The newly-weds had no need to seek a home of their own. Tredower House was large enough to accommodate as many children as they might be blessed with. It had become, in many ways, the Lanyons’ home, even though Cordelia remained technically a mere live-in housekeeper. Gran can have liked none of this, but she didn’t deem it politic to say so.
Instead, she did her best to ensure her brother didn’t forget how much thicker blood was than water. For his part, Uncle Joshua remained warily amiable. The proportions of his wealth and how he intended to dispose of it remained a matter between him, his conscience and Mr.
Cloke, his solicitor, in whose office safe in Lemon Street his will had long lain.
Rose Lanyon’s first pregnancy happened to coincide with my mother’s second. In March 1936, either side of Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, Nicky Lanyon and I entered this life and with it this story.
Monday morning brought the press to Tredower House. It was scarcely a zoom-lensed siege, just one or two of Fleet Street’s second-division snoopers, hoping to nose out the background to what was so far just a page-five suicide with strings. Too idle to read their own papers’
thirty-four-year-old cuttings, they were unaware of all the reverberations of the event and, naturally, we left them that way.
Trevor claimed a guest had found the body, which was almost true, but he didn’t mention that the guest was his brother-in-law and that he was still on the premises.
I left early for lunch with my parents and followed a rambling route down to the Helford estuary through the sun-warmed countryside.
Lanmartha was a low-pitched, mellow-stoned house on the heights above Helford Passage, with a glorious sub-tropical garden descending in leisurely terraces towards the river. Here my mother pursued her passion for camellias, hydrangeas and Mediterranean exotics, while, at the golf course that backed on to the property, my father pursued his passion for hitting a pimply white ball into a hole. Such occupations seemed superfluous to me, when you needed only to glance out of the window to see the greenest of headlands and the bluest of skies mirrored in sparkling water. But I lived in landlocked Berkshire and knew the rarity of such scenes. To my parents, who seldom left Cornwall, it was simply what you looked at while eating your breakfast.
They greeted me sympathetically, as if expecting me still to be distressed by my experience. I was, but not in the way they’d expected. The physical shock had been supplanted by a creeping unease, which no amount of sympathy was going to dispel. We sat out on the terrace above the top lawn with our aperitifs pink gin for Dad, sherry for Mum and home-made lemonade for me while Mrs. Hannaford, the housekeeper, prepared lunch. The setting made the sombreness of our discussion seem all the stranger. We should have been sharing our pleasure at how well the wedding had gone. But Tabitha and Dominic were for the moment forgotten. They, after all, had the good fortune to be on the other side of the world.
“I’m sorry for anyone who’s desperate enough to take their own life,”
said Mum. “But what I don’t understand is … coming all this way to do it.”
“One shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Dad chimed in, ‘but, damn it all, it seems almost spiteful.”
“In what way?” I enquired as I sipped my lemonade.
“Well, doing it at Tredower House guarantees embarrassment for us, doesn’t it? It means the press will remind everyone of the murder.”
“Why should that embarrass us?”
“It’s something we could certainly do without,” said Mum. “Saturday was so … altogether lovely. Then… this.”
“Gather from Pam he spoke to you that afternoon,” said Dad.
“Yes, he did.”
“Make any sense?”
“Not much.” I paused. “He asked me who killed his father.”
They both frowned at me in puzzlement for a moment. Then Dad said,
“Mad, you think?”
“Confused, certainly. But I suppose you’d have to be to do such a thing. You know the tree he used the horse chestnut? It’s the one we used to swing from.”
“I don’t remember a swing,” said Mum. “But we visited Tredower House so seldom in those days.”
“I virtually lived there in the summers.”
“Did you?”
“You know I did.”
“I know you and … Nicky… were quite friendly.”
“Quite friendly? We were best pals.”
“An exaggeration, surely, dear.”
“No, not at all. If we hadn’t been, why would I have spent a week with him at Nanceworthal the summer before?”
“Was it as long as that?”
“We were due to go again that summer too.”
“Really? I can’t recall.”
“You encouraged the friendship.”
Dad snorted. “Why should we have done that?”
“To keep in with Uncle Joshua, I suppose.”
A small but stubborn silence fell between us. Dad cleared his throat and swallowed some gin. Mum flicked a wasp away from the lemonade jug and rose hurriedly from her chair. “I’d better see how Mrs.
Hannaford’s getting on. Excuse me.”
As soon as she was out of sight, Dad looked across at me and said, “You were brooding on all this before he killed himself, weren’t you? I remember you were in an odd mood during our game of snooker. You should have told me what it was all about then.”
“I didn’t want to spoil your anniversary. Besides, if meeting him had been the end of it, I’d probably have been able to put it out of my mind.”
“You should try to do just that now. There’s no point agonizing over whether we thought it might be … beneficial… for you and him to get acquainted when you were both children. We’re talking about forty odd years ago, for God’s sake.”
“But did you … think it might be beneficial?”
He pursed his lips. “In a sense. Your grandmother was worried Uncle Joshua would forget about his family in favour of the Lanyons. And with good reason, as it turns out. But remember: it was your future yours and Pam’s we were trying to safeguard. I don’t see that as something we need to apologize for.” He threw me a challenging glare.
“Neither do I. It’s just that I can’t help feeling responsible in some way for Nicky ending up as he did.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it? He was my friend, however long ago.”
“And his father murdered your great-uncle, however long ago. Have you forgotten that?”
“No. But it’s more complicated than you think. I went to see Ethel Jago. According to her, when Rose Lanyon left Truro, she was ‘
“ChrisT It was my mother, calling to me from the French windows that led into the drawing-room. “Phone call for you.”
“Who is it?”
“Says he’s an old friend, though I’ve never heard of him. Don Prideaux.”
“Your mother’s memory’s not what it was,” Dad said softly. “You were at school with a boy called Prideaux, weren’t you?”
“Yes. Afterwards, he became a ‘
“Journalist with the Western Morning News.” Dad nodded. “He still writes for them.” Then he treated me to a mirthless smile. “That’s friendship for you.”
I let the remark go, rose and hurried into the drawing-room. My mother had vanished, but she’d left the telephone on the sideboard off the hook. I picked it up and said warily, “Hello?”
“Chris, you old bugger. It’s Don Prideaux.” His voice was lower and huskier than I recalled, but unmistakably his. “Any chance of a few words about poor old Nicky Lanyon?”
“What do you want to know, Don?”
“Could we meet for a chat?”
“I’m not sure. I ‘
“I’m in Truro. How about the City Inn at opening time this evening?
The drinks are on me.”
“Don, I’m really not sure I can make it. It’s … difficult.”
“I have to do this piece, Chr
is.” His tone altered, some of the matey-ness draining away. “You wouldn’t want me to get anything wrong, would you?”
“No. But ‘
“So I’ll see you there?”
I sighed. “All right.”
“Great.” He chuckled throatily. “Knew I could count on you.”
Strictly speaking, I’d known Don Prideaux longer than I had Nicky Lanyon. We met in the first year of Daniell Road School in the autumn of 1941, thrown together across the narrow aisle between our desks by alphabetical chance. He was large for his age, mischievously pugnacious and irrepressibly curious. The Second World War had been going on for two years by then, but since we were too young to remember much about life in peacetime, it had effectively been going on for ever.
I have no memory of the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, although the scene at Crescent Road is so enshrined in family tradition that I feel as if I do. We’d been to Perranporth for the day, in the splendid old dove-grey Talbot that was destined to spend the next six years laid up in the garage in sulky grandeur. We’d picnicked among the dunes and paddled on the beach. We’d passed a normal seaside Sunday. Then we’d driven back to Truro in time for the six o’clock news on the wireless and heard the dread announcement in perfectly modulated BBC English, which had so transfixed Gran that she hadn’t noticed half my egg soldier drop into her tea and had gone on drinking it without complaint.
Many of the features of life I became aware of as a child were actually wartime exigencies I mistook for permanent states of affairs. Rationing meant Napier’s Grocery became less a private business than a branch office of the Ministry of Food, with registered customers, fixed prices and a perpetual discussion of points, coupons and legendary pre-war delights like pineapples and bananas which I had difficulty even envisaging. Call-up meant half the adult males in the neighbourhood vanished to distant parts, occasionally reappearing on forty-eight-hour leave with bulging kit bags and severe haircuts. My father was one of them, departing in the spring of 1940 for a war spent administering army food supplies from behind a desk somewhere in Yorkshire. The blackout and restrictions on travel didn’t mean much to me, although Pam frequently complained that we never went to Perranporth any more.
Whether she’d have wanted to scramble over barbed-wire de fences to reach the sea, supposing we’d had enough petrol to drive there in the first place, is another matter, of course.
Cornwall was spared the worst of the Blitz, so nights huddled in an air-raid shelter didn’t figure in my childhood. Gran pointed out a glow on the eastern horizon to me one evening and told me it was Plymouth burning, but I had no conception of what that really meant. On spring and summer nights, I heard the dull and random thumps of bombing raids on Falmouth Docks, but nobody seemed to think they were likely to come any closer. They thought again in August 1942, when a bomb hit the Royal Cornwall Infirmary, just the other side of Chapel Hill from us. Don Prideaux, whose family lived in Redannick Lane, that bit closer to the hospital, reckoned the blast had vibrated him out of his bed, but even then he had a proto-journalistic gift for exaggeration.
We walked down to look at the damage together next morning and thought it all great fun, unaware as we were that real people had been crushed to death beneath the rubble.
The Lanyons were shadowy figures to me at this time. In my mind, they were relatives of some kind, cousins perhaps, but there always seemed to be an ambiguity about our connection with them. Gran took Pam and me to Tredower House for tea with Uncle Joshua on several occasions and the atmosphere was never one of a brother and sister at ease with each other. Uncle Joshua had taken in a Belgian family who’d fled the German invasion in 1940 and ended up on a cargo boat in Falmouth Harbour. Gran seemed to disapprove of them somehow, possibly because Uncle Joshua gave them such a free run of the place and didn’t appear to distinguish between their children and the Lanyons’ - Nicky and little Freda. Michael Lanyon was in the R.A.F. The prominent place in the drawing-room Uncle Joshua had accorded to a photograph of him in pilot officer’s uniform was another irritant to Gran, as I could tell by her surreptitious glares at it. But she kept up a stubbornly amicable front, the greatness of my unwitting expectations ever fixed in her mind. And at the end of my second year at Daniell Road, she played a trump card she’d been fondling for a long time.
Pam was about to start at the County Grammar School. No money had been spent on her education and it had never been implied that any would be spent on mine. But Gran had been putting funds aside for some time, apparently. She wanted to enrol me at Truro School. The reasoning behind this was obscure to me. I had no wish to leave Daniell Road and the circle of friends I’d acquired there, Don Prideaux among them. But my wishes were hardly relevant. “It’ll be the making of him,” Gran averred. “And what’s good enough for Cordelia Lanyon’s grandson’ here we came nearer the mark ‘is good enough for mine.”
There was no doubt in my mind that Gran resented, even disliked, Cordelia Lanyon. I couldn’t understand why, given the old lady’s gentle manner and quiet, white-haired beauty. She wore mostly black at this time, in Victorian-style mourning for her recently deceased husband, and was all dimple-cheeked kindness to me when we met. Gran described her as Uncle Joshua’s housekeeper, but her daughter-in-law Rose, a chubbier less elegant woman, though just as kindly, was the one who served tea whenever we visited Tredower House; Cordelia seemed to occupy a more exalted position. Pam referred darkly to family secrets I was too young to be entrusted with, probably because she hadn’t been entrusted with them either. But I was the one whose schooling was being disrupted on account of them, which made me all the more determined to find out what they were.
In September 1943,1 was packed off in my stiff new blue and grey serge uniform to Truro School’s prep department at Treliske, a converted manor house a mile out of the city along the Redruth road. That mile seemed more like a hundred, so remote did my friends at Daniell Road suddenly become. As it turned out, I was to be reunited with Don Prideaux five years later, when he won a scholarship to the senior school and caught up with me there. By then, the war would be over. So would the friendship I was about to form with Nicky Lanyon. And so would the lives of Joshua Carnoweth and Michael Lanyon.
It’s just as well we can’t foresee the future, otherwise the past wouldn’t be such a carefree place.
I hadn’t seen Don in twenty years. We’d revived our schoolboy friendship when work took both of us to Plymouth in the late Fifties.
He was chafing at the tedium and triviality of provincial journalism then, just as I was chafing at the tedium and triviality of department-store management. We’d become drinking companions, swapping
dreams of our glamorous cosmopolitan futures; his in Fleet Street, mine in the music business. However you looked at it, life hadn’t played along. The Don I found propping up the bar of the City Inn that evening had lost a lot of hair and gained a lot of weight. But he was still a long way from Fleet Street. And when he heard what I wanted to drink his horrified grimace suggested he didn’t think I’d handled the intervening years with much more success than he had.
Terrier water?” he spluttered. “You must be joking.”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve been tee total for more than ten years now.”
“In God’s name, why? With all your money, you could be rinsing your teeth in vintage champagne.”
I sat on the bar stool next to his and smiled ruefully. “Doctor’s orders.”
“That bad?”
“The big city didn’t turn out to be very good for me. Think yourself lucky you never made it to Fleet Street. They might have weaned you on to something harder on the system than beer.”
“I’d have been willing to take the chance.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“It never came. I got bored before I got famous. And now … it’s too late.”
“Surely it’s never too late.”
“Easy for you to say that, sitting pretty on the Carnoweth m
illions.”
“You know as well as I do, Don, that I’ve had to stand on my own two feet since leaving Plymouth. Not a penny of those millions has come my way.”
“But you’ve got them to look forward to, haven’t you?”
“I’m not sure. Except that the contents of my father’s will are definitely none of your business.”
Don raised his hands in a gesture of pacification, smoke curling up from the cigarette gripped between his two most nicotine-stained fingers. “OK, OK. I’m sorry. It’s just that from where I’m standing you haven’t had things so bad. That singer you married what was her name?”
Beyond Recall Page 6