She got up and tidied Matthew’s computer magazines again and put Scarlatti at the ready on the CD player. Then she sat down, to stare fixedly at the front door, waiting for Matthew and Flora.
Chapter 25
Matthew and Flora came early. The trains had favoured them on the route from Heathrow. They had not planned upon making disclosures to Alice so abruptly, but there it was. They did. Matthew’s ardour for his Parisian enchantress was difficult to conceal and, for Flora, disclosure meant, understandably, the grim satisfaction of fifteen years’ redress. Fifteen years of feeling herself at the receiving end of the Pillings’ generosity; a little matchgirl, tempted by the comfort and luxury of a suburban playroom in the house of a wealthy and ignorant building contractor, and of his wife who couldn’t pronounce bouillabaisse. She burned with love for her own father – handsome, scholarly, punitive and austere – brought low by her gregarious patrons in an orgy of nouvelle cuisine. And guilt, of course, caused Flora to over-react with Alice. Guilt because Alice, all through their childhood, had been so open, so blameless, so affectionate, so endowed with innocent blue eyes. The eyes were staring at her right now. Flora fixed her mind firmly on the McCrail girl, who had come to Alice in the wake of her father’s death, thereby rendering ineffectual all the force of her own gesture towards rejection.
‘Matthew is in love with me,’ Flora said. ‘So we’ll stay here until the funeral if that’s all right, but I would like to make it clear that afterwards he’s coming back with me.’ Alice stood and blinked, her back against the pretty dining table which she had so recently dressed in its plum-coloured cloth. Behind her the tall candles rose, pastel-pink. In one hand she held her glass of white wine and, in the other, an oval plate with vol-au-vents which she had been in the act of offering to Flora.
Matthew looked awkwardly at his feet throughout, but Flora sat beside him, ramrod straight on the two-seater cane sofa which was padded with a buttoned floral print. She looked Alice straight in the eye.
‘I wouldn’t normally indulge myself like this,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m a self-indulgent person. But you and your family – you owe me rather a lot. And all I’m taking in compensation is Matt.’
‘U-owe you alla-alla-alla-.’ Alice stopped and breathed deeply and started again. ‘I don’t unders-stand you,’ she said.
‘You and your family,’ Flora said, forming icicles with her cold venom. ‘When I think about how the three of you took me up in my infancy and bought me and fed me poisoned gifts. Oh, all through my childhood, Alice Pilling! Your family bought me – with coconut ice and visits to the pantomime and a Sindy doll’s house. A witch’s house all made of poisoned candy.’
‘But I th-th,’ Alice said. ‘Flora. I-I – you – I believed that you wanted to come.’
Flora’s lip curled impressively. ‘Oh, I wanted to come all right,’ she said. ‘I wanted to come all right. It was all too much to resist. And then, one fine day, came the biggest poisoned gift of all. Dinner in a restaurant during which you killed my father. To be followed, if you remember, by the offer of chocolate brownies.’
‘But it wasn’t her f-fault,’ Alice said. ‘My m-mother. Sh-she didn’t kn-n-n. Please. Anyway, n-not-not me. F-f-f.’
Flora was provoked to cold clarity by the evidence of Alice’s stammer. ‘Your mother,’ Flora said. ‘And of course your father.’ The sins of the fathers, her demeanous spoke eloquently, were to be visited on the children and the children’s children too. Flora had returned to pronounce the fairy’s curse.
‘Flora,’ Alice said. ‘You shouldn’t-sh-shouldn’t say th-th-. Your mother is dead. We sh-sh. You—’
‘My mother?’ Flora said. ‘My mother? Listen, Alice. I don’t give that for my mother. Or for my grandmother. Not for either of them. Not if they’d been seven years burning themselves to extinction. Your family killed my father. I loved and revered that man.’
‘R-really?’ Alice said ‘D-did you really?’ And it occurred to her with shock that Flora had loved him. Of course! She had loved him intensely. Had become a star of self-denial for him; had learned to swallow gristle for him; to perform in tests for him. Of course! Why had she not realized that before? Mr Fergusson, the twisted swine, had had more than his just share of all-male magnetism. How else could one have accounted for Mrs Fergusson’s obscene compliance? And he had been very handsome, as she remembered, in that grimly ascetic way.
‘I—’ she said and stopped. ‘I’m deeply sorry, Flora.’
‘You left me at the mercy of those abject crones,’ Flora said. ‘And in return I’m taking Matt.’ Alice looked down at the vol-au-vents, because Flora’s gaze was disconcerting her. Then she looked up at Matthew. She thought how becoming he was in his boyish way. She wondered why she didn’t really mind. Flora’s hatred, yes. But not Matt’s defection. Not too terribly. But her parents – they would be saddened by it. Her father had lent Matt fat sums of money and loved him as his very own son. And right then Flora’s righteous vengeance was turning her stomach all to rope.
‘I th-think th-th-th—’ She paused and started again. ‘Would you 1-1-like two tickets for the opera t-tonight?’ she said. ‘They’re to s-see The M-magic Flute.’
Flora laughed unkindly. ‘The last of the poisoned gifts,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Alice. We’ll take them with pleasure.’
III
The High Priest and the Demon Padrone
Chapter 26
When the knocking came, it was suitably loud and resonant. Alice got up from the supper table and went to answer the door. It was not the Commendatore. It was Giovanni B. Angeletti. He was wearing a black felt hat and a voluminous black gabardine coat which fell unbuttoned from his shoulders. Under it he wore evening dress.
‘Mizz Pilling?’ he said. ‘Joe Angeletti.’ He removed the hat to reveal lank, receding black hair. The handshake was brief and purposeful, with the touch of a steel clamp. It was apparent to Alice that his whole being was bristling with barely contained animosity. ‘I got a little message to call you,’ he said. ‘But there’s something the matter with your phone.’ Alice blanched and raised a hand to her mouth. She remembered, with deep embarrassment, that the telephone receiver was still dangling from its flex.
‘Oh, but I’m terribly sorry,’ she said. ‘Please. You haven’t come all the way from New York?’ Angeletti waved the question aside with ill-disguised impatience. He was tall and powerfully built and she saw now, by the light of the hall, that his eyes, which were hooded and predatory, came an unlovely greenish mud-brown. There was also something in the cast of his jaw which induced irrational aversion in her; something reminiscent of the public executioner in a children’s television cartoon which she had always watched with Flora.
‘I got into London this morning,’ he said. Then he added, as if for children and idiots, ‘I have my messages conveyed to my hotel.’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Yes of course.’
In the living room, where the table had been decked in its pink and white best, she introduced him to Matthew and Flora.
‘Mr Angeletti,’ she said, ‘is a publisher from New York.’ She turned with hospitable effort to the public executioner. ‘Will you join us for supper?’ she said. ‘Excuse me. It is rather early, but M-matthew and Flora have tickets for the opera.’
Angeletti cast an eye over the table. ‘No thank you,’ he said. ‘The time is short, Mizz Pilling and, frankly, pigeons remind me of bird shit.’ Matthew, being still uneasy in the wake of Flora’s righteous wrath, laughed rather too loudly in response, Alice thought. He observed, in broader Northumbrian than usual, that the association would have come from ‘growing up in New York’.
‘I was raised in San Francisco,’ Angeletti said. Then he returned his attention to Alice. ‘Mizz Pilling, you called up my office with an allegation the Duchess is plagiarized.’
‘Oh it’s plagiarized all right,’ Alice said.
‘Now that’s a pretty radical allegation,’ Angeletti said. ‘M
ay I suggest that we waste no more time in social pleasantries. You have a manuscript?’
‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve got a manuscript.’
‘Good,’ said Angeletti. ‘You show me your manuscript and I guess we can resolve the matter at once.’
Alice turned to Flora for support. ‘You’ll confirm this for me, Flora,’ she said. ‘That story of Jem’s. You’ll remember it. It was called My Last Duchess.’
‘Isn’t that Robert Browning?’ Flora said unhelpfully.
‘Oh please!’ Alice said. ‘Of course it’s Robert Browning. Jem was reading it on the playing f-field that f-first day you came back.’ Flora smoothed her sleeve.
‘Do me a favour and count me out,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but it all begins to sound predictably baroque. Actually I remember very little to do with Jem – other than that she always told lies.’
‘Flora,’ Alice said. ‘Jem’s story has been stolen. She-she needs us. She needs both of us.’
‘I owe Jem nothing,’ Flora said. ‘But perhaps you do.’ Alice winced. While she grappled to take on board her own failings towards her dearest friend, it seemed to her that Flora owed Jem a lot. Flora had robbed Jem of her scholarship. And now she was going to sit back and watch Angeletti steal Jem’s novel. Flora continued to stroke her sleeve with infuriating serenity. She was sitting, composed and upright, Alice thought, like a teacher’s pet in a deportment class. ‘She’ll have had you on about the novel,’ Flora said. ‘Frankly, Jem’s mendacity stood out a mile – that’s for anyone less gullible than you.’
Gullibility, Alice thought ruefully, is the sin of stupidity. Jem had told her that. She was acutely aware that Flora was not only reducing her credibility by the second, but was doing so with malicious intent. It distressed her that Flora could wish to do this to her.
‘Mizz Pilling,’ Angeletti said. ‘The manuscript.’
‘The manuscript,’ Alice said, summoning courage, ‘is in a cardboard box in Oxford.’ As he clenched his teeth and swallowed, she saw the Adam’s apple in Angeletti’s throat rise and fall, prominent, like a frog in the belly of a snake. Then he looked at his watch.
‘Grab your wrap,’ he said. ‘I have a cab waiting outside.’
‘A cab?’ Alice said. ‘But you can’t take a cab to Oxford. That’s just silly.’
Angeletti turned his hooded eyes on her as evenly as he could. ‘I have twenty thousand copies of that little book waiting for distribution in a warehouse,’ he said. ‘That’s excluding book club deals, etcetera. Have you any idea what I stand to lose in the event that you should turn out to be right?’
‘No,’ Alice said, ‘I haven’t.’
‘You would oblige me, Mizz Pilling,’ he said, ‘if you would desist from practising thrift on my behalf and jump into that cab. Just you leave me to pick up the tab.’
Alice got her jacket. As she left she turned momentarily to Matthew and Flora who had already usurped her space. Flora, unlike Matthew, was doing so with the air of being the Lord’s anointed.
‘Matt,’ she said, ‘the tickets are by the phone.’
‘Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind—’ Matthew said.
‘Thank you, Alice,’ Flora said. ‘You’re very kind.’
The taxi driver was reading a paperback with two large rats on the cover. The rats’ eyes had been pricked out in gold bas-relief. He stowed the book resignedly in the glove compartment when Angeletti and Alice got in.
‘Where to, squire?’ he said.
‘Oxford,’ Angeletti said.
There was a cellular telephone on the seat beside them in the back which Angeletti, she deduced, had brought with him. For over an hour in the cab, he said almost nothing to her at all. He evidently felt no compulsion towards the softening effect of small talk. He made a few unintelligible but litigious-sounding telephone calls from the cellular telephone. That was all. Intermittently, he chewed on ingots of Juicy Fruit or he smoked disgusting cigars.
One of the telephone calls made reference to the New York City Police Department and one of them was to a hospital. Another was to a person called something like ‘Aaron Schmutz-burger’. All the calls had to do with ‘Mary-Lou’ and somebody called ‘MacMahon’. Except for one. This arranged for the last-minute sale of a ticket to the English National Opera. Alice did not seriously begin to follow any of the calls. She had had the most terrible day. She was thinking about Matthew and Flora, and about the coroner’s court and the heavy breather. And about Jem’s unbearable dying and the convent exercise books containing My Last Duchess. With regard to these last she searched her memory repeatedly and fervently.
Iona had definitely returned them all to her and Alice had put them back in the alcove cupboard beside the attic fireplace. She hoped to God that they were still there. All that furious typing – that would have been Iona transcribing the thing. She would surely not have entered in and stolen the books back again after Alice had left for North Yorkshire? By the sounds of it she had been far too busy moving into Paul Koplinski’s bed. And then in shipping herself off to America. On balance, the likelihood was that the books would still be there. Iona was far too sloppy to cover her tracks really well. And, in any case, she would have executed the plagiarism not with any serious intent to defraud; merely as a way of being outrageous; to jump the gun and needle her mother and cock two fingers at Alice. Otherwise, why hadn’t she tried to write her own story? Had she stolen it rather as Jem had stolen the bracelet and the five-pound note? If Angeletti had been an easier sort of person, one more ready to see merit in ‘social pleasantries’, it might have been possible to convey these things, but he was not. He appeared resolutely indisposed towards any interaction with her. Besides, he was preoccupied with a cordless telephone and his cigars were making her feel sick.
None the less, in the gaps between the phone calls, Alice struggled to talk at Angeletti as coherently as she could. She wished to set the scene with regard to herself and Jem and Flora and Iona and Maya and Maya’s novel in the coalhole and the convent exercise books and the typewriter bought with the stolen cashcard.
When they got to David Morgan’s house, Angeletti told the driver to wait. Since the house was deserted, Alice deduced that the family was still on holiday. She led Angeletti down the obstructed side passage where, as luck would have it, he became immediately entangled in the Morgans’ roll of rusted chicken wire.
‘What the hell!’ he said edgily. Alice, after a protracted effort, succeeded in liberating him, though not before a small right-angular rent had appeared in the back of the gabardine coat. Then, having broken in through the lavatory window and let Angeletti into the kitchen, she excused herself and made her way up the three flights of stairs.
It stirred her with a strange and powerful emotion to be back in her old room. It induced a flow of gratitude that Maya and David had left it all so faithfully untouched – as if the room were waiting for her to re-enter and take up the threads of her life. Her A4 pad, with the half-completed essay, lay open on the desk and her Greek – English dictionary, also open, lay face down on the pad.
But the convent exercise books were not there. Nor were they in what had been Iona’s room, nor in David and Maya’s bedroom. They were not to be found in the coalhole, though Alice braved the blown-up photograph of Maya giving birth. She looked through every drawer and shelf. The exercise books were nowhere. Alice accepted this disheartening reality only after sifting determinedly through the Morgans’ semi-permanent piles of litter on the stairtreads and all the mantelshelves.
Back in the kitchen, Angeletti was smoking a cigar. He was once again talking on his telephone. She waited politely for him to stop.
‘It’s not there,’ Alice said. ‘The books aren’t there. I think we ought to look next door.’ Angeletti glanced pointedly at his watch, but he got up all the same, and followed her out through the door and down the side passage of Koplinski’s similarly unoccupied house. Alice sensed that he was doing so wi
th the air of one unreasonably indulging a deluded nonentity at a time highly inconvenient to himself.
‘We’ll have to pick the window,’ she said, and she climbed precariously on to the stone sill of Koplinski’s mezzanine floor.
‘Mizz Pilling?’ Angeletti said unhelpfully. ‘May I ask, do you know what you are doing? I have no wish to be apprehended in conspiracy with an infamous cat burglar.’
‘If you have a p-plastic credit card,’ Alice said, between her teeth, ‘I wish that you would p-pass it over.’ Angeletti produced from a breast pocket an extensive ribbon of credit cards from which Alice pointedly chose the gold American Express.
The daylight had begun to recede by the time they had broken and entered, and Paul Koplinski’s builders appeared to have repositioned all the staircase light switches. As a result Angeletti discovered almost too late that he was walking from the first-floor landing into a void created by one of Koplinski’s more devastating structural modifications. Alice pulled him back in the nick of time.
‘Look out,’ she said and she found the switch, though it was hanging backless from the wall, pending fixture. ‘He’s made a double volume sitting room down there.’
‘Pardon me?’ Angeletti said.
‘He’s taken out the ceiling,’ Alice said. Angeletti sat down on the staircase.
‘You go right ahead, Mizz Pilling,’ he said. ‘You do what you must. Bear in mind I give you thirty minutes. I have important personal business to attend to in the morning and your cab drivers don’t come cheap.’
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