Don Prideaux was about the only friend I had in Plymouth, unless you count the other regulars of the Abbey, the pub closest to my flat, where I took to drowning many of my murderous intentions towards Humphrey Metcalfe. Don had turned up at Truro School at the start of the second year, transferred on a hard-won scholarship from Daniell Road. Despite his never letting me forget that education as well as a career had been handed to me on a plate, whereas he’d had to earn his by dint of effort and application, we met regularly for midweek pub crawls, Friday night double-dates and weekend excursions onto Dartmoor in the frog-eyed Sprite I bought with the handful of cash Grandad left me in his will. The sentimental old fellow knew I was being kept on a short leash and may have thought it was too short, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
The last piece of advice Grandad gave me, and now I think about it probably the first, was to ignore the unanimous urgings of my sister, father, mother and grandmother to marry and settle down.
Freedom from financial pressures had come to him too late in life to be properly enjoyed, so I suppose he was effectively telling me what he’d have done as a young man if he’d had the same opportunities as me.
The only problem was that I wasn’t so very young any more. I was twenty-seven in 1963, the year of Profumo and the Beatles and the Great Train Robbery and the slow stirrings of the permissive society. I faced a choice between doing what was ever less patiently expected of me and breaking free of what I saw as a charade of trainee respectability; between a dull, safe, suffocating future and the great and glorious unknown.
I took a week off in October to catch up with some old university friends in London and remind myself what fun life was supposed to be.
Most of them were married by now and pursuing careers with more commitment than me. Fun, it turned out, was becoming a stranger to them as well. But not in every case. Johnny Newman, whom I’d shared some lodgings with in my final year, had always fancied himself as a rock ‘n’ roll singer. When I met him at a party in Hampstead thrown by a mutual former girlfriend, it transpired that he was about to go on the road full-time with his band of three guitarists and a drummer: the Meteors. Johnny was reluctant to sign up with a Tin Pan Alley agent.
He reckoned they’d be better off managing themselves. But he also reckoned the five of them should concentrate on music-making. What they needed was a non-playing member of the band to make bookings, organize transport, arrange accommodation and keep some rudimentary accounts.
It took me most of that very late night plus a black coffee encounter with the others next day to persuade Johnny to recruit me as the sixth Meteor on the basis of my experience at Napier’s as a manager and salesman. Just as well he wasn’t likely to ask Humphrey Metcalfe for a reference. I was in.
And out of the family firm. Dad was horrified, naturally. “Have you taken leave of your senses, boy? You can’t be serious.” But I was.
And so was he in making one thing absolutely clear. “You’ll be on your own if you walk out on this job. You’ll get no handouts from me or your mother. There’ll be nothing to fall back on. Do you understand that?” I assured him I did, although the truth was more ambivalent. I didn’t think he was giving me a once-for-all ultimatum, nor that I was cutting off every possibility of a retreat. Only later did I discover how stubborn we could both be how unforgiving and unrepentant. Even when forgiveness and repentance were badly needed.
The Meteors turned out to be aptly named. For a few months in 1964, they soared and shone. “Wasting the Night’ reached the Top Twenty. The musical press talked up their prospects. A lucrative and exhausting round of gigs and recording sessions edged them ever closer to fame and fortune. I proved my worth by maintaining a ramshackle kind of order in their lives managing the money, planning ahead, talking to journalists, negotiating with record companies. I even, single-handedly, kept the van in which we travelled the country on the road and in serviceable condition an heroic achievement in itself.
But the Meteors’ flaw was human rather than mechanical. The lead guitarist, Andy Wicks, had real musical flair and a yen for self-destruction to go with it. He didn’t so much succumb to alcoholism and drug addiction as embrace them like friends. In that sense, he died with his friends about him, choking on his own vomit in a basement flat in Lewisham at the end of a lost midweek.
Johnny and the others put a brave face on it, reckoning they could go on as a four-man band. But Andy had supplied the best of their lyrics and given their playing much of its heart. Without him, the Meteors burned out in a long night of slow and ultimately squalid decline. I had no idea that was how it was going to be. None of us had. The world tilted only gently at first beneath our feet, but eventually it was to become a sheer slope down which we careered.
Somewhere near the middle of that slope, with Andy less than a year dead and hope still giving us a run for our money, though not much of one, I talked our way into a series of gigs along the south coast. It was hard going by then to keep the band to any kind of itinerary. The entanglements of their love lives and drug habits, not to mention my heavy drinking, combined with the creeping awareness of a downward trend, resulted in more botched performances, no-shows and ugly disputes with night-club managers than the Meteors’ plummeting reputation could bear.
Brighton was only one of the places where things went wrong, but Johnny reacted so badly to being booed off stage by a student audience at the university that he smashed up the room I was sharing with him. Not a hotel room, in best pop-star tradition, but an attic in digs near the railway station. I suppose that’s when I realized there wasn’t going to be a comeback. As disasters went, that night in Brighton was in a class of its own. It took me sixteen years to realize it could have been worse. We might have stayed at the Ebb Tide Guest House, Madeira Place. Then the landlady I had to pay fifty pounds to cover the damage and keep the police out of it… would have been Edmund Tully’s wife.
“Mrs. Graham?”
That’s right.” She was about sixty, trying with some success to look a good deal younger, dark hair swept back from a fine-boned face that age was only just beginning to harshen. She wore an elegantly cut pleated skirt and crisp white blouse; there was nothing of the traditional seaside landlady about her. “A room just for yourself, is it?”
“Yes. Just for myself.” We were standing in the porch of the Ebb Tide Guest House with a streetful of low October sunlight behind us, traffic noise and the screech of gulls mixing in the Brighton air. I’d got home from Hebden Bridge late the previous night and driven down to the Sussex coast through the middle of the day, plotting my strategy as I went. “You do have a vacancy?”
“Oh yes. It’s a quiet time. I can even do you an en suite room at the standard rate. Seven pounds fifty bed and breakfast. Would that suit you?”
“Sounds fine.”
“Come in, then.”
The facade of the Ebb Tide had looked smart enough, area and balcony railings gleaming, cream stucco basking warmly in the sunshine. The interior was clean and homely too, the carpet thick beneath my feet. I followed her along the passage to be shown the airy dining-room, then we doubled back to the stairs.
“Somebody recommend me, did they?”
“Not exactly. The… accommodation bureau … pointed me in this direction.”
“It’s just, since you knew my name, I assumed somebody must have put you on to me.”
“Oh, the woman at the bureau mentioned it.”
“Really?” She looked round at me doubtfully as we reached the landing.
“Well, I must be doing something right. This is it.” She opened a door and stepped back to make way for me. It was a small but neatly furnished room, scented with just too much air freshener. The window promised a sea view, though; the bed a firm mattress.
“Very nice. The whole place is. Been here long, Mrs. Graham?”
“A good while, yes.”
“Do you run it single-handed?” Seeing her frown, I added, “I mean, is it
a husband and wife operation?”
“I’m a widow.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that. Any children to help out?”
Her mouth tightened and a stiffness entered her pose. “Are you sure it was the bureau who sent you here, Mr…”
“Napier.”
“Only most of my guests ask me about hot water and mealtimes, not my family history. And they don’t tend to know my name unless they’ve been before, which you haven’t.”
“I suppose I’d better come clean, then.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’m looking for your husband, Edmund Tully.” She didn’t so much as blink in surprise. I had to admire her coolness. But the way her gaze flicked across my features told me she was thinking fast and evasively.
“Don’t try the widow routine. It won’t wash.”
“Who are you?”
“That doesn’t matter. I simply want to know where Tully is.”
“I think you’d better leave. The accommodation’s no longer available.”
“Then I’ll have to go elsewhere. The street’s full of B & Bs, all with vacancies. Your neighbours, Mrs. Graham. Since you use your maiden name, I have an idea you don’t want them to know who your husband is and what he did. If you won’t help me, I might have to enlighten them.”
“Bastard.” She spoke in an undertone, with such a distant look on her face that it wasn’t clear who she meant me, or Edmund Tully.
“Just his whereabouts.”
“Like I told you. I’m a widow.”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t have to prove anything.”
“Why are you protecting him?”
“I’m not.”
“Then tell me where he is.”
“I can’t.”
“I think you can. Look at it this way. You don’t owe Tully a thing, so why not help me find him? Isn’t that preferable to having your friends and neighbours know how you extorted money out of Tully’s brother to set yourself and your daughter up here?”
“My daughter?”
“Henry Tully’s widow told me all about it. You can drop the pretence.”
Some decision some acceptance of expedient necessity drained the defiance from her. She closed the door softly behind her, crossed to the window and squinted out into the sunlight, then turned to look at me. “You said your name was Napier. As in Napier’s Department Stores?”
“Yes. Since you mention it.”
“Then why are you asking me where Edmund is? Whose behalf are you acting on?”
“My own.”
“Is Melvyn Napier your father?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“No. But I can’t see ‘
“Why do you want to find Edmund?”
“To learn the truth about the murder of Joshua Carnoweth.”
“Well, I can’t help you. I haven’t seen Edmund in years. He could be dead for all I know.”
“What about your daughter? Could she be in touch with him?”
Alice Graham smiled grimly. “There’s no chance of that.”
“Are you sure you know her well enough to say?”
“Oh yes.”
“I believe I may have met her, you see. Quite recently. Going under the name of Pauline Lucas.”
“You can’t have.”
“I’ve got a photograph of her. Not a very nice photograph, I’m afraid.
Not very nice at all. But you’ll recognize her, I’m sure.”
“No, Mr. Napier. I won’t.”
“Take a look.” I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket. “Then you’ll ‘
“I don’t have a daughter.”
“What?”
“I don’t have any children, living or dead. I’m childless. Got that?”
“But ‘
“I lied to the Tullys. They’d never have paid me a penny on my own.
For a niece, on the other hand …”
“You sent them a picture of the girl.”
“A picture of a girl. The daughter of a cousin of mine, born just after the war. I knew they’d never want to see her. One picture was more than enough for them. And for me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She shrugged. “That’s your privilege.”
“Look at this.” I slid the photograph from its envelope and held it out for her to see, as determined to force the issue as I was reluctant to let Pauline Lucas slip through my fingers again. “You recognize her, don’t you?”
But it was clear from her disinterested pout of disgust that she didn’t. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.” Then she caught the scowl of frustration on my face. “Looks like you’ve made a major misjudgement, Mr. Napier. I suppose having this kind of picture taken is an expensive business. It must be galling to learn you’ve wasted your money.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. I have no daughter. If I did, she wouldn’t be Edmund Tully’s. He and I Well, I’ll say this. When he came back from the war, he was incapable of fathering a child. The Japanese… hadn’t exactly been lenient with him.” She waved a dismissive hand at me or the past or the reflection of one in the other, walked back to the door and opened it. “I think you ought to leave now. I’ve told you enough.”
“You’ve told me nothing. Where is he?”
“What makes you think I either know or care? I married Edmund because he was handsome and flattering and because I was too young to know better. I made the kind of mistake lots of girls of my generation made, and I don’t need you to remind me of it.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t be in a position to, if you hadn’t decided to cash in on your mistake.”
“All right.” She closed the door again and briefly closed her eyes as well. “I cheated Henry Tully. But his brother played a far worse trick on me. I have nothing to apologize for. Not to you, anyway.”
“How could you be sure of getting away with it?” I said, still chasing the hope that there really had been a daughter. “What if he’d demanded to see the girl?”
“Then I’d have been found out. But he’d never bothered to see me and I’d been married to his brother for seven years. Besides, neither he nor Edmund told the police I even existed. That made it pretty obvious I was an embarrassment to both of them. So, I reckoned the odds of getting away with it were pretty good. And it didn’t much matter if I failed. I was as poor and desperate as I’d wish my worst enemy to be during those post-war years in London. I had nothing to lose, and a better life to win. So, I tried it on. And it worked.”
“But Edmund must have known what you’d done. Henry wrote to him in prison.”
“Yes. And Edmund said nothing. He always did have a warped sense of humour. He thought it was funny Henry paying out to support his non-existent daughter. He thought it was a really good joke. That’s what he told me, anyway, when he tracked me down after his release. I thought I’d shaken him off for good, but, thanks to Henry, he knew where to find me.”
“So it was a shock Edmund turning up here twelve years ago?”
“Oh yes. A very unpleasant one.”
“Did he stay long?”
“He didn’t stay at all. He came for some money, knowing I’d be willing to pay to see the back of him. It was Whit week. I had a houseful of holiday makers. I didn’t need an ex-con husband hanging about the place. So, I filled his wallet and sent him on his way.”
“His way to where?”
“That’s what I don’t understand about your visit, Mr. Napier. I haven’t seen or heard of Edmund since then. And I’m not about to complain, believe me. It doesn’t matter to me what he was up to. But if you really want to know, well, you didn’t have to go to all this bother to find out. Just ask your father.”
“My father? What do you mean?”
“I mean that I didn’t ask Edmund where he was going when he walked out of this house twelve years ago, but he told me anyway. He said he was going to Truro. To see
Melvyn Napier.”
Beyond Recall Page 23