by Jessica Mann
Basil Hutber: now perhaps an inch or so shorter than he had been in his prime, but never tall or physically remarkable. He had a charm that lay in his concentration on the person, adult or child, with whom he was speaking. Attention is very seductive. He had once had brown hair. Now a white fringe circled the slightly pointed dome of his bald head. His nose was still imperious, inquisitive, his lips thinner but still those of a sensuous man. He still wore a similar – perhaps even the same – three-piece tweed suit, today with a black tie. His shoes were still glassily polished.
Basil read the lesson. His voice was still vigorous and flexible, capable of sounding persuasive or cutting, masterful or caressing. In many ways he seemed more of a paternal support to Lawrence than the man they were burying ever had, and Basil’s own unconcealed emotion, as he mopped at his face with a silk bandanna, induced tears in Lawrence too.
The chapel smelt as it probably always had, even when the male bodies that filled it were those of monks not schoolboys: sweaty skin, damp wool, old shoes; wax polish and wax candles. They sang the school songs, tunes that Allan Cory used to hum. Lawrence was suffused by self reproach and futile regret. I could have helped him trace his ancestors, he thought, or at least seemed interested in it. I could have made him certain of having descendants of his own. A wave of anger against the absent Zoe shook him; wasn’t family more important than soap opera?
Outside the chapel boys tried to talk to Lawrence about Zoe. He accepted stamped addressed envelopes to be sent back with her autograph inside. He received polite condolences and knew that he was seen as Stacey Stewart’s husband.
He had not lost his knack with the young. He was kind, firm and gentle. This was his métier, and the boys’ massed presence was welcome as he watched the small urn placed in its hole in the ground, as he spooned earth back over it.
‘A name and dates, I thought, nothing else,’ he said. Basil Hutber nodded, and shooed his pupils back to their lessons.
Dame Viola had come to the service. One decorous photographer was there to record her presence, the news of which would seem very proper to her admirers. She said, ‘You could add whose son he was.’
‘But he didn’t know. He was brought up by foster parents,’ Lawrence said.
‘Are they still alive?’
‘My grandmother – well, that’s what I call her – she is, but she’s past understanding all this. I’m afraid she’s not herself any more.’
‘Did Allan have any luck, do you know, in tracing his ancestors?’ Basil Hutber asked. He opened the door to allow his sister and Lawrence to precede him into his study. ‘He didn’t seem very optimistic the last time I saw him. That was just before he died. He was up here talking about his idea of writing about St Uny’s, and I’m afraid I encouraged him. It seemed a more fertile subject. But if he hadn’t wanted to ask my sister about Carmell he might never have died. How far had he got with the family research, do you know? Did he leave notes about it?’
‘Nothing of any use. Just his file of denials, some kind, some less so. But then, you couldn’t expect to trace a girl who called herself Mary Smith and disappeared fifty years ago,’ Lawrence said.
‘Couldn’t he find any clues, even after the legislation that permitted adopted children to be given information?’
‘None. His natural mother simply vanished. It can’t have been all that unusual at the time.’ Lawrence leant back in the leather chair, its seat shaped by generations of male bottoms. The room was unchanged since Lawrence had undergone his adolescent upheavals and crises in it, and probably unchanged since Allan had done so. Thousands of us, Lawrence thought, exposing our souls to Basil Hutber in this room. He said, ‘I’m truly grateful for what you did today. It would have meant a great deal to my father. He always said that being sent here was the best thing that ever happened to him. It wouldn’t have been the usual place to educate a minister’s son.’
‘Why did his father choose it then?’ Dame Viola asked.
‘I don’t think he did. In fact I believe he was rather opposed to it. But an anonymous donor paid the fees.’
‘Most unusual. Did they find out who it was?’
‘No.’
‘Did you not know, Basil?’
‘As long as the fees were paid it was nothing to do with us,’ Basil Hutber said. ‘We were glad of any fees in those days, private schools were folding all the time, struggling to keep their numbers at an economic level.’
‘I wonder why St Uny’s was chosen.’
‘Perhaps if we knew who had chosen and paid we would know why. But there’s no way of telling now. As it was, we simply did what we could for the boy.’
‘For all your boys,’ Lawrence said.
‘I am sure that you and Nell both did,’ Dame Viola said. ‘You would neither of you have visited the sins of the parents on the child, I know.’
‘Nell knew nothing of the boy’s background. None of the staff did. There seemed no need to discuss it,’ Basil Hutber said.
‘You know how fond he became of you,’ Lawrence said.
‘Well,’ Basil said with a sigh, ‘we did the best we could. And now I want to do the best I can for you, Lawrence, my dear boy, for your father’s sake too. There’s a place for you here. Don’t forget that this place is mine to dispose of as I think best. I should like you to join me.’
Lawrence felt overwhelmed by the desire, the need, to come here to St Uny’s, not in refuge from life, not as a retreat, but to the place for its own sake; to this place, and this company, and this work. To refuse Basil Hutber was an agony.
Chapter Sixteen
The image was of a juggler.
Tamara Hoyland, who for several years since the murder of her lover Ian Barnes*, [* Sec No Man’s Island (Macmillan London, 1983)] had performed her various roles competently but without joy, was having fun.
She visualised herself dressed in glitter and performing to a ravished audience, sending balls leaping multi-coloured into the air like bubbles from a soap pipe, always avoiding the fumble fingering that would let them fall to expose her as a fraud. She enjoyed exercising her skills.
Tamara did not play parts as an actress would, but was them. Occasionally she wondered whether it was simply the change of costume that changed her, like a child transformed by a hat or a cloak into a great king or a scary monster. Tamara used small additions and subtractions of dress and ornament to change her from the civil servant to the field worker, or from the administrator to the creative worker in ‘the media’. All disguises were apt for her secret service. Today she had come to Mr Black’s office from her own.
‘You look well,’ he said.
‘I feel well. But I am not sure I can keep it up.’ Tamara could see the shining balls falling and rolling away. The commitment to Watchwomen was consuming far more time and attention than she had expected.
‘You are being converted,’ Mr Black said. Tamara was quick to deny it, and, not for the first time that afternoon, changed the subject.
‘I told you about the radio series, didn’t I?’ A silly question; all the same, Tamara knew that Tom Black would be interested in the antique gossip she had been told by the women she had interviewed. Tamara herself was no poet or fiction writer, unlike Mr Black who was the pseudonymous author of pessimistic verse. But she kept up with book reviews and had seen that Rex had been the subject of an appeal for information in the Times Literary Supplement. Chattering to postpone her cross examination, Tamara told Mr Black about the girl called Stella and about Chantal Digby’s baby. ‘I thought it would interest you. It looks as though Rex is due for a revival.’
‘Relevant material?’ Mr Black asked drily. Tamara knew that he saw her without the juggler’s motley. He had employed her, intermittently and secretly, for nearly three years, since Ian Barnes’s death. He knew everything about her, presumably from nursery-school days. His dossiers were always meticulous.
Mr T.G.H. Black, CBE (Assistant Secretary), appeared in Whitaker’s Almanack as the m
an in charge of one of the Department of the Environment’s sixty-four sections. Department E (Works), like the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments by which Tamara was employed, was housed in Fortress House, near Piccadilly. His was not an exalted rank; his department sounded archetypally boring. But Tom Black wielded more influence and earned more money than that listing implied.
Department E was the disguise of a branch of the secret services so secret as to have no secret name and no admitted function. Its role was hard to define, and perhaps had never been formally defined. Most of its personnel were successful in other careers, being lawyers, dons, business persons; one was a management consultant, one a publisher. Tamara Hoyland was an archaeologist. Their professions provided concealment and excuses for behaviour that could be regarded as illegal or as commendable. In exposing truths, they became strangers to the truth, and sometimes Tamara would remember with a kind of wonder that she had been brought up never to lie. Invention had become as much second nature to her as it is to a novelist or actor. Many an archaeological site had been studied by Tamara while some of her attention had been on a less innocent subject. She was successful as an archaeologist, had recently published her first full-length book and her eleventh article, and was beginning to wonder whether to apply for a university post. The quickness of hand and eye and thought that she had practised for Department E increased her appreciation of the timeless truths of scholarship. Her experience of life’s uncertainty and danger, so unusual in an Englishwoman of her generation, enhanced her interest in the immutable past. She had not always welcomed Mr Black’s commissions nor believed in their purposes. This one she had been happy to accept. She had leave due from the Royal Commission and had not expected to take long over investigating Dame Viola Hutber.
Whether there was any point in the work was another matter. Tamara had protested that, while she felt no sympathy with the aims of Watchwomen, she could hardly doubt that they were what they claimed. In any case, ‘Why bother?’ she had asked.
‘Know your enemy.’
‘Enemy?’
‘And know anyone capable of becoming an enemy. Once someone can deliver enough votes to make a difference—’
‘Election results aren’t anything to do with us!’ Tamara had interrupted, scandalised. ‘We can’t meddle in that.’
‘What we are here for, Tamara, is to think the unthinkable and to do what can’t be done. That is our job description. We are to consider possibilities that never cross other people’s minds. We are to plan for eventualities that seem to be episodes out of genre fiction.’
‘Even so . . .’
‘As you must know yourself, our work is partly based on feelings. Never ignore a good intuition,’ Mr Black said, his facial expression not that of someone given to flights of fancy. He was careful to look like a man who despised intuition; who dealt only in concrete facts and figures.
‘I,’ Tamara said, ‘try to back intuition up with rational argument.’
‘That is only because you are afraid of seeming to conform to a feminine stereotype. What we offer here at Department E is that intuition you pretend to distrust. We give free play to fancy, we think laterally. Our function is as a prophylactic against subversive surprises.’
‘Is that more than a pretty phrase?’ Tamara asked, her fine eyebrows disdainfully arched.
‘If it is true that Dame Viola Hutber can affect the results of the democratic process, and consequently that her views, or her wishes, could influence governments, then we need to know what her motives are.’
‘I should have thought they were only too obvious.’
‘If she is indeed what she seems you will be able to confirm it.’
‘Me and who else?’
‘My young people,’ Mr Black said, ‘have advantages over more conventional investigators. Need I list them?’
‘Anyway, I hate everything she stands for,’ Tamara complained. ‘All that stuff about good old days. If she had the slightest knowledge of history . . . what can she think life was like for most people a hundred years ago?’
‘Know thine enemy is good advice still,’ Mr Black had said. ‘Either she’ll convert you, Tamara, or you’ll work all the harder at finding something to prevent her converting other people.’
Annoying, then, for Tamara, to have returned from her sessions with Watchwomen and their President not converted but – and she could not deny it – impressed.
‘The woman has a very powerful personality,’ Mr Black commented.
But it was not just that. ‘The awful thing is’, Tamara admitted, ‘that you can’t exactly deny what she says. Disagreeing is like arguing against motherhood or brown bread. Like doing Plato at school. There was never a point where you could say he was wrong, but he ended up describing a fascist republic all the same.’
‘Of course that is the power of a demagogue,’ Mr Black said, leaning back with the tips of his fingers together, his eyes on the ceiling, like a philosophy don embarking on an hour of constructive argument. ‘It’s by sounding so reasonable that they persuade their audiences a step too far. By that, and by having the charismatic personality. On the other hand, Tamara, perhaps she is right, as you suggest. It may be as simple as that.’
‘I am trying to suspend my judgement,’ Tamara said rather unhappily. ‘All the same, you know, even if I am converted or rebel, it’s quite irrelevant to what you sent me to do. The woman’s life really is an open book.’
‘All the way back to Chapter One?’
‘Her childhood can hardly be relevant.’
‘The child is mother of the woman.’
‘You are always so cryptic,’ Tamara said crossly. ‘Do you mean that I should be asking questions in Carmell? She left the place before the war.’
‘That seems less distant a period to me than to you.’ Tom Black had fought throughout the war himself. He said thoughtfully, ‘Yes, I remember the heroics about Duaman. I’ve read your notes. There were questions left unasked about that too.’
‘Dame Viola won’t talk about it. I’ve tried.’
‘That’s interesting in itself. She joins up after Munich, serves for seven years, marries and lies low for another thirty, and then . . . whoomph. She leaps out of her closet. Thrives on fame and publicity, laps it up, accepts all that goes with it. Why? Why did she wait so long?’
‘Because her husband wouldn’t have liked it?’ Tamara suggested.
‘He died well before, if that’s what she was waiting for. No, either she chose the private life, and it’s peculiar that she changed her mind; or she always wanted what she’s got now, and she could have set about getting it much sooner. I don’t understand what makes the woman tick. It is your job,’ Mr Black commanded, ‘to find out.’
Chapter Seventeen
The photocopy of an article ordered months before was waiting for Lawrence on his return to California. It was an account in the Buriton University Journal of a visit made to Danny Pedlar just before his death. The writer, a lecturer in English literature, was working on the poet Julian Tapsell, who had been a friend of Danny Pedlar’s in pre-war London. The piece was less ‘work-in-progress’ than notes for a journal, a self-regarding form of publication that reminded Lawrence of the corrected pages of manuscript that famous writers would autograph and sell. Nice work if you can get it, Lawrence thought jealously.
The preamble reminded readers that Danny Pedlar was the brother of the potter Tilly Pedlar, herself a survivor of the Omega Workshops group of craftsmen. Through Tilly, Danny had known, and from her inherited the work of, many of the artists of the period. Months after his death a great fuss was still churning on about the disposal of his collection of paintings by Gertler, Grant, Bell, Carrington and so on and so on; and of his collection of autographed first editions, and his treasure chests of letters. It had been proposed that Danny Pedlar’s house should become a museum itself. But Shrubsole Corner was not a picturesque old house in pretty countryside. It was a bungalow built in 1935 on the c
orner of two busy roads. The Pedlar collection was heaped carelessly into a damp glass verandah. The books were foxed, the pictures spotted. Mice had nibbled the autographed letters.
Danny Pedlar’s own career had been practical. Trained for medicine, he had worked with Beveridge on plans for the Welfare State. His voice was well known on radio, and at one time he was part of the Brains’ Trust team. Later he was trotted out as a token intellectual on television discussions.
His voice, the young lecturer wrote, had risen and cracked. One would not have recognised it. ‘Somehow I had expected the grand old man to be a grand looking old man but he was short and egg-shaped. He lived with his niece in great inelegance. Lunch was luncheon meat. After it I was permitted twenty minutes of speech with him, no more no less. I felt like a prison visitor. Danny Pedlar told me to listen while he talked. He knew he hadn’t much time; though he was willing to speak about Julian Tapsell for me. “It must have been in the early twenties that I met Julian. He was sharing his flat with his wife and a man we knew as Rex. Ursula Tapsell earned the living in an advertising agency. She had to pretend to be single for she’d have got the sack for marrying.
‘“I often went there, for I was training at University College Hospital and they lived just off the Tottenham Court Road. It’s all quite clear in my mind. Very snug, with a gas fire hissing when we had shillings for the meter, and coffee in a yellow pot I’d given them myself – my sister was a potter – and some green earthenware cups. All four of us would go and eat Japanese food at Tokawaya’s in the Charing Cross Road when we could afford it as a change from the Express Dairy teashop. Sometimes Rex and I went on our own for the Tapsells were often too busy with their Communist propaganda. Julian was very Left in those days though you mightn’t believe it now. Rex and I took no interest in politics in those days. We grumbled, the world was not to our liking, but we didn’t do much about improving it then. Later, as you know, I took my part in trying to put things right, and Julian swung right around. I dare say Rex would have changed too. Grown up. At the time he was only interested in his art. Art for art’s sake. A most original talent. Self taught, I believe, and I never knew where he came from. Julian and I were at Eton together, as you know. But we didn’t care about backgrounds. We took people as they were. The only thing that mattered was expressing one’s own personality, what you call doing your own thing. We wanted to break away from the mould our families and education had poured us into. We were pagans, our bodies were our temples, we believed in all the new doctrines.