“And you and Guido? Were you happy?”
“Why do you ask?”
“The fact that you came back here, I suppose, after so many years.”
“But this Island is a strange place. It has that kind of effect. It pulls people back, sometimes after many years. I wasn’t trying to find something I’d lost if that’s what you mean. At least I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “I loved Guido dearly. I gave him a daughter and then a son, the present count, who rings me twice a week from Italy, begging me to return to Florence to live with him again.”
“I see.”
She stood up. “Guido understood what he called the ghost in my machine. The fact of Harry that would not go away. Aunt Helen told me there was a difference between being in love and loving someone.”
“She also told you that Martineau wasn’t for you.”
“She was right enough there. Whatever had gone wrong in Harry’s psyche was more than I could cure.” She opened the desk drawer again, took out a yellowing piece of paper and unfolded it. “This is the poem he threw away that first day at the cottage at Lulworth. The one I recovered.”
“May I see it?”
She passed it across and I read it quickly. The station is amintms at midnight. Hope is a dead letter. Time to change trains for something better. No local train now, long since departed. No way of getting back to where you started.
I felt inexpressibly saddened as I handed it back to her. “He called it a rotten poem,” she said. “But it says it all. No way of getting back to where you started. Maybe he was right after all. Perhaps he should have died at seventeen in that trench in Flanders.”
There didn’t seem a great deal to say to that. I said, “IVe taken enough of your time. I think I’d better be getting back to my hotel.”
“You’re staying at L’Horizon?”
“That’s right.”
“They do you very well there,” she said. “I’ll run you down.”
“There’s no need for that,” I protested. “It isn’t far.” “That’s all right. I want to take some flowers down to the grave anyway.”
It was raining heavily, darkness moving in from the horizon across the bay as we drove down the hill and parked outside the entrance to St. Brelade’s Church. Sarah Dray-ton got out and put up her umbrella and I handed the flowers to her.
“I want to show you something,” she said. “Over here.” She led the way to the older section of the cemetery and finally stopped before a moss-covered granite headstone. “What do you think of that?”
It read: Here lie the mortal remains of Captain Henry Martineau, late of the 5th Bengal Infantry, died July 7, 1859.
“I only discovered it last year quite by chance. When I did, I got one of those ancestor-tracing agencies to check up for me. Captain Martineau retired h¯re from the army in India. Apparently he died at the age of forty from the effects of some old wound or other. His wife and children moved to Lancashire and then emigrated to America.”
“How extraordinary.”
“When we visited this place he told me he had this strange feeling of being at home.”
As we walked back through the headstones I said, “What happened to all those Germans who were buried here?”
“They were all moved after the war,” she said. “Back to Germany, as far as I know.”
We reached the spot where he had been laid to rest earlier that afternoon. We stood there together, looking down at that fresh mound of earth She laid the flowers on it and straightened and what she said then astonished me.
“Damn you, Harry Martineau,” she said softly “You did for yourself, but you did for me as well.”
There was no answer to that, could never be, and suddenly, I felt like an intruder I turned and walked away and left her there in the rain in that ancient churchyard, alone with the past.
The End