Chorus Endings

by David Warwick

  ‘Not so his bosses. The old man was summoned up to Whitehall – that part I got out of him after the 1970 article had appeared – and to this day I don’t know what story he spun them. Building a private-enterprise fallout shelter was bad enough. Using it as an operation centre – if that’s what they really intended – worse. The auxiliary units were still hush-hush, remember, and running a private army in peacetime – if they got to hear about it – as Helen says must surely have been a treasonable offence. Fortunately, he still had friends in high places. And, of course, they were the people who not only recruited Burgess and McLean, but gave them access to our secrets, then let them slip through their fingers once they were discovered. Which my father was not going to let them forget, especially as he knew where quite a few of the bodies were buried!’

  Peter fully exonerated; no longer the arch-betrayer he’d believed himself to be. ‘With BadEgg showing his true colours. The “fourth man” in the spy ring even!’ I could hear the relief in his voice.

  ‘A KGB agent, leaking the secrets of our Eleven Plus papers to his Soviet masters? Using copybooks as ciphers? Hardly. Onwards and upwards in the educational hierarchy rather, an inspector no less.’

  ‘And no credit for Jimmy,’ Peter reminded us. ‘Not even when the truth emerged? Think of how much trouble your father would have been in if he’d not dreamt up the Jutish Chronicle.’

  ‘And you’re quite sure that was his motive in telling them?’ Important to be certain. I don’t think either of us could have stood any further disappointment.

  ‘Not the earlier stories. My guess is they were more about the erosion of the countryside, the disappearance of the old landmarks and the tales that went with them. He started inventing new ones to replace them, hit upon the Jutes as the perfect vehicle, then realised how perfect the match was – between them and the auxiliary units. It was Jimmy’s way of bringing my father to his senses. Not wanting to endanger those who’d been inveigled into following him, yet an early warning before they went too far. As long as he continued telling them there was a chance people would cotton on. And, if they didn’t, he could always make them more explicit, bring the whole project right out into the open if needs be. Might have worked as well, but for Bad Egg’s duplicity. You’ve got to hand it to him.’ Giles shook his head in mock admiration. ‘Turning Jimmy’s stories back against him. Claiming they were responsible for Howard’s breakdown; persuading others that was the case. How Jimmy was a bad influence. Leading the children astray.’

  ‘And your father really believed it?’

  ‘I don’t think Howard’s little adventure made much of an impression on him. But threatening to betray the revamped auxiliary unit? Another matter entirely. All that was needed was for someone to hint that Jimmy had leaked the story to the press.’

  ‘No prizes for guessing who that might have been.’ Peter seemed fully to have regained his spirits.

  ‘Spelling it out even more clearly with rumours about an illustrated version of the Jutish Chronicle. What else was the old man to think? You’ve seen from the diaries the kind of state he was in.’

  ‘With Mappa Mundi putting in an appearance at the crucial moment?’ I suggested.

  ‘And Codpiece horrified by what he’d seen of the picture, desperate to discover what further blasphemies it contained. Both of them vying with the other to get their hands on it. Dreading what they might see, but for very different reasons.’

  ‘And once your father got hold of it, what then? Destroy the picture and send the painter on his way before he created any more trouble?’ That last meeting with Jimmy, the time he’d camped outside Third Class Cottage, still lay heavily on Peter’s mind.

  ‘Not at all. And if you don’t believe me, it’s all here in the diary. If you can make it out. He was getting on by then. Must have realised that Stapleton had taken advantage of him, and never quite the same once he returned from the grilling they gave him in London.’

  Just a few pages remained. Seven or eight at the most. And we could see at a glance there was a marked difference between them and what had gone before. Beginning, clearly enough, with a stark entry that summarised the Squire’s dilemma:

  … not many in village left who J not upset: churchgoers who listen to Draper, teachers eager to get own back, worried parents, our new masters upset by his socialism, incomers who know no better, and now survivors of the unit themselves with this whole business of the Jutes. What’s to be done with the fellow?

  Thereafter gaps between entries became more frequent; the writing progressively illegible. Whole pages were omitted. Little attention had been given to dates, so that we had the greatest difficulty in piecing together anything approaching a precise chronology. But, with Giles’s help, we did our best.

  Just when or how Mappa Mundi was discovered is uncertain. Not so the Squire’s reaction:

  J at his very best. One in eye for our sanctimonious rector; even tried to scuttle Vernon’s memorial – the only worthwhile thing at St Matthias. Foolish letting the man have sight of it even. The picture’s dangerous he tells me. How right he is; did he but know it. And I suppose it has to go. Wish now I’d kept more of Jimmy’s work.

  The reference to the plaque that Jimmy had designed was significant. According to Giles, the older boy had been much on the old man’s mind at the time, both Jimmy and Vernon being artists, the bond that had originally brought them together.

  Maybe it was this that changed his mind regarding the picture’s fate. Just as likely to have been the Rev. Theobald Draper’s intransigence. We’d have missed the relevant entry if Giles had not pointed it out to us:

  Another dreary Draper diatribe; heavily disguised attack on J’s painting. Turns to Savonarola as role model. Congregation, those still awake, floored. Italian fellow, I believe, burnt books. ‘Bonfire of the Vanities.’ Ended up on the pyre himself if my memory serves.

  ‘No more than an afterthought, not that I remember it all that clearly, being home on half-term and revising like mad for Oxbridge entry. Right at the end of the sermon it was. A throw-off remark so I thought, five minutes at the most, and the old man’s right: passed right over the congregation’s head.’

  But not the Squire’s. Giles had returned in all innocence to his studies leaving his father in turmoil. As evidenced in the diary. Pity can’t be Vicar himself on the bonfire, he scribbled. Doubt he’d give off much heat. Incense only!

  Then, halfway down the following page: Protective custody. Out of harm’s way. Must act quickly before they steal a march; otherwise it’s the Savonarola scenario for certain. Followed by further references to Holy Joes, the importance of secrecy, a life-and-death situation almost.

  ‘It’s not what I’d have wanted you to see,’ Giles admitted. ‘Nor the way I like to remember him. Obsessing over that picture, regret for the way Stapleton had fooled him, remorse at his treatment of Jimmy tied to memories of Vernon – all pushing him more or less over the top. But you were insistent, you’d put so much time into your “quest”, and it seemed Peter had devils of his own that needed laying to rest.’

  Both of us, had he but known it.

  ‘Not content with which, he dragged in the rest of them to help him.’ Giles had returned to the diary. ‘Joe, Tom and the others. See, here and here, you can just make it out. And you can imagine how delighted they’d have been, hauled in to protect a picture that must have seemed worthless to them!’ Stray references to find the lady, Indian rope-trick followed, then the final entry: J. gone. Draper triumphant. Claims ‘all for the best’. Maybe, but the man doesn’t know the half of it. Pity about the cottage, though.

  Giles had closed the diary. ‘Never figured out exactly why or where he went. Unlike Jimmy to give way under pressure and my father always maintained it was none of his doing. I suppose other members of the unit may have rounded on him, especially if they’d not been briefed as to
his innocence – which seems highly likely judging from the old man’s state of mind. It’s the best I can do. I must have read his words a thousand times, without coming any closer to an explanation. So maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps Jimmy just felt it was time to move on and did so. Precisely as he’d arrived in the first place.’

  Which, we agreed, was about as far as we could take the matter. Peter, in his own mind, unsure as to whether – one way or the other – Sir Desmond hadn’t been responsible for Jimmy’s departure. Inadvertently tipping a wink to the unit: ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ Or deliberately setting out to discredit him? I didn’t see it that way. Jimmy, despite all I’d said about him, had proved himself no enemy. Just the opposite in fact, saving Sir Desmond from what could have been a very nasty situation. And he’d no motive for driving Jimmy away. ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’, isn’t that what they say? Especially if there was some secret they might reveal once out of your sight.

  By now the search had taken some eighteen months. We’d discovered as much as it seemed prudent to know about Jimmy; learnt even more about ourselves. Peter was finally absolved of the sense of betrayal he’d clung to since childhood; Geraldine’s matrimonial experiences were helping me form a more dispassionate view of the duplicity that had overshadowed my own. And we spoke more freely now about such matters. Jimmy we’d left behind us; a thing of the past. He, though, had not quite finished with us.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Singular Saintley

  Geraldine’s death should have come as no surprise; it was a wonder she’d reached seventy, let alone eighty, smoking the way she did. She’d always taken an active interest in what was going on around her, though, and Mildred’s company would certainly have kept her on her toes. Nor could her memory be faulted. We’d receive cards regularly each Christmas, carefully chosen. For me something of suitably sociological significance – a nativity scene featuring both kings and shepherds, the Holy Family’s homeless flight to Egypt, Christ teaching the wise men in the temple; a more literary offering – Pickwick, Lords a Leaping or Wenceslas – for Helen.

  The handwriting became increasingly unsteady as we entered the 1990s, but her greetings remained as cheerful as ever. She had, in fact, acknowledged a copy of my new book – one that I’d edited rather – just a month before the message came through. Mildred, pointedly wishing to speak to Helen rather than myself, quite calm, but giving the brief details of how it had happened – suddenly, in her sleep – and inviting us to the funeral.

  This turned out to be quite a grand affair, conducted according to her own precise instructions and attended mainly by professional colleagues who’d made their way down from London. A eulogy took in the full range of her artistic and literary achievements, a handsome tribute being paid to ‘the kind soul who’d watched over her declining years’; mention even of ‘newly acquired friends from academe’ – and here the vicar beamed over his spectacles at where we sat halfway down the aisle – but no mention of Derek from beginning to end. The introit hymn – Dear Lord and Father of mankind, Forgive our foolish ways – could well have been a parting shot in his direction, the Psalm, Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men, smacked of more of her companion, but the reading she’d selected from Corinthians stirred up old memories:

  Love is patient and kind; not arrogant and rude. It does not insist on its own way; is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice at wrong, but applauds the right. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

  Her true feelings? Mildred certainly felt so. ‘Came looking for inspiration for the embroidery, found the husband who’d deserted her,’ she reflected later at the wake held at the Spurs and Stirrup, again exactly as Geraldine had planned it. ‘Derek, alive and well after all those years, just when she’d managed to settle down, to make her own way in the world.’ She sniffed disconsolately into what must have been her fifth sherry. ‘Together with a schoolboy only too eager to help. Think you were hard done by, Peter? Never got over your supposed “betrayal”? Well, neither did she, and with far greater cause. Forever wondering if she’d done the right thing. Whether she should go back to him. Only to see reason at the last moment.’

  I ordered up a further schooner. Let her get it out of her system; with any luck she’d remember little of this in the morning, by which time we need never meet again. So I thought, but hardly a week had gone by before the letter arrived. Formal, professionally typed on cream vellum, signed with a flourish by Anthony J. Underwood of Messrs Townsend, Bright and Underwood, Solicitors, acquainting us with the last will and testament of one Geraldine Leapman, deceased. Mildred, it appeared, had inherited the house, together with a small annuity and a few paltry investments. Well deserved; it can’t have been easy looking after the old lady all those years. Helen was to have first choice of the needlework collection, the rest to be dispersed according to arrangements discussed with her agent, together with the mahogany tea box – a kind touch this and least expected. Till we reached the final paragraph. Funding had been set aside for an exhibition of Jimmy’s work, all save Fiddlers Three, which was to be mine, on permanent loan as administrator – three readings before I took it in – yes, administrator, of The Saintley Collection, if this could be fitted round my other responsibilities.

  I was hesitant. Not Helen, who relished the prospect of our co-operating together on further research, nor the University, which was more than content to have their name associated with such a venture. What finally clinched the matter was Giles’s plans for the future of the operations centre. Information regarding the auxiliary units was by now emerging right across the south coast so that, given the funding and fitted out with its wartime accoutrements, his father’s dream of restoring the funk hole as a permanent memorial would be realised.

  Bereden, where most of Jimmy’s artwork had been conceived and painted, seemed the obvious location for the proposed Saintley collection, and it did not take a massive leap of the imagination to put both of these ideas together. The paintings and the shelter had been created at the same time, complementing one another. As had the historic furniture, portraits of ancestral admirals and generals, bric-a-brac looted from defeated foes scattered about the Hall and the effigies of these self-same heroes languishing down at St Matthias. Add the yet-to-be-discovered underground tunnels, the stories and legends concerning them that Jimmy himself had perpetrated, throw in a replica of Third Class Cottage, and you had an almost unique record of one family’s day-to-day existence over the last couple of hundred years. Rather a belligerent one, it’s true.

  ‘The Armigerous Amberstones, the perfect title,’ Helen joked. ‘The kind of hands-on experience that museums would give their eye-teeth to possess.’

  ‘Or those stored away in their vaults,’ I replied.

  We settled on The Singular Saintley.

  Giles and the centre’s management had little difficulty in obtaining a grant. Mildred – probably only too pleased to have 52 Willow Drive shot of Jimmy’s artwork – approved of the idea, and the two of us – Helen and I – decided to operate as a team on the project. She would return to Bereden to work with Giles on sorting out those parts of the Squire’s diary that might be included in the exhibition, whilst it was back to the Spurs and Stirrup for me, getting the pictures ready for transport and helping Mildred with whatever documentation Geraldine had left behind. I was not looking forward to this part of it. Neither of us had been at our best on previous occasions and I seemed to have inherited most of the resentment she felt towards Jimmy. This dissipated over the week as we worked together removing paintings that hung on the walls and retrieving those we found stored away in cupboards. Nothing of great interest emerged: a few ineffectual first drafts of the Postbag series, a poor copy of Shakesphere V – Winter of Discontent, a rather charming Nervous Wreck I’d not seen.

  Till, crammed into a small shoebox, we
discovered what might have turned out to be a goldmine: the letters that Jimmy – or should that be Derek – had written to Geraldine – Veronica as she then was – from Pendarrell. Maybe she’d intended to destroy them or have them buried with her – further evidence, much to Mildred’s irritation, of how much she’d cared for him. Interesting enough, confirming everything she’d told us, but of a very personal nature. Once read, I gave them to Helen to dispose of as she felt fit, no questions asked. Of far greater significance, tucked in beside them, were a few notes in Jimmy’s own hand of the three years he’d spent at the college, some of them verbatim records of conversations that had taken place. Almost as indecipherable as Squire Desmond’s had been, it took several years, off and on, before we made sense of them, providing an invaluable supplement to Geraldine’s own account of the time he’d spent with the ‘brethren’.

  For the moment, I had other things to think about. We packed the artwork carefully into the car and I spent the long journey south mentally setting them out to best advantage in the various rooms that had been placed at our disposal. Everything was coming together splendidly for the grand opening later in the year.