by Jessica Mann
The London Library. Rosamund never knew that it had a back entrance. A young man came out and walked quickly away, and was followed soon by a girl. Rosamund slipped along the path through which they had emerged, and found herself pushing open a door into the basement of the Library. Other members of staff were on their way out, their voices preceding them along the passage. Rosamund stripped off her overall and scarf. Two girls came into the lobby. ‘Can I help you?’ one asked.
‘I was looking for the Newspaper Room. I seem to have landed up in the wrong place. Didn’t they say it was down here?’
‘I’ll show you. Look, through here, and along the passage.’
‘Thank you. Is it nearly closing time?’
‘No, it’s Thursday. Late opening until seven thirty.’
The Newspaper Room was empty, and Rosamund pulled a bound volume of The Times at random from the shelves and opened it on the high table. She was sure to be recognised when she went upstairs; but the Library was always full of well known faces, and its members refrained from staring. But there would be no anonymity for Rosamund in London.
The volume she had picked was the collected editions of 1957. That was the year Phoebe and Aidan Britton were married, and the year her father died. Rosamund turned to read the announcement again. ‘Married quietly yesterday,’ it said. They had been quick and private because Sholto was dying.
She turned on some pages. The Times had devoted a whole page to his obituary and, a few numbers later, to his obsequies. Rosamund could not see much difference between the pictures of her younger self and the frightened woman she had seen in the mirror today.
Rosamund went out of the Newspaper Room, and waited for the lift. On the entrance floor, dangerously many people were waiting by the catalogues and the issue desk. One of the librarians stood aside, but Rosamund said, ‘No, I’m going up further,’ and he joined her in the metal cubicle.
Up again, to the literature floors, and into the dim stacks where through the floor gratings one saw books below and books above. As a girl, Rosamund had wondered whether men might see up her skirt from the floors beneath. Once she had caught her stiletto heel in between the bars, and been forced to break it off the shoe and limp shamingly down, and out into St James’s Square. How many hours had she spent here, browsing and tasting? Here was Buchan, there Household, with their fictional examples of successful fugitives; here Sapper, there Oppenheim, Ambler, Fleming, Innes, Yates, all the thrillers long forgotten and now so imprecisely recalled, unhelpfully arrayed with their different circumstances, their other agonies. None made a textbook for a woman without experience, money, training or inclination to learn heroism. Better to read the Greek myths, or mediaeval romances, and believe that a knight in shining armour was on his way, even now, to rescue her.
In musty, dusty, private corners, hidden by ranks of religious history or theological quandary, Rosamund and Sylvester Crawford had embraced; another time, working at a table among the stacks of literary criticism, reminding each other of examinations to come as they were diverted by more physical enthusiasms, they had seen, below in the Square, a dustcart crush a bubble car to fragments. Sylvester had planned out a murder story, in which a victim, upstairs in Folios and Periodicals, dripped blood down through law and modern history so that a detective, floors below, should look up to see the corpse. But now, looking down through the gratings of French literature, Rosamund saw men who might be her enemies, and did not pause to wonder whether her reaction was paranoia or prudence. Sylvester had imagined poison darts flying through the gratings, or knives, or poisonous gases. Rosamund fled to the lift, but remembering how slowly it answered the bell, went on to the stairs, hurrying down them past the portraits of famous literary figures, all male, she noticed absent-mindedly, and yet when she was young it had never entered her head that women’s faces should appear in such galleries, and went on into the populated Reading Room where silent readers would guard her. She stood concealed from the door by the rack of reference directories, and looked up Steven Courtney, as she had learnt he was now called, in Who’s Who. He had been a don for a while, and had published three books about the alleviation of famine; he had been the national director of Hunger for seven years. He had put as his hobbies, Doing nothing, and doing nothing much, and had evidently become as English as his new name. His house, in a suburb of Cambridge, was called Copperbeeches.
‘Rosamund!’
There was a stir around the room as the loud voice broke the silence. The librarian half rose, but recognised the speaker and changed his mind.
‘Cousin Harriet.’
Harriet might be old, and the aristocracy a fading power, but there were still some names that carried more influence than that due simply to their owners. Harriet was like ‘home’ in some life-and-death game of hide-and-seek. Rosamund slipped her arm through Harriet’s. It was as fat as a girl’s waist. The vast old woman waddled to the door, and down the stairs. Wide as they were, there was not room for Harriet and another person to go side by side. Her huge frame seemed as reassuring and protective as when Harriet had hoicked a twelve-year-old Rosamund out of a trout stream into which she had fallen; but Harriet said, as they waited for her books to be entered, ‘Sorry I couldn’t get to the funeral. They won’t let me fly. I have to sail, very boring. I’m off on the Elizabeth tomorrow.’
Harriet signed her name with a flourish. It was she who had given life membership of the Library to Rosamund as a twenty-first birthday present. The same Rolls Royce was waiting that had been bought, new, by Harriet’s father in 1930.
‘My last luxury,’ Harriet grunted, while her chauffeur folded the fur rug across her lap. ‘Can’t get taxis when you want ’em, can’t park. Pays for itself though. I hire it out for weddings. Chap loves it. Counts the days to the next one. Right, John?’
‘Quite right, my lady.’
Harriet wound the handle to raise the window between herself and the driver. ‘You can come back with me,’ she announced. ‘Don’t know what you’ve been up to, but you look dreadful. Heard from Aidan you were back. Said you weren’t well.’
‘You’ve seen Aidan?’
‘Came to tell me about the funeral. Worried about you.’
There was a traffic jam in The Mall, and a blaze of lights at the Palace end of it. Rosamund looked fondly at her kinswoman; the Marchioness in her own right, heir to a thousand aristocrats, dressed in brown crimplene with a tartan scarf around her bulging neck and a small turquoise ring pressing into the flesh of her third finger, as unlike as could be to the delicious mother who had been a famous beauty, who had queued in her carriage in this equally crowded Mall and heard that same title announced when she swept into the Palace ahead. By the time that Rosamund and Phoebe were debutantes, they made their curtseys in cotton dresses and feathered hats at a garden party, but they had been driven to it in this same car. The old Marchioness was pictured with three plumes of ostrich feather crowning a pyramid of glossy jewelled hair; her daughter, a greater age now than her mother ever reached, wore a net stretched over her dingy locks, and grey hairpins dangled precariously through its holes. Harriet had never been a beauty, and being an heiress had been able to choose her own life. She scandalised her family by becoming a scholar. A college at Oxford was named after her, and a library in Leeds. She had been both chancellor and vice-chancellor of universities.
The car inched forward on the wet road. A grey afternoon had turned into a soaking evening. Pedestrians peered through the windows of the imposing machine, and Harriet absent-mindedly bowed and waved.
She said, ‘We can’t have dissension in the family at this time. Out of the question.’
‘Dissension, Cousin Harriet?’
‘Britton needs the Sholto connection. Crucial time coming up. Stand together. Close ranks. S’what your father would have said.’
‘Do you think he would, Cousin Harriet? Do you think he would have been for Britton? Britton for Britain?’
‘Can’t have Sholto’s daugh
ter queering Britton’s pitch. Phoebe not cold in her grave. Rank disloyalty. Promised I’d get the two of you together, shake hands, scotch rumours. You have been out of the country for too long, you don’t understand what’s happening. Only hope.’
It was pouring now, the heavy rain tapping on the car’s roof. To half-closed eyes, the lights and their reflections blurred into an orange pattern. A troop of guardsmen marched by, their feet thumping wetly onto the pavement.
‘And what’s this I have been hearing about you, my girl?’ Harriet’s little eyes peered shrewdly into Rosamund’s face. ‘Giving comfort to Her Majesty’s enemies? Terrorists? Sholto’s daughter?’
‘I’ll tell you everything soon,’ Rosamund said. She leant forward to turn the door handle.
‘You can’t go now. I want to talk to you. Aidan –’
‘Darling Harriet, I’m sorry. Another time.’ Rosamund stepped out into a puddle, dodged a bicycle, and disappeared between the shadows of the trees.
Chapter Eight
‘And that was that?’ the Director of Security asked. ‘She simply disappeared?’
The Minister, usually the most imperturbable of men, ran his finger between his collar and his chin. ‘We have no further record of her movements.’
The Director scribbled a note in his private shorthand, which was derived from Hebrew, ‘They lost her.’ Not that he would have expected Britton’s boys to do anything else.
‘I am sure you understand that it was thought necessary to keep her under surveillance,’ Aidan Britton said. ‘We were all worried about her. Her uncle, myself …’
‘I quite understand.’
‘Of course, what she thinks about me in private life is unimportant. But threats to the holder of my Office –’
‘She actually made threats then?’
‘Implicitly.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Of course she is not herself, poor girl. She needs treatment. But until we can get her into a clinic there is no telling what she might do.’
The Director leafed through the papers on his desk. ‘This message through the agreed secret channels seems to prove her connection with the Irish republicans. When was it received?’
‘It was rung through to my private office an hour ago. She had been out of sight for some time. The proper code words were used. Whoever it was sounded very self-satisfied.’
‘My people are working on the tape now. But it won’t be identifiable. They never are.’
‘An Irish accent.’
‘They always are. Real or assumed.’ The Director of Security looked over Aidan Britton’s shoulder to a framed photograph on the wall, showing a procession along Whitehall, flags at half mast, a formation of aircraft above. ‘I was there,’ he murmured. ‘Lieutenant of Marines. I remember every minute of it.’
‘So do I,’ Aidan Britton said. He was in the foreground of the picture, walking black-coated behind the coffin. He stood up and went over to the window. ‘Impossible to allow a word of this to get out. Think of the consequences.’
‘Sholto’s daughter and the IRA,’ the Director agreed. ‘Unthinkable.’
‘These girls,’ Aidan Britton said. ‘It can’t be what the suffragettes expected. Bridget Rose Dugdale and Ulrike Meinhof.’
‘One is occasionally inclined to wish that public affairs had remained a male preserve, I agree. Kinder, kuche, kirche and all that.’
‘Husband, home and hats. Of course the trouble with poor Rosamund is that she never married. Always being influenced by one unsuitable man after another. Her current lover buys arms for terrorists as a tax loss.’
The two men sat in silence for a moment, one thin and grey, the other as glossy and firm as he appeared in company reports or political pamphlets. ‘Well Director, I hope you feel able to cope with this distasteful business without letting any information outside your private office. Have to be sure the chaps will keep their mouths shut, what?’
‘Discretion is essential, certainly. On the other hand, we shall need ready access to the police computer facilities.’
‘Do bear in mind my own access to other sources. Credit cards, passport controls … let me know what you need. And of course, my own staff will carry on their enquiries. The trouble is that it really couldn’t be at a worse time for me. This distraction, just now, when the PM … I am a very busy man.’
‘Not to mention your bereavement.’
‘Yes, that too. Well, you’ll be sure to use only as few operatives as possible, I’m sure, and be certain of their discretion above all things. We’ll have to hope we can flush her out. A face as well known as hers will be …’
‘I shall keep my young man on the job.’
‘Barnes?’
‘He was satisfactory, I hope?’
‘So long as he’s discreet.’
‘All my staff are discreet,’ the Director of Security said.
Chapter Nine
Pillow talk.
Ian Barnes and Tamara Hoyland had made no promises to love, honour or obey, but they told each other everything.
‘So then you lost her?’ Tamara said.
‘It was horrible, chasing the wretched woman all over that damned mountain,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe that she could be any threat to your horrid master.’ Tamara had disapproved of Ian’s secondment to the Minister.
‘They said she was a danger to him.’
‘I expect he deserves it.’
‘She certainly seemed rather nice.’
The sky, seen through a dirty skylight, between the meshes of burglar proofing, was a limpid blue. Some shrivelled leaves were caught on the panes, blown there in last night’s storm, and soon to be tossed elsewhere in autumn gales. Inside the large room, tendrils of climbing plants stretched towards the glass.
‘I don’t see how someone like that could completely disappear,’ Tamara said.
‘They picked her up when she entered the country, trailed her from the airport, lost her, picked her up again and lost her for good in the Portia Club. Buffoons.’
‘And where were you?’
‘On the way back to London with the Minister.’
Tamara rolled away from Ian on the wide mattress, and off it onto the floor. ‘We had better eat. I’m exhausted.’
‘Busy day?’
‘Lots of frenzied filing.’ Tamara was due to leave soon for an end of season excavation in Central Europe. Ian had hoped to take his holiday then too, and dig with her, but it was beginning to look as though he might not get away.
‘Damn the woman, anyway.’ Tamara said. Ian handed her a plateful of pizza and delicatessen salad.
‘You eat while I show you what I’ve got.’ He set up the projector, and Tamara threw another illegal log onto the fire. He bent down to kiss her, and she murmured, ‘The spy who loved me.’
‘I had to sneak this out.’ He switched the machine on. Newsclips from recent bulletins: Phoebe Britton’s death, a shot of the wicked drop over which she had fallen, a studio photograph of her. Lots of clips charting Aidan Britton’s career with his wife half a step behind him wherever he went. Their wedding, a still series in black and white, Phoebe Sholto veiled on her uncle’s arm, Phoebe Britton, the new bride, the veil thrown back, her adoring gaze on her new husband’s face, and his on the camera. His first election campaign, he bounding over garden fences to chat up housewives with a huge rosette on his coat, she waiting on the pavement, with an armful of leaflets slipping from her grasp. His election, with him waving to enthusiasts outside the Town Hall, his wife too exhausted even to smile. By the time of the next election, there were motion pictures, just like the earlier stills, except that now Phoebe Britton sat in the loudspeaker van while her husband knocked on doors.
A jump back in time, to Sholto’s funeral: Tamara remembered seeing the whole two hours of it on live television, on a half holiday from school. ‘Watch it,’ her father had urged, ‘you can tell your grandchildren about it.’ But her attention had strayed to
the remarkable tears on her father’s cheek. Britton was there, following the gun carriage, fatter than he had been even weeks before at his wedding, and, on a colour film, red cheeked, glossy haired. A long study of the row of family mourners, Phoebe in a hat and veil, Rosamund slightly behind her sister, her eyes rigidly to the front. She looked, Tamara thought, embarrassed.
Another funeral: Phoebe Britton’s own. There were more camera men than subjects in the pictures. Rosamund Sholto stood apart from her brother-in-law, looking tired and anxious. There was a glimpse of Ian in the background in his formal funeral clothes. The camera followed the black cars as they drove away through the incongruously touristic scenery.
Ian put another cassette into the machine. This was not of the quality provided by news broadcasts, but had evidently been cobbled together in a hurry. Snapshots of the Sholto girls when young; a studio portrait of Rosamund Sholto as a debutante, bare neck and shoulders rising from a cloud of tulle, a graduated row of pearls around her neck. News photographs of her at various stages in her career. This film ended with the dots and dashes of home movies.
‘Shall I show you the other stuff?’ Ian said. ‘It might give you an idea, of where she’d be.’ He pulled a green folder from his case, in which miscellaneous papers were held together with a metal tag. Inside the front cover was pasted a form for those who had read the contents to initial and date. So far, only the Director of Security and Ian’s immediate boss, Mr Black, had appended their hieroglyphs.
The contents showed signs of having been assembled in haste, for the photocopies smelt of developing fluid and the newspaper cuttings were unyellowed. There had been no previous file on Rosamund Sholto.
Born April 26th, 1939; daughter of Sholto, of course, and of Muriel born Kennedy, whose family came from County Cork.
‘There’s the Irish connection, you see,’ Ian Barnes pointed out.
Muriel Sholto had been killed in one of the last air raids on London while Sholto was away attending a pre-peace conference in North Africa, and the little girls were in rural safety with their grandmother at Middlewood. Rosamund had been educated at a local prep school, at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Newnham College, Cambridge, the Architectural Association, and a period of practical experience with an architects’ practice in America. She did a stint with a large firm in London, during which she won a competition for the design of a block of flats, and was nominated as the ‘Promising Architect of the Sixties’. Then she moved permanently to New York.