The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

“That’s better,” she said as they got beyond the Leeds suburbs and got onto the M62. “No more nasty signals for you. You can breathe freely now.”

  “What about you, though, Aunt?”

  “Oh, I never felt they were directed at me.” The old car wheezed its slow, erratic way along the motorway. “Are you excited?”

  “Oh yes!” said the young Merlyn truthfully. “But I keep thinking of silly things, like what I’ve forgotten to pack. It’s not as though you can’t send anything important to me.”

  “No-o-o. Though I’ll probably do it from Bradford or Halifax.”

  This was the first time Merlyn registered her obsession with postman-spies. It remained with her, and they had very little written communication.

  “I hope I’ll be able to get English books in Italy,” he said.

  “Of course you will,” said Clarissa, who had never been there. “And if there are any old favorites you can’t find, I’ll get them to you somehow.”

  “All my old favorites are things I’ve grown out of,” said Merlyn. “I don’t suppose they will have the same variety of books in the Italian bookshops.”

  “I don’t suppose so. But you’ll soon be reading Italian.”

  “Maybe…What I’ll miss is not being able to come back here on a visit.”

  “Yes, I suppose you will. But if the situation changes, then of course I’ll tell you. You can suddenly reappear like a pantomime prince.”

  But she never had, and he never had.

  He walked from the corner and stood on the pavement opposite number fifteen looking at the house. It held for him many happy memories—not deliriously or ecstatically happy, but the happiness that sprang from solid, worthwhile contentment, nourished by Clarissa and welcomed gratefully by him. She had always been interesting, and had always fed his interest in any other subject, so that he regarded her as one of his educators, and more important than any single teacher he’d had at school.

  He tried to sum up his feelings about the place in his mind: he had been ripe for flight, for new worlds and new adventures when he left, but it was in this house that he had been matured to a stage when he could take responsibility for himself and benefit from the exciting changes.

  “Well, it’s young Merlyn, isn’t it? Merlyn Docherty?”

  Merlin turned around. It was Mr. Robinson from number twenty, followed as usual by his dog.

  “Mr. Robinson! Nice to see you again. And what’s this fellow called?”

  “This one’s Duke. Small but perky. You probably remember Sam.”

  “I do. It must be ten o’clock. You always walked Sam at ten.”

  “That’s right. Has the added advantage now that I miss the ten o’clock news. By ’eck, you look well, Merlyn. I’d heard you were back, but I hadn’t caught a glimpse of you.”

  “I’ve caught one of you. I was at the funeral, then at the wake afterwards.”

  “So I heard. That would have caused flutterings in the Cantelo dovecote!”

  “It did, rather. Though the ones who knew they wouldn’t benefit from Aunt Clarissa’s death took it in their stride.”

  “They would, I suppose. It usually comes down to money, doesn’t it? It’s a pity, really. This was a pleasant house in your auntie’s time—when she was in her prime. With you, and little Rosalind, and some of the other younger ones around. It was a lot pleasanter than when it was your grandfather’s, God rest his soul, though he doesn’t deserve rest. She wasn’t money-mad, wasn’t Clarissa. Mind you, we all thought she was a bit mad in other ways—spirit-mad, you might say. But she was well intentioned, and she always lived up to her responsibilities—you’d know that, lad, better than most.”

  “I do. I loved her. I hope she realized that. It wasn’t always easy to get it across.”

  “But why did you cut yourself off from her? We thought you were dead.”

  Mr. Robinson looked at him, wide-eyed, as he explained.

  “Well, I’ve never heard anything like it. Mind you, when I think about it, things fall into place.”

  “Things? What things? Things she said?”

  “That’s it, lad. One night we were talking here in the street, just like you and me now. It was after one of those terrorist outrages, and she shivered and said: ‘Sometimes I feel terrified at the violence in my own family.’ I was a bit surprised, though the family as a whole wasn’t liked around here, and I asked what they’d done, and she said, ‘Done, and might do. I can’t talk about it.’”

  “I see. Anything else?”

  “Well, similar things. Mention of hatred, jealousy, grudges—all in the family context.”

  “Any particular family member?”

  “Oh no, it was all general talk. You knew your aunt. It was as if she sensed there was evil somewhere around, but didn’t know the source.”

  But Merlyn, after he had said good night and walked on toward the cricket ground, wondered if Mr. Robinson was right. He thought that if his aunt had sensed evil she would probably have had a very good idea of what the source of it was. But like any good medium she would have couched her ideas in generalities, not made accusations against a specific figure. It was a sort of hedging of her psychical bets.

  The next day he rang Danielle, always seeing her, as they talked, against the background of the Grand Place, where they had first met.

  “Things are marching,” he said, after loving preliminaries.

  “Really? Are you finding out who you are?”

  “Well, maybe. Though I’ve always thought I’ve known who I am.”

  “You’ve certainly given that impression. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “I’m on my way to getting DNA confirmation as to who I am, which is rather different. But that will mean general, if reluctant, acceptance of me as my aunt’s legitimate heir.”

  “I suppose I should congratulate you.”

  “You better had! We could be looking at the cost of our first flat together.”

  “If I agree to moving in with you.”

  “You will. Anyway, who I am isn’t really the point at the moment. I’m learning about my family, some of whom I can’t remember ever having met. It provides a sort of context for me.”

  “Belgians always know their families. Perhaps all too well.”

  “Italians too. But I think the Cantelos are unusual even by English standards. Most people seem to have liked my mother, but beyond that suspicions and antagonisms seem to reign.”

  “Why are you so pleased about getting to know a family like that? I certainly hope you don’t find you share the family traits.”

  “Oh no, I’m sure I don’t. Getting to know them doesn’t help me to understand who I am. But I’m hoping it will help me to understand what happened to me.”

  “What happened to you when?”

  “When I was suddenly bundled out of England.”

  “Didn’t English families once ship their problem children off to the Colonies? I suppose bundling them off to Europe is the modern equivalent.”

  “That sounds plausible enough. But get it into your head, darling: I was not a problem child. I’ve yet to discover what the problem was, and in what way I was part of it.”

  “Bonne chance!”

  Chapter 6

  Fairest Rosalind

  Merlyn saw Rosalind as he drove along the Headrow. He had gone wrong on West Street, and it had proved impossible to get back into the right lane. So now he was going to have to snake through the nonpedestrianized streets of Leeds to arrive eventually at his hotel car park. He was turning up between the town hall and the library when he saw Rosalind Frere emerging from the Headrow entrance to the library and start toward Briggate. Merlyn immediately rethought his morning. By a miracle he found a vacant place in the Temple Street car park, paid a two-hour fee, then started rapidly but carefully toward Briggate and the Headrow. Standing casually by the corner of Allders store he looked toward the pedestrianized section of Briggate and saw, starting down it, Rosalind’s hat.

&n
bsp; Rosalind’s hat was not large or ostentatious: it was in fact a head-hugging dark green number, with tactful decoration. But he had noticed it on the brief sight he had of her at the library, and he noticed it now. As he proceeded after her, still casually, he noticed that she was almost the only woman he could see who was wearing a hat, and all of the others were pensioners, most of whom looked as if they were on a visit to Leeds center as a special treat to themselves, or from the institution they now lived in. Most fortyish women no longer wore hats except (Merlyn was guessing here) to weddings, christenings, and funerals. Rosalind, apparently, was the last of the hat wearers. She had been wearing a black number with a veil at Clarissa Cantelo’s funeral, probably bought joyfully when the occasion offered her the excuse.

  He watched her go into Borders and come out with what looked like a paperback in a plastic bag. He saw her look intently at the windows of Harvey Nicholls, then decide against going in. He saw her march determinedly into House of Fraser, as if this was currently Her Shop. His first instinct was not to go after her but to wait for her to come out. Then he remembered that the shop, when it had been part of another chain in his earlier days in Leeds, had had a back door to it. He went cautiously in, lingered about halfway along the ground floor, and established that the back door was still operative. He pored over a display of women’s tights and, fifteen minutes and a lot of suspicious looks later, he saw Rosalind sailing down the escalator and making for the back door. He followed her out toward the market, then past the Corn Exchange, and then down toward the Calls. She ended up by Leeds Parish Church, sitting on a public seat, her bags around her, her eyes fixed on the back of a bingo hall. She was, Merlyn concluded, deep in thought.

  He casually strolled up to her.

  “Hello, Rosalind.”

  She looked up sharply, then glared.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “On my way to the Armouries to be fitted for a back plate.”

  She didn’t deign to reply. He sat down beside her. This made her give voice.

  “I’m not aware that I asked you to sit with me—or gave you permission to use my Christian name.”

  “Oh, I think you did, at least by implication. It would have been back around 1980, when I was just a snotty-nosed teenager, and you were the female equivalent. We were really quite close at one time.”

  “I’ve no recollection of that. And it remains to be seen whether—”

  “I am who I claim to be. I think your impatience should be satisfied in a few weeks’ time, Mrs. Frere. You’ve probably heard that I’ve put matters in the hands of the Forensic Science Service.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard that.” Her glare was unremitting. She seemed to be refraining only with difficulty from uttering the Thurber line about “Mere proof won’t convince me.”

  “Meanwhile here you are shopping in town, and here is a man who is claiming to be your long-lost cousin, and the world is our oyster. It would simply beggar belief if we didn’t have something to discuss. In fact we both know we do. What about a cup of coffee?”

  Rosalind looked at him for a moment, as if tempted, then shook her head. Clearly it was a dismissal, but he refused to be dismissed.

  “Are you waiting for someone, or just taking in the view?” he asked pleasantly.

  “I’m waiting for Barnett.”

  “Going somewhere nice?”

  “We’re going to inspect a school.”

  “A school? Then you have children. I didn’t know. I expect Aunt Clarissa told me, but I’ve forgotten. How many?”

  “One son.”

  “I see. Of school age, then?”

  She nodded.

  “Yes. He’s about to go to boarding school.”

  “Oh, I see. About twelve or thirteen then?”

  “Eight. It’s a prep school.” Merlyn deliberately kept his eyebrows lowered, but continued to look at her, and she seemed to feel the need to supply him with an explanation. “Robin’s sport mad, and it’s a very good school for sport. And he’s been neglecting other things for running and cricket, so they’ll give him remedial classes to get him up to scratch for public school.”

  “Public school! I say, that’s quite a leg up for one of the Cantelos. We sometimes went to private schools—you did—but Eton or Harrow is something else!”

  “He’ll be going to Burnside. Barnett’s old school.”

  Merlyn suppressed the query whether Burnside was good for sport. Rosalind might think he was implying it was probably good for nothing else.

  “How will you fill your time when he’s gone, Ros—Mrs. Frere?”

  “The fact that I don’t call you Merlyn doesn’t make me any the less Rosalind,” snapped his cousin.

  “I’m sorry,” murmured Merlyn. “I thought I needed permission.”

  “And I shall have no difficulty filling up my time. I do a great deal of charity work as it is. And I expect to have a lot to do going through Aunt Clarissa’s possessions and disposing of them. If the house hadn’t been sealed off…”

  “It seemed necessary to Mr. Featherstone, my solicitor,” said Merlyn, “and I must say I agreed. We couldn’t have all sorts of people who thought they would inherit scrabbling around in there. Nothing should be done until the will is granted probate. If I were found to be not Merlyn Docherty, you would probably have problems with the possessions, since half of the estate has to be shared among four of you.”

  “Things can be valued if necessary,” said Rosalind, who had clearly talked the matter over with her husband. “I’m sure it will be simple enough with a little goodwill.”

  “Perhaps,” said Merlyn. He didn’t need to underline the unlikelihood of general goodwill in the Cantelo family. “But this is all quite academic at the moment. Everything is in the hands of the Forensic Science Service. They’ll be trying to get specimens from both my parents, but it’s all just a question of time before they pronounce on who I am.”

  A tiny light seemed to come into Rosalind’s eye at the mention of Merlyn’s parents, and her voice was firm and dismissive when she said, “They’re hardly likely to get a sample from your mother, after all these years.”

  “They said it shouldn’t be a problem. She died in hospital, and they keep medical samples there for years.” Rosalind’s shoulders sagged. “But you say nothing of my father.”

  “Should I? Silence is best, I would have thought.”

  “I mean, you mention my mother as dead, but not my father.”

  “Your mother is long dead, before you started worming your way in with Aunt Clarissa. Your father I know nothing about.”

  “Except that he’s been in trouble with the law. The family knows all about that, don’t they? Was it you who spread it around? Anyway, the trouble may help the forensic people, because the police will have kept his samples. I’m getting interested in my father, oddly enough. I don’t remember thinking about him more than occasionally after I took off for Italy. Now I do. I wonder what he’s been doing all these years. And why the Cantelo family should be interested in him at all.”

  “Why shouldn’t we? He was married to Aunt Thora. And people are generally interested when someone’s in trouble with the police. We’re a proud family—”

  “But not at all a close-knit one.”

  “—so we were bound to talk when he was sent to jail.”

  “Ah—he did go to jail, did he?”

  “So it said in the paper. I’ve never heard of him since.”

  “Well, he can’t still be in jail. He didn’t cause a death or anything from what I’ve heard. I expect he’s either gone straight, or he’s dead.”

  “I don’t know how you can talk about your father in that cold way. I loved my own father! He meant everything to me!”

  “Really? I don’t remember much about him. When I was living with Aunt Clarrie he was already on the way to being a highflier in London in something or other. British Petroleum, wasn’t it? I don’t think I saw much of him.”

  “He was
a very busy man. Enormously successful. And of course I was the apple of his eye. I don’t know how you can talk of your father as you do. It’s not natural.”

  Merlyn shrugged.

  “I think that depends more on the parent than the child, don’t you? I certainly was never the apple of Jake’s eye. More the discarded pip.”

  “You’re so bitter…I’d be worried if I really thought you were Merlyn Docherty. But everyone’s told me about Thora. She was a beautiful person. Everybody loved her. You can’t be her son.”

  “I expect it skipped a generation, this lovability. Maybe I take more after Grandfather Cantelo—”

  “Well, he—” Rosalind pulled herself up. “Anyway, I’m quite sure you just took Merlyn’s name when you heard of Clarrie’s death.”

  “You could soon find out that’s not true. I’ve been working at the EU for ten years. I had English, French, and Italian when I joined them, and they put me on to learning Romanian and handling their bid to join the union. That rather fizzled out, but I’ve been saddled with eastward expansion, investigating human rights in the applicant countries—that kind of thing. Interesting and frustrating in about equal measure.”

  Rosalind looked as if she was struggling to understand what he was talking about.

  “And you’re working there under the name of Merlyn Docherty?”

  Merlyn smiled, and nodded.

  “Utterly under my own name, yes. Anyone can ring up EU headquarters and check.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “You can do it if you like.”

  Rosalind’s mouth dropped in outrage. Any passerby, seeing them, might have thought that Merlyn was quoting something. Might even have guessed that he was quoting Rosalind herself, that she had once offered herself to him. But they were just two people, roughly of an age, sitting unhappily together on a public seat.

  “Where is Barnett?” Rosalind said, looking at her watch. “We’ve got an appointment at the school.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “Just over there.” She pointed back to the little streets between the parish church and the city center. “A very good firm. They specialize in property, but he keeps in touch with all aspects of the law, and knows the best people to consult on anything.”