The Graveyard Position

by Robert Barnard

  Merlyn decided that his grandfather had gone off the rails sexually after, and as a consequence of, his wife’s death. She, as Family Business had made clear, was his prop, his center, his butterer-up-in-chief.

  Had his grandfather’s aberrant behavior included incest with one or more of his other daughters, and was it this that had given Jake his idea? Had his grandfather in fact had a much earlier sexual relationship with Thora that had been without result? Or had he had eyes in those last years for any young woman in his vicinity, including the wives of his own sons? This idea appealed to Merlyn as more likely, as the sort of thing that would send Jake off on his harebrained course of thinking. It also threw an interesting spotlight on Roderick Massey, and on his mother, the wife of Paul Cantelo.

  He tried to get a picture in his mind of the Cantelo family and its dynamics. A strong, opinionated man, of considerable power in his smallish world, who has ruled his family by dividing them each from the other, loses his wife, the emotional, sexual, and ego-boosting prop in his life, and starts behaving like a dictator in the last, demented years of his rule. That seemed to make sense, to cohere as a picture.

  Other possibilities grew up around it: that Merlyn Cantelo’s behavior earlier had been similar but more discreet; that his behavior was aggravated by the fact that he was losing, or had already lost, the control he had once enjoyed over his family, particularly the male members, and hated his loss of power.

  When Merlyn went to the Cantelos’ lawyer in East Parade next morning he took the papers from the Forensic Science Service along with him. However, the firm had been associated in the request for a DNA test, and already had a copy of the letter and the appended scientific material. Mr. Featherstone’s manner was notably warmer than it had been on the previous meeting.

  “I think the whole unnecessary dispute can now be put to rest,” he said, shaking Merlyn’s hand. “You are Miss Cantelo’s nephew Merlyn Docherty, therefore the provisions of her will based on the assumption that you are alive can be put into effect. Very satisfactory all round.”

  “Not to some of my relatives,” Merlyn pointed out.

  “Perhaps not. They will no doubt receive the news of the new development in different ways. I have already drafted a letter informing them of the Forensic Science Services findings, and I shall send it today. Now, there’s the question of the house in Congreve Street—”

  “Yes, I’ve thought about that,” said Merlyn, sinking again into the chair in Mr. Featherstone’s office. “I presume that the firm that boarded up the place can now undo their work?”

  “Of course. I can phone them as soon as you like.”

  “I wonder if you could ask them to change the locks, both front and back, and deliver the keys to me at the Crowne Plaza Hotel?”

  Mr. Featherstone nodded thoughtfully.

  “Ah yes. You think that necessary?”

  “I think some members of the family had free access from the time of Aunt Clarissa’s death to the time it was boarded up, so it’s probable that I’m merely asking you to shut the stable door. Frankly, I don’t think the contents were of great value, though the house is. But still, I have to say I don’t like the idea of anyone in the family having free access at any time I’m not there.”

  “Naturally. In any case, this is a perfectly normal procedure when a property changes hands.”

  “I suppose so…. I wonder if you could satisfy my curiosity about something—merely to save time, because it’s a matter that’s already in the public domain.”

  “I will try,” said Featherstone, his caution returning in some measure.

  “I should like to know the terms of Grandfather Cantelo’s will.”

  “Hmmm,” said Mr. Featherstone, obviously not entirely pleased. “That is going some way back into the past.”

  “One often has to, to understand the present. There is a great gap in my knowledge of the family timewise, remember.”

  “Quite, quite…You have to remember that the old man’s last years were…shall we say, sad?”

  “Sad may cover it. And embarrassing, I gather?”

  “I believe so,” said Mr. Featherstone quietly to show his discretion. “I know no details, and don’t wish to know any. There was talk in his last years of his affairs being taken out of his hands.”

  “Really? And was his will made in those years?”

  “Yes, it was. In 1975. There was one great difficulty about that proposal to take control of his affairs.”

  “My grandfather himself?”

  “Exactly. He would have fought it. And really, the main evidence—apart from the usual, fairly trivial signs of old age—was in his…irregular behavior. It was not possible to argue that this made him incapable of managing his own affairs. He just—”

  “Went off the rails?”

  “Exactly. And the people arguing for affairs to be taken out of his hands would have been accused of the most obvious self-interest. He would certainly have fought it, and would have won. The will itself was perfectly sane, and in accordance with views he had held for much of his lifetime.”

  “And the terms of the will?”

  “He left the house to Clarissa—his favorite daughter, and the one who looked after him in his last years. And the accumulated fortune, including the money from the sale of Cantelo Shirts, the clothing firm, was to be divided among all his children, including Clarissa.”

  “I see. Divided equally?”

  “No,” said Mr. Featherstone decisively, as if he were taking on the character of the man he was talking about. “He had always brought up his family to believe that the men were for the hurly-burly of earning their own livings, making their own way in the world, while the women were to provide the graces of life—the beauty, the delicacy…. It’s not a fashionable viewpoint.”

  “Practically actionable…But some of the women were married.”

  “Yes, both Emily and Marigold, though Marigold’s husband was much older than her. Your mother was dead, but her share was left to Clarissa in trust for you.”

  “Ah. She always said she had money that was really mine. It financed my stay with an English family in Italy and my years at university.”

  “And what’s left will come to you now, with all of Clarissa’s own money.”

  “So how was the money divided up?”

  “The boys shared thirty percent of it—ten percent each. The women shared the remainder—seventeen and a half percent each. So all of them got an appreciable, a useful sum.”

  “But the men very much less than the women. Was he annoyed none of the men went into the family business?” asked Merlyn, something that had bothered him.

  “Maybe. Who knows? He could hardly say so. Or that Gerald was a dead loss, Paul unsatisfactory, and Hugh on his way to not needing any help. He’d always put a lot of emphasis on independence, initiative, carving your own way.”

  “If you were a man.”

  “Exactly. He was at least consistent, in tune with his own beliefs.”

  “Yes, indeed. But I don’t think I’d have liked Grandfather Cantelo all the same.” Merlyn got up. “I’ll wait to hear that the house has been opened up, and the locks changed. Then I might go to a car dealer and buy myself an old banger, something dispensable, for use during the rest of my time here.”

  “You don’t anticipate settling in Leeds, then?”

  Merlyn shook his head.

  “I have a job in Brussels.” Then he decided to be honest. “Somehow the call of family seems just as faint now as it has done for the last twenty-odd years.”

  Mr. Featherstone smiled bleakly. He liked dry humor. In fact, it was the only type of humor he recognized.

  So Merlyn fetched his car from the hotel car park and took it back to the hire firm. Then he went to a used-car dealer ten minutes’ walk from Congreve Street, and looked over their older stock, most of which he suspected of having had their mileages gently massaged. Honest Sam of Sam’s Wheels followed him around, a hulking prese
nce, to see how high up the price range he could be expected to go.

  “What you want it for then?” he asked.

  “Just to get me around for a few weeks, then to get me home to Brussels,” said Merlyn.

  “Brussels? You one of these Common Market bureaucrats? You could afford something better than an old banger.”

  “I could. But I’ve got a BMW at home.”

  He picked up a ten-year-old Ford for £1,500, went through all the paperwork, and drove it to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where a set of house keys was awaiting him at Reception. He paid his bill, packed, and drove off to the house he must temporarily consider his home.

  The houses in Congreve Street were too old to have any garages, and the streets of Leeds, he had found out during his stay, were not the best place to leave cars of any pretensions. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, he thought, as he left the old car outside the front gate.

  So Merlyn went back to the house where he had spent some fairly happy years of adolescence. He went back, however, without any expectations of sentimental reactions. He was aware that his sudden exile at the age of sixteen had left him cool, uninvolved, a man who stood on his own. If he felt strong emotion about anything in his current situation it was for Clarissa, not for her house, even though at the time when he had lived there she had been just beginning to make it her own. Warmth, fellow feeling, sympathy, sheer fun, all these he had got—it seemed sometimes as if for the first time—from his aunt, but the house had been a mere setting, hardly more than a stage set, apart from the little room that was his bedroom. Love and security meant people, and for Merlyn houses could not offer more than a symbolic version of them.

  Unboarded, the house looked like any other in the street. He got out of the car and raised his hand to Mr. Robinson farther down, who was cutting back shrubs in his front garden. Then he turned, took out the shining new keys, and in the declining evening sun went into his old home.

  The hall, he noticed for the first time, had not been redecorated since his time in the house, in the early eighties. Typical of Clarissa to take the view that a hall was a mere convenience, a transition, and not worth bothering about. Its neglect meant it exuded a feeling of desolation, nonoccupation, though Clarissa had only been dead for a few weeks. Merlyn turned into the dining room, where the wake had been held. Then a nest of tables, large and small, had been dotted around its length, but now it had reverted to its state, presumably, in Clarissa’s later years: the large table had been shunted to beside the wall—no big family dinners in her time, then. In fact, the large table had been virtually unused even in his time in the house, and Clarissa and he had, as often as not, eaten in the kitchen or off their laps. A couple of the other tables were still in the center of the room, but in spite of the fact that some redecoration had taken place, it seemed a space that had not had a purpose since the big family gatherings of Grandfather Cantelo’s time, only regaining it briefly for the family get-together at the funeral.

  Crossing the dim and probably dirty hallway, he went into the sitting room. This was the center of life in the house, but also Clarissa’s professional backdrop as well. The low table surrounded by sofa and easy chairs still had packs of cards on it—ordinary playing cards, tarot cards, and others Merlyn could not put a name to. The curtains were heavy and dark green, which Clarissa found a comfortable color, but they would only be drawn closed in daytime if his aunt thought her current subject would be happier in near-darkness. On the whole she tried to establish an atmosphere of normality and everydayness, and eschewed any suggestion of the bizarre.

  “Let’s sit down, dear, and you can tell me a bit about yourself,” she would say, and this opening part of the session could last anything from half an hour to an hour, and was usually thoroughly enjoyed by the clients, who had a strong vein of egotism (as well as credulity) in their makeup. When it finished and Clarissa got down to the real business of the consultation, she had learned quite as much as any more conventional counselor would have done. Often she would have guessed what the consultation was about, and was on her way to working out the most sensible solution to her client’s problem.

  She sometimes talked about these sessions with the young Merlyn.

  “I had a right old fool today,” she would say. “He just wanted me to advise him to do what he’d decided to do already. I told him it would end in disaster.”

  “Why did you do that?” Merlyn asked.

  “Because what fools decide to do normally does end in disaster.”

  The memories of his aunt when she was a vigorous, capable forty-five-year-old woman came flooding over Merlyn. He saw her at her writing desk (she had a whole string of correspondence-clients), he saw her coming through from the kitchen with one of her sizzling casseroles in her gloved hands, he saw her standing at the window commenting on life going by in the street.

  “Mr. Robinson would hardly exist without his dog,” she had once said. “That and the doings of the neighbors. He’s lost now; number fifteen only contains me, not the whole Cantelo clan. We gave his life an interest.”

  Remembering that remark, Merlyn realized, as he had not at the time, that until Grandfather Cantelo died there had been at least some family activity centered on the Congreve Street house. Family had come and gone, mainly to visit the old man himself, with motives pure or self-interested as the case might be. After the house became Clarissa’s there had been little or no activity. Why was that? Resentment at her inheriting the family home?

  When he went upstairs those early memories of his aunt merged into later ones. By her bed was an extension telephone—an obvious precaution for an elderly person living on her own. It was from bed that she had often conducted her side of the conversations with him in the last year or so of her life. Those were sad memories. The vital, funny aunt had given way to someone who had to struggle to keep her conversation on an even keel, someone who knew she was failing but did not know how to conceal it. There had been no question in his own mind that she was sliding gently toward senility, but all suggestions that he come over, make arrangements for her care, met with agitation and blank refusal. She didn’t want to be cared for, and that was that. Equally clear was the fact that she didn’t want him to come back home, though she dearly wanted to see him. Merlyn had been made aware that her old conviction that he would be in danger was still strong.

  So in those last phone calls—regular and loving as always—the poor mind slid backward and forward from wandering to urgency, from homely advice to vague, apocalyptic warnings. What part of all that rambling discourse was to be taken seriously, acted upon? That, he had never known.

  “I’m writing something,” Clarissa would say, and his heart would sink. It surely would be nothing more than evidence of her ramblings, testimony to mental decay. “It will explain everything,” she would say, not even sounding convinced herself. It would explain nothing, Merlyn thought. She still alighted on reality now and then, but she was incapable of sustained thought.

  As he shut the door of his aunt’s bedroom, overwhelmed by sadness and a sense of waste, another remark of hers came back to him.

  “I’ll put it in the usual place,” she had said.

  There had been “usual places” for a lot of things, to be collected by a lot of people—a key for young Rosalind, for emergencies, money for the paperboy, even a place where one or two favored clients could collect a weekly horoscope. However, the “usual place” for Merlyn was underneath the bedclothes in the airing cupboard. Money was left there for emergencies, and for paying any tradesman who called. This gave rise to standing jokes, and often the milkman or the baker’s roundsman would wink when he received the warm notes and say, “Nothing nicer than a well-aired fiver.”

  They were nice men, who probably hadn’t the faintest idea who he was—probably thought he was a by-blow of Clarissa’s, or her very-much-younger brother. Only the older residents of Congreve Street, in all probability, could have said precisely that he was the son of Thora, and
that just because she had been a general favorite.

  Merlyn wondered whether the airing cupboard still existed: central heating had been put in since his time, with probably a new boiler elsewhere. But when he went over to the large Edwardian bathroom, there it still was in the corner—a tall, white-painted cupboard stretching to the ceiling: not warm now, perhaps never warm, but still containing piles of bed linen and smaller piles of clean clothes, some of which Merlyn recognized. He thought for a moment, swallowed, then slid his hand under the bottom of the pile of sheets.

  He brought out two pages of exercise-book lined paper.

  His heart stopped. He recognized the spidery, all-over-the-place handwriting of Clarissa’s later letters to him. He was under no illusions. His aunt had been in no state of mind to lay out a coherent argument. There would be no answers on these pages.

  Nevertheless he felt a distinct excitement as he took the sheets down to the sitting room, poured himself a glass of his aunt Clarissa’s brandy, with soda from the drinks cabinet and ice from the fridge, and sat down in the easy chair by the empty grate.

  The pages were very difficult to decipher. But then, he told himself, so were her later letters, and these had in some ways trained him for the task: the first read-through gave you no more than a vague sense of what was on her mind. Then you had to set to and read again, and then again. As more and more of the letters became legible you got a clearer sense of what she was trying to say, though her mind was always sadly wayward.

  There was one line in the middle of the first page that, to one well acquainted with her writing, was legible at once. It had clearly had pains taken with it.

  They were all in it except me.

  So far so good, but still puzzling. Who were “they”? The family? That was the most likely explanation, Merlyn decided. But what was “it”? He took a sip of his drink, then deciphered a scrawled phrase that slanted down from the legible sentence.