“Great little dogs, pugs,” said Clive. “Not that Pooch here is the liveliest specimen.” He tickled the dog’s rumpled neck and it wheezed with pleasure.
“Tell me about your family,” Olivia said. “Your parents; your grandparents. What were they like?”
“Beats me why none of them ever said anything,” said Clive. “Even after Bella died, they could have said something.”
“I may be wrong,” said Olivia. “Wrong about that bit, anyway, but it fits. If you look for her birth certificate – Isabella’s – I don’t think you’ll find it. I think she was born Jane Quickshall, daughter of Georgiana.”
Clive levered himself to his feet and moved back towards the coffee machine. His limp seemed more pronounced than it had done when Olivia arrived, the stick a more necessary prop.
“How did you find me?” he asked, his back to her once more as he emptied out the damp grounds.
“I found your birth certificate. And your brother’s.”
“My brother’s dead.”
“I know; I’m sorry.” Should she tell him that anyone interested, for any reason, in the Quickshalls or the Shotters could find out all about them in a single afternoon? “I traced the family tree.”
Clive turned to face her again. “Why?”
Why indeed? “Because I know your aunt. Through the day centre she attends.”
“And she wants to meet me?”
That was the rub, of course. “She doesn’t know you exist. I thought – I thought it might be better to find you first. She has good reason to be wary of her family.”
Clive Shotter laughed suddenly.
“You’re quite a woman,” he said. “So you came to check me out, make sure I’d pass muster?”
“No, of course not …”
“Eminently sensible.” Clive waved his stick as if to dismiss Olivia’s embarrassment. “I feel protective of her already, this aunt. Glad you’re not springing any old nephew on her. She’s not gaga, is she?”
“Not yet.”
Clive nodded slowly, as though conjuring Georgie’s image in his mind.
“Tell me about your family,” Olivia said again.
Clive leaned against the sideboard for a moment, then pushed himself upright with a wince.
“Tell you what: got to take my constitutional. Limber up the new joint, you know? Come with me and I’ll fill you in on the whole clan. Kill two birds.”
Olivia stood at the top of the steps while Clive made his way down, grasping the ornate black railings. She was surprised to find that it was a beautiful day, one of those perfect winter mornings that are particularly lovely in city streets. The clarity of the light gave the white stucco the pure, glistening look of icing sugar, and the soft chill of the air made life seem simple, as though nothing mattered beyond the moment.
“This is a wonderful place to live,” she said.
Clive was breathless from the effort of manoeuvring himself down to the pavement.
“Lucky,” he agreed.
They made their way slowly along the couple of blocks that separated Clive’s house from the green space of Primrose Hill. Olivia didn’t know this area well, but she remembered walking here once before, a long time ago, with a young Irishman she’d known at university. The Rose of Tralee man, she called him now, in her head. The original Rose of Tralee man. A mad interlude before Robert came along. The awkward nostalgia the memory provoked felt lighter here, in the sunlit anonymity of this elegant enclave of London. Everything, Olivia thought, felt easier to bear, gilded by the ambience of early Victorian prosperity. She imagined Sylvia Plath walking these pavements, towards the hill and its views of the London skyline. Not that it had done her any good.
“You know what?” Clive said, as he settled into a steady walking pace. “I’m rather chuffed about all this. To tell the truth, I was expecting worse.”
“Worse?”
“After your call. Woman with a grievance, sort of thing.” He chuckled, making the allusion to sexual intrigue sound charmingly old-fashioned. “My loose ends are all tied up, far as I know, but there’s the next generation. Sins of the fathers, all that.”
Olivia thought of her boys; of the prospect of receiving phone calls from weeping girlfriends or their irate mothers. “You have sons?” she asked.
“Two. High fliers, both of them. Not much time for their ageing Pa. Good boys, though. Got some steady blood from their mother.”
They crossed the road into the park and began to climb up the broad asphalt path to the summit of the hill. A perfect scene, Olivia thought, the grass still green in December, soaring trees and cast-iron lampposts silhouetted against the skyline.
“There’s a slogan painted on one of the paths,” said Clive. “The view’s so nice. Comes from a song, apparently. Pop song. Take a drive to Primrose Hill, it’s windy there, and the view’s so nice. Rather like that, don’t you?”
“Mmm.”
“Haven of peace,” Clive went on, puffing now from the effort of the incline. “Not always, though. Lots of famous duels. Murders. Old Mother Shipton said – phew – said the streets of London would run with blood if the city ever grew to enclose the hill.” He halted, leaning on his stick. The pug pulled up at his heels, lifting its face towards Clive.
“I wonder if she’d reckon she was right,” Olivia said.
“Worth the climb,” Clive said, more to convince himself than Olivia, perhaps. He set off again, and Olivia followed. They didn’t speak again until they reached the top, and then London lay before them, spread across the horizon beyond the foreground of Regent’s Park. Olivia recognised the Post Office Tower, but the other landmarks were unfamiliar to her.
“I don’t know much about my maternal grandparents,” Clive said, when he’d got his breath back. “Old man Quickshall died when I was a baby.”
“In the war?”
“During the war, not in it. 1940, I think. Or ‘41. He wasn’t spoken of much. I had the impression Ma was frightened of him. Small wonder, if he’d packed one daughter off to a loony bin.”
“A tyrant?”
“A drunk, is my guess. Free with his fists.”
“What did he do for a living?” Olivia remembered the marriage certificate: Thomas Quickshall, clerk.
“He did well for himself.” Clive lifted his stick to demonstrate. “Worked his way up. East Anglian Building Society. Started out as scribe, ended up chief accountant.”
“And your grandmother?”
“Granny went on until I was fourteen or fifteen. Not your warm, cosy grandmother: bit of a cold fish, in fact. Lived alone, ten miles from us, but rarely visited. Sunday lunch, once a month, right up to the end. Mind you, I reckon she was the one with the aspirations.”
Those flowery names, Olivia thought. Eliza Frances and Georgiana Christina. Hauling up her family by the bootstraps, christening them into the middle classes.
“More Hardy than Dickens, my family,” said Clive. “Even without today’s revelations.”
“More than their fair share of tragedy, you mean?”
Clive turned away from the view and began to walk slowly down the hill again. A slower pace than the ascent, Olivia noticed. Wasn’t that the way with knees?
“Isabella was the tragedy. Enough tragedy for any family. She was the life and soul, Isabella. Kept us all alight. When she died, everything fell apart. Ma’s heart was broken: nothing Phil or I could do to make up for it.”
“She loved Isabella?” Olivia was agog.
“Adored her. Everyone adored her. You couldn’t not. She was beautiful, clever: too good to be true, really. Too good for this life, Pa said afterwards. That was the kind of thing he said; drove Ma mad.”
Olivia tried to remember the dates on the documents she’d printed off: Edwin and Eliza had both been dead within a decade of Isabella, as she recalled. “How old were you when she died?”
“Twenty-one.” Clive didn’t hesitate. “June 1959, end of national service. About to go up to university
.”
“So she was …”
“Twenty-four.”
“Not married?”
Clive shook his head. “Lots of beaux, to quote Ma. In no rush to choose between them.”
“No child?” ventured Olivia.
Clive turned sharply towards her, but all he said was, “no child.”
So that avenue was closed, anyway. That fanciful idea. Olivia smiled to herself. Ridiculous to imagine that life could deliver such a coincidence.
As they reached the street again a young mother passed with a baby in a pushchair and a toddler trailing behind, tears streaming down his cheeks. Red hands, red cheeks, red eyes, Olivia thought. The gruelling drag through the winter, cold mornings and long afternoons. That was another thing about memory: you didn’t exactly forget the boredom and the tiredness and the never-ending struggle to get from one end of the day to the other, but they were stored in a different place from the technicolour images burned onto the hard disc for future viewing. Benjy looking comical with his giant bandage, solaced by sweets from the ample-bosomed first aider, not the half hour of screaming beforehand. Not the anxiety about time running out on the parking meter, the accident on the M40 that added an hour to the journey home.
“You haven’t told me much about my aunt,” Clive said, as they turned into his street.
Olivia felt a spasm of anxiety: she tried to imagine Georgie, austere, withdrawn Georgie, meeting this garrulous, worldly-wise nephew.
“You have to bear in mind that forty-seven years in an institution has an indelible effect,” she said. “She’s not the woman she might have been. Sometimes I feel there’s no more than a shell left, a suggestion of her.”
“But there must be something,” Clive said. “Something about her, to make you go to all this trouble, come all this way.”
Olivia smiled. “You’re right,” she said. “There is. The shell of a remarkable person.”
Olivia had expected to take her leave soon after she and Clive returned from their walk. She’d imagined that he’d asked her to come early because he had business to deal with later, or perhaps because he’d need a nap at lunchtime. He was convalescing from major surgery, after all. When they reached his front door she began to make noises about calling a cab, leaving him to get on with his day.
Clive halted with his key in the lock. The face he turned to her looked older, suddenly; sagging, like the pug’s.
“We haven’t had lunch yet,” he said. “You don’t really have to go already, do you?”
“Well, not immediately, but …”
“Stay for lunch,” he insisted. “Don’t often have company these days. I’ll take you to a little place round the corner. Italian. You like Italian?”
“You don’t have to take me out,” said Olivia. “I could make us a sandwich.”
Clive laughed cheerily. “Not unless you go shopping first,” he said. “Not a crust in the house.”
Clive was evidently well-known in the restaurant, an intimate, atmospheric little place on a side street, run by three Italians who could have been brothers, and who looked at least Clive’s age.
“Signora.” They beamed and bowed to Olivia, ushered her theatrically to a table in the window. She smiled, imagining herself in a long line of women brought here by Clive, fêted by the waiters, discussed afterwards. Not too high a price to pay for his hospitality, she thought. She put her hand lightly on Clive’s arm as he held her chair for her and smiled at the four old men, feeling like a minor celebrity. She was glad she’d worn her decent coat.
There was, apparently, no menu.
“Food’s wonderful here,” said Clive with satisfaction. “Not vegetarian, are you?”
Olivia shook her head.
“Glass of Prosecco to start? Toast my aunt Georgiana?”
“Why not?”
The food was indeed wonderful. They could have been in Italy, Olivia thought.
“Nice place to have round the corner,” she said.
“One reason I’ve stuck around.” Clive reached for the wine bottle; Olivia was too slow to prevent him refilling her glass. “Love it here: couldn’t imagine moving. Hettie took off to the country after the divorce. Surrounded by cows.” He chortled.
“What did you do?” Olivia asked. “For a living, I mean?”
“City.” Clive shrugged dismissively. “Hey day long gone.”
“Yours?”
He laughed. “No, the City’s. Long lunches; gentlemen’s agreements. Rat race, now. My older boy’s a currency dealer: wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.” He put his fork down for a moment. “Tell you something, though. Not sure I’d have got where I got if it hadn’t been for Bella.”
“How do you mean?”
“My parents weren’t interested, after she died. Gave up on us. Could have gone two ways after that. My brother Phil went down the tubes, but I was buggered if I was going anywhere but up. Set my sights. Not as meteoric as grandpa Quickshall, but I stuck it out.”
“What happened to Philip?” asked Olivia.
“Not a lot. Bit of speculating. Wasn’t bad at it, some of the time. Spent his money, such as it was, on women and wine.” He laughed suddenly. “Unlike his big bro. What about you? What’s your line?”
“I teach the piano.”
“Ah!” Clive looked interested; more interested than people usually did. “Play, too?”
“Not much any more,” Olivia admitted.
“I’m involved in a little charity,” said Clive. “Music lessons for underprivileged children. Maybe you could help us out a bit.”
Olivia was taken aback. “I’d be glad to, if you’ve got children in Oxford who need teaching.”
“No, no. Advice, I meant. Strategy, sort of thing. We need musicians on the board.”
It was Olivia’s turn to laugh. “I don’t know anything about strategy,” she said. “And I’m hardly a musician any more.”
Clive shook his head. “Nonsense. You’re just the kind of person we need. Bit of time on your hands, eh?”
“What makes you think I’ve got time on my hands?”
“Enough time to come up to London on a wild goose chase like this.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows, but she didn’t reply.
They ate in silence for a while then. It struck Olivia as deeply ironic that she should be eating a slap-up lunch with Georgie’s nephew while Georgie, still unaware of his existence, was at home in Oxford, sitting out another identical day of her impoverished life. How could she explain that to Georgie? How could she explain what she’d done without her consent? It was clear to Olivia that Clive Shotter wouldn’t give up his newly-discovered aunt now without a struggle: satisfying her own curiosity wasn’t going to be the end of it. How could she raise the subject again with Georgie after the flat dismissal she’d received last time?
“Why bother learning to cook?” said Clive happily, as he chased the last parcel of ravioli around his plate, gathering the traces of sauce. “Perfetto, Alessandro,” he declared, as the youngest of the waiters hovered into view.
“Grazie, signore.”
“So,” said Clive, when the plates had been cleared. “Question: are you going to break it to my aunt that you’ve sniffed me out, or am I going to pretend I’ve got a yen for family history all of a sudden?”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “If you could find me, I could find her. Odd name like Quickshall: not that many around, I imagine.”
Olivia felt a rush of relief. “Why would you do that?”
“Plenty of people look into their forebears. Perfectly natural thing to do.”
“No, I mean why would you present it like that? Pretend it was your doing?”
Clive twinkled. “Don’t much fancy a rebuff before I’ve clapped eyes on the old bird,” he said. “Good reason to be wary of her family, you said. As translated: had no idea you were coming to find me. Am I right?”
Olivia blushed. “You might still be rebuffed,” she said. �
�She’s a person of strong will. You’d have to be, to survive in the kind of place they put her in.”
“I’ll polish up the old charm,” said Clive. “Take the pooch along. Never met an aunt yet who didn’t fall for the pug.” He grinned. “Now: better get you on that train before your husband sends a search party.”
Chapter 38
Faith’s business went through a quiet patch in December. It was a relief at first: she’d been flat out since September, and she reckoned it was about time she had a rest. She needed to look for new premises, too. Some of the contracts she’d been getting lately were beyond the scope of her family-sized kitchen, and the business was steadily taking over her whole flat. Her paperwork was stashed in a drawer under the telly, and her second fridge-freezer jostled for position in the so-called living area with the wardrobe that wouldn’t fit in the minuscule bedroom. Maybe she was doing well enough, these days, that she could afford to live in one place and work in another. Keep herself above board with the planning regulations, too.
She certainly needed a bit of time to take stock, but it was a fine line, how much of a lull she wanted. She had plenty on over Christmas, but not a lot after the holiday season. No good planning for expansion if she’d come to the end of a run of good times. So when an enquiry came through about a wedding, a last-minute contract for a big do in one of the colleges in January, she was relieved – even if it was going to be a tall order.
“I’ll be quite frank,” the bride said on the phone. “I’ve lost confidence in the people I’d booked. It’s disappointing; I took a lot of trouble over choosing them. But I found out yesterday that the person I’ve been dealing with wasn’t even going to be there on the day. I don’t know how they think they can get away with it. A wedding’s a wedding, after all.”
“Absolutely,” said Faith. “Your big day: you want it to be perfect.”
“Exactly.” The woman paused. “I take it you don’t have any other bookings that day?”
The Partridge and the Pelican Page 27