Imagining such ruination was beyond him. Perhaps he had not been married long enough.
‘Frank was feckless, and shiftless and brilliant, and a sodding alcoholic. I knew the drink would kill him one day. It might have killed me too, you know, but three kids, well, that’s enough to sober you up, isn’t it? But I loved him. Always. And he loved me, and I knew, we both knew, from the time we met, from the time we first kissed or made love, there was never anyone else, not really … Well, the occasional—’ She shrugged ‘—you know …’
He did not, but he nodded just the same.
‘He could drink the Roman army under the table and still be brilliant, recite poetry, Shakespeare, so there wasn’t a dry eye in the house! Hardy’s “Convergence Of The Twain”? Oh! You’d think the sea had washed over you right there in some low, smoky pub. And all those silly music-hall songs, and sentimental ballads.’ She burst into tears all over again. She mopped her face, and raised her chin. ‘He had the tenor voice of an angel. We used to sing duets.’ She gulped, but she could not immediately speak. ‘And of course, he could write like no other, living or dead. He could take a September afternoon, or a crashing wave, or an old tart caterwauling “Some Of These Days” and turn them into words so beautiful, you’d have to close the book for a bit because you couldn’t stand to read on for the beauty of it.’
‘He was a very great writer.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Yes,’ he lied, though he had promised he wouldn’t. ‘I admired his work profoundly.’
‘I loved him so! Oh, this is so awful, and now, all this grief, I’m so alone with it. It’s so shocking, as if I’d been singled out for something dreadful. Not like the war. Everyone lost someone. During the war, there was such a great pool of grief that everyone shared in it. Like we were all splashing about in sorrow. Now there’s just this little puddle, and I’m alone in it.’
‘You’re not alone. You have me. Us. The agency. People will mourn with you. He was a very great writer.’
‘I can’t take that to bed, can I?’
Quentin murmured something inadequate.
‘Let us drink to Frank; dear, dear Frank. Bottoms up, Mr Castle. What is your first name?’
‘Quentin.’
‘I’m Claire.’ She touched her cup to his. ‘Bottoms up, Quentin. We might as well drink now and believe we won’t die.’
Her round blue eyes crinkled, and perhaps it was the whisky so early in the morning, or the lack of sleep, but she looked to him altogether luminous. That image of Claire Carson – her tragic blue eyes deepened by the blue sweater that clung to her throat, her tousled blonde hair, her pale, sad mouth – he thought he might carry that to his grave. And he did.
CHAPTER SIX
ON BEHALF OF THE FIRM
Claire went upstairs to tell her children the dire news. Quentin went to the lav which had been built on, added to a small hallway off the kitchen perhaps fifty years before.
The toilet was a huge ceramic bowl, Ottley and Sons, Banbury in Gothic lettering, set in an enormous box of polished wood. The overhead chain was brass, and when pulled, the sound rumbled with an operatic echo. He took off his coat and glasses, splashed his face with icy water; the lavender-scented soap pleased his memory in some wordless way.
On his return to the kitchen he winced to hear distant childish wailing. He moved to the huge hearth that once had clearly served many purposes. The fire had burned to mere embers. He stoked it with some nearby logs, sat in the rocker, loosed his tie, and fell into a dreamless sleep.
Claire rattled his shoulder and woke him.
‘Sorry,’ he said. He wiped his lips, and wondered if he’d snored. He had no idea how long he had slept. The light in the kitchen had shifted.
‘I’ve told the children. They’re busted up, but they’re tough. They’d have to be to be our children. They know it’s not your fault.’
‘How could it be?’
‘They’re only children. You brought the news.’
‘Yes. Sorry,’ he said again.
She turned to the children, who had straggled into the kitchen. ‘Children,’ she said, ‘this is Mr Quentin Castle, Daddy’s literary agent. These are our children. Michael, Catherine and Mary. Say something, children.’
The three children mumbled and murmured. They wore rough clothes and their hair was mussed, their faces none too clean, and streaked with tears. Quentin couldn’t tell the girls apart.
‘I’m very sorry about your father,’ he said.
One of the girls marched up to him, and stood, arms crossed, before him. ‘I hate you.’
‘Hush, Catherine,’ said Claire.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. Feeling foolish and useless, he asked if he could help.
‘Firewood. Show him, Michael.’
The surly boy bade him follow back outside, across a cobbled yard with crusts of frost that crunched under Quentin’s city shoes. He had to step gingerly to avoid assorted piles of animal excrement. They rounded a corner and came to a shed where logs were neatly stacked under a protective shelter. Michael picked up one that looked to weigh as much as he did.
‘I’ll do that,’ said Quentin.
‘I don’t need your help,’ snapped the boy. ‘She don’t either. She’s got me.’
Regardless of his best wool suit, Quentin bent, filled his arms with firewood; the scent that pitched up off the logs was musky, moss or something, wild and sweet. He followed the boy inside where they found Claire in the rocker, a small girl in her lap. She rocked back and forth, soothing the child, singing softly, something about a mockingbird and a diamond ring. Her hair swirled at her shoulders, falling forward, obscuring her face. Quentin stacked the logs as best he could beside the fireplace. The boy stoked the fire, and the immediate vicinity warmed.
Claire put the child down, donned the dirty apron, and picked up a massive fry pan. ‘I hate you too,’ said Mary, kicking Quentin when her mother’s back was turned.
Quentin was ravenously hungry, and perhaps that’s why he could not remember a breakfast this wonderful. Not in ages. Before the war? Perhaps his grandmother’s house in Cornwall? That long ago.
Though the tea was weak, heavy on the milk (no sugar, Claire said, she’d used her ration on a birthday cake for Catherine last week), the eggs, scrambled, were fresh and fluffy. There was no bread, but smaller biscuits, she called them, soft inside with crispy tops. ‘Not your sort of English biscuits,’ she said. ‘Idaho biscuits. Easy to make in small batches.’ There was no butter, just the usual oleaginous marge, but plenty of fruity jam that contrasted vividly with tender, salty ham.
The little girls whimpered all through the meal. Claire finally hoisted the youngest on her lap, and fed her like a little baby while she hiccupped tears. The meal finished, she made no effort to clean up the empty plates that sat in dirty profusion. Finally she asked Michael to see to the animals and take the girls with him. She gently lifted the youngest to the floor. ‘Go on, then, go with Michael.’
Claire and Quentin sat together in companionable, contented silence. Perhaps he ought to look at his wristwatch and say how the time had got away from him. But he didn’t. He rose and fed the fire, which crackled happily. A house cat darted after a mouse, or a rat.
‘It was all going to be grand, this house,’ she sighed, and a wan smile escaped her lips. ‘Frank thought this place was Blenheim Palace. He never noticed that it was a Jacobean dump. When Frank was going to the bathroom, he’d turn to us and announce: “I’m going to sit on the throne!” Little Frankie Carson, the schoolmaster’s asthmatic son, suddenly lord of the manor, squire to his own great pile of golden stone in Oxfordshire. He believed that we would have fine parties here. He saw teatime in the grand garden, and string quartets in the folly, Noël Coward and Cole Porter at the grand piano. Oh, not that upright thing over there.’ She pointed to the battered instrument with yellowed keys. ‘I insisted on that old thumper. I said to him, just until we could have the salo
ns redone, Frank, and the grand piano lowered in through the French doors opening off the balcony.’ She scoffed. ‘Can you imagine? He really thought that’s what it would be like.’
‘He was a fiction writer, after all.’ This was all he could offer.
‘Yes. Frank saw what he wished. That’s why they call it fiction. I saw what you see.’
Quentin glanced round the kitchen. ‘The Aga’s very nice.’
‘That’s new. You should have seen what was here when we moved in. Frank bought the place outright. Didn’t even tell me, just drove us all out here, opened the gate and says, “Welcome home, Claire,” happy as if he’d got the deed to Eden, this great barn of a place.’ Her arm swept out. ‘First thing, he had a folly built, like Woodlands, only ours was a little wooden gazebo, and theirs was a marble shelter by a willow tree. Oh, our place would be better than Woodlands one day! He was certain he’d be knighted, or lorded or whatever you Brits call it. He would be Sir Francis with his own grand house and gardens. He used up the whole Hay Days advance to buy this house, and then the book was a crashing failure. No one would forgive him, not for writing a mediocre book – look how many of those there are! – but that he didn’t live the war like everyone else.’
‘The book was badly timed,’ said Quentin diplo-
matically.
‘And now look at us. What shall I do?’
His earlier answer, endure, was inadequate now. He sought something more concrete. ‘Is there anyone you’d like me to call or contact when I get back to London? Family? Friends?’
The breath seemed to exit her body in a gust of fatigue, and she wept all over again. When finally she looked up from her hands, she said, ‘Like Frank’s high-flying literary friends? Only too happy to jolly him along. The rich, the well born, well educated, men and women alike, Lady Sybil La-di-da Dane? Those friends?’ She seemed to want an answer.
‘I know nothing of his friends.’
‘Lucky you. These people—’ She shrugged ‘—there’ll be a great flying of sympathetic fur, and then it will all be over. They will be indifferent in a week. Frank will be forgotten.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
She scoffed. ‘All the sodding literati. They loved to dish it out. “Oh, Francis! You’re a genius!” And Frank loved to hear it.’
Quentin remembered his father’s advice, that authors needed only a bit of praise and a bit of brass to be obedient. Perhaps that was true.
‘They’d drink to him. They’d buy him drinks. Or he’d buy theirs. He was dead drunk in Soho when Michael was born, thank you. The boy was almost born in a taxi. Catherine was born at Woodlands, and God knows what he was up to while I was up there on the fourth floor popping out this baby with only the housemaid to hold my hand.’
‘No midwife?’
‘She got there later. I’d kill for a fag.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I hated every day at Woodlands. Sometimes I had to tell myself, at least Frank’s not being bombed or burnt or shot at or trekking through some godforsaken jungle. He’s here beside me every night, no matter who he slept with in the afternoon. Sybil, of course. You won’t hear me calling her Lady. He was safe from the war, but everything he wrote there was tripe; worse, shite. Sybil Dane would type his every bloody word – not me, not that book – and every evening, she’d hand him his pages like they were the fecking Magna Carta, and Frank would orate and declaim in the library, reading aloud, and they’d all swoon, and baste him with praise like a prize goose at Christmas. Fawning toadies. To them he was nothing but a minstrel tarted up. They used him for their amusement. He lost his head. Hay Days—’ She snorted audibly ‘—dedicated to Lady Sybil Dane. Yes, he really put her bloody title in there. He was …’ She glanced towards the mud room as though the word might come through the door. ‘Besotted. Not so much with Sybil, but with the flattery she fed him. He did not listen to me. You can see what it cost him. It undermined his reputation.’
‘He saved his hide and lost his reputation,’ said Quentin, quoting his father, though he did not attribute the thought.
‘Yes. At first I don’t even think he knew it, but after Hay Days, that’s when the fear started to come on him. He was afraid that his gift would run out, like a roll of twine or string that would unfurl, that he’d lose his talent. He was desperate to get everything on paper before that happened. Instead his life ran out.’ The kitchen clock on the shelf ticked in the silence. She bit her lip. ‘We’d drifted apart, you know?’
Quentin didn’t, but he nodded just the same.
‘He bought this great wreck of a house, and loved it for a while, but then he drove the car into the ditch and sat there all night, dead drunk, singing and snoring and sitting in his own filth. That was the beginning of the end, now that I look back at it. After that, he was restless, off to London or somewhere, constantly, and after Sybil gave him the key to her London flat … well, he’d take himself and his suitcase full of manuscripts, and say, “Oh, just a day or two, Claire, I have to meet with Albert Castle, or Bernard at Selwyn and Archer.” But a week might go by before he’d come home. I knew where he was, and who with.’ Her lip trembled, and she fought tears. ‘We might have been at the end of our tether, and yet—’ Her blue eyes were mirrors of pain ‘—I can’t believe that he died without me. It seems so unfair. We should have gone together.’
‘Then who would look after your children?’
She glanced around the room, as if surprised that Mary, Catherine and Michael weren’t there.
‘Is there some family you can turn to?’
She shrugged. ‘The Carsons? They’re gone. They broke Frank’s heart with all the abuse they heaped on The Moth and the Star. His father, the schoolmaster, and his nasty Quaker mother and his prig brother wrote him horrible, accusatory letters and then said don’t darken our door. The brother, the last of them, died in a motoring accident in ’46. Even if they were alive, they’d not lift a finger for me. The American whore.’
‘What about your own people?’
‘In Idaho? I haven’t had a word from any of them since I left in 1935.’
Quentin tried in vain to place Idaho in his vague geographical sense of America. ‘How on earth did you meet Francis Carson?’
‘A long story. Stranger than fiction, truly. We were just kids. We met at Broadstairs. We fell in love. Frank would go swimming, naked, in the mornings before he taught school. I would sneak out and meet him down at the beach. Can you imagine how cold that surf was? He was such a strong swimmer. He’d run up on the beach, naked, and I’d help him get warm. He was a wild, poetic presence, unlike anyone I’d ever known, or ever will know, and certainly not like the rest of the English, prim little aspidistras, happy in their tidy little pots behind lace curtains.’ She added hastily, ‘Present company excepted, of course.’
Quentin nodded, though he knew the description fit him all too well.
Both dogs perked up their heads and barked ferociously. Quentin looked at his watch. It was past noon. ‘That might be the press. They would have heard by now. Shall I deal with them? I can do that much. You needn’t.’
She nodded, suddenly, clearly exhausted. ‘Thank you. I mean it, Quentin, thank you.’
‘Perhaps I ought to leave with them. It’s getting late and I’ve got to get back to London.’
‘Must you leave? Couldn’t you stay? Just tonight. You’ve been such a comfort to me. Tomorrow I can drive you into Woodstock. I can’t use the petrol to go all the way into Oxford, but there’s a bus out of—’
‘I’m happy to stay. Of course.’
Quentin put on his coat and gloves, and followed the sound of the dogs’ fierce barking. The sky had thickened with clouds foreboding snow and it fell in flurries. On the other side of the gate where lately he himself had perched, he could see perhaps half a dozen men and three or four vehicles. Bulbs popped, questions too. Michael stood there, telling them to sod off, calling them bastards.
‘I am Quentin
Castle,’ he announced. ‘Mr Carson’s literary representative. It’s true that the novelist Francis Carson has died in California where he was working on a film to be made of his novel, Some of These Days. I will answer your questions, but you’ve no right to bother Mrs Carson. Go inside, Michael, please,’ said Quentin. He waited till the boy had turned the corner before he interrupted their clamouring questions with a simple statement. ‘Mrs Carson and her family are grieved beyond words and ask for your understanding. They need privacy. Anything further you need, contact my father, Albert Castle, at Castle Literary.’
‘Was he drunk when he fell in?’ one demanded.
Quentin wanted to ask where and what Carson had fallen into, but he dared not betray his ignorance.
‘What else would he be?’ another laughed. ‘Francis Carson spent whole days spreadeagle drunk, pissing himself blue.’
‘He could certainly write rings around any of you. That’s why he was in California and you’re out here in the cold.’ Quentin paused to let the insult penetrate. No more bulbs flashed and they started towards their cars. ‘Hey, you!’ Quentin called out to a man who had a cigarette between his lips the whole time he was jotting with his pencil. ‘Do you have any more cigarettes?’ He rummaged in his pocket for some coins, and without counting, held them out.
The man put a half-pack of Player’s in his hand, and offered in music-hall Cockney, ‘Wot! A poor scribbling bloke, the likes of me, givin’ you a fag?’ He spat for good measure, in case Quentin might have missed the derision.
‘Sorry. Could I ask you one more favour? Could you send a telegram for me? Sorry.’ Quentin proved it with a pound note, borrowed his pencil and paper, wrote down the Castle Literary Ltd address and scribbled: Needed here. Home tomorrow. Send money immediately to Mrs C.
When he turned back to the house, the snow was coming down in earnest. The brown and dun and grey landscape he had beheld this morning had all been transformed into white shapes, sparkling, the path back to the house softly delineated, pocked with the tracks of the dogs’ paws and the horse’s hooves. Quentin stomped his feet in the mud room and came into the kitchen. Claire had not moved from where he had left her.
Three Strange Angels Page 8