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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
CHAPTER 1
“THEA?”
“Oh hello, Lydia.”
“Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Really lovely. Summer here at last, I hope.”
“I was wondering, dear, if Andrew will be going into Halifax today, or in the next day or two?”
“I imagine so . . . Yes, I’m sure he will.”
“It’s so unlike me, but I’m nearly out of paper. I did so many drafts of the assassination chapter last week that I got very low without noticing it.”
“A ream of A4, then? I’ll tell him.”
“That’s awfully kind. Any old stuff will do. And tell him I shan’t need it before the weekend. Any news? Any letters?”
“Nothing of interest . . . Oh sorry—I forgot. I did have a letter from Maurice.”
“Poor Maurice. No sign of life on that front?”
“That depends what you mean by life, Lydia. The letter is full of details of in-fighting among the various television companies. I couldn’t really follow it. I gather things are fraught because of the new Broadcasting Act.”
“I know you think me a snob, Thea, but I can’t get over the feeling that television is frightfully infra dig, and commercial television—well, almost beneath contempt.”
“It’s an old-fashioned view, Lydia. I get a great deal of cachet having a son in television, I can tell you, and I’d get a great deal more if he actually appeared on the screen.”
“Most of my views are old-fashioned, I suppose. . . . When I said signs of life I meant that wife of his. Any signs of his getting rid of her yet?”
“No, of course not. He still seems quite devoted.”
“Hmmm. He’ll never be anything with that woman dragging him down. If only Gavin had lived. . . .”
There was silence at the other end.
“Well, thank Andy in advance. I’ll drop down and pick up the paper when I know he’s been into town.”
“No need. He’ll drop it up to you, or I will.”
“Sweet of you, dear. You know I appreciate it. Have a nice day, as the Americans say.”
“You too, Lydia.”
Thus went the telephone conversation between Lydia Perceval and her sister Thea Hoddle on a morning in late June. Like most conversations, particularly conversations between near relatives, this one had not only a text, but a subtext. Two sub-texts in fact. In Lydia Perceval’s mind the sub-text went: I’ll go through the motions of asking, but of course Andy will be going into Halifax, and we both know why. Maurice is a poor fish, pulled down by a silly job and an impossible wife, and he is so because you and Andy hated the influence I had over him. Not that Maurice had the seeds of greatness in him. But Gavin did. Gavin would have been a hero.
And in Thea Hoddle’s mind the sub-text went: You know damned well Andy will be going into Halifax, because he has to collect his dole money and he has to buy drink. If Maurice’s life is unsatisfactory it is because you had absurd ambitions for him and put absurd notions into his head. You fought me for my sons, you bitch. Gavin would never have joined the navy if it hadn’t been for the nonsense you filled him with. You killed him! You killed my son!
• • •
Lydia Perceval finished a paragraph in her elegant, sloping longhand that could have been sent straight to the printer, so legible was it. She laid down her pen and stretched her arms above her head. A good paragraph in a good chapter. Craftsmanship was its own reward. You felt good because you knew it was right—not right historically, though Lydia’s use of sources was impeccable and her judgment balanced, but right artistically: the book would be shapely, aesthetically satisfying.
She got up from her desk and looked out of the window that gave on to the front garden. Summer really had come: the first roses were out, pink and triumphant. The laburnum was a picture—a shower of gold. No, yellow. Wordsworth was wrong about daffodils: they are yellow, and so is laburnum. Accuracy in all things, that was what Lydia believed in, though she did not always realize that understanding yourself and your own motives is often more difficult than understanding an historical figure.
She came from the window and walked around her study. Her eyes caught with affection the photographs and reproductions that she cherished: Queen Charlotte and her dog by Breeley, T. E. Lawrence on a motor-cycle, George V and Nicholas II at Cowes, Byron landing from a boat in a rocky landscape, from the painting by George Sanders. At moments of stasis such as this she had always in the past had a cigarette. She had given them up three years ago, feeling nicotine was really a smelly menace and a weakness she could conquer, and she had. Still, nothing quite replaced a cigarette as something to do, in the intervals of writing.
Her eye strayed to the photograph on top of the little bookcase by the door, the photograph that was above all others painfully dear to her: her nephew Gavin in the uniform of a Royal Navy lieutenant, taken just a month before he set sail for the Falklands. He had been in Washington at the time, attached to the Embassy. He had written to her constantly about his job, his plans, his new and exciting friends. She had loved thinking about him, and the conquests he must be making. In the studio portrait he looked straight ahead at the photographer, clean, proud, brave. Her heart missed a beat as a picture came into her mind of the boys as she remembered them best: in summer shorts and shirts, wheeling their bikes up the hill from the village, Gavin dark and clear-eyed, the perfect sporting schoolboy, Maurice fairer of hair and smaller, but talking animatedly and excitedly. Then they would come in through her gate, and the lovely part of the day would begin.
And now Maurice was working at a foolish, demeaning job, married to a sluttish woman with a Birmingham accent. And Gavin, dear, dear Gavin, had sailed off, proud and excited, to fight in the Falklands War, never to come back.
She turned her eyes away from the photograph. It had always absurdly hurt her that her sister Thea had the same photograph on her living room mantelpiece. She went into her sister’s home as seldom as she decently could.
She turned back towards her desk. Her biography of Charles X was reaching its climactic point: Louis XVIII would shortly shuffle off the long sickness of his life, and the old reactionary would become king at last. People with power, and the way they wielded it, had always fascinated Lydia. Her biography of Charles had not disguised her subject’s weaknesses: his garrulity, his unwisdom, his treachery, And yet when it came to that moment when the last legitimate monarch of France abdicated on the steps of the Château of Saint Cloud, there would hang over her lucid prose an autumnal tinge of sadness and regret at a notable passing, a loss of much that was fine and beautiful.
She took a deep breath and sat down at her desk. Her next page was now clear in her mind.
Lunch was usually a scratch meal for Lydia. For dinner she cooked herself unusual and exquisite things, never thinking the effort wasted on herself alone, but for lunch she always had
boiled eggs, or toasted cheese, or a made meal from Marks and Spencer’s, kept in the deep freeze. Today it was canneloni, and when it was eaten, and a cup of tea drunk, Lydia was back in her study and looking through her morning’s work, making minor corrections and putting question marks beside any statement that she felt might need verification. But before she got down to the afternoon’s writing, she telephoned through to the British Library division at Boston Spa.
“Could I speak to Dorothy Eccles, please?. . . . Oh, Dorothy—Lydia Perceval here, I’ve got a list for you—is that all right? I’ll be in on Monday the twelfth, all day, I have a whole mass of queries and problems to sort out. These are books and articles, and some of them will have to be got from London, I imagine. Ready? Right—here we go . . . .”
When she had gone through the list, spelling out the names of difficult authors, Lydia said:
“Do you expect to be busy that day?”
The rather breathless voice at the other end said: “I’m sure I could arrange not to be, if you needed help.”
“Oh no. Everything on the list is pretty straightforward. I was thinking of lunch.”
“Oh, that would be lovely.”
“Slip into Wetherby, perhaps, to La Tavola Calda.”
“Super.”
“Well, barring any unpleasant surprises with the stuff you’re getting out for me, it should be easy enough to take an hour or so off. So if you were able to get off, you could slip along to my desk, say around twelve o’clock.”
“I shall look forward to that.”
Lydia put down the phone. Dorothy Eccles was terribly useful to her, and it was good to repay her devotion. True, the work she did in a way repaid itself: she was flattered to work for a popular biographer whose books were at once respected by scholars and much read by book-buyers and book-borrowers—“both in this country and the States” she had once heard Dorothy say in hushed tones to one of her fellow librarians. Lydia had evidence enough that it warmed the little dried-up woman’s soul to be part of the apparatus of scholarship and literature, and to be thanked in the acknowledgements section. She knew her feelings and enjoyed her devotion. It was right to reward it with some special treat now and then, and it did her own heart good to feel the woman’s pleasure and excitement.
Suddenly a stab of feeling struck her to the heart: to be reduced to giving little treats to spinster librarians! She, whose life had once been so full, so happy, so fulfilled! What a deprivation, what an emotional barrenness had overtaken her, that she could give and take pleasure only on so meagre a scale! She put her head in her hands and tried for some seconds to regain her composure.
Then she shook herself and returned to her manuscript.
Some time after five she laid down her pen. The old king was not yet ready to die, but he was in the way of dying. Soon her man would be king, and she was looking forward to writing her account of his coronation—the last French coronation. She had a mass of material on the junketings that surrounded it, and she would enjoy marshalling it. She always watched the news at six, and then began preparations for dinner. Meanwhile the sun was streaming down outside, and the air was inviting. She pushed open the kitchen door and went into the garden.
The memories of Gavin and Maurice in the garden were mental pictures rather than plants. True, there was the Buff Beauty rose they had bought for her fortieth birthday—out now, and deliciously aromatic. But what she remembered was them working with her there: mowing the lawn and raking up the cuttings, forking and weeding, learning from her how to prune. And all the time talking—talking and laughing, talking about serious matters, about politics and their futures, talking, talking, talking.
She walked round to the front, where the garden stretched out towards the hill down to the village, gracious in its lawns and its roses. Was that greenfly? She looked closely. Yes, it was. And there were tell-tale black patches on a bud of one of her Mischiefs. She must get at them with a spray, or tell Hobson the next time he came. Hobson—he was all the help she had now, and very unsatisfactory and erratic help he was too. A cloud came over the sun, and suddenly she saw the garden as an image of its mistress: adrift, somehow bereft. It had had its heyday and was now past its prime. She wandered through it, her mind on the past—her own past, the boys’, and mixed in with theirs the French nation’s. She looked back at the house, its warm old stone glowing in the evening sun, and thought she must have a dinner party soon. The boys had been all the social life she had needed, and somehow after Gavin’s death she had never created or got into any new social round. She walked under the yellow magnificence of the laburnum and rested on the gate. Ahead of her the rich farmland of the Dales stretched, dotted only with the occasional farmhouse or minor road. She turned her head to the right, to the hill that led down to the village, and her heart stopped.
Two boys, one fair and one dark, in shorts and summer shirts, were wheeling their bicycles up the hill.
CHAPTER 2
ANDY Hoddle went to catch the bus into Halifax as soon as he had finished his breakfast. Nothing else to do. Nothing else to do most days, though he was conscious that, as an unemployed professional person, he ought to have plenty of interests, both intellectual and practical, with which to fill up his day. It was a question of being bothered to take them up. It was the same with breakfasts: Andy regretted the New Breakfast of fibrous cereal and brown toast, and he would have reverted to the old style If he could have been bothered to cook it, or persuaded Thea to. But he couldn’t, so he just went along with the new dispensation. Because there was also the fact that sausages and bacon and eggs and mushrooms cost money. He and Thea had to save their pennies these days. Alcohol cost money too.
He had had the letter from the Department of Social Services two days before, and it was burning a hole in his pocket now. It had sounded ominous. Probably for that reason he had said nothing about it to Thea. As far as she was concerned this was one more day on the long, unsignposted road of his unemployment.
Of course once he got to Halifax there was nothing much to do there. He bought the ream of A4 for Lydia and immediately regretted it. Bloody heavy, typing paper—he’d forgotten that. He mooched around the shops, a balding, paunchy man in a suit that needed dry-cleaning. He bought himself a packet of ten cigarettes, and then made a systematic tour of the supermarkets, noting which ones had whisky on special offer, and which brands. He went to buy coley for their dinner, and got irritable with the fishmonger for trying to sell him too much. I’m becoming the typical pensioner, he thought: convinced that everyone is trying to swindle me.
It was eleven o’clock. Over an hour before his appointment at the Department. He ambled down to the Piece Hall, to sit in the central square, enjoy a cigarette and ease the weight of the paper. Bloody Lydia! She could have jumped into her car, fetched herself a ream of paper, and been home within the hour. Didn’t even consider it, probably. Couldn’t interrupt the great work of historical scholarship, no doubt. And Andy’s got nothing to do, has he? He racked his brain to decide who she was writing about this time, but he couldn’t remember.
Strange to think how happy they had been, the three of them, not so long back. Twenty-five years ago they’d been near-inseparable, it wasn’t just the closeness of the sisters: he had been genuinely fond of Lydia himself then. Those wonderful holidays in France, year after year. Thea and Lydia had been Francophiles ever since they’d gone on exchange holidays there just after the war. As they toured around, first by train and bus, later by car, he had provided the bourdon of dissent: “The trouble with France is it’s impossible to get a decent meal.” “What do they call this wine? Château Clochemerle?” “If I want beautiful scenery I’ll get it on the television, where it’s always sunset and there’s lovely music in the background.” The self-conscious comic grouser, a role he had relished. His common touch had counterpointed Lydia’s already rather middle-class persona. It had sometimes felt, then, as if he had married the two sisters, not just one.
Then t
he boys had grown too old and boisterous to be left with their grandparents, there had been Lydia’s brief marriage—or was that earlier? Anyway, and crucially, there had been the fact that Lydia had started to . . . to take the boys over. There was no other way of describing it. And then Gavin had died, a ball of fire on the Sir Galahad, and since then Andy had somehow felt childless. Unfair to Maurice, but there it was—childless and empty. Redundancy had been no more than a confirmation of that emptiness, one more brutal kick at the expiring corpse of his happiness and self-esteem. Bloody Lydia! She had robbed them of their boy, and then killed him. And left him and Thea empty shells of their former selves.
He had a sudden vision of himself from the outside, as it might be any old layabout or drunk whiling away the day on a city bench, bemoaning his lack of the price of a pint, and compensating by mulling over all his ancient grievances.
He ground his cigarette stub angrily into the grass and got up.
It was still early for his appointment at (summons to, more like) the Department of Social Security. As he went out into the streets again he passed a pub with the doors open to let in the odd summer breeze. He could do with a drink. He looked in, caught the fug of beer fumes and tobacco smoke, heard the metallic chink of the fruit machine dispensing money to the mugs. Before he could turn into the Public Bar the juke-box started up, the bass charging into his head like a gang of football hooligans. He turned and went on his way. He didn’t much like town pubs these days. Only rarely went to his local village one, come to that. If a man’s got to get stinking drunk, he said to Thea, he should have the decency to do it in the privacy of his own home.
He was lucky, really, that he could still say things like that to Thea—say them and laugh over them, say them without feeling shame-faced.
He was early at the D.S.S. Inevitably he was early, He sat around waiting with the other people who were early like him, other people who had nothing to do. Promptly at 12:10 he was called in to Mrs Wharton’s office and found she was someone whom he had talked to briefly before: cool, down-to-earth, almost academic. He felt relieved. Like many another long-term unemployed person, he could cope with everything except sympathy.
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