Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  ‘But you weren’t.’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘What was the disagreement about?’ Again, on paper this seems intrusive, but we had, as they say now, ‘bonded’ during the evening, or I felt we had, and it didn’t seem to be prying when I said it.

  ‘Joanna was having a lot of problems. Well,’ he ran his fingers through his enviable hair, ‘you can tell that from the way she died. And I wanted to be Malcolm’s principal carer. I don’t mean I didn’t want her to see him, or anything like that.’ It was clear that guilt for his first wife’s death coursed through his veins so hotly he could still feel it twenty-three years later. ‘I just thought he would be better off living with me, rather than trailing round after his mother. I had more money than she did by then-’

  ‘Jeepers.’

  He shook his head. ‘Alfred went down in a property crash a few years earlier, so there was nothing much left in that quarter. Their whole life had changed from when you knew them. They were really quite broke, living in a flat on the edge of Streatham.’ I had a sudden, vivid vision of Mrs Langley, sparkling with gems and watching from the edge of a ballroom like a shifty ferret to spy any interest in her daughter from Viscount Summersby. I never liked her much but I was sorry all the same. At that time nobody would have imagined the future waiting for her. ‘It wasn’t only the money. Joanna was very disappointed in the way the world had turned out. She thought by then we’d all be living in some kind of spiritual Nepal, smoking dope and mouthing the lyrics from Hair. Not taking out pensions in Mrs Thatcher’s Britain.’

  ‘A lot of our generation thought that. Some of them are in government.’

  But I couldn’t staunch the flow. Kieran had to tell his story. As the television quiz show has it: He’d started, so he’d finish. ‘And of course, looking at it from her point of view I was at the peak of my madness, screaming if there was a crease on my collar, sacking staff because the knives and forks weren’t tidy enough in the kitchen drawer… None of that side of it was her fault.’ His effort to be fair to his late wife was more than commendable, it was heartbreaking. He sighed again. ‘Anyway, we fought about the boy like a couple of cats. She said I’d poison his mind and make him a fascist. I said she’d poison his body and make him an addict. On and on we went, tearing at each other’s throats. Until finally she dropped the bombshell. We were having breakfast one morning in that weird, angry way of two people who are still living together but know they won’t be for long. We were sitting there in silence, until she looked up, preparing to speak. I knew some insult was on its way, so I deliberately made no enquiries. After a bit she got bored and just said it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That Malcolm wasn’t my son.’

  ‘How did she say it?’

  ‘Like that. “Malcolm isn’t your son.”’

  He stopped now to let the words sink in. So was this where my quest was to end? It felt strange to have reached my destination, and yet also satisfactory in a way that Joanna’s death should be partially redeemed by the boy’s father at last acknowledging his blood child. Even if there was an anticlimactic element in the thought of Damian’s fortune going to the only family in England who wouldn’t notice it.

  Kieran hadn’t finished. ‘You mentioned the house party in Portugal.’

  ‘Yes.’ I knew Portugal would come into it.

  ‘She said she’d met up with “the boy’s father” there and that she’d slept with him when we were back in London. That night, in fact. As soon as we got home from the airport we had a row about why we’d gone at all and she walked out…’ He shrugged. ‘It was obvious she was talking about Damian.’ He must have caught and mistaken my response to this news, and hurried to undo any possible hurt. ‘She was always very fond of you, but…’ How was he to phrase it?

  I helped him out. ‘She wasn’t interested in me.’

  We both knew she wasn’t, so why should he argue? ‘Not like that,’ he said, accepting my own verdict. ‘And Joanna couldn’t have cared less about the Tremaynes. It had to be Damian.’ He paused. However often he went over this territory, it obviously still hurt. ‘So I sat there, with a piece of toast in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, while she blew my life out of the water. And I minded when she told me. I minded very much.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘It wasn’t just the boy. She was unravelling our life. This was retroactive legislation. We’d only been married a year at the time she was talking about and I’d thought we were happy, then. I’d been against the damn holiday anyway, because I dreaded her being pulled back into a crowd that I didn’t believe was any good for her.’

  ‘But you went because her mother made you. And when you got back she slept with Damian.’ At least I now understood his visceral dislike.

  ‘That’s about it. And by this stage of the battle she was glad to talk about it, because it was going to save her son from the vile Leona Helmsley world of mad indulgence that I was living in. She thought it would settle matters. That I would give up and back off, and Malcolm would go with her, and I would be left alone to count my money and weep.’

  ‘But that didn’t happen.’

  ‘Of course not. My name was on the birth certificate for God’s sake. I was married to her when he was conceived, never mind born. I loved him. He was my son.’ He almost shouted this assertion, back in the grip of the row, but seeing my startled face he recovered, repeating the words in a gentler tone, which touched me as it would have touched anyone who heard him. ‘I loved him. He was my son. I could have made my claim on that basis alone.’ I sat up. I’d assumed he had made his claim on that basis alone, if he’d kept in contact with the boy. Which, from the way he was talking, he obviously had.

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  He shook his head. ‘I had a paternity test done. I wanted to know how tough the battle was going to be.’ He looked at me again quite fiercely, and for a moment I rather sympathised with Joanna when I saw what she’d taken on. I suppose nobody can be as successful as Kieran had been without having some steel in them somewhere. ‘When the results came back they showed Malcolm was mine after all.’

  All my sense of matters being resolved deserted me on the instant. ‘How did she take it?’

  ‘How do you think?’ He rolled his eyes at me. ‘She wasn’t thinking straight by then. She said she didn’t believe me. It was exactly the kind of thing I would fix, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine.’ I could. ‘So we ran another test under her team’s supervision and obviously the result was the same again, and by then she was coming apart at the seams…’ He was standing, staring out of one of the windows, silhouetted against a dark-blue velvet sky studded with stars. He continued talking, facing on to the night, hardly aware I was there. ‘As you might expect, she hadn’t helped her case as a rational woman with all this screaming carry-on, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when the judge gave me full custody, with visiting rights for her, which was much more than I’d asked for. We got the decision in September eighty-five.’

  ‘And the following month she killed herself.’

  ‘She killed herself, or she took an accidental overdose. Anyway,’ he sighed, wearily, his remembered rage quite gone, ‘she was dead. That’s how it finished for Joanna. And it was all so unnecessary. Malcolm was fourteen by then. I couldn’t have controlled his seeing her even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, for more than a year or two at the most.’

  Some decisions are so difficult to unravel; decisions made by countries and decisions of private individuals can be impossible to explain. Why did Napoleon invade Russia? Why didn’t Charles I make peace when it was offered? And why did Joanna Langley run away and marry this man when he was an anxious and desperate grotesque, but leave him when he was at the beginning of his triumphs? Why did she try to pull their boy in half when he was old enough to make up his own mind about both his parents and their warring philosophies? Why did she spiral into death-dealing depression when she really had nothing to
fear?

  ‘I don’t understand why we never heard about it. Why isn’t it on the Internet?’

  ‘Mainly because I have spent an enormous amount of time and money making sure that no one hears about it. I kept the reporting to a minimum at the time, I will not tell you how, and I have one man who spends his working life combing the Web to get rid of any stories that I dislike, including even a whisper of Joanna.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I owe it to her. I ruined her life. I won’t let her be a tabloid item in death.’

  I ruined her life. I was so struck by the unvarnished, stark, merciless guilt in this. He allowed himself no defence at all. ‘How sad,’ I said. And I meant it with all my heart. I was truly sad. Sad at the ruin that, in a few short minutes, I’d heard engulf the whole House of Langley. In my sorrowing mind, rich, nice Alfred and his scratchy, ambitious Valerie had been suddenly pulled from their golden pedestal, where they had been secure in my imaginings until now and dashed down, like Don Giovanni, back to the place below, from whence they came. While Joanna, my lifelong standard for how lovely a woman can be, lay desecrated and dead, her scabrous wrist pitted with needle marks, her dirty, tangled hair spread out on a urine-stained, concrete floor somewhere in the Midlands. ‘How very sad.’

  I looked at my watch. It was time to leave. I understood now that Kieran had embraced the chance to talk about the wife who had left him against his will, but who would never leave his head. He had simply wanted to talk about her with someone who’d known her and those opportunities must be getting rare, even for him. He noticed me checking the time. ‘I’d like to show you something before you go,’ he said, and leaving the magnificent Chamber of Privilege he led me down the passage, past half-open doors revealing delectable rooms for eating and reading and other delights, until we came to the last door in the row. He opened it and ushered me into what was postulated as a study of some sort, with a desk and a comfortable chair. I could sense that Kieran probably did his actual work in it, as opposed to leafing through papers with a scribbling secretary in the glamorous library along the passage. Certainly he spent a lot of time here, as much as he could I would say, but the reason was not because it was quiet or tidy. In fact, its role as a writing room was not its moral purpose. This was a shrine. All four walls were covered with framed photographs, one consisting entirely of pictures of Joanna, Joanna as I remembered her, young and definitively gorgeous; then Joanna a little older and a little older still, but never Joanna old. Joanna at thirty, looking more harassed and careworn and lined than she should have done; Joanna at thirty-three, pictured leaving the law courts during the divorce, a candid picture of her unhappiness, so generously taken by the snapper of some evening rag but presumably unprinted; Joanna at thirty-five, sitting with her son, laughing. Kieran was looking with me. ‘That was taken by a friend of hers. Malcolm was there for lunch or something and this friend took it. It was the last picture of them together. It’s the last picture of her. She had less than a week to go. You couldn’t have told.’

  ‘No, indeed.’ I stared at the smiling mouth and the tired eyes. I found myself hoping it had been a really happy day, that last outing with her beloved child. I glanced around for newspaper pictures of the story. Even after all he’d said, I was surprised there weren’t any. ‘And there was no coverage at all? I still don’t understand how you kept it out of the papers completely. Even the local ones?’

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘There were a few squibs, but not much.’

  ‘I couldn’t find anything on Google. There was really nothing about her at all, once you’d separated.’

  Kieran knew why. ‘She used my real name after the divorce. That was the name on everything in her bag when they found her. I managed to stop them making the connection.’ He hesitated. ‘You can read the coverage if you punch in Joanna Futtock.’

  ‘Futtock?’ I was so glad to know that I could still find something funny.

  He looked rather sheepish. ‘Why do you think I never gave up “de Yong”?’

  ‘I did wonder. What was your mother’s maiden name?’

  ‘Cock.’ He gave a despairing sigh. ‘I ask you.’

  ‘Some people have all the luck,’ I said. Then we both did laugh.

  I’d started to look round the other walls of this little star chamber. There were pictures of Joanna with Kieran, a young Kieran with his awful blond mop and an apparently endless supply of the ugliest clothes in the world. Then grown-up Kieran; Kieran successful; Kieran shaking hands with presidents and kings; even Kieran in better and better suits. And alongside Kieran, everywhere you looked, there were more and more pictures of the boy. Malcolm in the school photograph from pre-prep; Malcolm swimming; Malcolm on a bicycle; Malcolm on a horse; Malcolm the public schoolboy, with both parents, one on either side of the sulking child, resisting his role at some Speech Day celebration. Malcolm skiing; Malcolm at university; Malcolm graduating with a very serious face; Malcolm backpacking. ‘What’s he up to now?’ I asked.

  Kieran was silent for a second, then he spoke in as pleasant a manner as he could manage. ‘He’s dead, too.’

  ‘What?’ I did not know the boy at all and the father only slightly, but I felt as if I were being pistol-whipped.

  ‘Nothing bad. Not like his mother.’ This time I could see his eyes filling, even while he remained in admirable control of his voice. ‘He was perfectly well, twenty-three, just starting at Warburg’s and he couldn’t shake off a bout of flu, so we thought he should be looked at.’ He stopped to breathe, back in that terrible moment. ‘I took him to hospital for some tests and he was dead seven weeks later.’ He rubbed his nose swiftly with his left hand, trying unsuccessfully to push back the tears. He talked on, more to steady himself than to give me any information. ‘And that was it, really. I didn’t quite take in what had happened. Not at first. Not for a while. A few years afterwards I even married again.’ He shook his head at life’s absurdity. ‘Of course, it was ridiculous and it didn’t last long. I made a mistake, you see.’ He looked back at me. ‘I thought I could still go on living. Anyway,’ he sighed, as if this at least was understood between us, ‘after I’d got rid of Jeanne I sold the houses and everything else, and came here. I did bring a lot of stuff with me, as you can see. I hadn’t signed off completely.’

  ‘How do you spend your time?’

  ‘Oh.’ He thought for a second, as if this was rather a curious query and difficult to answer. ‘I’ve still got quite a lot of things on the boil and I take a bit of interest in financing research, into cancer, mainly. I’d like to think that it might help to prevent it happening to someone else. And I do worry about education these days, or rather the lack of it. If I’d been born now, I’d have ended up pulling pints in a bar in Chelmsford. I mind about those kids who’ll never have a chance, the way things are.’ He seemed pleased to think about these issues and glad of his role in them. Which he deserved to be. ‘Apart from that I read. I watch a lot of television and I enjoy it, which nobody admits to. You see,’ he tried to smile but gave up, ‘the thing is, when your only child is dead, you’re dead.’ He paused as if to mark the rightness of this sentence to himself. ‘Your life is finished. You’re not a parent any more. You’re nothing. It’s over. You’re just waiting for your body to catch up with your soul.’

  He stopped talking and we just stood there in that holy place of love. Kieran was weeping quite openly by this stage, with tears coursing down his cheeks, leaving a dark trail of water marks on his expensive lapels, and I freely confess that I was, too. We didn’t say anything more and for a few minutes we didn’t even move. It would have been a strange sight if anyone had interrupted us. Two rather overweight men in late middle age, standing motionless in their Savile Row suits, crying.

  Terry

  ELEVEN

  Not very surprisingly, after an evening like that I decided I needed some air. Kieran offered to get his driver to take me home but I wanted to walk, just for a bit, and he didn’t ins
ist. So we shook hands in that funny English way, as if we hadn’t been through an emotional trauma together, as though the whole thing hadn’t really happened and the stains of our tears had some other, more banal and more acceptable explanation. We made the usual murmurings about meeting again, which one always says. Unusually, I rather hope it will happen, but I expect not. After that I set off down the Embankment.

  It was a long walk home and quite cold, but it did not seem so. I strolled along, both reliving and then laying to rest my memories of Joanna. I was glad to have had a chance to revalue Kieran, even while I knew he was far beyond help, and I felt that I had been allowed to look into a soul that was worth looking into. Filled with these melancholy thoughts, I had just turned off Gloucester Road into Hereford Square when there was a scream, then laughter, then shouting, then the sound of someone being sick. I wish I could write that I was astonished to hear what sounded like a large Indian takeaway being splashily deposited on to the pavement, but these days it would require a Martian, and one only recently arrived from outer space, to be surprised at these charming goings-on. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, I would guess, were loitering on the corner of the square, perhaps recent refugees from the Hereford Arms on the other side of the road, perhaps not. One woman, in a short leather skirt and trainers, was throwing up and another, with suspiciously black hair, was tending to her. The rest just stood around, waiting for the next act in their evening’s entertainment. Foolishly, I paused to study them. ‘Got a problem?’ said a man with a shaved head and a whole array of piercings down the edge of his right ear. I wondered the weight didn’t throw him off balance.

  ‘My problems seem nothing to yours,’ I said and then rather regretted my clever-clogs answer as he took a menacing step towards me.