I drew it out, a tiny scrap of a thing, laceedged.
I stared at it, frowning, for it was not mine.
I remembered then that Frith had picked it up from the stone floor of the hall.
It must have fallen out of the pocket in the mackintosh.
I turned it over in my hand.
It was grubby; little bits of fluff from the pocket clung to it.
It must have been in the mackintosh pocket for a long time.
There was a monogram in the corner.
A tall sloping R, with the letters de W interlaced.
The R dwarfed the other letters, the tail of it ran down into the cambric, away from the laced edge.
It was only a small handkerchief, quite a scrap of a thing.
It had been rolled in a ball and put away in the pocket and forgotten.
I must have been the first person to put on that mackintosh since the handkerchief was used.
She who had worn the coat then was tall, slim, broader than me about the shoulders, for I had found it big and overlong, and the sleeves had come below my wrist.
Some of the buttons were missing.
She had not bothered then to do it up.
She had thrown it over her shoulders like a cape, or worn it loose, hanging open, her hands deep in the pockets.
There was a pink mark upon the handkerchief.
The mark of lipstick.
She had rubbed her lips with the handkerchief, and then rolled it in a ball, and left it in the pocket.
I wiped my fingers with the handkerchief, and as I did so I noticed that a dull scent clung about it still.
A scent I recognised, a scent I knew.
I shut my eyes and tried to remember.
It was something elusive, something faint and fragrant that I could not name.
I had breathed it before, touched it surely, that very afternoon.
And then I knew that the vanished scent upon the handkerchief was the same as the crushed white petals of the azaleas in the Happy Valley.
Chapter eleven
The weather was wet and cold for quite a week, as it often can be in the west country in the early summer, and we did not go down to the beach again.
I could see the sea from the terrace, and the lawns.
It looked grey and uninviting, great rollers sweeping in to the bay past the beacon on the headland.
I pictured them surging into the little cove and breaking with a roar upon the rocks, then running swift and strong to the shelving beach.
If I stood on the terrace and listened I could hear the murmur of the sea below me, low and sullen.
A dull, persistent sound that never ceased.
And the gulls flew inland too, driven by the weather. They hovered above the house in circles, wheeling and crying, flapping their spread wings.
I began to understand why some people could not bear the clamour of the sea.
It has a mournful harping note sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged tune upon the nerves.
I was glad our rooms were in the east wing and I could lean out of my window and look down upon the rose-garden.
For sometimes I could not sleep, and getting softly out of bed in the quiet night I would wander to the window, and lean there, my arms upon the sill, and the air would be very peaceful, very still.
I could not hear the restless sea, and because I could not hear it my thoughts would be peaceful too.
They would not carry me down that steep path through the woods to the grey cove and the deserted cottage.
I did not want to think about the cottage.
I remembered it too often in the day.
The memory of it nagged at me whenever I saw the sea from the terrace.
For I would see once more the blue spots on the china, the spun webs on the little masts of those model ships, and the rat holes on the sofa bed.
I would remember the pattering of the rain on the roof. And I thought of Ben, too, with his narrow watery blue eyes, his sly idiot's smile.
These things disturbed me, I was not happy about them.
I wanted to forget them but at the same time I wanted to know why they disturbed me, why they made me uneasy and unhappy.
Somewhere, at the back of my mind, there was a frightened furtive seed of curiosity that grew slowly and stealthily, for all my denial of it, and I knew all the doubt and anxiety of the child who has been told, 'these things are not discussed, they are forbidden.'
I could not forget the white, lost look in Maxim's eyes when we came up the path through the woods, and I could not forget his words.
'Oh, God, what a fool I was to come back'.