by Jessica Mann
Other offerings arrived with the midday mail; posted at Carmell, letters for the school were transferred directly to its Post Office Box, and unlike any others of Her Majesty’s Mails could reach their recipient on the day of posting. These were mercy parcels, Zoe thought, like those sent by the Red Cross to prisoners of war.
Gillian Hutber thought it would not be suitable for her to call at the Abbey, but telephoned with the advice that the solicitors in Hexbridge had a good reputation. Zoe did not want a local lawyer who would remember Basil Hutber reverentially or hope for favour from the Carmell Coroner. She left a frantic message on her agent’s answering machine. If there was one thing Joe Tanner could surely supply, it was a tough mouthpiece. That was Stacey Stewart language. Zoe wished that she could produce Stacey Stewart actions too.
The lunchtime news told the world that Stacey Stewart’s husband was helping police with a murder enquiry. Some more police were sent from Hexbridge to reinforce the Abbey gates. They refused to let anyone in without Zoe’s agreement, and she said, like a Victorian lady, that she was not at home. She did not want any more visitors, whether kind or curious.
Offices would be opening for the day in Washington. Zoe began trying to track down a father who, if distant both in spirit and in body, was the only person in her life apart from Lawrence on whom she had the right to lean. He was out of reach even by telephone, on a confidential mission for the State Department in Indonesia.
Zoe was exhausted but could not rest. She walked up and down the house, twitching irritably at the furniture. She peered from its windows. The quadrangle and, as far as she could see, the buildings round it were deserted, as though the slur on the headmaster had made the place unclean. Lawrence’s car was the only one parked at the front. She could not see to the end of the drive, but could imagine what was going on there. She wondered whether confronting the crowd would be better than being here alone. If she was the fox, the quarry of the news-hounds, their baying had sent her to earth. Did animals ever turn towards their hunters because they could not bear cowering alone any longer?
When the telephone rang to ask whether Dr Hoyland could come up, Zoe could not remember the name.
‘I don’t want to see any more doctors,’ she said.
‘The lady says to say it’s Tamara.’
‘Tamara? Oh, of course. That’s different. Ask her to come right away.’
Tamara Hoyland was empty handed. She radiated neither the curiosity nor the hostility that Zoe had sensed in the local ladies. She said, ‘I was still in the district when I heard the news. I thought you might like some moral support. But say if you’d rather be left in peace.’
‘Peace! Hardly. Please stay. Come and have something to eat. We’ll go into the kitchen.’
The table was laden with half unwrapped packages.
‘Have you been collecting for refugees?’ Tamara said, laughing.
‘It seems to be what people here do at times like this.’
‘No flowers.’
‘No, it’s nearly all edible. It should last—’ Zoe’s voice faltered. ‘It should last me and Lawrence for weeks.’
‘Lavender bags and scented soap . . .’
‘Those were from one of the cleaners.’
‘And chocolates.’
‘There wasn’t a card with them. Look, let’s try Mrs Arnold’s soup.’ Tamara’s arrival had cheered Zoe up. She poured the soup into a saucepan.
‘Do you like this make?’ Tamara asked. It was a much advertised brand of soft centred sweets. The cellophane had been removed, and it had been wrapped in paper with a design of puppies and kittens.
‘I even advertised it once. I would like it if I wasn’t so sick all the time. I might take them to Lawrence, if . . .’
‘If they arrest him?’ While Zoe’s back was turned to her, Tamara opened and quickly examined the chocolate box.
Expressed in Tamara’s cool voice, it seemed much less appalling. ‘If he isn’t allowed home, yes,’ Zoe said.
‘Did he actually do it, do you think?’ Tamara asked, as though such a question were quite in the natural course of conversation, and Zoe, enabled to be equally matter-of-fact, said, ‘I can’t believe it. Admittedly he was very odd. I wondered if he’d had a nervous breakdown . . . the stress of the new job . . . I mean, the very idea that Basil Hutber could ever have been Rex!’
‘I didn’t hear that on the news,’ Tamara said, her mind whirling. ‘Is that supposed to be the motive?’
‘Lawrence seems to think that his father was the illegitimate son of Rex – the painter, you know? – and that Rex managed to turn himself into Basil Hutber. It does sound loony when it’s put like that.’
Zoe stood with her back to the stove, soup dripping from the wooden spoon on to the floor, and gave a quick run-down of what she knew to Tamara Hoyland who could know nothing of it. Expressing it in words made it clear in Zoe’s mind, and clarified much more in Tamara’s.
‘Your soup’s boiling over,’ Tamara said. Zoe turned to it, and Tamara slid the chocolates into her shoulder bag. ‘Shall I clear the table?’
‘Do. Spoons and things are in the dresser.’
Tamara carried the sympathy gifts out of the way. She made a pile of the cards, naïvely decorated emblems of kindness bearing noncommittal messages like, ‘We are all thinking of you’ or ‘with all heartfelt sympathy’.
‘People here are very kind, don’t you think?’ Zoe said.
‘Look, here’s your prescription. Shall I—’
‘You can throw that away. I keep telling them, I won’t take drugs when I’m pregnant. Being sick won’t kill me and drugs might damage the baby. I don’t know why the doctor came. He knows I don’t want anything.’
‘No matter how ill you are? Isn’t that taking it a bit—’
‘There you go. Honestly, Tamara, I’d have thought you would understand. This sickness must be nature’s way. I won’t take anything for it.’
You wouldn’t even have to hide the telephone and make sure the doors were locked, Tamara thought. Zoe could vomit to death without trying to get help. She wondered whether the doctor would then certify natural death caused by stubbornness. Would they even think a post mortem necessary?
‘Who brought the soup?’ she asked.
‘That was Mrs Arnold. She’s new in Carmell too. Her husband and she have come back from Hong Kong.’
‘Not part of the local mafia?’
‘She’s the only person I’ve met here who doesn’t seem to be.’
Her soup should be harmless. Zoe and Tamara sipped it. Zoe said, ‘It’s rather good. Artichoke, I think.’
‘You know,’ Tamara said thoughtfully, ‘mightn’t it be rather satisfactory to be descended from Rex? I’d be proud of it.’
‘He was the most scandalous man. Do you know about him and his work? It’s obscene. He was called Rex the Pornographer. I have been quite persuaded that he was a dreadful influence.’
‘One of the great talents of the century,’ Tamara murmured.
‘When you think of the effect his talent had on people . . . it was prostituting it. No, I’m a total convert to Watchwomen in this, and I’m adamant about it.’
‘Converts usually are.’
‘You’re a Watchwoman yourself, aren’t you?’ Zoe reminded her guest.
‘I did join it, yes. Tell me, who was the girl supposed to be? The child’s mother? His model was called Stella, as far as I remember. I’ve seen some of the pictures. He always painted a star mark on her thigh. Stella is the Latin for star.’
Zoe did not make the connection. ‘The birth certificate of Lawrence’s father said he was born to a Mary Smith.’
‘While I was making my radio programmes I met someone called Miss Isbister,’ Tamara said.
‘I’ve heard of her. A raging feminist.’
‘That’s the one. She did mention that Rex had lived with a girl called Stella.’
‘It’s too late to track her down now, whoever she was. Even if
Basil really was Rex,’ Zoe said, her voice low from embarrassment on the last word, as though she were blaspheming. ‘Even if he did know, he’s dead now.’
‘Unless the girl returned to a respectable old life too,’ Tamara nudged. ‘It couldn’t have been Mrs Hutber?’
‘Not possibly. She was here all the time that her father ran the school, from 1919 onwards.’
‘Well then . . .’ Tamara waited for enlightenment to strike. If she had been a teacher with a slow child she would have been muttering, come on, come on.
Zoe sipped cautiously at her soup and nibbled the bread as though waiting for her stomach to reject it. ‘You see, what I can’t make out is how Basil Hutber could have dropped out of sight for nearly ten years. He had family. A mother. A sister. Wouldn’t Dame Viola have known where he was during those years?’
‘She’d have been very young,’ Tamara said.
‘In her teens. Old enough to know about her only brother. I know things were different in those days, but all the same!’
‘Why not ask her?’
‘I did. It took ages to track her down, but eventually I got her at home,’
‘What did she say?’
‘She said she’d been too young to know. But she couldn’t talk for long.’ Zoe said.
‘Perhaps she will think up the explanation,’ Tamara suggested.
‘I am sure she’ll try. She’s wonderful you know, Tamara, I keep thinking about what she said. You remember, about the child being the base that civilisation’s built on and how all it’s for is to protect it. It’s a brand new idea to me.’
‘Watchwomen do say that they change lives.’
‘If Lawrence had never started studying something as wrong, as corrupting to the young as Rex’s paintings, he wouldn’t be in prison now.’
‘I thought he was just helping the police with their enquiries.’
‘It comes to the same thing. No,’ Zoe said, glancing at her own reflection in a silver spoon, ‘I’m sure I’m right. I mean, I’m sure that Dame Viola is right.’
Stacey Stewart’s fans would not have recognised their heroine. Zoe looked not dashing but soulful, with her pale face and short hair, as though her last part on the sinful stage had been as a nun or mother rather than an adventuress. And I, Tamara thought smugly, seem to look like a confidante. She did not want Zoe to recognise in her either the intellect that analysed and despised Watchwomen’s muddled thinking, or the daring of the true action woman.
Chapter Thirty-Three
‘It was serendipity,’ Tamara shouted. Thunder grumbling nearby, which had made it hard to hear the radio news, now caused the telephone to emit disconcerting crackles.
In the vast car park near Hadrian’s Wall, Tamara was alone; as isolated as the Roman sentries who had once watched here for the barbarians, she scanned the wastes to the north, shadowed beneath a steely sky. The first fat, slow drops of water fell like advance guards upon the windscreen.
Mr Black’s noncommittal, ‘Mmm, hmmm,’ sounded like a doctor observing signs and symptoms.
‘Paul Dillon took me to the exhibition of twenties painters last winter.’
Mr Black’s grunt in reply to that was amused; he already knew what Tamara had only recently realised, that there could be no future for her with a man who knew nothing of her secret work or of what it had made of her.
Stripes of lightning patterned the sky. One and two and three and – the thunder was stupendous. Tamara said, ‘Sorry, I missed what you said.’
These radio telephones were inconveniently affected by atmospheric interference. ‘. . . not going to be easy to prove . . .’
Another clap of thunder, and suddenly a rush of rain hammering on the roof. It sounded like weapons beating against shields, and Mr Black’s words were as indecipherable as Pictish war cries.
‘Can you hear me?’ Tamara yelled, but the only reply was a roaring in the receiver. She put it away. Should she make for a public call box, or wait for the storm to pass? Should she do what instinct was urging?
Tamara had made the original decision to work for a secret organisation almost carelessly, almost accidentally. Since that time she had often found herself thinking up justification for doing things of which her younger, innocent self would so much have disapproved. She came, every time, to the same arrogant conclusion: the only judgement she could trust was her own. She might make mistakes. She might base her arguments on inadequate data. But she would accept the responsibility or the guilt. She was employed, presumably, on account of her qualities of intelligence and resourcefulness. If with them went a bloody minded unwillingness to do what she was told, or to wait to be told, her employers must accept that as part of the package.
Now Tamara sat in an uncharacteristic stillness and solemnity, checking and re-checking the tracks of her thoughts.
Like most educated people Tamara had been dazzled by complication often enough to distrust it. On occasions like this, she expressed her conclusions in simple words to make sure that she had not been fazed by imprecision.
The Watchwomen trust their leader. They will do what she tells them. They will vote as she says. So she has power. If she is not worth the trust, should she have the power? Should anyone have such power? Only if the trust is based on truth. If they know it’s lies, and still trust her, so be it.
Would Mr Black let the truth be known? He might not. He – his boss – has he got a boss? – they might try to use the power that she has. That would be even worse.
Mr Black trusts me to find out the truth.
He will have to trust me to act on it.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Edinburgh: its streets shiny after rain and slickly reflecting the multi-coloured lights of a modern city, and the magically timeless shape of the floodlit castle above it. When Viola first saw the place, it seemed dark and solemn to her. That was the year her father died, when she and her mother had gone to stay with an aunt in Corstorphine. There had been an ill tempered terrier and for years afterwards messages from the dog to dear little Viola were appended to the aunt’s Christmas cards.
‘What do you think of Edinburgh then?’ a reporter shouted, and Dame Viola replied that she had loved it since she first came as a little girl; but it was a lie. She had been frightened of the dog and oppressed by the dour black town. Now it held only the memory of uneasiness. The rally had gone well without any of the hostile demonstrations that Watchwomen always feared in university towns. Security had been strict. Nothing had marred the impression of an unstoppable, invincible movement of the people. Observers from the political parties that hoped for Watchwomen’s endorsement were in the audience. It was all very satisfactory, and Dame Viola had commended her staff.
Now she would have a rest in her hotel suite before the greater triumph of the evening, when Watchwomen’s success would be televised for the whole nation. Annie Hamilton Routley’s inspired publicity had induced a national network to bring the live programme Truth or Dare to Edinburgh to coincide with the Watchwomen Festival. It consisted of a reversal of the usual format in which one host received and questioned several guests. Four interviewers and a moderator would confront one ‘personality’ with their own questions and those of the audience. It was a public inquisition; a grilling. One could be shown up as quick witted and candid, or as disastrously hypocritical, or simply lost without a script. The programme had ended careers and launched others. It would confirm Dame Viola Hutber’s. After all, as she often said, her life was an open book and only she knew that the text had been rigorously edited.
Dame Viola glanced out at the trees in Charlotte Square, and beyond them to the green-domed church. She was able to check that the crowd on the pavement was still growing, and no doubt she would hear her own name if she opened the double glazed window, as the women waited for their leader. She padded across to the bed and picked up the disc shaped chocolate peppermint that had been left on her pillow. She paused before it reached her mouth, and put on her reading glasses to ex
amine it in close detail. Then, smiling at her own paranoia, she ate it with pleasure before composing herself to sleep under the chintz canopy of the four-poster bed. She felt, as she always did these days, a renewed pleasure in having the bed to herself, and wondered, as she had often done since his death, how she had borne Georg Kaminski’s proximity for so long. She answered herself as she always did. She had been afraid. Afraid of him, of not being with him, of the world. Afraid that if she were known for what she was, she would be stoned, reviled, rendered a public mockery. So well had Nell St Uny done her work on an impressionable girl. She had become an old woman before she shed the burden of shame that Nell had tied on to her shoulders. All the same, if Nell had known it, she performed a service by insisting that Basil’s sister should disappear. Except in the colour of the eyes there was no likeness left between the young Stella and the old Viola, so that by the time Nell Hutber died, releasing Viola from her threats of exposure, nobody would connect the shameful past with the newly identified Hilary Vivian. ‘The woman must simply disappear,’ Nell had insisted. ‘She can hide or change her name or kill herself but I swear I’ll tell the whole world what she is if I ever hear of her again.’ She believed that Viola had corrupted Basil. She taught Viola to feel for herself the disgust that the world would feel for her. She lived like a leper. She accepted Georg Kaminski’s bullying as her due punishment. She supposed that she was lucky to have him.
Back in 1938, with Nell’s contemptuous rejection echoing in her ears, Viola had been glad to leave Carmell, and had welcomed the disguise of her ranked and numbered uniformity among the other recruits who joined the navy after Munich. She had felt as free of her old self as Basil became when he assumed the character of Rex. Second Officer Hutber almost forgot the lascivious child that Stella had been; she was glad to have left Viola’s role as the dutiful sister running their parents’ house in Carmell for her brother. She saw a brand new life ahead of her, until Evelyn Dillon, who had not recognised her when she was depersonalised by her rank and uniform, gazed delirious on the dishevelled woman who tended him on Duaman and began to babble about Stella. On the day that they were spotted from the air, when they knew rescue would come, he told the other girl about her, and Viola Hutber still shuddered to remember what she had been forced to do with the materials at hand, creeping across in the night to beat out their brains. The noise of wood against skin and bone seemed so loud that she could hardly believe that none of the other survivors had heard it, so she was hardly surprised when it turned out that the Pole, Kaminski, had heard and seen and in exchange for silence wanted to marry her. It gave him no British passport, as it would have given a foreign woman marrying an English man, but it made the authorities lenient about residence permits, and after five years he was naturalised and became a British subject.