The Ruffian on the Stair

by Gary Newman

  Then there was the actual covering letter from Lawyer Le Touzel in Jersey, on whose doorstep the contents of the Jiffy bag had been dumped. He ‘didn’t envisage that the donor would be traced’, and I could guess why. No doubt some shamefaced heir, who’d discovered the stuff in his old dad’s or grandfather’s attic, booty of my English-born grandparents’ vicarage looted by neighbours after the big German round-up in the summer of 1940. My aunt in Malmesbury, Nanny Rolvenden’s niece, had once told me how my grandmother had described to her how she and my grandfather had been sent by the Germans to a camp near Freiburg, but that, both of them being over sixty, they’d been repatriated to England via the Swiss Red Cross.

  My grandparents had gone back to Jersey straight after Liberation, only to find their vicarage ransacked and gutted – doors, floors and window frames gone for firewood – with none of their former neighbours and parishioners knowing anything about it . . . They’d never gone back, though over the years Reet and I had spent several holidays in the beachside cottage, which had been left in one piece after the war, owing to its having been a billet for a couple of German officers. Even today, they tend not to talk too much about the war on the island – live and let live, and all that. I suspected that that had been the subtext, too, of Lawyer Le Touzel’s doubts expressed in his letter as to the ‘donor’ of the Jiffy bag contents ever being traced. But I’ll bet that, back in the 1940s, my grandfather had a few sleepless nights over who might be reading his stolen notebook!

  Funny, but recently I’d been fishing around in vain for a subject for my next book, then this lot drops out of the sky on me. If ever I’d wanted to write a book on something, this was it. Leah was going to be an invaluable help to me here, too, with her cutting intelligence and insight, just as she’d been invaluable to me since the smash. I’d met her at a party I’d been invited to by my old crony Frank Hague at his boathouse in Wivenhoe, when he’d thought I needed to be taken out of myself, reintroduced to life sort-of-thing. When I’d told Leah I’d read Botany and Spanish at university, we’d launched into a confab about heredity, an issue she was into as a major part of her study of human behaviour and its causes. We’d liked the same music, loathed the same politicians, and the relationship had really taken off – one up to Frank.

  I’d known Frank ever since school, and our paths had kept crossing over the years until he’d opened his antique shop in Wivenhoe, though he still spent quite a lot of his time up in London, an aspect of his life he didn’t talk about much. Frank’s wife, Pat, taught English at the nearby university, where Leah taught psychology. Frank was known to be seriously well off, though they used the flat over the shop as a sort of perch, and lived fairly modestly there. Of course they had the boathouse in the nearby marina, and there was talk of a place near Grasse on the French Riviera. I suspected that Frank’s relations with the taxman weren’t all that effusive, and that Pat kept on with her job because she liked it and was damned good at it, judging by the heavyweight literary biographies she’d written, and the Readership she’d recently been appointed to. Frank, if rumour was to be believed, had several odd gaps in his CV dating from his London period, which the envious attributed to brushes with the law, but, as I’ve said, I owed my meeting with Leah to him, not to mention the way he’d negotiated the purchase of my present home for me after the smash.

  After so many years of marriage to an inveterate clinger, I loved Leah’s self-containment, too – if ever there was a case of anyone being her own woman, Leah Rooney was it. But she had her work at the university, too, and I, what was I working on? Tod Slaughter, His Life and Crimes . . . Tweaking up the first draft, to be precise. It’s funny how I got on to writing film biographies: after years of patient hacking as a staffer on gardening mags, I’d had the idea of celebrating all the holiday Saturday matinées of my boyhood, and had my first go with The Lugosi No One Knew, and, hey presto! – a late-flowering little niche as a film biographer. I even consult on it. I largely owe my starting to write again to Leah, too.

  But damn it! That reminded me I’d promised to have lunch with Frank and Pat Hague in Wivenhoe: in my excitement over the arrival of the package from Jersey I’d clean forgotten about the date. Make it short and sweet, though – there’s sure to be a twist in the tail – trust Frank! – and I feel uneasy with Pat now since what happened during our last foursome in the cottage in Jersey. I really think Pat gets a buzz now out of putting me alongside Frank, then giving me nods and winks. I feel really guilty with regard to Frank, too, though I’ve long been aware that he and Pat go their own ways in these matters. All the same, keep it short.

  I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece – time to get a move on. I took up the Jiffy bag with its contents – there’d be time after lunch to do it all justice – and was about to put away the little marble-backed notebook, too, but something prompted me to keep it by me. Call it superstition, what you will, but I wanted to have the feeling of carrying my grandfather’s truth with me. I went over to the bureau and locked the bag in the deep bottom compartment, then returned to the sofa where I’d left my jacket and slipped the notebook into the inside pocket before pulling it on and going out to the car.

  I bowled along meditatively over the causeway under the huge, lowering grey skies: the Easter hols might be just a week away, but the weather certainly wasn’t performing to script. At one point, a wind-tossed willow branch from a ditch-side hedge lashed its skeletal fingers against the windscreen, and I recalled the encounter between Pip and Magwitch in the graveyard in the ‘lone, shivering marshes’ in the 1946 film version of Great Expectations. It was all a bit sad. I slipped in a cassette of the Enigma Variations – why not be low-spirited in style . . .

  Reet didn’t like Elgar – thought it was ‘sick Romanticism’. She couldn’t abide Pat, either, after the Jersey cottage incident – no, I wasn’t really looking forward to lunch. And Frank – we were after all such unlikely friends. We hadn’t been what you’d have called close chums at school, but there’d been a sort of attraction of opposites, and with me being as sturdy and uncertain of temper as he was small and unsure of himself, I was always an insurance against the bullies. I suppose it was their attentions that had left him with the slight stammer that still dogged him, but they must also have honed his knack of weighing people up, spotting their weaknesses, and how he might make them serve his turn. Frank took the insider’s satisfaction in showing you the ropes: when Reet and I had left university, he in fact had found our first London flat for us, and later, when we’d got into organic smallholding – Reet actually doing it, and I writing it up – he’d used his local contacts to find the Holt for us, which Reet and my son Paul were still farming. Frank’ll fix it . . .

  And now I was helping him out with his film memorabilia website – that was in all likelihood what the lunch would be leading to. Funny, though, but – Christ! – how do you tell someone: Look, Frank, I’ve known you for forty years, and you’ve been of great help to me in more than one crisis in my life – don’t think I don’t sincerely appreciate it – but, well . . . the thing is, I don’t really like you . . . And Pat: I still felt bad about how we’d behaved together in Jersey, though she’d made the running. Just do the lunch, ignore her tricks, help him with the website, over and out.

  Just then it started to rain, and the strings in the Elgar music really got to me – the tears of things. I’m sorry, Frank, you’re an eager, manipulative little man, but I’m sure you’ve been my friend in your own way, and I’ll do what I can for you.

  The windscreen-wiper was dispersing rivulets now – grey rivulets, like floods of tears – enough Elgar. God, I wish I were going home to Leah afterwards. Leah would only have the best of me – I’d see to that. What was that Grandfather Rolvenden had quoted in his proposal to Nanny? A man in all the truth of nature. Yes. The masts of the marina were coming into view: straight round it and up to the shop.

  It was a fair lunch, cooked by Frank – salmon and a nice sauce, with Chardon
nay – and Pat started in with her indignation at the new marking policy now being enforced at the university, just the latest, according to her, in a long series of target-driven lunacies being foisted on the weary toilers of Academe.

  ‘TLAC!’ she hooted in her brittle, throaty voice. ‘I ask you, what sort of a name’s that for a policy!’

  ‘TLC with something extra added!’ Frank cracked, his nondescript, bearded face creasing and his snuffling little laugh escaping. ‘Shows how much they think of you.’

  ‘There was a Mexican rain god called Tlaloc,’ I said, contributing my two penny worth, to a curl of the nostrils of Pat’s handsome prow of a nose.

  ‘At least he did something bloody useful!’

  ‘What’s the new rule all about, then?’ I asked, more seriously.

  ‘Just the fifty-word appreciation at the foot of each exam paper, but next year we’re to be given a new treat – RAE, Research Assessment Exercise – a minimum of four papers in accredited publications. I suppose if we can find time, we’ll be able to sneak behind the bike sheds and do a little clandestine teaching or writing in our subjects.’

  ‘And the Dylan Thomas book?’ I put in brightly, wondering how such a hard-favoured woman could be so sexy.

  ‘Next sabbatical,’ Pat snorted. ‘I’m going to stay in Swansea to really absorb Dylan’s background.’

  ‘You could apply for a travel grant,’ Frank stammered in his uncertain way, the foxy grey eyes taking us in through the oblong specs, then, when he saw that we were laughing, he laughed his own apologetic snuffle, too.

  ‘Ha, bloody ha,’ Pat retorted, as Frank got up deftly and started to clear away the lunch things. As soon as he was out of the room, Pat locked her leg round mine under the table. I recalled the strength of those strapping brown legs on that warm, curtained afternoon in Jersey two summers before.

  ‘It’s no good, Pat, I . . .’

  ‘It was good then, Seb.’

  ‘Think of Frank – you’re . . .’

  ‘You were married then, too, Seb, and what does Frank care? He has his little hobbies in London. I like a man who’s not a rabbit, and I make you laugh, too, don’t I? It’s nice to be with a woman who’s not a hysteric, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s different now, Pat.’

  ‘Still smitten by the little trick-cyclist, are we?’

  This reference to Leah really hit home: if Pat should try to spoil things between her and me . . .

  ‘You want me, don’t you, Seb?’

  I surveyed the firm bust under the tight jumper, then the taut neck and the jutting chin and the nut-brown, freckled face with the big nose and insolent, provocative dark eyes, the half-open, thickish lips and the tusky gap-teeth. I said nothing, but was all too well aware that the confusion and longing in my eyes and in every line of my face must be screaming ‘Yes!’ to her last question. Sensing her triumph, Pat’s eyes softened, and she smiled, the crows’ feet coming into play at the edges of her eyes doing nothing to lessen her allure. She slipped her leg out from mine and got up lazily.

  ‘I’ll leave you little boys to your train sets,’ she said simply, and left the room.

  Shortly afterwards, I heard a powerful car engine rev up and then drive away. I resolved to keep away from her in future: it only worked when I was with her. Pat had been right: I still lusted after her, I did relish her totally disabused sense of humour, admired her sheer dash, but I was afraid of her coldness, which was like staring down a deep, dark well.

  ‘Seb . . .’ Frank said as he came back into the room, breaking my reverie. ‘Grab a drink and come into the workroom: I’d like you to take a look at the blurb I’ve blocked out for the new website. I’m not sure the register’s quite right for the States . . .’

  It was as if we were back at school again, and I was helping Frank with his prep, but this time it was with his antique dealer’s website rather than with a Latin prose. As he explained what he was aiming at, part of my mind went back to Pat; or rather to the car she’d driven off in not long before: it had been a vintage black Bristol 400. There must be all sorts of ways a bored, clever woman can get back at the man she despises but who pays for her lifestyle. You don’t come by a car like that on the proceeds of teaching Eng. Lit. and almost finishing a book on Dylan Thomas.

  And why did Frank put up with it? There was clearly no longer any sympathy between them. Habit? Or maybe Pat revelled in her power over him? I thought again of his unspecified London activities: maybe the answer lay there, and in what Pat knew about them.

  But back to Frank’s workroom and his new website: we quickly agreed on something for the text, then, after he’d asked rather pointedly if I was all right – why not just ask whether I was still taking the tablets? – I thanked him for the lunch and left. I was a bit puzzled as to why he’d asked me along at all, since my ‘help’ with the website had merely consisted in confirming all his suggestions. My doubts, though, were quickly forgotten in my relief at getting clear of the fraught, ménage-à-trois atmosphere that had reigned in the Hagues’ flat.

  Once outside, I breathed in the fresh air with gusto. My mind soon went back to the Jiffy bag that had arrived that morning, with its intriguing contents, and the vow I’d made to learn more about Julian Rawbeck, the disappeared Impressionist painter. It occurred to me that the local library would still be open, so I nipped along there and managed to find a copy of Rothenstein’s authoritative biography of Julian Rawbeck – good weekend reading.

  I regained my car, got in with the book, and soon I was driving back over the flats in the raw, April greyness towards my empty watchtower. It was now far too late for tea, and too early for dinner, and I was still dogged by my bad feelings over how I stood with Frank and Pat. Like my attraction to Pat, my friendly feelings towards Frank only operated while I was actually there with him. I felt false – a man of straw. Perhaps I should move away – strike out for a completely new start – you could write articles for gardening magazines or biographies of defunct film actors wherever they had modems and telephone jacks. But then the lighthouse hove into view. A squatter version of the usual workaday nineteenth- and twentieth-century models you see today, square at the base, with three storeys and a pyramidal, leaded roof with a finial on top. I could see the discreet, green front door now, then the two, single-room storeys and attic – where the light had been in the old days – one room above the other like building blocks, each with its squarish, many-paned window. They did lighthouses very tastefully in 1720. I loved the vast view from the second-floor bedroom, too, with marsh, sea and sky joining in a sort of silver truce. No: I didn’t think I’d move after all.

  Once inside, I made coffee, and, moving to the sitting room and my cane-backed armchair, plunked the coffee mug on the side table and reached automatically for the phone. But then I recalled that Leah usually went out with her mother on the first evenings of her Leeds visits, and, besides, I didn’t want to be forever bleating after her like a lost sheep. I desperately wanted her to respect me. I remembered Grandfather Rolvenden’s letter to his love, Cecily: I have striven always to show you my poor best . . . I put the receiver back down on its rest.

  To the Jiffy bag, then, and the earthly effects of Sebastian John Rolvenden. The street map first, I thought – I hadn’t really looked at that. A handsome linen-backed affair from 1871, with Highgate a scattered village and open country east of Hackney Marshes. I smiled on reading on the yellow inside folder that no more than a shilling should be paid for cab journeys within the ‘four-mile circle’, and was duly impressed to learn that the India Office might be visited by the public on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I scanned the actual street plan, and, hello – what was this? Markings. Faint, pencilled crosses – half a dozen of them scattered at points within a two-mile radius roughly east of King’s Cross station. I examined the map back and front, but there were no other markings or additions to the printed text. So the X’s marked what spots? That would need further investigation.

&nbs
p; I carefully refolded the map and put it aside, turning my attention to the Crockford. It was for 1940, the year my Rolvenden grandparents had been collared by the Germans in Jersey. On first riffle, no inscriptions or markings to be seen aside from the printed text. Then the Bible, and in its cloth flap the bundle of letters between my grandfather and grandmother way back in their courting days in the 1890s. I went carefully through the letters again, and was struck more than ever by the contrast between my grandfather’s expressed personality and Nanny’s – or Miss Cecily Woodruff as she appeared in most of them. His tense earnestness, without a glimmer of humour – I was fully behind Leah’s diagnosis on that one now – and Nanny’s rather mocking, affectionate common sense. It was certainly how I remembered her. They’d been each other’s complements, I supposed. But what Sebastian Rolvenden had been through . . .

  I was getting ready to replace the letters in their bundle when – what was this? – there was another sheet jammed into the envelope which contained one of my grandfather’s letters to Nanny. A single sheet, folded once, but too big to slide easily out of the envelope. I tugged it out, to find that it was cheap, rather slippery notepaper, written in a completely different hand from his, and in French! There was no accompanying envelope. The address at the head of the sheet was L’Oustalet Grau, Balmes le Vidame, Niort, Deux Sèvres. It was written in fairly basic French, so I was able to get the gist of the text:

  Dear Monsieur Rolvenden,

  I’m writing to you on behalf of my husband Laurent, who has been very ill these last three months, owing to the wounds he suffered during the War – affected lungs. [I think this answered to poumons atteints.] Because of his illness, he is unable to work, and now we find ourselves in a desperate situation. Laurent has often spoken to me about you, always describing you as a real gentleman [‘gentleman’ written in English], and we would be eternally in your debt if you could help us in our difficulties.

  May God bless you.