My heart stopped. What had I said to her? Had I been so surprised by her presence at Gresham that I’d given it all away? Could I have? What had I told her? My thoughts were flying about like a crowd of ravens with nowhere to settle. I couldn’t seem to remember anything about that evening, yet I thought I’d remembered every moment. ‘Search?’ I said, feeling this was the best way to flush out information.
‘You said Damian wanted you to look up some of his old friends. You told me when we met up that time in Yorkshire. I wondered if Candida was one of them, since she couldn’t think of any other reason you’d want to see her again.’
‘She’s rather hard on herself. I can think of lots of reasons.’
‘But was it? Is it?’
‘As a matter of fact yes, it is. I thought I’d buy her lunch and get her news. That’s all he wants, really.’
‘Well, I’ve got a much better idea. She’s coming down here next weekend, so I wondered if you could join her. Join us. We’d love it.’
My despair at my own stupidity was suddenly and totally replaced by a chorus of angels’ wings. ‘That’s incredibly kind. Do you mean it?’
‘Absolutely. Come on Friday, for dinner. And you can leave at some stage on Sunday afternoon.’
‘As long as we’ve got that settled.’
She laughed. ‘Andrew always needs to know he’ll have the house back by dinner on Sunday.’
I’ll bet he does, I thought, the mannerless toad. ‘What about clothes?’
‘He wears a smoking jacket but no tie on Saturday night. Apart from that we’ll be in rags the whole time.’
‘Well, if you’re sure…’
‘Completely sure. I’ll e-mail you directions. We’re very easy to find, but you might as well have them, if you’ll give me your address.’
So I did. And it was settled. I wondered if I ought to ring Candida, but I never heard back from her, so presumably Serena had filled her in.
After this conversation I sat at the desk for several minutes, quite unable to resolve exactly what I was thinking. Naturally, as I have observed, the invitation had set off a peal of chiming, silver bells in my heart, ringing and singing with joy at the prospect of two whole days when I might look upon her face to my heart’s content. But there is also the old proverb that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and now that I was faced with a real prospect of having the Blessed Serena back in my life, paradoxically, I wasn’t completely convinced it was a good idea. Of course, all this was Damian’s fault. It was Damian’s fault she had left my life thirty-eight years before. At least I dated the beginning of the end from that dinner. Now it was Damian’s fault she had come back. That she had been, would always be, the love of my life, was clearly established, to my satisfaction anyway, and, if I was honest with myself, it was her return to my conscious mind that had spelled curtains for poor Bridget, as I had more or less told my father. The reminder of what love is, of what it could be, made the thin facsimile that I had been living feel rather pointless.
But then Serena was content with the way her life was, and if she wasn’t she would never leave her husband, of that I was quite sure, and if she did it wouldn’t be for me, and if it would I had nothing comparable to offer her, and… so on. I was equally certain she was not the type for any extra-marital activity, and if even this too were wrong, I would certainly not be her chosen co-adulterer. I knew well enough that while maturity and some success had transformed me into a marriage possibility for various, lonely divorcees who were not quite clear as to how they would finance their latter years, still I was not the sort of man who tempts a girl to sin. I had neither the looks nor the chops.
No, the future that was on offer, or at least a possibility since nothing at all was yet on offer, would simply be as a friend, a walker, a companion. The literate ally that fashionable women married to fools or workaholics sometimes need to buy them lunch or carry their coat at the theatre, who might join a party at the villa in Amalfi and make the other guests laugh. Did I want this? I had done enough of it in the past, of course, and sung for my supper a thousand times and more, but did I want it with the added twist of pain? To sit and watch the woman I would have died for, as she chattered on about a weekend in Trouville or a play at the Almeida or her latest purchases? No. A man has his pride, I thought, my mind clearly still running on empty. I would go for the weekend. I had anyway to question Candida, or that was my excuse, but that would finish it. I was nearly at the end of the quest that had taken me through my old stamping ground of long ago. But once the search was done, Candida’s child would get the money and Damian would die, and I would go home and write my books again, and say hello to Serena when I saw her at Christie’s Summer Party. And it would be enough to know that she was well. Or so I vowed.
Waverly Park sounds a little more romantic than it is. The original seat of the Earls of Belton, Mellingburgh Castle, left the family when the senior line died out in an heiress during the 1890s and is now buried beneath the station car park in Milton Keynes, for much of which its walls supplied the hardcore. But the title had jumped sideways to a junior branch and they celebrated its arrival with marriage to a well-endowed American and the purchase of Waverly in Dorset, not far from the Jurassic coast. The estate had shrunk, after both wars and then again quite recently as when old Lord Belton died it turned out his provisions had been drawn up quite wrongly, making it impossible to prevent half the estate being divided between Andrew’s siblings. I believe there was an expectation that they would gamely hand this back to their older brother, but as so often with these things, it didn’t happen. To make matters worse, the sister, Annabella, had turned out a gambler and she sold her share within three years of getting it, leaving a gaping hole in the centre of the farms, and the other son, Eustace, married to an even worse bully than his mother, had divided his between four daughters, none of whom would stay long term. I was told later that the whole mess had occurred because Lady Belton insisted on using the son of a cousin as their lawyer, instead of someone who knew what they were doing. I cannot swear to the truth of this, but it sounds very likely. The net result was that Andrew was left with far too little land to support the house, a situation exacerbated by his almost chemical lack of brainpower, which ensured that no outside income would come to his aid. Serena may have had something to look forward to from her father, but families like the Greshams do not stay rich by enriching all the siblings and it would never have been much.
The house itself was a fairly large but unremarkable pile. There had been a dwelling there since the 1660s but all that remained of this period was the cantilevered staircase, the nicest thing to look at in the place. The entire building had been enveloped twice, well in the 1750s and badly in the 1900s, by the newly arrived and gleeful Beltons. A burst of optimism in the late 1940s on the part of Andrew’s grandfather had swept away the service wing, relocated the kitchens to the site of a former morning room and converted the great hall to a library. The effect of this was to pull the entrance round the corner, away from the main portico, so the existing front door led one through a sort of tunnel towards the stairs, arriving at them from the back, at a slightly peculiar angle. It never works to fight a house’s architecture and Waverly was no exception to the rule. The rooms had been tossed this way and that in the changeover, swapping their roles as they went, ending with dining rooms full of sofas and drawing rooms stuffed with tables and chairs. Huge fireplaces found themselves warming tiny studies, and dainty bedroom detailing adorned the walls of a semi-ballroom. None of which was improved by the timing of the work, during those post-war years when building materials were rationed, so almost everything had been contrived from plywood and painted plaster. Not all of it was bad. The loss of the hall was hopeless and dislocated the whole ground floor, but the library that replaced it was a great success, and the breakfast room was pretty, if too small. In truth, the house had a lost, bewildered feel, like a private home too quickly changed to a hotel, where the rooms
have not been allowed a period of adjustment to get used to their new jobs. Naturally, Andrew thought it a palace and every visitor as lucky as a peasant from Nan Cheng allowed entry for a few, sacred moments to the glories of the Forbidden City.
The drive out of London on Friday afternoon was as murderous as ever, and it was after six when I finally arrived and staggered down the passage with my case. Serena emerged from a doorway and stood there in welcome, dressed in a shirt and skirt, casual and marvellous. ‘Dump that there. You can go up later. Come and have some tea.’ I followed her into what proved to be the library and a few faces turned to look at me. There were others besides Candida and what I perceived was an already grumpy Andrew, making a great show of being absorbed in Country Life.
One pair, the Jamiesons, I’d met a few times in London and the others, a sporty couple from Norfolk called Hugh and Melissa Purbrick whose life seemed to consist of farming and killing things and not much else, were some sort of connections of an old friend of my mother, so I didn’t anticipate much trouble. ‘Do you want tea? Or a drink to take upstairs?’ said Serena, but I refused both and sat on the sofa next to Candida.
‘I feel very guilty,’ she said. ‘I came back to my answering machine flashing like the Blackpool illuminations. I thought I must have won the Lottery. Either that, or somebody was dead. But they were all from you.’ She had not aged well, certainly nothing like as well as Serena. Her hair was grey and her face was rough and lined and even redder than it used to be, although I would not speculate as to the cause. On the whole, unlike her cousin she looked her age, but her manner was very different from what it had been when I knew her and at first encounter considerably improved. She seemed much calmer, no, not calmer, calm. As the French say, she was bien dans sa peau, and as a result I found myself warming to her in a way that I never really had done when we were young.
‘I’m afraid I was a bit eager. Sorry.’
She shook her head to free us from the need to apologise. ‘I should switch it off when I go away. At least people would know I hadn’t got the message instead of having to deduce it.’
‘What were you doing in Paris?’
‘Oh, just larking about. I’ve got a grand-daughter who’s mad about art and I persuaded her parents to let me take her to see the Musée d’Orsay. Of course, once we were there we spent about three minutes in the museum and the rest of the time shopping.’ She smiled, curious now to get to the bottom of it. ‘So what’s the big thing? Serena said that you were coming as an envoy of the mighty Damian.’
‘In a way. No, I am.’
‘You’re looking up his friends from the old days.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’m rather flattered to be included. Whom have you seen?’ I told her. ‘Now I’m less flattered. What a peculiar list.’ She pondered the names again. ‘Weren’t they all in Portugal that time?’
‘All except Terry.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Of course, that evening was another story.’ She stretched her eyes silently at me, sharing the memory. ‘Have we ever talked about it?’
‘Not properly. We’ve hardly met since we got back.’
‘No. I suppose that’s right.’ Again she thought over what I’d been telling her. ‘Terry Vitkov…’ she grimaced. ‘I’m quite surprised she was a pal of Damian’s. I thought he had better taste.’
‘Ouch.’ I was amused by this as plenty of people from those days would probably have said something similar of her.
‘Is she the same as ever?’
‘She is the same, if you add the effects of forty years of disappointment. ’
Candida absorbed this for a moment. ‘Do you remember her dance?’
‘No one who was there could forget it without medical intervention.’
She laughed. ‘It was the first time I’d been in the papers since the announcement of my birth. My grandmother wouldn’t speak to me for weeks.’ I considered Candida’s subsequent career of sexual profligacy, illegitimate motherhood and the more recent tragedy of 9/11, and pondered what the grandmother in question would have made of any of that. Presumably death had spared her. Candida was still at Madame Tussaud’s. ‘I know she did it. Whatever she said at the time.’
‘She says not. She says it was Philip Rawnsley-Price.’
‘He might have helped her. He was stupid enough. But she must have known. The choice of brownies for a start. We were all so innocent.’
‘Quite innocent.’ I didn’t bother to defend Terry, although I didn’t think the accusation true. I suppose I didn’t care.
Candida was staring at the fire. By this time I knew the process of what I had to put these people through. I’d arrive and suddenly the woman of the week would be plunged back into a world of four decades ago, which she hadn’t thought about in ages. ‘Golly, we had some funny times that year. Do you remember Dagmar’s dance?
‘Who could forget?’
‘When Damian gatecrashed and had a fight with-’ She put her hand to her mouth. She’d suddenly remembered the identity of Damian’s opponent. Our host shook out the pages of his magazine sharply.
‘I remember it well,’ I said. We shared the moment and tried not to look at the bump on the bridge of Andrew’s nose.
Candida sighed. ‘The main thing I recall is just how young we were. How little we knew of what was coming.’
‘I think we were great,’ I said. Which she took no exception to and smiled. ‘What’s your son doing now?’
‘I have two sons and a daughter, in fact.’ She flashed me a slightly defensive glance. ‘But I know you mean Archie.’ Perhaps sensing I meant her no ill, she relaxed. ‘He’s got his own property company. He’s frightfully rich and successful.’
Not half as rich and successful as he’s going to be, I thought. ‘Is he married?’
‘Absolutely. He’s got a wife called Agnes and two kids, the shopaholic daughter, who’s ten, and a son of six. Funnily enough, Agnes’s mother is a girl you used to hang about with, Minna Bunting. She married a chap called Havelock, who was in the army. Do you remember her?’
‘Very well.’
She pulled a slight face. ‘That’s the thing. I don’t. I never really knew her at the time, but of course now we pretend we were terrific friends and we’ve almost convinced each other it’s true.’
Was it comforting or smothering, this constant interlocking of the old patterns? Revolutions in morality might flare up, Socialism in all its indignant fury might come and go, but still the same faces, the same families, the same relationships, are endlessly repeated. ‘I like the name Agnes,’ I said.
‘So do I. Quite,’ she added, telling me more of what she thought of her daughter-in-law than she intended.
‘Was it very hard with Archie?’
Candida was silent for a moment. She paid me the compliment of not pretending she didn’t know what I was asking. ‘It was easier in a way than it would have been for some. Both my parents were dead and so was my grandmother by then. Just. I hated my stepmother and couldn’t have given a monkey’s tiddly what she thought about anything. I was terribly broke, of course. My stepmother wouldn’t give me a penny and by the end she didn’t have much to give, but at least I didn’t have to feel I was letting everyone down. Actually, Aunt Roo behaved very well, given that she thought I was out of my mind.’
‘But?’
‘Same as the earlier answer. My parents were dead and I hated my stepmother. I had no close family, no backup, beyond Aunt Roo and Serena, and they thought I’d gone mad. So did my friends, to be honest, but they were a little bit more circumspect about showing it.’
‘I know you married in the end.’
‘I did. A chap called Harry Stanforth. Did you ever come across him?’
‘His name seems familiar, since I first heard it, so maybe I did, but if so I can’t remember where. I was terribly sorry to hear what happened.’
‘Yes.’ She gave one of those twitchy smiles of bleak acceptance. ‘It is diff
icult when nothing’s ever found. I always used to feel for mothers of sons killed in foreign wars, who never got a body back to bury, and now I know just what it’s like. I don’t know why exactly, but you need a proper funeral with something there, something more than a photograph, which is what I had, in order to feel it really is the end.’
‘The Americans call it “closure.”
‘Well, I wouldn’t, but I do know what they mean. You keep imagining that he’s in a coma somewhere or struggling with amnesia, or he escaped and had a nervous breakdown in Waikiki. Of course, you tell yourself to accept it, not to believe anything different, but you can’t help it. Every time the doorbell goes unexpectedly, or the telephone rings very late at night…’ she smiled gently at her own foolishness. ‘You do get over it in the end.’
‘Awful.’
‘But you mustn’t think I’m a sad person. Please don’t.’ Candida’s tone had changed and she was looking straight at my eyes. I could see that she was keen to convince me, and I think she was telling the truth. I suppose it was somehow a case of being loyal to his memory. ‘I’m not at all sad. Really. I was sad before I met Harry, and trapped at the end of a cul-de-sac with a boy half my family felt uncomfortable with. I know you all thought me ridiculous in those days.’
‘Not ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous. A loud, red-faced bed-hopper who was embarrassing to have around.’ This was all true so I didn’t contradict her, but as with almost all of the women I had visited I had that revelation of how much better we would have got on forty years before if we had only known each other’s true natures. Candida shrugged off these memories with happier ones. ‘Then Harry arrived one day and just saved me. He saved us. I don’t know to this day what he saw in me, but we never had an unhappy hour.’
‘He loved you.’ Funnily enough I meant this. I could sort of begin to see what he had loved in her now, which came as something of a surprise.
She nodded, her eyes starting to glisten. ‘I think he did. God knows why. And he took us both on. He adopted Archie, you know, completely legally, and then we had two more, and when he…’ I could see that despite her strictures her eyes were filling, and so were mine. ‘When he died it turned out he’d left some money equally to the three of them. Just split three ways. He made no distinction. And that meant so much to Archie. So very much. Did you know that all their mobiles worked, when they were trapped in the tower?’
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