The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  “Detective Sergeant Peace.”

  “Merlyn Docherty here. Are those the sounds of the Leeds CID solving the city’s crimes?”

  “They are.”

  “With Sergeant Peace at the forefront of the struggle?”

  “Absolutely so. And it may be Inspector Peace soon, so let’s have a bit of respect as a preliminary gesture.”

  “Well, congratulations first, and then increased respect.”

  “I said ‘may be.’ My wife calls me Pollyanna. I go around saying ‘Be glad’ without having anything to be glad about. But the signs do seem to be encouraging…. It’s something my wife has come up with that I’m calling about.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yes. Felicity’s in the fiction business—like most of the people I deal with here, now I come to think of it. She’s got nothing on them for sheer invention. She’s at the stage of getting a nicer sort of rejection letter. She thinks she’s going to make it to publication and I think she’s going to make it to publication, but then some people might say we’re biased and she’s as much a Pollyanna as I am.”

  “The idea would never have crossed my mind.”

  “Good. Meanwhile she’s doing a bit of teaching and supervising for Leeds University English Department. Recently she’s been doing a lot of reading in minor Victorian novelists in the Leeds Library—that’s a private library dating back to seventeen-something-or-other, and older than the London Library, or so they keep telling people. All the books from the cellar come up with a quarter of a pound of in-built dust.”

  “Sounds inviting.”

  “It is for some people, including Felicity, particularly when they tell her that what she wants to read was last borrowed in 1852. But while she’s there she does work on her own behalf, especially in local history. Her next book—next manuscript, I should say—is set in Headingley in the 1920s, among the comfortably-off classes.”

  “I begin to get your drift.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up too high. The local Leeds historians are not primarily into the middle classes. It’s the millworkers and the tanners and the forge men they like. All very interesting, but Felicity isn’t aiming to be the next Catherine Cookson. So when I told her about the Cantelo family, she did her best in all the background books on Leeds, and came up with nothing—not even a mention. She wasn’t surprised. But just as a last resort she looked up Cantelo in the general card index (they’re not computerized in the Leeds Library, and probably won’t be until the twenty-second century). And there was a card for a book by an X. Cantelo. It was a novel called Family Business.”

  “Sounds a possible title for a novel by a Cantelo. What is its date?”

  “No date on the card. Felicity took it to the librarian. It was a typed card, typed on a very dirty manual, in fact, and the librarian thought it would be sometime in the seventies. He compared it with cards for other books—early Martin Amis, late Greene, Spark, and Olivia Manning—and they seemed to confirm that sort of date.”

  “Seventies. Old Man Cantelo, Clarissa’s father, would still be alive then.”

  “Yes, it’s—But I shouldn’t be talking about this. I’m the world’s greatest ignoramus about such things, and anything I throw at you is the sort of thing I’ve picked up from Felicity since we’ve been together. Any chance of your coming round to see us, so you can talk to her? She thinks it could be of some relevance, or at least of background interest.”

  “I’d like that. It would be getting things from the horse’s mouth. If your wife knows anything about Leeds in the just-after-the-war years, she knows more than I do. I was born in the 1960s, but I didn’t come visiting Clarissa until the late seventies, and I came to live with her in the early eighties. I’d like to talk to her.”

  So it was that, that evening around seven, Merlyn parked outside the nineteenth-century house in Cumberland Road and went up to the first-floor flat that was spacious and suitable for a small family, though the square patch of garden at the front and the small wilderness at the back made it less than ideal for older children.

  “We’ll get more garden when I get the inspectorship,” said Charlie. “Though goodness knows, inspectors aren’t paid a fortune anymore.”

  “Better put your faith in fiction then,” said Merlyn.

  At that point Felicity came in with Carola, already dressed for bed but raring to put on a performance for a twenty-minute charm session before going quietly. A born pop star couldn’t have done more to woo her audience. Merlyn reserved judgment on Charlie’s confident pronouncements on her intelligence and her intuitive good taste, but her determination was evident on the slightest acquaintanceship, and so was her calculated charm. On the evidence of that session, she would go far.

  When Felicity had put her to bed they all drank coffee, and soon Felicity went to the desk in her study and brought out for Merlyn the copy of Family Business.

  “Not very impressive, as you can see,” she said.

  Even on a first flicking-through he could see that the pages were browned—the cheap paper used, though, had later become standard for English books: some of the typeface was askew on the page, and the binding was the cheapest imaginable, with only the author’s surname and the title on the spine. The publisher’s name at the bottom of the title page was simply given as Hurstmonceaux. On the verso title page no date was given, and no publisher’s address.

  “Looks a shoddy job,” he commented.

  “In every respect,” agreed Felicity. “This was when vanity publishing was just that. No halfway houses, as there are now. You paid to have something in print that you could hand to your friends. This firm clearly made no pretense at all that it was anything other than a commercial bargain between writer and printer.”

  “They took the money and ran?”

  “Probably. Or a kinder interpretation might be that they were honest, and made no pretense of being a mainline publisher.”

  “Hmmm. So one of the Cantelos vanity-published a book in the seventies. Do I take it that the Cantelos themselves are the family whose business—that’s an ambiguous word, isn’t it?—is dealt with in the book?”

  “That’s for you to decide,” said Felicity firmly. “I’ve only flicked through it. I have the collected masterpieces of Mrs. Trollope, Caroline Norton, and G. P. R. James to gorge myself with, to supervise eager-beaver Ph.D. students. All I can say off-the-cuff is that the plot seems to follow the fortunes of two younger members of the family, one male and one female. And that an early chapter—the second, I think—has a family scene, with the members all assembled at breakfast, the whole thing presided over by the formidable figure of the paterfamilias—a Victorian father well out of his time.”

  “The usual tyrant?”

  “No, not really. But someone with firm opinions and a sententious manner—someone who apparently always gets his own way. It’s really a sort of comic caricature—something out of Dickens or Waugh.”

  “But the novel is set in what was then the present day?”

  “Seems to be. I’ve seen references to the cinema and the radio, but not so far to television. It existed then, of course, but maybe Dad thought it beneath the family.”

  “Maybe. Clarissa had an old black-and-white set she almost never watched.”

  Merlyn sat thinking, flicking through the already fragile pages. There seemed nothing in the book that brought back the past, but of course it was not his past.

  “I’m trying to calculate my dates,” he said. “The member of my family—my mother’s family, that is—that I can most readily imagine writing a novel, maybe as a species of revenge, would be Malachi. Now, I think we can take it that the X is a sign of an unknown quantity. There is no Xavier in the family, and I can’t think of any other normal Christian name beginning with that letter.”

  “Xenia,” said Felicity. “But it’s not common.”

  “Why do words that start with X get pronounced as if they started with a Z?” asked Charlie.

  �
�I’ll give you a short lecture on that,” said Felicity, “when I’ve found out why myself.”

  Merlyn cut them short.

  “However, I do rather doubt whether Malachi has the staying power to write a whole novel as an act of revenge or anything else, let alone to get it published. He’d flake after chapter three.”

  “A lot of people do that,” said Felicity.

  “Not you,” said Charlie. “We’re piling up rejection slips and putting a star on the ones where the manuscript seems to have been read.”

  “Not many of those,” said Felicity. “Now, if we’re thinking seventies we’re talking about thirty-odd years ago. I’d say an age of twenty to twenty-five is the lowest we could imagine for writing a novel and getting it vanity-published. So we are looking for someone who is now at least in their mid-fifties, and probably older. And at a guess I would say a woman.”

  “Why?” asked Charlie.

  “Because if it’s a young person who wrote it I feel the men would be active getting qualifications and starting in a job, making a place in the world for themselves. Even at that late date in Leeds, middle-class women were expected to have a mildly good time when they were young, while fitting themselves to become virtuous wives and mothers, which was their destiny. This seems to be the worldview of the father of the family, if we can believe the picture to be based on the Cantelos. So the women had more leisure time, more unexpended emotional energy, more sheer frustration.”

  “That sounds convincing,” said Merlyn. “Except that Hugh seems to have been the only Cantelo boy who was interested in money and a career. Gerald got religious mania quite young, if my memory serves, and Paul took off to America, leaving a wife and child, and becoming a sort of intellectual hobo, if the family gossip when I was living with Clarissa is to be believed. Which admittedly is a big if.”

  “Then perhaps we should leave open the sex of the writer. Is it terribly important anyway?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to read the book to decide.”

  “I wanted you to see the book mainly to get an idea of the sort of atmosphere in the family when the children were all younger.”

  Charlie had been thinking.

  “Why would you use the misleading initial X when you were willing to put the name Cantelo to the book?”

  “Maybe because he or she wanted to have the family identified, as part of some kind of revenge or scheme to bring ridicule down on them, but didn’t want his or her own identity to be revealed. There were enough Cantelos to spread the suspicion,” said Merlyn.

  “Fair enough,” said Felicity. She turned to Merlyn. “Well, it’s up to you now. You’re about to have an encounter with your family in earlier days—if I’m right, of course.”

  They all three (because Felicity was as interested as Charlie) chewed over the case, had a drink, went into the DNA test, and the implications of Jake’s coming back into the picture. Merlyn reported on his talks with Malachi and Rosalind, they had another drink, and then started to talk about Carola. Normally Merlyn was perfectly willing to talk about other people’s infants and toddlers, and rather looked forward to the day when he would have one or two of his own, but now he felt the copy of Family Business burning a hole in his briefcase.

  It was the first thing that he extracted from it when he got back to his hotel room. Felicity had loaned it to him with the proviso that he return it to the library. He put on his pajamas, brewed himself a little pot of tea, then sat down in the easy chair with the book. In the bright light of the standard lamp it looked an even less impressive production than it had seemed in Charlie and Felicity’s flat—like many much more recent British books, it seemed to be made to fall to pieces at the first excuse. Luckily it had probably had few readers, if it had had any. Then he thought about that. Who had read it? Members of the Cantelo family? Perhaps, especially if copies were distributed gratis among them. He seemed to remember that several of them had shares in the privately owned library—perhaps shares were the sort of thing that the Cantelos were given on their twenty-first birthdays. And the book could have been a creator of disunity and grudges and have been intended as such.

  He flicked through the later chapters, as Felicity obviously had done. A story of two young people making their ways in the world, against the combined opposition of parents and siblings. It was hardly riveting stuff, Merlyn thought, and the pall of adolescence hung over it—grievances nursed, naiveties nourished as if they were blinding insights. It was saved, if at all, by the humor of the pictures not only of the parents, but also of some of the siblings: as they grew up in the story, the ambitious Hugh, the tiresomely conventional Emily, the Bible-bashing Gerald, all took on a sort of fictional life.

  When he went back to the beginning of the book to find the breakfast chapter he made a discovery that Felicity apparently had not noticed. The family were introduced in a rather amateur way in the opening pages, and by each fictitious name there was in pencil in the margin a faint initial. Were these the author’s identifications, before giving the book (they would hardly have bought it) to the Leeds Library?

  He went through in his own mind what he knew about his aunt’s generation of Cantelos. Rosalind’s father was Hugh, Caroline’s mother was Marigold. Malachi and Francis’s father was Gerald, Edward’s mother was Emily. Here, as the children of the family appeared, were an H, an M, a G and an E, as well as a Th for his own mother and a Cl for Clarissa. A P identified the man who had flown the nest before Merlyn had ever gone to live with Clarissa, and was never mentioned except with a sharp intake of breath by Aunt Emily.

  The identification had one big advantage: when he came to the chapter of the family at breakfast he could substitute in his own mind the real name of the person mentioned, in place of the fictitious one. Taking it up, the second chapter had something of the broad humor one would hope for from a picture of a disunited family seen from inside.

  “Kidneys!” said Mr. Cantelo, waving one on the end of a fork, and taking care none of the rich sauce dripped down onto his blue and silver tie. “The prince of breakfast meats. You children don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Ugh!” said Marigold. Her mother blinked reproof at her.

  “Your father always says a good breakfast sets you up for the day,” she said.

  “Yes, he always does,” said Paul.

  The irony passed Mr. Cantelo by. His substantial stomach swelled, as it always did when he was about to make a pronouncement, which was frequently.

  “And bacon!” he announced, his voice throbbing with passion. “The essence of Englishness, that’s what bacon is. It’s what marks us off from ‘lesser breeds without the law.’”

  His wide lips, sensual and self-regarding, opened to receive a forkful of streaky, after the napkin had been adjusted over his tie.

  “Perhaps Kipling should have said ‘lesser breeds without the bacon,’” said Paul.

  “Perhaps he couldn’t find a rhyme for bacon,” said Clarissa.

  Mr. Cantelo treated his children’s lightest remarks as if they were possible specimens of childish wisdom.

  “Perhaps he couldn’t,” he said. “The ways of poets are beyond the understanding of a practical man of affairs like myself. If you can’t find a rhyme for a word like bacon, why on earth put it at the end of a line?”

  His tummy swelled once more, and his children were reduced to silence, with some twisting at the corners of their mouths. Their father was king of the breakfast and dinner tables, but the first rumblings of revolutionary republicanism trembled beneath the surface calm.

  “And how,” asked Mr. Cantelo in the apparently cowed silence, and turning to Hugh, “did your essay on Disraeli’s foreign policy go?”

  “All right,” said Hugh. Then, fearing he might have given a hostage to fortune, the boy amended that to: “not too bad.”

  “Disraeli was a great charlatan,” asserted his father.

  “Well, perhaps,” said Hugh. “But that doesn’t get one far on the subjec
t of his foreign policy.”

  “He had not a principled bone in his body. And thatcould probably be discerned in his foreign policy.”

  Hugh was one of those who pursued the useless strategy of battling with his father on his own terms.

  “The trouble is that I thought foreign policy was something big, something high-flown and difficult to grasp—”

  “Do you mean abstract?” his father asked, showering condescension.

  “Yes,” gulped Hugh, grasping at the straw. “Abstract. But all it is, is bits and pieces—things he did when something or other turned up. Not a principle at all.”

  “Exactly what one would expect of an unprincipled person. Reacting to events, taking chances. Like making the poor old Queen Empress of India, a piece of foolish vanity on both their parts which burdened the British crown for seventy years.”

  “Well, yes, I said that…something like that…I think I did all right. At least I hope so.”

  Having reduced his confident son to a nervous jelly, Mr. Cantelo pressed home his advantage, smiling around the table with teeth that flashed warning signals.

  “I hope so. I really hope so. Or you will suffer where it hurts you most, Hugh: in your pocket.” He put his knife and fork across his plate, and the maid immediately whipped it away and put the tea plate and knife onto his placemat. “And what you lose, someone else will gain. If I find that good work has been done, the worker will be rewarded.” He smiled his civilized-crocodile smile. “But mind: betas and beta-minuses are not regarded as good work in the Cantelo family!”

  Most assuredly they were not! Mr. Cantelo’s masterstroke in child-rearing had been to devise a series of rewards and penalties, and a week’s pocket money could be seriously eroded by two or three poor performances. The fact that the money docked was then awarded to a child whose performances at school had rated beta-plus or higher did not improve relations in the large brood.