Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  Nineteen fifty-six? Yes. In the little green kitchen Angela had told him that she was ill. She held Elizabeth tightly and the child sucked her thumb. On the wireless a man sang of a white sports coat, a pink carnation and a dance.

  They had rented a little house in a village built of brown stones. It was modern and ugly and known, for reasons Max could never fathom, as a ‘bungalow’. When it rained the stream which had been diverted when the house was built returned to its old ways and the house would flood. The rental was high: three pounds a week. ‘We get five for our caravan in the south of France,’ said the landlord, a fierce, florid man called Cowgill. ‘I’m a banker!’ he would say angrily. As he might have said: ‘I am an assassin!’

  Max moved around the kitchen, lifting the salt cellars, smoothing his hair, trying to force into his head the information she’d given him. Lifting one great foot and placing it softly on the scuffed, dark-green kitchen lino, he looked, thought Angela, like a walking tree. A broad, strong face. Slightly grey but bright skin, birch-like skin. The long nose and deep-blue eyes seemed natural features, almost accidental markings on the bark of the tree, which unexpectedly came together to make a face.

  Max remembered little more of that particular day, though it was there somewhere just beneath his scalp. He’d only to lift his hands to his head and touch his still thick grey hair and the pain of it came back. That horrid little school with the bad sherry, the tight-arsed masters where he had once endured a whole year and lost his wife. Angela’s ways had always been light, slight but exquisite. She could hardly have been said to have sickened, instead she grew quieter, paler, smaller, weaker. ‘I feel like the Cheshire Cat, fading from view,’ she told him as she lay in the hospital bed, seemingly relieved at last to be allowed to stop everything and simply lie down. ‘I’ll only leave my smile behind.’ And she had: his daughter Elizabeth had her mother’s smile. Of those years only certain sharp memories came back, like splinters beneath the finger-nails.

  He did remember a boy named Hoskins. Small and furtive, he smelt of unaired cupboards and very faintly of cheese. Max never liked Hoskins though, for some reason he couldn’t follow, Hoskins attached himself. His face was too narrow and covered with freckles, his thick, dark hair looked unclean and dull and Hoskins was stealthy, Hoskins hung about, he had a habit of drawing his breath in sharply and when he did Max saw his teeth were white and sharp. There was something intense, shamelessly cruel about Hoskins but there was something even more disconcerting – he made no attempt to hide the friendly admiration with which he regarded Max Montfalcon. And it had been Hoskins who caught up with him. One day not long after Angela had died. He carried a hockey stick over his shoulder as if it were a rifle.

  ‘Do you like rabbit, sir?’

  ‘I’ve never tried, Hoskins.’

  ‘Killed five, sir. Myself, sir. That was yesterday. I go out on the estate for a bit of hunting.’

  ‘You use a gun?’

  ‘Ferrets, sir.’

  Later that afternoon Max discovered the rabbit on his doorstep. A film of dried blood connected the three whiskers like a very delicate ruby fan. Its eyes were open, fur cold. He brought the stiff body indoors and laid it on the kitchen table and, for some unaccountable reason, he felt an urge to take a pair of callipers and measure its skull.

  He also remembered a boy named Touche. Or was it Tooth? No, it couldn’t have been Tooth. A boy with burnished skin, deep chestnut hair and eyes so dark they were almost black. He seemed the perfect androgyne. There was nothing particularly girlish about him. He was very much a boy but equally there was about him no hint at all of anything particularly masculine. He fell outside, and within, all of those categories and, in a class of pleasant fifteen-year-olds, his beauty was unearthly. Touche watched Max silently from the centre of the room – it was, Max realised, the fixed and almost blind gaze of a very young child, a baby.

  But it was his own reaction that so astonished him. He felt himself hardening. Max had never had an erection in an English class – he had never felt the slightest sexual stirrings towards persons of his own gender. He didn’t like it. He didn’t approve of it and yet there it was, pressed achingly against the lip of his desk in the middle of the afternoon while he attempted to explain to the sleepy class the difference between ‘factitious’ and ‘fictitious’.

  ‘Let me take an example. Perhaps you’ll see the difference then. Let’s say I know a man to be an Anglican. And I go over and say to him – “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? I can tell by looking at you. You are of the Jewish faith.” Then I’d be making a factitious argument – something made up for a particular purpose. For the sake of an argument. Or a controversy. Or an insult. But, on the other hand, if I happened to tell you that I was a secret agent planted here in Occam College to supply a foreign power with the secrets of the English educational system, then I would be telling a fictitious story. Do you see the difference?’

  ‘Sir – what did you do in the war?’ Now why was it that this question, coming so unexpectedly from the usually unnaturally silent boy Touche, should have caused such hilarity amongst the back desks of his class on that afternoon? He hadn’t answered it at first because he couldn’t look up, couldn’t look at Touche. His ten fingers were extended on the table, the edge of the table now hurting him, yet he was so hard that he had to continue to press himself against it. Slowly he lifted his fingers and saw on the polished surface of the desk his finger-prints etched in sweat. The class waited.

  ‘Nothing much – I’m sorry to say. An historian, my interests were culture, language, ethnic groups. My practical interest was anthropology. To tell the truth I spent the war in a research department.’

  ‘Did you kill anyone, sir?’

  ‘Measurements,’ said Max as evenly as he could. He had to lean forward and ball his hands into fists and then lean again on the knuckles till he could have cried out with the pain. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He could feel Touche’s dark eyes on him and he hated the boy and he hated himself, above all he hated the involuntary, irresistible, treacherous sign of his own outrageous weakness. ‘Statistical investigations. It was all very boring I can tell you.’

  Then, at last, someone asked him a question he could answer. Touche was the boy and his question was simple: ‘How much do you earn, sir?’ In his relief at the directness of the question, Max told him, down to the last penny. There was a long, shocked silence in the classroom. Never before in their lives had these boys heard an adult reveal his salary. There seemed something indecent, obscene even, in both question and the flagrant, exhibitionist response. No one said a word – except Touche.

  ‘My father earns more than that each week.’

  When he looked back he knew that was the moment when ‘the word’ reached him. What gave Max the impetus, the rage to succeed, was a small word that blew up from nowhere, hit his mind the way a fly hits the windscreen at high speed and explodes in blood and wings. And stays there. Stuck. Max’s response, the answer to the answer Touche gave him one morning, and which he now could not remember, did not need to remember, because he had gone out and done it, was condensed into a single syllable.

  When Max moved from teaching (when had he moved from teaching? – some time in the late fifties, had it been?) he’d fled the tight world of the common-room. Certainly after Angela’s death – an event which had undoubtedly contributed to his decision. But more than that, he had fled the questions – though precisely what the questions had been, he could not now exactly remember. Except in his dreams. He woke feeling he had been summoned for searching interrogation by persons unknown. And he sometimes found himself repeating, though he did not know it, that one little word that was the making of Max Montfalcon – ‘kill!’

  One had gone into business, on one’s own account, as one used to say. ‘Montfalcon Holdings’. The initial capital came from a sale of personal assets. Mementoes, trinkets. He had begun in a modest way by acquiring a pie and pastie firm in the West Midlands, f
iring the management, installing modern equipment, simply because all these things seemed logical and then, by Jove! a chappie came along and offered to take it off his hands at almost twice the price he’d paid for it! After that there was no holding him.

  Montfalcon Holdings – ‘what he has he holds,’ they had said of him in the City. And someone once called him the ‘piranha of the boardroom’. The boardroom bit was wrong. He had no board, no staff, no successors, no confidants. He bought and sold. Max’s line of business was to become fashionable in the seventies and eighties, but in the sixties it had no name. It was simply business. And when he did what he did the word went round in the small circles where these things were done that Montfalcon had made a ‘killing’. He had owned, in his time, a tiny brewery in Northampton; an edible oils concern in Coventry; a drop-forge and iron castings plant in Solihull; a sanitary towel factory outside Cheltenham and, finally, a small hotel chain in Dorset.

  The last had caused him most astonishment and given him most pleasure. For it was blindingly obvious to Max, who stayed once in one of the group’s lodging houses in Poole, that anywhere else it would be the guests who should be paid and paid handsomely by the owners for enduring a night in these grimy, sad reservoirs of the lost and the ill-fated. That the customers did not demand to be paid, that they seemed almost pathetically grateful for a roof over their heads and that the owners failed to make money from this stunning display of resignation, decided him. When Max began in the hotel business guests calling for room-service were greeted, when they were greeted at all, by an incredulous, guttural ‘yer-wah?’ By the time he was ready to sell they were answered instantly with: ‘Hello, I’m Sharon, your in-service manager. How may I help you?’ He calculated further that a small investment in a new kitchen, and modest refurbishment, a waiter who shaved, and clean sheets at least every other day would seem like a revolution to the travelling public. Indeed it did. The Hotelier announced – ‘Poole Leads the Way!’ and The Caterer went even further with – ‘Dorset Looks to Twenty-first Century!’

  He got out as quietly as he bought in. And all that time no one asked him a single question. Silent, successful, invisible and small. Max had no interest in growth. He simply liked to see things work. And everybody left him entirely alone. God, the freedom of it! It made you proud to be an Englishman.

  When his son-in-law to be (oh, dreadful prospect!), one Albert Turberville who, for reasons he could make neither head nor tail of, Lizzie decided to marry, plucked up the courage to ask him: ‘What is it exactly that you do, Mr Montfalcon?’

  Max replied simply: ‘Did.’

  ‘Very well. Did.’

  ‘A bit of this and a bit of that.’

  Albert, despite years of exposure to the noisy theatre of the House of Commons, remembered enough of his former life to know he was being told to mind his own fucking business. Albert who was dogged – you had to give him that – tried another tack. He tried his wife. ‘Where does he come from, your dad?’

  Elizabeth paused and thought this over. She had inherited from her mother her blue eyes and golden hair, a soft peachy texture. Of Angela she remembered very little. There had been always and only her father in her life. A school, she recalled dimly, years ago, somewhere in Oxfordshire. And then a large house in Henley, with river frontage. There she had grown up. After that the mansion in Hampstead Garden Suburb with the garden far too large and the two Portuguese maids. Home had been where her father was. But he was a secretive, intense, demanding, dreamy man and perhaps in her heart she longed for something else. Perhaps that was why she had fallen for Albert. So pink and round. Uncomplicated, untroubled, settled. Bright, certainly. The youngest MP in the House, just twenty-eight and one for whom the newspapers forecast ‘a brilliant career’, as if brilliance were something you predicted like the weather, like an unusually hot June, or a fine December.

  ‘Daddy comes from Harwich.’

  Albert threw back his head and roared. ‘Go on!’

  ‘What’s so amusing?’

  ‘Harwich!’

  ‘You remind me of a seaside comic. Say “Wigan!” and everyone falls about. I don’t see what you find so terribly funny about Harwich.’

  ‘I’m not expert on the dialects up that way. But Norwich, Ipswich or Harwich. I hardly think they speak like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  But Albert’s only reply was to growl with laughter and hold his belly.

  ‘Are you implying that my father isn’t British?’

  ‘Lizzie, for God’s sake – are you seriously saying you never noticed?’

  ‘He’s as British as you are, Albert Turberville.’

  ‘My family came over with the Conqueror.’

  ‘Well, there you are then. Mongrel French. Daddy went to prep school in London. He was up at Oxford in the thirties. If you’re going to make cheap, silly, xenophobic jokes about people who to your tin ear sound strange, then you can go to hell. I suppose you also do a nice line in Pakistanis?’

  ‘Now hang on!’ It was Albert’s turn to be outraged. He prided himself on his race relations record. He stuck to his guns. Not for nothing was he known in one of his early parliaments, thank God now forgotten, as ‘Dogbert – Hound of the Turbervilles’.

  On his wedding day he threw Max a curved ball, collaring the old chap in the corner. They eyed each other carefully across their flutes of champagne. All through the ghastly service Max had kept telling himself that this was a bad dream. That Elizabeth would change her mind. That he would wake up and the large pink man by the side of his beautiful girl would have vanished.

  ‘I believe you had a stint as a teacher, once?’ Albert gave one of his warm approving smiles, as if teaching, like charity work or famine relief, was a worthy thing. ‘Is that right, sir?’ He threw in the ‘sir’ for added spin, more mileage.

  ‘For my sins,’ said Max. ‘I taught English.’

  ‘English.’ Albert nodded owlishly.

  ‘You seem surprised. I had a particular interest in usage. I was, I am, a student of the great Fowler. Have you read him?’

  ‘I don’t believe I have.’

  ‘I recommend him.’

  ‘I’ll look him out.’

  ‘Do. I’m sure they must have a copy of his Modern English Usage in the House of Commons Library. Though judging from the parliamentary reports I read in the newspapers, he’s not much consulted by MPs.’

  ‘I suppose – sir – you came out of teaching because the game just wasn’t worth the candle. Not enough reward?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said his new father-in-law. ‘Too many bloody questions.’

  What a collection turned up for the nuptials! The Hon. Mrs Angus Watts, little and liverish, who carried everywhere a furious Peke beneath her arm in the manner of a bagpipe. She whistled when she spoke and was said to be a distant cousin of the Queen; several of Albert’s parliamentary colleagues including Jimbo Mandeville in old Carthusian tie which clashed alarmingly with his ruddy complexion, one of those florid, malleable English faces which appears to have been delivered from a jelly mould; and that Labour woman, Erica Snafus, in a little black Chanel r amber and large white teeth. Several friends of the bride and groom, wearing uniform moustaches, broad lapels – girls in very short skirts or very wide trousers, flowery ties. Like Gastarbeiter, thought Max, who have fallen to earth from some strange planet and have no idea how silly they look to the natives.

  And then it was Albert’s turn to register amazement. For who was Max Montfalcon greeting so warmly? Talking to so animatedly? None other than old Ralphie Treehouse. A legendary figure in political circles. Amazing to think he was still alive! Treehouse – the Foreign Office star. Minister in three administrations. Lecher, classicist, homosexual. And what were he and Max talking about so intently? Recalling young von F – a mutual friend of their student days. And after that? They’d talked about Max’s success. And Albert, drawing near, heard Treehouse speak warmly of ‘abroad’. Max replied that abroad had never bee
n his cup of tea. But he’d sometimes thought of retirement somewhere in Wales. Treehouse shook his massive head and pursed his full lips. Wales, he smiled, might not be far enough. When people started digging, Wales simply would not do. Abroad would be best. Best not to leave it too late. Max looked puzzled: ‘You know, I’ve never got on with abroad. Can’t think why.’

  And Treehouse, eyeing Erica Snafus talking easily of ‘contradictory forecasts for the final quarter’, said mildly: ‘Can’t think why you can’t think why.’

  But Max stayed put. Retired in the mid-seventies to his big house and sat out the eighties, experiencing a growing sense of something lost, and strangely homesick. From Oxfordshire and Hampstead Garden Suburb, from Harwich, from all the places where once he had started a new life, Max turned away feeling, increasingly, that it was time to go home. He had become a stiff old man who had trouble walking. A long way from the pirate entrepreneur, the ‘corporate raider’ as that type of predator was called nowadays with quite a radioactive glow of admiration. A longer way from the teacher of English he had once been. And how much further still from careers he felt sure he had pursued successfully long ago, but lost now in the mists of his mind.

  So he had called young Jeb Touser of Touser and Burlap, and asked about the feasibility of his plan. Could he cede his assets? ‘I want to hand them over to my daughter. Can I do it? Should I do it?’

  Jeb Touser favoured camouflage colours, green, tan and black. Hair grew out of his ears like the fine filaments of light-bulbs. ‘You could do it, Mr Montfalcon. Whether you should do it is a moral decision only you can take.’

  Max called a Monday morning meeting at Elizabeth’s house. Albert turned up looking grumpy. Innocenta was there in her purple robes announcing her to be a daughter of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At least they were supposed to be purple but had turned a faintly pinky-brown because the drycleaners dyeing department, bloody expensive as it was, never did a good job and times were tight in the Clerkenwell squat where she had been living with a boy named Nigel whose family owned several thousand acres of good land in Lincolnshire. Nigel’s people were respectable but impoverished. Nigel was also a cult member, but an increasingly fainthearted one. The arrest of the Bhagwan in the mid eighties had dented his faith. Lately, in the manner of the young, he had turned from rebelliousness to extreme orthodoxy overnight. He wished to marry Innocenta and carry her back to live in Lincolnshire. Innocenta had opened her leafy-green eyes with their coppery tints.