by Rachel Hore
‘Brilliant,’ Joel said, making a note of his own. ‘I’ll give you a call about that.’
Lunch, served by Lorna in the austere dining room, was delicious, lamb in a red wine sauce and fluffy mashed potato, comforting and piping hot. It was a stiff occasion, though, with Jacqueline Morton seated at the head of the table, as if at a board meeting. Poor Joel started by eating with his fork only, American fashion, until Jacqueline Morton’s frown shamed him into picking up his knife. Emily once had a great-aunt just like Jacqueline, and didn’t feel nervous of her exactly, but she was beginning to suspect that the woman needed to be watched. There was something going on about this biography that she didn’t trust. However good a writer Joel might be, he’d have to be a strong character to insist on including anything Jacqueline Morton didn’t like. Emily resolved to speak to him about this as soon as she could, though she wasn’t sure how to frame it.
Mrs Morton turned her steely attentions on Emily. How long had she worked for Parchment? What writers had she worked with? She appeared to be satisfied with the answers. Then came some low-key probing of her family background and her education.
‘Dad’s a headmaster,’ Emily told her, taking a sip of red wine, ‘and Mum – well, she used to work in a bank, but then she had us so she left.’
‘Us? You have brothers and sisters then?’
‘Just an older sister. She was a fashion buyer for a department store, but she’s given that up since my niece and nephew were born. They’re still only three and eighteen months, you see.’
‘No, of course it wouldn’t do,’ Mrs Morton said, in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘Children need their mothers to be at home.’ Emily met Joel’s eye and he gave an embarrassed shrug.
The old lady talked about her own children, the boys, James and Harry, now middle-aged men. ‘Harry has three children, and James one, all grown up now, of course. And all doing very well for themselves.’
‘Do you see them often?’ Joel asked, laying down his knife and fork.
‘Not as much as I’d like. They do have such busy lives.’ There was a wistfulness in Jacqueline’s voice and Emily suddenly glimpsed a chink in her armour. ‘I still have Lorna, though, haven’t I, dear?’ Jacqueline smiled at her daughter, but there was something patronising in the smile.
Lorna stood up. ‘Will you have more cabbage, Joel? No?’ The top button of her blouse had come undone and as she leaned forward to pick up the vegetable dish, a delicate chain with a gold ring on it swung out. She shoved it back and did up the button, but it was too late, everyone had seen that it was a wedding ring.
Emily helped stack the dishes, though Lorna refused to let her help take them to the kitchen. Whilst Lorna was out of the room, Mrs Morton draped her napkin on the table and said in a low voice, ‘Of course, it was simply dreadful for us all when Malcolm left her, so early in their marriage, too, but it was a godsend to have her back home.’ Emily was struck by the awful sense that the woman was not really sorry at all about Lorna’s heartbreak. Instead she was thinking about her own convenience.
It was at this point that she began seriously to dislike Jacqueline Morton.
After lunch they drifted back to the drawing room. The downstairs bathroom being occupied, Lorna directed Emily to one upstairs. When she emerged onto the landing afterwards, she noticed a door standing open almost opposite and couldn’t help peering in.
It was painted in the same cold blue and white as the hall and the drawing room, and in a bedroom the effect was merciless. Everything was meticulously tidy, the curtains folded back and secured by tassels, the bedspread on the double bed perfectly draped, the silver-backed brushes on the dressing table symmetrically arranged. Only a library book on a bedside table next to a spectacle case proclaimed that the room was occupied. It was obviously the master bedroom, and it wasn’t hard to guess that Jacqueline slept there. What had it been like when Hugh was alive? Emily wondered, for now it spoke entirely of Jacqueline. Maybe the couple hadn’t shared a room. Whatever the explanation, there was something disturbing about this sterile atmosphere. Just then she heard voices in the hall so she stepped back guiltily and hurried downstairs.
Later, Joel offered to drive Emily to the station to get her train. It appeared that he was staying on to take another look at some of Hugh’s correspondence.
‘Oh, Lorna will take Emily’ Mrs Morton said immediately. Poor Lorna, Emily thought. Jacqueline’s daughter had only just come in to sit down after washing up.
‘It’s really no trouble,’ Joel told Emily and before their host could draw breath to disagree, Emily accepted.
Outside, the fog had begun to clear, and as she walked with Joel to the sporty black car, Emily turned to view the frontage of the house. She found the grey stone too grim for her liking, but the classical lines were softened by a great wisteria plant, which when blossomed must be beautiful.
‘How old is the place, do you think?’ she asked Joel.
‘Early Victorian. Most of it, anyway’ There were more modern additions, a newish conservatory to one side, and a flagged terrace in front studded with little flowerbeds.
They got into the car, which Joel turned in a single, graceful arc. ‘It should only take twenty minutes,’ he said.
‘This is really kind of you,’ Emily said.
‘No problem.’ He pressed a button and a woman’s sultry voice began to croon. For a while they were silent. The drive met the lane on a blind corner and it was a relief once they were clear. When they were through the village, Joel picked up speed, the car clinging to the bends, and Emily sensed his enjoyment. The engine was smooth, the car comfortable with low bucket seats. She felt cocooned from the gloomy world outside.
‘I’ve already started writing the book,’ Joel told her, as they gained a straight bit of road. ‘I can send you an outline right away.’ He glanced round at her. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how certain is Parchment to go for this project?’
‘I can’t say for definite, but it’s looking good,’ Emily said. ‘Our publisher, Gillian Bradshaw, is keen. And so, of course, am I.’
They came to a narrow bridge and Joel had to concentrate. Afterwards he said, ‘I hope I’m not breaking confidences if I say that whilst I would appreciate a decent advance, it’s important to me that I have a good publisher like Parchment. Not that my agent won’t drive a hard bargain. Mrs Morton will see to that.’
‘I can imagine,’ Emily replied, laughing, and Joel laughed too.
She wondered how to phrase the question she needed to ask. She didn’t want to offend him. ‘Given that Mrs Morton has so much control, how do you feel about this project?’ she came up with eventually.
‘Lucky I’m doing it,’ he said. ‘Morton is fascinating. So much there in his writing, but so controlled. His early books were stronger, maybe – I think it’s the passion in them. I find the later work rather dry, to be honest – as if he became out of touch. I’m so grateful Jacqueline has given me full access to the papers. Sorry – now I sound like a quote from a press release.’
‘Not really.’ She smiled. ‘It’s not going to be just about his writing, is it, the biography? I mean, people are going to want to know what kind of a person Hugh Morton was, his life story, what inspired him.’
‘The deadly secrets, you mean? The exposures.’ He chuckled.
‘If you put it like that, yes. Publicity angles.’
‘There isn’t much. Even the business of how he won the Booker Prize turns out to be in order. It wasn’t that he was friendly with the Chair of the judges. It was simply that they thought his was the best book.’
‘Why did he turn down an honour, for instance?’
‘The official line is he didn’t believe in them,’ Joel said with the smallest of smiles, ‘but I have my suspicions Jacqueline didn’t think the one he was offered was grand enough.’
‘She fancied being Lady Morton?’ Emily giggled. ‘She’ll hardly let you write that.’
‘There a
re ways of putting it.’ Joel tapped his finger on the driving wheel. ‘Then there’s his war record.’
Emily was immediately interested. ‘What did he do in the war? Isn’t Coming Home based on that?’
‘Yes. There’s a possibility the rescue for which he got the Distinguished Flying Cross didn’t happen quite how he described it, though there’s no doubting his bravery. I must talk to a couple of people.’ They entered a tunnel under the main road and he fell silent. Emily wondered if he was keeping something back. They turned up the slip road to join the dual carriageway, Joel concentrated on edging in between two lorries. When they were safely in lane, she tried again.
‘How is examining Morton’s war record going to go down with Jacqueline? Given that she seems to think he’s a saint or something.’
Joel shrugged. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine,’ he said firmly, but something about his tone left Emily feeling uneasy.
The rest of the way they discussed logistics.
‘You will let me know about the Parchment archives?’ he asked her.
‘Of course,’ she replied, and put his contact details into her phone.
The car drew up in front of the station, shadowy in the dying afternoon. ‘Well, thank you,’ Emily said. As she scrabbled in her bag for her tickets, her fingers closed around a book. Coming Home – she should have shown him earlier. She pulled it out. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I found this in the office.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Joel put out his hand, but before he could take the book, the car shook with a juddering roar from behind; then came a squeal of brakes. She whipped round to see a lorry, pulled up practically on top of them. The driver leaned on the horn.
‘What’s he on?’ Joel muttered, craning in the rear-view mirror. The lorry driver hooted again and revved his engine.
‘I’d better let you go,’ Emily said, stuffing the book back in her bag and getting out.
‘Speak soon,’ he called as she closed the door. A wave and he pulled away.
As the train unzipped the darkening landscape to London, she thought about Joel, how impressed she was by him. As well as having the right credentials, he was professional to deal with – straightforward, reasonable. He’d do the job well, she was sure, and deliver on time, most likely. She hoped Parchment did offer for the book. She knew she’d enjoy working with him.
A week went by before she spoke to him again, but a lot happened in that time. His agent emailed her the synopsis for the book and the Introduction, which spoke of Hugh Morton as a key figure in the British post-war literary scene. Joel’s approach was suitably scholarly, yet he wrote with style and panache.
At the next editorial meeting those gathered agreed to wait for Gillian’s return from Australia before going any further with the proposal. Emily rang Joel, who was on a busy street somewhere and, against a background of traffic noise, explained what was going on.
‘I’ve also ordered up those files you wanted,’ she told him. They’ll take a few days, I think. Apparently they have to come from Gloucestershire.’
‘Gloucestershire?’
‘That’s where our warehouse is. Shall I call you when they get here?’
‘Yes, please,’ he said. Then: ‘I must go now, I’m late for filming.’
A couple of days later, Emily returned to her desk from a meeting to find that a cardboard box had been left on her chair. It was stained and dusty and sealed with dozens of strips of parcel tape. She eyed it with trepidation.
Sarah, her neighbour in the next pod, who edited children’s books, peered round the partition. ‘I hope it’s not a bomb.’
‘Or a three-volume horror story,’ Emily groaned. ‘Handwritten in blood.’ She waved a pair of scissors dangerously. ‘I always get the weird ones.’
But when Emily winched open the flaps, it was to find three ancient-looking folders, bulky and tied up with ribbon.
‘We’re safe,’ she told Sarah. ‘It’s just some stuff I ordered from the archive.’
In fact, she was rather intrigued. Stuck on the first folder was a yellowing typed label: The Silent Tide by Hugh Morton, it read. She untied the ends of the ribbon with an odd sense of excitement, feeling the pull of the past. The date of a handwritten note from Jacqueline, acknowledging receipt of a book, suggested this folder was the most recent, though it was full of letters and flimsy carbon copies of memos, going back years, about reprints and new editions. Out of the next folder fell a ragged mass of old press cuttings. The third must be the oldest. Emily turned the whispering dry pages and read with delicious reverence a long typed letter signed Hugh Morton in his bold handwriting, familiar from her copy of Coming Home.
It was only a list of proof corrections addressed to a Mr Richard Snow, who appeared to be Morton’s editor, but it was a connection with the famous writer. She smiled when it plaintively mentioned hoped-for changes to the jacket. Hugh wasn’t the first or the last author to argue with his publisher on that touchy subject. It was with great reluctance that Emily retied the ribbons and returned all the files to the box to wait for Joel to examine them. She was becoming absorbed in Hugh Morton’s life story to an extent that surprised her.
Chapter 6
Isabel
McKinnon & Holt, in common with most other businesses, expected its employees to work Saturday mornings. It was lunchtime one Saturday in December and Isabel had been in London for three weeks. Lately, the weather had turned wet, then icy, so it was with care that she alighted from the bus at Earl’s Court and set off towards Aunt Penelope’s house, her bag heavy with the weekend’s reading. Rounding the final bend, she stopped short in surprise and dismay, for in the porch of number 32 Mimosa Road was parked a pushchair, a very familiar-looking one. It was her sister Lydia’s. For a moment she could hardly breathe. Then she turned and started to walk back quickly the way she’d come. And stopped again. There was no shirking it, she’d have to go and face her mother. For three weeks she’d tried not to think of her family. Most of the time this wasn’t difficult; she’d been so busy working, becoming used to a new way of living. But at times something would catch her offguard. Twice her pulse had been sent racing, the first time by the sight of a ginger-haired boy ahead of her in the street, a boy with the same rolling walk as the twins’. The other occasion was when a woman in a headscarf identical to her mother’s and wearing that same unhappy, wound-up expression, had collided with her in the Underground, and had frightened her by gripping her arm for a moment and staring into her eyes. One night she’d dreamed of her father, her father as he’d been when she was very young, before the war, the gentle, friendly man she’d kept in her heart all those years he’d been away. It was a different person who’d returned and her unhappiness about this was still like a great, tight ball, knotting her insides. There had been no one she could speak to about it. Certainly not her mother, whose own misery was communicated only in her expression and by short, angry movements, dinner plates set down too smartly on the table, the desperate way she’d draw on a cigarette. The twins didn’t seem to notice anything. They were bound up in each other, and they’d only been four when their father went away. As for little Lydia, she was the child of the stranger who’d returned. His black moods and his anger were all she’d ever known. Lydia couldn’t lose someone she’d never had. Who was luckier, Isabel with her cherished memories, or Lydia with none?
Slowly, wearily, she walked towards the house. Going up the path, the pushchair blurred through unshed tears. Her aunt opened the front door before she could knock and admitted her without a word. Her grim expression said it all. Isabel followed her into the living room.
‘Izzy.’ Pamela Barber’s voice quavered as she rose from the sofa to greet her elder daughter. In her worn navy skirt and jacket she looked even thinner than Isabel remembered, and her brown eyes were dark with worry in her pinched face.
‘Hello,’ Isabel muttered. She did not go to her, but hovered near the door. Lydia had been playing on the floor, a set of Russian dolls from the mantelp
iece strewn about her. When she saw her big sister she struggled to her feet with a shout of joy and toddled across to her, offering up the silly smiling top half of the largest doll. Her nose needed wiping, Isabel saw, ignoring the gift. Lydia gripped Isabel’s skirt and burying her face in it, began to wail. Isabel stroked the pale, silky hair and tried to soothe her.
‘How very grown up you’ve become,’ her mother said, looking Isabel up and down. ‘And I was searching for that cardigan this morning. It really is a dreadful nuisance, you taking it.’
‘I’m very well, thank you for asking,’ Isabel said. She set about peeling off the cardigan. ‘Here, you can have it back. I don’t need it.’
‘I didn’t mean . . .’ her mother said, stricken, as Isabel thrust the garment, all warm and inside out, like a shriven skin, into her hands.
Isabel was appalled at her own callousness, yet couldn’t stop herself. It was as though she was possessed by some primeval force. Lydia let go of her skirt and Isabel looked down in disgust to see a snail trail from Lydia’s cold glistening on the brown wool.
When her mother pulled a handkerchief from a sleeve and bent to wipe it, Isabel let her, but then stepped back beyond her reach.
Mother and daughter stood, eyes locked, the mother clutching the cardigan, the balled handkerchief in her raised hand. Her expression was desperate. Isabel glowered back.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Penelope pronounced, hand on hip. ‘The pair of you should be ashamed of yourselves.’ She left the room and the door snicked shut.
The rebuke was enough to break the tension. Unable to bear the suffering in her mother’s eyes any more, Isabel burst into tears and threw herself into her arms. They clung together for the first time since Isabel could remember. Her mother’s suit smelled faintly of mothballs. How light and thin she was, the girl thought, how worn away, yet there was still a wiry strength in her.