‘I don’t like Sara Toffener much either,’ said Jelly into the tape recorder, ‘but I’ll try. She’s a woman and I must do my best for sisterhood. I daresay she, too, is what marriage has made her.
‘The File Room at Catterwall & Moss is in a mess. I like to sit there and consider my situation. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I mix up the files still further. Will anyone care?
‘Stapled to Toffener v. Toffener (Tully and Sara) divorce documents – Tully started and withdrew divorce proceedings five years back, on the grounds of Sara’s adultery – vigorously denied – were further depositions and statements relating to the Musgrave family, all of them illuminating, none of them particularly happy, but suggesting why there might be grounds for forgiving Sara who, before she became Toffener, was a Musgrave.
‘The dusty filing cabinets of solicitors’ offices bear witness to the energetic and tumultuous nature of human relationships, which no amount of legal language – as it sucks out the sweat of passion, best and worst endeavour, sexual indiscreetness, misadventure, good will and malice – can render dry of import. Attempt to fit us all nicely in under one law, render ruly the unruly, and you must in the end fail: diversity triumphs for ever over the law’s desire to universalise the ordinary, contain the exceptional.
‘1899. Violet Musgrave begat Wendy at the turn of the century, who begat Una at the beginning of the Great Depression, and Una was clearly a trouble to everyone, and begat Sara, whose father was described as “unknown” – being married to her grandmother and therefore unclaimable – on her birth certificate. When Sara was five, Una sued her residential nursery for damages: they had given Sara meat to eat and the child was a vegan. The nursery’s defence was that Sara was returned to them so pale and thin after the Christmas holidays they felt it necessary to feed her up with whatever came to hand. Sara had been at the nursery for two years, returning home only for three weeks every Christmas. Una lost her case.
‘There in the file was the Deed of Gift by which the property at Lodestar Avenue was given to Violet Musgrave in 1904, in token of Sir Oscar Rice Musgrave’s natural love and affection. Oscar Rice Musgrave was Violet’s cousin: Wendy no doubt Violet and Oscar’s child, in spite of his being married to one Alice.
‘Wendy grew up to believe that property was theft. She had lived through the age of Marx: she thought that sacrifice on her part would somehow make others happy. Perhaps Wendy’s ardent socialism was what made Violet disinherit her: perhaps these views of hers were held to spite her mother, to diminish any sense of maternal achievement, rather than existing as a cool and disinterested conclusion as to what to do about society. Men do it often enough – the stockbroker’s son throws a million dollar bills from the top of the Empire State building, to prove the inconsequence of money: the old hippie’s son goes into the SAS – why not women?
‘There in the file was Violet’s Deed Poll changing her name from Bonham to Musgrave in May 1903. There was Alice Musgrave’s action contesting the Deed of Gift after her husband’s death in 1915. That failed, too.
‘Finger through the yellowing sheets and find Oscar’s death certificate. Killed in Action in 1915. Alice didn’t manage to get hold of that, either. Una’s birth certificate – Mother, Wendy Musgrave: Father, Philip Grace, medical practitioner. The one and only mention, but at least he must have turned up in person to declare himself the father, thus lessening the force of the illegitimacy. In 1935 Wendy married one Mogens Larsen, a Danish engineer. In 1949 she divorced him, changed her name back to Musgrave and left Lodestar House. Mogens continued to live there with Una, his erstwhile stepdaughter. Sara was born. Three years later Una left Lodestar; two months later Wendy returned. Tied in ribbon, a bundle of love letters written by Gerald Catterwall to Una in the late nineteen fifties. Una was clearly a goer.
‘Gerald Catterwall’s portrait hangs in the waiting room. The painter’s art has done little to disguise his piggy eyes and flabby chin. Perhaps the artist was underpaid? It was perfectly likely. Catterwall & Moss – Gerald Catterwall was one of the founders of the firm – are not known for their handsome payment of staff; on the contrary, and I wonder if this was one of the causes of the firm’s general incompetence. If you underpay the filing clerk you must expect files in such a state as these. Jelly, of course, now deliberately adds to the confusion.
‘Holly, the accountant in charge of paying tradesmen’s bills for various scions of the Rice family and now inadvertently meeting my hotel bill, once told Jelly that Gerald had taken his own life some twelve years earlier, being in financial difficulties to do with the clients’ money. The circumstances of his death had been understandably hushed up. He was seventy-eight at the time, and still practising. He saw retirement as defeat.
‘Then I came across, and unfolded with difficulty, a document so seriously faded I doubted that anyone other than myself had referred to it since the turn of the century. It related to the issuing in 1899, to Oscar Rice Musgrave by the Rice Estate, a hundred-year leasehold on the Lodestar property. The Deed of Gift, by which Oscar so generously passed the freehold property on to Violet, presumably after Wendy’s birth, do not allude to the forms of tenure, it being a mere leasehold. “Have it, my dear. Take it, for you and your child,” no doubt sounded a better phrase than “Have it for ninety-five years, my dear; hang on a minute while I consider the legal implications.”
‘In 1954 Violet had innocently bequeathed the house to Una, bypassing her daughter Wendy for reasons as yet unknown, but obviously adding to Wendy’s discomfort. Wendy had lost her husband to her daughter Una. In 1965 Una had, generously or otherwise, given her mother a thirty-five year tenancy; taken it neatly to the millennium, no doubt, as people tend to do; not thinking “but mother might still be alive! What then?” What then, indeed? She had not in the past shown much mercy to her mother.
‘Gerald Catterwall, who had drawn up various of these transactions, deserved to die. He was a perfectly dreadful solicitor. Nowhere in the Rice Estate schedule of assets, which I know by heart, observing, fascinated, the mechanisms by which Sir Edwin’s interests are protected from Inland Revenue and wives alike, is there any mention of Lodestar. The property has simply dropped from sight, as is the fate of many large old houses in a state of disrepair, when lived in by the elderly and administered by incompetent lawyers.
‘The more I perused the documents in my lonely room at The Claremont, “News at Ten” on with the volume right down, silent images of war, famine and disease reproaching me for my self pity, the more convinced I was that Tully had less time than he thought to get his hands on the tenancy. This would not revert back to the freeholder, the Rice Estate, in four years’ time: no, by rights it would go to the leaseholder in a mere two years: whoever that leaseholder might now be: the heirs of the heirs of Sir Oscar Musgrave. Some taxi-driver, perhaps, or artist in a garret, who had no idea of his legal rights, and never would unless I called the matter to his attention. I would refrain from doing so, but enjoyed knowing a secret of such significance.’