Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  ‘Live on what?’ she had demanded.

  As if to underline her rejection she wore that morning a pair of Doc Martens, the heavily scuffed toes of which showed beneath her robes giving her a clumpy, rather dangerous look, like a hobbled hawk. Albert sat on the chesterfield in a dark blue suit and red tie; his black brogues were highly polished. They seemed to share the same brittle impatience of their owner to be up and away. He was very morose. He couldn’t imagine why Elizabeth’s father insisted on the meeting. It could only mean trouble, of that he was sure. He wore a blue striped shirt with white collar and cuffs. He was supposed to be attending a meeting at Central Office where he chaired a little committee studying unemployment in the marginal constituencies and its impact on the Government’s chances at the next election. Elizabeth, trim and cool, sat on the piano stool. In blue jeans and a silk top of pillar box red with a high collar, she thought her father looked very well for his eighty plus years. A little too thin perhaps, but then he had never carried much weight on that lanky frame. With his silver hair he was still a handsome man. There was something almost regal about Max Montfalcon. She noticed the way he hooked his thumb into the waistband of his trousers and tapped, absentmindedly, on his fly, but she put this down to one of those vague little tics the old acquire. She did not know that he did it because he had begun to be troubled by a slight incontinence – ‘Intermittent incontinence’ his GP called it, ‘or leaky tap syndrome’. Max tapped because that way he could be sure the pad of tissues he’d wedged in between the two pairs of underpants he was wearing was securely in place.

  Max kissed his granddaughter and she twined her fingers in his.

  ‘Grandpa, this is Nigel. A friend. Do you mind if he sits in? He wants to marry me and carry me off to Lincolnshire where his poor sisters live and his mother and their horses. What will we all eat? Grass?’

  ‘He may be in for a pleasant surprise,’ said Max.

  He introduced Jeb Touser. Willow-green silk blouson and black woollen trousers. ‘Accountant.’ Albert grimly noted the Raybans and Italian loafers. More like one of the bodyguards seen accompanying fiery American preachers. He carried a briefcase, flipcharts and a selection of day-glo markers in pink, green and yellow.

  During his presentation of the figures Max sat beside Elizabeth and held her hand. His son-in-law grew no more attractive over the years. Looking at Albert in his House of Commons back-bench slouch, head back on the sofa, the skin beneath his chin had softened and slackened and swayed when he moved his head. He went in several directions did Albert. How could a man so corporeally indecisive seem so sure of just about everything? Uncertain as to the shape it wished to assume, his body had given up.

  Touser explained the proposition lucidly and economically. Max had decided to divest himself of his assets. He showed them the figures. ‘My estimate is a total sum of around one and a half to three-quarters of a million.’

  Max interrupted. ‘I’m tired of the big house, you see. I’m tired of living alone.’

  ‘So he has a proposition to put to you, his family. He will make over this sum to you. Everything but for a small amount which will be paid to him each month.’

  ‘Tobacco money,’ said Max. ‘That damn place in Hampstead is just too big, sweetheart.’ He squeezed Elizabeth’s hand and smiled into his daughter’s blue eyes. ‘And this place you’ve got here, well – it’s very pretty and so on. But really it’s rather uncomfortable. So why don’t we, as a family, pool our resources?’

  ‘Pool – Daddy?’ Elizabeth said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He’s suggesting moving in with us, if I’m not very much mistaken,’ Albert was sitting upright now. ‘Is that a million and a half clear?’

  ‘Net of tax,’ Touser confirmed. ‘And then there are the proceeds of the houses. Say another million. These numbers are on the conservative side.’

  ‘Houses?’

  ‘You can hardly go on in this house when I live with you,’ Max explained. ‘Take the money and find somewhere big and pretty. Perhaps up Highgate way. I get a wing, or a section of the house. Self-contained, separate entrance, a kitchen. Everything. We live together but not on top of one another.’ He turned to Elizabeth. ‘I want to come home, Lizzie. I want to be together with you again.’

  ‘Tax obligations, capital gains, et cetera. All high on the lump sum,’ Touser intoned. ‘Less though than overall death-duties. Some further tax leeway is visible by virtue of the two-way split.’

  ‘Split? What’s this?’ Albert demanded.

  ‘I’ll only come if you want me to come,’ Max stroked Elizabeth’s hair. ‘That’s the heart of the bargain. Common consent. We must all want it.’

  ‘How can we tell if you want it, Grandpa?’ Innocenta’s question rang with disbelief.

  She began rummaging in her bag as if she might find in it a warning flag or klaxon with which she could sound the alarm. Max heard her fear but he put it down to her sense of her own insecurity. Away from home, between the devil and the deep blue sea. Even her clothes had a refugee look about them. Threads and patches. He would have to speak to her sometime about the dangers of refugee status. He felt strangely moved. He had found a way of saving Innocenta.

  He knew how to do this. Some old talent revived. His to give, theirs to receive. Providing they met the requirements for selection. Just like old times.

  Max surveyed the room. Lizzie, trembling, trying to smile through her tears. Albert, his black shoes buffed to a military gleam. So proud of his full head of thick auburn hair. ‘Rapunzel’, the opposition benches like to shout at Albert when he tossed his head. Albert’s was a body that missed a uniform. Max remembered bodies like his, the nip and tuck of waist and breast, the curiously girlish posture of the close-fitting tunic, the shining footwear. There was something Nordic about Albert. No, not Nordic exactly – Teutonic. How very German the English could be – even when they claimed to be Norman French by origin. Blood will out.

  ‘I propose to ask each of you whether you really want me back with you.’

  Innocenta took from her Peruvian indigo shoulder bag a red triangular Tattva card and studied it. She drew in the glowing astral doorway until it hung invitingly before her eyes. Large enough to walk through. Red for fire. Red for danger. ‘Poor Grandpa. They’ll eat you alive.’

  ‘Ask away then,’ Albert spoke briskly. The committee man.

  ‘We’re getting a teeny bit ahead of ourselves,’ said Touser. ‘Let me explain the division. Mr Montfalcon proposes that the sum involved be divided equally between his daughter, Mrs Elizabeth Turberville, and his granddaughter, Innocenta. The arrangement being dependent on the condition.’

  ‘Condition?’ Albert’s voice rose in alarm. Albert crossed his ankles. His shiny shoes clashed softly like sharpened knives.

  ‘Happy with the division, Mr Montfalcon?’ Touser asked.

  Max nodded without glancing at Albert.

  Nigel, the boy from Lincolnshire, turned on Innocenta in her ruddy robes and her big black boots a look of rapt devotion. She replaced her Tattva card in her bag. She wiped her eyes. He couldn’t for the life of him see what she was so upset about. Her arms were folded, eyes fixed on a large painting of a North Sea oil platform which hung on the wall opposite, a present to her father by a grateful consortium of Norwegian speculators. Her chin was tilted, her eyes frozen. Nigel had never seen a millionairess before, certainly not a millionairess who only hours earlier could not afford the tube fare from Clerkenwell to Belsize Park. That morning he would have married her stony-broke. But he had to confess to himself, not without a twinge of distaste at his swift commercial corruption, that for a million and a half he would have walked across burning coals for her. Innocenta must have read his thoughts. Interrupting her fierce study of the oil platform, lashed by mountainous seas as green as her eyes, she leapt to her feet.

  ‘Now just hold it right there. You’re crazy, Grandpa! You’ve got your house and your freedom. You’re loaded with money and all of
a sudden you want to hurl it all in and go home? Home? Where is that? A granny flat in a damp basement and your treat of the week a trip to the post office to collect your pension?’ She crossed to where Max sat, stiff and fierce, fell to her knees, reached up and took his face in her hands. ‘You’re a free spirit, Grandpa. You’re an eagle, a wild thing. You’re my best person in the world. Because you come and go as you like. Because you can’t go home. There isn’t a home to go to.’

  ‘What’s the condition?’ Albert asked.

  Max took Innocenta’s hands and gently pulled them away from his face. ‘That you want me. We’re all going into this with open eyes. That’s the bargain, the grand bargain. You get my asset and I get a home.’

  ‘Assets I think,’ Albert said firmly.

  ‘Asset, asset, asset! Singular always. See Fowler,’ the old man muttered.

  ‘“Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”’ Innocenta addressed her question to the piano.

  Max ignored her. ‘Sooner rather than later Max Montfalcon will die. You and I could be said to have grown up together, Lizzie. Why shouldn’t we spend a little time, last days, together again? But you must want it too. Want me. Well, Lizzie, what do you say?’

  Jeb Touser, commando accountant, pointed his day-glo marker at Innocenta. ‘Hey! Love us most? That’s King Lear.’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Innocenta.

  On the piano stool Elizabeth wept. She made no effort to wipe away her tears. She shook her head helplessly and her blonde hair slowly lifted and fell. Max loved to see it doing that. Eventually she quietened and sighed deeply. ‘Yes, Daddy. Yes. We can do it. If that’s what you want. We’ll find a place where we can live together.’

  ‘Can I suggest a formal agreement? I’m sorry it sounds calculating.’ Albert did not look sorry. ‘But these things are best in writing. So we’ll know where we stand.’

  ‘The papers are ready. Once you find a common abode and move in the transfer of assets is triggered,’ Jeb Touser said.

  Max looked at his son-in-law with palpable distaste. ‘You’ve got the order all wrong, Albert. First – where do we stand?’

  ‘Well.’ Albert’s word weighed the matter. The judicious chairman of a hundred small committees choosing his words carefully. ‘I certainly don’t see why it shouldn’t be made to work. If we all put our backs into it. Yes. Well, I mean – why not?’

  Max leaned forward and kissed Innocenta in the middle of her forehead. ‘And now you, my darling?’

  Innocenta simply shook her head.

  ‘We won’t get far on silence,’ Max urged. ‘Try again.’

  Innocenta got slowly to her feet. She appeared deep in thought. Then she crossed to Nigel.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK what?’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Sorry. You’ve lost me. Do what?’

  ‘Lincolnshire. The rich acres, and all that. Your mother and sisters. The horses. In a word – yes.’

  ‘Now wait a minute.’ Nigel put his hands on her shoulders and looked in mute appeal over her bowed head at Max.

  ‘I see.’ Innocenta’s lips were thin and icy.

  ‘All I’m saying is – think it over. It’s up to you to choose.’

  ‘I am thinking. What I’m thinking is that you’re a real drag, Nige. Out for everything. You were happy to take me as I was when we came here today. Now the sight of a million pound notes fertilising the fields of Lincolnshire has blown your mind. Choose? To see my grandfather rolled over a cliff? You’re a colossal idiot, Grandpa. Don’t you see what you’re doing? Delivering yourself into the hands of people who don’t love you or understand you. They don’t’ – and here she shot a significant glance at her father – ‘even like you.’

  ‘I don’t think, Innocenta, you’re in any position to give lessons in love,’ Albert was almost enjoying himself now, ‘standing there in your boots and old tablecloth looking like some washerwoman on the loose, and pontificating.’

  Innocenta glanced at her feet. ‘Boots? What boots? You’re removed from the world, Daddy. You walked out on it. Your soul has gone critical. You’re in melt down.’

  ‘Choose or lose,’ Max snapped at his granddaughter.

  It was Jeb Touser who unexpectedly intervened now. ‘Your granddaughter is at least consistent: you’ve got to give her that.’

  ‘I don’t have to give her anything.’ Max was on his feet now, pointing a shaking finger at Touser. ‘And I’d remind you that I’m paying you – which I don’t have to do either.’

  ‘Mr Montfalcon, cut her out of the bargain and you’re still holding half your assets. How will you resolve that?’

  ‘Simple,’ snapped Max. ‘I’ll give them to Lizzie. Yes. She gets the lot.’

  Touser replaced the tops of his day-glo markers with stubborn, precise clicks of defiance. ‘There is a slight logical contradiction here. One minute your granddaughter’s the apple of your eye. Dammit, she loves you, sir! And the next she’s dead in the water.’

  ‘Enough! Another word and you can collect your cards!’

  ‘Collect my – Jesus wept!’ Touser yelled. ‘My cards! It’s all too much.’ Young Jeb Touser who in all his few years as an investment adviser had never rejected a brief or contradicted a client and was said by all to be destined for the very pinnacle of the LLL business – little old people, low life expectancy, lovely large estates – turned smartly on his heel and said goodbye to, oh, twenty thousand’s worth? if a penny. All because, as he told his friends later at the Drum and Monkey, Threadneedle Street, a girl had the greatest green eyes he’d ever seen, ‘like frozen Irelands, I tell you’; and a girl to boot who looked like a refugee from the Hare Krishna place off Oxford Street, only not so pale.

  And Innocenta? Well, she was cut out of the bargain. Her mother said it didn’t matter as everything she owned would be Innocenta’s one day. Her father said it was a sharp lesson to her.

  And Nigel? Well, he got the thousands of acres in Lincolnshire. And his mother and his sisters got a reformed son. Gone was all that Eastern mish-mash.

  Max got his nice big wing in a great house in Highgate.

  Elizabeth got her father back again.

  And Albert actually believed, for about a month, that things were looking up.

  Indeed, once settled into Greyacres, the Georgian residence on Highgate Hill, Albert went so far as to warm to what he called ‘a good deal all round’ over a celebratory glass of Cognac in Max’s splendid new quarters: bedroom, kitchen, sitting-room, two bathrooms, one en suite; the wallpaper was silver chevrons against a dark blue ground; the furniture steel and glass and somewhat severe for Albert’s taste, but elegant, certainly, in a faintly aggressive way.

  ‘A bargain,’ his father-in-law corrected him. ‘The word “deal” is slang and should be avoided even when used in the sense of a piece of bargaining or give-and-take.’

  ‘Fowler, I suppose?’ Albert hoped he hit the right note of polite enquiry.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Daddy,’ said Elizabeth, ‘Mr Fowler doesn’t rule the world. People today make “deals” all the time. They don’t “strike bargains”.’

  ‘Perhaps not in your world, dearest Lizzie, but they still do in my book.’

  ‘Which edition do you use?’ Albert asked.

  ‘Thirty-seven. Revised, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ And Albert added silently, into his brandy, ‘Sweet bloody hell!’ For it occurred to him then – though he tried to push it out of his mind – that he was sharing a house with an elderly foreign man who claimed to come from Harwich and lived his life according to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 1937 edition (revised).

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Spider in the Bath

  When Elizabeth Turberville moved to Greyacres, she developed a passion for entertaining. She had never before thought of herself as a hostess. Now, for the first time in her life, she made use of her connections, and Albert’s. She used her house and enjoyed her flair for assem
bling two dozen of the best and brightest under her roof.

  In past years Lizzie Turberville had been to a few social soirées in the country and studied her hostesses with appalled admiration. They seemed all to own houses called Somewhere Easten or Easten Something and to enliven their living-room walls with Chinese papers of startling vacuity which their price did nothing to alleviate. The pale English sunlight fell on the yellow walls of the Forbidden City and one felt distinctly queasy. One watched the minglings of dainty jockeys and splay-footed three-day-eventing persons, ex-cabinet ministers with alarming amounts of hair and surprisingly tall, angular wives who said things like: ‘For God’s sake, Roddy – turn it up!’ One was very surprised, not to say slightly bemused, to find the same sorts of guests turning up at Greyacres in absolute bevies in the months after Elizabeth and Albert made their home on the crest of Highgate Hill.

  Elizabeth became suddenly so fashionable she turned up in the gossip columns, ‘Politics and Prawn Crackers in Darkest Highgate’ the papers said. She was quoted as saying: ‘Not at all! I feed a few guests, from time to time. But I don’t entertain them at all. Yes, we have some people from both sides of the House. But they’re just friends really, rather than politicians.’