by Brett, Simon
‘Well,’ said Carole firmly. ‘It is going to be me who talks to Professor Teischbaum, so what do you want me to say to her?’
Whether Graham might have argued his point further was impossible to know, because they were interrupted by the arrival of his aunt with the coffee. And not just coffee, either. As well as the silver pot and bone china cups on the tray – with a tray-cloth! – there was an untouched circular sponge cake whose midriff revealed a jam and cream filling. Side-plates and silver cake forks completed the layout.
In the speed with which this apparition distracted Graham Chadleigh-Bewes from their conversation lay the explanation for his spreading girth. His Aunt Belinda not only pampered his ego and kept house for him; she also saw it as her duty to fatten him up. And the gleam in Graham’s eye showed that he loved being fattened up. The arrival of the sponge cake crystallized a vague feeling that Carole had formed about the man – that he was asexual, driven by pique rather than passion, that even his enthusiasm for the works of Esmond Chadleigh was in some way automatic. But there was nothing half-hearted or unspontaneous about his love of food.
Carole refused the offer of a slice. She had only had breakfast a couple of hours before and, anyway, didn’t ever eat between meals. Having resisted the biscuit-nibbling culture of the Civil Service all her working life, she wasn’t going to relax her standards in retirement.
Her host had no such scruples. His ageing face looked ever more babyish as he watched his Aunt Belinda make one incision in the powdered surface of the sponge and remove the knife. Then she went through a little pantomime of moving the knife round the arc to find exactly the size of slice he favoured. An angle of twenty-five degrees was condemned as ‘Too mean’, and her overreaction of moving the knife round to forty-five degrees prompted a squeal of ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Auntie – I’ll explode!’ But the slice he ended up with was still a pretty substantial one.
Carole found the display a little unwholesome, because it was clearly such a well-established routine. The two of them did this every day – possibly at every meal – the elderly woman playing mothering games with the middle-aged man-child. Carole found herself wondering what had happened to Graham’s real mother, and how long Belinda had been looking after her nephew.
As soon as he’d got his slice of cake, Graham Chadleigh-Bewes said, with some brusqueness, ‘Now you must go, Auntie. Carole and I have got important things to discuss.’
The old lady, unoffended, reached for the tray. ‘Shall I take this with me?’
‘No,’ her nephew replied hastily. ‘I . . . or my guest . . . might want some more . . . coffee.’
The coy exchange of looks between them made Carole realize that this was an extension of their game. Aunt Belinda threatened to take Graham’s cake away every morning. Every morning he stopped her – and no doubt later helped himself to a second slice. Carole felt increasingly uncomfortable as, with a little chortle, Belinda Chadleigh left the room.
‘Now where were we?’ asked Graham, as though he were a serious executive in a serious business meeting.
‘We had just agreed,’ replied Carole, removing the possibility of further argument, ‘that since I’m going to see Professor Teischbaum, you were going to give me some stuff for her.’
He looked puzzled. His recollection had not got their conversation to quite the same point. But Carole didn’t give him time to respond – and his mouth was too full of sponge cake to make a very effective remonstrance, anyway.
‘That’s what you mentioned on the phone, Graham. That’s why I’m here. You said you wanted to give me some papers for Professor Teischbaum.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘In fact, to use your precise words, you said you wanted to “fob her off with some unimportant stuff”.’
Graham Chadleigh-Bewes chuckled at his own cunning. ‘Exactly. I’ve got it all ready here.’ Clearly he’d given up on Plan A, persuading Carole to cede her meeting with Marla Teischbaum to Sheila Cartwright, and he was moving on to Plan B.
Given the chaos on his desk, it was surprising how quickly he found the documents he was looking for. And how neatly they were ordered in a cardboard file.
He flicked through the contents. Carole could see holograph and typewritten letters. ‘These are only copies,’ he said. ‘Obviously we wouldn’t let her have the originals. Original Esmond Chadleigh material is like gold-dust. My mother and Aunt Belinda wouldn’t let a single scrap of paper be destroyed when he died.’
‘Not even stuff that wasn’t to his credit?’
Graham Chadleigh-Bewes looked at her sharply, piqued like the baby whose rattle has been taken away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. There were no secrets in Esmond Chadleigh’s life.’
Oh no, thought Carole. Then that makes him unique in the history of the human race. But she didn’t pursue the point. ‘So all this material I’m passing on to Professor Teischbaum is completely useless, is it?’
‘By no means. And they’re documents I know she won’t have seen, because they’re from our archive here at Bracketts.’
‘Very generous of you all of a sudden,’ she observed.
Once again he glowed at his own cleverness. ‘Oh yes,’ he agreed, ‘very generous.’ He tapped the file. ‘Useful stuff. No biographer could write anything about Esmond without access to this.’
‘But equally, I assume, all pretty uncontroversial.’
‘Hm?’
‘Material that reinforces the accepted image of Esmond Chadleigh, just a further illustration of information that could be obtained from other sources.’
Graham nodded complacently. ‘That is exactly right. Sheila and I worked out a strategy on this, you see. If we give the Teischbaum woman – I might almost call her “The Teischbaum Claimant” . . .’ He chuckled at his own verbal dexterity. The play on words about a famous Victorian fraudster, ‘the Tichborne Claimant’, was exactly the sort of joke to tickle Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ fancy – obscure, academic, and completely pointless.
‘If we give her this lot, there’s no way she can accuse the Esmond Chadleigh estate of being uncooperative. And when we refuse to give her anything else, we won’t appear to be unreasonable.’
Carole took the file. ‘From the way she sounded on the phone, I don’t think she’ll be satisfied with this.’
‘That is her problem, not ours. That is all the documentation that will be granted to . . . The Teischbaum Claimant.’ He was rather pleased with the nickname that he had coined, and would undoubtedly be using it on many other occasions.
‘And what about the family?’ asked Carole.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I would think it quite likely that Professor Teischbaum would ask to talk to you . . . to your Aunt Belinda, I imagine . . . and I don’t know whether there are other living descendants of Esmond Chadleigh . . .’
‘There are a few, yes.’
‘Well, what will you say when the request comes in?’
‘I’ll tell the bloody woman to get lost and . . .’ But his instinctive anger dried up. A little smile irradiated his baby features. ‘No, maybe there too I’ll follow Sheila’s route of conciliation.’
‘So fobbing Marla Teischbaum off with the stuff in this file was Sheila’s idea, was it?’
‘Oh yes.’ Graham spoke as if the question had not been worth asking. He was more excited by the new thought Carole had planted in his mind, and he spoke slowly as he worked it out. ‘Yes . . . I will agree to meet The Teischbaum Claimant . . . and I will be terribly nice to her . . . and I will endeavour to answer all of her questions . . . in my inimitably helpful and charming manner . . .’ He grinned with childish glee. ‘And I will tell her absolutely nothing at all.’
‘Well, good luck,’ said Carole. ‘I hope she plays ball.’
‘It is not a matter of her “playing ball”,’ snapped Graham Chadleigh-Bewes, suddenly angry. Perhaps, after all, there was something other than food that could rouse his passion. ‘It is a matt
er of the truth. And of the truth being told to the public. Esmond Chadleigh was a wonderful man, a good Catholic, and a writer of extraordinary genius! It is important that the public knows that about him.’
‘And that is what they will know when they read your biography?’
‘Yes. And what they won’t know if the muck-rakers are allowed to defile his memory!’
‘Your use of the word, Graham . . . suggests that there might be muck to rake . . .’
‘No! There is none!’ With an effort, he calmed himself down. There was a silence, filled only by the persistent rain outside. ‘God, it’s a comment on the modern world, isn’t it, that everyone is assumed to have a “dark side”. Literary biography these days doesn’t look at a man’s writings; it starts its researches in the divorce courts and the VD clinics. Unless there’s some sleazy scandal, nobody’s interested. Why can’t people still believe in the concept of goodness? Esmond had no “dark side”. He was a genuinely Good Man. And that’s how he’ll be remembered . . . in spite of the worst excesses of The Teischbaum Claimant.’
His tirade seemed both to have satisfied and exhausted him. The eyes in his chubby face gleamed as they moved towards the tray.
‘Now, are you going to have another slice of cake . . .’ he asked as his hand moved forward to the knife, ‘or is it just me?’
Chapter Eleven
They heard the rattle of the front door opening, a loud female voice saying, ‘It’s all right, Belinda, I’ll see myself in’, and Sheila Cartwright’s height suddenly filled the room. She too was wearing one of the long Bracketts Volunteer waterproofs, and she shook the rain off as she lowered its hood.
Graham Chadleigh-Bewes was instantly on his feet. Though he’d shown no such deference to Carole, there were clearly some guests for whom he had respect – or possible fear.
‘I’m glad you’re still here, Carole,’ said Sheila without preamble of greeting. ‘I wanted to make sure you’d got the message right about what I want you to do, and I know Graham’s hopeless at that kind of thing.’
The grandson shrugged ineffectually. ‘Sheila, would you care for a bit of cake or—?’
‘No, thank you. Unlike you, I don’t spend my entire day stuffing my face. Carole, has he made it clear to you what you have to do?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ She indicated the file on her lap. ‘I have my olive branch at the ready.’
‘Mm. My first thought was that I should do it, but it makes sense to use someone more ignorant.’ Unaware that she’d said anything mildly offensive, Sheila Cartwright swept on. ‘The important thing is that you are very pleasant to this dreadful woman.’ She infused the words with the same level of contempt that Graham had. ‘You say the Trustees are happy to co-operate with her in her researches, but you also make it clear that those documents are the beginning and end of that co-operation.’
‘I somehow doubt if she’s going to take that very well.’
‘I don’t care how she takes it! That is all she’s getting. Which is why it’s a good idea for you to act as my ambassador.’ (Interesting choice of possessive pronoun, thought Carole. Not even the pretence that she was being sent as the representative of the Trustees. It said a lot about how Sheila Cartwright viewed her own relationship with Bracketts.) ‘Because I know so much about Esmond Chadleigh, the Teischbaum woman might try to winkle more out of me.’
‘It’d be the same if I talked to her,’ asserted Graham Chadleigh-Bewes, who thought he’d been out of the conversation too long.
Sheila Cartwright turned a withering look on him. ‘There was never any question of you meeting Professor Teischbaum. You’d have messed it up, like you mess up everything.’
Carole saw a momentary blaze of anger in his eye, but it was quickly extinguished. Graham Chadleigh-Bewes was used to being diminished by Sheila Cartwright; what angered him was the knowledge that her assessment of him was accurate.
She hadn’t finished, either. ‘If you’d done what you’d promised, and delivered your biography of Esmond last year, we wouldn’t have any of these problems.’
He looked sulky. ‘I thought we’d agreed that it’d be better for the book to come out for the centenary of his birth in 2004.’
‘We only agreed that when we saw there wasn’t a chance in hell of it coming out any earlier.’
Wounded, Graham shrank back into his chair. ‘It’s a massive undertaking. You wouldn’t understand, Sheila, because you’ve never been a writer. New material keeps being discovered.’
But his whingeing defence prompted no more response than a dismissive ‘Huh’. Sheila turned her attention to Carole. ‘When are you going to meet the woman?’
‘Actually,’ Graham interrupted, ‘I’ve got a rather good name for her . . .’
‘What?’ asked Sheila testily. ‘Good name for who?’
‘La Teischbaum. I call her “The Teischbaum Claimant”.’
His esoteric pun didn’t even get an acknowledgement. ‘So when are you going to see her, Carole?’
‘We haven’t fixed a time. She was going to ring me back today.’
‘Make it as soon as possible. We need that woman safely back in America. We’ve got quite enough on our plates here without distractions of that kind.’
‘Are you referring to the body in the kitchen garden?’
Carole was favoured by the kind of look she might have given her dog Gulliver if he’d made a mess on the carpet. ‘That is one of the issues concerning us here at Bracketts,’ said Sheila Cartwright loftily. ‘And, incidentally, whatever you do, don’t mention anything about that to Professor Teischbaum.’
‘Of course I won’t.’ Carole was getting sick of being treated like an unreliable schoolgirl. ‘So it hasn’t become public yet?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The police haven’t made an announcement to the press yet?’
‘No. Mercifully, the whole business is still under wraps.’
‘It can’t stay that way for ever.’
‘I am well aware of that, thank you.’
Carole was enjoying being more combative, and she could see that Sheila Cartwright disliked the taste of her own medicine. ‘Have the police arrested the Austen prisoner who made the confession?’
The shock on Graham Chadleigh-Bewes’ face showed that he knew nothing of this, but Sheila Cartwright’s reaction was even more extreme. ‘How on earth did you hear about that?’ she hissed.
Carole thought it was time to show that she could do ‘lofty’ too. ‘From a contact in the prison service.’
‘Well, you keep it to yourself. Don’t breathe a word about it to another soul.’
‘Of course I won’t. I do understand the responsibility of being a Trustee. I won’t mention it to anyone.’ Except Jude, of course. ‘Anyway, what’s happened? Have they arrested him?’
‘The police are continuing their enquiries.’ Sheila Cartwright sounded like an official spokesman at a press conference. ‘The remains found in the kitchen garden are currently undergoing forensic analysis.’
‘Oh? Well, do let me know when you hear anything, won’t you?’
This question was not even thought worthy of an answer.
‘I must go,’ Sheila announced abruptly. ‘There’s always so much to do round this place.’
Even when you no longer have any official function here, thought Carole.
Graham Chadleigh-Bewes quailed when the beam of Sheila Cartwright’s eye was turned on him. ‘Forget you ever heard anything about the confession – right?’
‘Right,’ he echoed feebly.
‘I know what a blabbermouth you are. For once, just keep that mouth of yours zipped, Graham. Not a word to a soul. Not even to Belinda – all right?’
His reaction to her last words suggested she had anticipated an intention to spill the beans to his aunt at the first opportunity. ‘No. No, of course not, Sheila.’
Then, straightening up her tall frame, raising the hood of her waterproof against the weather, a
nd with the most perfunctory of goodbyes, Sheila Cartwright left the cottage. Carole had seen plenty of the energy that had created the Esmond Chadleigh shrine. But she had yet to see evidence of the charm, which must also have been there, to enlist the army of Volunteers and wheedle large sums of money out of people to set up the project.
Still, at the end of the encounter, Carole felt pleased with the advance that she’d made in her relationship with Sheila Cartwright. There had been no rapprochement between them – and Carole thought such an event remained extremely unlikely ever to happen – but she had found a level at which to deal with the other woman. By exactly matching the abruptness and aggression, Carole could neutralize her power.
At the sounds of departure, Belinda Chadleigh appeared in the doorway (prompting speculation about how much else she had heard of the conversation). As Sheila bustled past her, the old woman caught her nephew’s eye. They watched the former Director leave the house, and Carole was surprised to see on both their faces an expression of pure loathing.
Chapter Twelve
The first thing that hit Jude when Sandy Fairbarns ushered her into the hall was the noise. Then the smoke. Children screamed and shrieked above the low rumble of conversation. There was a crèche area cordoned off in the corner, manned by a couple of inmate orderlies with red armbands, but few of the children were in there playing with the plastic toys. The very tiny ones sat on their mothers’ knees, but all the rest seemed to be rushing round the room making as much noise as they possibly could, while their parents tried to make meaningful contact between their fragmented lives.
The prisoners and their visitors sat in low easy chairs around low tables (low so that nothing could be passed unseen beneath them). Everyone seemed to have a cigarette in his or her mouth – in the case of the prisoners usually a roll-up. Individual plumes of smoke rose up to join the fug which blurred the metal girders of the pitched roof above. The smell of smoke was more powerful than that of male sweat. Jude knew she’d have to change all her clothes when she got home, hang them out in the garden for a long time, and have a bath to get rid of the tang of tobacco.