“Bully for Barnett. By the way, you talked about my ‘worming my way’ into Aunt Clarrie’s affections.”
“Well, what else could you call it?”
“Something more generous, perhaps? I’d been without a mother for four years when I first started coming to stay with her, and effectively without a father for long periods. And Clarissa herself was a spinster, childless, of course, and had just lost her own father. She was happy to have me move in a few years later. Affection seems a very natural emotion between the two of us.”
“That’s just self-pity. I was without a father practically the whole time of my childhood. He loved me so much, but he needed to earn so as to leave us financially secure.”
Merlyn was puzzled about that. Did her father know he was going to die young?
“You never told me that. But you had a mother. Clarissa was mother and father to me—and entertainer to boot. Staying with her was an end-of-the-pier show, as well as an education.”
“She was a charlatan. You knew that as well as I did.”
“Yes—we talked about it once, didn’t we? But I think you can only be a charlatan if you yourself don’t believe in what you’re peddling. I’m quite sure Aunt Clarissa did believe it.”
“Well, I’m quite sure she didn’t, and had a good laugh at all the people she was fooling and robbing.”
“No. No!” Merlyn was becoming heated. He knew Rosalind had fixed unerringly on his aunt’s weakest spot. “Clarissa wasn’t like that. Yes, she would laugh about clients from time to time, but she never had any doubts she could help them, if they let her.”
Rosalind shrugged. She looked, as she had throughout their talk, to the right, at the cars coming.
“I think that’s Barnett…. Yes, it is.”
She gathered up her packages and handbag, and put on her gloves. Gloves? In May? Merlyn thought. She really was, at thirty-seven, a sort of anachronism. Barnett’s Mercedes pulled up in front of them. He got out of the car, ushered Rosalind into the passenger seat, then shut the door and looked straight at Merlyn.
“Tough being both husband and father,” he said. “And footman too.” He winked, got into the car, and pulled away.
Merlyn sat for a few moments, then began to walk thoughtfully toward the Temple Street car park. Barnett, obviously, was brighter than his wife. He must have realized from the moment he heard about the Forensic Science Service being brought into the matter that calling them was not the act of an impostor. Any hope he had that Rosalind might inherit a good share of the spoils must have been given up then. The news that Merlyn had made a will leaving the whole lot to charity must also have made him think. The implication that the family, or one of them, had Merlyn in their sights must have made Barnett want to distance himself, as far as that was possible, from the Cantelos. This was becoming the sort of family story that any man whose livelihood depended on his respectability would want to steer well clear of. Hence his access of friendliness.
Rosalind was more difficult to fathom. She still clung, or pretended to, to the idea that he was an impostor. Was this greed, clinging to the last shred of hope? She was obviously comfortably off, and money never seemed to bring any particular glint to her eye. Was it fear that made her still hope that he was not who he claimed to be? Fear that Clarissa had told him something? Fear that his establishing his claim would lead to all sorts of other family skeletons tumbling out of the cupboard?
He arrived back at his car, and drove off around the circle of streets to get back to his hotel, his mind still working. Rosalind had been fairly often to Congreve Street, she had even been interested in him in an early-adolescent way—though whether her teenaged offer of herself to him was serious, who could now decide? She had known that Clarissa had treated him as an adult, talked to him as if he were one, made him for the first time part of the Cantelo family. Was Rosalind afraid he had been told something? And that now he was back he would want to use it?
He parked his car carefully, then walked around to the front of the hotel and up the steps. He went straight to Reception.
“Room 417, please,” he said.
Clutching his room key he turned toward the lifts.
“Merlyn Docherty?”
He turned again. Coming up behind him was a gray-haired man, untidily dressed, but far from down-at-heel, with an inquiring expression on his face.
“Jake,” said Merlyn. “What do you want?”
Chapter 7
Father Confessor
“What do you want?” Merlyn asked again.
The man was unfazed.
“Well, nothing, really. Nothing specific. It’s just that, hearing you were home, I thought we should make contact.”
“Why?”
“Because—well—I thought I had a lot of making up to do.”
“Ah really? Now would that be making up in the sense of reconciliation? Or would it be making up in the sense of compensating? Or would it, even, be making up in the sense of inventing, fabricating, concocting, making a fiction out of—”
“You talk like a fucking lawyer,” said Jake.
“I am a fucking lawyer. I suppose what you want is a bit of a talk, is it?”
“Yes. That’s it, exactly.”
Merlyn paused, then turned on his heels and went toward the bar. He could not have rationalized it, lawyer though he was, but he did not want to invite Jake up to his room. Even though they were in a hotel, it would have seemed like letting him into his space. And that would have meant having a powwow, working toward peace, acknowledging a relationship Merlyn did not feel existed. Jake had once had charge of him, and had neglected his trust. That was all.
Meanwhile Jake was beside him, puppyish, looking up at him, half pathetic, half disreputable, full of uncertainties and unsureness, but also full of hope and sheer cheek.
At the bar Merlyn turned to his father and raised his eyebrows.
“Pint of bitter, Webster’s if they’ve got it,” said Jake. “I haven’t changed my tastes.”
“I was never with you in a pub, remember?” The barman, grateful for something to do at that time of day, pulled a pint of Webster’s and got Merlyn his scotch and soda. For some reason Merlyn didn’t feel he had to keep a clear head with his father, as he had done with the Cantelos. The disorder of Jake’s personality seemed to lull him into a sense of security, true or false.
“So you’re not in jail, then?” said Merlyn as they sat down.
“In jail? No, of course I’m not in jail.”
“The Cantelos seemed to think that you might be.”
“Oh that. Did they see that report in the Yorkshire Post? That would have had them rubbing their hands. Anyway, that was years ago.”
“But you did get put inside?”
“One year,” said Jake, as if a sentence so short hardly counted. “I was out after eight months. I don’t have any quarrel with the judge—I earned it.”
“Big of you.”
“It was the making of me. Made me understand all those things I’d been messed up about in my mind.”
“That would take eight months.”
“You’ve become right sarky, Merlyn. It doesn’t suit you.”
“It wasn’t inborn, it was induced by experience. So how did prison help you? Did it make a man of you?”
“It was there I met my wife.”
“Really?” Merlyn raised his eyebrows. “Prisons are so up-to-date these days, aren’t they? Positively Scandinavian.”
“She wasn’t a prisoner. She was in the education office. Still is. We hit it off right from the word go.”
“I’m so glad. Was it footsie over Virgil’s Aeneid, Book I? Or simultaneous swoons over the ‘Ode to Autumn’?”
“We just looked, and that was it. You know—‘across a crowded room.’ I knew then that it was a new beginning. I was going to go straight, get a job, stop drinking.”
“Cheers.”
“Cheers. And that’s how it’s turned out.”
�
��So what sort of job did you get?”
“Well, actually, I became a househusband. Roxanne has two kids by her former partner, and she was pregnant when I came out.”
“Oh? Some kind of in vincular fertilization? A quick naughty behind the Dictionary of National Biography?”
“Never you mind. Anyway, we’ve got this lovely little girl. She’s the light of my life.” Merlyn felt a sudden stab of jealousy. It was absurd! To feel jealous of a child of an elderly father whom he despised—a father who had never been one, a father whom, if he had offered love, Merlyn would have kicked aside with contempt. What strange emotional gymnastics the brain performed, Merlyn thought. How humiliating to be at the mercy of them.
“And you’ve got stepchildren too, you say?”
“That’s right. Sandra’s nineteen. She’ll be moving out before long, I wouldn’t mind betting. There’ve been plenty of boyfriends, I can tell you. Jason is fifteen. He’ll be around for a while yet. He’s a very bright boy. We won’t let him go easily.”
“Lucky Jason.”
Jake shot him a glance.
“I’m not going to make the same mistake again. It wouldn’t make my treatment of you any better if I was to repeat it with Jason, now would it? You’ve got to realize I wasn’t my normal self when you were growing up. Losing your mother, then Deborah—both my womenfolk. It knocked me over—I was just a shell of my old self. I needed help.”
Merlyn’s face twisted with contempt.
“Oh, and how do you think I felt, a young lad who had just lost his mother and elder sister. Didn’t I need help?”
“Yes, of course. I realize that now.”
“My mother was intensely lovable, even during her long illness. Deborah was the sister who had done everything for me, comforted me when I was lonely or afraid, mothered me when I needed someone just to hug me. Did you expect me to take my loss of both of them in my stride?”
“No, no—of course not. I just didn’t think.”
“That’s right. That’s exactly right. It was yourself from beginning to end. You didn’t think of me at all. Obviously your new family is luckier.”
“But it didn’t turn out so badly for you, did it?” said Jake in a wheedling tone that Merlyn found nauseating. “I mean, Clarissa was a mother to you. Of course I didn’t plan it like that, but that’s how it worked out.”
“And like a good mother she left me everything she had—is that what you’re counting on? A share in the spoils?”
“No,” said Jake, suddenly forceful. “That’s totally unfair, Merlyn. We may not have been close, but you should know me better than that. I’ve never been a grasper or a grabber, never had much interest in money.”
“No-o-o,” admitted Merlyn grudgingly. “But it’s surprising how many of the hippie generation turned out to be good at amassing a very large pile of dosh in later years. Half the people who went to sit at the feet of the maharishis are now sitting in penthouses on the East River or Canary Wharf. Right little doctrinaire capitalists, most of them turned out to be.”
“Not me,” protested Jake. “Roxanne and me and the family, we live in a semidetached house in Carlyn Street in Sheffield, and we’re happy as birds. I’m not after your money, Merlyn. Good luck to you, enjoy it. But don’t let it spoil you, boy.”
“I won’t. I won’t.”
“And come and see us. You have another family now, remember. Not just the Cantelos.”
“Hmm, maybe. As a matter of interest, when did you last speak to Clarissa?”
Jake shrugged, apparently uninterested.
“Lord only knows. We lost touch while I was in jail, I suppose.”
“So before that you spoke occasionally?”
“I think so. I don’t remember. I was a bit…well, it was a crisis in my life, and it got worse and worse. The drinking, I mean.”
“And do you remember if Clarissa ever told you whether I was alive or dead?”
“She told me you were missing…I remember that. I’d seen you…not long before, and it was a surprise when you went to India, and then soon after to hear that you were missing.”
“But did she tell you I was alive?”
“I…don’t think so. I don’t remember. I tell you, Son, those were bad times for me…. But I shouldn’t think she did tell me.”
“Why? Because you were always drunk, and couldn’t be relied upon to keep the secret?”
Jake thought about this.
“Well, yes. But why was it a secret? If I’ve got it right, Clarissa let everybody think you’d gone missing in the Hindu Kush or some such goddamn place. And she never let on she knew that you were alive. Now, why would she do that? You’re asking me things, now I’m asking you. Why? Was it one of Clarissa’s strange fancies?”
“You could probably call it that. But Clarissa usually had perfectly sound reasons for what seemed to be odd notions.”
“Did she? If she did they passed me by. She once told me—just out of the blue, like she did, to catch you off guard, I always thought—that I’d never settle down in life. If I didn’t settle with Thora then I’d never settle with anyone. She was wrong about that.”
“Oh, I didn’t say she was never wrong. She could be just as offbeam about character as people who use more orthodox methods of assessment.”
“Still, she was a good mother to you, wasn’t she? If I’d chosen her as surrogate mother I couldn’t have picked a better.”
“If anyone chose I suspect it was me,” said Merlyn, sour at his father’s hints of making decisions, when as far as he could remember Jake’s whole life twenty-odd years before had been geared to the avoidance of making decisions, especially ones for the welfare of his son. “She chose me too, though, I suppose. We looked at each other and saw we were suited.”
“You did. And that was nice. Good for both of you. But you haven’t told me why Clarissa wanted you dead, or wanted it generally thought you were dead.”
“No, I haven’t, have I? I must say I took to nonexistence like a duck to water. In one stroke all the Cantelos were out of my life, and all the Dochertys too.”
Jake looked astonished.
“I never involved you with any of my family. If you saw the Docherty grandparents once it was as much as you ever did.”
“Well, one Docherty. There I was free of the lot of them and of you, except, of course, for Clarissa. Heaven! I went to Italy, did a lot of menial jobs, educated myself, got a degree, got to understand the system, so that by the time I was twenty-five I had used the degree in law, with economics as a second subject, to get a highly respectable job. And by the time I was twenty-eight, I was working in Brussels.”
“All your own work, eh?”
“All the essential part. Clarissa sent me a sub now and then, if I asked her for one.”
“And plenty of girlfriends too, I should think. Knowing Italy…”
“I don’t think Britain can cast the first stone, as far as available teenage girls are concerned.”
“Maybe not. I wouldn’t know.”
“You seem to have a teenage daughter with plenty of…admirers from what you say. Anyway, yes, I had the love of my life in Verona, and after that plenty of girlfriends when I studied in Naples and Turin. Oddly enough, it seemed to help that I’m British. We don’t think of ourselves as romantic catches.”
“Maybe they just wanted you for conversation practice. Or to learn the secrets of English cuisine.”
“Maybe. You can be sarky yourself if you try, can’t you, Jake? Now, I’m a bit busy—”
“Oh, I thought—”
“We’ve made contact. I think that’s enough after twenty-two years and eleven months. If you’ll give me your phone number—”
“Here’s my card.”
“Oh right. Well, maybe I’ll be in touch. Good-bye.”
Merlyn held out his hand, briefly took his father’s, then strode to the lifts without a backward glance. He could see his father in the mirrors of the foyer, and in the stainless s
teel of the lifts. He pressed the button for the fourth floor, then, when he got there, pressed the ground-floor button. When he got back to the foyer the glass door giving onto Wellington Street was just closing, and he saw his father disappearing down the steps. He went to the door and saw him turn right, going toward the center of Leeds and the railway station. He waited a few seconds and then slowly followed him.
As he began the stalking he asked himself why he hadn’t found out how his father had known he was back in Britain, and where he was staying. The more he thought about it, he had missed chances. The fact that his father had reappeared when he was about to inherit money did genuinely make him wonder: Had he in the past only seemed to be unworldly, above money? Could he not in fact have engineered his son’s whole connection with Clarissa Cantelo, knowing she had in her sole control a large part of the family fortune?
He kept his distance. Jake went past the demolished central Royal Mail sorting office, past the old Wellesley Hotel, now flats, past little businesses—the inevitable sandwich shop, a duplicating shop—concerns too marginal for a central position, then toward the Queens Hotel and the station. He did not turn right into the station, however, but continued on, then crossed the road, past the British Home Stores, then on, finally stopping at the Square on the Lane, turning toward it without a moment’s hesitation.
Merlyn kept going, and glanced through the window as he passed. His father had merged into the vastness of the largest pub bar in the land, invisible, undistinguishable from the punters dotted here and there throughout the drinking hall. Merlyn turned, crossed the road, then went back toward the Crowne Plaza. It was illogical to conclude from the fact that his father went from a drink in a bar with his son to another drink in a bar on his own that he was not quite the reformed and blissfully contented and changed person he claimed. But illogical or not, that is what Merlyn did conclude.
Chapter 8
The Old Folks at Home
It was two days after Merlyn’s confrontation with his past in the form of his father that he had another, less direct confrontation with the force that had made him what he was. This second encounter came from an unexpected source. When he got back to the Crowne Plaza after lunch for his usual siesta, relic of his years in Italy, his key had a note on it: Ring 2415676. Peace. His first thought was that he was being solicited by an evangelical Christian group. Then he remembered Charlie.
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