The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  “I suppose it was on those visits that he and I—”

  “—went on your sprees. Yes, it was. Have you had much to do with him since I…left?”

  “Why would I, dear boy? He would hardly come back to visit Clarissa, would he? To her, he was her sister’s widower and your father, and I think she quite liked him too, but beyond that? Nothing. As for the rest of us, he didn’t give a fig for any of us. No, my drinking days with him ended when you went to India. He never came here after that, that I knew of.”

  “I went to Italy.”

  “Wherever. India sounds much more adventurous.”

  “Have you ever heard that he’s died?”

  Francis perked up at the fascinating topic of death.

  “Died? He wouldn’t be more than sixty-five now, would he? No age. Anyway, you’d be the one to know that, surely?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Everyone thought I was dead, remember. If Clarissa hadn’t heard of it, there was nobody else who could tell me.”

  Malachi digested this, along with a piece of red beef, which he chewed appreciatively. Francis, even, was attacking his sea bass with something like relish, and getting most of it into his mouth.

  “Wonderful chicken!” he said appreciatively. Malachi smirked at Merlyn.

  “The French really know about food,” he said.

  Merlyn refused to be sidetracked on to French cooking.

  “Have you ever heard anything about him since I left? Has he got into any scrapes, for example? Got arrested, maybe?”

  Malachi looked shifty.

  “Ah well, I wasn’t going to mention it. No point in upsetting you.”

  “You wouldn’t. Tell me.”

  “Well, a while ago—maybe ten years, at a guess—there was a report in the Yorkshire Post about a really horrendous piece of driving which resulted in a second car turning over on the hard shoulder and someone being quite severely injured.”

  “And the driver turned out to be Jake?”

  “Yes. I can’t remember who spread this around. It must have been one of the Yorkshire Post readers—Rosalind, maybe, or Emily.”

  “When you think about it, the Cantelos are a pretty Yorkshire Post sort of family.”

  “I suppose so. So it could be almost anyone. Anyway, the tale was that the driver had been found, it was your father, he had been drunk at the time, and eventually he was tried and sentenced—I think to a short jail term.”

  “Good.”

  “I say, that’s a bit hard, dear boy, isn’t it?” said Francis.

  “Not really. It means there might be something in the police records that would help the DNA people.”

  “I see,” said Francis, who clearly didn’t. “Why are we talking about your father, old chap? You can’t have expectations from him, can you?”

  “None whatsoever. But he’s one way of proving who I am.”

  Malachi and Francis thought about this, then went on forking in the last of their main courses. Later in the meal, after Cousin Malachi had drooled his way through the dessert menu and chosen the most monstrous and calorific of the confections and was eating it avidly, as if it would make him grow to the height of the other men who had carried Clarissa Cantelo’s coffin, Merlyn asked him, “So what are the rest of the family up to now?”

  Malachi did not pause in stuffing himself, but he did look up.

  “I presume you don’t mean what do they do for a living?”

  “No. I mean how are they reacting to my reappearance?”

  “In their own ways,” said Malachi, bored with the interruption to his eating. “Most of them are doing nothing at all.”

  “That’s sensible.”

  “You’re right. It is. ‘Why should we bother?’—that’s the view we take. We had no expectations of Clarissa, and it’s nothing to us if everything goes to you rather than to Rosalind. We’d prefer it, in a way. Rosalind is nobody’s favorite person—not even her husband’s, if the truth be known. And of course we all know that Clarissa loved you, but didn’t care greatly for Rosalind.”

  Francis, who had refused a sweet on the grounds that he was not used to eating full meals, said meditatively, “You know, one does try to be charitable, and it’s not always easy, but when someone is universally unpopular, one does feel there must be some reason. I mean, when I was late for the funeral, there was no need—”

  Merlyn interrupted hastily.

  “You know, it’s not occurred to me before, but why was Rosalind one of the favored four heirs in the event of my death? Was it because her father was Clarissa’s eldest brother? And if so, why didn’t he inherit the house in the first place?”

  “Because he was on the way to becoming a financial big fish even in the seventies, when Grandfather Cantelo made his will,” said Malachi. “Grandfather thought there was no point in leaving him something he didn’t need and would never use. Hugh despised Leeds, and always said he was aiming to make London his power base, which is what happened. But he died at fifty-three, all burnt out, and his wealth was all personal, and most of it went to his second—wife, was it, Francis?”

  “I can’t remember. His London woman. She got most of it, and used it to acquire a replacement. I think it meant that Clarissa felt some kind of obligation to his eldest child—all honor to her.”

  “That sounds like her,” said Merlyn. “For all you call her a charlatan, there was always a strong strain of duty, doing what was right, about Clarissa. Benefiting the weaker ones, the ones who’d had a raw deal, would appeal to her…. So Rosalind is, or was, one of the next heirs. That leaves the interesting question: What is Rosalind doing at the moment? How is she reacting to my turning up like a bad penny?”

  Malachi began digging around in the lower recesses of his glass for any remains of cream, meringue, or sorbet, and not looking at Merlyn.

  “Well, you saw her at the funeral,” he said.

  “Spitting fire and rage and denying that I’m Merlyn Docherty.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s still doing that?”

  “Well, yes, to anyone who will listen. Now and then she does say that this test thing will settle matters, but she doesn’t say that often, or with any conviction.”

  “She knows the test will find in my favor. Otherwise why would I call in the DNA people at all?”

  “There is that, I suppose. I hadn’t thought of that….”

  Francis put his oar in, obviously feeling strongly about Rosalind.

  “She’s not a very well-balanced person, you know, Merlyn. She keeps going on about you, and things that you’ve done, and it’s just spite and not relevant. If you’re Merlyn Docherty you’re the heir, no matter what you’ve done.”

  “Of course I am. What does she know about me anyway, apart from the things I told people at the funeral? Nothing.”

  “Ah…Well, the things she is talking about are things that happened before you went away.”

  “Before?” Merlyn gulped down some coffee, then scratched his head. “I can’t remember doing anything very dreadful in my youth.”

  “Oh—this is her talking, rather than me, remember—she goes on about how you sucked up to Aunt Clarissa to get made the heir, says you got money out of her, thieved it if she didn’t cough up, and then took off when you got that girl pregnant.”

  “Got which girl pregnant?”

  “Oh—what was the name?—Jenny something-or-other.”

  “I did not get Jenny Watson pregnant, and I can be quite confident on that point because we never slept together. In any case I felt tender toward unwanted children. Jenny was pregnant when I left Leeds, but we hadn’t even been seeing each other for several months, and so far as I know the father was someone called Lee Hunter.”

  “I think Rosalind’s just picking up on all sorts of rumors that went around in the family at the time,” mumbled Malachi. “There were a lot of rumors.”

  “I bet there were. Most of them didn’t get as far as me. The one about stealing money is new to m
e. My friends were all at school, not family members apart from Eddie, and so I didn’t get to hear much of what was said. Clarissa heard the rumors, though, and now and again we laughed about them. Rosalind must be hard-pressed for material if she’s relying on that old stuff.”

  Malachi looked cunning.

  “Ah, but we don’t know anything about your later life, do we? You said as much yourself. We only know what you’ve chosen to tell us yourself.”

  “Point made,” said Merlyn. “But when I’m confirmed as the heir, all that will be totally irrelevant. Whether my life is something I should apologize for, boast about, keep schtum about, or whatever—it has no bearing whatever on the fact that most of what Clarissa owned will then be mine. End of story.”

  But after he had said good-bye to Francis outside the Belle Provence and dropped Malachi off at the front door of his pokey house (where he stood in the doorway waving primly his thanks for the evening and not opening his door until Merlyn was well out of sight of the bomb-making equipment—or whatever it was he was bothered about—in his front room), Merlyn drove back to Leeds, past Kirkstall Abbey, past Yorkshire Television, and then to his hotel, thinking of what Malachi had told him, and what he had said to Malachi. He regretted asking which girl got pregnant. It was no more than an ambiguity in the English, but Malachi was just the sort of person to soak up delightedly a wrong impression. Girls, for Merlyn, really started in Verona.

  He wondered whether he was being unfair to his father, was still nurturing exaggerated adolescent grievances, and whether he’d been the victim of nothing worse than a perfectly routine case of parental neglect. But when he reviewed his actions since he came back to Leeds, he felt on the whole that he had acted rationally and carefully, and done no more than he ought to have done, in accordance with Clarissa’s warnings all those years ago, and the occasional repetition of them during their regular phone calls. She was convinced that there was danger emanating from someone in or around the family. And though clairvoyancy might not normally impress him as a reason for taking care, the fact that his aunt Clarissa’s normally had some rational basis surely justified some degree of caution.

  Chapter 5

  Nocturne

  Merlyn was used to hotel rooms: overnight and shortstay hotel rooms, long-term hotel rooms when negotiations were tricky or impossibly detailed. Being used to them made them feel better; in fact, a characterless room in Plovdiv or Brasov could be a comfort in its international ordinariness. You could convince yourself you were in Le Touquet or Manchester.

  That sort of fantasy was not working in Leeds, the reason probably being that he was not on international business but on personal business. He could go to the bar for a drink, or to one of the nearby restaurants or wine bars for a meal, but his situation went with him, his personal worries and fears remained there, sitting on his shoulder, prodding him now and then to remind him: if Aunt Clarissa was right, someone just might be trying to murder you.

  That even made his phone calls to Danielle difficult.

  “How are things going?” she would ask (in French).

  “Not too bad. I’m still pretty much in the dark,” he would reply.

  Because he had never been able to tell his girlfriend just what it was that he was worried about, what he was trying to sort out. He had had no difficulty conveying to her the idea that this was not simply the death of an old aunt: she understood that Clarissa had been a surrogate mother to him for his last years in England, that he had expectations of her, even that the family as a whole would be less than enchanted by his return.

  But he had never got beyond that, never been able to convey to her the real reason for his uneasiness, the real difficulties of his mission to his onetime home. He realized now that those years on his own from the age of sixteen (albeit an unaturally matured and independent sixteen) had made him secretive, unable to confide or to share. All his girlfriends had felt it. None of them had lasted. He did not keep Danielle at arm’s length because he wanted to. He did it because he couldn’t help it.

  The evening, even though dusk was approaching, seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of him. The soaps were over and the rest of the scheduled programming was crap on all five channels. The porn channel and the rest of the extraterrestrials presented crap of a different kind. He could have a drink that he didn’t want from the minibar, or call room service for a sandwich or a meal he didn’t want either. He decided that if he was going to be forced to look in on himself and his past, he was going to do it while walking the streets. But when he got outside and into the center of town he found there were too many people around, even at that hour, for brooding, and certainly too many for an analytical thinking-through. He took a bus up to the university, then made his way along Headingley Lane and down toward the house where he had spent his adolescence. As he walked he thought of that time, twenty-two years ago, when he had taken his leave of Headingley and Leeds.

  He found he could no longer remember precisely what Clarissa had said. He had known for some time that she was disturbed, worried about something. Then at last, when he had come home after his last GCE exam, she had spoken. She had not used the word vibrations, because she knew it amused him. What had she said?

  “I’m getting some very bad signals.”

  It was something like that. He had not laughed, and had been quite serious as she explained that the signals had suggested violent death: death in the past and death in the future—perhaps his own. He wondered now why he didn’t scoff at the suggestions, whether it wouldn’t have been much better if he had. But he thought that being virtually adopted by one who was intimate with the spirit world, at least in her own estimation, meant that he had grown to accept the unlikely or the outrageous as part of his life too. So he had not reacted with hostility to the suggestion that he should disappear for a time.

  “Where do you think you’d like to go?” Clarissa had asked.

  “France, maybe?” Merlyn had said, knowing the language. Clarissa had frowned.

  “Too close. Too many English tourists.”

  “Maybe Italy?”

  Clarissa, probably feeling she could not insist on some nontouristy place like Finland or Albania, had had to agree. She had arranged for him to live with an English art historian and his family in Mantua for six months. Merlyn would have preferred to be with an Italian family, but he stuck to it for six months and then branched out on his own. Merlyn at sixteen had suggested Italy with no feeling for its art, its music, its fine buildings. But his casual expression of what was hardly even a preference had led to twelve wonderful years in a country whose problems of corruption, inefficiency, fissiparousness, and worship of phony messiahs was by now known to him better than to most, but made no difference. Those times when his loves had lasted more than a few weeks meant he had been embraced into that warmest and most idiosyncratic of bodies, the Italian family, and he could sample for the first time its joys, its embarrassments, its high-temperature emotional life. He loved it. He loved above all being part of it.

  He had left Headingley Lane now, and was nearing Congreve Street and Aunt Clarissa’s house. He slowed down. Here be ghosts, he thought: himself going to school; himself and the (mostly suspicious) Cantelo family, making rare visits to Clarissa’s to see what was going on; himself and the neighbors…. He had sometimes felt like an outsider, but to Clarissa’s credit, he had never felt unwanted.

  “I think you should disappear,” said Clarissa to him on the phone, after he had been in Italy about three months.

  “I thought I already had,” he replied.

  “A bit more. You wouldn’t need to be definitely dead, but you could be reported missing and never heard of again till I die.”

  Merlyn thought.

  “There’s a lot of kidnapping here, but it’s either politicians or rich people, not people like me.”

  “I’ve said you’ve gone to India anyway. A much better place for you to disappear in. And the only people who go there are young ones or pe
ople generally considered weirdos. I think you could vanish in Kashmir and no one would think it odd.”

  And so, apparently, it had happened. She had told him later that the ruse had been entirely successful—that was when she agreed to pay the fees for a crammer in Pescara who would make sure he was able to get into an Italian university and profit by the experience. Clarissa was not very pleased when he chose to go to university in Verona, but she approved of his doing an ordinary job first to accumulate money, and she encouraged him to change his appearance, in case among the tens of thousands trouping to see the supposed balcony of Juliet or Aida in the Arena, there might be someone from Leeds who would recognize him. He had dyed his hair blond, coming to resemble an Australian surfie, and he’d become very popular with Veronese girls.

  It would have seemed odd, had he come to think about it: to have a new existence under his old name. Presumably if he had ever landed a high-profile job—actor, opera singer, politician—he would have changed his name. As it was, being a civil servant in the vast Common Market apparatus in Brussels was as anonymous as it was possible to get, and even there he saw to it that in published lists he always appeared as M. Docherty. The Merlyn had been a freak of the imagination perpetrated, he presumed, by his father. It did what Clarissa didn’t want to happen: it marked him off.

  So did he believe Clarissa’s rather melodramatic scenario, that someone was trying, or might try, to murder him?

  Not all the time. Days and weeks went by without his even thinking of it, and he certainly did not live in fear. But yes: respect for his aunt’s judgment as well as his liking for her did make him take seriously the precautions she advised.

  He turned into Congreve Street and took his first leisurely look at number fifteen since he returned. How it all came back! Particularly his departure from the house, in Aunt Clarissa’s battered old Hillman Minx, in the middle of the night. She had deliberately booked him on an early-morning flight to Rome from Manchester Airport, so they could leave when the neighbors were asleep.