Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  “She had an affair. With my father,” I said in a flat voice. “It’s all right, Winnie. I worked it out weeks ago. Either it was just before I was born or just after. The details don’t matter. I’m sure he loved my mother—but he loved Constance too. And she certainly loved him. Things like that happen—I know that. I’ll get used to it—”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Winnie snapped. “It wasn’t like that at all—and if she suggests it was, she’s lying through her teeth. What happened was very simple. She turned up—at your christening, if you please!—she set her cap at your father, and he turned her down. She went back to New York in a fine temper. I told you, she thought she was irresistible to men—even a man like your father, with a happy home and a wife he loved and a newborn baby. She couldn’t stand that, of course. She wanted to smash it up.” She paused. “You’d understand that, surely? You know what she’s like. She did the same thing to you.”

  There was a certain challenge in the way this last remark was said. I did not reply.

  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Winnie trumpeted. “Do you see? I’ve always believed that. When Constance left Winterscombe, she was perfectly livid. In my opinion, she’d always wanted to get her talons into your father—and having failed, she’d turned to you instead. I’ve always said to Freddie, that woman is a damaging influence. He should have put his foot down. She should never have been your guardian. You should never have gone to live in New York. If I’d been married to Freddie then, it would certainly never have happened.”

  “Winnie. She was kind to me. For many years. More than kind—until we quarreled—”

  “Ah, but when did you quarrel?” Winnie asked on a note of triumph. “When she thought she was losing you. When she thought you’d found happiness. Just as she did with your father—do you see? When I think of the scene she made that last night at Winterscombe, the lies she told. In front of everyone. Wexton was there. You can ask Wexton if you feel the need. He’ll confirm what I say. I told your mother at the time—exile! Exile wasn’t enough. What one needed in Constance’s case was exorcism.”

  Here Winnie came to an unexpected halt. Her cheeks were still scarlet from her outburst, but her expression changed: She began to look simultaneously kind and furtive. She fumbled in her pocket, thrust a card into my hand, and maneuvered me toward the door.

  “Something we wanted you to have, Freddie and I. Don’t look at it now—you can look at it later. We can’t go, you see, and so we thought, perhaps you …”

  She opened the door. She propelled me out onto the steps. She suddenly seemed in a great hurry for me to leave. “Inspect the newts on the way out,” she cried, somewhat wildly. “There’s one big brute we’re very fond of. By the lily pad on the left, usually. That’s his den.”

  The door shut, hastily. I inspected the newt, mystified. He was where Winnie had said he would be: a fine, fat, warty specimen. I reached out to touch him, but he was wily. When my hand was still three inches away, he plopped back out of sight under his lily pad.

  When I was half a street away, I unfolded the card Winnie had given me. I then understood the glances toward the mantelpiece (where Winnie propped invitations). I also understood the embarrassed and surreptitious way it had been pressed into my hand. A benign conspiracy. The card was an invitation to a lecture two days away. The lecture was being given, in London, by Dr. Frank Gerhard.

  There were a great many letters after his name. I stood on the corner and counted them. Freddie’s and Winnie’s names were in the top left-hand corner: the writing was Frank’s own. Since I still loved him, since—for what it is worth—I had never stopped loving him, I was tempted. I thought: I could go.

  However, I had spent eight years training myself to be sensible, and those eight years slammed in my face. Reunions after eight years may occur in fiction; they are rare in real life.

  I walked to Paddington Station. I bought four newspapers, because I wanted to read and not think. It was the end of October by then, and the papers were full of war: the Vietnam War, in which a halt had just been called to the American bombing. I read the same story, in four versions, over and over again. I did not understand the words or the sentences, but I stared at them with blind concentration all the way back to Winterscombe.

  The next day I had the distraction of that potential purchaser—for which I was grateful. There was not a great deal that could be done to improve Winterscombe’s appearance at that point, but what little there was, I did. I spent the morning arranging flowers. The corporate raider, whose name was Cunningham, was due at eleven o’clock.

  It was not raining, which was fortunate; in rain, Winterscombe did not look its best. It was a clear, cold, bright day. At nine, returning to the house from the winter garden with an armful of the last late roses, I stopped and looked up at the house.

  The morning sun shone on this, the east face of the building; it softened the house’s architectural assertions and mellowed the color of its brick. A beautiful disarray of creepers advanced upon the windows; I turned to look back across the lake, toward the autumn woods. There was a faint mauve mist over the water, no sound except birdsong. I remembered the phrase Franz-Jacob had once used to me, thirty years before: Ein Zauber On—a magical place.

  I felt a great welling of affection for the house then—for the house, its past inhabitants, their lives and their secrets. I could, this morning, sense their ghosts. A magical place. I wondered, would a corporate raider sense this?

  When he arrived (on time, in the back of a chauffeur-driven Corniche; Garstang-Nott and I were waiting for him) he did not look the kind of man who would enter “magic” in the credit column when he accounted the pros and cons of a house. He stood frowning at the façade. I was sure his eyes rested on the inadequacies of the guttering. His expression was that of a man who senses the invisible fungi beneath the floorboards. I took him to be in his mid-sixties. He was actually a good bit older, I learned. He was spruce, slightly built, well got-up, deeply tanned. His clothes were expensive and a shade too carefully conservative. He emanated a wiry, impatient air of cocksure energy. His accent was mid-Atlantic. His first question, as soon as he was inside the door, was whether he might use the telephone.

  I was familiar with businessmen who suffered withdrawal symptoms when deprived of a telephone for more than an hour. I think Mr. Cunningham experienced this; I also think he wanted to emphasize his own importance. He took the call in the next room, door open, voice loud; large figures were bandied about in some detail. Garstang-Nott’s expression became pained. He pursed his lips. He winced. When Cunningham finally returned, bristling with new confidence, he and Garstang-Nott exchanged a challenging glance. It was clear that their detestation of each other was immediate, that neither was very inclined to disguise it. Garstang-Nott spoke in a patronizing manner acquired at his public school, a manner he had had many years to perfect; Cunningham responded with new-money aggression. Garstang-Nott implied he found it very odd indeed that a man such as Cunningham should aspire to such a house; Cunningham, by gesture, stance, and remark, implied that times had changed, buddy—the public-school man was a flunky and he himself was now cock of the walk. Class hatred sparked; the air was dense with its smoke.

  We began the tour of the house. Garstang-Nott’s theory—it might sound perverse, but I, too, had encountered the phenomenon and knew he was right—was that the very rich were not interested in acquiring perfection. They did not believe in perfection. Even presented with a house faultless in every respect, there would be niggles. They liked niggles. They itched to find something to alter, something to correct.

  Winterscombe, of course, was far from faultless—and as we proceeded from room to room, Garstang-Nott, obeying his theory, enumerated its disadvantages with zest: dry rot, wet rot, drains, guttering, roofing, wiring, heating. He gave the now-silent Cunningham a pale glance. Undersell: Garstang-Nott proved a master at it. I had a precise idea of how much money it would cost to restore Winterscombe
properly; Garstang-Nott coolly doubled it.

  “As a minimum,” he drawled. “That’s leaving aside, of course, all question of redecoration.”

  The implicit suggestion, conveyed by accent and general air of unassailable superiority, was that Winterscombe was well beyond Cunningham’s means. The corporate raider rose to the bait.

  “So?” he said with considerable aggression. He turned his back on the real-estate agent. He advanced on the fireplace, where the original bellpull for the servants was situated. He yanked it. “These work, do they?”

  I said yes, they still did. He smiled, in an odd, slightly malicious way. It was then, as we moved on to the next bedroom, that I began to realize something. He seemed familiar with the geography of the house, and—Winterscombe being so large—that geography was complex. He seemed to expect stairs, to see around corners—and it occurred to me he might have been here before. I wondered if it had been during the war years, if he could have been stationed here in the period after the army requisitioned the house.

  We went from room to room. Cunningham made little comment, but within an hour I could tell he was not going to buy. He was palpably losing interest. He looked around him with an air of resentful irritation, as if he had expected much and the house failed him.

  I was hurt by that, and angered too. I was still old-fashioned enough to feel he could have made an effort to be polite. I thought that if Winterscombe had the absurdities of its era, it also had its strengths. I felt partisan. I pointed out the views: the lake, the trees, the woods. He glanced briefly, looked away. He kicked a wainscot. He glared at the parquet. Behind his back, Garstang-Nott made a rude face.

  We trudged around the stables, the coach house, the old laundry buildings, the abandoned dairy. I stood, for the first time in many years, in that converted dormitory used every summer by the orphanage children. This was the end of the room where my friend Franz-Jacob had had his bed; this was the very window from which he had flashed Morse-code messages to me, thirty years before. I closed my eyes. I saw the letters flash. I opened them again and looked around with a sense of despair. Was nothing in this house ever thrown away? The long room was still stacked with the old iron-frame orphanage beds.

  I knew I was wasting time—all three of us were. As we walked back toward the house I was just about to suggest we recognize that fact, and curtail the inspection, when Cunningham stopped. Still ignoring the estate agent, he turned to me.

  “I know this place,” he said.

  I hesitated. The admission seemed made reluctantly. His air of cocky energy was gone.

  “I thought you did. Was it during the war?”

  “What?”

  “Were you stationed here, during the war? I thought—”

  “Stationed here?” He gave an odd smile. “Oh, no. I used to work here. They sent me down from the London place when I was fifteen years old. Your family trained me.” The smile became a slight sneer. “I was valet to your … uncle, would it be? Your uncle Frederic? Writes now, I believe. Detective stories, that sort of stuff?”

  I stared at him, astonished. “You’re Arthur—Arthur Tubbs?”

  Because my mind was still full of the past, I saw him as a boy, a thin, acned boy bursting into Freddie’s room, drunk on disaster, the morning of the accident. I thought of him as Constance described him—nervous-weasely, the best man at Jenna’s wedding. A bit player, now center stage. I wanted to say: But you were peripheral. I wanted to say: Oh, but you’re real. Fortunately, I said no such idiotic thing. I noticed that at the mention of his name (probably unexpected) he had flushed beneath his tan.

  “Yes, well, I don’t use that name now. I changed it. For business purposes, see? I’m Cunningham now. I’ve been Cunningham for forty years.”

  I thought: Conyngham/Cunningham. I thought: There is another story here, one I shall never know. He had turned back, meanwhile, to the house.

  “It’s weird.” The mid-Atlantic accent, which had wavered, was now firmly in control. “I wanted this place. I waited for years for it to come on the market. I knew it would, in the end. I thought, when it does, see, I’ll buy it. Only …”

  “Only now you don’t want it?”

  “No. I don’t.” He turned back to me. He gave a shrug. “Can’t say why exactly. It doesn’t … measure up.”

  “Well, the house is run-down now,” I began. “I know that. It needs restoration. But—”

  “Oh, it’s not that.” He gave me a scornful look. “I’d want to do it over, in any case. I had thought, maybe you—I’ve seen your work. Anyway. No point in discussing that. It doesn’t suit. Time is money. No point in wasting either. I have to get back.”

  He set off at a rapid pace, to the front of the house and his waiting car. His driver climbed out. He doffed his cap. He opened the rear door.

  “Well trained.” Tubbs/Cunningham gave a small tight smile. “But then, I was well trained. I know how things are done.”

  He glanced back at the house one last time. I began to see why he might have considered employing me to redecorate this house—a decision that would have had nothing to do with any skills I might have as a decorator. The server, served. I realized for the first time that Garstang-Nott was an irrelevance. It was me that Cunningham disliked.

  “You know how many indoor servants there were then?” He gave me a cold glance. “Fifty. Who knows? Maybe that’s what I miss. All that bowing and scraping. Yes, my lord. No, my lady. Three bags full, my lady. You know what I used to be paid to pick up clothes? A pound a week.”

  “With room and board, I imagine,” Garstang-Nott put in, none too politely. “And it was rather a long time ago.”

  They exchanged glances of cordial hostility. Cunningham climbed into his car. He made—to me—one last remark before it pulled away.

  “Jumped-up little creep,” said Garstang-Nott. “Made his first pile as a black-marketeer, I believe. Rather a crook, didn’t you think?”

  I made no reply. I did not share Garstang-Nott’s political or social certitudes; neither did I agree with them. I thought Arthur Tubbs more interesting, and more complex, than that. To be exploited, then to wish to exploit; to seal a business career by purchasing the very house where you once served—I could see the sad logic of that.

  I looked at Winterscombe with new eyes. I saw its capacity to transmute, to be valued, in many different ways by many different people. For Arthur Tubbs the house was a revenge for years of servitude; for my grandfather, escaping the taint of trade, a way of obliterating all memory of factories that made bleach. For Montague Stern it had represented freedom and power, a dominion where the outsider could rule, a bequest to a dream-son. To Constance it had been a house of secrets; to my father, an elegy; to me, a shrine to a lost childhood. All of us, I thought, in our different ways, had looked at bricks and mortar and created a chimera.

  I could see the danger. I think it was then, looking at Winterscombe, that I determined, truly determined, to let it go.

  “It’s not … as I remembered it,” Cunningham had said to me, before he rolled up the car window. I was struck by that. Chance remarks can often lead one around a necessary corner.

  “Wexton,” I said, when Garstang-Nott had departed and I had gone inside. “Would you mind if I went up to London tomorrow? I want to go to a lecture.”

  “Sure,” Wexton replied, in a way that made me immediately certain that he knew which lecture, given by whom, and that he, too, was included in Freddie and Winnie’s benign conspiracy.

  Going to my room that night, knowing I would not sleep, I thought of all the versions of the past I had been given: There were as many possible versions as there were people. But there remained one version still unexplored, and one story so far excluded. My own: the past as I remembered it.

  It was territory long avoided. Only one person, I think, could have persuaded me back there, and it was he who waited for me there, obscured by the practiced evasions of the last eight years.

  Oh, yes, I knew
where this route led. It led backwards, but also forward, to that man in the laboratory: my American, Dr. Frank Gerhard.

  He cured people. That was his profession. After taking his medical degree at Columbia, he moved on to Yale, then the Scripps-Foster Institute, where he pursued his biochemical research. His special field was the transmutation of cells, the anarchy or—if you like—the internal wars that disrupt the human body’s equilibrium. He was a biochemist; I was a decorator. You will see now, I hope, why a parting eight years before had easily remained absolute. To meet again required decisive action, on his part or on mine. There was no likelihood of chance encounters. The paths of biochemists and interior decorators do not often cross. He worked in America: I avoided that country. We were both, perhaps, excessively careful; even in the same city accidental meetings would have been unlikely. I regretted this. There had been many times, those past eight years, when (not believing in destiny) I had wished some such force might have intervened and given us—a nudge.

  On the other hand, had it done so, I might have been obstinately blind to it. I could be blind—I had been blind when we first met. I met Frank Gerhard through my work, and through my friendship with his mother, the impossible Rosa. I was to meet him again, on several occasions, over several years. That first time I met him, at Rosa’s house, he said two words to me: “Hello” and “Goodbye.” Behind the greeting and the farewell, I thought I sensed indifference, even dislike—for which there seemed no very obvious reason. Five minutes in my company (and that first meeting was as brief as that) seemed enough to make him dismiss me. This rankled. I resolved to ignore his reaction, and him; since he continued to make his dislike plain whenever we met, this was not always easy.

  The first time I was unable to ignore him was in 1956. It was early spring. Constance and I were in Venice. Yes, it was the occasion on which Conrad Vickers (part of Constance’s entourage) took that photograph outside the church of Santa Maria della Salute.