by Patrick Gale
‘Why should you?’
‘Think, Thomas. She needs a mother. A woman to love her. They were talking about it last night. Miriam already has a bed at Sally’s parents’. A drawer full of clothes. But Sally’s mother is too old, really. I don’t think she’s well.’ Almost absently, Edward took Thomas’s hand again and pressed it between his. Thomas felt a tremendous urge to lift the other hand and stroke Edward’s cheek. He had never felt so tempted by danger. With one touch he might destroy everything. He raised his other hand but found it reaching instead for the folded note in his pocket.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘There was a late delivery of flowers at the church. Beautiful ones. Lilies. Rosemary for remembrance. This was with them.’
‘Yes?’ Edward took the note, releasing Thomas’s hand. He held it unopened on his knees.
‘It’s really not a problem,’ Thomas assured him. ‘Of course Mrs Banks wants to help, and of course she’ll want to have Miriam to stay occasionally, take her for walks and so on. But she’s not strong or young enough to do it full time. All you need is a nanny. There are agencies. Reputable ones. So I’m told. Obviously you’d have to pay the woman you hired to live in, but money need not be a problem.’
‘You really think so?’ Edward’s face lit up. The thought had clearly never occurred to him and he had been worrying himself into a state of needless turmoil. Thomas relished the advantage of wisdom. ‘Would you help me?’ Edward asked.
‘Of course I’ll help. Edward, you must realise I’d do anything –’
‘And you think a nanny would be prepared to come and live out here? There’s no question of my moving, you see.’
Thomas could only hesitate.
‘Well … Well yes. Of course she would,’ he said.
A handful of words like so many bullets had torn his dream to tawdry ribbons. Edward talked on, his mind entering a comfortable channel, about the legal impossibility of selling The Roundel, of how rooted he was there now, of how it now belonged to Miriam. Miriam woke at the excitement in his voice and he lifted her free of her bedding. Her eyes focused sleepily on Thomas, a hint of challenge in their stirring curiosity. Thomas stared back at her and, as he sensed the exclusivity of the bond between father and daughter, muttered automatic promises to seek recommendations among the wives of other senior fellows.
Together they walked out onto the landing and down the stairs to where there was soon a circle of admiring arms stretching out to caress the now boisterous child. When Mrs Banks had stirred from her sofa, seizing on a role, and taken Miriam from his arms, Edward opened the envelope and read the note. Thomas was perplexed to see two quite different emotions reflected on his face. First he blushed and began to fold the note away again then, seeing Thomas watching him, he smiled and displayed what seemed like manufactured amazement, showing the note to the people around him, avoiding Thomas’s gaze.
‘Myra Toye!’ he exclaimed. ‘Myra Toye and Sir Julius sent flowers and even wrote a letter with them. Look! Wasn’t that kind?’
Thomas thought he seemed quite disproportionately pleased with what was surely a routine gesture from an assiduous professional, and felt a stab of jealousy. He fed Edward’s pleasure, however, and with it his own disapproval, by explaining that she had insisted the florist deliver the flowers to the church himself, all the way from the studios, so that Edward should receive a note in her own hand. Others exclaimed, impressed, and asked to see the ordinary scrap of paper which, by the mere addition of a certain name, had been transformed for them into a thing of worth.
After another cup of tea and a second, this time inescapable, slice of seed cake, it was with a certain gratitude that Thomas saw the same, broad-shouldered cab-driver walk hesitantly through the front door. His sly, inquisitive smile as Thomas greeted him and suggested they stop off for a drink on their drive back into Rexbridge, suggested that, romantic disappointments notwithstanding, life would not be entirely without unexpected treats.
PART II
They reminded me of photographs of the victims of the Holocaust concentration camps at the end of the ’39–’45 war. They were mostly in their middle twenties … I wanted some way of dignifying their deaths. I longed for music, poetry; something which would restore to them some of their human dignity.
Dr Anne Bailey, describing her
first encounter with AIDS in Uganda
THE PLAGUE, CHANNEL 4,
WORLD AIDS DAY, 1993
33
Edward had been failing to concentrate on his work all morning and when he heard tyres on gravel and looked up to see an unfamiliar car swing up the drive, he left the sequencer with a kind of relief and went out to meet it. Ordinarily he would have received such a person, if at all, at his flat in London. Over the years, he had kept the flat studiously impersonal, the kind of place one could lend to visiting colleagues or let out for a year with the minimum of preparation. Journalists eagerly agreed to meet him there only to be sent away disappointed by the lack of photographs, or mementoes. But this one, the biographer, with all the worrying Jamesian overtones her profession carried, had telephoned beseechingly once too often and had caught him, exhausted and uncaring, after a three-week European tour. Then his record company’s publicist had joined forces with her and Edward’s weakened resistance had crumbled. So here she was.
She was young, svelte, freshly dressed. Unaware that he was padding over the garden behind her, she took a pocket camera from her briefcase and snapped a few quick photographs of the house. When she heard him cough, she slipped the camera away, surreptitious as a thief. For a second he caught the frown on her unguarded face, then she looked up, turned a bright, almost friendly, smile upon him and came to shake his hand.
‘Mr Pepper. What an honour. I’m Venetia. Venetia Peake.’
Her quick appraisal of his face was palpable, like the brisk strokes of a nurse’s flannel.
‘Come on in,’ he told her. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’
She seemed disappointed that they were heading away from The Roundel.
‘I haven’t lived in there for decades,’ he explained. ‘It’s always belonged to women, and I was only ever a caretaker. My daughter lived there for a while, with a group of her friends in the late sixties. A commune of sorts, though rather half-hearted. She got married a few years ago and moved away, so my grandchildren use the place. They both live in London so it’s quite peaceful here again.’
‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’
‘I love to be alone.’
They arrived at the single storey studio whose modern bricks had almost disappeared beneath a cushion of clematis and rampaging jasmine. He smiled, waving her in. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘this place is a damned sight cheaper to heat.’
‘Doesn’t the river ever flood?’
She realised too late the gaffe she had just made.
‘Frequently,’ he told her, amused at her little discomfited pout. ‘That’s why I had them build this on a bank. Do you take milk?’ She shook her head, pausing to note a slightly battered Oscar statuette doing duty as a doorstop.
‘I thought you had two,’ she said.
‘I use the other as a paperweight,’ he told her, gesturing towards his desk. She arranged herself on a sofa and took some files and a tape recorder from her bag. He served the coffee then sat across from her. Now that girls were wearing short skirts yet again, they had taken to sitting the way their grandmothers were taught to do, with ankles crossed and legs tucked chastely to the side. She had good legs. Nervous again, he tried to seize the initiative. ‘So tell me. How’s Myra?’
‘Fine. Radiant. Hard at work on a fourth series. Do you watch it?’
‘Afraid not.’ He glanced around them in explanation. ‘I don’t watch anything.’ The studio had always been a television-free zone. He occasionally sneaked an evening in front of the one his granddaughter had installed in The Roundel, but there was no need for this journalist to know that, not least because it was often Myra’s old films that he watched.
>
‘She says hello by the way,’ Venetia Peake continued. ‘Sends her love.’
Edward merely raised his eyebrows and nodded noncommittal acceptance.
‘So she knows we’re going to talk?’
‘Yes, but not how deeply.’
Edward stalled, unsettled by the threat of steel in her tone.
‘I don’t quite see what I can tell you,’ he began. ‘Myra and I saw each other at the studios of course, but I’m not sure there’s much I can add to the anecdotes you’ll already have.’
Ignoring his disclaimers, she clicked down the record button on her dictation machine and a little microphone popped out of it towards him.
‘You don’t mind?’ she asked. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps we should start with some photographs from around forty-eight and forty-nine. I want to be sure I’ve identified them right. Who’s this?’ Edward looked and smiled. It was Myra in aviator gear clowning with Howard Winks.
‘He was a lighting man called Howard Winks. This was during Reach for the Stars. He died in a fire in fifty-seven. Bad heart.’
‘And how about this?’
Edward looked again. Myra linking arms with two men in dark overcoats and hats.
‘The one on the left is Sam Hirsch,’ he told her. ‘I recognise the one on the right but I can’t remember his name. Jim? John?’
‘James?’ she prompted.
‘That’s it. James something. James McBean. He did makeup. Sam was hair.’
‘Myra and her Boys, eh?’
‘That sort of thing, yes.’ Edward thought back, remembering raucous laughter and the hot, dark undertow of his jealousy. ‘Myra with her Boys.’
She produced more photographs, six or seven. Two he could not place at all. In one, Myra was being kissed by someone, clearly unaware of the photographer.
‘And what about this?’
Another of Myra. Myra curled in a chair in an outsize man’s dressing gown and little else, one small foot caught in surprising detail against the dark fabric of the chair cover.
‘Well that’s just Myra.’ He made to hand it back. ‘Myra in a chair.’
‘Yes,’ she pursued, ‘but where?’
He had known straight away. It had been his chair, his photograph, his London bachelor pad on a long, boozy Sunday afternoon. He remembered the brisk excursion to the nearest corner shop – trousers and coat tugged on to cover his nudity – to buy her cigarettes, and the return to the womby fug of his gas-fired rooms with their smell of body and tobacco. He looked up into Venetia Peake’s unflinching gaze.
‘I don’t know.’
‘How about this one then?’
She sounded almost like a policewoman. It was another picture of Myra, this time sprawled on a car rug amid the remains of a picnic, laughing as she added extra leaves to her already mussed-up hair.
‘No idea,’ Edward said, although he knew that the shadow cast in the inexpert snapshot was his own.
Venetia Peake watched him for a moment then opened another file.
‘The thing is, Edward,’ she said, her abrupt familiarity startling as an unwelcome proposal, ‘That I seem to know more than you do. I’ve got some letters and things here. Rather a lot, so I won’t bore you with the details, but they’re all to her and they’re all from you. To “Darling M from Hopeless E”, to “My Darling”, to “Sweetness”, to “Liebchen”, to “Cupcake” …’
‘She showed you these?’
Venetia Peake merely shrugged.
‘Let’s just say they’re all here. You can see them if you want. I have photocopies in my office in New York.’ She held out the file full of old, crumpled scraps, scraps of a cherished and utterly private devotion, but he brushed it aside, blood racing, as he lurched to his feet and made for the bookcase.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Since you’re evidently going to tell the story at least make sure you tell it with both sides fully documented.’ He climbed on a ladder, scanned a high shelf and tugged out a thick pink tome called Fond Remembered Loves, bought in a second-hand shop with the sole purpose of providing an ironic hiding-place. ‘Here,’ he said, opening it and passing sheet by faded, crumpled sheet to Ms Peake who had come eagerly to the ladder’s side. ‘Letters from her. To “Dearest E”. To “My Darling”. To “Bunny”. To “Mr Hotinsack”.’
‘Oh. Well. Thank you,’ she stammered, turning greedily from one to the next. ‘She said she never wrote any letters.’
‘She forgot.’
‘Of course, I already have her side of the story.’
He followed her back to the sofa.
‘Let me guess,’ he said bitterly. ‘I besieged her with flowers and letters and she finally succumbed out of pity?’
‘Well … Er … God, I never thought this could be so embarrassing.’ She struggled back to composure. ‘Yes. Something like that,’ she said at last.
‘There were no letters. No flowers. Not at first,’ he said after thinking for a while. ‘It started when she was drunk. She used to drink. Everyone did then but she drank more than everyone. I found her in the studio car park. She could hardly stand up and she was about to climb into her racer, the one St Teath gave her as a wedding present. Luckily for her she’d dropped the keys and couldn’t find them or she’d have killed herself.’
‘So what happened?’ she asked, adjusting the volume on the tape recorder.
‘Nothing much. It was raining. She was wet through, crying, hair everywhere. A real mess. I drove her back to London, to my place in Albert Hall Mansions. Ran her a bath. Lent her some pyjamas while her clothes dried. I put her to bed while I slept on the sofa.’
‘And then?’
‘And then she woke up in the middle of the night having a panic attack, screaming the place down. I went to calm her, explained where she was, what had happened then she … well … she had a rather winning way of saying thank you and ended up spending the weekend.’ Edward found he was smiling despite himself.
‘Then what?’
So Edward told her the whole sad, sweet, humiliating story of their affair. It was not the only liaison of his long widowerhood but the first and the last in which he had allowed himself to become involved to the point of pain. The telling of it, the long-forgotten sight of her childish handwriting and of the intensely evocative snapshots so mysteriously acquired, softened his rage. Venetia Peake’s questions, her relentless interest, broke up the heartless flibbertigibbet image of Myra he had carefully constructed in his wrath, and expensively endorsed in prolonged psychotherapy.
His inquisitor made no allusion to his and Myra’s having had anything but a professional relationship in the brief years of his marriage to Sally. Either she was being cunningly manipulative, or she was genuinely ignorant. In his initial outburst of rage and panic, he had assumed that Myra had not only handed over private letters for this young woman’s cold perusal but had told her of their one adulterous encounter. Now that his vengefulness seemed cheap beside her delicacy, he wanted to unsay what he had said or at least take back some of the letters which showed her at her most sluttish and illiterate. Then he reflected that this was, after all, to be an authorized biography and that Myra would surely therefore have power of veto.
He softened slightly towards Venetia Peake too – but to say that he warmed to her would have been an exaggeration. He offered her a drink once the dictation machine and letters had been clicked away into her capacious bag and was touched to observe, from her evident relief, that she had been as apprehensive about the interview as he. She knew nothing whatever about music – although it seemed she came from a musical family – so they talked about America, where she had taken out citizenship after a brief, convenient marriage, and about his grandchildren.
‘Are these them?’ she asked, picking a photograph off the piano.
Edward nodded.
‘Alison and Jamie. It’s a bit out of date apparently but that seems to be the way I remember them.’
‘He’s so handsome,’ she enthused politely. �
�What does he do?’
‘In the City,’ he said and had to touch his brow to rub away a frown he felt forming there. ‘She’s in publishing.’
‘Oh but I think I know her. That is, we’ve met once. She wouldn’t remember. She’s at Mallard and Rose isn’t she?’
‘Pharos, actually.’
‘That’s the one,’ she bluffed. ‘I get confused. You must be very proud of them both.’
Her tone was rather patronising, but he found himself nodding and feeling a small warmth of pride, if only in being a grandfather. Regretting his initial hostility, he showed her the hall and gallery of The Roundel. She presumed to peck him on the cheek before climbing into her car. Then, slightly drunk from a whisky on an empty stomach, he found himself waving her off as fondly as if she were a favourite niece.
Back in the studio, having abandoned all hope of useful work for the afternoon, he telephoned Miriam to warn her the journalist might track her down. However he learned from a halting conversation with her cleaning lady that, incongruous but true, Miriam was out at the hairdressers. He telephoned Pharos to ask Alison if she intended to come down at the weekend, but she was in a meeting and he had to trust a message to her arrogant male secretary. It was actually Jamie he most wanted to speak to, but he knew the boy found it awkward to receive personal calls at the office. He rang his flat instead and left a pointless and slightly garbled message on his machine beginning, ‘Don’t worry. It’s only me –’
34
‘No! No, I’m not ready.’
‘Yes,’ Jamie commanded and thrust home so hard that the man gasped as if he were being stabbed. ‘Yes you are.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’ Another thrust. ‘Come.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Go on. you’re coming.’ Another thrust. Harder this time. ‘I can tell. Come now!’
‘No. Yes. No! Oh God!’ The man arched his back and wrapped his thighs tight around Jamie’s waist, pulling him towards him. As he came, with a series of dry sobs, the muscles in his arse seized and released Jamie’s numb, bruised dick, seized and released it. For a moment, watching the man thrash and wince on the rug before him, Jamie wondered whether he could be bothered to come as well. But even as he made up his mind to pretend to, he felt the obscure mechanism in his loins thumping into motion of its own accord.