He could have written of my years in the Black Box. He could have written of the sunny years before that, and of the shadows that from time to time slanted across them, bringing a warping dampness. He could have written of our friendship; of Kensington and Como and Gladbury; of Dad, and Ma’s lovers, and the particular lover, the one we called The One and Only. He could even have written about It, though I should have preferred him not to do so. But why did he have to reveal that it was Noreen, eleven years older than I (he specifies the precise difference), who prised open the lid of the Black Box and let me out; that we live seven miles from Brighton; that, as an antique dealer, I specialise in Staffordshire? Why did he have to give all those clues? Anyone with a pair of compasses can pinpoint our village; and anyone can look there for an antique shop with Staffordshire figures crowding the window. That he calls Noreen Nesta and that he calls me not by my former name and not by my present name but (why choose something so weird?) by the fictitious name Otto Cramp, is not going to put anyone persistent off the scent.
When I write ‘anyone persistent’, I mean, of course, any journalist. I have begun to feel like one of those war criminals who, after decades of hard-working and respectable obscurity, suddenly find themselves blinking in terror in the arc-light of publicity.
He’s a distinguished scientist, a Nobel Prize winner; and of course any distinguished scientist has the right to write his own life. But does he have the right to write mine too? I can hear his answer: ‘if you wished to photograph a rambler rose and the rose was intertwined with another rose, then you would have to photograph both roses, wouldn’t you?’ But does an autobiography have to have the accuracy of a snapshot? Can’t the photograph be a studio one, tactfully air-brushed here and there?
I put down the typescript on the sofa. Then, in case Noreen or Mrs P. should pick it up (like most women, they are as inquisitive as sniffer dogs) I stuff it into the bottom drawer of my desk under the used cheque books, the bank statements, the dividend vouchers.
It is time that I carried Noreen’s breakfast up to her.
‘Well, how are you, old dear?’
‘Not so much of the old!’ Noreen is now eighty-three. She no longer plays tennis, accompanies me on my long walks on the downs, or runs up the stairs to this bedroom, as she used to do a year ago. But she still hobbles out, leaning on the blackthorn stick which belonged to her father, to post a letter at the post box at the first corner of our street or to arrange the flowers in St Cuthbert’s at the second.
I set down the tray on her kneehole desk and pull back the curtains. Then I fetch the bed-rest. I do all these things with love and gratitude. ‘You’ve married your mother,’ Bob told me years ago, before we had stopped seeing each other. But I never felt such love or such gratitude for poor old Ma.
‘So how are we feeling this morning?’
With others she is courageously dismissive of her illness, but never with me. ‘Oh, I had a ghastly night. I hardly slept a wink.’
I do not tell her that through the early hours I lay awake in the room next door, listening to her snoring. Instead I put an arm round her: ‘Poor darling! Why don’t you have the morning in bed?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing!’ She raises a hand, knobbly with the arthritis which has made an invalid of her, up to my cheek and strokes it. ‘ I want to finish that picture for Ellen’s birthday.’ She no longer paints as she used to do when she rescued me from the Black Box; but she makes these collages out of dried leaves and flowers, which I must now collect for her, since she is no longer strong enough to collect them for herself. I take the hand in mine, turn it over, and kiss the palm.
‘Has the post arrived?’
‘Oh, it arrived ages ago,’ I say without thinking. ‘ It’s that new postman – far better than old Harry.’
‘Anything interesting?’
If I were truthful, I should answer: ‘Only something which may destroy our lives.’ But I shake my head. ‘Nothing. Some circulars, that’s all. What they call junk mail.’ Then to change the subject, I ask her: ‘Would you like me to butter that toast?’ On a good day she can manage the task; but I have a feeling that today may be a bad one.
‘Would you, dear? Thank you.’
After I have left her, I have almost an hour before I open the shop.
Instead of reading The Times, as I usually do, I go to the drawer and take out the typescript. Once again.I read that chapter about our school-days, this time slowly, not racing through it with a palpitating heart, as on the first occasion after I had looked in the index, still without page numbers, and seen all those entries under not my own name, Mervyn Frost, and not under my present name, Maurice Yates, but under that absurd name Otto Cramp. I should never have realised that Otto Cramp was I, were it not for that first entry, ‘first meeting at Gladbury’, and that second entry, ‘holiday with mother of’, and all those subsequent entries, at least a dozen of them.
This will kill Noreen, I think in fury and despair; and then I think: This will kill me. I am like a fox gone to earth; and now, because of this book, I can hear the panting of the hounds. Somehow I must destroy the book. But how can I do that? And why did he send it to me, still only in typescript, with no covering letter of explanation or excuse? Long ago, I finished with him and I thought that he had finished with me.
Noreen is calling. I shout up the stairs. ‘Yes? What is it?’
‘Sony, darling. I wonder if you … The blasted paper has fallen off the bed.’
I run up the stairs and pick up the Guardian for her.
‘There you are, old thing.’ ‘I told you not so much of the old!’ She is laughing that ageless laugh of hers.
My first customer is a middle-aged woman in a black velvet beret pulled over one ear. Her insteps bulge over court shoes which seem uncomfortably small for her feet, and her midriff bulges over a skirt which seems uncomfortably tight for her stomach. She has a sunnily optimistic expression on her face, as she begins to unwrap the parcel which she has been carrying under her arm.
‘I’ve got to sell this,’ she explains, without revealing what ‘this’ is. ‘ The usual problem. My old man’s been made redundant after seventeen years with the same firm. I ask you!’ She drops the brown paper on to my desk. ‘There! It’s been in the family for yonks. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It’s only a drawing, I know. But it ought to be worth quite a lot. I wonder if you’d be interested. Would you?’
I peer at the drawing, a head and shoulders of Elizabeth Siddal. Then I realise that it is one that I have seen in the V & A. I sigh my regret. ‘I’m afraid – I’m terribly afraid … It’s not an original drawing, you see, it’s a print.’
Chin pulled in, she draws herself up, affronted. ‘Oh, I don’t think you can be right about that. I’m sure you can’t. It was given to my in-laws as a wedding present years and years ago. By some rich relative. When we got married, they passed it on to us.’
‘I’m terribly sorry.’
She begins to rewrap the picture, with angry, flustered movements. ‘Perhaps I should take it up to Sotheby’s. Or Christie’s. Let an expert see to it.’
‘Yes, you could certainly do that. But I think you’ll find you’ll be told the same thing.’
‘Well, thank you for your trouble.’ She gives her head a toss and then puts a hand up to straighten the beret.
‘Thank you.’
Even before she has shut the door of the shop decisively behind her, I succumb to the pathos of the incident. For a moment it distracts me from the devouring pain, as of a duodenal ulcer, occasioned by that book. Then the pain returns. What is to happen? What am I to do?
I lower myself into the bergère chair which Colonel Sprott has been dithering whether to buy for most of this summer, and begin to think of the Black Box, hemmed in by its dripping privet, of the months of silence, and of my deliverance by Noreen.