A Gathering Storm(7)

‘Have you got a room, please? I haven’t booked or anything.’

‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘We had a cancellation come in this morning.’

The room was surprisingly cheap and the girl showed Lucy up several flights of stairs. It was a poky L-shaped attic with a view of the sky, but Lucy liked the solidity of the old building, the scent of lavender polish. A glance at the tiny shower room and the coffee-making facilities completed her satisfaction. It might be a bit cramped but it would certainly do for a few nights.

‘Oh, I’ll need to give you some washing,’ she told the girl. She’d only brought enough clothes for her week’s holiday with Will.

‘That’s no trouble. There’s a bag in the wardrobe. Just put it out for me,’ was the reply. ‘I’m Cara, by the way. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.’

As soon as Cara left, Lucy picked up the television remote control and sat cross-legged on the bed flicking through the channels with the sound off. On the news channel, soldiers moved in tanks through a rocky landscape. After a while, she pressed the off-button and lay back on the pillows, suddenly weary. And all her anxieties rushed in.

Why had she marooned herself here? The reality of what she’d done rose like a bubble in her chest. She’d offended Will – of whom she’d been quite fond, and who’d brought her on a not unpleasant holiday – and was stuck alone in a hotel room, probably miles from any public transport. And for what exactly?

The panic passed. She pulled a plastic folder out of a pocket in her suitcase and consulted the pages she’d printed from her father’s laptop. He’d visited the Imperial War Museum in search of Rafe and checked certain National Archive documents. Apart from Rafe’s date of birth, 1920, and the bare facts of his schooling and war career, he hadn’t found out much – nothing personal anyway. Except something that connected him with St Florian: his mother’s sister had lived there.

Inside the folder was an envelope containing the photograph she’d found in the bottom of the box with Granny’s things. It was of a very young man, thick fair hair sleeked back, a joyous expression in his sparkling eyes. The photo caught him leaning over a stone wall with his head resting on his forearm. There was no name, yet somehow she knew. The young man looked very like her Grandfather Gerald, but he wasn’t Gerald. He must be Rafe.

Over the past three months, Lucy had tried to make sense of her father’s investigations but she’d ended up finding out more about Tom Cardwell than about his Uncle Rafe.

‘Did you know about Rafe?’ she asked her mother on a weekend visit in March.

Following the divorce, Gabriella had decamped to a small cottage in North Norfolk where she painted great abstract canvases that didn’t sell, and more conventional sea scenes that paid her living expenses. Gabriella actually seemed happier and calmer than she had for months. Lucy wondered whether a man named ‘Lewin’ who owned a local art gallery and whose name Gabriella would frequently drop into the conversation had something to do with this, and if so she was glad. Still in her late fifties, Gabriella Cardwell deserved a little happiness.

‘No. Your father was so secretive,’ Gabriella said, caressing her beautiful long-haired tabby cat. ‘Not like Lewin. We talk about everything.’ Lucy was familiar with this line of argument. ‘Your father had such a strait-laced upbringing, you see. Those public schools are responsible for so much, and as for his mother – oh . . . a nightmare, so possessive. I saw right away what she thought of me. But despite our differences Tom and I were so happy together, Lucy. So very happy.’ She looked appealingly at her daughter.

‘I know, Mum,’ Lucy said gently.

‘It was only when your granny died, and then you left to go to college – not that I blame you, of course, darling – that he sort of changed, got awfully depressed. It was grief, I suppose. Still, we’d have pulled through if that cow hadn’t come along.’ She cast her eyes to the south, as though Helena, sitting tight amidst her neutral decor in Suffolk, might, even at this distance, be scorched by her vitriol.

Lucy tried to move the conversation forward. ‘But he never mentioned his Uncle Rafe?’ she said.

‘Not a thing. Grandad Gerald was unwell in his later years and he didn’t make much sense. I remember that he’d lived in India as a child, because as I told you, I had that wonderful year at the ashram before I met your father, but I didn’t know there’d been a younger brother.’

Now, recalling this conversation, Lucy put away the photograph and her notes, picked up her bag and her camera and went downstairs, thinking she’d look round the town. Cara was vacuuming the lobby, but nodded encouragement when Lucy picked up a free tourist map from a pile on the desk.