by Fiona Walker
Legs glanced anxiously towards the stairs.
‘Dad gave him regular tips,’ he went on. ‘There’s nothing underhand in a jockey tipping, provided it’s one of his own rides. And with Thelonious Monk, he knew the horse couldn’t lose. What he didn’t realise until too late was that the race was being targeted by a gambling ring, so the horse would be hampered to hell.’
‘And he’d lose his whole career,’ Legs breathed.
‘Hector tried to help financially after the accident,’ Byrne went on, his voice bitter, ‘but I think that was just an excuse to keep Poppy in his sights. Dad hated him. He convinced himself that Hector had deliberately set him up for the fall. He had a girl who came in and cared for him – another of Goblin Granny’s recommendations – full of conspiracy theories that played to his paranoia; her imagination was amazing. I can’t remember her name.’
‘Liz.’
‘That’s right – Thin Lizzie.’ He looked at her in surprise. ‘Jesus, my research assistant strikes again.’
Legs bit her lip, realising that he had no idea that Liz Delamere was the reason she was so well informed, and that her daughter was tied up in the Protheroe dynasty too.
She opened her mouth to explain, then stopped herself because she wanted to hear more. Witnessing Byrne opening up was like watching the most extraordinary dawn breaking. She was hypnotised by the intensity of his face and his voice.
He picked charred leather from the notebook’s cover: ‘Dad used to play “Whisky in the Jar” to her; she had the patience to listen to him rant on for hours, which nobody else did, trying to make sense of his ramblings – if you can call it sense. Between them, they created this scenario with Hector as the personification of evil. That suited me just fine at the time.’ He looked up at her, and the rage in his eyes seemed to scorch right through the room, ‘I wanted to hate him too. Thin Lizzie came and went, but Dad stuck to his story religiously. He knew Hector wanted his wife for himself. When Poppy took a job working for the festival, that plot twist had already been written in his suspicious mind many times over. Dad had his bags packed long before she left him.’
‘Did his storyline include you coming back to Farcombe for revenge?’ she asked before she could stop herself.
He looked away, evading the question, eyes focusing on her hand resting on the table between them. He reached out for it again, and she felt an electric charge course up it as he placed it back in the bowl. She half expected to see the water inside boil with the heat sparking off their linked fingers.
‘Would you want revenge?’ he turned the tables.
‘Quite probably,’ she said honestly. ‘But I don’t play the long game in anything, so I’d have tried to cut Hector’s brakes with a pen knife aged ten. If that didn’t work, I’d have written him a very long, very angry letter. It’s pretty pathetic.’
‘I’ve done one of those already.’ He let out a gruff laugh. ‘All six novels of it. Who do you think Rushlore is based on?’
Legs let out a gasp of delight which turned into a predictable chesty cough as she instantly recognised Hector as Ptolemy’s gargantuan, waspish enemy who breathes poisonous wind, fire, sand and ice through the many fluted tentacles that rise from his neck and shoulders, has a weakness for country music and flirts outrageously with Purple at every opportunity.
Byrne relaxed briefly, that intense face watching hers, his trust burning loyalty deeper into her heart as he sank back in his chair. ‘There was a big argument last week. I shouted a lot, mostly at Hector. Now Poppy wants me to come to her grand dinner and “all make friends”. I hate formal gatherings; I can’t stand the pretence.’
‘But you’re keeping up the biggest pretence of all,’ she pointed out, her voice growing hoarser. ‘You’re Gordon Lapis.’
Trust destroyed, he glared at her as though she’d just shouted ‘the butler did it!’ at curtain up for The Mousetrap.
‘When were you planning to break it to Poppy that you’re the festival’s star act?’ she went on, rasping now. ‘Or is revenge going to be your mother and Hector learning the truth about you at the same time as an audience of millions across the world?’
‘I’ve never wanted publicity.’
‘Pretty hard to avoid it now.’
He rubbed his face uneasily. ‘I always planned to come back here to find my mother,’ he admitted. ‘I wanted to do it as soon as I got published, to show her how well I’d done; I thought it would make her love me. But in the end I couldn’t do that to Dad. He was still so bitter, and terrified of losing me. And he was going through hell around that time trying to quit drinking. His liver’s so shot to pieces; the doctors kept warning him that he’d be dead in a year if he didn’t stop. My kids’ fantasy book didn’t seem important compared to his life. The advance was tiny; I had no idea it would be such a success. I asked to stay anonymous to protect my father, and then it seemed easier to keep it like that.
‘Dad knew the truth, of course, and he was incredibly proud. Not long after that, he started turning his life around. He’s stayed dry five years now; he’s back training full-time and his horses are winning some decent races; he’s even found love again. Last year, they got married and he finally gave me his blessing to come to England to see Poppy.’
‘By which point Gordon Lapis was publishing’s best kept secret,’ she realised, her strained voice barely more than a whisper now.
He nodded, ‘I never dreamed it would be such a success story: Ptolemy Finch is a huge global franchise, but of course it’s all happened remotely. I just wrote the books and banked the cheques. I like it that way.’
‘Didn’t you resent getting no public credit?’
‘Any publicity would inevitably rake up Dad’s accident; I had to protect him. What he’s achieved in the past few years is far more glorious than my writing career. He couldn’t have done that in the shadow of Gordon Lapis. Nowadays, he’s the one who is frustrated that he can’t boast that Gordon is a part of the family, but I enjoy my life just the way it is; I love my family and friends, my freedom. I’ve never wanted that to change, although the money is grand.’
‘But you’ve always wanted to contact Poppy again?’
‘All my adult life. When I thought about coming to England, I’d get very keyed up about needing my mother to acknowledge my success, and getting one over on Hector. I was too twisted up with anger and hurt to know how to deal with it. I kept starting letters to her and not knowing what to say or how to explain. Then, out of the blue, she emailed me – or rather she emailed Gordon.’
‘Poppy sent Gordon Lapis fan mail?’
He nodded. ‘She signed the message with her maiden name, but it came from the Farcombe email address so it was obvious who she was. Of course she had no idea it was me. She said reading Ptolemy Finch was her secret vice, and that she absolutely adored my books.’
‘You must have felt so thrilled.’
‘Not entirely. I didn’t want Poppy to love Gordon; I wanted her to love me, her son. I really resented the fact she could write such gushing praise to Gordon but hadn’t sent me a birthday card in fifteen years.’
Put like that, Legs could see his point. ‘What did you do?’
‘I telephoned her, but I was so tongue-tied that she heard my name wrong, calling me “Mr Goburn”, and when I said that I was a voice from the past, she seemed to think I was a historian, so I bottled out and decided to email instead. At first, I just sent her a couple of lines apologising for the strange call. My private Gmail address doesn’t have an automatic signature. She replied to ‘Jay Goburn’ straight away and was so charming, sending lots of details about the house and its history, that I couldn’t bring myself to disillusion her.’
‘So you corresponded as yet another alter ego?’ Her strained, whispering voice had settled into a comfortable niche now, somewhere between inflating bagpipes and a snooker commentator.
He shrugged. ‘I guess, albeit accidentally. It gave me an opportunity to get to know her again,
and it was obvious how unhappy and frustrated she was. I stopped feeling quite so angry with her, although I still longed to shock her into action. She seemed to be living a half-life, using her agoraphobia as defence shield.’
‘Like you use Gordon?’
‘Perhaps a little,’ he acknowledged. ‘Maybe we both needed a way out. By that point, Conrad was really getting on my case about revealing my identity as Gordon’s creator, threatening to frogmarch me onto Oprah or to Hay-on-Wye, so I Googled this place for the hell of it. I read a profile of Hector in an online newspaper, full of praise for his championing of the Arts and his charitable benevolence, tipping him for a knighthood this year; it made me so angry.’
‘He didn’t get it,’ Legs glanced at the stairs, remembering Francis saying that he’d started the affair with Lucy as a result of that snub.
‘I told Conrad I’d come here to Farcombe out of bloody-mindedness; I knew enough about the festival to see the selection process would never allow any commercial writer past, let alone a monstrous mega-seller like Gordon. I didn’t think it could really happen but I figured that if it did, it was fate. Then you got involved and tempted fate.’
‘Is that why you turned up to try to stop me?’ She eyed him hopefully.
He shook his head, turning the notebook over in his hands, not looking at her. ‘You mentioned that Hector had left Poppy. I had to come.’
‘Oh.’
‘Besides, Gordon had grown very fond of you, and it was obvious Conrad was exploiting you. It wasn’t fair.’
‘You’re Gordon, Byrne. You! And you’re Mr Goburn. And even Kelly the PA!’
‘I know.’ He still wouldn’t look at her. ‘Having alter egos is the ultimate in egotism, according to my father. He says Gordon is my excuse to be cantankerous and anti-social; my OCD. I guess that makes Kelly my bossy and conscientious streak.’
‘I was so mad when I found out she was you,’ she remembered irritably, coughs blasting though her chest like firecrackers.
He reached for her hand again, long since escaped from its water soak. The electric current ran across her skin the moment he touched her; her burned thumb throbbed. She waited for him to lift it and drop it back in its watery harbour, but he held on tight.
‘I’m sorry. You were the only one I wanted to break through the alter egos and overturn the tables. And you have.’ He looked up at her face.
Legs found that once their gazes met, it was impossible to tear them apart. Her stomach seemed to burn away faster than the shredded tailcoat pocket still crumpled in front of her.
‘I adore Gordon,’ she said truthfully. ‘His sense of humour is so wonderful. I even like his cantankerousness. It’s all that angry energy that fuels his talent.’
‘He was certainly pretty angry when he arrived here.’ He looked away abruptly, placing her hand back into the water bowl. ‘And yes, when I first planned this, perhaps I did think there’d be a great deal of satisfaction in revealing who I really was while my mother and Hector watched on, unaware. What better platform to announce what an immoral crook Hector Protheroe is than his own festival stage, after all?’
‘So that’s what you’re planning to do?’ Legs gaped at him, torn between fear and admiration.
Reaching for the leather notebook, he flipped trough to select one of the least burned pages and started reading out the list of abbreviations running down the final column, the acronyms which Legs hadn’t understood, ‘ICA, BDRS – they’re all charities,’ he explained. ‘Mostly art funds. That’s where all his winnings went – about two million in total in this book alone.’
‘Hector gave his winnings to charity?’
Byrne closed the book angrily. ‘It’s pretty irresponsible to fund one’s charitable donations through gambling, perhaps, but that fits the character perfectly; it was his money to lose and he mostly made a profit after all. I guess that was a part of the thrill. His philanthropy is still a matter of record. He won’t be judged any differently if this fact is made public, in fact many will admire him all the more for that famous loveable roguishness. That he stole his wife from another man and fucked up my childhood in the process is neither here nor there in the world at large, particularly all these years later. It’s just a romantic aside to a long, benevolent calling as a patron of the arts.’ His eyes flashed angrily. ‘I should thank you, Allegra. This has saved me.’ He held up the book. ‘If I try to publicly discredit Hector as planned, he’d have me laughed off the stage. And wouldn’t he just love to see me squirm?’
‘You’ve certainly stoked his anger,’ Legs thought about the threats she’d overheard in the study.
‘He knows I hate him. This makes no difference.’ He turned the book in his hands. ‘It wasn’t just a broken back Dad suffered; what Hector did to my father’s heart is just as bad.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
He looked around the little cottage, scene of a summer’s love-nesting. ‘You tell me. You must hate him too.’
‘Hector’s armour-plated; trying to fight fire with fire just means getting burned.’ She glared at the bassoon resting on its stand in the corner, coughing angrily. ‘You have to wait for him to trundle off and find a new target.’
He turned to her again, taking in the dusty velvet dress covered with twigs, the pale skin and wild hair. ‘Is that what you think I should do, Heavenly Pony? Lie low in the woods until he goes away?’
‘Obviously not,’ she said hotly, wondering if it would be petty to suggest they smash up the bassoon and quickly deciding it would. ‘But he’s had life his own way for a very long time, and now Poppy has a new hero just as he’s been caught behaving very badly indeed, he’s bound to be defensive. You already have the perfect comeuppance to hand. If I’d written all those amazing books and held claim over the world’s most famous pseudonym, I’d stand up and shout my real name to the rooftops. That was always the idea in coming here, after all, wasn’t it? Forget Hector. Let him join the congratulatory queue.’
Byrne was staring angrily at the bassoon now too. He stared at it for so long, Legs half expected it to start leaping around the room batting the crockery on the draining board into orbit and playing refrains from ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’.
‘Even if it were as straightforward as you say.’ He rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. ‘I’m not sure Poppy could take it. I had no idea how fragile she was until now. I can’t stand back and watch her get hurt just to revel in schadenfreude.’
‘So tell her the truth beforehand.’
‘That won’t stop the media invasion,’ he pointed out. ‘Exposing her to public glare could damage her very deeply.’
‘But she’s always courted publicity; she’s the ultimate attention seeker.’
‘Good publicity, yes – the sort that means she doesn’t have to leave Farcombe. But this isn’t about hosting a jolly lunch for Brian Sewell then giving him a tour of the sculpture garden. This is the ugly, angry, resentful public exposure and invasion of privacy that comes with mass media popularity. You know as well as anyone the sort of attention Gordon attracts, the stalkers, begging letters and hate mail. As soon as this secret gets out, Poppy will be exposed to that alongside the feature pieces and photo shoots.’
It was starting to dawn on Legs that he’d hidden behind a pen name all these years to protect his father, only to find that when he had Brooke’s blessing to reveal the truth, his mother needed shielding just as much.
‘Maybe that’s what the threatening letters which have come to Farcombe are about.’
His eyes fixed on hers. ‘Who exactly were they addressed to?’
‘I’m not sure, but Poppy opened them first,’ she whispered. ‘There have been two, I think. I don’t know what they contain, but I’m guessing it’s something like the potty ones we used to get through the agency when I still handled your snail mail. Conrad got a temp in when it started arriving in sacks, so I have no idea what they write these days.’
‘Still much the
same: mostly that they love Ptolemy; sometimes that they love me; occasionally that they want to kill me. It goes with the territory. The more imaginative ones add diagrams and illustrations of how they’d go about it.’
‘What do they want to do to you?’ she asked in trepidation.
‘Pretty much the same as I did to Ptolemy in Raven’s Curse, I should think.’ He looked away. ‘If someone’s sending threats direct to Farcombe, it’s my fault. I’ve screwed up big time.’
Legs remembered Conrad saying that the novel would be highly controversial, and that Gopi and Poppy had both despaired in the final chapters. ‘Is it something to do with what happens at the end of the book?’ she asked quietly.
‘You mean you haven’t read it?’ He looked hurt, Gordon’s fragile ego flashing through the customary Byrne cool.
‘I haven’t quite finished.’
‘Where are you up to?’
‘The dedication.’
‘That’s a crushing blow for an author’s ego.’
‘Ghosts don’t read too fast,’ she joked feebly then jumped as a gunshot cracked in the woods nearby, water splashing everywhere.
Reaching out automatically to catch the rolling water bowl and return her hand to it, Byrne turned towards the noise. ‘If I hang around here together much longer, I might be able to test that theory.’
‘It’s just Hector shooting game,’ she reminded him, clinging onto his fingers underwater. ‘Poppy should really add a brace of pleasant to her sculpture for authenticity.’
His eyes watched the windows warily. Then he said, ‘Inside each and every one of Poppy’s abstract fibreglass sculptures are amazing caricatures like the one we saw in the cellars.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘She calls them “the hidden truths”.’ He turned to her. ‘The smooth outer shell conceals the real grotesque within. It’s conceptual, but even the concept is kept secret.’