RETURN OF THE NATIVE
The cab’s headlamps barely dented the broth of fog and soot and night as the driver inched along, chatting about the weather which, in his ’umble opinion, was getting worse every year. Flattened with fatigue, Quentin could only grunt in reply. At Quentin’s home, the cabbie kindly helped him haul the two suitcases to his front step, where the door was locked.
‘Worse luck,’ said the cabbie cheerfully. ‘The old ball-and-chain’s locked you out, has she?’
‘I suppose she has.’ Hardly worth it to explain that he was arriving home five days sooner than anyone expected. None of his family knew he had bought a Pan American ticket in Los Angeles, booked flights all the way to London, a transcontinental to New York and thence transatlantic to London. Riding with Gigi Fischer had made him less afraid of flying, though he had hardly slept in days.
Slivering sleety bits of rain beat down as Quentin rummaged about in his Burberry pockets for his keys. He found his Mexican sunglasses, but not the key. He opened the leather case, knelt and muddled through its contents, finding the key at the bottom. The house he entered was dark, and chill. He left the bags by the door, and dropped his hat on the umbrella stand. Louisa Partridge’s words came to him. The cab left me off in front of the house in Chiswick. My key still fit in the door. I opened it, and Herbert was exactly where I had left him. As if nothing had changed. He walked, peering into each room, like a guest, or a ghost. Chintz chairs in the sitting room faced each other across a tea table. The wireless stood silent. His own chair sat by the window with the stacks of manuscripts on a table nearby, their pages hanging out, like white tongues lolling. He glanced into the dining room, its sturdy oak table and empty chairs, the purple African violets on one windowsill, the aspidistra in the other. The narrow passage to the kitchen where the smell of Effie’s fags still lingered, and the tap dripped with a metronome’s precision. Everything was exactly the same. Except for Quentin.
Quentin Castle came home a changed man, though not as changed as Frank Carson, whose ashes were in the black velvet box. With Gigi at the wheel of the MG, they sped through southern California and crossed the border into Tijuana. Beyond Tijuana’s galaxy of septic stench and piñata colours, a ribbon of pocked road separated low, dry hills from the pounding surf of the Pacific. She pulled over, got out of the MG, and said it was his turn to drive. Before he took the wheel, he took her in his arms and kissed her. In those three days in Mexico he learned how to drive a car, to feel the wheel beneath his right hand, the throttle of the gearshift in his left as he leaned the MG into curves and swerved around potholes in the Mexican roads, or over the beaches of Baja. He drove to the Jacaranda Café in Ensenada, where lacy purple blossoms fell, to the Rosarita Beach Hotel where he danced with Gigi on the hotel patio to tinny and repetitive Mexican music. They walked from the hotel, barefoot, and stood before the waves crashing into foaming flounces on the smooth sand beach marred by trash, empty beer bottles and used condoms like tiny, spent jellyfish. He tasted for the first time tequila and tortillas and jalapeños, and guacamole made from the weird, soft avocados, limes and cilantro, tastes he had never even imagined. He learned how to make love in a way he had never imagined.
Quentin stripped off his clothes, stepping out of them, leaving them where they fell on the bathroom floor instead of methodically hanging them. He used the toilet and washed his face and hands, brushed his teeth without looking in the mirror. In the bedroom the lamp by Florence’s side of the bed was on, and she had fallen asleep reading her Barbara Cartland novel, her head to one side, her breath heavy and soft. The room itself was in total disarray; a nightgown lay in a heap on the floor. Other clothes, stockings, dressing gown, knickers, a slip, a blouse, were strewn about, almost happily, it seemed to Quentin. He had no idea she was so untidy. It was endearing, to think she had a secret side of herself when he was not there. A single lipsticked cigarette butt lay in the ashtray by the bed.
She roused slowly. ‘Quentin? Quentin, is that you?’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘Quentin, you’re home so soon! I didn’t expect …’
‘I know, Florence. I missed you.’ He went to the bed and she flung the satiny quilt back, and opened her arms to him, to warm him, to comfort him. He went to her and drank in with gratitude the scent of her, powder and perfume and sweat. Sustenance.
Miss Marr, Miss Sherrill and Monica were nearly as surprised to see him in the office late the next morning as Florence had been the night before. They commented on how different he looked, though words failed them. He was certainly browner or pinker or something. They offered him a cup of tea, and exclamations of alarm.
‘You flew from New York to London! Wasn’t it terrifying?’
‘I tried to think of it as a modern adventure.’
‘And was it?’ asked Miss Sherrill.
‘Yes.’ He put his leather case down and took off his Burberry, hung it on the rack with all the others, still damp, their human miasmas mixing in the heat of the nearby radiator. He took the Cunard ticket from his pocket and gave it to Miss Marr. ‘Get us a refund, will you, please?’
‘I shouldn’t think they’d give us a refund just because you changed your mind, Quentin.’
‘Miss Marr, I do not doubt that you can do anything you really want to achieve.’
Miss Marr’s sallow face flushed, and she patted her hairpins.
‘Would you please tell me when my father comes in,’ he said, knowing full well that Albert’s entrances were always known to the entire office.
‘You mean Mr Castle don’t know you’re back either?’ asked Monica.
In fact he did not. What Quentin had to tell his father, as with what he had to tell Claire Carson – the failure of his mission, the failure of this fool’s errand – could only be said face to face. This morning he had told Florence nothing of substance. She was content with a bowdlerized version of the goings on at the Garden of Allah, and thrilled to hear of his long chat with Linda St John (that’s how he told it, a long, cordial, on-set conversation) and disappointed he hadn’t got an autograph. Florence cared nothing for the death of Francis Carson, whose remains she assumed were decently in the capable hands of London undertakers, and not in her own front hall.
‘I got in very late last night,’ Quentin said to Miss Sherrill, Miss Marr and Monica. ‘By the way, has there been any word on Mrs Partridge’s new book?’
‘They all three came back,’ said Miss Marr. ‘Chatto and Windus, John Murray, The Bodley Head. They’re all on your desk.’
And so they were. All three manuscripts returned. The three declines for Louisa Partridge’s Apricot Olive Lemon he laid out side by side on the blotter. All stale phrases … lovely that Castle had thought of them … should Mrs Partridge wish to write something along the lines of her classic … happy to … He skimmed through the other letters stacked on his desk. Nothing of interest, save for one letter in a strong, hasty hand.
Harrington Hall nr Woodstock
15 February 1950
Dear Quentin,
The outpouring of grief and sympathy and offers of help when people have learned of Frank’s death has left me humbled and anxious, contrite and comforted all in the same moment. I cannot begin to describe, certainly not in the midst of everything obliged of me, how I truly feel. I dash this off to let you know that when you return from California, we won’t be at Harrington Hall.
We are just moving into north Oxford, Summertown, Polstead Road. Prof. Ellsworth, a longtime admirer of Frank’s work (he used to come out here to talk literature with Frank, to catch the pearls of wisdom as they dropped from Frank’s lips; that was Frank’s description of their afternoons), has offered to sublet their place on Polstead Road for three years while he will be teaching in America. Very modest terms. I think there is a telephone there, but I don’t know. I’ll call your office if there is. I’m in such a rush, packing, no, not packing, really just throwing what I want to take into crates and boxes. I’ll come back and go through the rest. I’ve no time to find a new tenant. I don’t care, really. I plan to sell Harrington Hall as soon as I can, and you cannot imagine my joy at being out of here and moving into town. The animals, of course, are a problem. The dogs Pooh and Tigger are good farm dogs and someone will take them, and the pigs and chickens and ducks, they’ll go, but no one wants the horse. It is good for nothing. We only kept it to amuse the children. I fear I’ll have to have it knackered. Cats always fend for themselves. You can’t imagine everything, large and small, I have to deal with.
Thank you for bringing Frank home, Quentin. I am so grateful for your seeing to everything.
And I’m grateful to your father too for advancing money. I look forward to seeing you.
Yours in haste,
Claire Carson
PS I have quit smoking. Just quit. I never again want to need something as badly as I wanted a cigarette in those days before you came here.
He read it twice, and then called his mother. Margaret too wanted to know all about Linda St John. She demanded to know what drove him to the foolhardy extreme of a transcontinental and a transatlantic flight. Quentin listened to her with forbearance and affection while he again reread Claire’s letter. Tomorrow. He would see her tomorrow. North Oxford. He rang off with Margaret, and made a new file for the cabinet, Claire Carson, and put the letter in. His happiness at the thought of seeing Claire again was tainted with anxiety, dreading what he had to tell her.
Quentin removed his glasses, massaged the top of his nose, and stared out the window at the well-known view, the roofs and chimney pots softened by the light, ashy snow. He closed his eyes and saw instead Gigi with a yellow hibiscus tucked behind her ear, and another tucked in the cleavage of the off-shoulder blouse she had bought in Ensenada, leaning together over a table shaded by an umbrella thatched of palm fronds. They would go up to their room and make love. The recollection came to him with a splash of lime and jalapeños, margaritas with salt around the rim of the glass, and the scent of something he could not name, not even in the moment. He opened his eyes and glanced at the carriage clock on his desk. Nearly ten. Two in the morning in Los Angeles. Gigi would be asleep. He could not picture her life at all. Perhaps that was the way of all love affairs. They had nothing to do with the rest of one’s life. He could only picture her behind the wheel of the MG, on the beach at Rosarita, the sunny streets of Ensenada, the hotel bar, their tousled bed. Baja. He liked the softened sound of it, Baja. He liked the hard consonant sound of her name, Gigi. He had gone to bed with a woman not his wife. He knew he should be stricken with guilt. Going to bed with Gigi was a lapse, put mildly, a sin, put boldly, a breach of faith, a broken vow by any standard, but Quentin felt no special regret, indeed Quentin felt only pleasure at the memory of Gigi. She seemed to him like a vivid character in a novel, like Elsie Rose in Some of These Days, an indelible, though unreal memory, a bright experience woven like a brilliant seam across the otherwise neutral fabric of one’s life. Gigi was appetite, he told himself, not sustenance.
‘Hello, all!’ Albert Castle’s voice echoed through the office.
‘Your son is back,’ said Miss Marr, loud enough that her voice would carry. ‘He’ll be in your office directly.’
Quentin took the leather case with him. He wasn’t about to carry Francis Carson’s mortal remains through the office.
His father shook Quentin’s hand genially. ‘Transatlantic flight, eh? Florence called Margaret as soon as you left the house this morning. Hours instead of days. They say speed is the wave of the future, or some such rubbish. Why we should all wish to go faster is beyond me. We paid for the Cunard liner.’
‘I’m sure Miss Marr can get a refund.’
Albert grunted, though in dissent or doubt Quentin could not tell. ‘I’ve had a wire from Roy Rosenbaum saying what a pleasure it was to meet you,’ Albert went on. ‘Oh, and he sent along the name of Carson’s California bank, and the account numbers.’
‘That’s more than they would do for me.’ Quentin closed the office door and took a seat in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace He did not wish to face his father across the desk. That chair was quite low, and he always felt like a boy in it. ‘I got bloody nothing from them.’
‘Well, maybe they thought it would be better just to send; you know, more efficient.’
‘More efficient than dealing with Mrs Carson’s representative while I was there, in Los Angeles? In the office? More efficient than that, Father? And Roy’s lying through his bloody teeth about the pleasure to meet me. It was not a pleasure for anyone. Not for them, and certainly not for me. They are corrupt, the lot of them. Brace yourself for what they’ve done to Some of These Days.’
As Albert listened, his efforts to light the pipe became more agitated. ‘San Francisco earthquake, indeed! Beastly! Why would Francis do that to his own book?’
‘He didn’t! Don’t you understand? He wrote the first version of the script, but he was one of many. As soon as he finished his version, they handed it over to another writer who moved it to 1906, and made Elsie Rose thirty years younger than she is in the novel.’
‘Carson must have been appalled.’
‘I was appalled. I can’t even begin to imagine what Frank must have felt.’ Having worn his clothes and carried his ashes, Quentin could never again think of him as the distant, formal Carson. ‘They wanted him to go back to England after he finished, but he didn’t. By then, he was bedding Linda St John.’
‘No! The actress! He was bedding her? Linda St John! Really!’
‘Regularly. I think her husband killed him.’
At that Albert Castle went to the desk, punched the intercom and told Miss Marr to hold all calls. He went to the door of his office and locked it, leaving the key in the hole. He returned to the chairs before the grate and sat opposite his son, cautioned him to keep his voice low, that Miss Marr had the hearing of a cat. ‘Murder? How do you know he was murdered?’
‘I don’t,’ Quentin confessed. ‘But I think it might be, certainly, it could be.’
‘Have you any proof?’
‘No. What was I supposed to do? Badger the police? I’m not Hercule Poirot, Father.’ Quentin’s shoulders sagged. ‘I have no proof at all. None. Just a feeling.’
Albert snorted. ‘Well, then, you had better not be offering that little observation round town, had you? That had better stay right within these walls. Isn’t it bad enough that he’s died, but you would have him murdered by a jealous husband like a third-rate crime novel?’
‘Sorry. It was just a thought. He was a strong swimmer. Why would he drown in a pool?’
‘Will you just shut up, sir!’
‘Yes.’
‘Let that be an end to it. And the body? Where is that?’
‘Here.’ His hands trembling, Quentin opened the briefcase and took out the black velvet box and put it on the marble tea table between them. ‘Francis Carson.’
Albert’s usually cheery countenance went white as he struggled with the meaning of his son’s words and the fact of the box. The only other time Quentin had seen his father express such utter dismay, pale disbelief, even horror, was when they received the telegram with news of Robert’s death. ‘Francis Carson in there? That is…?’ Albert wagged his finger at the box. ‘How can that be? What happened?’
As Quentin told his story, Albert simply listened and smoked. His father’s silence reproached him painfully. However, he left out the part that when, on Monday morning, he and Gigi had pulled up to the Regent Films entrance booth, they were absolutely denied the right to enter. Moreover the guard said the order had come from Mr Rosenbaum himself: Gigi Fischer was not allowed in. The rebuke angered Quentin, but it stung Gigi, first into shock, then into rage that erupted into invective splattered at Aaron, the Lotus, and included Roy as well. She drove around the block, returned and tried another booth, only to be told the same thing more emphatically. Gigi Fischer was banned from Regent Films. Her native ebullience instantly soured into grimness, and her driving became even more heedless and headlong as she propelled the MG to the Garden of Allah where Quentin had a noisy, pointless quarrel with the incompetent manager. The manager steadfastly maintained his staff had washed the deceased’s clothes, and packed them into the only suitcase on the premises. If anyone else had been in Frank’s villa, the manager absolutely knew nothing of it. Disgusted, Quentin returned to the villa, threw his own things into his suitcase, snapped it shut, and asked Gigi to take him to the airport. Now. Monday. A day early. Their parting was not hostile, but neither was it sweet. They were no longer lovers. The magic of Mexico, that was gone, fled, dissolved, erased. He got out of the car, and they did not kiss goodbye. That much of the story – that and Mexico itself – he did not tell his father.
Albert puffed out clouds of smoke, as the depth, the scope of Quentin’s failures, became more and more apparent. When, clearly, there was no second suitcase, no lucrative posthumous possibilities forthcoming, Albert’s mood further darkened. ‘This whole trip … the entire …’ Albert blustered, stammered, ‘has been …’
‘A snafu,’ said Quentin, ‘from beginning to end.’
‘A what?’
‘Disaster. I did the best I could.’
‘Yes, and we can all see how well that worked out!’ Albert stared at the black velvet box. ‘This certainly changes the question of burial, doesn’t it? Lady Sybil Dane has been in and out of here, dealing with Enid, mercifully. Oh, fancy Enid’s response when she sees …’ He pointed to the box. ‘When she hears …’
Quentin could all too well imagine Miss Sherrill’s stinging response. He stared at the match burns in the carpet.
‘Lady Sybil’s offered Woodlands, the family mausoleum there, for Francis. The wife, the FMB, has agreed.’
‘I find that hard to believe. Mrs Carson detests Lady Sybil.’
‘That may be, but she’s agreed nonetheless. She … God! I should never have let you go on such a difficult, delicate matter. You’ve bollocksed the whole thing! You’re inexperienced. I should have … A situation like this …’ He quickly relit his pipe and puffed the unsaid into smoke circling the room. ‘Now I shall have to tell the FMB that her husband …’ Again he wagged his finger at the black box, bereft of any words adequate to the moment.
‘To call Mrs Carson the FMB seems ungenerous under the circumstances. We want to keep her as a client.’
‘Indeed we do, and won’t she be pleased to see that you’ve made a total cock-up of it.’
Quentin burned with shame. A mere foretaste of what he would feel facing Claire. Yet face her he must. ‘Whatever blame there is is mine, and I will accept it. But I shall do it face to face.’
‘What! Do you think for one minute I will entrust you with this any further? Are you mad?’
‘I should be the one to see Mrs Carson. I acted on her behalf.’
‘You will do as I say. Francis has been my client since ’37.’
‘Do you want to hand her this box with his ashes?’
Albert smoked furiously. ‘I see what you mean. Quite right. She’s moved to north Oxford.’
‘I know. I had a letter from her. I’ll go tomorrow.’
‘Tell her to make an appointment with me, at her convenience, naturally, and we’ll discuss what’s to be done with Francis’s work.’
‘I suppose you will renegotiate with Selwyn and Archer for better terms for new editions of Frank’s books, especially if his work continues to sell well.’
‘Oh, of course I will try. But I rather doubt interest in his work will last. No offence to Francis.’ Albert glanced uneasily at the black velvet box. ‘There’ll be a spasm of appreciation for his work, a year, perhaps, and then it’ll be over. Without new work, he’ll be forgotten. That’s the way it always happens.’
‘Sydney Thaxton is still read and admired.’
‘Perhaps,’ Albert said with a shrug, ‘but he is rather an anomaly, and who knows if that will last. I’ve been at this trade too long, thirty years, and I personally don’t believe there is such a thing as deathless prose, or even great authors – oh, Shakespeare aside, of course. There are authors who make a sort of lovely splash, lots of praise and attention, money, and then the fashion changes – don’t think it won’t – and it’s over. Look at Galsworthy, Michael Arlen, Compton McKenzie, Hugh Walpole, all wonderful writers in their day, sold like mad, lauded, courted up, adored. Still readable, but no one does. Their books are rotting on second-hand barrows. Who reads Sir Walter Scott any more? All those fine leather-bound collections of the Waverley novels? Doorstops in Blackpool lodging houses. Speaking of passé authors, what news of Louisa’s book? Is it true you sent it out without asking her for revision?’
‘It is.’
‘To whom?’
‘Chatto and Windus, The Bodley Head and Murray.’
‘And?’ The word hung between them, dripping irony, and Quentin did not reply. ‘Of course! Everyone knows it must be poison if Bernard turned it down. Have you told Louisa?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I shouldn’t think she will much like that. Hmmph. Now, go ring your mother. At least she’ll be glad you’re home.’ He rose and returned to his desk.
‘I already talked with her.’ Quentin placed the large envelope on the table. ‘The death certificate, coroner’s report. All that.’
‘Fine. Go. Take that—’ He pointed to the box ‘—with you.’
‘Don’t you want to keep the envelope, read the death certificate, or any of it?’
Albert’s broad brow wrinkled with genuine perplexity. ‘Take the box of ashes. I can’t bear to have them near me. Leave the rest. I will look at it. I suppose I must. Come collect it this afternoon at three.’
‘There is some good news for Mrs Carson.’
‘Really? To go along with her husband’s death and cremation?’
Quentin flushed. ‘The studio assigned the life insurance policy to the wife, and she gets double because it was an accident.’
‘Life insurance policy?’
‘They take out policies on the principals in any film, with the studio as the beneficiary, and they let them lapse when the film is done. The film was not done, and the policy had not lapsed, and Regent Films assigned it to Mrs Carson. She will get twenty thousand American dollars.’
Albert repeated this incredible sum breathlessly, adding, ‘To think how I fostered his career! I slaved for that thankless drunk! What would he have been without me? Just another scribbler. A schoolmaster getting his petard hoisted by the local ladies! Everything I gave to him! My time, my insight, my hard work!’ He brought his fist down on the desk. ‘And she gets twenty thousand American dollars? And we haven’t got a sixpence, and not so much as a posthumous scrap to offer.’ Albert put the pipe down and fanned the smoke away. ‘Please, just leave me to think on all of this. Off with you.’
Quentin took this schoolboy’s dismissal without visibly flinching, though inwardly he was more crushed than seething. He had been shown up, proven to be an inexperienced lout, weak, inept, unworthy of the trust he had insisted on assuming, a bungling novice who had been sent to do a professional’s job.
He closed the door behind him, and stared across the office expanse. Miss Marr, answering the phone with her crisp voice, held her pencil poised above her notepad. Monica continued to flail away on her typewriter. Enid Sherrill, without so much as a glance at him, greeted a well-known writer of crime novels, a stout lady in a moulting fur coat. Quentin calculated the distance from his father’s office to his own door, not in feet, but miles, even years. Could he cross that room and become a man again? Could he ever deserve the partnership? Would it always be a gift unearned?
THE INCONVENIENT WIFE
Quentin spent the journey to Oxford considering how, quite, he would tell Claire Carson that her husband’s ashes were in a black velvet box. He was still wincing from the barely veiled disdain in the eyes of Miss Marr and Miss Sherrill, even Monica, when word had quickly percolated round the office. Failure, Lout, Incompetent roiled, unspoken, around the firm.
He stepped off the train into the thick, chill fog that lay swathed over Oxford, and elected to walk to Summertown rather than take a cab, or the bus. Despite the winter weather Oxford seemed cheerful compared to London. No rubble among these stones, people on the street seemed less bent, intent and harried. Pretty girls in twos and threes laughed in passing, and mothers tugged at little children who still regarded passers-by with something like healthy curiosity. He smiled to see the students on bicycles, their black gowns flying out behind them, the ageing dons in their regalia. Were dons ever young? Oxford was resistant to change, and perhaps that was its great secret, one past merely grafted over another, as with geologic strata, change so slow one strata oozed into the next. There were differences, of course, but they were not immediately discernible. Nostalgia enveloped him as he passed by his old college, St John’s. His university years seemed part of his own geologic past, as though they had happened to someone else a hundred years ago.
Indeed, a hundred years before, the colleges slowly deemed their dons could marry, and the town changed forever in response. Summertown, north Oxford, prospered, populated with women and children, with new shops to serve these households, with schools to educate these children, and the families of cooks and housemaids and delivery boys who served these solid late-Victorian homes. Moving up the Woodstock Road, north Oxford had a very different air from the monastic confines of the colleges themselves. The streets still retained something of the era of Alice Liddell and Rhoda Broughton, of all the women who, over time, had eroded the ingrown, deeply masculine Oxonian way of life. The streets with their pleasing density of brick homes still exuded a late-Victorian mixture of high spirits and propriety. Quentin imagined families like the Ramsays of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse living in them, with all those scampering, rambunctious children. Thick black drainage pipes criss-crossed the fronts, like gnarled veins on aged hands. Many homes had been carved into flats. Occasionally one of these houses had an unkempt appearance, but most testified to comfort and correctness.
When he reached Polstead Road, he was happy to see that Claire’s did too. The brick house with its neo-Gothic touches was set back from the street, a small spate of lawn, some border shrubs and a gravelled drive with room for perhaps three cars; one of them was her Humber. His eye was drawn to the top floor where a swathe of windows filled with brilliant red geraniums, pressing up against the glass, contrasted wildly with the nutmeg-brown brick, and the mossy shingles on the roof. The red geraniums clamoured against the windows, streaking them with condensation, making a bright statement against the grey day.
A row of bells stood beside the front door; he rang the one that had a hasty Carson taped over it. No answer. He left Frank’s suitcase there by the door, though he kept his own leather case, and strolled to the front and waited.
He saw her walking, bundled against the chill, head down, her mind clearly elsewhere. She wore the same long black skirt, an odd, floppy velvet hat and a maroon coat. She was very nearly at the gate before she saw him. A smile wreathed her face. He took her hand in his, pleased to see she still wore his gloves. ‘Claire.’ He said her name with some pleasure. ‘Claire. I’m happy to see you.’
‘Oh, Quentin, you’re looking so well! So … I don’t know … different somehow! I’m just back from walking the girls to school. It’s just round the corner. Squirrel School, isn’t that the silliest name you ever heard? But it’s a wonderful school, really charming.’ He followed her up the three flights, letting the pleasures of her voice float over him. ‘And the girls are going to learn so much, and make friends and be so happy. They’re not happy at the moment. They did not want to move. You can imagine, all the freedoms they had out at Harrington, and here, well, the top floor is ours, and that’s it. It’s a flat after all.’
‘They feel constrained,’ he offered.
‘Yes, and leaving Pooh and Tigger behind, that was traumatic, and I’m afraid they’re still angry with me about the horse.’
‘The horse?’
‘You know, that old grey nag. They loved that horse. The knackers came for it. But what else could I do?’ She opened the door and ushered him into a spacious room where boxes and crates were haphazardly stacked on and around the furniture; chaos seemed to reign amid vases of drooping flower arrangements, some of them enormous unto garish. Potted geraniums filled the front windows. ‘This place belongs to Avery Ellsworth who teaches at, well, I can’t remember now, I get all the Oxford colleges confused. He’s gone to America, to Columbia? Columbus? I don’t know. He’s always so admired Frank’s work. He used to come out to Harrington just to talk to him, and then when he heard, he knew we couldn’t afford to go on living there, he insisted we move into Oxford and live here, nominal rent. We have the place for three years! It’s such a godsend! He considered it a privilege to contribute. He really said that! I know what you’re thinking, Quentin: has Claire really forgiven all those toadies fawning over Frank? And the answer is yes! Really, I’m not being a snide cat about it. I mean it. All those people I so despised, they’ve been so kind to us, and I am grateful. I’ve had my share of humble pie.’
‘Yes,’ he said, knowing full well he would be heaping his own plate very soon with that same dish. ‘How goes the not smoking?’
‘Terrible, but I haven’t lapsed. Not yet anyway. When your life’s in a total uproar, it’s easier to quit; no daily routines, no habits. Take off your coat, and sit down, and put it anywhere. I’ll make us a cuppa.’ She draped her maroon coat on a hook, the hat too. She wore a thick, knitted sweater the colour of straw, probably one of Frank’s, he thought; it was too big for her and she kept pushing up the sleeves. Her hair was pulled away from her face, tied up high on her head, much of it escaping and framing her face. ‘Please, put yourself at ease, though I suppose it’s difficult with all this mess and upheaval, and all these famous floral tributes. Stale condolences. God, I despise all that stinking convention. And look at them! They’re dying, aren’t they? More dead and dying everywhere. Who invented such customs?’
‘I don’t think I know.’
A warm bit of laughter escaped her. ‘You are so serious, Quentin. So solid and rooted. You make me feel embarrassed. Of course I should be grateful people thought so well of Frank.’
‘I told you that you would not be alone.’
‘I’m just not one for gesture. That was Frank’s province.’ She talked to him from the tiny kitchen – the getting used to living in a small flat after the huge Harrington Hall, Professor Ellsworth having left their ration tickets for her, his wife’s passion for the geraniums, and the hope that Claire wouldn’t kill them – while Quentin wandered among the boxes and drooping floral tributes. The scent of dying lilies lay heavy on the air. He glanced at the cards (one of which read With Deepest Sympathies, Albert Castle and Enid Sherrill) and stepped over children’s toys. The chairs were deep and overstuffed, like the laps of Victorian nannies, and a copy of Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child lay, face flattened, on the tea table. A small wireless sat on a shelf beside a phonograph and stacks of records. Apparently Professor Ellsworth liked jazz. The pots of long, leggy geraniums sat on boards placed atop the radiators fronting the window. The flowers looked less dramatic from the inside, even a trifle limp. He stood at the windows and peered through them to the grey fog and the black and leafless branches.
‘There,’ she said, placing a small tea tray on the table between the chairs. The milk jug, cups, and pot were all chipped, like doughty veterans of old battles. ‘I’m ready. I think.’
He sat down across from her. ‘I tried to write to you from California, but everything I put on paper sounded trite and stupid. I needed to see you,’ he said, tucking two truths into one. ‘I think I understand what happened to Frank out there.’
‘His dying?’
‘No, not that, but how he must have …’ He paused, knowing he was speaking of himself, not Frank. ‘Nothing could have prepared him for all that glamour, all that … bright, hard, unforgiving light. He had no allies. No friends. Nowhere to turn with his ambivalence and confusion. Those people are all so gorgeous and desirable, so patently false.’
‘Are you talking about those Hollywood tarts? About Linda St John?’ she scoffed. ‘His latest Hollywood tart. One might even say his last.’ She regarded him defiantly. ‘I read the papers. Was she with him when he died?’
‘He was alone when he died. He was very drunk. He came back from a party at her house – her husband is the director on Some of These Days.’
‘A husband never stopped Frank. Look at Sybil Dane. He was bedding her in Sir Sanford’s own house.’
‘After the party the chauffeur drove him to the Garden of Allah and dropped him off. No one saw him fall in the pool. They found him in the morning.’
‘I suppose there was a lot of police and all,’ she said bitterly.
‘Yes. There’s a proper coroner’s report. Accidental drowning.’ He patted the leather case by his side. ‘I have all the papers here. The death certificate.’ His failures twisted his innards like a sword dual-edged with trite and stupid. Explaining failure was worse than the failure itself. ‘I have it all in my case. There is a life insurance policy too.’
‘Frank didn’t have life insurance.’
‘The studio bought it for him. They do it for all the principals on any film. The studio is the beneficiary in these cases, since it’s their loss if the person dies. Roy Rosenbaum, the studio head, had the policy assigned over to you. It’s double because it was an accident.’
Her eyes grew wide, and her jaw dropped, and when she heard the phrase ‘twenty thousand American dollars’, she put her face in her hands and wept. The thick, gold wedding band gleamed on her hand. His once-atrophied instinct for human empathy did not fail him this time. Quentin moved to sit beside her, to put his hand on her shoulder, but she stood abruptly, kicked a nearby box, and eked out a metallic bit of laughter.
‘Oh, that Frank, he dwelt in irony, didn’t he? I’ve lost him, lost everything I loved about him, but I’ll have twenty thousand American dollars. How ridiculous is that, Quentin? Don’t you want to just fall over laughing?’ Her eyes filled with tears as she walked among the chaos, moving towards the curtain of red geraniums where she put her hands over her face and wept.
Quentin followed, handed her his own freshly ironed handkerchief, and waited while she wiped her eyes. He took her hand, and led her back to the chair. ‘There’s more.’
‘More money?’
‘No. I think they destroyed the second suitcase, the one with his manuscripts. It was gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the truth. The suitcase I brought you—’ He nodded towards the door ‘—that has only his clothes.’ He did not say he had worn some of these clothes. He wondered briefly if the truth shorn and shaped is still the truth. ‘Everyone denied there ever was a second suitcase. I did my best, I even did my worst. I threatened them. It was not enough. I failed you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he said again, hoping to hear her say she forgave him.
‘But why? Why would they care about a bunch of papers? Drafts?’
‘He told lots of people he was going to write a novel about all of them. He was taking notes. Did you know that?’
‘I suppose.’
‘Perhaps they just wanted everything scrubbed clean and no trace of him, the scandal. When I came to the Garden of Allah the place was cleaned out, and there was nothing of Frank left. Your letters, letters from my father, everything, gone. The rent was paid for the rest of the month, and I stayed there those few days.’
‘You stayed in Frank’s place?’ Her blue eyes widened. ‘Didn’t you think that was strange?’
‘I did. It seems even stranger on reflection, doesn’t it? They said they would take care of everything …’ His throat constricted, and would not clear.
‘And tell me who “they” are.’
‘The studio. Regent Films. Roy Rosenbaum and his son-in-law, Aaron Reichart. Before I got there, the studio took care of everything. I regret to say … they did … I’m sorry to … they …’
‘Oh, please just get it out, and don’t be so bloody English!’
He reached into his leather case and took out the black velvet box and placed it on the low table. ‘I’m sorry, Claire.’ She stared at it, mouth agape, unable to speak or understand. ‘This is how I found him.’
‘What?’
‘Frank.’
‘Frank?’
He nodded meaningfully towards the box.
‘That’s Frank! That’s Frank’s… !’
‘His ashes.’
‘They … they had him cremated? They did that without …’
‘Yes. They did it without asking your permission, or anyone’s authority, and all I can tell you is that …’
She burst into long, gasping sobs. He moved to kneel at her chair with his arms around her, and let her weep against his shoulder, her cheek against his as he murmured her name again and again.
Finally she sat back, and wiped her eyes, not with the handkerchief but with the heel of her hand. ‘They are dirty bastards, aren’t they?’
‘They are.’ They both stood. She put her hands on his shoulders; he reached up and held them. She searched his face, and he brushed a lock of tawny hair away from her face. Adulterous cad that he was, he wanted to kiss her lips, to drown in the depths of her blue eyes. Though he did not succumb to these impulses, he blamed – or thanked – Frank Carson for having them at all.
‘Excuse me, I need a moment.’ She left the room, and he heard a door slam, and her long, prostrate sobs.
Quentin stared at the black velvet box. Claire’s tears had totally vitiated that spasm of outrage he had felt in Aaron Reichart’s office when he had tried and failed to get justice for Frank. Frank didn’t deserve justice anyway. Why should Quentin be here absorbing the sorrow, the anguish that Frank Carson had wrought? Why should Quentin be powerless to make right what Frank had done wrong? Quentin stared at the black velvet box. Damn you, Frank. ‘It’s your damn fault, you stupid bugger.’ It was Frank’s fault he had met Claire in the first place, Frank’s fault he’d met Gigi, went to bed with Gigi. Frank’s own fault too that he didn’t regret his sins. He recognized, with a dyspeptic twinge, that he and Frank would be somehow fundamentally forever linked. Friends and nemeses. Fellow sinners. Fellow bloody fools.
He heard the toilet flush and the taps run and thumping, as if boxes were being dropped. He wanted to go to her, but didn’t. This was not a failure of empathy, but respect. Twenty minutes passed. He went into the small hall, to the one door that was closed, and knocked. She came to the door. She had washed her face, refreshed her hair, and changed clothes. She wore boots, trousers, and a black sweater that intensified her pallor and her tragic blue eyes.
‘If we stay here, I will fall to pieces, and that won’t do anyone any good. If we stay here I won’t be able to live without a cigarette. Let’s walk. We have hours before the children are out of school.’ She put on her maroon coat and floppy velvet hat, and took her keys and together they walked down the stairs and towards the river.
Winter’s eventual defeat lay hinted at everywhere, tiny shoots of green, snowdrops here and there, crocuses in narrow front gardens, the stubs of early bulbs pushing up, a forsythia branch glowing a tenuous yellow. The trees remained stark. Frail sunshine had burnt off most of the fog, though it still lay in lavish banners across the river Cherwell itself. He was unaccustomed to walking beside such a tall woman with such a firm stride.
‘Talk to me, Quentin. Tell me anything that isn’t Frank Carson. I need to breathe apart from him, apart from his death. Tell me something about yourself.’
For the second time in less than a week, Quentin Castle opened up his life to a sympathetic woman. Unburdening himself to Gigi required that he be specific; her sunlit past was so totally different from his, she required elaborate explanations. Claire was easier. Though she was some five years older than he, she had lived in the country where he had lived, lived through events that he had lived through. The grey-green river itself offered a watery narrative thread as he told her something of his Oxford years as they walked the paths.
‘You speak as if it’s all ancient history, Quentin,’ she chided him, ‘as if you’re an old man looking back. Your whole life is in front of you!’
‘Not really. I sometimes think I was born old. I’m not like Frank, or you, not one of those people who are or become what they want to be, who take risks, and rue them or not, they’re shaped by what they dared to be. I love to read novels about people like that, about all their gnashing and uncertainty, their struggles, like the characters in The Moth and the Star, or Some of These Days, but I have no especial gifts, no driving passions. From the time I was a schoolboy, I always knew the job I would have, even perhaps the woman I would marry.’
‘Tell me about your wife. You and I are such good friends and I don’t even know her name.’
‘Florence,’ he said, pleased that Claire, too, believed they were good friends.
‘Is she pretty?’
‘Very.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘I can’t remember a time I didn’t know her.’ He talked at length about Florence, their long affection, their lovely wedding last June.
‘We got an invitation to your wedding, but Frank was in California, and I wasn’t about to go alone, though I must admit I was tempted to, just to see the people from the office that Frank described – long-nosed nasty Miss Marr, and eagle-eyed Miss Sherrill. Frank did such funny imitations of all of them. He would have me and the children in stitches when he came back from London. He used to do an imitation of your father with his pipe, telling a story about a second-best umbrella, and that old humbug, Thaxton.’
Quentin felt a twinge of bruised loyalty for his father. Albert would not like it that Frank had used him to comic effect. ‘Why do you think Thaxton a humbug?’
‘Oh, Frank thought he was just a mediocre writer with a streak of luck. Nothing more. Frank judged other writers harshly.’
‘Most writers do. From what I know, or what I’ve heard, it’s a friendless profession. The greater your gifts, the fewer your friends.’
‘That was certainly true of Frank. But I don’t want to think about him. Tell me about your gifts.’
‘I told you. I have none. Robert had all the gifts.’
By the time they sat down to lunch in a tiny unpopulated fish and chip café in the central market, he had told her all about Robert, his vibrant life, his distant death; he had told her about his mother, Margaret, and the telegram that stayed on the mantel for five years, the blackout curtains still in the windows. The dreary lunch they ordered brought to mind Louisa Partridge, and her insistence that the British diet was killing the Britons. Even Claire knew The Book of British Housekeeping, though she dismissed it as total tripe, and hated its berating tone.
‘Louisa thinks the same thing,’ he explained. ‘She’s completely repudiated that book. This new book, Apricot Olive Lemon, is something entirely different. Entirely new. I was totally confounded by it. I still am.’ He floundered about for fifteen minutes trying to describe the book while greasy steam condensed on the café windows. Finally he gave it up, confessing, ‘I don’t know what to do next. All three publishers returned the book to me. Everyone knows that Selwyn and Archer have made piles of money off her. Why would Bernard decline if the book didn’t somehow …’
‘Stink.’
‘I suppose,’ he said miserably. ‘Louisa will blame me if it doesn’t sell. She thinks it’s a masterpiece. She won’t revise.’ He picked up a chip with his fingers; the news-paper they were wrapped in was bleary with grease. ‘This is the very sort of food the new book rails against.’
‘Perhaps you’re presenting it in the wrong way.’
‘That’s obvious.’
‘You say it’s a cookery book.’
‘Not exactly. There are recipes, but it’s like being on holiday, and then looking up from the page, and here you are in London again. It’s unsettling. She says the book is about appetite, not sustenance.’
Claire mopped her fingers on a paper napkin. ‘Well, no doubt the people you sent it to are eating fish and chips just like we are. Maybe you have to translate it into experience for them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Translate the words into experience. Think how long we’ve lived this way, Quentin, the shortages, the queues, the austerity, the rubble, the sense of loss. Since 1939. Ten years. Maybe to get them to understand her book, you have to offer them not just something to read but something to experience.’ In the distance college bells tolled. ‘Oh, look at the time!’ Claire glanced at her watch. ‘We must get back. The girls will be coming home from school. Michael stays all day, but they don’t.’
They caught a crowded bus up Banbury Road, and stood clinging to the pole, their hands touching, their shoulders brushing as the bus lurched. They jumped off and walked swiftly up Polstead Road. Assorted school-children and mothers were already moving up the sidewalks.
‘Quickly,’ said Claire, dashing up the stairs. ‘They mustn’t see that box!’
Once in the flat, she ran to the table and picked the black velvet box up, and took it down the hall. He heard childish voices and feet clamouring up the stairs. The door burst open and Mary and Catherine tumbled in. Catherine was the stronger, sturdier of the two, with her father’s dark hair and eyes but Mary was fair like Claire. They both regarded him suspiciously. They did not say hello.
Claire came out, brushing tears from her face; she took off her own coat and hat and helped them with theirs and scolded them for making so much noise on the stairs. ‘You remember Mr Castle, don’t you?’
‘No,’ they said in unison, and ran off.
‘I’m sorry, Quentin. They’re very rude.’
‘I think the word is hoyden, and that’s not so very bad.’
‘I put the box in my room. On the desk overlooking the back garden.’
‘What will you tell them, the children?’
‘The truth. I’ll have to. What else is there, finally? But not just yet. Not just now. They’re all still so angry, dazed, leaving Harrington, losing the pets, the horse. They haven’t yet absorbed the loss of Frank. He was gone for such a long time. Oh God, how can I describe cremation to a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old? How can I possibly explain that their father’s body is in that box? Frank! So physical, so full of life! Reduced to ashes?’ She gulped back tears, and wiped her nose. ‘And Michael! How can I tell him? It’s worse for Michael. He’s older and he understands the finality of death. He’s been beastly ever since we moved. He reminds me of my old Granny Dunstan. He’s said hateful things to me. He hates Oxford, hates his school, hates everything. And now, to see the box! Imagine, if I am that undone to see Frank in a box, ashes …’
‘Claire, I’m sorry, I should have written, warned you. I—’
‘Oh, how could it make any difference?’
The telephone rang, jangled insistently, and Claire answered it. Her back was to him, and her replies were short and succinct. ‘Yes, it’s true, they cremated him.’ A long tract of silence. ‘Please, calm down. No, I don’t know why … Yes, I have the box with his ashes.’ Silence. ‘There is no rush now.’ More silence that seemed to Quentin to be interminable. ‘Shall we talk later? No. Yes. I understand. No. No marble urn. No. Absolutely not. I’m going to put his ashes in the carpet bag I brought from America, Sybil. There’s an end to it. Yes, I’m very clear on that. I don’t need time to … Look, can we discuss this later? I have someone here.’ She hung up, turned and faced him. ‘Sybil Dane.’
‘My father said you’d agreed to have Frank buried at Woodlands. I didn’t believe it.’
‘Well, it’s true.’
‘But why, Claire?’
‘The schoolmaster’s son to lie among the nobles, the landed mighty? It would make Frank happy, the silly sod. Of course these glorious dead aren’t Sanford Dane’s family. He bought Woodlands off some poor busted-up aristocrat whose family had owned the place for three or four hundred years. That’s what Frank thought he was doing buying Harrington Hall. It’s all such rot.’ She moved among the boxes, picking up toys, righting nothing. ‘But it mattered to Frank.’
‘But to have him buried there at Woodlands where you were so unhappy? Every time you want to see him, you’ll have to return there.’
‘See him? There’ll be no more seeing him! He’s gone. I won’t be taking my children to lay flowers on marble headstones. I’m not the sort of person to be making pilgrimages to graves, laying wreaths. Stone angels, the old family burial ground? I don’t give a damn about any of that. I’m an American. Life matters to me. I have my children, and I am going to look after them. If Sybil wants to immolate herself on Frank Carson’s grave, let her, to throw herself over the family mausoleum, let her.’
‘Is that really why you agreed?’
‘It’s nothing to me.’
‘You sound very bitter, Claire.’ He picked up his case to leave. ‘You despise her. Don’t you?’
‘I don’t despise anyone any more. I haven’t that luxury.’
‘With the life insurance money, you could make your own choices.’
‘I have made them.’
He put his hat on. ‘Anything you need from me, you have but to ask.’
‘Thank you, Quentin.’
‘I’m sorry I so failed you in California.’
‘It wasn’t your fault they cremated him. You did what I asked. You brought him home.’ But she did not offer him her hand, or say she forgave him, or that she hoped to see him again, and he walked down the stairs and out into the cold February afternoon with a heavy heart, and the conviction that this failure was one he would rue for the rest of his life.
AUSTERITY AND DESIRE
The Chelsea street where Louisa Partridge lived had had its bohemian heyday with the likes of Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and other late-Victorians. Even more raffish repute lay a few years in the future when Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Twiggy and their ephemeral entourages descended. But when Quentin Castle found her door, in late February 1950, he was disappointed. He expected to find Louisa Partridge in a space as exotic as her hat, her snake earrings and alligator handbag, but it was modest, very narrow, squeezed in on either side by more imposing homes of bankers, or wealthy businessmen. Unlike their immaculate steps, Louisa’s were crowded with pots of herbs, now in sad, frozen states of disrepute, grey, drooping, bitten by the February cold.
‘Coming,’ she called in her cawing, unlovely voice. ‘Ah, Quentin.’
The hall was not broad enough for two people shoulder to shoulder, particularly as the hooks on the wall bulged with an assortment of coats, a brilliant-red poncho, an American army jacket. She enquired how he had come, and when he said the bus, she replied, ‘I suppose you’re one of those who sit up on the top, aren’t you? One of those “He who is tired of London is tired of life” types?’
‘I suppose I am.’ He did not know what else to say.
She took his Burberry. ‘Follow me.’ She wore grey woollen trousers and a shirt of some thick weave with a colourful fringe and tassels at the bottom. Her bangles made a noise as they passed a door on the right, and she flung his coat without a thought on the chair in the tiny sitting room filled with strange and jumbled artefacts. ‘I knocked out a wall,’ she explained. ‘When I moved here, the sitting room was large, and the kitchen was small and squalid. And so I thought, why not change things around? Now the kitchen is big, and the sitting room is small. Of course it meant I had to buy the place, I mean, to knock out the wall, and fortunately, I have my own money, and Herbert has his. We have separate lives altogether, though every Christmas we do the whole grisly Yuletide family bit with the children.’
‘It’s like no other kitchen I’ve seen,’ Quentin confessed, coming into a long room that was at once functional and marvellous: a large, plain pine table in the centre, one end of which was taken up by a typewriter, a ream of paper on one side, a box of carbon paper on the other. The Aga monopolized one wall, and there were two fridges speckled with postcards taped to them, and a board across the top to serve as shelf. From a high brass rack hung copper pans and kettles, sieves and ladles and cooking instruments he could not begin to name. Shining knives and cleavers were on the wall, clinging to a two-inch-wide metal bracket, and the kitchen dresser held an array of mismatched plates.
‘Have a seat. What’s your poison?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what my Tallahassee colonel always said. It means what do you want to drink.’
‘Coffee, please,’ said Quentin, afraid to ask for the conventional cuppa in her demanding presence. ‘What is that wonderful smell?’
‘Onion tart.’
‘You needn’t feed me, you know.’
‘I want to feed you, Quentin. I like to see people eat as long as it’s not rubbish. Onions can be had off any barrow in the street, and this tart takes only two eggs, a bit of butter, and a bit of sugar for the caramelizing, and some bacon. It’s not out of the question even in London, especially since the bacon ration got raised last month. We’ll have coffee after lunch. Wine with. How about a martini?’
‘I confess I’ve never had one. I just do gin and tonic.’
‘Civilized people drink martinis. Are you civilized?’
‘I like to think so.’
‘You’ve been to California. That ought to make you civilized.’ She turned to a bureau that held several bottles and a cocktail shaker. ‘You’re back rather sooner than I expected.’
‘I flew the whole way.’ Their talk turned to travel, air versus ship. Why are these conversations so predictable and tedious, he wondered, even with someone as original as Louisa Partridge? Should he wait for her to bring up the subject of the three declines, or just launch into it? After all, when he called her yesterday, he was the one who had insisted on secrecy. He had his reasons for not wanting to meet her in some public place, a restaurant, say, where no doubt she would find the food appalling, and might well make a scene. And the office? Never. If she disparaged his idea, she would not do so quietly. Not Louisa Partridge. No, he had specifically requested to see her on a Saturday in her own home. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘the figs were shattering.’
‘Shattering?’ She looked pleased.
‘The figs you gave me. They had the same effect on my parents.’
‘You shared them with Albert?’
‘And my mother. ‘
‘Of course.’
‘And my wife.’ He didn’t know how to say that his wife had made love to him without checking her calendar under the bed. He just said Florence had loved them too.
‘And you?’
‘They were … they seemed to shatter some wall or impediment between me and, well, I don’t quite know what. I can’t describe it. They were an experience I shall not soon forget.’
‘I have more!’ She brought a small woven basket from a shelf and there in mauve tissue paper were three more black figs. She took one out, placed it on a saucer and sliced it expertly. Its roly-poly body split evenly and fell in two halves. ‘Just look at them,’ said Louisa fondly. ‘I always think of figs as widows.’
‘Widows? That seems odd.’
‘Young widows. Look at them, clad in black, but inside they teem with possibility, swarm with these pale-pink seeds connected by tiny green threads.’
‘I suppose that’s true,’ he said, unable to keep his thoughts away from a certain widow who, though not clad in black, certainly seemed to Quentin to suggest possibilities he tried not to imagine. ‘But it’s still very odd.’
‘I am odd. Haven’t you guessed?’ She gave one of her jagged laughs. ‘Now, the olive oil. Tell me, what did you think of that?’
‘I … I can’t describe it. I tasted it, of course, and I brought it home, but I hid it in a cupboard.’
‘But you must use it!’
‘Oh, I shall. I hid it because I didn’t want Effie using it.’
‘Who is Effie?’
‘A maid-of–all-work who comes every day. Her wages were Rosamund’s wedding present to us.’
‘So like Rosamund,’ she clucked in an unflattering way. ‘Finish that martini. Lunch is nearly ready. Oh, and by the way, there’s your letter. On the dresser. Take it.’
He hoped it was not the one he had mailed from Mexico, but it was. It had been opened, and replaced in its envelope with the Mexican stamp he had bought at the hotel. He slid it into his pocket. He instinctively felt he ought to make some sort of social apology for writing a letter by turns chaotic and confessional, but he also instinctively knew that Louisa would scoff at social apologies. ‘Why are you returning it to me?’
‘Because you’ll need it. Oh, not today or tomorrow, or really, who knows when, but one day you will want to remember everything that’s in that letter.’
‘I might not,’ he said, colouring.
‘Fine. Destroy it if you like, it’s yours to decide. Honestly, I thought that’s why you wanted to come here today. To ask for it back. It just arrived this morning.’
He hoped she hadn’t read it, but she informed him that she had. ‘Most impressive.’
‘I’m not a writer.’
‘No, but it was passionate and headstrong, and that’s always impressive.’
‘And utterly unlike me.’
‘Yes, all the more reason that you must keep it, I should think.’
‘Why?’
‘One day you’ll need that letter to remind you that this was a beginning. A harbinger. Next to panache, harbinger is one of my favourite words. I like the way it tastes. I like the way they both taste, but harbinger seems to me one of those salty words with layers of possibility.’
‘A harbinger of what?’
‘I don’t know you well enough to answer that. I hardly know you at all. But I feel there’s a sort of simpatico between us. Don’t you?’
‘I do, or I would not have written you such a letter.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I don’t know what I was trying to say, really. I was in a sort of fog, and though it was only a week ago, it feels as though I am at a great distance.’
‘There’s the past for you!’ Louisa said. ‘Always inconvenient. Either failing to be retrieved, or so close, so vivid, it makes you cringe.’
Quentin did cringe a bit, remembering the rest of the letter, the contrast of austerity and desire, and how, in going to Mexico with Gigi, he had flung off austerity like a dirty shirt and embraced desire. ‘Perhaps,’ he ventured, ‘you are one of the three strange angels in the D. H. Lawrence poem, “The Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through”.’
‘Well, I’d certainly be a damned strange angel, wouldn’t I? I prefer to think of myself as a retired demon, but you mentioned that poem in your letter. He was a marvellous poet, wasn’t he? A much better poet than a novelist. All that emotion! Who can bear to read it? Page after page!’
‘People do.’
‘Not over lunch.’ She took the onion tart from the oven, snapped a tablecloth out, put down some cutlery, rumpled napkins, and battered plates. The oniony fragrance wafted up to him, and he breathed deeply. She smiled and cut him a large wedge. The taste of the tart was a revelation, and he said so. The proud, harsh lines of her face relaxed, pleased at the compliment. In two mismated (but genuine Waterford crystal) glasses, she poured them each a splash of wine which she described as swill, but there was nothing else to be had. ‘What shall we toast to?’ she asked.
‘Expect great change?’ he replied, easing, feeling the martini’s tingle.
Louisa Partridge lifted her glass to his, and lowered her voice. ‘Why are we meeting in secret?’
Quentin collected himself, began in a businesslike way, repeating what he’d said on the telephone about the three declines.
‘I know all that,’ she interrupted. ‘What can’t wait? Why are we meeting on Saturday? Besides, sod them all, Chatto, Windus, John Murray, and The Bodley Head. Have they no insight, no sense of adventure at all?’
‘Only pirates make money from adventure, Louisa. Publishers are conservative men.’
‘What next, then? I’m assuming you have some ideas.’
‘I do, actually. I have had some thoughts, unconventional, but interesting. I thought they might appeal to you.’
‘Is it immoral, illegal or likely to frighten the horses?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he faltered.
‘Then out with it.’
‘I’ve come to have a new vision of Apricot Olive Lemon. You see, Louisa, when I first read the book, I didn’t know how to approach it. My letters to those editors were all wrong. Now I understand, it has to be read, for now, like a novel.’
‘I didn’t make it up.’
‘No, of course not. But when one reads a novel, one does so from a happy distance. You know, the adventures of whomever, whose life and bad judgement the reader watches from afar, the romance, the penalties, all that, without ever having that experience oneself. Think of Lawrence, or a writer like Frank Carson. They’re exhilarating to read, but who would want to actually live like those characters? All that lyricism and emotion.’
‘No one has the energy to live like that, investing everything with such significance.’
‘Exactly! But while the reader is in the pages, everything is invested with such significance, and the very best novels become one’s own experience. One carries them around in one’s head and heart, like memory.’
‘But my book is not fiction!’
‘No, but now, this moment in time, it has to be read like a novel. That’s what Bernard failed to realize. That’s what I failed to realize. The book is about appetite, not sustenance.’
‘Yes. I told you that.’
‘Bernard didn’t know the difference.’
Louisa’s brow furrowed, but her eyes lit with interest.
‘Neither did Chatto or Windus, or John Murray, or The Bodley Head. Neither did I until …’ He took a bite and considered his words, keeping to the kernel, but not the whole plant, which is to say, not mentioning his insights gained in Mexico. ‘A man wouldn’t know the difference if he hadn’t had experience that made it clear. Sustenance, that is, the way we live now, that’s easy to describe. But appetite? A man who did not know the difference couldn’t possibly recognize appetite. It would be a grave error to confuse them, or believe they could ever be the same thing. You see?’
‘Keep talking.’
‘People expect sustenance of Louisa Partridge. The Book of British Housekeeping was sustenance. But Apricot Olive Lemon describes something we do not know, like fiction, like Frank Carson’s novels.’
‘Lyricism and emotion? I doubt that, Quentin!’
‘Think again, Louisa. All those lovely lemons and apricots, saffron and rice and Sicilian olive oil, all that rosemary and garlic, and cinnamon and honey, what are they but fiction? But one day, people will be able to read it as a cookbook. We will move beyond this… .’
‘What exactly are you trying to say?’
He groped for words. ‘In my office you quoted Rupert Brooke, remember? That we had all buried some part or another of ourselves far away. For my parents’ generation, even mine, everything we endured during the war is fresh and raw, and likely to stay that way, but right behind me there is a whole generation who may be in the schoolroom now, but in five years, say, they will be out in the world. For them, the anguish of the war, the losses, the tears, scars, the terrible price we paid, all that will be dulled. It won’t be fresh and raw. And for people born today, 1950, or next, or in ten years’ time, there will be a sort of creeping amnesia. Finally, only people like my parents, say, will still care – every day of their lives – that Robert died at El Alamein. They are the people who will never escape that past, any more than my mother’s brother who lived through Verdun escaped Verdun, which he never did.’
‘Oh, don’t I know it! My uncle was gassed in the trenches. He couldn’t work, and he had to move in with us, and he would wake in the night, screaming his bloody guts out. Scared my brother and me within an inch of our lives first few times we heard him.’
‘And then?’
‘And then, it was just old Uncle Walter, foaming at the mouth, we used to say. That’s the way it happens, isn’t it? The horrifying becomes commonplace.’
‘And yet, when I was in California, Louisa, no one would ever guess there had ever been a war.’
‘Yes.’ She lit up a cigarette. ‘The Americans are not alone. A year ago I was in Italy with my daughter. I was astonished. I wanted to throttle the Italians, to cry out, to shake them by their national shoulders! How dare you drink aperitifs in your sunny squares, you happy bastards! How dare you have your beautiful women and fat babies, your noisy little scooters and your wine and opera? How dare you have your lovers strolling arm in arm, lost in one another? How dare you? We won the war, you happy bastards! You lost! Here, in London, we have rubble everywhere, and we’re crushed under it! The basic necessities of life are meted out to us with ration tickets. For us life has slowed to an ugly crawl, and we’re all of us, rich and poor, urban and rural, relentlessly grim and pinched and grey.’
‘You see, we recognize sustenance, but your book asks people to imagine appetite! You understand now why Bernard turned the book down, why those other three did as well? Like a novel, your book describes experience they have not had, not yet, appetite for things not just food, but a world that is bright and warm and gay, and for want of a better word, opulent, a world of desire. But it will not always be fiction. Life will not always be pinched and austere.’
‘Tell that to those narrow, pettifogging editors.’
‘We can’t tell them. We have to show them.’
A slow, conspiratorial smile spread over her face. ‘I am going to like this.’
Quentin’s idea – which, he stressed, she should not tell anyone else in the firm; he certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone in the firm that he was contemplating something so outside the bounds of standard practice – was nothing short of brilliant. At least that’s what Louisa Partridge called it, bloody brilliant.
Quentin would choose three or four editors from likely houses, and Louisa would invite them all to lunch one afternoon in March. Louisa would cook for them. It must be magical, Quentin insisted, and everything from the book Apricot Olive Lemon. It must suggest a not-distant, not-dismal future. ‘You invite them for lunch, and you and I will be wonderfully charming and witty. You will be anyway. I’ll do my best. We will absolutely not mention Apricot Olive Lemon.’
‘Why not?’
‘We’re not asking them to buy the book. We’re telling them a story. When they read the manuscript, they’ll see it, they’ll understand.’
‘But maybe they’ll bring it up. Four publishers have turned it down, so it must be poison.’
‘Or nectar.’ Quentin finished off his second piece of onion tart. ‘Don’t worry. These men subscribe to a code of civility. They will want to talk about The Book of British Housekeeping, that wonderful tome that everyone knows and loves.’
‘Except me.’
‘You must promise not to be savage about it. Think of it as a relic, Louisa. You wouldn’t savage a relic.’
‘I would.’ She smashed out her cigarette. ‘I’m something of a relic myself. They might not come.’ She poured his coffee from an instrument he had never seen, explaining, ‘This is how they make coffee in Africa.’
‘You still have a good deal of cachet. They’ll come.’
‘Will you tell them the others will be here?’
Quentin sipped his coffee. ‘We’ll let them be surprised.’
‘Well, don’t invite all the old men. There must be one or two hungry young editors out there.’
‘Good idea. And when they leave, we’ll give them each a copy of the manuscript. A parting gift. And we’ll let them quarrel over who will publish it.’
‘I like the way you think.’
The strategy hatched that Saturday afternoon earned Quentin Castle the cryptic dedication of Louisa Partridge’s Apricot Olive Lemon. It read:
For Quentin Castle.
For Quentin knows what and Quentin knows why.
Florence was not amused. Albert said it sounded indecent. Rosamund thought it egregious bad taste. Margaret thought it cheeky, which it was, since Louisa lifted it wholesale from a book given to her by her Tallahassee colonel, Don Marquis’s Archie and Mehitabel Poems, a brash book of free verse ostensibly written by a cockroach.
The Garden of Allah
Thursday 16 February 1950
Dear Louisa,
A writer such as yourself can put paper in the machine and write, but I cannot simply put my thoughts in some sort of free-form expression, I must write TO someone. A letter. So I shall write to you, as, of my acquaintance, you alone, a person who has felt her life upended more than once. I should think you might understand what I am trying to convey, my thoughts, unsettled as they are, confused and contradictory, in a word, ambivalent.
I have come from the land of austerity and stepped into the land of desire, Louisa. I am native to austerity, and find desire both attractive and repellant. Repellant in that excess offends me. I think. However, I wonder if I have actually ever met, experienced excess. Can one recognize excess in theory? This in itself is a conundrum. And desire? Not merely sexual desire, though I include that, but some larger overall aching desire. Can desire be theoretical? I am charmed here by the very things I disdain. I am torn, confused, unsettled, ambivalent about my duty to the agency. To Mrs Carson. To my father. (Quite apart from the agency.) To myself even. And then, to Frank Carson, that adulterous, egotistical destructive bastard, but I am his only ally, Louisa.
Frank Carson and I both came from the land of austerity and walked into the land of desire. Could he have been as confused as I? Could he have got lost, unmoored, and finally just succumbed to the excess all around him, the desire, the artifice, the illusion, the condescension? Could all that have driven him, or made him stupidly plunge to a watery death? Or did something else befall him?
Would that I had some wise counsel, Louisa. But all I had tonight was a fortune cookie. They gave them out at the Chinese restaurant. A bit of cheap wisdom on a scrap of paper. Mine said Expect Great Change. I am not equal to Great Change. I do not like it. I am a man of regular habits and practices. I know this of myself, and yet, I hear, battering at my brain – like the sparrow who flung itself against the grey wired glass – the lines from the D. H Lawrence poem, ‘Song Of A Man Who Has Come Through’ and the line about the three strange angels. Admit them. Admit them.
Louisa, am I making any sense at all?
This letter – or at least this much of it – was in the pocket of an old double-breasted suit thrust at the back of an unused closet, and it went to the jumble sale in 2000, undiscovered. With it there was a tiny scrap of paper that had all but disintegrated, on which, half a century earlier, the faded words that had promised great change could no longer be discerned.
EVERYBODY BACK ON THEIR HEADS
The following day, Sunday, as though he had never gone to California at all, Quentin sat in his parents’ sitting room, bound by the gravity of the planets-in-their-orbits luncheon. By tacit agreement, the conversation was local, evasive, and no one brought up Francis Carson, his death or his work. And yet, Quentin felt Frank’s presence vividly, a ghost, leaning against the mantel, full of mocking bonhomie, underscoring his own famous charm, contrasting it with Quentin’s weaknesses, which were so manifest his own family forbore to mention them.
Returning to work on Monday Quentin found that gossip had percolated everywhere, far beyond Castle Literary. Colleagues and competitors, publishers and writers might ring Quentin up on some pretext or another, only to enquire sotto voce if it were true, what they’d heard, that Carson had come home in a box like the scrapings of a grate. Everyone seemed to know; some seemed to blame Quentin, not perhaps for Carson’s death, but for allowing him to be cremated. He had few defences. He wished more than ever that Robert were alive so he could follow his example, or that he had something of Louisa’s imperious aptitude, but he did not. Everyone back on their heads. He truly felt that he had waded into a room full of shit and coffee break was over.
On Wednesday, 1 March , he came late to the office, and found atop the post on his desk a bright picture postcard, a beach dotted with umbrellas, Santa Monica, California, and on the side, a note from Gigi, typical Gigi, completely lacking in all discretion.
Sorry our time together ended up so grim. Not yr fault. Not mine either. Hey! I’m taking yr advice, baby. Setting myself up as an agent. Anyone can do it. All I need is a phone, a business card, and letterhead, right? For my 1st client I called Don. The guy who 2 timed me. I told Don I owed him. He called me nasty names, but I said I’d work for free, and he agreed. He’s an OK writer. If I can place one of his scripts, think what I cd do with a really good writer! I have built-in connections. People are afraid to be rude to me because of RR. I’m still mad about being banned from the studio. Anyway, wish me luck. I’ve moved out of the Moroccan Mausoleum and into one of RR’s rentals. Home and office. You’ll be hearing from me, Mr. muy hombre! Adios and a little Margarita on the side! GGF
Quentin literally groaned each time he read this. Of course Miss Marr – and probably Miss Sherrill, no doubt Monica and his father – had read it, parsing together its more cryptic references. He was about to bolt for the London Library, anything to escape their collective disapproval, when the intercom buzzed and Miss Marr, in an aggrieved tone, said, ‘You must come out here now. You have a visitor.’
He opened his door to find the outer office frozen in a sort of tableau: Miss Sherrill emerging from the small staffroom and loo at the back, a stunned look on her face, Miss Marr wearing a particularly pruney expression, Monica turning round, mouth agape, and Albert, his face draped with wounded shock. Claire Carson stood behind the low gate.
‘Claire!’ Quentin cried, then modulated his voice to a professional register. ‘Mrs Carson! I didn’t expect you.’
She wore her maroon coat, floppy velvet hat, a long, thick-knitted scarf of rainbow hues, and trousers. That probably accounted for Miss Marr’s disdain. What she said next accounted for Albert’s outrage and Miss Sherrill’s shock. ‘I should have been more specific, Quentin. I asked for Mr Castle and your father came out to see me, and I have been explaining to him, to them—’ She glanced uneasily round the office ‘—that I meant you. That you and I will be working together now. You will be representing Frank’s work.’
The look on his father’s face so pained Quentin that his reflexes dictated he must defer, at the very least, say they should work together. But he did not. Whatever he ended up paying for his arrogance – oh yes, arrogance is how they would see it, Albert and Enid – he would pay the price. He went to the low gate and opened it. He shook her gloved hand (his gloves) and she held close a parcel tied with string. ‘This way, Claire.’ He nodded uneasily to office staff and led Claire to his office. He did not dare look at his father.
‘So this is where you spend your days,’ she said, sitting in the battered armchair. ‘Very Pickwickian, if you ask me. Frank would have liked it.’
‘He was never here. He is – was – my father’s client.’ He quickly hid Gigi’s postcard, and sat across from her, thinking that he for once understood the phrase to feast one’s eyes. She radiated a kind of tonic quality that enlivened everything around her, and she brightened the grey confines of his native habitat. The room seemed happier with her in it, even the wan African violets seemed to turn merrily in their small pots.
‘Is that Robert’s picture? Handsome. Do you have a picture of Florence?’ From a drawer he produced a framed snapshot of Florence in front of Dove Cottage. Claire pronounced her lovely, and said all women should be lovely on their honeymoon. She laughed and added in a low voice, ‘Frank and I never had a proper honeymoon. We had a baby before we even got married.’
This casual admission of Michael’s illegitimacy so shocked him, he had to clear his throat before he asked how he could help her.
‘I’ve come begging a favour.’
‘Anything.’
‘I’m meeting Sybil Dane for lunch to talk over the arrangements for Frank’s burial, or entombment or whatever it is now, whatever we have to call it, and even though I said I was prepared to be nice to everyone I once detested, I’m not equal to Sybil. I can’t go through with it.’
‘You mean, burying Frank, or rather, placing his ashes at Woodlands?’
‘No. Lunch. I need an ally for lunch.’
‘Ah,’ he said, perplexed.
‘I’m supposed to meet Sybil at the Savoy. That’s why I wore trousers. I’m hoping they won’t let me in. I can’t bear the thought of sitting in that woman’s presence and listening to her rattle on. She’s embraced this mourning, this funeral, like Medea, or Medusa, or whoever that was, tearing out her snaky hair. She’s planning a vast, public spectacle, Quentin, two services, one for the family and one for Frank’s so-called friends, and a huge reception at Woodlands afterwards. So gruesome! I told her I just wanted something small and private, a farewell, but she’s absolutely intent on a great public show of … grief? Adulation? I can’t endure it, even though I said I would.’
‘Lady Sybil has no right to say how Frank ought to be buried. Change your mind.’
‘It’s not that simple.’ Discomfort knotted her features.
‘Is it money? Please, be candid with me. If you need something immediately, we’ll advance it. You have, or you will have, the twenty thousand American dollars. You are not beholden to her.’
Claire stared at her hands in her lap, the left one atop the right, the thick gold wedding band gleaming. ‘Actually, I am beholden to Sybil. I didn’t tell you everything last week when you came to Oxford. The truth is, I made a sort of bargain with her, with them, really, Sybil and her husband, Sir Sanford.’
‘The newspaper magnate.’
‘Yes. I don’t quite know how it happened, but it has, and now … now I have to go to lunch with Sybil, and talk about all this face to face, and it makes me want to scream.’
‘What kind of bargain?’
Colour rose to her face. ‘Sybil and her husband are paying for Dragon School for Michael, the finest, the most elite school in Oxford for my son, all the fees, uniforms, sports, everything. The fees are astronomical. Not only that, but Sir Sanford got him admitted immediately. The day after we moved to Oxford, somehow it was all beautifully and quickly settled, and Michael goes to school there.’
The stark exchange shocked Quentin even more than her admission that Michael was born out of wedlock. He said, ‘I see,’ though he did not see at all.
‘Michael hates the Dragon School naturally. He’s full of anger and confusion. He’s full of rage, really. I’ve told him, you’ll get no sympathy from me, my lad. Hate it all you like, but being educated there will serve you for life. I’m not being a snob about it. It’s a fact of life here.’
So that he should be absolutely clear, Quentin said, ‘They pay for the Dragon School for your son’s education, and in return, they – she – gets your husband’s ashes?’
‘What good are his ashes to me? I loved the man, not a box of …’ Then, deflated, she added, ‘Yes. Sybil gets Frank’s ashes in her mausoleum. I would do it again.’ Claire struck a note of bruised bravado that was, at least in Quentin’s experience, unlike her. ‘Whatever happens after this, it’s on me. I will protect my children. I will see to it they have opportunities and possibilities. I never want them to say, “Oh, if only Da hadn’t died, it would all be different.” I suppose you think I’m an awful hypocrite.’
‘No,’ he lied baldly. ‘As you’ve said, you are an American, and not likely to be laying wreaths on graves.’ He glanced down at the day’s appointments. He was supposed to lunch with an author of sporting books and later, an appointment with a journalist just back from the Soviet Union. He punched the intercom and asked Miss Marr to cancel everything for the rest of the day. ‘I’m going to lunch with Mrs Carson.’ The disapproval from the main office seemed to seep under the door, a rust-coloured, septic pool congealing at his feet. He turned back to Claire. ‘Of course I’ll be your ally. I’ll always be your ally.’
‘There’s something else. Before we go.’ She handed him the parcel, and pulled the string. ‘I’ve gone back out to Harrington several times, to pack, to collect what I couldn’t get in the first rush of moving out. I’ve found some really astonishing stuff, Quentin. Go on, open it.’
He pulled out a thick sheaf of typed carbon pages. His fingers went instantly blue. ‘What is it?’
‘That suitcase of Frank’s, the one that was lost, well, he’s been writing so long now it wasn’t big enough for all his drafts. I found all this material, Quentin, you see? It was there, at Harrington all the time! I found the carbon I made of An Inconvenient Wife! Can you imagine?’
Her favourite phrase, can you imagine, always struck him as both challenge and invitation. ‘But it wasn’t finished, was it? Was it finished?’
‘No.’ Her blue eyes met his candidly, searching his face. ‘Not yet. But it will be. Soon. As soon as I find the rest of it.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. I see.’ He wasn’t quite sure that he did, so he said very carefully, ‘Shall we give it to Monica to retype?’
‘Oh no. It’s not ready yet.’ She took the pages back, laid them on the paper, wrapped and tied the string neatly. ‘I have so much to do. I have boxes yet to go through. There’s still, oh, scads of stuff at Harrington that I have to deal with before I can sell the place, but I wanted you to see this much of it. So you’d know it exists, and there’s enough for a posthumous novel. Maybe two. Frank’s work needn’t die with him.’
‘My father will be delighted.’
‘Only you’re Frank’s agent now, remember?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘And when I’ve found it all and put it in order – I don’t know when that will be, there’s so much to do – but when it is, you’ll come to Oxford and collect it, won’t you? I don’t think we can trust the Royal Mail with the only copy.’
He smiled in spite of himself. She wanted to see him again. He agreed that anything that important should be hand-carried to London. He rose and opened the door for her, meeting, as he expected, Miss Marr’s disapproval, though Quentin could not tell if it stemmed from Claire’s choosing Quentin over Albert, or the fact that she wore trousers.
As they walked towards the Savoy, Quentin’s mind scurried over everything he could remember of Lady Sybil Dane. He had met her, briefly introduced he remembered, at Selwyn and Archer’s elaborate cocktail party for Hay Days. Claire, clearly, had not deigned to come; he would have remembered her, no matter how numerous the crowd. But since Carson’s wife wasn’t there, Lady Sybil had rather carried the day as Francis’s consort, especially since the book was dedicated to her. He remembered watching her, thinking that she was accepting accolades as though she’d written Hay Days herself. He remembered too that Lady Sybil Dane created around herself the impression, even the conviction, of beauty, though in fact her youth had long fled, and she had an olive complexion, an outstanding nose, short legs, and an undifferentiated waist. To compensate, she wore flowing clothes in peacock colours, blues, greens, and glints of gold. Her conviction of her own worth also remained unimpugned despite unflattering portrayals in any number of anecdotes, stories, novels and a few juicy memoirs over these past thirty years.
He asked Claire several questions, and while her replies were tainted with dislike, Sybil’s story emerged: her unlikely pilgrimage from penniless bohemian to mistress of the vast Woodlands manor. In the mid twenties, at some avant garde gallery opening, Sybil, then an aspiring writer, aspiring actress, aspiring artist, artists’ model, and all-round poseur, captured the attention of the recently widowed Sir Sanford Dane, a man thirty years her senior. Having lived a life of unrelenting propriety with his first wife, Sybil blew into Sir Sanford’s milieu like the wind off the sea. (His grown children thought her a foul miasma and remained unreconciled.) He could have kept her as his mistress, but he was besotted, and married her. Sir Sanford remained enchanted with her and she remained enchanted with his fortune, an empire in newspapers. Sybil built her own little empire of literary magazines, small presses, and funded gallery showings for her variegated coteries of taste and expression, writers, painters, poets, critics, many of whom she slept with. (Sir Sanford adopted her casual approach to fidelity.) She preferred men, but she was known to be eclectic, and she was never exclusionary for more than a few months at a time.
‘Except possibly for Frank,’ Claire conceded as they approached the Savoy. ‘She might have actually loved him.’
Quentin thought to himself that Linda might actually have loved him, and Claire certainly had loved him, and he wondered how three such different women could have been so devoted to (as Gigi would say) a two-timing bastard.
‘Their affair went on the whole time we lived at Woodlands, naturally. She gave us, the family, a suite of rooms on the fourth floor to live in, mostly so the children and I would be out of sight, and she gave Frank her whole vast library to write in. Sybil convinced him he could do no wrong, that every word that fell from his pen was golden. I refused even to type it. Never mind, Sybil typed it. We finally left Woodlands before the war ended, and took a cottage by the sea. We froze there, but I had him to myself again. Selwyn and Archer gave him that fine fat advance, everyone thinking Hay Days would be another Some of These Days. Frank bought Harrington Hall and, well, the rest you know. I ended up there alone with the children and the menagerie, and the place falling down around our ears.’
‘How did Frank take the failure of Hay Days?’
‘Badly. It accelerated his drinking. He blamed Sybil. He was angry with her. I kept reminding him of his own stupidity. That was probably a mistake. We had terrible rows. Then, I don’t know how, or exactly when, but he reconnected with Sybil in London. At some point, she gave him the key to her flat. He brought other women there, I’m sure of it. Served her right. When he went to America, honestly, at first I was glad. At least Sybil wouldn’t have him any more. I was certain when he came home, we could … we would …we always had …’ They were nearing the Savoy; she stopped walking, and turned to him, and again for a man unaccustomed to reading women’s eyes, he saw the pain submerged in her pride. ‘You see, yet another of Frank’s stories of a desperate woman and an errant man. I was so inconvenient, he not only didn’t come home, he quit writing to me at all.’
‘You are not inconvenient to me,’ he said, taking her arm.
The Savoy maitre d’, noting that the lady was in trousers, was about to pluck a few choice phrases from a repertoire of rejection until Quentin said Lady Sybil Dane expected them. All was well.
Quentin followed Claire, admiring the way she sailed through the Savoy, wearing her unconventional trousers, and floppy velvet hat, confident, uncaring, perhaps even unaware of how beautiful and unique she was amid this sea of overdressed privilege. Quentin remembered Gigi Fischer striding into Schwab’s, consciously creating an effect. For Claire, the effect she created was effortless, a spontaneous expression of who she was. He wished he had met her in a Broadstairs pub fifteen years before.
Lady Sybil Dane too exuded an air of singularity, wearing deep, unbecoming mourning. Though she was now at least fifty, her great dark eyes, her jet-black hair had not deserted her. She was clearly surprised to see Claire with a man until Claire introduced him as Frank’s literary agent, Quentin Castle.
‘Oh,’ said Sybil in her gravelly voice, waving her cigarette.
‘You might have confused me with my father, Albert,’ said Quentin politely.
‘I rather doubt that,’ replied Sybil, letting her unimpressed appraisal of Quentin bubble beneath her words. ‘You are the junior partner, the one who went to California.’ She folded her menu and turned to Claire. ‘I hear the veal is very good.’
Hoping he could quell the flush of shame rising in his cheeks, Quentin ordered a civilized martini. Claire asked for a gin and tonic. Lady Sybil gave her attention entirely to Claire, insisting on driving her back to Oxford after lunch, and hopes that grief had not sapped all her strength. Not until their meals arrived did Sybil Dane turn again to Quentin. ‘Your father has been renowned for his literary taste for thirty years, so you have a lot to live up to.’ Her tone left no doubt that she thought him unequal to the task.
And yet within five years Albert Castle desperately wanted to retire, though he told no one, not even Margaret, the true reason he wished to retreat from the firm he had founded and sustained, the business he had loved. His son – the weak-eyed son who never seemed to have much promise or any charm or even ability, the son, in short, who was Not Robert – had eclipsed the father.
Quentin’s handling of the estate of Francis Carson was shrewd and exemplary. The posthumous novel The Inconvenient Wife reinstated the writer’s reputation that had been diminished by Hay Days. Published in 1954, The Inconvenient Wife sold well, sold internationally, and save for the grumbling of younger, more astringent critics, the book reaped elegiac, even ecstatic reviews. All that glory reflected on Quentin. And yet Albert had instigated, nurtured, fostered, advanced Carson’s talents when no one had heard of him. Albert could hardly bear it. Even worse, Louisa Partridge, once Albert’s lover, treated him as one would a friend’s old, nasty dog: a pat on the head, a kind hello, but one wouldn’t want to get too close. She reserved her respect and affection for Quentin.
Albert finally did retire in 1956. Quentin moved into his father’s spacious office, sparking a colossal fight with Enid Sherrill, who departed Castle Ltd. She started her own agency, taking all her authors with her.
Quentin was glad to see her go. Castle Literary Ltd flourished. Not only did they still have the cachet of tradition, but Quentin proved himself – quite apart from his father – a man with daring literary instincts. Quentin took on, advocated for adventurous writers whose colonial experience of Empire was searingly different from, say, Kipling’s. The voices, the views of these writers undercut the old imperial complacency and upended literary criticism, enlarged the scope of writers in English. Moreover, Quentin was envied for his lucrative contacts with American film producers (and American film agents, like Georgina Fischer). But it was the story of Apricot Olive Lemon that raised him to fame, a story that came to have the same smoothness as Thaxton and the Second-Best Umbrella, as it was told over and over, by writers drinking pints at pubs, by other agents over bad red at wine bars, over martinis at editors’ luncheons, and later – decades later – fodder for chatter among young editorial assistants riding in lifts to ozone levels of glassy office buildings in sterile corporate parks. The story testified not simply to Quentin’s acumen, but to his audacity. Who else would have thought of so unconventional a plan, and made a fortune for the author and the agent?
The four editors who came to lunch at Louisa’s that day walked into a honeyed snare. Louisa created an enchanting moment: for that afternoon these four men were transported to the proverbial Other Country, the realm one visits in fiction. All four responded as they should have and made Louisa offers, very low, given the experimental nature of the book, and of course, the prevalent austerity everywhere. Quentin for his part negotiated up, not for the immediate offer, but for the percentage. A young editor finally agreed to Quentin’s terms for a twenty per cent royalty rate (unheard of then or now) for Louisa. The book was published in the spring of 1951; critical reception was mixed. Some brayed that Louisa Partridge was a traitor to The Book of British Housekeeping, which they still admired. Some saw it as ludicrous, and quoted the recipes only to poke fun at them. (‘Vermouth to moisten the stuffing for a roasted chicken? Preposterous.’) But some, an eclectic, influential few saw it for what it was: the first clarion call to a post-war world. Louisa’s tart, sharp, clean prose, her evocations of culinary experience-yet-to-come struck some as an antidote not simply to the grey pall of 1951 Britain, but an antidote to both gloom and nostalgia. Apricot Olive Lemon sold slowly at first, but it sold well, and it picked up momentum. The book did not reflect, it predicted. It has never been out of print, from that day to this. It was followed by six more volumes, all selling well and rapturously reviewed, and countless collections of essays, minor journalism and myriad magazine pieces, but nothing as seminal and important as Apricot Olive Lemon. In 1964 Louisa Partridge was awarded an OBE. Her dear friend, and longtime literary agent, Quentin Castle, escorted her to the ceremony.
FOOTPATH TO FOLLY
Albert, as the head of Castle Literary Ltd, received the black-bordered invitation to the memorial service for the late Francis Carson, at ten in the morning, Monday, 6 March 1950 at the Woodlands parish church. Luncheon at Woodlands to follow. Albert intended to go alone, but Miss Sherrill reminded him that Mrs Carson might look askance, even take offence if Quentin were not there. The firm wished to keep Carson’s estate. Grumbling, Albert could see the wisdom in this. Then Miss Sherrill announced that she too would be going. Albert objected, but Miss Sherrill asked no man’s permission.
They drove to Oxfordshire the night before, Albert at the wheel of his trusty Morris. Miss Marr was able to book only two rooms at the local inn, a dreary place with dusty stuffed pheasants on high shelves. The three ate an abysmal supper in a dining room where the walls were dotted with hunting scenes featuring lots of bloody animals. The stuffy, low-ceilinged chamber Quentin shared with his father was also decorated with paintings of bloody animals. Quentin’s stomach troubled him all night, and Albert snored like a bellows, so much so that Quentin more than once had to get out of his own bed, go to his father and shake his shoulder to shut him up.
Breakfast was, if anything, worse than the supper. Quentin took dry toast and tea. As they were about to leave for the church, Miss Sherrill could not find the gloves to go with her navy-blue suit. She fussed and flapped, unhinged because no lady could go to a church without gloves. She returned to her room and insisted they search the car. Quentin swore under his breath. By the time she found the errant gloves, and they drove to the church, and parked the car, they were very nearly late. They stood in the doorway while the organist filled the church with lugubrious music, and wondered where they might sit. The pews were packed.
In that back row many bottoms squeezed more tightly together so Quentin, Albert and Enid could sit. Since the church was unheated, the close-pressed human warmth was not unwelcome. From his place at the back, and across a sea of black, Quentin could only see the hats of Claire and Lady Sybil where they sat with Sir Sanford, and presumably, the three children in the front pew, reserved for the family.
The vicar stepped into the pulpit, raised his hands, prayed, and addressed them as brothers and sisters; he began with praise for the deceased, farewell to one beloved of all, our brother, Francis, with copious references to his genius, his goodness, his many merits. Quentin found the whole exercise excruciating. Though he had been uncomplainingly raised C of E all his life, he was suddenly impatient, irritated beyond endurance by the well-known phrases and responses, by the rhetorical lauding of a man who, for all the good he had written, had strewn many lives with pain. Quentin’s included. When required, Quentin stood and sat, and sang with the rest of them, but bereavement for Francis Carson, like sleep the night before, eluded him. His mind wandered, and his stomach was upset. The vicar laced his remarks with biblical references reminding everyone there would come the day when death would be as nothing, and love would triumph over all; he invoked the ubiquitous Corinthians, verse 13. Oh God, Quentin thought, was ever there a set of verses so often abused? And yet, to Quentin’s surprise, these words of comfort and farewell clearly moved people in the congregation. He heard snuffling, and many dabbed their eyes with hankies, including, of all people, Enid Sherrill. Disdainfully Quentin Castle spent the service reflecting uncharitably on Frank Carson, though acknowledging his own hypocrisy: how else would Quentin have met Claire? How else would he have met Gigi? He knew that in some fundamental way both of these women had exerted a lunar tug upon his life, though quite what that tug was, he did not know. Expect great change? They had brought him great change whether he liked it or not, wanted it or not. He had not wanted it. And yet, he cherished it. He thought of love and death, and bits of Donne, the master of love and death, floated through his mind, chased away when, beside him, his father moved uneasily with a gas pain which he then discreetly released. Quentin turned his head. At the last amen, Quentin rose with the rest of them to sing the final hymn, ‘Abide With Me’, while the front rows filed out first.
Michael Carson led, perhaps in his eagerness to escape. As he walked up the aisle Michael shot Quentin a look of resentment, detestation, so pure, intense and unguarded it could only have been on the face of a boy. Catherine and Mary, in lovely new dresses of dark-blue taffeta, held hands and seemed pleased by the novelty of the experience. Quentin assumed they had grown up heathen and probably church itself seemed a place to play-act. Sir Sanford, corpulent, bald, adorned with medals, looked pleased rather than saddened, probably happy for Sybil’s sake, at the turnout. On his arm, Lady Sybil Dane, her black hair sleek under a smart hat, her black clothing belted at her thick waist, her dark eyes downcast, looked every inch the grieving mistress, if not the widow. She carried a tiny bouquet of snowdrops tied with a black ribbon. Claire followed behind them. In a simple sheath she looked like a tall black flower, regal, Quentin thought, like a black iris. Her veiled hat concealed her bright hair, which was tucked up high and tight in a French roll. She too carried white snowdrops in black ribbon. As she passed him, she raised the slight veil, and in those few seconds, her blue eyes were bleak and eloquent with pain.
A long cortege of cars drove up to Woodlands, the Danes’ grand, many-winged Georgian mansion, the golden stone glowing in the cold noon light. Overworked servants greeted them, directing guests to ascend the broad staircase. As they handed off their coats and hats, Quentin and Albert and Enid mingled with the publishing professions, with Frank’s European and American publishers and translators, with other writers, artists, critics, the entire editorial staff of Selwyn and Archer, editors from other houses, editors of defunct arts journals, and assorted other literati and hangers-on, nearly all of them men (the few women were of the mothy-sweater sort, indifferent to their looks and tetchy on their politics). The hall was vast and Quentin’s gaze was drawn to the high overhead dome where fat, glowing cherubs cavorted with nymphs, their flesh so opulent, their breasts seemed to hang pendulous from the gilt dome, their rosy nipples like jewels. All along the walls hung massive works of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century art, portraits, landscapes and scenes of antique grandeur, portrayals of classical myth and literature, all in thick gilded frames, all this grandeur now gracing the home of Sir Sanford Dane, once a scrappy Manchester lad.
Miss Sherrill remarked as they walked up the vast marble staircase that one didn’t see too many houses of this splendor so well maintained any more. At the open doors of the elaborate gold and green drawing room with its six Venetian chandeliers illuminating gilded furniture, stood uniformed waiters bearing trays of drinks. No further enticement was necessary. For writers and artists free drinks and free food were cause for celebration, no matter who had to die.
Theirs was a genial profession, and Albert Castle, certainly, was known to be amiable, affable even in these sombre circumstances. Albert became more delightful the more he drank, the more they all drank. Miss Sherrill, who drank only sherry, and that in sips, staked herself beside Albert like a pole to a patch of runner beans. Over years of social occasions when Albert waxed indiscreet, Miss Sherrill had evolved a quick, almost invisible jab to which he responded like Pavlov’s dog. Her elbow was at the ready as they stood in a small clutch of compatriots and competitors. The whole high-ceilinged room echoed with a respectful drone broken here and there with bits of stifled laughter. It was, after all, a sad occasion.
Quentin stationed himself quite alone, in a far corner before a phalanx of enormous potted palms. Perhaps if need be, like Tarzan, he could run into the jungle. But first he took a drink from a passing waiter who carried trays of sherry and whisky. Quentin bolted his first whisky, and felt its burn and its tingling in his veins almost immediately. He signalled the waiter for another.
From where he stood Quentin could look across the room at Claire and Sybil and Michael, who remained stationary while people swarmed around them. He watched as Sybil introduced Michael to everyone, her arm draped protectively on his shoulders. Michael looked miserable, twitching as though his fine suit of clothes itched, or perhaps to shrug off Sybil’s protective hand. Get used to it, lad, thought Quentin; she is paying your school fees, and she’s got you now. He watched Claire nod, smile, nod, smile, moving like an iris in the wind, responding to outside forces, the effort clearly taxing her patience, perhaps her strength, but not her innate dignity. The spontaneity he always so prized in her was utterly eclipsed. Oh Frank, Quentin thought, what an ass you were. What kind of fool trades Claire Carson for Mavis Ryan? For Sybil Dane?
‘A sad loss, eh, Castle?’ said the managing editor from Selwyn and Archer.
‘Are we here to bury Caesar or to praise him?’ Quentin replied.
‘I hear they’ve turned the film Some of These Days into some sort of farce.’
‘Have you?’
‘Well, I heard it from your father. You went there, you saw it.’
‘I went, I saw, but I did not conquer,’ Quentin said with ironic gravity.
‘Tell me, is Linda St John really that beautiful?’
Quentin snatched yet another Scotch from the tray of a passing waiter. ‘What does it matter?’
‘Must have been a jolly old shock to you to see they’d cremated him.’
‘Oh, will you just bloody shut up!’
The editor moved away, but Quentin was joined at his jungle outpost by others of the publishing fraternity, each of whom had sympathies and opinions. Quentin had neither. He drank, and listened, unamused, to anecdotes of Francis Carson’s capacity for alcohol, and his gifts with inciting women into bed. The stories were legion. Time for another whisky.
The two Carson girls were playing hide and seek among the guests, and wreaking hell among the waiters with their darting, shrieking back and forth. The youngest, Mary, barrelled into Quentin’s knees. He knelt and caught her, and the collision spilled a bit of his drink on her blue taffeta dress.
She stared at him intently. ‘I hate you!’ and she was off again.
‘Does no one discipline those children?’ asked an agent from Watt. ‘They’re heathens.’
‘They’re little girls,’ snapped Quentin, ‘and you should be damn glad they’re happy.’
The voices in the room were louder now; laughter was more frequent, the occasional guffaw so loud it echoed up and rattled the Venetian chandeliers. Political discussions too broke out here and there, grew heated as various left-wing factions argued finer points of socialism and the Soviet Union. Thick banners of cigarette smoke wafted up. Quentin wondered if Lady Sybil and Sir Sanford had quite anticipated the effect of all this whisky before lunch on a crowd of people of the ink- slinging trades.
An agent from another rival firm planted himself at Quentin’s side. ‘I hear there is a posthumous novel.’
‘Really?’ said Quentin.
‘So the wife has control of everything now. Be staying with the old firm, will she?’
‘Where did you go to subtlety school?’
The man laughed good-naturedly and took himself off with one of his own authors, leaving Quentin to the comfort of Sir Sanford Dane’s fine Scotch. The meandering crowds shuttled and obscured his view of Claire, still rooted between Sybil and Sir Sanford.
Michael Carson, squirming finally from under Sybil’s embrace, bolted, and found his way to Quentin. ‘I don’t s’pose you’d give us a sip of that whisky, would you?’
‘What? You’re only ten.’
‘I’m disgusted.’ The boy crossed his arms over his chest grimly.
Quentin regarded him with affectionate understanding. Michael was pudgy and unlovely, though he had not seemed so when Quentin first met him. At Harrington Hall he had seemed quite the man of the place. Perhaps because at Harrington Hall he was in his own element. Here, he was in the Danes’ element. Quentin wondered how many years would pass before Michael Carson found his own element again. But all he said was, ‘It’ll all be over soon.’
‘It’ll never be the same.’
‘No,’ Quentin conceded, ‘it’ll never be the same. How do you like Dragon School?’
‘I hate it. And that won’t be over soon. That’ll go on for bloody years.’
‘Yes.’ Quentin watched Lady Sybil Dane accepting the sympathies of an especially voluble writer. ‘That’s likely to go on quite a long time.’
Claire, too, eventually managed to break away from the reception line. She had taken off the veiled hat, and her bright hair wound tight atop her head made her look like a candle moving across a sea of darkness. When people accosted her, she swayed towards them, listening, nodding, shaking hands, accepting air kisses, back pats and praise for her late husband. Some were friends from their old Chelsea days, some the very critics who had reamed Hay Days, some from Sir Sanford’s papers who had praised it, some were translators, and some had no discernible connection with Francis Carson and were here for the spectacle, the food and drink. When she could disentangle herself, she gave a wan smile to Quentin and Michael. Each thought the smile was for him alone. Her progress towards them was slow, but they both knew she was coming. Each thought to him alone.
When she at last stood before them she placed a gloved hand lightly on Michael’s head, and handed Quentin the snowdrop bouquet. ‘Please get rid of this for me, will you? Sybil’s idea of … something. Too bizarre. Like a wedding with the dead.’
He took the bouquet, and dropped it in the potted palm behind him. He sent Michael off to get his mother a drink. ‘See you don’t spill some,’ he added, assuming the boy would drink half before he got back to Claire.
‘I should have put Frank’s ashes on the bookshelf, and left him there,’ said Claire, peeling off the black gloves. Quentin held his hand out for the gloves, and then tossed them into the potted palm as well. This amused her.
‘Sybil looks terrible,’ he offered, happy to heap abuse on their hostess.
‘Mourning doesn’t suit her. She looks much better in flowing peacock robes.’
‘But here she is the star of a play. I think it’s called The Beloved Mistress.’
‘As opposed to the inconvenient wife.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve made a grave error, Quentin.’
‘You mean burying him here, all that? All this?’ He waved his arm around to the lively, literary crowd; voices were louder now, laughter more persistent; even the vicar and the organist were jolly under the amber influence of whisky and sherry. ‘I agree with you, Mrs Carson. This was an error of the gravest sort.’
‘I thought I was past all the pain associated with this place, and I’m not. Frank seems to me more present here than he ever did at Harrington, as though he better belonged here with her than with me.’
‘Well, he’s here now,’ said Quentin, ‘forever.’
‘Yes, I have stupidly delivered Frank into the hands of my enemy. I certainly shan’t be coming back, I can tell you that. Sybil’s car came for us yesterday, chauffeur and all, making a big bloody fuss on Polstead Road, and once here, servants led us to a lovely suite of rooms on the second floor. Can I do this for you, madam? Can I do that? Revolting. The girls thought it was all great fun, tea in that massive library. Michael was a complete ass, sulking through everything. And then we had to sit through that awful service at the mausoleum.’
‘Last night? What was that we just sat through?’
‘That was the public one. Last night they put my old carpet bag with Frank’s ashes into the marble tomb and sealed it up. Just us, Sybil, Sir Sanford, the vicar and a string quartet. The girls went berserk, no one could calm them. They screamed the whole way back here, and Michael was roaring through the place, slamming doors, and swearing like a trooper, and then the servants insisted I leave the children and go down to dinner with Sybil and Sir Sanford. They awaited me. Can you imagine how ghastly that was?’
‘I can, but I’d rather not.’
‘The whole day, beginning to end, was just unspeakably awful.’
‘Worse than what we just sat through? What we’re doing here now?’
They watched as Sybil moved through the crowds, collecting condolences as if sympathy could be minted into small bright coins to be showered upon her outstretched hands. She looked both tragic and joyous, and Quentin noticed that someone had brought her a glass of champagne which the waiters were now circulating.
‘Is that champagne?’ asked Claire. ‘What is she celebrating?’
‘She’s won,’ he observed.
Michael joined them and thrust a half-filled glass into his mother’s hand.
‘Oh, Michael, thank you for the drink, dear.’ She smoothed his hair away from his eyes.
‘I’m famished,’ he said. ‘When’ll we eat?’
‘Whenever Lady Sybil finishes holding court,’ said Quentin.
‘That’ll be forever,’ he grumbled.
‘Yes,’ Quentin agreed, ‘she will not be finished for a very long time. Years, I should think. Perhaps we should all get used to it.’
‘Why are you being unkind?’ asked Claire. ‘It’s not like you.’
‘I’m angry.’
‘At?’
‘Everyone. Forgive me. I’m a stupid sod.’
‘Ha ha ha!’ Michael crowed. ‘You said it, you sod!’
‘Michael! Go find the girls and go into the kitchen,’ said Claire. ‘The cook there will remember you. Tell her you’re hungry and she’ll feed you. Go on. Tell her Lady Sybil said you were to be fed anything you like.’ She turned back to Quentin when he left. ‘You’re not a stupid sod.’
‘A cad, then.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he muttered.
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘Of course I’m angry with you. I’m an aspidistra, the kind you despise, all tidy and contained in its little pot behind respectable lace curtains, and I never knew it till I met you.’
Her blue eyes widened. ‘And what are you now?’
‘A bloody fool. Drunk too, but no longer the potted aspidistra. No, madam—’ He set his empty glass in the potted palm ‘—I’m an ass, I know, but a newly minted one, and now that I know I’m not an aspidistra, I am truly an ass, a fool, and I can say I could take you away from all this. No, really, I have a chariot outside. A Morris chariot. I could say your chariot awaits, madam. I can drive now.’
‘And where would we go?’
‘Mexico. Baja.’
‘Mexico! Is this part of the play?’
‘You mean The Beloved Mistress, that play? No. This play is called The Fool’s Confession, written by some lesser talent, some dreary hack. Me. I am the fool. My lines are: Time’s winged chariot awaits you, and I am at its help, I mean, helm. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace,’ he went on, knowing his tongue had been unhinged by alcohol, and flinging himself into folly nonetheless. ‘I could say that Frank is gone, but I am here, and I love you, Claire. I loved you from the moment I first saw you. Sorry to muddy up the whole bloody farewell, but on a day like this one thinks of love and death, and nothing else. At least I can think of nothing else. Love and death. I’m afraid I will always love you, and I have to say it before I die.’
She was momentarily quiet. ‘Why afraid?’
‘Because love is an uncharted territory for me, wholly and completely new. What I feel for you I’ve never experienced before. I keep thinking of old McVicar, up on some peak where the air is cold and thin, and he can hardly breathe. He knows he’s looking at undiscovered country, and his heart must have constricted with excitement, knowing that everything he’s seen before is small, diminished now that he’s seen this. That nothing will ever seem quite so grand or fine as this, and he could reach out his hand, and …’ Quentin reached out his hand, and Claire took it. He snatched it back. ‘I’ve had too much to drink. You can ignore me if you want. You should. In any case, I’m hopeless. I mean, I haven’t any hope that you … And I couldn’t expect you to. I don’t expect it, but I don’t want to die without saying it. I’m a fool. Forgive me.’
She placed her hand lightly on his arm. ‘I don’t need to forgive you. I want to be with you. Will you come to me, Quentin? Will you?’
He focused his attention on her eyes, forced himself to look only into their blue depths, and for a man with so little experience reading women’s eyes, he saw there clearly, truth plain, love unsullied. ‘When? Whenever.’
‘Shall I come to you?’
‘Yes. Where? Tomorrow? Shall I come to Oxford tomorrow?’
‘Today. Now. There is a suite of rooms on the fourth floor, north wing. Where we used to live. They’re empty. The whole wing is empty. Meet me there. There’s a small lift. You’ll find it at the back of the central staircase. Take the lift and go to the fourth floor and turn to your right. The second door on your right.’
‘Now, Claire? Do you mean it?’
‘Now. I’ll follow.’ Her blue eyes gazed into his, and an expectant smile tugged at her lips.
She turned and left him, taken up by the soggy embrace of a writer from the old days in Chelsea.
The fourth floor was preternaturally quiet, abandoned, no sounds floated up. The room itself was furnished only with a high, hard, canopied bed of ancient origins, a rug rolled up leaving the heavy wood floor bare, and a portrait of a glowering be-wigged clergyman pointing at a Bible. He was the very embodiment of austerity, save for his heavy, fleshy jowls. Quentin stood at the window, waiting for her, fearful she wouldn’t come, half wondering if he had dreamed her words, looking out over gardens, and beyond the woodlands for which the place was named, swathed in fog. From this window he could see the distant folly, an airy gazebo in marble with fine columns and a domed top. He smiled to himself. Footpath to folly. He was ready to tread that footpath, dance down it, embrace folly in all its glory and consequence.
He came down in the lift, mercifully passing no one except an overburdened housemaid who ignored him. The green and gold drawing room was empty, save for a corpulent editor drunkenly passed out on a settee. A waiter collecting glasses directed him to where luncheon was being served at the other end of the wing, a different drawing room, this one in blue and gold.
Quentin had roused his every appetite and now he needed sustenance. He was positively starving. The many tables were, most of them, only half full; people had trains to catch. Quentin seated himself with a couple who introduced themselves as neighbours of Sir Sanford and Lady Sybil, lord and lady names Quentin didn’t bother to remember. They were delighted to meet Francis Carson’s literary agent. A tired-looking waiter offered him food which he ate, not knowing or caring what it was. Another waiter offered some wine. Quentin declined anything to drink.
He wanted nothing to blur the moment, nothing that might soften the tingling awareness that shot through his body, head to toe in sweet little jolts. He needed every ounce of concentration to play his role. Calling on all his skill in undergraduate amateur theatrics – which, at long last were not useless – Quentin Castle put on the performance of his life: to persuade this fatuous couple and others in this unsuspecting audience, including his father and Miss Sherrill, that he was the same man who had sat in the church that morning. However, Quentin was absolutely not that man, and never would be again. That man had never known the passion Quentin had experienced, the madness, the sheer act of devouring and being devoured in another, of reaching with his body what his heart and soul and spirit had always longed for, exulted in, wanted to proclaim. Instead he asked the Danes’ neighbour if she might pass him the salt.
Quentin Castle and Claire Carson had made love in their own fine and private place, on that ancient bed and in full view of the disapproving cleric whose expression darkened with every endearment, with every piece of clothing that fell to the floor. Quentin and Claire had no time for languor, or long lovers’ talks, no time for the lilt and ease, exploration, tease, but here, now, swift, stolen, delicious, tender and intense. Quentin’s every corpuscle seemed to rejoice, his flesh – and hers – seemed transcendent when Claire’s lips slid down his chest, when he brought his mouth to her nipples, across the creamy expanse of her torso, that she had rolled over him, sat astride him, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, making little sounds that fell on his ears like grace notes. I love you, Quentin wreathed his heart in happiness. I love you, Claire, I love you… . And when he held her tousled hair in his hands, his cheek to hers, and urged her, body and soul, to meet him, that final jolt of joy, to be with him, and in him, and part of him forever.
Lord and Lady Whoever-they-were spoke highly of the Danes’ tennis courts. Quentin listened, bringing his napkin to his lips to inhale the smell of her still on his fingers. He played his role to perfection so that these people should never guess he had rested his head against Claire’s belly, and risen from that bed, laughed and given the American kiss-off to the grim, be-jowled cleric pointing to the Bible and promising hellfire. Quentin and Claire could have come together and perished right there, in flames, and been happy. Quentin knelt before his lover, and kissed her pliant thighs before he rolled each stocking up her long legs. She had begged him to go downstairs first, pressing herself to his chest, impressing herself there forever, and brushing his lips with words of love so sweet he could still taste them, words far more confectionery than the elegant fruit-studded cake placed gleaming on a dish before him.
When finally Claire came down to lunch, Quentin dared not look at her. She made her way to the table where the Danes and Bernard and some left-wing journalists sat. She asked them to excuse her absence, that she was overcome with emotion, that she had a headache. Sir Sanford patted her hand, and said everyone understood. She gave her attention to a journalist, a woman with frowsy hair and nicotine-stained fingers who hoped to publish something posthumous of Frank’s. Claire said all such requests had to go through the agent, and pointed out Quentin to her.
A fine and private play indeed. The Fool’s Confession became The Beloved Mistress. They acted their parts well.
The last scene: at the end of that very long day, and after a lavish tea (also garnished with alcohol for those who wished to imbibe), when only those few people who had cars remained. Quentin, his father and Miss Sherrill were among the last to leave. Their car was brought round, and they collected their coats in the high and airy hall. Albert was clearly very drunk, and Miss Sherrill very tired. Quentin was very grateful to Lady Sybil Dane – she would never know for what – and offered his formal farewells to Claire.
‘Yes, goodbye, Quentin, and thank you for all your help.’
‘You’re most welcome.’
‘Can you come to Oxford, do you think? One day later this week to talk about the book? Or shall I come to London?’ she said, pressing his hand.
Quentin could only gulp and nod, and be grateful he had his Burberry on, such was the surge he felt from the mere pressure of her hand. ‘I’ll come to Oxford.’
‘Francis didn’t mention any new book to me, a’tall,’ Albert sulked, ‘and I’m his agent. I take it as a damned insult.’
‘An oversight, Albert,’ Enid soothed.
‘He wrote like mad these past few years,’ said Claire, speaking to anyone nearby, including their hostess, ‘since we moved to our lovely country place. Harrington Hall was so good for him creatively. He was so hard-working and productive.’
‘But he wasn’t always able to write there,’ said Sybil, ‘what with all the distractions. Sometimes he had to come to London just for the peace of it.’
‘Peace indeed!’ snapped Albert. Enid delivered him one of her practised jabs. Albert, muted, gazed up at the cavorting nymphs in the dome.
Lady Sybil turned to Quentin. ‘Was he writing in Los Angeles?’
‘Yes. All the time. Every day. Every night at the Garden of Allah. He had his own typewriter there.’ Quentin was such a happy actor he wanted to say Frank had fallen head first into his typewriter and drowned there in a sea of inky ribbons and a swathe of keys, letters imprinted across his face.
‘I have all his many letters from California.’ Sybil’s dark eyes shone. ‘He was so dispirited at what they’d done to Some of These Days. I buoyed him as best I could. I’m so delighted there will be one last novel.’ Her brightly ringed hand splayed across her breast. ‘An Inconvenient Wife, though I’m sure the title was a figure of speech,’ she added with a look of consummate pity for the widow.
‘I’m sure you were a great help to him, Lady Sybil, an asset,’ said Enid Sherrill. She turned to Claire and offered a prim smile. ‘Though we all know you were his muse, Mrs Carson.’ She cast an odd, knowing, unsettling look to Quentin and announced that they should leave now.
‘We should too,’ said Claire. ‘Could your driver take us back to Oxford now?’
‘You should spend one more night,’ Sybil protested. ‘The children can go riding in the morning. We have ponies.’
‘Thank you, no. Ah, here are the children.’ She smiled to see them accompanied by Sir Sanford Dane. ‘Go get your things. We’re leaving.’
‘No need,’ said Sir Sanford, a manly hand on Michael’s shoulder. ‘The servants will bring them down.’
‘Can you say goodbye to Mr Castle?’ Claire asked the children. ‘This is Mr Castle’s father, and this is Miss Sherrill. Can you say goodbye to them? Please.’ Her last word tattered into shreds of desperation as she met their stubborn faces. ‘Please.’ The girls finally did as she asked. Michael hung back, grim and defiant. ‘Don’t disappoint me, Michael.’
Albert, the ever-cordial, stepped forward and forced the issue for young Michael. Albert patted his shoulder, called him a fine young man just like his father. Michael was forced to shake hands. And on that insincere note, Albert, Quentin and Miss Sherrill went outside where their car was waiting, already warmed up.
‘I’ll drive,’ said Quentin.
‘Can you drive?’ asked Albert and Miss Sherrill together.
‘I learned in California.’
Albert was only too happy to cede the wheel. Miss Sherrill got in the back seat and fell asleep immediately, as did Albert in the front. While Albert’s snores were punctuated with farts, Quentin drove, eyes alight, the joy he felt all but parting the darkness falling before him. He was loved. He loved and was loved. Love and death. That’s all there is. One’s guaranteed. One you must risk.
THE EAGLE AND THE MOLE
Margaret flung open the door, and stood framed by the light, her lips pursed, her arms crossed over her dressing gown, watching as Quentin helped his father stagger out of the Morris. Margaret expressed some surprise that Quentin could drive even before she chastised Albert for his drinking, and wrapped her arm round his shoulders, and helped him up the steps. Her back to them, she said that given the hour, Quentin should take Miss Sherrill home and return the Morris on Sunday when he and Florence and Rosamund came for lunch.
He wanted to cry out, The planets have dropped out of their orbits! He wanted to announce that he would not lead fat Rosamund up the steps on Sunday, not extol the cabbage soup! Never again! Given what he now knew, of discovery, of returning and rejoicing in love, he was, for the first time in his life, a whole man. A whole man could not live a half life. In fact he might have said all this, but Margaret closed the door. Quentin returned to the Morris.
Miss Sherrill, fully alert, had moved to the passenger seat beside him. ‘We’ve suffered two calamities in a month,’ she said as soon as he had put it in reverse and backed out of the drive. ‘McVicar’s heirs will almost certainly leave us.’
‘How do you know that? He only died … what? A month ago?’
‘It does not look good for us. The family will fight it out in the courts, and it will take a long time, but it really doesn’t matter who wins. They are all rather sour on your father of late.’
‘Why?’
‘I’d rather not go into it.’ Miss Sherrill was silent, as though she had an elaborate menu in her hand and could not choose. Finally she said, ‘Francis Carson will be a lucrative client especially for the next few years. The posthumous novel will help. What is it called again?’
‘An Inconvenient Wife,’ he offered, thinking that the title described Florence.
‘Well, good or bad, it will get attention and it will sell. We cannot lose him.’
‘Mrs Carson won’t be leaving us.’
‘Are you resting on the laurels you brought home from California?’ she said, the sharp rasp of sarcasm grating on his ears.
‘I wasn’t altogether successful,’ he admitted, ‘but I did bring him home.’
‘Well, his wife is your client now, and his work will be your responsibility. Albert feels the loss, you know.’ The motor, and the unspoken, hummed between them. ‘Your father is a good man, but he can be very foolish. I should certainly hope you will not be making his same mistakes.’
‘What sort of mistakes?’
‘Louisa Partridge, for one.’
His high spirits got the best of him, and he laughed out loud, assuring her he was not having an affair with Mrs Partridge.
‘Think this quite funny, do you? It would be a dangerous error for you to take up with Mrs Carson. There, I’ve said it.’ She folded her gloved hands over her handbag.
Quentin strangled the high-spirited laughter that begged to erupt. He pretended instead to burp, then retorted, ‘I’m not taking up with her, as you so genteelly put it, but what makes you think that I would?’
‘She’s vulnerable now. If it was hard for her when he was alive – and I’ve certainly heard enough Francis Carson stories to assume that life with him was hard – it will be twice as difficult now that he’s gone. She has no one but that surly boy. She’s in need. I gather from watching her today she detests most of her husband’s friends. Who can blame her? They’re all wastrels. She was the one carrying all the responsibility, not just for the children, but for Carson, getting him to write at all these past few years. All that genius and he threw it away on drink, on women, on any sort of excuse that would keep him from working. The stupid sod. Oh, and that Sybil Dane is good for nothing except feathering her own silly nest. Hmmph.’ Enid had absorbed this exact expression from Albert. ‘Carson was a gifted fool. Charming, I suppose, but he squandered his gifts in his all too brief life.’
‘You sound as though you pitied him.’
‘Today, I actually did. There, in the church. He might have written books better than Some of These Days. It was a fine novel, but not superlative. He might have grown with maturity. He might have done something quite extraordinary had he lived. Now he will never write anything again, his wife’s alone and his children are without a father.’
‘She’s not alone. She has the firm. Our firm. We can extend her some extra courtesies.’
‘Whatever you are about with her, please do not call it courtesy. You are not gifted, but you are not a total fool either, so let us be plain.’
‘Thank you, Miss Sherrill,’ he replied, downshifting, ‘your estimates of my abilities are so appreciated.’
‘Don’t patronize me, Quentin. I was working for this firm when you were a mewling babe. This firm is my life, the reputation we have built, and I shall not be made to look after you as I have looked after your father for nearly thirty years, this scrape and that, this forgotten bit of business, and that, this detail overlooked and that. Why do you think we’re losing McVicar?’
He did not want to hear the stories behind that statement. He took the offensive. ‘Are you saying that the success of Castle Literary is entirely due to you?’
‘Not entirely. But the longevity of many of our relationships, yes. It’s simply not possible for Albert, for anyone, to dally with people’s affections and their work, and then to walk away with impunity.’
‘I’m not my father. I do not dally with affections, and I’m grateful for all you’ve done for the firm.’
‘Oh, shut up, will you? Anyone could see you are in love with her. You’re mad for her, and she is mad for you.’
‘Anyone?’
‘All right, not anyone. I could. It can’t last, Quentin. It won’t, and the firm will suffer. Our reputation will suffer. You personally will suffer, and I do not speak of your marriage to Florence. I’m not about to lecture you on sin. I do not care a fig for sin. Whatever you may do with your personal life – including that woman in California, a pretty bit of business, that! Imagine every postal clerk between here and there knowing …’
‘Knowing what?’
‘Never mind. I care nothing for any of that. The firm—’ She took a deep emphatic breath ‘—the firm is my responsibility. Your recklessness will cost us Carson’s estate.’
Quentin was rather pleased to be thought reckless, but he suppressed a smile. ‘I assure you, Claire, Mrs Carson, won’t leave us.’
‘Won’t leave you, you mean.’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’
‘She could be using you.’
‘What for?’
‘To forward Carson’s posthumous career, and ensure her own well-being. Her children’s well-being.’
‘She is not using me.’
‘The boy detests you,’ Enid observed. ‘The girls are flibbertigibbets, probably like their father, but the boy is not, and he detests you. He is important to his mother, and she to him. He will be more important as he grows older, and you will find him resistant to your charm. If you had charm, which you do not.’
Quentin thought of the look on Michael’s face as he had walked up the aisle. ‘He’ll get over it. He’s angry now. He’s lost his father.’
‘He lost his father a long time ago. Carson hadn’t even been home in almost a year. That boy has only had his mother, and he’s desperate for her attention.’
‘He’s desperate to be thought the man of the house.’
‘My point. He’s a grim, determined child.’
‘Claire says Michael reminds her of her dour old Grandmother Dunstan.’
‘I care nothing for Mrs Carson’s relatives. You are jeopardizing my life’s work, Quentin! You are treading a dangerous path, young man.’
‘A footpath to folly?’ he asked lightly, suppressing a smile.
‘Are you really so stupid as to think this is funny? Our reputation is at stake. Will you heed me on this?’
‘Miss Sherrill, I am not a schoolboy to be lectured. I know you think I do not deserve to be a partner in this firm, but I assure you I am. I work hard. I am not bedding the clients, using or being used by them. Please say no more on this. Which is your address?’ He ground the gears to downshift as he dawdled along her street.
‘Will you heed me on this?’ she insisted.
‘Miss Sherrill, I value your judgement, and experience, but my heart is my own.’
‘You personally will suffer for this. It cannot bode well. I have been in this business for nearly thirty years and I have seen it all.’
‘Enid, you are a gallant woman in a man’s profession. I salute you.’ And he did, with something of cheery bravado that Robert might have done.
‘Here is my flat. Don’t get out. I’m perfectly capable of walking myself to my door.’ She took her small suitcase from the back seat and without another word, left him.
He drove all over Bloomsbury. Never having had a car, Quentin had never considered the complications, frustrations of where to park the damn thing. This late at night every possible kerbside slot filled. He was tempted to drive back to his parents’ place, leave the Morris in their drive and stay the night there, but the thought of the St Ives watercolours, of having to sleep in Robert’s shrine of a room, of breathing the dust-choked air of a long, stale marriage, a dismal yoke of years and custom, was too terrible. And his own stale marriage? Quentin would step from that as one would peel off filthy clothes and stand naked, clean in a summer rain. He would undo the past. He had married Florence in a surfeit of ignorance. What was it Louisa had said of marrying Herbert Partridge? I didn’t love him, but I didn’t not love him. I was married off before I had any idea what the world might hold. The same was true for him. He and Florence knew nothing of life or love when they wed. They had simply fallen into what was expected of them, and called it love. His marriage to Florence was a mere legal fiction. Adultery? Quentin did not feel remorse. On the contrary, he felt clean and alive and refreshed. Not simply as he had à la his petite affaire de corps with Gigi, but a positive burst of gratitude and plentitude and beauty engulfed him. In that transfiguring light, all else paled. Oh, to be given this experience now! He was still young. It wasn’t too late for him. His marriage to Florence was an obstacle, an impediment. Nothing more. Divorce would be temporarily unpleasant. Fine. Whatever it cost, he would pay. Whatever he had to give up, so be it. ‘If this be folly, then fate lead on!’ he cried, quoting someone or another, ecstatic to see another car pulling out so he could have the parking place. However, squeezing the Morris in was more difficult than he’d imagined, and took a long time. Gigi had taught him many things, but not how to park on a crowded London street.
His brief, lovely romp with Gigi had awakened in him desire, as one might feel hunger or thirst. Claire did not sate his desire; she fanned it. With Claire desire seemed to Quentin suddenly limitless and profound. If it hadn’t been for Gigi, he might never have had the courage for Claire. Gigi did not love him. Claire did. Claire returned his love. I love you, Quentin. We have, we love each other. ‘We have each other, Claire,’ he whispered as he finally forced the car awkwardly into the space.
He was perhaps three quarters of a mile from his house, and the chilly walk through the night-time neighbourhood was odd. The occasional dog barked. A distant cat mewed briefly. Lights were off. Drapes firmly drawn. Milk bottles on the step. All the little lives tucked up within. He walked past them all, pitying them, pitying everyone from Mrs Rackwell to Linda St John. He pitied his father’s eternal philandering, and his mother’s stoic avoidance of the unpleasant. He pitied Enid Sherrill, whose love affair with an entity, a firm, would never pulsate under her dry, thin hand. He pitied plain Monica and prim Miss Marr, whose lips had probably never brushed another’s. He pitied fat Rosamund, who had not been fondled in thirty years. He pitied his own wife, who hadn’t the wit to live, or be, or even imagine beyond the small, pre-etched grooves of their life. He pitied everyone who did not know what he had known this day. He walked more quickly, breathing the damp cold, wishing like hell Robert were alive. Robert would have understood this feeling. He did not wish that Frank Carson were alive, but Frank too would understand because at last Quentin understood what Frank Carson knew. Quentin had always believed that writers like Carson and Lawrence dwelt in hyperbole. But it wasn’t. It was the truth. An act of love so elemental, so commonly human, could in fact be transcendent, could change a man or woman, could alter everything, and everyone. Two people stood, naked, hand in hand forever, and the rest of the world fell away. Quentin did not pretend to be Frank Carson – he was not, could not be a wild poetic presence – but thunder to Claire’s lightning? Yes! Quentin could be that. Frank Carson might have been the proverbial eagle. But Quentin Castle was no longer the mole living underground. At long last he had come up, come out, soared in the sunshine. Claire Carson was that reigning sun. ‘Claire Castle,’ he corrected himself. He would get a divorce, and marry her, and they would be inseparable. Grow old together. He laughed out loud, happy at the thought.
At his own house he was surprised to see the sitting-room light on. He did not call out, but removed his hat and coat, put down his small overnight case beside the umbrella stand, and opened the sitting-room door. Florence was asleep in the chair, a book in her lap. Her mouth was open and her hair in pin curls. He took the book from her hands. Some of These Days. He was touched; she usually read Barbara Cartland, and took no interest in his authors. He kissed her forehead fraternally.
She woke with a start and a smile. ‘Quentin, you’re very late. I worried. Your mother called some time ago. After you brought your father home.’
‘I had to take Miss Sherrill home, and then I couldn’t find a place to park the bloody car.’
Surprise lit her face. ‘I didn’t know you could drive.’
‘It’s not so very hard. A little dance you do with the clutch and the accelerator and the gearshift, that’s all. Let’s go to bed. Thank you for waiting up. It was kind of you.’ His pity for her made him gentle.
‘Well, don’t you want to tell me all about Woodlands? Your mother said—’
‘Tomorrow,’ he replied, offering her his hand. ‘Tomorrow.’
Not having slept well, Quentin was still up early the next morning. Earlier than usual. He got the milk, snatching the bottles from the pelting rain. He made a pot of tea, but he only scanned The Times in the most rudderless fashion, waiting to hear Effie at the back door. And soon enough, she came in, her tread heavy, her expression ever the same, slack jaw, resentful scowl tightening her brow. She brought with her the odour of wet cigarette smoke. Quentin felt sorry for her too; he was suffering a paroxysm of universal pity for the blighted and unloved, even those as blighted and unlovely as Effie.
‘I see you’re at it again, sir. You know Mrs Castle don’t like you in the kitchen.’
‘Effie.’ He rose, removed her coat and hat from the hooks, placed her hat on her head at a jaunty angle and gave her odorous coat a good shaking-out. ‘Today you are taking a holiday.’
‘A wot?’
‘Have you never heard of a holiday, Effie?’
‘Not on a Tuesday, I ain’t.’
He held her coat as though she were a duchess. ‘Well, this Wednesday, you have a holiday. We shan’t be needing your services today. You’re off. You’ll be paid, but you’re free.’
‘What does Mrs Castle think?’
‘That you deserve a paid holiday. Go do something daring, Effie. Go get into trouble.’
She stepped away from her own coat. ‘Are you making advances on me?’
‘I swear I’m not, but someone should. You’d be the better for it. Now, off you go.’ Quentin held the door for her. She backed towards it, and once through she said she’d be back tomorrow and there had better not be any funny stuff.
It won’t be funny, Quentin thought as he went upstairs. He bathed and shaved and dressed, and returned to the kitchen to make breakfast. He found Louisa’s bottle of olive oil high in the cupboard where he had stashed it. He poured some in the fry pan and lit the gas. A single, tired-looking onion lolled in a bowl, and he chopped that fine, and when the pan smoked, he put the onion in. The fragrance wafted upstairs, and soon Florence came down, her pin curls out, her hair tumbled about her pink face and a quizzical expression in her eyes.
‘Where’s Effie?’
‘Gone for the day. I gave her a holiday.’
‘Isn’t that rather extraordinary? I might need her. There’s the ironing.’
‘Well, we don’t need her today. I don’t even like her, but we certainly can get by one day without her. We deserve one day to ourselves.’
‘But it’s Wednesday.’
‘What does that matter?’
She looked pleased. ‘What are you going to do with those onions?’
‘Put them in with powdered eggs, I guess. That’s all we have.’
She went to the fridge and reached into the back, withdrawing two eggs. ‘I was saving them to ask Effie to make a cake.’
‘A cake made by Effie is a waste of two eggs. Go on, take the paper and the teapot into the dining room, I’ll bring breakfast in. The eggs will cook quickly.’
‘What’s come over you, Quentin? Are you—’
‘I am excellent. That is the absolute truth.’
‘I have to ask, Quentin. It’s crossed my mind. You seem strange. You’ve been rather, well, different, ever since you got back from California, and I hate to ask, but I suppose I should. Was there a girl in California?’
‘Linda St John. Love at first sight.’ He chided himself for his high spirits and humour, knowing what he was about to inflict. He ought to be gloomy but he was jubilant. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Something Mummy said. She said you seemed quite unlike yourself at lunch on Sunday.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t have thought Fair Rosamund would pay me any mind at all.’
Florence frowned, unsure what he might mean. She went on, ‘Mummy says you might have had a driver while you were in California, and it might have been a girl, someone to chauffeur you about. She always had a driver when she went to garden shows in America.’
‘And did she have affairs with her drivers?’
‘Quentin! What a terrible thing to say.’
‘Your mother should stick to her herbaceous borders. Now, go on. Off with you. I’m about to make you the Louisa Partridge special.’
‘More figs?’ She looked at him flirtatiously.
He gave a small compliant laugh, though he knew he was about to break his wife’s heart. He was a cur. A total cur.
At breakfast Florence talked about Some of These Days, how she wanted to like it, but couldn’t really. Elsie Rose, throwing herself into that love affair when she knew it was wrong. ‘I haven’t finished the book, but I’m certain there’s no happy ending. And the writing is so … so …’
‘Lyrical and full of emotion. Yes, all that’s out of favour now.’ Quentin bolted his eggs and onions, enjoying both the appetite and sustenance. ‘But it could come back. It probably will. We can’t always live like this.’
‘Like what?’
He gazed out the window where the rain streaking down rendered the rubble across the street into a sort of impressionist study in grey, highlighted by the pale aspidistra and the African violet. ‘In such austerity.’
‘Are you talking about rationing, Quentin?’
‘No. Finish your eggs and onions. What do you think of them?’
‘Interesting, but a bit weird, don’t you think? Are you done? Shall I wash up?’
‘No, you stay here and have a cigarette.’
‘Not just now, thanks.’
He took the dishes into the kitchen, threw them in the sink, cursed himself again for being a dog. His heart was thumping; he could feel it in his throat. If he spent one more night in this house with this woman, he would crumble into dust, implode, explode. Something dire.
When he went back into the dining room, she was leafing through the paper, but she seemed to sense his urgency and folded it. She smiled. ‘Tea?’
‘Yes. Thanks. I mean no. No, thank you. Florence, dear.’ He sat across from her. ‘There are important things, important days that are ahead of us, our whole lives, really, and what I’m trying to say …’ He knew very well what he was trying to say, but the look of rapt affection on her face stole his words. Damn! He should have said yes to the girl in California. It would have been so much easier. Perhaps Florence would accuse him again of having slept with another woman when he was in California, then he could say yes. Yes, he had been unfaithful. There would be a scene, of some sort, tears, unpleasant things said, but it would all be over in, say, half an hour. Hour at most. He wasn’t really sure how long scenes like that lasted. He had only read about them in novels. ‘Florence, it’s change that we all have to make, of some sort. Nothing stays static, does it?’
‘I suppose not.’
Be a man about this, he regaled himself. You are a whole man at last. The eagle and the mole. Act like the eagle. ‘I’m trying to say that everything’s about to change. Everything. My whole life. And yours.’ How could he explain to Florence that Claire had touched his life, his soul from the very beginning? If he had never seen Claire Carson again after that first time, he would never forget her until the day he died. How could he explain that one woman’s blue eyes had changed him forever, and now that he knew she loved him, his life was forever altered? He could not do that. Too complex. But he could admit to Gigi and Mexico. He could admit to being a faithless cad in California. Admit to infidelity. Florence would have an accusatory fit, and expect him to beg her forgiveness. Then he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t ask for anything at all, except a divorce.
‘What is it, Quentin?’
He gulped. ‘It’s hard to say.’
‘Yes, it is.’ She nodded, bit her lip and she seemed to tear up.
‘It’s something we should have spoken of when I came back from California. The truth is—’
‘You’re right, dear. Of course it’s life-changing and exciting. Oh, Quentin.’
‘Don’t cry. I mean, of course you must cry if you feel like. You must do just exactly as you like,’ he said as she picked up her napkin and wept into it. ‘I will take care of you. You mustn’t doubt that. It’s true, Florence—’
‘Oh yes, it is true! Quentin, dear, dear Quentin,’ Florence choked with emotion. ‘You’ve guessed, haven’t you?’
His lips parted, but no words came out. Could it be? Could he be so fortunate that Florence had fallen in love with someone else? That she too was willing to admit their marriage last June had been a foolish, youthful mistake, that they had more or less fallen into marriage, ignorant of love or life, that divorce was very modern, lots of people did it, lots of people, and moved on with their lives? He studied her more intently. He read her eyes, her expectant expression. No. He was not that fortunate.
‘You see, I’ve known, well, I guessed,’ she added. ‘And then … I’ve just been waiting for the perfect moment, and here, you knew all along, didn’t you?’
‘Not all along, no …’
‘I haven’t felt well, but that will pass. That’s what the doctor said.’
‘You’ve been to a doctor?’
‘Yes, dear; you see, I wanted to be absolutely certain before I told you, but you’re so sweet, you guessed. And you couldn’t wait for me. And I was so silly to think there had to be a right moment. But you chose it, Quentin, and I’m so so happy. So happy. And so happy you’re happy.’ She rose and walked to him, placed her arms around his shoulders, and her cheek to his.
Other lips than Quentin’s formed words. These other lips seemed to be working in some sort of happy, happy unison, ringing with her voice to create the impression that Quentin Castle was happy, that he was responding, replying to his wife’s chatting about the baby due in November and perhaps they ought to move, to a proper house, perhaps nearer to their parents, not right away, of course, but think about it, and her having told Rosamund and Margaret and her dear schoolfriend Amelia, who was the bridesmaid at their wedding – he remembered Amelia, didn’t he? – and swearing all of them to the most solemn secrecy until she told her husband… .
Whatever these other lips were doing, Quentin Castle watched the rain shimmer down the window. He watched the African violets pucker and pale, and go grey before his eyes. He watched the aspidistra turn, really rotate so that it faced him and regarded him with the pity he had so lately bestowed upon the rest of the human race.
‘So I’m grateful to Louisa Partridge.’
Other lips forsook him and she said it twice and he finally croaked out, ‘What’s Louisa got to do with it?’
‘It was those figs, so luscious, so earthy. I forgot to check the calendar that night. The night that Francis Carson died. How can you forget that night?’
‘I shall never be able to forget that night.’
‘Nor I. We’ll name it Robert if it’s a boy. Would you like that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can Margaret tell Albert now? She’s been beside herself. Can I go ring her, and tell her to tell Albert?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be right back and we’ll have the whole day to ourselves, won’t we? A holiday.’
‘No. Sorry. Can’t. The old family firm, you know. Off I go. Cheerio.’ He rose and allowed himself to be kissed. He patted her back. Then she went to make her telephone call.
Quentin somehow propelled himself up the stairs, listening to her voice echoing from the phone alcove. He took his glasses off. Mechanically he brushed his teeth and smoothed his hair and washed the smell of onions from his hands. After he had turned away from the mirror, he put his glasses back on. When he went downstairs, Florence was in the front hall by the door.
‘Must you go in right now?’ She kissed him, and fondled his tie. Her peach-coloured dressing gown slightly open, the arc of her white breast bright in the grey morning light falling from the transom. ‘What about our holiday?’ she added coyly. ‘You did let Effie go for the day.’
The thought of Effie was somehow intolerable, though he forbade himself to say so. Instead he burbled and bobbled about things he had forgotten at the office. A mistake. He should never have …
‘Well, stay for a bit, dear, anyway. I want to hear all about yesterday. Margaret says your father is not feeling well – overindulged, I expect. She has called Miss Marr, and cancelled his morning appointments. She said the memorial at Woodlands was vulgar beyond belief.’
‘Yes. Vulgar beyond belief.’ He took his hat and slid his arms into the Burberry. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
‘When you come home this evening.’ She gave him a light connubial kiss on the cheek and said he had made her the happiest little wife in the world. She handed him the second-best umbrella, explaining she would need the best one later when she went to type for her mother.
He took his leather case, and opened the door to the pounding rain, stepped into the street, opened the umbrella and bent under it, bobbing like the rest of the black-clad populace, men making their way to the Russell Square tube station to go down, down, down into the bowels of the city that had ingested many little lives like his.