by Bella Pollen
‘How old is the baby?’ I asked, totally confused.
‘Thirty-eight and bright as a button too. Poor boy leads a terrible rackety life down in the city, never one to eat properly … much too thin, just like yourself.’ She felt her hands towards the tea tray, ‘if you’re no’ drinking tea, then will you take a glass of milk?’
‘No thanks very much I don’t like—’
‘Now,’ she said briskly, ‘I don’t approve of dieters or vomiters. Lady Diana, may God rest her poor soul, was a vomiter … but in my opinion it’s a wicked waste of good food. Alistair?’
The Earl poured milk into the cup she was holding towards him, ‘Nanny knows best,’ he said with heavy irony. Removing a baby beaker which obscurely had been clipped to his jacket ever since we arrived, he added a dose of whatever was inside before handing it to me with a wink.
Brandy from the smell of it. The Earl had the look of an alcoholic. His skin was rough, his face heavy and jowled, but although he continually took swigs from the beaker, he never seemed to get all that drunk. Plus he was in good shape, striding ahead of us all afternoon, pointing his walking stick at trees he’d planted giving us both Latin and English names and describing them as if they were fine wines. ‘Now that’s a Fraxinus excelsior “Jaspidea”, little like your common ash but goes a wonderful buffer yellow in the autumn, over there is a full-bodied Fraxinus mariesii, ravishing flowers, white, like feathery smoke … left of the oak is a rather perky little Coculus trilobus from the somewhat risqué-sounding family of Menispermaceae.’ But as the day wore on his attention began to stray and I detected a faint slur to his words.
* * *
Downstairs in the drawing room, he poured us all shots of neat Scotch from a decanter. From his pocket he produced a straw which he stuck in his own glass. It was one of those curly plastic things Toys R Us sell as Christmas stocking fillers.
‘Uh … what’s the significance of the straw?’ I couldn’t help asking. I watched fascinated as the golden liquid rose through its bends like oil in a pipeline.
‘This?’ He picked it up. ‘Simple really. Question of economy. Alcohol reaches your bloodstream quicker when drunk through a straw.’
I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘A higher level of inebriation can be achieved through less alcohol,’ he explained patiently. ‘Saves money. As I said. A simple question of economy.’
* * *
‘A simple question of economy,’ Wolf pointed the camera at Dwight. ‘Tell us, your Earlyship,’ he mimicked my voice. ‘Is it the drink or the bad genes that make you a candidate for the funny farm?’
‘Survival of the weirdest, dear boy,’ Dwight said in his best English accent, ‘Although five hundred years of sleeping with my sister sure helped.’
‘Are you boys taking the piss by any chance?’ I murmured. We were through for the day, and reluctantly packing up. I would have happily stayed longer but Rory had been adamant about not messing around any more of his clients so we were committed to meeting him at Stately Locations early the next morning. I had my back to the crew, checking out titles on the shelf. Bevan’s library was nothing like as distinguished as Roxmere’s but there were some lovely old books. An illustrated complete works of Shakespeare, the imprint on its spine rubbed almost bare. A navy cloth-bound copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I pulled out.
‘These people are awesome, Maggie,’ Wolf said. ‘We couldn’t have invented better.’
‘From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day; and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like a falling star.’ I closed the book and tried to ease it back into the shelf but it wouldn’t fit. The books on either side had closed ranks as though relieved at the extra space, but it wasn’t a question of width, something else was blocking it from behind. I stood on the chair to investigate. Another thinner book had slipped from the shelf above and wedged itself in the way. I prised it loose and wiped the dust from the cover with my sleeve. It was a volume of Nietzsche – its title, The Birth of Tragedy engraved in gold. A piece of paper fluttered out. I stooped down and picked it off the floor. In fact it was a photograph, a barely legible pencil mark on the back dating it as 1938. I turned it over and suddenly felt the hairs on my arm rise. The photograph was of a group of children with their nanny, a man and a large Alsatian dog standing in front of a mountain chalet. It could have been any family holiday snap: Italy, Switzerland maybe. It could have been a scene straight out of the Sound of Music. Except it wasn’t – the man in the picture was Adolf Hitler.
I turned it over and over disbelievingly.
‘What’s wrong, Maggie?’
I handed it to Wolf and fumbled to the front of the Nietzsche book.
Wolf read over my shoulder.
‘To my good English friend, Viscount Lytton-Jones, in memoriam of a most successful visit, Herman Goebbels.’
‘Holy shit!’ he said.
I stared at it, stunned. ‘Holy shit is right.’
* * *
‘Drive safely.’ Alistair Bevan seized my hand and pumped it. I thanked him, worrying some gravel under the toe of my sneaker. ‘It’s been really interesting.’ I looked at the house, looked at the open door of the van, at the Earl’s wife smiling at us in her misshapen tweed skirt, friendly, trusting.
‘You know what,’ I said, ‘I think I left my cell in the library.’
I’d just got the book tucked down my pants and my shirt over the top when the old lady walked in. ‘Found it,’ I said.
‘Well done.’ She answered politely, though I could swear she could barely see me, let alone the cell I was waving in the air.
I passed through the door she was holding open. ‘Nanny?’ I hesitated, ‘… I meant to ask earlier … who is Viscount Lytton-Jones?’
She was quiet for a minute and I held my breath. Uncovering the vague snobbishness and eccentricity of the aristocracy was one thing, uncovering a Nazi collaboration was something else entirely. ‘He died tragically,’ she said finally. When she raised her eyes there was something fierce in their watery blue depths. ‘I wouldn’t mention it if I were you. It still causes the family a great deal of pain.’
* * *
As soon as Wolf steered the van out through the gates he turned on me. ‘Show and Tell, Maggie,’ he said, and I eased the photograph from my pocket.
‘And just what do you intend to do with that?’
I didn’t know, but I knew what the photo meant. Alistair, Con, William, Dinah, Robert. The names of the five children were written in pencil on the back. Viscount Lytton-Jones was Alistair Bevan’s father. There was a story there, even if he was dead. It was just a question of finding it.
* * *
My mother once said that as a documentarian it was her job to shine the light into those dark corners where injustice was taking place because if you don’t know what’s happening, it doesn’t affect your life, and if things don’t affect your life, you do nothing to change them. There were crimes being committed all over the world, there were dirty secrets in every corner …
* * *
Back at the Cadogan Hotel I called Newsline. Bevan, potentially, was a very dirty little secret indeed but Alan’s direct line didn’t get me through to him and it took forty minutes of back-to-back talking to robots, literally, before the system found him.
‘You better have something really good up your sleeve,’ he said.
‘I do.’
‘Keep me in the loop and make sure you get everything for your original brief.’
‘I will.’
Wolf waited till I’d hung up.
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked for the second time and when I didn’t answer he handed the photograph back to me. ‘Tread carefully, Maggie,’ he said. ‘Whatever this means, it’s probably not their finest hour.’
daniel
Maggie and her crew do not turn up at Stately Locations at the appointed time following their ‘personal’ day so Rory leave
s the address with Alison and treats Benj to brunch in Yo Sushi round the corner, where plates of food are plucked like startled commuters from a moving conveyor belt. When Benj blurs his eyes, he imagines the accompanying clear soup bowls are shot glasses of gin. To distract himself from this taboo image he asks Rory when he first discovered Alistair and Audrey drank.
Rory tells him it was the time he nearly drowned.
I remember our mother then. She was never beautiful as such, but very striking. Strong features, thick dark hair. ‘She was a great swimmer,’ Rory tells Benj. ‘She could have swum for England.’ She’d grown up in Ireland and learnt to swim in the loughs and the sea. At Bevan she used to swim in the lake most days even in cold weather, cutting across the water, from jetty to boathouse, sleek as an otter in her thick rubber swimming cap.
The water was damn cold in that lake. Pike nibbled your feet and slunk around the jetty where there were only a few painful steps before the ground disappeared to nothing and the water became ten degrees colder.
Rory had only just learnt to swim when I announced we would steal the boat to go fishing. It was mid August and a hot, hot summer. We’d had a picnic and both Ma and Pa were drinking from the coffee flask. Coffee was a big thing for our parents. They took it with them whenever they left the house, once even driving the 10 miles back to Bevan because the flask had been forgotten. After coffee they fell asleep lying side by side on the tartan picnic blanket.
The boathouse smelt musty as we tossed the anchor in the boat and jumped down after it. Rory balanced his feet on either side to steady the boat as I eased it through the reeds and bulrushes, out into the bright sunlight.
‘There’s a Babar story like this,’ Rory reminds Benj. ‘Celeste and Babar give birth to triplets, Alexander, Flora and Pom, then embark on a series of fantastically irresponsible outings which these days would have social services rushing to fill out foster home forms.’ He picks a Californian roll apart with his chopsticks. ‘First they allow Arthur, who’s, what, three or fours years old, to take Pom for a walk, but Arthur, who’s rightly pissed off to be presented with not one but three sibling rivals pushes the pram over the cliff. Next, Celeste, who’s gone berserk from breastfeeding triplets, gives the new-born Flora a rattle to suck whereupon she chokes. Finally Babar and Celeste go for a picnic and drink themselves insensible, leaving the toddlers to play by the lake. I mean everybody knows you don’t let small elephants play by water,’ Rory says, ‘everybody knows,’ he trails off.
‘And sure enough,’ Benj says quietly, ‘Alexander sneaks out in the boat and falls in.’
* * *
Rory caught the fishing rod in the weeds and gave it a yank. I lost the oars and Rory fell backwards. He thinks of Alexander as he sinks through the water. It’s deeper and much colder in the middle of the lake and Rory can’t get himself horizontal. The blackness of the water pulls at his legs. The crocodile swims towards Alexander and Rory worries about the pike. If they were a foot long at the jetty then imagine how big they are out in the middle. He’s a lot more scared of being bitten than drowning.
He splutters up and down, down and up but just as his vision blurs to milky he sees Audrey powering towards him, her short hair capless. How she’d spotted him all the way from the bank, I’ve no idea. Just in time Babar throws the boat anchor into the throat of the crocodile. Just in time Rory feels himself plucked from the lake like a bobbing apple from a water keg. Crouched in the still drifting boat, I never saw such determination and purpose in my mother and I never would again.
* * *
‘On the bank she gave me mouth to mouth,’ Rory said, ‘and in her mouth I tasted coffee.’ He’d smelt it too on her breath as she’d hauled him back to shore. It was her smell, cosy and familiar. It clung to her like a scent and neither of us had ever found it unpleasant. She smelt of it in the morning and it was even stronger in the evening when she kissed us goodnight.
The next morning, Rory walked into the library. Mrs Bindey was on her hands and knees picking broken glass off the carpet. He handed her the top to the crystal decanter which had rolled to the doorway. The whole room reeked of coffee and he said so. Mrs Bindey straightened up and stared at him.
That was the day he discovered what whisky was.
* * *
‘In retrospect, Babar was a latent homosexual,’ Rory says.
‘He most certainly was not.’ Benj is incensed at this outing of his hero.
‘He had an unhealthy preoccupation with his spats.’
‘He was happily married to Celeste.’ Benj takes a plastic dog turd from his pocket, puts it on an empty chicken yakitori plate and returns it to the moving conveyer.
‘It’s not normal for elephants to be that pernickety about their footwear.’
‘He was the king of the elephants, he doesn’t go by normal elephant rules.’
‘Celeste had Munchausen’s syndrome, Arthur was a retard and as for the Old Lady…’
Benj laughs. ‘My father’s convinced I’m a latent homosexual.’
‘Are you?’ Rory asks idly. He can see the crew’s van mounting the kerb of the pavement outside.
‘I have no idea,’ Benj says. ‘Maybe one of these days I’ll be lucky enough to find out.’
News is part of our communal experience. News is a public service. I believe that good journalism, good television can make our world a better, fairer place.
– Christiane Amanpour
maggie
Sir Harding Montague was a wiry, extremely articulate man who enunciated his words in a voice unsettlingly lacking in peaks or troughs. He reminded me forcibly of a toad and, like the South American version of the species, when you squeezed him poison leaked from every pore of his skin.
Waverley, his Estate, was a gothic miracle of a house in the county of Suffolk. Newsline researchers had turned it up before Christmas. It hadn’t been on the Stately Locations books, but Sir Montague had jumped at the idea of ‘expenses’ and Rory had grudgingly orchestrated a deal.
Montague had quite a reputation. He was notorious for his affairs with other women while his wife had quietly and discreetly died from cancer. He’d held a government position under Edward Heath, but had been fired when caught, ‘in flagrante’, as Rory put it, with a senior minister’s wife. Montague’s own description of the lady who had cost him his career was, ‘Labia like an elephant’s trunk … had to be careful or it would snatch things off the table when you weren’t looking.’ This dazzling imagery had made Dwight choke. Montague was an appalling character; snobbish, misogynistic, racist, and he took obvious delight in discomfiting us. ‘I don’t like that man,’ Montague said, once he’d made sure Dwight was within earshot. ‘I don’t like his shoes.’
‘Actually that makes two of us,’ I agreed. Dwight’s inexplicable transmogrification into an English gent was continuing unabated. For Montague’s opening gambit – a show of Waverley’s grounds, Dwight had worn a new pair of brown brogues, which Wolf gleefully later reported gave him terrible blisters.
The afternoon we arrived, we were able, by sheer good fortune, to film a fox hunt. It was everything we could have hoped for. The red coats, the sherry, the baleful howling of the hounds as they were given a whiff of fox. We even got the anti-hunt protesters, and Montague’s hysterically funny dealings with them. Rory was totally against us filming and spent an hour on the telephone trying to talk Sir Montague out of it, but Montague clearly relished the controversy and Rory, having driven straight back to London soon after delivering us, was 200 miles away.
When he reappeared the following day he was still angry.
‘The hunting issue is highly inflammatory, as you’re well aware, so if you’re going to include it you need to understand it.’
I had been about to make the same point myself, but the lecturing tone of his voice got to me. ‘What was it one of your poets, Oscar Wilde or someone, called it? The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable? Yeah…’ I said smugly, ‘That was it.’
&n
bsp; ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it was Shaw—’
‘Are you trying to say that you’re pro fox hunting?’
‘That’s not the point—’
‘Well I mean you either are or you aren’t, right?’
‘I’m pro fox hunting and I’m pro the fox.’
‘My people might call that sitting on the fence.’
‘I can tell you what I’m not pro,’ he said, ‘and that’s the trumpeting lines of hideous sanctimonious do-gooders like yourself, ignoring the wishes of people in the countryside…’
‘I suppose you’re up for clubbing seals too.’
‘… who feel they can dictate to their “intellectual” inferiors, ignoring the fact that everyone in a democracy has a free choice.’
‘And why not eat a little dolphin in your tuna salad?’
‘Before you start preaching to me,’ he said furiously, ‘perhaps you should be obliged, in between bites of your steak sandwich, to watch lambs and cows being butchered in an abattoir. Did you know that when cows smell the blood of their own species they start screaming in panic?’
He was insufferably pompous. ‘Hey, I film what I see,’ I yelled at his retreating back.
* * *
We didn’t see him for the rest of the day, which was unusual, given his fondness for frowning and spluttering during interviews. We were talking to Montague in his dressing room where he had requested to be filmed, backlit and coiled on his bed in a hilariously opulent velvet dressing gown.