Three Strange Angels
Page 34
‘I shall. Your wife—’
‘And you are sacked as of today. As of this moment. You will have three months’ wages, but you will not come back tomorrow. Is that clear?’
‘I—I—’
He slammed the phone down. Slowly he turned to face Claire. He took in the whole, this final vision: her ash-blonde hair, the blue of her eyes, her tanned arms and bare feet, her lips parted, as though she might speak, offer up some of the conventional phrases she had always so disdained. He could not bear it. In two steps he crossed the floor, took her in his arms, roughly, brought her up against his body with all the strength he possessed, he held her, kissed her, the fierce, last kiss of a man who knows that as much of time and the world is left to him, between here and the grave, whatever else he might do or achieve, or become, this is the end, he is about to go under once and for all, to drown forever, the waters closing over his head as the sky blurred above.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SMOKE AND SHADOW
Quentin Castle kept the vow he made that day. He never saw Claire Carson again. As the head of Castle Literary, he oversaw Francis Carson’s estate, but Gordon Pennypacker signed all the cheques and letters; on those few occasions when Mrs Carson called the firm with a question, Pennypacker spoke with her. Pennypacker penned the agency’s public statement when Claire died in the 1979 plane crash.
However when news of that crash reached Quentin Castle, he collapsed in his office, and had to be taken to hospital; his staff feared he was having a heart attack. Even when released, his grief was disordered, extravagant; he acted like a madman for days, and then he simply fell into a stupor, refusing to speak, refusing food and drink, clutching his personal copy of Some of These Days to his chest. His doctors were concerned for him. Florence and his children pitied him. His friends and colleagues feared for him. Louisa, personally, came to the house (she had never met Florence) and took over the cooking. To no avail. Pennypacker delivered the letter from Michael Carson’s solicitor, brought it to Quentin’s home, and gave it to him.
The letter read that Michael Carson, as the chosen executor to his mother’s estate, withdrew his father’s work from Castle Literary Ltd; the agreement between Albert and Francis in 1937 was based on a handshake, and this note sufficed to sever the connection. Further instructions would be pending.
Pennypacker began, ‘I’ve heard they’ve chosen—’
‘I’ve no wish to know. I count on you to handle everything.’
‘Of course. Will we see you back at Number 11 soon, sir?’
‘Not soon.’
Florence, unequal to her husband’s grief, his refusal to eat or speak, or engage, unable to endure the grim and distant looks he gave her and his children, beseeched Louisa Partridge to take him to Italy, to her house in the hills above Fiesole. Louisa concurred immediately. Quentin neither agreed, nor refused. Florence packed his suitcase and Louisa came to collect him. He went without complaint, without enthusiasm. He allowed himself to be moved like a piece of luggage.
Once there he sat in the Tuscan sunshine on Louisa’s terrace. He had no appetite, nor sought any sustenance. He stayed alive. He didn’t know quite how or why. Though Louisa let him wallow, undisturbed in his despondence, she requested that Pennypacker send new, fresh manuscripts for consideration. She left them by his chair. She knew that at some point the lifelong tug of work – thirty years – would rouse him, the old habits would press, that London would eventually beckon, that he would return, and pick up the reins of his old life. Those basic, stolid qualities of his character would reassert themselves. Eventually.
One afternoon Louisa brought out to him a letter from Mary. She sat across from him until he deigned to open it. After he read it, he passed it to her.
Mary wrote that Michael had severed any but official correspondence with his sisters. Mary and Catherine each had a letter from him advising that, as executor of their mother’s estate, he intended to sell the Linton Road house to be carved into flats. Mary and Catherine would each receive one third of the selling price. On a specified date they could go to the house to take what they wanted. A security guard from Great Dane Enterprises opened the house for them, remained there while they were inside, and locked it when they left. Furniture, clothes, bits of childhood memorabilia, that’s all Mary and Catherine found at Linton Road. Michael had already been through the house with movers who, on his instructions, had packed up all the documents, the papers, Claire’s vast trove of photographs, boxes and trunks of drafts of their father’s novels, notes, letters, invoices, shards and scraps and reams of paper – all of it in total Claire-chaos. Michael had the whole removed to his country home, Woodlands, to the fourth floor where he had lived as a boy. Mary wrote: I have heard that Michael personally went through everything before he burnt it, Mum’s photographs, Da’s papers, their letters, your letters, all of it. Everything either one of them had ever created. They say there were bonfires behind the gardener’s cottage, and that the pall of smoke hung over Woodlands for days.
‘So,’ said Louisa, ‘is that the end of it, then? The spite and revenge of an angry boy destroying his parents’ lives.’
‘He is not a boy.’
‘He is still angry, and loveless, stinking rich, and pitiful.’
‘I don’t pity him.’
‘Michael Carson can never destroy the fact that she loved you.’
‘Did she?’
‘I feel certain she did,’ Louisa said. She could speak that much in truth. She gave him back his letter and left him there.
He tilted his face to the sun and the Fiesole hills, remembering the joy, the discovery he had known in that fourth-floor room at Woodlands, remembering the framed picture of the be-wigged cleric, the high old bed, the view that looked out to the distant folly and the footpath to folly. Once he had believed that love and death were infinite, and now he knew he was wrong. Only cold death was infinite. Love, like fire, vanishes into smoke and shadow and silence. Ashes crumble. Time rolls on and over, heedless as the wind that blew pale, poisonous oleander blossoms along the flagstones at his feet.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank Pamela Malpas and Gill Jackson for their support and enthusiasm, and a special thanks to Peggy K. Johnson, the author’s ever-best ally.
© Laura Kalpakian
First published in Great Britain 2015
ISBN 978 0 7198 1775 5 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7198 1776 2 (mobi)
ISBN 978 0 7198 1777 9 (pdf)
ISBN 978 1 910208 12 0 (print)
Robert Hale Limited
Clerkenwell House
Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT
www.halebooks.com
The right of Laura Kalpakian to be identified as
author of this work has been asserted by her
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988