Account Rendered & Other Stories

by Marjorie Eccles

  When Mike and Cluny returned, Mike was enthusiastic about the house, talking about period pieces, and rather less about the drawback of there being a business situated on the premises. ‘But if potential buyers aren’t happy with that, I’m sure I can find somewhere suitable for old Daniel,’ he said to me in a confidential aside as I showed them out. ‘Er—Rebecca tells me you’re coming back here to live.’ As if the two thoughts were connected. It must have been Rebecca who’d given him the idea they might be. She’d never given up on the idea of Daniel and me.

  I sighed as I watched him making the awkward reverse turn necessary to go back down the drive. This was the downside of living around here, where your private life was never your own—but it was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? To be part, once more, of a community where everybody knew you, where you had friends who cared? Unlike Muswell Hill, where nobody knew you, and couldn’t care less.

  * * *

  ‘I’ll bet she can’t wait to get away’ said Mrs Sugden, settled in with her coffee as I took the cups back into the kitchen. She reached for a Hobnob and took a large bite. ‘Like the first Mrs Brereton. That would be your gran—’ The rest of it was drowned in a spasm of coughing, as she realized what she’d said and the dry biscuit crumbs went the wrong way. Minutes later, her streaming eyes patted dry and the crumbs washed down by half a mug of coffee, she said, ‘I’m sorry, I spoke out of turn.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’d love to hear about my grandmother, Mrs Sugden.’ She shook her head and I said encouragingly, ‘Go on, I don’t mind skeletons in the cupboard.’

  It hadn’t even occurred to me until I spoke that I might have stumbled on the truth, that the reason there’d been no talk of the family past from William was because there might indeed be metaphorical skeletons to rattle, something shameful to hide, like Mrs Rochester hidden in the upper regions. It could even be that my grandmother might still be alive, not dead, as I’d always imagined. ‘The first Mrs Brereton, my grandmother—’

  ‘Before my time,’ Mrs Sugden said hastily, getting up to rinse her coffee mug. ‘Gossip. Stuff I heard from my mother, who worked here before me. Hearsay, that’s all.’

  Clearly, she’d been warned that the subject of the first Mrs Brereton was taboo, but I didn’t intend to be put off. ‘What was her name—my grandmother’s, I mean?’ It was really weird that I didn’t even know that.

  ‘Oh, something outlandish, I forget.’ Not Sophie, then, you wouldn’t describe that as an outlandish name. Besides, the Sophie of the portrait was before William’s generation—she was Edwardian, or perhaps a little later.

  ‘Janetta—no, Jacquetta, that was it.’ Triumphant as she was at having remembered, however, Mrs Sugden wasn’t to be drawn further. ‘I’d best be getting on. It’s my day for the windows, and I’ve no time to be sitting here, chewing the fat.’

  * * *

  I should have been flat-hunting, but the dismal weather gave me the excuse I wanted to get back to the attic. It looked more desolate than ever this morning. A single, dim bulb hung from the rafters and cast shadows into the far corners.

  I whisked down the attic stairs, and then the back stairs, and returned double-quick with a 200 watt bulb to exchange for the dim 60 watt, also picking up a duster or two and a broom while I was at it. I rubbed vigorously at the grimy panes in the window to let in a little more light, and pushed against its resistance for some ventilation, hearing a creak and a splinter of wood, then—oops! it was open. Damp as it was, the fresh air rushing in helped to disperse the musty smell and made me suddenly feel more optimistic about what I might discover.

  Half an hour later, I sat back in the pink velvet chair, defeated. I could see why the contents of that box had seemed like inconsequential trivia to Cluny. I’d been hoping, if not for the rest of that draft letter, then perhaps diaries or other letters, birth certificates even, if I got very lucky. The things I found were a few mementos from William’s wartime days—an RAF cap badge, a star chart and an aircraft recognition chart, one or two photographs of young men in uniform, including one of an unexpectedly dashing Grandpa. Some of his old school exercise books, revealing little except that he’d been an average pupil, with a talent for woodwork, maths and art. Plus a whole heap of old-fashioned, unidentified sepia photographs of people who meant nothing to me, though scattered among them were some of my mother, as a child and a young woman, and of me as a gap-toothed six-year-old and a lumpy teenager. And a poem I’d written when I was eleven, about spring and daffodils, that he’d kept all these years . . .

  There was nothing else.

  Then, as I flipped open a book about the Boer War, I came across an old black and white photo tucked inside the front flap. A group photo of about twenty people, taken on the steps of some large, colonnaded white building. It looked like a group of guests at a wedding. The women were all dolled-up in small hats and dresses with fitted waists and full skirts. Handbags and white gloves. In the early 1950s, I thought it would have been. One woman’s head was circled in ink. The reverse gave the name of the professional photographer who’d taken it. Alexander Temple, it said, The Orthochrome, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. And in faded pencil was written ‘For Elisabeth’.

  Elisabeth, my mother.

  I sat very still. I ought to have paid more attention in school to the way the pink parts of the globe had changed. My inner map of the shrunken British Empire was sketchy, but I was fairly certain that Salisbury, once the capital of Southern Rhodesia, was now Harare, and Southern Rhodesia itself was Zimbabwe. And Zimbabwe was where Cluny had lived before coming here, and where she was now returning.

  I’ve never had much belief in coincidences, simple or otherwise. But it was the name of the photographer that clinched it, that gave me that lurch of the insides which made me know I was on the right track, at last. Alexander Temple. Hadn’t William written that Temple, Benjamin Temple, was the name of Sophie’s father—and, referring to his wife in the last few lines of his letter: she had inherited the Temple genes?

  I left the attic, still shaken by my discoveries there, and met Cluny in the hall, a couple of large books tucked under her arm. ‘I thought I’d returned all these to the workshop but I’ve found two more,’ she said.

  I recognized the two leather-covered folios with the honeysuckle and bee decoration on the front, unmistakably Brereton design books.

  ‘I’ll take them back, if you like,’ I offered. ‘But first, have a look at this, will you?’ I held out the photo I’d just discovered.

  I had to admire her control. Not a flicker of surprise showed on her face as she scanned it. But I’d have put money on it she was furious with herself for having been careless enough not to have spotted it. ‘Where did you find this?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘It was with all that useless stuff of Grandpa’s you were going to burn.’

  Two spots of giveaway colour appeared on her face. The Cluny I’d once quite liked and admired in a funny sort of way, she of the quick wit and the amusing comeback, had been nowhere in evidence since my arrival at Ingshaw. Perhaps I was seeing the real Cluny for the first time, the one who’d married William for what she could get, the one who’d cold-bloodedly helped to orchestrate that fall to his death, if she hadn’t personally fixed it?

  She soon recovered herself and answered carelessly, ‘Well, it wouldn’t have been any big deal, would it, if it had been burnt. Some old photo that matters to nobody now.’

  ‘You don’t recognize her, then? The woman with the ring drawn round her head?’

  ‘Heavens, no! Should I?’

  ‘It says on the back that the photo was taken in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. By someone named Temple. He ran a photographic studio called The Orthochrome, and seeing as how you lived there, I thought you might have remembered such an unusual name.’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  It was possible she was telling the truth. She could only have been a small child, perhaps not even born, if I’d been right about the date of the photo.
What was more, the name, Orthochrome, must have had a passé, old-fashioned ring to it even then, as if it and its proprietor had belonged to another era. But somehow I knew she was lying.

  I shrugged as if it was of no consequence. ‘It just seemed such a coincidence, Grandpa having this photo, and you coming from Salisbury—sorry, Harare.’

  ‘Not really. It was Johannesburg I came from. I only went to live in Zimbabwe after I was married,’ she said firmly.

  Before returning the books, I took them into the study and went through them, turning the pages feverishly, and then with more care, but alas, with no result. I’d only come across that rough draft of the first page of his letter by a sheer fluke—and it was becoming more and more probable that even if William had left me a fair copy of the whole thing somewhere, the chance of finding it was remote. But there was no way I was going to throw in the towel until I’d explored every possibility.

  All the same, I felt rather low about the whole business, and my spirits didn’t rise much when I found Daniel in his office, looking rather grim—for him, that is. If things did ever get him down, he rarely allowed it to show. ‘I’m so sorry, Daniel,’ I told him. ‘About the property being sold, and everything.’ Though truly, Cluny selling the house wasn’t the only thing I had to be sorry about . . .

  ‘Thanks, Zoe.’

  Impulsively, I squeezed his hand. It was as near as I could get to an apology for my suspicions that he’d deliberately kept that first page of the letter from me. He squeezed back. No current of electricity this time, but as a smile warmed his eyes, something sang inside me. I no longer understood myself. Here I was, having burned my boats well and truly. Given up the lease on my flat, swapped jobs for a new one not half as glamorous and a lot less well paid. Come back to somewhere all my London friends regarded as a backwater. And it felt wonderful.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, things could be worse,’ Daniel said, bringing me down to earth, his natural optimism beginning to surface once more. ‘I’ve other plans. Survival, it’s called. I need to prioritize, you know? Focus on improving the quality of operations, become a leading-edge supplier—’ He pulled himself up with a short laugh. Sounding like a young Turk in red braces wasn’t really his style. ‘Trouble is, I’m not up for the brainy stuff. Give me a piece of wood and I’m OK, but it’ll never make me a millionaire.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ As far as I knew, money had never been a priority with Daniel. Satisfaction for him, as for William, had always come from the quality of his work, the respect it gained.

  ‘No, but I have to eat, Zoe.’ Without enthusiasm, he said, ‘The answer’s fairly obvious—employ more staff and make built-in kitchens, bread-and-butter stuff like that. Plenty of demand there. I know it has to happen sooner or later. Only I hadn’t anticipated it being sooner.’ The worry at the back of his eyes returned.

  I nodded. ‘You need money to start up that sort of operation.’ ‘How true! A commodity in rather short supply just now. But don’t look so miserable, love. I’ll find a way.’

  I said, ‘Mike Priestley’s just been to give the house the once-over. He told me he’d be able to find you some more premises, if necessary.’

  ‘Trust old Mike not to miss a trick!’

  ‘And Baines was with him.’ I gave him my view on the charmless Stephen Baines—amongst other things, boring, bloodless . . . as for murderous, well, there didn’t seem much mileage in pursuing that one.

  ‘Right, but don’t underestimate him. Not a lot of bottle, but an eye to the main chance, that’s for sure. And I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’

  Yes, Daniel had always set great store on people being upfront and honest. I braced myself. ‘Daniel, there’s something I’d better get off my chest.’

  ‘Sounds ominous. Hang on a sec.’ He opened the door and shouted, ‘How long’s that coffee going to be, Sean?’

  ‘Coming up when I’ve finished this!’

  He came back and straddled a chair. ‘Fire away,’ he said amiably.

  I twisted my legs round the stool I was perched on. ‘I—er—took something from here yesterday.’

  He looked amused. ‘News to me that there’s anything around here worth pinching!’

  ‘It wasn’t really pinching. It belongs to me . . . but I should’ve asked.’ I drew in a deep breath, and told him everything. I showed him that first roughed-out page of William’s letter, and handed him the photo, too. It was clear he hadn’t seen either before, which did a lot to raise my spirits.

  I hoped, as I watched him read, that he could make more sense out of it than I could. All I really had was a series of unlikely coincidences: the photographer’s name, Temple, being the same as the Benjamin Temple mentioned in William’s letter; the message on the back of the photograph—‘For Elisabeth; and the place where it had been taken—Southern Rhodesia, where Cluny had formerly lived.

  ‘Know what I think?’ Daniel said, when he had finally finished reading. ‘I reckon the woman circled in the picture is probably Jacquetta, your grandmother, that she—or this Alexander Temple, the photographer—sent it to the Old Man after she’d gone back home, and he kept it because he couldn’t bear to part with it. Or more likely, because he was too bitter about her to pass it on to your mother.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘He said she went back home. But he said he met Sophie in London—and Jacquetta when he was in the RAF!’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they didn’t come from Rhodesia. And you’ve assumed Sophie was Jacquetta’s mother, but it might just as well have been Alexander who was her father.’

  He was right. All I knew for certain was that Sophie had been the daughter of Benjamin Temple, and my grandmother, Jacquetta, had been Benjamin’s granddaughter. I had perhaps too easily wanted the enigmatic Sophie to be my great-grandmother. For why else should my grandfather have left me her portrait?

  And in all this, where did Cluny come in? I couldn’t believe it was mere chance that she’d landed up here all the way from Zimbabwe and had just happened to meet Jacquetta’s former husband. And not only that—had persuaded him to marry her. Which was the most astonishing thing of all. William was never easily manipulated. And it was impossible to imagine him being swept off his feet, at any time of his life.

  ‘We might find the answers if we had the rest of the letter -which should, logically, be with that first page,’ Daniel said in that maddeningly direct way he had of going straight to the heart of things, and he remembered, without prompting, the very book he’d been consulting when I’d walked in and nosily begun to look through it. He began to leaf through it systematically, and almost immediately found a sheet of paper lying between a design for a court cupboard and one for an inlaid rosewood table. I snatched it up, but it turned out to be simply a note of the modifications required for a customer who’d wanted a similar cupboard. I was bitterly disappointed when the book revealed nothing else. But Daniel was staring at me. ‘Zoe,’ he said quietly, ‘Zoe, where’s that portrait?’

  ‘The portrait? Where I left it, wrapped up in my car boot.’

  Ten minutes later, we were unwrapping it from its bubblewrap and Sophie in her velvet hat was lying face upwards on the bench, looking neat, prim and as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. Then Daniel turned it over and his strong hands began expertly using a pair of pliers to pull out the nails that held in position the splintery old backing of thin-cut wood—the original backing that William had retained when he’d made the new maplewood frame, perhaps because stuck on it was a faded old label bearing the title, handwritten in copperplate, presumably by the artist.

  ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Trust me.’ A moment later, the backing was off, without further damage. ‘What have we here?’

  A long brown envelope. With my name on the front, in William’s writing. ‘So that’s why he wanted you to have the portrait,’ Daniel said.

  Had Magda been right? Had there been a will after all? But
hidden behind a picture—how corny could he get? ‘I might never have found this!’

  ‘I think the Old Man would’ve thought of some way of making sure you did—though don’t ask me how. Maybe you’ll find out if you open it.’

  I realized I’d been clutching the envelope for all of three minutes, and tore it open. And no, it wasn’t a will inside. It was the fair copy of the whole of that letter William had written to me. I skimmed through the first, now so familiar, lines and saw there’d been no substantial changes to the first page. I should have tried to understand her more, but . . . that page had ended. And now the next page went on:

  . . . perhaps Jacquetta was wiser than I was when she decided to call it a day, packed her bags and went back to Rhodesia, though I didn’t see it like that at the time, left alone with an eighteen-month-old baby to raise. If Magda hadn’t arrived on the scene like a guardian angel, I doubt whether I could have managed. My little Elisabeth became my lifeline as well as my responsibility. I worshipped her, spoiled her a bit, I admit. Maybe that’s why I was so angry when she announced she was going to marry your father. I knew he was wrong for her, a charmer but not in her league. For the first time, I understood how Benjamin Temple had felt about Sophie’s marriage. But I wasn’t about to make the same mistake he’d made—and besides, I might have been as wrong in my judgement of Tony as he had been of Sophie’s husband. As it turned out, my fears were justified, but who can be certain of these things?

  I thought of Tony Kennedy, the husband who walked away. The father I’d never known, now dead, who’d only ever written to me at Christmas, or on my birthday. When he remembered, which wasn’t often. I thought of Grandpa, who’d taken his place. Blinking hard, I read on:

  Benjamin Temple was a typical Victorian, prosperous, self-made, father of the twins, Alexander and Sophie. He was also a regular tyrant. Alexander worked for him in the family shipping business in London, though he hated it, since his ambition was to become an artist. As you’ll see from his portrait of his sister, he was extremely talented, but Benjamin knew it took more than talent to make a living from painting, and flatly refused to support him while he tried to make his mark. It was a brave young man who would defy his father in those days, and risk being cut off without a penny. Alexander stayed.