Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  Of course, she did not always head for home. It was the postcards allied to certain other significant portents that indicated an early return.

  Usually, until he became too ill, there was contact from Claude, as if he could sense her getting close. It might be a phone call that didn’t appear to be about Rachel at all: “Luke?” He was the only person who could turn “Luke” into a two-syllable word. “That restaurant we all went to last summer, the Thai one where they did that noodle thing, you can’t remember the name, can you? I’m looking for somewhere to take Justin tomorrow. It’s his birthday.”

  He always got round to Rachel eventually. He was lost without her. She had begun to cut him off, as she had all of us. “Have you heard from Madam?”

  “I had a postcard.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “I’m not sure, Claude.”

  “Will you tell her to call me?”

  He was sometimes “just in the area.” He was sometimes “passing through on the off-chance.” The last time I saw him was in the coffee bar at the supermarket in Linton. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and sharing a doughnut with a boy who was young even by Claude’s standards. He looked terrible. He had always been thin, but not like he was now.

  As I walked towards him, he rose from the orange plastic chair with a papal gesture of the arms. “This is a surprise,” he said.

  “Why? I live here.”

  “Yes, but I’m just passing through. Isn’t this extraordinary?” He turned to his friend. “This is who I was talking about,” he said, in a what-a-coincidence voice. “Rachel’s little brother. Luke. You know.” They exchanged a glance that had a certain conspiratorial content. He turned back to me. “We’re on an architectural tour.” The idea that the medieval churches of Dorset were on, or even part of, his silent friend’s agenda required a certain suspension of disbelief. “Is your …” he mouthed “mother” “… in residence? The thing is, I’m still trying to find all that crusader stuff she asked me to look up so I’m far too embarrassed to speak to her.” And then, in a down-to-business voice, “Now. Have you heard from Rachel?”

  The other thing that tended to happen was an influx of packages delivered for Rachel. They tended to arrive within a few days of each other, so presumably they had been ordered in one go with some cumulative purpose that was hard to fathom from their diverse contents.

  A catalogue from a plus-size women’s wear wholesaler was curious enough for someone who had flirted with anorexia while other girls were going through their pony phase, but when it arrived in the same post as the brochure from a company that manufactured prosthetic limbs, even Martha raised an eyebrow. There was the Hot-As-Hell Creole Spice catalogue, the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Copenhagen’s Christmas gift catalogue, the Philadelphia cream cheese cookbook, a bibliography of large-print books and their publishers, issued by some society for the blind with a special supplement of books-on-tape.

  I suspect, although I don’t know for certain, that on what was to be her last day in wherever she was, when whoever she was with had dumped her or when her credit card had been snipped in half or swallowed whole by the machine because she hadn’t bothered to pay the bills, she was filled with a sense of purpose and would begin telephoning. “I wonder if you can help me,” she would say, when she got through, or “Would it be possible for me to speak to the person who deals with …” She would certainly want to explain to someone the precise reason for her request, to get them to understand her rather unusual need for the heavy-duty fish kettle as soon as possible or why she had to see the handbook of registered children’s entertainers so urgently.

  Then, because children had suddenly come into her mind, she might get on to the firm that made children’s clothes from natural undyed fabrics, and a whole host of possibilities would spin in front of her like a roulette wheel. Leaving might not be such a bad thing. In fact, there was now an actual reason to leave. She could set up an office or a secondhand-clothes shop or a consultancy business and … And what? Something good would come of all this, even though Julian or Pascal or Pietro had been such a shit. Yes, she would go home.

  A taxi would come up the drive a day later, or a week later. Rachel would be pale and tired, but buzzy with enthusiasm for her new scheme. Martha tended to keep out of her way as much as possible, and for the first few days Rachel would spend a lot of time on the telephone, dropping her voice if anyone came into the room. She would only talk about her project in the most general terms. She had spotted “a niche in the market,” or she had realized that “There’s one service you can’t get for love or money outside London.” The idea had come to her “on a bateau-mouche going under the Pont Neuf,” or “when I found this extraordinary shop literally in the middle of nowhere.” But what the idea was, precisely, was not to be divulged until she had done more research.

  But then things began to change: she spent less time on the phone; her morning appearances became later and later until sometimes she didn’t appear at all; she didn’t want any lunch, she was going to have a sandwich on the run; Claude was arriving any minute and there was so much to do before he came. And then, most telling of all, she began to spend all day in Arthur’s study, with only an espresso machine, which had arrived by special delivery from Rome, for company.

  Like a child trying to run away from home, she had reached the garden gate and then, too frightened to go on, had returned to what she was trying to leave: all her schemes, which had once seemed so fertile and full of promise, finally evolved, by some strange Darwinian process only understandable to her, into Hayseed projects. What had begun during one particular stay as a business plan for opening a chain of sandwich shops, to be financed by someone she had met on Long Island, morphed into a catalogue of plant references in the Hayseed books, which she was going to sell in garden centers—only half finished, anyway, by the time Claude appeared in his new reconditioned MG Sprite to whisk her off to the villas of the Veneto or a boat on the Marne. I would run into people in London who knew her, and I would politely answer their questions about the annotated manuscripts Rachel was preparing for the University of Texas, or the limited edition of Lila’s unused drawings she was working on, or the Hayseed board game she was devising “with the people who invented Trivial Pursuit.”

  All the while she traveled, and even after she came home for the last time and the traveling stopped, there was one thing she never lost, one thing she always managed to keep with her when she was mugged in Cyprus or held up at gunpoint in Costa Rica or her luggage was lost by the airline or stolen from her hotel room: a stone, worn round her neck on a silver chain, with a chakra mandala symbol painted on it in red, the symbol that indicates grounding, balance of physical body, and clearing of fear.

  Mr. Toppit has come and gone. These were the enigmatic words that were found scrawled on the wall in Rachel’s room after she had gone. Some of the newspaper stories talked about her “escape,” but I remembered Dr. Honey’s sanctimonious statement that Broadmeadow Clinic was not a prison and I preferred to believe that she had simply checked out.

  In the days that followed, I found a strange fascination in seeing our lives spread across the papers. Unlike Laurie, we didn’t have fleets of lawyers and press people to hush up the story. Anyway, as Dr. Honey had said to me, they weren’t strangers to the children of well-known figures at Broadmeadow and so many members of staff were probably getting backhanders from newspapers and clicking away with secret cameras that even Laurie’s crack team would have had difficulty in plugging the holes.

  Without the graffito the story might have faded away quite quickly but it brought another element into play: the mysterious words were just enough to shift the narrative up a gear and give the papers the opportunity to rehash the old stories about the phenomenon of the books but with a quirky twist of mystery. “Hayseed Girl’s Cryptic Message—Clue To Disappearance?” The question mark in the Daily Mail story was appropriate because nobody had any real idea whether Rac
hel’s words meant anything or were just one of the many unanswerable—or, at any rate, unanswered—enigmas that were such a major factor in the success of the Hayseed saga.

  The other element of the story that intrigued people was that Rachel was not on her own, which added a kind of Bonnie and Clyde spin to it: she had decamped with Matthew Sumner, the strange boy I had met at Broadmeadow, the one who had told me he knew who Mr. Toppit was. He should have talked to Merry: they could have compared notes. My guess is that it was him who had scrawled the graffito. For one thing, it didn’t look like Rachel’s handwriting, though I admit it’s hard to recognize anyone’s handwriting when the writing implement is a paintbrush. It was too crude a gesture for Rachel, cheap and on-the-nose, too obvious, really.

  The stories—for once—were less about me than about Martha and Rachel. Of course, I was described, as usual, as “eponymous” in some of the more upmarket papers, not strictly accurate because my name is Luke Hayman, not Luke Hayseed, and, also as usual, many of the pieces printed a childhood photograph of me alongside one of Lila’s drawings of Luke. But luckily I led a life “away from the limelight,” as one newspaper put it, so apart from retelling the story of my “arrest” the night before I had left for Los Angeles five years before, there wasn’t much to add about me.

  There had been articles about us in the past, but now the tone of the pieces was quite different. The Hayseed story had been shoehorned into that particular arena where journalists drop lottery winners whose lives are destroyed by money, and movie stars who crash and burn: we were a living illustration of the Price of Success. The problem was that Rachel had not ignored whatever limelight the Hayseed phenomenon had shone on our lives. She would always speak to journalists, much to Martha’s fury, so there were many old quotes by her that now found their way into the newspaper pieces, and many references were made to a particularly shambolic interview she had done. Even at the time it had caused comment, although the most pejorative adjective used had been “rambling.” Now, “sources close to the family” were quoted as “alleging” she had been “drunk” or “under the influence of drugs.”

  In the piece entitled “Troubled Legacy of a Publishing Phenomenon,” Rachel and I were described as “heirs to a pot of literary gold.” From time to time, Martha had been labeled “eccentric,” but now the tone of the pieces was less kind: she had become “reclusive and bitter” and, in one article, “viciously protective of her late husband’s heritage.” She was “estranged from her children” and “at loggerheads with the publishers.” While the first statement could be construed as relatively accurate, in Rachel’s case at least, the second was not: the court case with the Carter Press had been resolved some years before and her relationship with Graham was reasonably calm.

  As the days wore on, what had seemed like a minor blip in Rachel’s chaotic life acquired a more worrying dimension. There had been many times when we didn’t know precisely where she was, but somebody would hear from her: me, or Claude when he was alive, sometimes Martha. Even Lila got the odd postcard. This time there were enough unusual elements to make it different. The graffito, for one thing—even if she hadn’t done it herself, she must have been party to it. Then there was Matthew Sumner: not her style, I would have thought, from my one meeting with him—too young, too needy, too insubstantial. As it turned out, I was wrong. Then there was the most worrying thing of all, which only I knew about: how she had been the last time I saw her, when I had visited her at Broadmeadow. It was like LA all over again: although she was missing, she wasn’t a missing person—she was an adult and had presumably left Broadmeadow of her own volition—and while the police were helpful, they were clearly not going to instigate a full-scale manhunt for an over-privileged girl with a history of unreliability and drug issues.

  There wasn’t enough oxygen to keep the story burning for long, but just when it seemed exhausted, Matthew Sumner turned up. “Hayseed Boy Found” was the irritatingly imprecise way it was described. I didn’t often feel proprietorial but I did have a moment of outrage that he had stolen my crown. He was spotted early in the morning by someone he had been at school with just a few miles from his home in Weybridge. Rather pathetically, he was buying a Crunchie for breakfast.

  He was “unharmed,” as the papers had it, though I couldn’t imagine what harm was meant to come to him: he and Rachel appeared to have traveled rather slowly from one end of Surrey to the other, not crossed the Gobi Desert. They had been staying in a bed-and-breakfast—another troublingly uncharacteristic element for Rachel—outside Weybridge, but by the time the police got there she was gone. Some days later Matthew was shipped back to Broadmeadow to continue his treatment for what the papers called “a nervous disorder.”

  Then there was an interview entitled “Every Parent’s Nightmare.” The piece had one of those cute photographs of Matthew aged about twelve, smiling and gap-toothed in his school uniform, so perfect in its depiction of innocence that it can only tempt fate and end up one day in a newspaper as an icon of what the subject was like in the good years, the years before God had told him to stab his classmates during school assembly or whip out a Kalashnikov in a Burger King or end up, in Matthew’s case, incarcerated in Broadmeadow with borderline schizophrenia caused, in his parents’ view, by smoking marijuana.

  Matthew had been a perfect child—weren’t they always?—a keen footballer and a grade-six flautist, popular at school, plucky but caring, top of the class. It was a “loving family,” churchgoing, of course, in which an unspecified but definite set of values had been instilled in Matthew and his younger sister. So far, so numbingly predictable: such an obvious setup for the fall that, inevitably, would come.

  And so it did : bad influences, peer-group drug-taking, trouble with the police, behavior and control issues, eating disorder, self-harming, unhealthy obsessions, particularly with Mr. Toppit. It was “a regrettable coincidence” with “unfortunate consequences” that Rachel had been at Broadmeadow at the same time as Matthew: she “fed” those obsessions; he had become “withdrawn.” It was here that the paper’s lawyers had clearly got out their pencils: a sexual relationship was “alleged” to have started between them, instigated, of course, by her. I would have liked to tell the parents that he should have been so lucky. He was probably gay. He had, after all, told me he had fucked Toby Luttrell. Anyway, they were praying for him, praying for a return to the boy whose ambition, once upon a time, was to be a fireman, who was happiest when he was flying his kite, the boy who might once have baked forty separate muffins for his mother’s birthday and put a candle on each. That was what I loved about Rachel: she would never have done that in a million years.

  By then, the police had been in touch with us. They couldn’t have behaved more courteously: they telephoned Martha to say they had interviewed Matthew Sumner and he had made a statement she might care to see. Would she be able to present herself at the main police station in Guildford? No, she wouldn’t. Why couldn’t they put it in the post? Politely, they informed her that it was not “policy” to release confidential statements. Grumpily, she told them that I would have to do it.

  They were very nice at the police station. They gave me tea and biscuits and put me in a little room with a table and chair. A file was waiting for me with the statement in it, ready for me to read.

  INTERVIEW BETWEEN DC JANE CLARK AND MATTHEW SUMNER. ALSO PRESENT: DR. DAVID FORD (SUBJECT’S GP)

  INTERVIEW COMMENCED 3.05 P.M., 24 AUGUST 1995

  DC JANE CLARK: What were your intentions in leaving Broadmeadow Clinic?

  MATTHEW SUMNER: [inaudible]

  CLARK: I’m sorry, Matthew. Could you please speak up?

  SUMNER: To find him.

  CLARK : To find who?

  SUMNER : Why do you want to know?

  CLARK : We are trying to establish the circumstances of your and Miss Hayman’s leaving Broadmeadow Clinic.

  SUMNER : We were going to find him.

  CLARK : To find who?
>
  SUMNER: Someone.

  CLARK : Were you on medication?

  SUMNER: I stopped taking the pills. They made me sleepy.

  CLARK : Are you on medication now?

  DR. DAVID FORD: [interrupting] Yes, he is.

  CLARK : Was Miss Hayman on medication?

  SUMNER: She tried to score in Croydon.

  CLARK : Is that the person you were trying to find? A drug dealer?

  SUMNER: [laughs]

  CLARK: Then who was it?

  SUMNER: I don’t want to say his name.

  CLARK : Will you write it down?

  RECORDING PAUSED 3.12 P.M.

  RECORDING RESTARTED 3.15 P.M.

  CLARK : May I say his name?

  SUMNER: If you want to.

  CLARK : Why did you want to find Mr. Toppit?

  SUMNER : He came to Broadmeadow. I think I saw him. I think he had been there.

  CLARK : Did Miss Hayman see him?

  SUMNER: No. I told her, though. I told her we had to find him. He had gone.

  CLARK: Where had he gone?

  SUMNER : I can’t tell you. He’ll be angry.

  CLARK : Did Miss Hayman want to find him?

  SUMNER: She had to. I told her she had to.

  CLARK : Was that when you decided to leave?

  SUMNER: She wasn’t talking then. She didn’t talk to people, but she talked to me. She knew she had to come.

  CLARK : Why did you want her to come with you?

  SUMNER: I wanted us to be like blood brothers. I wanted us to cut ourselves and mix our blood. I’ve cut myself before. [Holds up arms and shows scars.] She was my best friend.

  CLARK : Were you having sexual relations?

  SUMNER: [inaudible]

  CLARK : Was she your girlfriend?