I rented a flat in south London, near enough to get to the libraries, galleries and auction houses but far enough out of the city to be affordable. I wrote short articles which I submitted to local newspapers, regional magazines and the small cheques soon added up, £50 here, £100 there until I could buy my own computer. I wrote short stories which were accepted for some of the lower circulation women’s magazines. The theme of all my work was the generation that grew up between the wars. It was something I was learning more and more about. I even did some teaching, tutoring in the evenings to help the children of over-anxious parents enjoy reading and learning about words.
I had nothing in common with my flat mate Caroline, a young teacher at the local comprehensive. She had an active social life and seemed to spend practically every evening out. I wondered when she managed to do any marking or lesson planning, activities I had always thought teachers had to do in their spare time. At least she was away for long periods during her holidays and I had the flat to myself. She had a regular boyfriend who frequently stayed with her.
After several weeks I had had enough of feeling that neither Caroline nor he recognised that it wasn’t their flat. They would sit on the settee entwined, touching each other as if I didn’t exist and in the mornings he would wander around the flat in his underpants. When I tackled them about their behaviour I was rewarded with a withering look ‘We didn’t think you’d notice, you’re old enough to be our mother.’
It hurt to realise they were right.
That made me wonder about my own children. Josie would be coming up to her 21st birthday, the boys all in their late teens. Even Bill would be 16, the same age I was when I was pregnant with Josie. They would all have grown up in the three years since Cambridge. I had rarely wondered about their lives but what Caroline had said struck a chord and I began to think of them more, of Maureen and of Ted. I had vanished, again, from their lives. What, if anything, did they ever think of me?
Most of my time was spent working on Max’s inventories. He had given me page upon page of lists. All the items he knew to have been brought to England by David’s Fishermen. Tracking down items in arts sales over the past few years was easier than I had thought it might be, but was time consuming. It was more difficult to persuade museums and art galleries to provide lists of the items they had in their cellars and storage facilities. They admitted quite readily that only a small percentage of their complete catalogue was ever on display and that many items were on loan to government ministries, embassies around the world and even, in exceptional circumstances, individuals. Whenever I was able to match an item to Max’s inventories and identify, as far as possible, where it had been since the 1930s the details were entered on my spreadsheet and I quietly celebrated another piece in the jigsaw. Somehow something must connect to Vijay.
The details on some items such as Princess Sophie’s decanter, were very easy to complete. Everything that had been in Max’s column now had a question mark against them. Nothing that had been Max’s had showed up since the burglary in any of the sales catalogues I had seen.
But there were successes. I traced three Fabergé eggs which had been brought over by Max. They were sold at Christie’s in London in 1983 by a member of the House of Lords to an American. The sum paid astonished me and I wondered how his Lordship had explained the provenance of eggs and how he had proved his ownership. I felt like I was really achieving something and it was most satisfying, little successes buoyed me up through the days when the only contact I had with anyone was a letter in the post from Jonathan’s lawyers.
He had not been happy with my assault on his credit card the day I had left him but he had accepted it and had not asked me to repay anything. I could not have done anyway.
I was glad Ted was not acting for me, there was much I would not want him to have known.
I hated telling my solicitor so many details about my life but she seemed to think the divorce would be quite straightforward. I had come into the marriage with nothing and would leave with as much as she could extract on my behalf. I had told her I didn’t care what I got, I just wanted my freedom and that was more important than regular maintenance payments or a lump sum. She seemed to think I could get quite a substantial sum. Jonathan had earned a great deal of money when we were married, had property and assets, and she seemed to think I was entitled to a reasonable share. “It won’t be half or even a third but we should get 15%, maybe 20 if we’re lucky.”
“Even though we were only married a few months?”
“Absolutely, it was his unreasonable behaviour that brought the marriage to its premature end wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely.” I had confirmed. There were few things about my marriage that I did not tell her. “I really was not prepared for marriage to a drug addict. He had never indicated before the honeymoon that he had ever taken drugs. I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him if I had known.”
“The court will like that. A woman, widowed so young, wanting another chance of happiness, you had such a shock so early in your marriage, yet you persevered, you didn’t leave him immediately, you tried to make it work.”
I had agreed with a slight nod of my head, as if words would have been too difficult.
“It’ll play very well. I think we might get more than the 20.”
Ted’s approach would have been completely different. He would have looked at both sides of the argument and I couldn’t see him believing my word quite so readily. He wouldn’t have taken some of the excesses of my statements at their face value, but Miss James asked me more questions, leading me to greater detail of my husband’s depravities. I found myself exaggerating his friendship with Ramesh, hinting at a relationship that might have been rather more intimate than perhaps it should have been.
“Excellent!” Miss James had exclaimed, “We don’t have to actually say that they were lovers, we can just gently hint at it. Worth an extra 5% I would expect. “Wonderful.”
I couldn’t imagine Ted even accepting the possibility let alone using it to my advantage.