tears. “Don’t leave me,” he said hoarsely. His hands reached up to frame her face. “Promise you won’t leave me.”

  “Never,” she promised, but the word was lost against his lips as he drew her face down to his.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  New York, 2000

  Aunt Anna’s apartment looked much smaller without Jon in it.

  This time, it was Aunt Anna who met Clemmie at the door, casually elegant in a brightly patterned dress that looked like—and probably was—vintage Pucci. Jon and his snowmen seemed like half a lifetime ago.

  “Thanks for having me over,” Clemmie said, trying not to wince at the brightness of the colors. She had the hangover to end all hangovers. She hadn’t had one this bad since law school.

  Aunt Anna led her past the study, into a small, rectangular living room with built-in bookcases on two sides of a small, glassed-in fireplace. Some of the shelves held books; most were filled with pictures, pictures of Aunt Anna’s stepchildren and pets. Clemmie recognized the late, lamented Shoo-Shoo.

  “I wondered when you’d be over,” said Aunt Anna, not realizing that her voice had the effect of a buzz saw. “Coffee? Or something stronger?”

  “Coffee,” said Clemmie with feeling. “But that’s okay, you don’t need to—”

  “It will take two minutes. Sit.”

  Clemmie didn’t sit. Instead, she wandered over to the bookcases. Jon’s wedding picture was still there, Jon in a tux, Caitlin in a traditional meringue of a dress. It suddenly struck Clemmie that she wouldn’t want to be in Caitlin’s shoes, married to a man who didn’t know if he could believe in love. It was a strange feeling, feeling sorry for Caitlin, but she did. It made a nice change from bitterly resenting her.

  Was Jon right? Were they all too screwed up to ever love anyone properly? Clemmie didn’t want to believe that. Surely that was what self-determination was all about, taking responsibility for one’s own destiny. Just because their parents’ marriages had been screwed up didn’t mean theirs needed to be.

  She just wished she could be as comfortable with anyone as she was with Jon, could feel as alive bickering with someone. Tony was a nice guy, but talking to him felt like an exercise in translation. What was it someone had called the Americans and the Brits? Divided by a common language? It was that and more than that. She hadn’t quite been able to shake off that slight feeling of the creeps she’d gotten when he’d told her he’d had a crush on her grandmother’s portrait. They’d had a good time last night, especially after the third round of drinks, but any little spark she might have felt was long since gone.

  She’d been glad when they parted with a wobbly kiss on the cheek. They’d parted friends, she was fairly sure. He’d reiterated his invitation to come stay at Rivesdale House. And not because of the portrait, he said, and she’d thanked him with an effusiveness born of booze.

  Clemmie winced in the afternoon sunlight reflecting off Aunt Anna’s blindingly white bookshelves. Tony must think she was slightly unstable.

  She was slightly unstable. She felt off-balance, and not just because of the hangover. No law firm—no Granny Addie—all the familiar paving stones of Clemmie’s life had been dug up and dumped away, leaving her on highly uncertain ground.

  There were so many familiar family pictures on Aunt Anna’s shelves, but Clemmie looked at them differently now, trying to figure out who was really related to whom, scrutinizing Uncle Teddy for any resemblance to Granny Addie. Clemmie had thought her mother looked like Granny Addie, but it must have been simply a trick of expression.

  “Here you go.” Aunt Anna came back into the room carrying two heavy ceramic mugs.

  Clemmie turned away from the pictures. “Was Uncle Teddy Granny Addie’s or Bea’s?” she asked.

  “Addie’s,” said Aunt Anna promptly. “He was the only one of us who was.” Dropping gracefully onto the couch, Aunt Anna reached for a crumpled pack of Benson & Hedges. “God, I miss him. It’s been almost thirty years now—can you believe it?”

  “I remember his funeral,” said Clemmie, and she did, vaguely. She remembered the hushed tones and the dark clothes and her mother’s red eyes and feeling obscurely guilty for taking such pleasure in her new black velvet dress. “It was the first time I met Jon.”

  “Jon.” Aunt Anna held up her orange plastic lighter. Her eyes took on a very particular gleam. “Speaking of Jon—”

  “I gather Caitlin’s back in town,” said Clemmie quickly.

  Frowning, Aunt Anna held the flame to her cigarette and breathed in, making the point glow red. “I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

  “Well, anyway,” Clemmie said quickly, before they could wander further down that alleyway, “what I really wanted to talk to you about was—”

  “I know. Your grandmother.” She didn’t specify which one. Aunt Anna stretched out comfortably on the couch. She still, Clemmie noted, had amazing legs for a septuagenarian. “I’m glad you called me. I wanted to tell you years ago, you know.”

  “Thanks,” said Clemmie, and
sipped her coffee. It was one of the powdered, flavored varieties, thick and cloying. It made Clemmie’s stomach churn. She set it aside.

  “Your mother was against it. She didn’t want to screw up your relationship with Addie.” Anna’s expression amply betrayed what she thought of that.

  Clemmie sat on the edge of her chair. “I’ve seen the newspaper clippings,” she said bluntly. “About Bea’s death.”

  Aunt Anna’s manicured eyebrows rose. “You have been a busy little bee, haven’t you? You always did do your homework.”

  Clemmie wasn’t in the mood to play games. “What happened?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question. Wouldn’t we all like to know?” Aunt Anna flicked ash into a silver ashtray. “The short answer is that no one really knows. My mother, my father, and Addie went on safari. My mother didn’t come back. You do the math.”

  “Couldn’t it have been a horrible accident?” Clemmie wasn’t sure why it mattered quite so much, but it did. A grieving widower remarrying was one thing. The other possibilities weren’t to be contemplated. “The way Granny spoke about Bea—she sounded like she loved her.”

  “She might have,” said Aunt Anna coolly. “Once. But she loved my father more.”

  There was no arguing with that. Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick’s love for each other had been legendary. Clemmie could remember them together when she was little, still entirely wound up in each other, finishing each other’s sentences, leaning on each other for support—although it had always seemed that Grandpa Frederick leaned a little more. Which made sense. He had been older and frailer, already suffering from the first stages of the esophageal cancer that later killed him.

  “Once she had him,” said Aunt Anna, breaking into Clemmie’s thoughts, “she would have done anything to keep him.”

  “Not murder,” said Clemmie stubbornly. This was the woman who had bandaged her childhood cuts and supervised her homework. Addie might have lied to her, but Clemmie couldn’t believe her capable of that. Not even for love, love with a capital L, the kind of love Clemmie sometimes doubted existed.

  “No,” agreed Aunt Anna, and there was a decidedly odd expression on her face. “Not murder.”

  Clemmie felt some of the tightness in her chest release.

  Until Aunt Anna added, “I don’t think my mother was dead. And I’m fairly sure Addie knew it.”

  “That’s—” Clemmie choked on sickly sweet coffee, her eyes watering. “That’s insane.”

  “Is it?” Aunt Anna sipped her coffee, smoke curling up from the cigarette balanced in the ashtray. “All they found was a scarf, a shoe, and a diamond clip. The party line was that my mother wandered away from camp and was eaten by animals. There were certainly plenty of people with a motive for murder—my father and Aunt Addie among them—but nothing was ever proved. One way or the other.” She added, almost as an afterthought, “They never found the body.”

  Clemmie looked up sharply at her. “But she was declared dead. She would have to have been for—”

  “For Addie to marry my father. Yes. They married two years later, as soon as my mother was declared legally dead. Legally dead and dead are two very different things.”

  “But wouldn’t they have had to have proof—”

  “What proof? All they needed to do was wait it out. There was never any proof. There was never any body.” Anna leaned forward, her face intent. “I saw her. In Nairobi.”

  Aunt Anna rose from the couch, pacing restlessly across the room, years of pent-up energy, pent-up anger, in her stance.

  “I was seven years old, and there she was, in the bazaar. I tried to find her, but Addie caught me and brought me back. They told me I was imagining things.” After all these years, the hurt and rage still came through. “As if I would imagine that! They sent us off to school in England not long after that,” she added bitterly. “Addie saw her, too. I’m sure of it.”

  Clemmie looked up at her, not sure where to even begin. “Wouldn’t Addie”—she stumbled over the name, strange on her tongue without the usual honorific—“have said something? Done something?”

  “And risk blowing everything? Are you kidding? With my mother out of the picture, she had it all—the farm, Farve. And then there was Teddy. If Mummy showed up out of the blue—” Aunt Anna gestured expressively. “Marriage might have been a loose concept in Kenya, but they still frowned on bigamy.”

  “Even though she—your mother—had been declared dead?”

  “You’re the lawyer,” said Anna. “I don’t know. But it would have been a legal mess and a huge scandal. Addie didn’t like scandal.”

  That much was true. Granny Addie had been very much of the shovel-it-under-the-carpet variety. Clemmie’s mother had inherited that in spades.

  “But couldn’t they have just gotten a divorce? Your mother and Grandpa Frederick, I mean?” Clemmie was floundering. “If they divorced and Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick remarried—”

  “There was still Teddy,” said Aunt Anna. “Teddy would have been one or two at the time. The laws regarding legitimacy didn’t change until 1976. Until then, even if the parents married each other after, the child was still legally a bastard.” She spoke with the grim certainty of someone who had studied her subject. “So you see, Addie had a reason for making sure Bea stayed lost.”

  “But what about Bea?” Clemmie asked logically. “If she were alive, wouldn’t she have tried to get back to you?”

  “Unless Addie paid her off—or threatened her. Who knows? But I know my mother was there, in Nairobi, that day. I know she tried to come back to us.”

  Something about the way she said it sent a shiver down Clemmie’s spine.

  “I was too young, then, to do anything about it. My father and Addie had the final say.” Aunt Anna stared out over Clemmie’s shoulder, a million miles and sixty years away. “But I always knew my mother was out there, somewhere. I went looking for her, later.”

  Clemmie looked at her aunt. “Did you ever find her?”

  “No.” Aunt Anna ground her cigarette into the ashtray. “No.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  New York, 1971

  “Thank you, you’re very kind.”

  If one more person told her how sorry he was, Addie would scream. She would scream and scream until the china ornaments on the mantel shattered and the glass in the pictures cracked, until the windows dissolved into tiny pools of sand and salt and the wind howled through the open apertures from the park beyond.

  Her son was dead. Her baby boy. How was that right or fair or just? It had been a heart attack, they said, on Metro-North. One moment he was sitting there, with his briefcase and his paper; the next he was flat out on the floor, gasping for help that didn’t come, his own body turned against him.

  Why Teddy? He was one of life’s golden creatures, good-natured to a fault, open and kind. Admittedly, he had married a creature of quite staggering vapidity, but that wasn’t the sort of mistake that killed; one didn’t die of boredom or suffer heart attacks from it. He’d been a big, bluff, hearty man, Teddy, fond of his drink, but equally fond of the golf course and the tennis court. He should have outlived them all.

  Who had ever heard of heart trouble in their family? Addie’s was still going strong, for all that it felt like breaking. As for her own father and mother, they hadn’t lived long enough to tell. It was staggering to think that they, forever old in her imagination, had been younger than Teddy when they died. It crawled over her like a creeping chill, the knowledge that she was older than her parents had ever been, older than her son would ever be, her son, her son, the only child of her body.

  “At least you have something to remind you of him,” said the particularly vapid wife of Addie’s stockbroker, looking sentimentally at Teddy’s children, arranged prettily around their mother, the girls in neat black dresses, Ed in a black suit that looked as though it pinched.

  “Yes,” said Addie. “They’re a great comfort.”

  They rem
inded her of Teddy not at all. They were all Patty’s. Addie had never liked Patty.

  She liked her just as little now, although one would think they’d be linked in their common grief, if nothing else. But Patty’s wailings had set Addie’s teeth on edge, nothing about Teddy, about his loss to the world, but all her own woes; how was she to survive, how was she to live, now that Teddy had gone? Addie had patted Patty’s hand mechanically, blotting out her selfish cries, the endless repetition of “me,” “I,” “me.” Such a selfish kind of grief.

  Addie’s grief was selfish, too, she supposed. All grief was, in the end.

  She grieved for all the things Teddy might have done and hadn’t: the grandchildren he would never dandle, the tennis matches he would never play, the stars that would never shine for him again. She grieved for the children who had never been, the younger siblings Teddy had never known, two of them, one after the other, barely formed, not even recognizable as babies, too early for headstones, bundled out of the house and buried in the garden. Teddy had only been told that Mummy was sick; he’d sat on the edge of her bed and babbled at her in his own childish patois while she’d tried not to let him see how she was weeping, the tears seeping soundlessly down the side of her face.

  After the last miscarriage, the doctors in Nairobi had told her she couldn’t have other children. She’d told Frederick she didn’t mind; three was more than enough for them, what with school fees and the like. They had their two girls and a boy; anything else would be sheer excess.

  Their girls. They were always very careful to treat all the children equally. At least, they tried. It wasn’t an effort on Frederick’s part; he loved them all equally, his children, although Addie had always suspected that he had a special place in his heart for Anna, his wild child.

  Anna had come back from Hawaii for the funeral, bringing with her the latest husband, a playwright of some sort, with a bristly reddish brown mustache and a mustard-colored velvet blazer over wide-legged tweed pants. His skin was violently sunburned beneath the extraneous facial hair, a relic of their barefoot beach wedding.