Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I told them that Castle Literary is handling all the arrangements.’

  ‘And are you?’ Her pale face was tragic in dim light. Tears gleamed in her eyes.

  ‘Of course. If you like.’ He struggled with the strange, discordant impulses Claire Carson roused in him, the conviction he would do anything to earn and keep her favour. He handed her the cigarettes.

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ She put a match to the hearth and it flared. She lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply, smiling. ‘I should quit. Bad habit, and bloody expensive, but there are times a fag’s a great comfort. Where’d you get them? I thought you didn’t smoke.’

  ‘I bought them off a reporter. They always smoke. Let me be of some use. Why don’t you get some rest? Send your children in here. I’ll read to them,’ he added in a moment of inspiration.

  ‘Frank always read to them. Oh, he was a marvellous reader.’ She started to cry again.

  ‘I am not a marvellous reader, but I can do this.’ He rose and went to the bookshelf in the corner, and took down the Yellow Fairy Book.

  ‘You needn’t read to Michael. He has chores. I rely on him. Too much. He’s just a boy. He can be gruff. Always so anxious to be the man, is our Michael. What will I do with him when he is a man? He’ll be quite the lad, won’t he?’

  ‘Like his father?’

  ‘Michael will never be a free spirit like Frank. Truth is, he reminds me of my old Dunstan grandmother.’

  ‘Go to your room, and get some sleep,’ he said tenderly, as if she were a child.

  She started up the stairwell and turned back to him. ‘My old dad used to say, no rest for the wicked and the righteous don’t need it. I know what camp I’m in.’

  ‘And I’m with you,’ he lied. At that moment Quentin actively regretted not being among the reckless, the daring and colourful, the flamboyant, the witty, the wicked and adventurous, the freewheeling and free-spirited. Like Robert. Like Frank. Still, someone had to be righteous, upright, orderly and responsible. Perhaps Michael would grow up to be that.

  The children, of course, would have nothing to do with him. He put the book back on the shelf. Gloved, hatted, his scarf round his neck, he took a wintry stroll round Harrington Hall in the late afternoon sunshine that peeked out from under heavy-lidded clouds. Chickens, ducks and the pig roamed in the cobbled yard near the stone barn. He wandered further, out to where once there had been a formal garden, now run to ruin. In what had been the grand front of the house, the windows on two of the three storeys were boarded-up doors and a massive lock clung to the door. Snow settled over a dry fountain in the middle of the drive. Clearly, the Carsons only lived in a small portion of the place; the rest was completely shut up. The house was, in fact, a Jacobean dump. The work required to make it right would have bankrupted a lord.

  Quentin could hear the children calling, hooting to one another, and he guessed they were playing a game, themselves as the spies and allies, and himself as the enemy. He came upon all three on the back of the dappled nag, clinging to each other. They rode on without speaking to him, and he turned in a different direction. In the distance he could see the skeletal structure of a folly, an eighteenth-century bit of fol-de-rol, a frothy gazebo set in what was meant to be a garden, and was now a ruin of naked blackberry bushes and blackened ferns. Where he stood, there was a crudely hand-lettered sign: Footpath to Folly. The story, inasmuch as Quentin could tell, of Frank Carson’s life, and judging from the reporter’s question, his death as well.

  Claire was awake, back in the rocker, gazing at the remains of the fire when he returned to the kitchen. Quentin fed the fire, prodding it till sparks flared up and flames crackled. They sat across from each other, their hands extended towards the warmth. The kitchen clock ticked.

  At last she spoke. ‘I’ve never dealt with a death. I don’t know what happens next, and all this is so …’

  ‘Overwhelming. Sudden and unexpected,’ he offered, thinking it odd that he should finish someone else’s sentence instead of the other way around. ‘Did Frank have a will?’

  ‘Oh yes. I made sure of that. I insisted. After he wrecked the car and I could see that one day he’d step over some line or another, and God would say, “Enough!” Though I never thought it would be so soon.’ She ran a hand over her face. ‘I can’t remember where the will is. I’m not very organized. I’m sure there must be a thousand things I ought to do, but I can’t think what they are.’

  ‘There’s the question of burial.’ That lingered between them; the fire popped and Quentin picked up the poker and pushed the log back. ‘You will have to decide what you want.’

  ‘He has to come home. I won’t have him buried in California. Not by those philistines.’

  ‘Oxford?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.’ She rose and took a cigarette off the mantel, lit it, plucking a bit of tobacco from her tongue, looking into the fire. ‘He liked to pretend he was lord of the falling-down manor out here, but he was happiest in London. He loved London.’

  ‘I don’t know if there’s a place for him in London. The graveyards are filled. The papers said that George Orwell wanted to be buried in London, but they had to take him to Sussex or somewhere. But perhaps my father can arrange something. He’s very persuasive. We looked after Francis’s interests in life, and we’ll do so now. I speak on behalf of the firm,’ he lied. He was speaking wholly and completely for himself.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Mary, bursting in, flinging her sturdy little body against her mother. ‘And Michael is being mean.’

  ‘We’ll have our tea after I put the chickens away, and the animals in the barn. It’s getting dark.’

  ‘Would you like me to help?’

  ‘Oh, Quentin, have you ever in all your life chased a chicken into the henhouse? You stay with Mary.’

  ‘No. I hate him. I’m coming with you.’ She put her hand in her mother’s, and Quentin wondered if she feared her mother, too, might vanish, as her father had, though he reminded himself, Francis Carson had been gone for almost a year. Since April or May.

  By the time they ate, the lamp over the table whose light had been so wan in the morning shone brightly; its beams stretched unsuccessfully towards the far reaches of the room, dancing on the pans hanging overhead and the irregular panes of glass in the windows. The little girls clamoured, and cried, and whined, clinging to their mother in ways that Quentin found appalling, even intolerable. Though he knew nothing of children, he could neither remember nor imagine himself clinging to Margaret in that bratty and demanding fashion. Margaret would not have stood for it. Claire seemed not to notice. Michael pounded upstairs, refusing his mother’s request that he should light a fire in the room where Quentin would sleep. Quentin hastily assured her he did not want a fire in his room; he would not be indebted to the testy Michael Carson for anything if he could help it.

  Finally, the girls, one by one, wore themselves out and fell asleep, one of them on the floor with her head on the unprotesting dog. Claire roused the eldest gently and guided her upstairs. Quentin lifted the youngest, Mary, off the sleeping dog and followed. In his arms, she was all sweet repose. A child in his arms was an altogether new experience. The narrow stairwell was lit by only one uncertain bulb at the landing, and the steps creaked like old bones. The hall was draughty. The room was cold. The little girls shared one room. Michael had another.

  Claire lit a flickering lamp. Following instructions, and Claire’s example with Catherine, Quentin took off Mary’s shoes, leaving her stockings on for warmth. Claire tossed him a small flannel nightgown and when he had got the little girl, protesting, out of her clothes, he put it over her head, struggling as well with an odd rush of affection for a child who hated him. Claire pulled the bedclothes up over the girls, who instantly rolled towards each other for warmth.

  Quentin and Claire finished the bottle of Dewar’s and talked late into the night, as she told him the Stranger Than Ficti
on story of how she had met the gifted but difficult, the mercurial Francis Carson, their early life together. Quentin listened, his forte. The unusual surroundings, her voice, the rapt attention of this beautiful woman all combined to rouse in him unlikely, even foreign, impulses, not even emotions, but odd crackling combinations of lust and tenderness, of ease and arousal, of having his every sense sharpened, heightened, and at the same time relaxed. No doubt it was the whisky and the late hour, but he had the sensation that somewhere deep inside him some new alchemy was transforming the ordinary straw of his life into gold the same colour as her hair.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  The story Claire told him over the bottle of Dewar’s that night suggests that life or destiny, or even God, must enjoy irony. The Broadstairs beaches that Claire Dunstan and Francis Carson had frolicked on were well known to her father, John Dunstan, though it is unlikely that any of the Dunstans ever frolicked at all.

  John Dunstan was one of four sons in a dour maritime family. Leaving school at fourteen, he went to work at a chandler’s shop for a few years then left home for Brighton, for reasons he never made clear. There he was swept up by the fervour of a couple of Mormon missionaries whose zeal (to say nothing of their stirring stories of biblical battles, glorious rendition of the afterlife, and belief in earthly patriarchal blessings for men) appealed to him, a scrawny young man with few prospects. He converted, went under the waters of baptism, and in 1910 took passage with a group of newly minted British Mormons to America to populate Zion, the mountain stronghold of the Latter Day Saints in Utah.

  John Dunstan always believed that God Himself had intervened to spare him the fate of his brothers in the Great War. One ended up a rotting corpse on some bit of barbed wire in northern France. One brother died in Gallipoli. One brother, William, survived; that is to say that by 1919 he was still warm, and more or less upright, though one-armed and nearly deaf. John Dunstan, by contrast, was a whole man, a sterling pillar of the Mormon Church, confident in his eventual accession to the Celestial Kingdom where he would inherit, as befit the meek, many celestial wives and vast tracts of heavenly property.

  On earth his lot was less splendid. John Dunstan eked out an often impoverished seasonal living in the sugar-beet fields of Idaho, that and anything else he could find. He had married young, and his bride Alice was younger yet. They had six children, of whom Claire Catherine, born 1919, was the eldest girl. Claire’s earliest recollection, she told Quentin, was following her brothers along the train tracks not far from their house, picking up coal that had fallen along the tracks. She thought she might have been four or five. The Dunstans routinely ate rabbits that her older brothers trapped. They couldn’t afford the bullets to shoot them.

  The Dunstans couldn’t afford to feed their children, and so parted with them whenever possible. The boys went to live with Alice’s relatives, dry farmers who needed their brawn. At sixteen Claire too was parcelled out, but to another branch of the family, to John’s people in Kent. Word came that John’s mother had had a stroke. His one-armed brother William could not look after her, and there was no money for a proper nurse. If John could spare one of his daughters, the Dunstans would pay her third-class ticket and give her room and board in Broadstairs.

  For an imaginative 16-year-old girl who had grown up in frontier Idaho, the journey by train, rattling across the open plains of the Midwest, and passing through the cities of the east, was full of wonder. In New York she was met by an elder of the Mormon Church who escorted her to the ship, and saw to it she boarded with no chance to experience the city. The great ship, even travelling third class, thrilled her, whetted her appetite for adventure, convinced her that great things lay ahead. Full of hope and high spirits, good health, good looks and native intelligence, Claire Dunstan stood on the deck and looked fearlessly ahead, certain that life in England would live up to the Sir Walter Scott and Brontë novels she adored: mysterious castles, great houses, noble families, verdant streams, rolling meadows. She imagined her grandmother a lovely old lady with pink cheeks, white hair and a lace cap, living in a charming cottage near the sea.

  She was met at Southampton by her uncle, William, who was bitter that his brother had converted, emigrated, and escaped the war where William had lost an arm, and much of his hearing, from an explosion on the Somme. William lived on a pension, and could no longer afford the occasional prostitute. He looked at his tall, blooming niece, her fair hair, fine posture and bright mouth with something other than avuncular affection. On the train to Broadstairs he rode in silence, though she chattered away. With his good arm he carried her carpet bag as they walked from the Broadstairs station to the Dunstan house. He stopped before a grey brick rowhouse with a single narrow downstairs window framed in lace curtains shielding an aspidistra in a ceramic pot.

  This was not the seaside cottage she’d imagined. William ushered her into the stale, sour-smelling parlour to meet her grandmother, and Claire knew that the adventure was over.

  Mrs Dunstan, who insisted on being called Mrs Dunstan, was perhaps sixty-five, and in an alarming state of physical decay. A stroke had robbed her of mobility, and her mental faculties were equal only to rants against the government, her late husband, and the son who had abandoned her to join the bloody Mormons. She and William attended no church whatever.

  Claire hoped at least Sundays would be free, but her duties were unending, seven days a week. She was the fetch-and-toter, fire-maker, grate-scrubber, pot-emptier, bootblack and laundress, ironer, cook, cleaner, and all-round slavey. Additionally Claire had to perform nursing duties for the old woman, whose days were divided between a wheeled chair and a bed in the parlour. Claire changed her daily, bathed her twice a month, fed her three times a day and saw to her toileting needs.

  Mrs Dunstan also required Claire to read aloud to her for hours at a time, three-decker Victorian novels, not just Dickens and Thackeray and Trollope, George Eliot and the Brontës, but Rhoda Broughton, and Mary Braddon, and George Meredith, Samuel Butler. The books had all been left in the house by a previous tenant, their pages stuck together and odorous with mildew. These long reading sessions fed Claire’s imagination and engaged her heart. She sometimes took the books to bed with her to read ahead, and then, eager to move on to the next book, she made up the story the following day for Mrs Dunstan, who didn’t seem to know the difference as long as everything ended in a tidy fashion, the wicked duly killed off and everyone else married; in short, a happy ending.

  Claire’s was a tiny room at the back of the kitchen, a narrow bed, a chest instead of a bureau and a rag rug. She took her meagre meals alone. William mostly kept to his upstairs room, his good ear turned towards his wireless, while he built model airplanes. Claire could sometimes hear William’s heavy tread coming down the stairs at night. She put a chair in front of her bedroom door, and a teacup and saucer on the chair to alert her if it were to be opened. He sometimes paused at her door, but went on to the privy at the back. Brutally homesick, she wrote imploring letters to her parents asking to come home. They did not reply. Their defection pierced her heart, but within a few months, Claire knew she must fend for herself. Without friends or funds (they paid her no wages), Claire could imagine no way out, save for the old woman dying. And at that, the thought of being alone in the house with William was too terrible to contemplate.

  She managed to pinch, hold back tiny bits, tuppence here and there when she was sent out to the shops, but she did not attempt outright thievery. She was certain Mrs Dunstan and William would send the law after her. Her American accent, her height, even her beauty was against her. Mercifully the old woman went to bed early, slept like the dead and snored like a rattling pump handle. William played his wireless loud to compensate for his hearing loss. Claire took to making tiptoeing escapes from her small room, out the back gate, and down the alley.

  She went to the Oak and Crown, a pub she had noticed on her rounds of the shops. The air was turgid with cigarett
e smoke, but the voices were loud and lively; there was often singing, and beer splashed. She didn’t know that a girl alone oughtn’t to wander into pubs, and she didn’t care. As an American she was already an anomaly in town. Claire, who had never tasted beer or liquor of any sort, found it to her liking, that it loosed her voice, her bright soprano trained in the LDS church choir. She and the schoolmaster, one Francis Carson, both had a good ear and could sing any song having heard it only once. They did duets of music-hall tunes. Francis Carson was only one of many young men swarming around the tall American girl with pale hair the colour of raw sugar and crystalline blue eyes. Men vied to buy her a drink, vied for the honour of walking her back to the Dunstans’; not all the way back, mind you, she would not risk that, just to the alley. Claire took up smoking to cover up the smell of smoke in her hair and her clothes after these escapades.

  Francis Carson was a few years older than Claire Dunstan. A solid, broad-shouldered young man, with a thick mop of curling dark hair, half-hooded grey eyes, a slow smile, and fingers stained with nicotine, he was well known in Broadstairs. He was a schoolmaster, after all, his university education cut short by his father’s death. His students feared him. He had a fierce roar and was not afraid to use it. When he was not terrorizing schoolboys, Francis knew well how to charm women. As the schoolmaster, he was much sought as a matrimonial prospect for the young ladies, and on more than one occasion provided afternoon amusement for their mothers.

  His way with women was not lost on Claire. Within a few months he was the only man walking her home. Frank Carson did not deign to stop at the alley, fearing William. He walked her all the way to the back gate where he held her tight, his lips to hers, his hands to her breasts and buttocks and told her she was driving him mad with desire. He had to have her.