The Warning Bell Read online

  ‘Mum, I don’t understand. Why didn’t he tell you himself?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me,’ she said with great precision, ‘because he never wanted to see me again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He wanted me to think he’d died that night in April ’44. And part of him had.’

  ‘That’s rubbish. He adores you. He always has.’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘Iain, something followed him back from France. Something that never gave him peace. Oh, I found him again, helped him back on his feet. Then in 1948 we lost Callum and I thought that would finish him. But we picked ourselves up and kept going. And for years after the War it was better. You were born. It seemed a shadow had lifted, and life became… good again. Not what it had promised to be, but good enough.’ Her brow furrowed. ‘And then he took you out on the water that day, when you were little. It started again from that moment. And after that it never left him alone.’

  I sat back. ‘You never told me any of this.’

  ‘He made me promise. And I didn’t know much myself. He didn’t talk to anyone about what happened in France, not even to me. But it was something horrible. I know that. Something horrible.’

  I took her hand again and sat silently holding it. Afraid? That was what she had said. And now I could hear it again, my father’s harsh voice raised in the night while she soothed him, gentled him. That was fear? No one had ever told me that. But then I had never asked.

  ‘I meant to tell you, Iain, so many times.’ Her voice wavered a little. ‘I kept some things – not much, but I always meant to show you.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Things he brought back from France with him. He told me I was to throw it all into the sea. He still doesn’t know I kept anything from those days. But now someone’s found the launch, and that can’t be hidden.’

  ‘His launch? After sixty years?’

  ‘Just a few weeks ago. A man kept phoning about it, but your father would never speak to him. I tried to make myself call you, Iain.’ Her breathing was growing ragged. ‘But I’d promised him… And I thought, perhaps you’d come down to see us and I’d have the chance then… But you never did come...’ She was silent for a few moments. Then she said: ‘Fetch my case.’

  Among my earliest memories was the cracked brown leather attaché case which my mother stored in the corner of the wardrobe. I had always thought she kept only chequebooks and bills in it. Now I got up and brought the case over to the bed and sat down again with it on my knee. I stroked the rusty catches with my thumbs.

  ‘Don’t open it now,’ she said quickly.

  I took my hands away from the catches.

  ‘When you leave this room,’ she said, ‘when it’s over and you leave this room, you are to take the case with you. Don’t let your father see it. Do you understand? And when you’re back home in London, then you can open it. Then you can decide what is to be done.’

  She touched my strong hand with her frail one as if she were the one offering me comfort. I could feel her slipping. I put the case on the floor and took her hand in both of mine and rubbed it and murmured to her.

  She said: ‘Your father was such a good man, Iain.’

  I brushed a lock of grey hair from her forehead.

  She smiled. ‘Ah, you never knew him the way I knew him. Laughing. Always laughing. And with such courage. I can still see him, standing there on the cobbles outside Constable’s Gate at Dover Castle, waiting for me to come off duty. He’d bring his motorbike up from the town. I used to linger in the shadows inside the gateway, behind the guard hut, just so that I could watch him standing there, leaning on that old motorbike, waiting for me.’ Her smile drained away. ‘I don’t like to think what must have happened over there to change him so.’

  I ran the backs of my fingers down her cheek. Her skin was cool and damp. Her eyes sought for mine in the darkness, and it was as if she had come floating up from the depths of a pool. She lifted herself towards me and I slipped my arm under her thin back to hold her. I could feel her breath against my cheek.

  ‘They were like wolves,’ she whispered. ‘The memories. Slinking after us down the years, like wolves in the dark forest, waiting for their chance to pull him down. You mustn’t let them pull him down, Iain. Even now. Promise me that.’

  I promised, not knowing what I was promising, nor how I could refuse, and at that moment not caring.

  She grew still and heavy against my arm. I settled her back on the pillow and talked softly to her until her breathing steadied. Her eyes were still open but I could no longer tell whether they were focused on me. I sat with her for a full hour after that, stroking her hand in the night. Even though I watched for it – and I watched like a lynx – I was unable to identify the precise moment when she died.

  At a little after four in the morning I closed her eyes. I settled the blankets around her and kissed her forehead for the last time. After that I sat for a while longer in the dark room, and then I took the old brown attaché case out to the car and locked it in the luggage compartment and came back in to wake my father.

  4

  Only a handful of mourners came back to the cottage, to stand around in a morose little group for an hour or two, nibbling food they didn’t want. Now the last of them had gone, the last taxi winding away down the lane. I slipped out into the grey afternoon. The winter greens in the vegetable garden lay drab in the wan light. Below, the Channel shone like steel. I saw my father at once, standing at his favourite vantage point on the cliff path, high above the cottage. He was gazing seaward, his brown coat flapping. I pulled my jacket around me and set off up the grassy slope. He stood with his back to me, leaning into the wind like an old tree. A few spots of rain were driving in now, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  I walked up and stopped beside him, willing him to face me. He did not. I said: ‘You know we’ll have to leave soon.’

  ‘Go back to your life in the city, Iain,’ he said to the sea. ‘You’re best away from here. You were always best away from me.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like this any more, Dad.’

  ‘It’s not the time to speak of new beginnings.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the right time.’

  Finally he looked at me. ‘You go on your way now, Iain. It’s better you do.’

  If he had just opened the door to me then, even the merest crack… But then again, perhaps nothing we did or said could have changed things. At that moment, at least, it felt that way. I hesitated, on the point of retreating, but below me I glimpsed Kate standing outside the back door of the cottage, her face tilted anxiously towards us and her fair hair streaming in the wind. I swung back towards my father and stepped in front of him, onto the very edge of the cliff.

  ‘What happened in France all those years ago, Dad?’

  He did not move, but I saw the pupils of his eyes shrink to black dots.

  ‘Don’t think badly of her,’ I said. ‘She told me about Brittany.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Not much. How you went missing. She thought it might help us if I knew. What happened to you there, Dad?’

  ‘The world’s past caring about all that.’

  ‘I care about it. You suffered and so we all suffered. Everyone around you suffered. And you couldn’t even tell us?’

  ‘It couldn’t have profited you. It cannot profit you now. It would have been better if your mother had kept her peace, God bless her.’

  ‘She did for as long as she could, Dad. But now I can’t unknow this thing. I can’t just pretend she didn’t speak.’

  His shoulders rose and fell. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do you think I want? I want us to salvage what we can before it’s too late.’

  He turned his head, shifting the focus of his gaze far out towards the horizon once more. I realised that he wasn’t going to answer me. I had thought he might be angry, or stricken, or remorseful. But it hadn’t occurred to me that he would simply stay sil
ent. It filled me with a kind of panic, as if – having finally glimpsed him – I could see him slipping away from me again and was unable to stop him.

  He made to move away but I took his arm and held him.

  ‘Dad, help me understand. Why has it been the way it has between the two of us?’

  He met my eyes at last, and I saw that his own were full of pain. Gently he freed his arm from my grip. ‘Let it be, Iain.’

  He stumped away up the flank of the hill, and I stood there like a fool in the rain, watching him as he kept plodding up and up, towards the cliff top and the pewter sky. The wind began to strengthen, blowing in from the Channel. I could hear it sweeping through the grass and I felt the rain running down my hot face.

  I drove home down the A303 across Salisbury Plain, the tyres sibilant on the wet road and Kate curled asleep in the seat beside me. Stonehenge stood like a ring of grim sentinels against a rinsed sky. This was the route I had followed when I had left home as a teenager. No, I hadn’t left: I’d fled. I hadn’t known where I was going to stay when I got to London. I hadn’t known anything much at all except the need to escape, and the need to make him sorry by my escaping.

  I had hitchhiked from the West Country over two January days, with twenty-three pounds in my pocket, and nothing in my backpack but one change of clothes and a burden of rejection I could no longer shoulder. I had stuck my thumb out at every passing car along this route, and even now every lay-by and landmark had a memory for me. In that bus shelter outside Honiton I had tried to sleep through the first iron-hard night. On that dry stone wall on the Salisbury road I had waited for three hours in driving sleet, until, out of pity, a local farmer had picked me up on his tractor and taken me a couple of miles. I had tried to look tough and capable as I clung behind his shuddering cab. But I was neither. I was merely young and scared.

  Most vividly of all, I remembered endlessly scanning the grey country roads, looking for the police my father would surely have alerted. I had watched for the white patrol cars through the bitter day as I moved further and further northeast, through Devon and Somerset and Wiltshire and nearer to my goal. I wasn’t sure now what I would actually have done if, as winter darkness fell for the second time, a police car had cruised past with a couple of warm beefy constables inside.

  It didn’t matter. There had been no police. My father, who was a veteran sergeant in the Devon and Cornwall force by then, and could have called in all kinds of favours, had never even reported me missing. I had always assumed that this was my punishment.

  But now as I drove I kept hearing my mother’s voice whispering to me in the night, speaking of Callum’s death. Had my father truly imagined that dead child was his punishment, just as I had thought his rejection was mine? She had told me how afraid he had been. And I realised that what my father had told me just yesterday was literally true, and had long been true: he believed I was better away from him. He had wanted me gone from that place and from him, for my own good. I glanced down at my sleeping daughter. I wondered what could drive a father to wish for such a thing. And I thought of the old leather briefcase lying still unopened in the boot.

  5

  I awoke at five to the sound of the wind buffeting the picture windows. Chantal breathed softly beside me and I was comforted by her presence. I had been dreaming, and a confused patchwork of images still crowded my mind – a launch pitching on a black sea, men hunched in duffel coats, luminous surf breaking over a sandbank. I could taste tension, and knew I wouldn’t sleep any more. The curve of Chantal’s warm back tempted me for a moment, but she had arrived home exhausted late the previous evening, and needed all the rest she could get. I got up and dressed quietly.

  I settled myself at my desk. London was a mass of lights. The sky over Docklands was still dark, the river a mercury serpent slithering eastward. A loose hoarding banged like a cannon in the rising wind and made me think again of a storm at sea, way out there to the east, beyond what I knew and understood. I lifted the brown attaché case onto the desk and clicked open the catches.

  Gas bills, bank statements, chequebook, bills. I took the papers out, flicked through them quickly and stacked them on the desk to my left. At the bottom of the case was a fat buff envelope, and under it a folder of faded green cardboard, its corners pulpy. I had never seen either before. I took out the envelope and opened it.

  She had kept my old school reports right back to primary, and childhood drawings of stick people with straw hair, and a letter I had written to her while on a French exchange trip, scribbled on the back of a menu. There was a photograph of me setting off for my first day at St Edmund’s Grammar, my satchel over my shoulder, and a colour picture of my wedding day eighteen years ago. I could fix the very moment that photo had been taken: I couldn’t stop smiling, I remembered, with Chantal dazzling at my side.

  At first my father had refused to come to the wedding. I was hurt and angry, but Chantal would not hear of him staying away, and she and my mother had managed it somehow. He had been gruff and silent as ever, but he had at least been there. We owed such rapprochement as we had been able to achieve to that day, and I had started going down to see them again after that, a hurried visit every few months, but a visit nonetheless.

  I had no idea my mother had kept any of this. She never spoke of such things. But the pictures and the papers were well handled, and it was evident that she had often taken them out and looked through them. I sifted through the little pile of memories under the desk lamp. All that remained of a life of over eighty years, and it would fit in a shoebox. It was a little while before I could bring myself to put it all back into its envelope and set it aside, next to the gas bills and the bank statements.

  I opened the green folder and the contents slipped out onto the desk. I found myself staring at an odd little collection of relics: a flattened Senior Service cigarette packet with its logo of a clipper ship in full sail; an antique coin; a small square snapshot, now fading to sepia; a yellowed article from an old newspaper and a much more recent one clipped from a colour magazine.

  The newer of the two articles was stapled to a compliment slip and had been cut from a recent issue of a French tourist magazine. It was crumpled and stained with grease and what might have been tea. I translated the title to myself as: ‘FAST LADY COMES TO SAD END’. There were a few lines of racy copy, and though I merely glanced at them I caught the name of a village – St Cyriac-sur-Mer, Brittany. The picture itself hardly looked as dramatic as the caption promised. A group of elderly men in wet weather gear grinned bravely in the rain, standing on the muddy bed of a tidal river at low water. The riverbank was overhung with willows and fringed with reeds. One of the men carried a miniature French flag, and one of them a British. Behind them loomed a dark shape, like the carcass of a whale overshadowing its hunters, partly screened by the willows on the bank. The pale disc of an RAF roundel was visible on the hull. The tall numerals were faded and half hidden by dirt: 2548.

  The second cutting was so faded and brittle that I had to move it directly under the light to read it. It was from an issue of the Kent Courier dated 22nd March, 1944, and it read:

  YOUNG WOMAN’S DEATH ‘SUSPICIOUS’

  Dover police have not yet released the identity of a young woman found dead in a flat in the Buckland area of the city on Friday last. Detective Sgt Adrian Proctor confirmed that police are treating the death as suspicious. The woman is believed to have been a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service.

  Printed across the top of the cutting, in my mother’s neat handwriting, was the name ‘Sally’. Was that the name of the dead girl in the article? It looked like it. But I couldn’t remember my mother ever mentioning anyone called Sally, nor a presumed murder in Dover.

  The coin was a sovereign with George VI’s head on it, and dated 1944. I turned it in my fingers, rubbing the gold with the ball of my thumb until it shone.

  The sepia snapshot would fill the third panel of the triptych on the bookcase in my parents�
� cottage. My father, in his early twenties, stood black-bearded in a white Air Sea Rescue sweater, an RAF cap set at an angle on his head. He was smiling, his eyes closed to merry slits, like some devil-may-care pirate. Beside him, her arm around his waist, my mother stood in her WREN’s uniform, the pride of possession in every angle of her body. Her cap was in her free hand and long-ago sunshine glinted on her blonde hair. She was almost as tall as he was, but looked half his size, and she was quite lovely.

  Behind the two of them was a grey blur of beach, a groyne, ridged water. I stared at the photo, held it to the light. I had never seen him laughing in a photograph before. For years I had not seen him laugh at all. I had to search my memory before I could find an image of him which came close to matching this young buccaneer, and when I did it was a long, long way back.

  I went through them all again without learning much more, except that on the back of the cigarette packet was a map of some kind, crosshatched squares of buildings, stylised waves, jotted numbers. It was clearly the plan of a complex of buildings, four of them set back from a beach. A pier or landing stage jutted out into the waves, and close to it were scrawled the letters LW. Just behind the shoreline a fifth building was drawn in more detail than the rest, with individual rooms. An odd design – a box with three lines across it – was marked in the centre of the main room, and beside it measurements in feet and inches. The card was water-stained and the lines uncertain, but I was certain that the map had been drawn by my father.

  None of it meant anything to me.

  I fired up the computer and began to run searches. I went onto a Brittany tourist website and found St Cyriac quickly enough. The map showed a small village tucked into a fold of the rugged north Breton coast perhaps one hundred kilometres west of St Malo. The place lay on the western bank of a modest river which emptied into the broadest and most easterly reach of the English Channel.