A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4)

by Jessica Mann

  The doctor was much more optimistic than Rainsford. He said that old people frequently suffer cerebrovascular incidents.

  ‘Incidents!’

  ‘That may be all it is. Give it a couple of nights and then we shall have a better idea.’

  The school secretary had worked for Basil Hutber for thirty-four years and thought that he was probably indestructible. She posted his letters and carried on as best and as normally as she could, and dared to say, ‘There, you see, I told you so,’ to Rainsford when Basil returned to his work after ten days, limping almost imperceptibly and needing stronger lenses in his spectacles, but perfectly able and determined to go on running his own school in his own way.

  ‘At his age!’ Rainsford said, and the secretary replied firmly. ‘The parents want him. Entries are up, the waiting list is longer than ever, exam results have been excellent. You don’t need to go worrying about Mr Basil. He knows what he’s doing. Anyway, he’s getting help. He’s invited Mr Cory to join him.’

  Rainsford Hutber wrote to Lawrence Cory to warn him there was no guarantee that the school would carry on indefinitely; but in his cautious, legalistic way he qualified every noun and verb so as to rob his message of much force.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Life President of Watchwomen’s American tour was much more successful than she or its organisers had dared to hope. As she progressed across the continent the audience sizes steadily increased. For the last meeting, in California, the hall had to be switched for a much larger one than had been booked. Bomb threats forced the paedophiles to cancel a rally, and Dame Viola Hutber, suitably enough, took their place. She seemed a most unlikely person to enthral that audience, there.

  Without hair colouring or plastic surgery or silicon implants, without exercise programmes or massage or even the restraint of a corset, Viola Hutber was a non-starter in the sexual attraction stakes. She did not look wonderful for her age. She was very fat, displaying all the traces of the contemporary sins of over-eating and under-exercising, but her message was about traditional sins and her listeners, bored by the moral issue of the body beautiful, were hooked by her accounts of older morality.

  It was not only converts who admired her. She was besieged by men at any party she went to since she expected nothing from them but conversation. She was flattered by women who felt no need to measure their own looks against hers. She was reassuring and comfortable, and presented no sexual threats.

  Lawrence and Zoe could not get to her performance, as Zoe flippantly called it, being on parade at the time at a press showing of Stacey’s Sleuths. Lawrence resented being there; everyone was polite; their eyes always slid away to worthier guests. He felt spare. In any case, he wanted to show solidarity with Basil Hutber’s sister. He set the tape to record the news that evening, and the moment he got into the house settled down to watch.

  ‘I’m sorry you had such a dull evening,’ Zoe said, and went to prove it by brewing him some English-style tea. Lawrence had not been bored, as it happened. That was not the right word, for he was always fascinated by Zoe’s face and figure on the screen. What he could not bear was the thought that other men were fascinated too. ‘It’s like rape, their eyes on you,’ he said once, and she’d laughed and asked whether she should wear a yashmak and burkha. He wanted to say yes, yes he did, that she belonged to him and that he was diminished when other men looked at her, but one could not admit to thoughts like that any more. He did not own his wife, but some primitive instinct within him still thought he did. And now she was being sweet, indulgent and remorseful, and he felt boorish, demanding and remorseful. ‘Communicate,’ the agony aunties always exhorted as though telling troubles ended them, but there was nothing to be done about this one. If he wanted to keep Zoe he had to lump it . . .

  Lawrence humped himself forward on the leather chair and tried to concentrate on the screen. He expected nothing but absurdity from this extraneous old woman, absurdity and vicarious embarrassment. He supposed that most of the audience had gone prepared to laugh. During the warm-up there was plenty to laugh at. Drum majorettes who lost the beat, a politician who missed the point, a comic whose jokes were the very type that Watchwomen condemned.

  Nothing could have seemed further from provincial England. The camera showed an audience of forward-looking people, prototypes for the rest of the world. Here in California, Lawrence thought, was the catalogue of up-to-date patterns for humanity, to be debased by imitation, quick to change before outsiders could catch up. Lawrence felt like a fossil here, typical of a dead, or at least moribund, society.

  There was no flourish when Viola Hutber walked on to the platform. She stumped in, business-like, carrying a clipboard and wearing a draped woollen dress in a blue to which television was not kind.

  ‘That dress!’ Zoe exclaimed, putting the tea tray beside Lawrence.

  ‘She looks wonderful. So English.’

  The news showed only the beginning of the speech and the end. There did not seem to be any highlights to be endlessly replayed in later years so as to render a sentence, carelessly invented and uttered, the encapsulation of a message or a career. Watchwomen would not be remembered for Viola Hutber’s slogans. One saw enough to realise that here was no demagogue, not much even of a natural orator; just an old woman with a conviction. But at the end the crowd surged on to the stage to shake her hand. They testified. They signed. They shared. She signed, for each enthusiast, in both her names: Viola Hutber, Hilary Vivian.

  It was inexplicable. It was a phenomenon.

  The magic was not transferable to paper. The newspapers, quoting Viola Hutber’s words, showed that they were not persuasive without her voice. The photograph of the woman who had spoken them was unremarkable. None the less, the next day, the host of the afternoon show, who had led his viewers into countless temporary enthusiasms, announced that he had signed Watchwomen’s manifesto. ‘She’s wonderful. Incredible. It was like the Sermon on the Mount. You can’t imagine it. She’s something else.’ Incredulous, Lawrence interrupted the afternoon show to check on his own memory. Dame Viola Hutber left him cold; but he reminded himself of the effect that Hitler and Mussolini, or even Richard Nixon, had had on those ready for conversion.

  This being California, Dame Viola acquired some converts she might not welcome, and of them several had come to proclaim it on the afternoon show. One was a self-entitled leader of the gay community, another a spokeswoman for the prostitutes’ union. A black bishop asserted the illegality of Watchwomen’s refusal to admit men. The host was holding a sheaf of messages from enthusiasts with offers of free advertisement, designer uniforms or even just money. His voice took on a solemn, judicious tone.

  ‘I believe in her. I admit it. But let’s be cool about this. I’ve invited Julian Tapsell to join me today.’ The grand old man of the literary community, so called, was shown on the host’s right.

  Julian Tapsell was an expatriate poet from England who, like T.S.Eliot or Henry James in the other direction, had moved to California and regarded his adopted country with insightful affection. He described, and in describing created if only in fossilised form, its traditions. He had the admiring passion for America that earlier Americans had shown for the old world.

  The screen showed his familiar, lined mask that mapped every emotion of a long life full of them. In his old age he was reputed to be a devoted family man, with a wife ten years younger than his eldest child, and a youngest child ten years older than his great-granddaughter.

  Lawrence had tried to visit Julian Tapsell, who had been a friend, or at least acquaintance, of Rex, but he had not tried very hard and had so far been refused an invitation. One of the writers at Zoe’s studio said that Tapsell never opened his mouth even in private for less than a grand.

  ‘Tell us, Julian Tapsell, are you going to join the new movement?’

  The great man’s voice was unchanged since he had been British and therefore sounded quite foreign to Lawrence now, with the tight vowels and clippe
d consonants usually heard only in pre-war films.

  He could see a case, he said, for what Viola Hutber said, even if he deplored every word written by Hilary Vivian. ‘There’s something in what she says. Not much, but something. It reminded me of the old days. The life we led in London between the wars, when we had the restrictions that she wants re-imposed, but they didn’t always work. In another form, perhaps, some protection for the very young . . . there was one girl . . .’

  ‘Do tell us. Share it with us.’

  ‘I was going to. It was a crime then, of course, still would be now as a matter of fact, under-age girls – if they want to escape they will, you know, nothing would stop them. But it seemed sad, all the same, that starry little creature, so unaware of anything except her lover. Can’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, like Juliet; but not innocent. Far from innocent.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘What does happen to girls like that? They get pregnant, have abortions or spend their lives scraping to bring up a child. Nobody would have married her. I suppose she went on the streets in the end.’ There was a curious coldness about Julian Tapsell’s words.

  ‘Wasn’t it illegal?’

  ‘Of course, what of it? The point is that it was wrong, not that the law had anything to do with it. Most of the things we did then were illegal. The law was an ass. Still is. But that girl . . . if my own daughter were as unprotected I’d—’ The camera focused on his bunched fist and his multifariously wrinkled scowl. The interview had already been longer than the four point five minutes permitted between commercials.

  ‘You see, we need Watchwomen, even Julian Tapsell agrees. We’ll take a break.’

  Lawrence Cory wondered whether Zoe would have modelled for Toys and Teases if Watchwomen had existed then. She might never have become an actress. He might never have felt the need to leave his safe teaching job for something more glamorous if it had not been for her glamorous career. They might be living a normal, ordinary life in England with a mortgage and children and roses round the door.

  ‘Ghastly, isn’t it,’ Zoe said. She sat on the chair with Lawrence and made sexy finger messages in his palm. Together they watched a re-run of the Watchwomen rally. ‘Stuffy. Repressive. Arrogant. Fascist.’ With her other hand she aimed her fingers at the image of Viola Hutber. ‘Bang bang, she’s dead.’

  ‘You don’t think that there might be something in it?’

  ‘Lawrence!’ Zoe was shocked.

  He pulled his hand free and stood up. ‘I thought she was quite impressive.’

  ‘It’s the right-wing backlash,’ Zoe said wisely.

  ‘They call it the Moral Majority, here,’ he told her, and she laughed; but, he wondered, how could he be sure that the majority was misguided? Perhaps, instead, he had lost his way himself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘I was a very silly young woman at the time,’ Lady Smith said. A smile of fond reminiscence cheered her usually grim face. ‘I know you wouldn’t think so now. Of course it was before my husband went into politics.’

  ‘You’re talking about the twenties?’

  ‘Of course. Can’t you tell from the clothes?’ Her gnarled, spotted hands turned the pages of a cuttings album. Tamara Hoyland put her recording machine to one side and helped to hold the large book. ‘That’s me leading the Derby winner in. And there we are on a cruise up the Dalmatian Coast. What does it say?’

  She screwed her eyes up, but Tamara read aloud, ‘Mr and Mrs Smith are seen with the King of Greece on their yacht the Gin Fizz at Corfu. Mrs Smith’s secretary said—’

  ‘There, that’s enough. I told you we were silly. They were frivolous days. That’s a fancy-dress ball I gave. I went as the Queen of the Night.’

  ‘Was that the time that Lady Digby’s friends—?’

  ‘That woman. I suppose you heard her tell the story on television.’

  ‘I was watching it to see C.K.Isbister. She’s taking part in this series.’

  ‘It surfaces every few years but it isn’t true. It’s like all legends, a basis of fact and a lot of canonical embroidery. She certainly tried to disrupt my ball. She was jealous because I’d caught some big fish. I had a gang of foreign royals and the Prince of Wales came as Henry V. But what Chantal never admitted was that her plot was a flop. She sent her Bohemian chums along to spoil things and they stayed to have fun instead. Look, there’s poor Evelyn Dillon of the Cavalier Press, he was killed in the war, and that’s Peter Munvies. We became the best of friends after that and now we lunch in the House of Lords every week. That’s Rex. I think he was meant to be Julius Caesar. Aren’t those laurel leaves?’

  ‘Miss Isbister talked about him too, and his Stella.’

  ‘Was that her name? I never met her. Of course he was a protegé of Chantal’s, but he failed her at my ball that evening too. She ruined him, you know. She was a destructive female, though I suppose one shouldn’t say so now. Do you agree that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead?’

  ‘It always seems to me more a description than an injunction. One doesn’t seem to want to—’ Tamara said, from limited experience.

  ‘Really? I do. Take Chantal, for instance, I can’t think of anything in the least bit charitable to say about her. The trouble she caused . . . my poor husband was involved somehow in hushing it up about Rex and her, but that was for poor Digby’s sake, not hers, she could have gone to blazes as far as we were concerned. She and the baby.’

  ‘Lady Digby’s baby?’

  ‘Hers and Rex’s, we assumed. But then Rex died, and I really don’t remember what happened then. It’s all so long ago. I do remember that it was very secret and complicated.’

  Tamara was of a generation that did not know what terror and misery an unplanned pregnancy once caused. She said, ‘What did people do?’

  ‘Oh, have them adopted, send them to orphanages, something like that. It wasn’t really difficult if you had money, you could always find someone to take a baby.’

  ‘You mean like baby farming?’

  ‘No, no, they usually went to good homes. There was no question of keeping them, of course. Illegitimacy was still a stigma.’

  ‘You mean, a contribution to Dr Barnardo’s and your little problem was solved?’ Tamara asked rather coldly.

  ‘For that kind of woman. I agree, the whole idea is distasteful. But then, in Chantal Digby’s case, not at all surprising. One only has to think how badly she behaved during the war.’ Evangeline Smith had organised several counties’ ambulance services during the war, the administrative energy that had gone into her social life suddenly useful. ‘Evelyn Dillon told me that Chantal had been very heartless. Do you know who I mean? We all loved him. Queer as a coot, but he was brilliant in the war, and then they sent him out east and he was killed in an air crash. He’d been concerned with Chantal, but he went off her too when he heard what she was getting up to in the Argentine. Even during the war news filtered through, one heard everything sooner or later. That must have been when he told me about Chantal’s baby, for my husband had always been very cagey about it. She farmed it out somewhere near her husband’s place. Maxton. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘National Trust, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why are we talking about Chantal Digby in the first place? I can hardly suppose that she’s the type of woman you’d want to describe in your programmes.’

  ‘But during the twenties you were rivals?’ Tamara said, starting up the tape.

  ‘Rivals! Not at all. We were both living in London at the time but our circles hardly overlapped. My friends were important people, not jailbirds like Rex. Chantal was actually said to have procured young girls to model – that’s what they called it – for him. Her whole life was a scandal.’

  Methinks the lady doth protest too much, Tamara thought, having read accounts of Evangeline Smith’s own scandalous excesses in gossip columns of this period. ‘Well, she’s dead now,’ Tamara said bluntly.

  ‘And what a way to g
o. It all fits,’ Lady Smith said.

  ‘Wasn’t it food poisoning?’

  ‘So they said. But my guess is that it was a convenient accident, if accident it was. That woman made trouble wherever she went. The enemies she must have had . . . and it wouldn’t be hard to poison a ready made meal. The perfect crime.’

  ‘That sounds a little . . .’

  ‘Paranoid? My dear, you’ve no idea what mischief she was planning. It was probably to make mischief that she came back to London at all. She rang me up, you know, Christmas morning, just when my grandchildren were arriving. Said she wanted to wish me as happy a Christmas as I’d had in Maxton the first year she was married when we all went up there. She said she was picking up with all her old friends. I asked how many were still alive and she said that more were than I’d think, and she was looking forward to renewing old friendships.’

  ‘But that would hardly imply that anyone wanted to—’

  ‘I should think that there are quite a few people still with good reason to fear Chantal Digby’s indiscretions.’ Lady Smith said, with a wise look and wagging forefinger. ‘Don’t forget, she was in the swing of things before the war. Appeasers, fellow travellers, Hitler’s friends, people who are in high places now.’

  ‘But it’s all so long ago,’ Tamara protested, and Lady Smith said huffily, ‘Some of us are still active.’

  ‘Of course, and that’s why I’m making this series of programmes. You, Dame Viola Hutber . . .’

  ‘I know her. We have served on committees together. There was the Paull Commission on Custodial Sentences for Female Offenders . . .’ Lady Smith had numerous such experiences to recount, which would make quite interesting radio if heavily edited. Tamara checked the sound levels and settled down to concentrate on something more important than the antics of a raffish set half a century before.