Companies are reluctant to offer flood insurance for properties in Lodestar Avenue. It is too near the River Thames and every year the level of the water rises as new embankments and levels contain and speed its flow. Besides, the river is tidal, and though there are great new flood barriers at the river’s mouth, the seas are rising, are they not, and once or twice a year the city’s newspapers panic and say this time we are finally out of luck. The moon is full, a swollen tide, the wind is strong and from the East, nothing can save us now. Why, in such a climate, should insurers take a risk? They, whose ambition in life is not to take risks though their function is to do so.
Gerald Catterwall engaged Sun Life in a long correspondence on the subject of their refusal to offer Wendy Musgrave flood cover, and they relented; sensibly, since I notice from the files no claim has ever been made in this respect.
But I like to think of Sara Toffener, beating upon the side door of Lodestar House – the front door is all but hidden by ivy, and has obviously not been opened for a decade or more – in her attempt to gain admittance, looking behind her to make sure that black flood water was not trickling down the steps after her.
The side door was below ground level. To get to it you had first to pass through a kind of lych gate in the high grey brick wall which enclosed the property, using the rusty iron ring handle which left reddish-black marks on the hand, and down a short flight of stone steps, through much vaulted and pillared masonry which oozed water (or so one hoped it was: perhaps it was sewage, from some fractured pipe or other) in slow drops upon the head. The flight of steps which rose above were these days decorative, not functional, leading nowhere but to stone patterns inset into brick. Someone along the decades, probably Una, Sara’s mother, the trouble-maker, had seen fit to block up the original front door: or perhaps the structure had suffered bomb damage, and a temporary measure had drifted into permanence.
Tully Toffener felt, rightly, that to live in Lodestar House – especially as the Heritage Department would pay for the house’s repairs and modernisation – would reflect well upon his status and standing. The garden could be sold off for development, for yet further millions. Or he could be bold and do the developing himself. Nothing wrong with an apartment block or so at the bottom of the garden. But Lodestar! – a house which had been in the in-laws’ family for generations – Good Lord, how naturally a title would then come. And Tully twisted Sara’s moral arm to persuade her of it. Poor little Sara, sent away from home at three, and none the nicer for it. Victims are seldom nice: that is the effect of victimisation. Evil is not easily rectified. It is as infectious as measles: it has a knock-on effect: ripples as smoothly as dominoes will, each one tipping the next, falling one after another.
‘Let’s just get the Lodestar matter settled,’ Tully would say, ‘then we’ll have children.’ And Sara hardly liked to say she did not particularly want children for fear they would inherit Tully’s genes, as if they would not be bad enough without, but took the point well enough that he was wielding an axe above her head, though only he believed that axe had substance.
To have children, if you were Sara, you had to have servants, nannies, and Sara’s files at Catterwall & Moss were already thick with correspondence about staff who had robbed her, or were demanding unreasonable compensation for dismissal; enquiries about the penalties for illegal entry into the country and so forth. She had learned from Tully the gift of hanging axes.
‘When we finally get possession of Lodestar,’ Sara had once said crossly to Tully, having temporarily just got rid of a girl who’d worn Sara’s best shoes to go to a wedding and thought she wouldn’t be discovered, ‘I’m as likely to burn it down as restore it, and build some nice new labour-saving bungalow in its place, and live without servants altogether,’ and Tully had looked at her admiringly, for he loved everything that was drastic in her nature, and when she was pink with anger looked almost pretty, and said, ‘Over my dead body, so it’s suttee for you, my girl. Lodestar will stand and you will be Lady Toffener and London’s premiere hostess, or it will be the worse for you.’
And he wished he had the nerve to ask Sara to wear her high-heeled shoes to bed and to tie him up to the bedposts, but he never quite could.