Time for Silence Read Free Page A

in the bed valance. Someone must have forgotten to close the window, and when my parents had returned and seen it open they had assumed we had had a burglary.
    There was an apology to the police for the trouble caused, a substantial contribution to police charities, and the case was closed.
    It was for this reason that I remember so vividly my first meeting with Carl Zimmerman.

La Pinière
    I OFTEN THOUGHT HOW lucky I was to have been born into a well-knit family. There had been a wonderful sense of security in those early days to know that besides my parents there were others, such as Aunt Rebecca and her family in Cornwall where I went now and then for holidays. Then there were the Cartwrights—Rebecca’s husband’s people down there. They always made much of me.
    Aunt Rebecca was my mother’s half sister and they were devoted to each other; then there was Uncle Gerald, my father’s brother. He was a colonel in the Guards and was married to Aunt Hester, a very energetic lady who was immersed in army life and her two sons, my cousins, George and Harold.
    Apart from the family, there were the Denvers, and through them Jean Pascal Bourdon—that fascinating and somewhat enigmatic character about whom, for me, there was an almost satanic aura. He was Aunt Belinda’s father.
    Closest to me was my mother, although my father came very near. I admired him deeply. He was a highly respected Member of Parliament. He was always busy, if not in London at the House of Commons, in the country at Marchlands, where he was “nursing” the constituency. When the House was sitting late, my mother used to wait up for him with a little cold supper so that they could talk together about the day’s proceedings. She had done that for her own father, who had also been in Parliament. In fact, that was how she had come to know the Greenhams and had married one of them, for the two families had been friends since her childhood. I had heard it said that she had adopted the habit from Mrs. Disraeli, who used to do it for the great Benjamin.
    My father was very highly regarded; his words were often quoted in the newspapers when he made a speech either in the House or at some meeting. Yet, although his party had been in power since 1905, he had never attained Cabinet status. And he never sought it.
    In spite of the fact that he was a normal, loving father and completely approachable, there was some mystery about him. For instance, there were occasions when he went away and we were never sure where he was going and when he would come back. Whether my mother knew, I could not be sure. If she did, she would never tell.
    “Oh, he’s going on Government business,” she would say, but I, who knew her well, could detect a certain anxiety at such times, and she was always relieved when he returned.
    I suppose it was because of this that I felt there was a little part of my father which I did not know, and this made him seem apart from me, as my mother never was. He was a good man and I loved him dearly, but this mystery, vague and intangible, was always there.
    I once told my mother that I was glad to be called Lucinda, because she was Lucie and that made us seem like a part of each other. She was touched and told me that she had always wanted a daughter, and the day I was born was the happiest in her life. And how different her life had been from mine. Not for her, in those early days, had there been the security of loving parents and a big family about her.
    “Your Aunt Rebecca was as a mother to me,” she had told me. “I often wonder what would have happened to me if it had not been for Rebecca.” In those early days she had not known who her father was, and it was much later when she discovered that he was the well-known politician Benedict Lansdon and that she was Rebecca’s half sister.
    Then, having learned of their relationship, she and Benedict Lansdon became very important to each other. She talked of him now and then; she would glow