He took the eggs into the kitchen, and she followed, chatting inconsequentially, as though they had between them an easy understanding, a bond forged in the long night they had spent talking. She held her hands out to the fire, then wandered around the table, picking up the occasional toy, or doll, or shoe, placing it here or there, distractedly and without imparting any sort of order. ‘I tell you, Quentin, some lovely bright light, a beacon, has gone out of the world. Frank ought to have written a dozen more books, and we ought to have laughed and had rows and made up and made love for years yet. And now he’ll be shipped home in a box, like so much crockery or furniture, a tag attached, a destination. A beautiful man no longer. A thing. Freight. I can’t bear the thought of it. Oh, dear God, how will I ever deal with those people? How can I even bring him home?’
‘I could do it,’ he offered.
‘What?’
‘I could go to California. On your behalf,’ he said in a spasm of chivalry. ‘I could accompany the body home.’
‘You’d do that?’ she marvelled. ‘Go all the way to California?’
‘We, I, would be honoured,’ he added, though he could hear his father protesting against the expense, ranting against the FMB and demanding to know if Quentin were absolutely daft to make such an offer. Quentin decided he wouldn’t say he’d offered, but rather that he’d been asked. He knew how his father felt about keeping on the good side of the late author’s heirs.
‘Oh, Quentin, would you?’
‘Yes. I would be honoured.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Oh, thank you. For everything.’ She crumpled onto the bench across from him. ‘You tell them for me, in London and, yes, in California too, it has to be you. No one else fetching Frank, or judging him, or bringing him home but you. You and no other.’
‘Of course.’
She rumpled her hair and fought tears. ‘Frank would have liked you. He was easily led by flattery, especially if it came from some sneaky tart, but he prided himself on recognizing the good in people, in recognizing other poetic souls.’
‘I am prosaic, I’m afraid.’
‘You do yourself an injustice. I’m sorry you didn’t know him.’
‘I’m sorry too.’ This was a sudden truth to Quentin.
She put her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands, pulling the blue sweater up towards her face. ‘Will you bring home the suitcase too? Please.’
‘What suitcase?’
‘Frank always travelled with a suitcase full of manuscripts, some of them half written, some even abandoned, sometimes just notes he was keeping towards books he thought he might write, but he put everything in the suitcase. Every night, no matter where we lived, from those Brixton digs, to this place, when he finished working, he’d put that day’s work in the suitcase and put it by the door, so if there ever was an emergency, a fire, say, he could grab it, fast, on his way out, he’d never lose his work.’ She smiled. ‘I remember sitting on that suitcase in the back of the market-garden truck the day we ran away from Broadstairs. Even when we could afford new suitcases, Frank wouldn’t part with that one. He was superstitious about it. The new book will be in it. It’s almost finished.’
‘I don’t think my father knew of any new book.’
‘Your father doesn’t know everything.’
‘Ah. What’s it about?’
‘It’s about me,’ she said with injured dignity, ‘about our marriage being tattered and banged up long before he left for America. I’d have grabbed his ankles and crawled to keep him from going. I was like Elsie Rose in Some of These Days, a woman willing to give up everything to hold on to a man who didn’t want her. I was ready to burn for him, you see?’ She picked up a cigarette, struck a match and lit it, watched the smoke waft away. ‘Not like this little match, but like a fiery torch, like a lighthouse beam, like a Roman candle lighting up the sky. But finally all he wanted was just the useful little Lucifer to shine on his face for a single moment while people around him, women mostly, swooned. I had no pride by then. But when you’re ready to sacrifice everything, and everything has no value, what’s the point?’
Quentin was confused, and his face must have shown it.
‘I was an inconvenient wife.’ She blew out a plume of smoke. ‘The woman who still loved and needed her husband, but he has tired of her. He wants to move on. That was me. That’s what he was calling the book.’
‘Didn’t you mind? I mean, to be written about. It sounds so unflattering.’
‘Oh, it was unflattering all right, but what’s the use of protest? It’s like that with writers. They use what they want from people. They never ask. When I read his drafts, typed them, it was déjà vu. I read what I had lived just a few months before. He made no excuses. My life belonged to him. Everything we burnt up in our path became fodder for his writing. Even our marriage.’ Her blue eyes were unflinching, though her lip trembled.
Bewildered, and having no experience with the sort of love, the passion and rancour she described, Quentin could not offer even understanding. He felt rather like a tourist, in the midst of grandeur to which he had no connection.
‘You bring him home, Quentin,’ she spoke fiercely, gulping tears, ‘and you tell them there in California, tell them I won’t have any pious blather, or crocodile tears, or Hollywood tarts throwing themselves over the coffin. There won’t be any of that shite for Frank Carson. Nothing.You tell them for me. You bring him home and we’ll say goodbye here.’
‘You can trust me. I promise. You have my word.’
This seemed to Quentin a solemn vow, sacred as his marriage vows. One made one’s wedding vows knowing – everyone did – that one could not possibly live up to the letter of those vows, sickness, health, richer, poorer, every day of their lives. It was enough to promise to try. But this vow to Claire Carson? Quentin would keep this promise. He must succeed, whatever obstacles his father might put in his path.
Michael clomped down the stairs, pale and sulky. The girls followed him, moving instantly to their mother, clinging to her embrace. Michael hunkered across from Quentin, playing with his knife, flinging it, time and again, against the wooden floor, trying to get it to stick upright.
‘Stop!’ cried Claire at last. ‘The sound will drive me mad! Stop that, and do something useful for humanity.’
‘What do I care for humanity?’ The boy closed the knife and put it in his pocket. ‘My da is dead.’
The girls burst into tears.
‘See to it the dogs are fed,’ Claire snapped.
‘That’s not humanity.’
‘It’ll do.’
All through breakfast Quentin tried to remember the workday morning at Castle Literary. Miss Marr and Miss Sherrill and Monica, and his father, all bustle and business, and paper and people, ringing phones, pinging bells as the typewriter carriages came to the end of one line, and crashed back to start another. Though he had only been here twenty-four hours, he felt as though days, weeks, whole seasons separated him from his old life. Still, once the children scattered, he said, ‘I suppose I should be going.’
‘Yes, I know you must,’ she replied. ‘And I shall have to face everything alone.’
‘Not alone. You have us. The firm will not desert you,’ he said, feeling like a fool for citing the firm when what he meant was himself, that he would not desert her. ‘And tomorrow, certainly by tomorrow, there will be money in your account. I shall see to it personally. Against your husband’s royalties, naturally.’ The mercenary thought came to him that with his untimely death, Carson’s book sales would doubtlessly rise. He was starting to think like his father. That thought gave him pause. ‘Perhaps you should write me a letter.’
‘A letter?’
‘A letter in your hand with your wishes. I may need some sort of authorization. If I should have any …’
‘You’re right. Of course. Typed?’
‘I should think not. Handwritten.’
She we
nt to the large bureau and brought paper and pen to the table. The cream-coloured paper was beautifully engraved with Harrington Hall nr Woodstock at the top. This letterhead too, it turned out, was a luxury Frank Carson had insisted on.
This letter later turned up, inexplicably, in the effects of Miss Adeline Marr on her death in 1991, amid a vast trove of valuable literary memorabilia relating to Castle Literary Ltd clients. (And a few non-clients, including a whimsical exchange between Albert Castle and H. G. Wells, and a testy exchange with Virginia Woolf.) Miss Marr’s nephew, her only heir, offered the whole for auction through Sotheby’s. The literary curator at Sotheby’s – a friend of Quentin’s and fellow former London Library trustee – was a man who believed in discretion. He alerted Quentin to the contents, adding that some of the letters were rather ordinary, some lively, but some were passionate, even beautiful love letters signed CC as well as short epistles from Roo to Kanga, erotic promises conveyed in the code of longtime lovers.
Quentin’s solicitors sent Miss Marr’s nephew a letter saying these letters had been systematically stolen over years, and he had no right to sell them. The nephew maintained Mr Albert Castle had given Miss Marr all this memorabilia in return for her many years of unsung service and low wages, and that she deserved some compensation since, after all those years of service, Miss Marr had been summarily sacked in June 1965, without cause, without references, and forced to retire on a pittance. Quentin’s solicitors ignored this plea. They pointed out that many of the letters were dated after Albert Castle’s death in 1959, thus they could only have been stolen. The nephew, forced to settle, asked to keep at least the H. G. Wells exchange, but Quentin was adamant. Everything was returned to him. When he opened the box, this letter, handwritten, dated 7 February 1950, was at the top:
7 February 1950
To Whom it May Concern
I hereby authorize Mr Quentin Castle to represent me in all things dealing with my late husband, [Frank, scratched out] Francis Carson. Castle Literary Ltd. represents my husband’s work, and Mr. Quentin Castle himself is acquainted with, and prepared to carry out my wishes regarding my husband’s remains, his effects and his manuscripts. Mr. Castle has my full confidence. Please show him every courtesy, and consider his requests to be my own.
Signed
Claire Carson
She blotted the letter with a tea towel, and called for Michael to mind the girls, that she would drive Quentin into Woodstock. She put the scarf round her neck and slid her arms into a heavy jacket, and Quentin, also muffled against the cold, and carrying his leather case, followed her outside.
One of the dogs came too, but then tore off, chasing some creature in the underbrush. The snow lay all around, transforming everything in its path, democratic as death. Their breath frosted in the cold as they struggled with a sliding door in an outbuilding that sheltered the car, a battered Humber.
‘I hope it will start,’ she offered, coaxing it with the choke. ‘It’s not very reliable after Frank drove it into the ditch.’ As if to disprove her point, the motor coughed to life.
He reached into his jacket, took out a money clip and pulled out what he’d need for the train and cab fare. He gave the rest to her. ‘To hold you over. Just for a bit.’
‘Thank you.’ She took the money. ‘You can’t imagine …’
‘I can imagine, actually.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Why couldn’t you have been Frank’s agent? How he would have liked you.’
‘Did he not like my father?’
Claire shrugged and backed the car out. ‘It was a business arrangement.’
Quentin gave a definitive nod, like final punctuation. To have said anything more would have been disloyal to his father.
Michael stood at the unlocked gate, holding it open for the car to leave. Quentin raised a hand in farewell as he passed the boy, whose face remained stony, impassive.
She navigated the icy, narrow roads carefully. ‘Would you have just rung me up if there’d been a phone? Not come all the way out here?’
‘I would have brought you this news myself no matter what,’ he said, knowing this to be a lie. ‘Will you get the telephone reconnected? My father will need to talk to you. I could ring you too.’
‘It’s not worth it. I’ll be leaving here. Soon.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘I don’t know. But we could barely eke by here while Frank was alive and sending money. And now? I will sell this place as soon as I can, even if it’s at a loss. But where we’ll go? I can’t think that far ahead. I’ll let you know when I see you again. I will figure out everything by then; well, maybe not everything. There’s too much.’
He smiled to himself as she drove towards Woodstock. He would see her again. ‘I’ll come as soon as I return from California.’
‘Will you bring my letters too? I wrote to him all the time, replied to all his letters. I wrote to him even after he quit writing to me. I don’t know if he saved them, of course. But if he did—’
‘You can rely on me.’
She stopped at the Woodstock bus stop by a newsstand where stout matrons in headscarves and carrying empty shopping bags awaited the bus into Oxford. The car idled and she reached out a cold, rough hand. ‘Thank you, Quentin. Thank you for bringing him home. For everything.’
Quentin took off his glove. Took off both gloves. ‘Put them on. They’ll keep you warm.’
‘I can’t take them.’
‘Of course you can. You need them.’
‘They’re too fine,’ she said, stroking the soft leather.
‘I have others,’ he lied.
She put the gloves on her hands. The bus throttled up, spewing an excess of exhaust upon the already dirty snow. He started to open the car door.
‘Would you do me one more favour?’ she asked.
‘Anything,’ he said. Then he cleared his throat, and added, needlessly legalistically, ‘In my power.’
‘My name.’
‘What?’
‘You haven’t said my name once.’
‘I haven’t? That seems astonishing, doesn’t it? Claire. Claire Carson.’
She nodded, smiled. Her eyes were blue and bright, gleaming like votive candles, and suddenly the small cold confines of the car felt like sacred space, suffused with significance.
‘I will come back,’ he said.
‘Good.’
They got out of the car together, and she leaned against it, smiling. He joined the line of matrons, and got on the bus, taking a seat at the back where he could see her, waving in farewell. He returned her wave until the gears ground into first, and the bus rattled away and turned a corner. Under that drear winter sky, her warm brightness highlighted by the cold snow, she seemed to him like a slender flame.
Before he died in 2007, just as he clutched his chest, and fell to the ground in the Oxford Circus Tube station, Quentin Castle thought he saw her waving to him again, not wavering as a ghost, but brilliant, warm, tangible as she looked against that snowy background. In that last moment he would cry out her name: Claire! The crowd gathering round him, mobile phones frantically dialling, thought he was crying out for air, and respectfully stepped back. Claire! he cried again while his heart attacked him, beat wildly, wildly till someone knelt and asked him what he wanted. Too late; death had taken him.
In this regard Quentin Castle the literary agent, a man temperate, shrewd and circumspect, shared a fundamental connection with Francis Carson, the garrulous drunk, reciter of poetry, singer of duets, erstwhile genius, renowned lover whose flame had beckoned hundreds of women into his arms. As death exploded in his chest, Francis Carson too had tried to cry out Claire! and though he could not speak, hers was the last image, that face, those blue eyes, wavering before his vision, blurring underwater.
PART II
CHAPTER NINE
THE POST-WAR MODEL
Quentin Castle finally arrived back at Number 11 to find the agency in an uproar, Monica physicall
y putting herself between Miss Marr’s desk and a half-dozen gentlemen of the press, demanding to speak to Albert. Miss Sherrill sat in Miss Marr’s chair, talking on the phone, saying curtly, ‘Lady Sybil, I am not in the habit of dealing with wailing women. You must contain yourself and be reasonable. Call back when you are lucid. No, I am not putting you off, I am merely …’
As she spoke, Miss Sherrill waved Quentin into his father’s office, and when he opened the door, Miss Marr greeted him in a shrill voice of pure outrage. ‘Did you have to send the press to us? Look at them!’
‘Now, now, Miss Marr.’ Albert rose and came to her. ‘Quentin was quite right. Who else can speak for poor Francis? He’s our client, after all. Was.’
‘I shall never get any work done today.’
‘Of course you will,’ Albert soothed. ‘Bring us a nice cup of tea, will you?’ He closed the door behind her and leaned against it. ‘She sometimes makes me feel like I work for her, and not the other way round. Well, lad, you look like hell, if I must say.’
Quentin wanted to protest that he was no longer a lad, but held his tongue. He had bigger bones of contention. He brought out Claire’s note.
Predictably Albert reacted by going red in the face and insisting there was no need for Quentin to go to California. Shipping the body back was a mere matter of forms, international forms, fine, but mere paperwork that did not require the junior partner’s actual presence. And all the expense that would entail. Quentin lied without a single qualm, saying Mrs Carson had asked him to go, and that the firm must now stay on the sunny side of the FMB or stand to lose Francis as their client. Albert saw the wisdom, especially after he was promised a new and almost finished novel in the second suitcase that Quentin would bring back. Besides, Albert reasoned aloud, Castle Ltd could eventually deduct Quentin’s expenses from Carson’s royalties.
Quentin went home to pack, where he lied to Florence as well, that Mrs Carson had asked him to escort her husband’s body home. This lie too was easier than he would have thought possible. Certainly easier than saying that Claire Carson’s plight and dignity touched his heart. That he had never met a woman, anyone really, so freely open with her sorrows, her troubles, her love, her fears and failures; he had never before breathed the air of such candour. He could not say that though it was winter, Quentin had found Claire Carson warm, refreshing as a spring rain.
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