Gossamer Cord

“I’ve looked in the dressing room and bedroom. That was where she kept it. I can’t think of anywhere else she might have put it.”

“I expect she put it away somewhere.”

“I wonder where? You know I have one of her and they are a pair of frames so would look well together.”

“She was very fond of it. It’ll turn up one day, no doubt.”

Once when I was sitting with Dermot I asked him if he knew where the miniature was.

“It’s in the dressing room, I think,” he said. “She kept it in a drawer there and took it out when you were there. She didn’t want to look at it often when you weren’t there. She said you were a beast to stay away and she was hurt by your desertion. She didn’t want to think of you. You know what she was like.”

“Yes. She said that to me.”

“It will be somewhere about.”

He was sad and I wished I had not raised the subject because it had set him thinking of her afresh. Not that she was ever far from his thoughts.

“They were beautiful, those miniatures,” he mused. “The painter had caught the likeness of you both. It was just like her, wasn’t it?”

I said: “Yes, Dermot.”

“She had something on her mind…at the end. It used to worry me.”

“What was that?”

“I didn’t know. I just had the feeling that things weren’t right somehow.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes…she was too merry…a little…well, not spontaneous, but as though she were pretending everything was all right, as though she were planning something. She had some secret. I think she didn’t like it much here. It was too dull for her. Sometimes, I used to think…”

“What did you think?” I asked sharply.

“I wondered if she were planning…to leave me.”

“No.”

“It was just a fancy.”

“That could have been so. She was happy. She had always been the restless sort. She would have told me if anything were wrong.”

“Would, she?”

“She always did.”

“But you weren’t here.”

“No, but she would have written. She used to talk to me…always. I was her confidante from the time we were two years old. If she had a problem she always brought it to me to solve.”

“I just had this impression. It worried me.”

“No, Dermot, everything was all right.”

A tortured look came onto his face and once more I blamed myself for bringing up the subject of the miniature.

“She was everything, Violetta,” he said. “You understand.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Life without her is empty.”

“Dermot, do you ever have a feeling that she is not dead?”

“What?”

“They haven’t found her body, have they?”

“They wouldn’t. She’s out there…lying at the bottom of the sea. I can’t bear to think of her. She was so full of life. That’s why I felt she wouldn’t stay here. She always wanted to have the best in life. She reveled in living. She was able to enjoy it so much…when she had what she wanted. I was worried about her. I thought she would leave me…and she did.”

“Not of her own free will,” I said.

We were doing no good to each other, Dermot and I.

I thought of something else to talk about. The political situation. That was not going to cheer him, though I imagined at that moment he felt as indifferent as I did about the troubles of Europe. I talked about the farm I had visited with Jowan the day before. He pretended to listen, but I knew his thoughts were in the past with Dorabella.

It was September. My mother wrote complaining that she had not seen me for so long. “It is like the old days when you were away at school, but this is even longer than a term. Your father and I are coming down to see you and we are going to try and persuade them to let you and Tristan come to us for Christmas.”

They arrived in mid-September. Matilda made them very welcome. It was wonderful to see them. I heard that Hildegarde was the perfect child and that my mother went to London often to see them and they came to Caddington.

“We all miss you so much, Violetta,” my mother told me. “It’s such a pity that you are shut away down here, particularly as…”

I knew she meant that they had lost Dorabella, too.

Gordon took my father off to see something of the estate and it was a pleasant visit; but Matilda made it clear to my parents that old Mr. Tregarland was very loath to let Tristan go away just yet.

“He is afraid something might happen to him,” she explained. “You see, there has been this terrible accident to Dermot following close on the other tragedy. You understand what I mean. You know that you are welcome here at any time. You must come to us for Christmas.”

My mother said they would be delighted to do that.

“We must see Violetta and our little grandson,” she added.

Concern about the world situation increased during that September.

I said to Jowan, when he and I were riding together, that I was weary of the names of Adolf Hitler and the Sudetenland.

“That is how we all feel,” he replied. “But the situation is grave. War could break out at any time.”

“There are many people who think we ought to keep out of trouble.”

“You will always have the ostrich types who think that if they bury their heads in the sand and do not look, the trouble will go away.”

“Do you think there is going to be war?”