by Caro Fraser
Adam asked the waiter for the wine list. Meacher perused it thoughtfully, then ordered a triple Armagnac.
‘Anyway,’ he said to Adam, ‘that’s a nice little story for your book.’
‘If it’s true.’
Meacher didn’t look in the least offended. ‘Oh, it is. Take my word.’
‘What about Gerald the GP? Is he still around?’
‘No. Long dead.’
‘If it’s true that the children were adopted,’ said Adam slowly, ‘you would expect Harry and Cecile to have told them at some point. You would tell children that they were adopted, wouldn’t you?’
‘Would you? I don’t know.’
‘His daughter has never mentioned anything about it. Harry’s obituary simply referred to his children, nothing about adopted children.’
George Meacher shrugged. ‘Sometimes you start off lying – and I suppose silence can be as good as a lie – and you get to a point where it’s more of a problem to tell the truth than carry on lying. You do what’s best.’
The waiter brought the bill. Adam stared at the total. Either this was an enormous amount of money to be conned out of for nothing, or it was worth every penny. He had no way of knowing. He handed over his credit card.
‘The thing is, I can’t put something like that in a book without verification. Forgive me – but you could be making it all up.’
‘True.’ Meacher tapped the ash from his cigarette, nodding.
‘I can’t ask his children. I mean, it’s not something you–’ He stopped, sighed. ‘Anyway, if it is true, I don’t think they know, somehow.’
‘Mmm. That’s a bit of a problem.’ Meacher grinned.
Adam signed his credit-card slip and put away his wallet, tape recorder, pen and notebook. ‘Thank you for your time and trouble.’
‘Always a pleasure.’
Adam looked across at the happy, well-fed Meacher, bathed in a haze of cigarette smoke, his triple Armagnac still before him. Then he got up and left.
Meacher crushed out his cigarette and went to the gents’ for a long and gratifying piss. Then he returned to the table, picked up his cigarettes and his brandy, and went downstairs to the bar. He perched again on the bar stool where he had been sitting when Adam first came in.
‘Who was your friend, then, George?’ asked the barman, wiping glasses. ‘Not often someone buys you lunch upstairs.’
‘Some journalist,’ replied Meacher. He lit another from the new pack of Marlboros. Talking about Harry and their times together in Soho all those years back – it had been strange. He never much thought about life then, when he had been young. Suddenly it seemed as clear as yesterday. All the chaotic times fused into a single image – himself, coming down Old Compton Street in the bright, clear late morning, head a bit thick but going to be all right, Robert Colquhoun sitting on the step of the Golden Lion in his tweed coat, smoking, thinking about nothing, waiting for opening time, for that blessed, raw sound of the bolts dragging back and shutters going up, and the first of the day. He could smell the room he and Harry had shared, almost feel beneath his hand the wooden knob on the cupboard where they kept their bread, maybe a lump of cheese wrapped in greaseproof paper. No fridges then. Bottled beer. Sometimes oysters at Wheeler’s when one of them was flush. Sometimes a plate of corned beef and pickles in the pub. What a life. Those years. Here he was, still in this place, still in Soho, alone. People bought you drinks all right, people still talked, but it wasn’t like back then, when you still thought you were going to make something of your life, when the next drink, the next conversation, the next exchange of witty banter, seemed worth living for. The next day, the next drink. Friends. And everyone growing old and thinking time wasn’t paying any attention, with the present turning into a past that some journo was going to write about. And here he still was, sitting in the French, waiting for someone to come and buy him a drink. Someone like Adam.
‘Fucking idiot,’ he muttered. About whom, he wasn’t quite sure.
Adam walked back down through Chinatown to Leicester Square. It was busier now, the day in full flight. He sat down on a bench in the gardens, and tried to think. He hadn’t a clue what to do. Not a clue. He watched the pigeons stepping in aimless circles. In his heart, he believed every word Meacher had told him. There was the possibility it was a piece of malicious mischief-making, but Adam didn’t think so. Yet he couldn’t possibly put such a thing into print without talking to Harry’s family, without verifying the story. And how was he to do that? Cecile had actually talked about giving birth to Bella and Charlie – he could hardly go back and confront her with Meacher’s story. Or could he?
He thought about Bella. Maybe she knew. Maybe Charlie did. Maybe Cecile had told them ages ago about the adoption, but for some reason they had all agreed to collude in keeping it secret. Why? Well, why did anyone do anything? Perhaps they simply didn’t see any need for people to know. Yet if he proceeded on the assumption that Bella knew, and asked her about it, there was always the horrible possibility that she didn’t know… And then he would be right in it. If Bella and Charlie didn’t know, didn’t they have a right to? Even so, it seemed incredibly presumptuous of him to take it upon himself to tell them.
Leaving the dilemma of the family aside, he couldn’t help feeling a certain appalled elation. This was exactly the kind of new information about Harry which he’d hoped might turn up. He wondered how much Harry would have welcomed him making the discovery. He’d certainly never once mentioned George Meacher, and that, given that they’d shared a room together for some months, had to amount to some kind of concealment. Adam remembered Harry saying, about a month before he died, ‘It would be interesting to see what you make of my life. A pity I won’t be around to read it. Maybe it would surprise me.’ And he had smiled in that way Harry had. Was that some sort of challenge to Adam to unearth this kind of secret? A licence to find out the truth…
He had no idea. He didn’t know where to go from here.
5
‘Does this look all right?’ Megan twisted in front of the mirror, trying to survey the back of the dress she had bought for Jo’s wedding.
‘Fine. Very nice,’ said Adam.
She turned and surveyed Adam. ‘I wish you’d dress up a bit, sometimes.’
Adam was wearing his one and only suit. ‘I don’t do dressing up. Come on. We’re going to be late if we don’t go now.’
They left the flat and set off in Adam’s Fiat for Epsom.
The narrow road where the church was situated was lined with cars. Adam squeezed the Fiat into a space on the verge between a Jag and a Land Rover, and he and Megan made their way to the church.
Adam had no particular expectations of the occasion. He was prepared to be mildly bored, since he knew no one and assumed Megan would spend most of her time talking to old school friends. He had his doubts about the relevance of his presence there at all. It was only as they nudged their way into a pew on the bride’s side, and Megan began to introduce Adam to the various couples around them, that he understood his role. It was bemusing. He had never, until this moment, thought of himself as being anyone’s appendage. He was part of a unit. The entire congregation, he realized, consisted of little family units. That was how everyone was identified. The bride and groom were their own about-to-be unit, there were aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, themselves little units forming a much bigger one. There were young-married-couple units – a lot of them, it seemed – with toddlers and very new babies. The sense of being identified according to which unit you belonged to, even down to the business of being ushered to the correct side of the church – bride or groom? – was peculiarly strong. Adam decided he didn’t care for it. When he and Megan were with people socially in London, although they were together, so to speak, he was not conscious of being identified as a couple. Here he felt his entire existence was defined only by his relationship to Megan.
‘This is Adam,’ Megan said, introduci
ng him to people. In context, these innocuous words seemed to have ‘and he’s mine’ automatically tagged on at the end. He knew the thought was unfair to Megan, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t like being seen as someone’s accessory, or other half. He realized, with sudden misgivings, how happy Megan seemed to be in the cosiness of it all.
He smiled politely at the various people Megan introduced him to, but had nothing to say. It simply wasn’t the right set-up for conversation. While Megan chatted to a red-faced young woman in the pew behind, who was struggling to contain a boisterous one-year-old on her lap, Adam kept himself amused with a quick riffle through the Book of Common Prayer.
Suddenly there was a rustling and murmuring and turning of heads. Adam assumed this heralded the entrance of the bride. Odd, he thought, since the organ music was still pootering tunelessly along, instead of blasting out something triumphal. He turned round, along with everyone else, and was astonished to see Bella entering the church with Charlie and Claire and a few friends. What on earth were they doing here? Megan would certainly have mentioned if any of her friends knew the Day family, so presumably they were here on account of the groom. He gazed at Bella, musing on the coincidence. She looked, Adam thought, utterly amazing. She was wearing a suede skirt of a dusty shade of pink, a cashmere top of the same colour, and boots. No hat. Her raggedly cut blonde hair was longer than when he had last seen her. But it wasn’t the way she looked that went straight to Adam’s heart – it was the expression on her face. Conscious of the attention she was attracting, she looked defensive, yet provocatively proud and endearingly apologetic all at the same time. Adam found himself smiling as he turned back to his perusal of Psalm 21.
‘That’s Bella Day!’ whispered Megan.
‘I know,’ said Adam. Ever since he’d had lunch with George Meacher, he’d been debating how best to tackle the ticklish issue of Meacher’s unlikely story about the adoption. Seeing Bella here today, delightful though it was, only served to remind him that he had to do something about it soon. Today, however, would definitely not be a good day.
At the end of the wedding service he filed dutifully from the church with Megan by his side.
‘Oh, there’s Imogen!’ squeaked Megan, sighting a long-lost friend among the guests. She trotted across the grass in her kitten heels, leaving Adam on his own. He stood aimlessly on the gravel path for a few moments, chattering guests milling around him, then decided to wander off and soak up the morose charm of the ancient churchyard.
He surveyed the time-worn epitaphs on the headstones, reflecting with pleasant melancholy on his own mortality, and came at last to a little cluster of smaller headstones in the mossy turf beneath a very large yew. As he walked around these, he suddenly came upon Bella, leaning on the other side of the yew tree, smoking.
‘Hello there.’
She turned, eyes widening in surprise. Her smile lit him up inside. ‘Adam! How extraordinary to see you here. Are you a friend of Toby’s?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know anyone. My girlfriend’s an old friend of the bride’s. They were at school together. I’m merely here as a decorative accessory.’
‘Poor you.’ She dropped her spent cigarette on to the grass and ground it in with her heel. ‘Oh, well, you can always talk to me.’
‘I take it you and Charlie know the groom.’
‘Toby? Yes, we were at school together, years ago. It’s quite astonishing how respectable he’s become, considering the kind of teenager he was.’
There was a moment of speculative silence.
‘We’d better be getting back. I think everyone’s heading off to the reception.’
She nodded, and they walked back through the church-yard together. Close to her, Adam was faintly conscious of her scent, and thought how perfectly like a new summer’s day she smelt.
Megan caught sight of Adam and Bella coming round the side of the church together. Adam said something to Bella, then they parted. Something about the serenity of his expression gave Megan a little pang of unfathomable anxiety.
‘You were quick enough off the mark there.’
‘She’s the only person here that I know,’ said Adam.
‘I wasn’t being serious. Anyway, you must introduce me later.’ She glanced in Bella’s direction. ‘She’s sickeningly gorgeous, isn’t she?’
‘If you say so,’ said Adam, with an affectation of boredom. He smiled at Megan and kissed her face lightly.
Bella, standing near the church door, caught sight of this brief gesture. So that was the girlfriend. Well, they seemed very fond of one another. Not that Bella particularly cared.
The reception was held in a marquee in the large gardens of the bride’s home. Heat under canvas, the tent-warmed scent of newly cut grass, always reminded Adam of school sports days – the familiar, involuntary flicker of excitement… or was that just the thought of being only a few yards away from Bella?
Throughout the meal Adam made polite small talk to a landscape gardener and an old schoolfriend of Megan’s. During the speeches, which were to do with people and events he knew nothing about, he felt a growing sense of detachment. He had been up late the night before, and the wine and the closeness of the marquee were making him sleepy. He longed to get outside and stretch his legs. His glance strayed in the direction of Bella, who was sitting three tables away, and stayed there. She seemed utterly absorbed in what the best man was saying, and so he let his gaze dwell on the curve of her half-parted lips, her cheek, her hair… From contemplation of her loveliness, his mind moved idly to thoughts of Harry and Cecile. He saw now how utterly unlike either of them she actually was. Much as he disliked thinking about George Meacher, he couldn’t help it. Looking at Bella now seemed to make sense of everything Meacher had told him.
Little bursts of clapping and laughter broke his train of thought and he looked round to find Megan gazing pointedly at him. He let his glance stray on as though he hadn’t noticed.
When the speeches and formalities were over, little knots of people began to move between tables, finding friends and talking. Music began at the other end of the marquee. Adam leaned back in his chair and took a huge gulp of rather flat mineral water. He would be driving in an hour’s time. He wished it were sooner.
‘Adam Downing, isn’t it? I’ve been expecting to hear from you.’ Adam looked up to see Charlie smiling down at him, resplendent in full morning dress, glass in hand. He sat down in the chair which one of Adam’s neighbours had vacated. ‘How’s the book coming along?’
‘A bit stalled at the moment, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘Earning a living is rather getting in the way. But I hope to be getting down to it soon. I will be in touch.’
‘Good, good. I know Harry was really keen for the book to happen…’
Suddenly Bella appeared and laid a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Toby’s looking for you.’
‘Is he? Better go and see what he wants.’ Charlie gave Adam a nod, and went in search of Toby.
Bella sat down. Adam smiled at her. They both began to speak at once.
‘Go on, you first,’ said Bella.
‘No – please. After you.’
‘I was going to ask why you were staring at me all through Alan’s speech.’
‘Was I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was thinking.’
‘Oh?’ She waited for the usual flattering elaboration.
‘About you. Largely. About you and your family.’ He glanced around. ‘Look, this isn’t really the time or the place, but I need to have a talk with you.’
Bella gave Adam her best soft, sensuous smile. She always felt terrifically sexy after a few glasses of champagne. She had already decided she couldn’t let this one get away, girlfriend or not. He was too good-looking, too much of a challenge. It would be fun to seduce someone so achingly conventional, to find the animal beneath that literary exterior. That night at Gandercleugh had just whetted her app
etite for the challenge. ‘Sounds serious,’ she said.
‘Well, it is, actually. I know you must be very busy, but I was wondering if we could meet up in the next few days.’ Just the thought of trying to tackle the subject made him go cold, but it had to be done. It could be that he was worrying needlessly.
‘Mmm, I’m sure we could manage that. Why don’t I come over one afternoon after rehearsals?’
‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble. We could meet in town, if you prefer.’
‘It’s no trouble, honestly.’
Perhaps it would be better if she came to the flat. It wasn’t the ideal thing to discuss in public. ‘What about Tuesday, then?’
‘Fine. Tell me where you live.’ He told her his address. ‘I’ll be round a little after four.’
Adam gazed after her as she threaded her way through the crowd of guests. Just three days in which to work out how to broach the information which he had bought from George Meacher. If he had three years, he didn’t think he’d find the right way.
Bella dressed with care on Tuesday. Normally she wore any old thing to rehearsals, but that day she put on a blue cotton shirt tied above her midriff, showing an expanse of smooth, soft skin, and a pair of Versace hipster jeans. Not too dressy, simple but sexy. All day she felt elated. Then, on the way over to Baron’s Court in the taxi, she was suddenly assailed by a dipping, familiar sense of depression. No use pretending to herself that this was going to be anything special or different. Bella knew herself too well. It was just the pattern repeating itself. Always the same old thing. She would meet someone, and decide she wanted them. It didn’t matter that she didn’t really know them. All that mattered was getting what she wanted. She would go after them, just as she had with Adam that first night. He’d turned her down, and it had made her mildly delusional, giving her a heightened sense of need. That was what she craved. Connection, the other person’s desire. It was never the actual person she wanted, not in the long run. What she really yearned for was that high, the hit that came from flirting, touching, taking… That lovely rollercoaster that started with a shared glance, and ended up in bed. Nothing, nothing was ever as good as that first time. The shock of the new. The high curve. And after that – downhill all the way. Because she never cared enough.