The girl was still standing in the same position, holding her mug of soup. ‘Has anything else been taken?’ she asked.
‘It wasn’t burglars,’ said Annie. ‘Just my ex-husband.’
The girl said, ‘Bad luck. Are you going round there to make him give the stuff back.’
‘He can have it,’ Annie told her. ‘Drink up.’
Annie sat on the remaining chair, the girl on a cushion on the floor. So – Julian had tried to take the computer when he thought she was away, been foiled, and come back when she really was. He and Tamsin must be asleep on her mother’s sheets even now. She’d have to think about all this. In the meanwhile, there was the girl. She asked, ‘Where does your uncle live?’
‘Clapton,’ she said, wincing as she bit into a piece of chocolate Annie had given her from a bar she’d found in her handbag.
‘Toothache?’ enquired Annie.
‘Flared up on the train here,’ the girl told her. ‘My name’s Melanie, by the way.’
‘Annie Vane,’ Annie said. ‘You’re a long way from Clapton.’
‘I was stupid. I just took off. Dad was getting on to me again. I thought – I’ll go. He’d threatened me with a bashing for something I’d done and I ran for it. I got a bus into town, took my savings out of the Abbey National, the lot, and I got a train down here and then I was standing there in that big station, trying to make head or tail of the Underground map they have there and I was feeling frightened by then, what with being in London and what I’d done, so then a man came up—’ She looked at Annie’s face, which had fallen, and said, ‘I know. Silly, wasn’t I? So he said he and his mate had a cheap minicab service, and they couldn’t go round the streets picking up passengers like a normal taxi, but they could offer to take me to where I was going. So – I said Clapton and he said well, he could do it for two pounds fifty. Anyway, we went outside the station and there was the car, one man in the back already, then the other fellow shows me in, fastens my seatbelt – that was when I started to feel worried. He kind of lingered over it. Know what I mean?’
Annie nodded. ‘So after that he sets off at a lick and we go for miles. London’s so big. I thought it was all right. They asked me questions, friendly, like why was I here and like a mug, I told them. Stupid, wasn’t I? Then I began to ask when we’d get there – “Ten minutes,” says the one in the back. Ten minutes went past so I asked again – “Soon enough,” said the one driving and then he put his hand on my leg, right up there, and the other one laughed. So from that time my one idea was to get out of the car. I waited and waited and then we were somewhere, at the traffic lights. Fast as I could I unlocked the door and chucked it open and started calling out to people to help me, while the driver was trying to get his hand over my mouth and stop me from undoing the seatbelt at the same time. So I’m yelling, and the people going by are taking no notice. Finally I bit his hand and he yelled and took it away, just as I managed to undo the seatbelt. I threw myself sideways out of the car and landed on the pavement, and I got up and started running. When I turned back, the car had gone from the lights, and the traffic was moving on. I suppose they had to go on when the lights changed, but I just kept on running – I thought they’d drive round looking for me. So then I thought I’d go to a police station. I thought I’d rather face my dad than them. They were horrible …’ She paused. ‘But I couldn’t see a policeman, or a police station, and it was so dark. I just turned into your doorway thinking I’d sit down for a minute – but, of course, I fell asleep …’
Annie was shocked. ‘What an experience. Well – I don’t know. You ought to phone home to say you’re safe—’
‘I only want to go to my uncle’s,’ Melanie said. ‘I’ll phone him, if you like …’
But Jim Allardyce of Clapton was not on the telephone, they discovered. Annie was tired. ‘Look – I’m whacked,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty late. Why don’t you sleep in the spare room for tonight? We’ll sort it all out in the morning. Have a couple of aspirin if your tooth’s aching …’
Melanie, cautiously, agreed.
‘You can lock your door,’ said Annie.
As they went upstairs Melanie asked, ‘Did your husband really take the settee?’
‘Yes,’ Annie said wearily. ‘We’re lucky he left the beds.’
As Annie turned back her counterpane she half-expected to find her sheets missing. But Julian had only taken the good ones. She lay down. It had been a long day, starting with her walk over the fields to visit her sister and say goodbye. She’d caught the train which stopped at every station, found a girl asleep on her step, found Julian had robbed the house.
It seemed a long time since she had rung her mother, saying, ‘I’ll come down for Christmas. Julian won’t be with me – he’s left. We’re getting a divorce.’ It was hard to bring out the words.
To her surprise her mother was instantly sympathetic and not disconcerted by the news. ‘Come down at once, Annie. Have you got a good solicitor?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’d better go to Mr Danby. I’ll tell Howard. Come as soon as you can.’
As Annie put the phone down in Rutherford Street, she had the sense that the world she had thought so stable was changing quickly and would go on changing from that moment on.
Annie took the mainline train, then the small local train to Cottersley. She got out at the little station and, as the moon was full, walked quiet country roads for a mile and a half, stepped through the village of Belshaw and went on, in clear, cold air, with stars glittering overhead, until she reached the open gates of Froggett’s, the big red brick house where her parents lived.
It had been built in the twenties by a prosperous farming family, who had pulled down the old farmhouse in favour of something modern and convenient. But war-time conditions led the ageing farmer to sell his land to his neighbour, Sir Henry Fellows. When Sir Henry would not meet his price for the house, Mr Froggett put it on the market and sold it, with an acre and a half of land, to young Howard Browning, a promising novelist and his first wife, a sculptor. Later the sculptor left, making way for Juliet Cunningham, a painter. Their daughters, Annie and her younger sister Jasmine, had been brought up in the house. The Brownings, unmarried on principle, had been happy together for thirty-five years. The sisters were used to Juliet’s first husband, Howard’s first wife and the children of their later marriages coming and staying for long periods – and their friends, children’s friends, lovers. Annie’s in-laws, the Vanes, and her sister Jasmine’s in-laws, the Fellowses, called the set-up ‘bohemian’, and made it sound like a criticism.
Annie walked round the side of the house and into the vast kitchen-cum-living room. There was a small sitting room behind the kitchen, with a hard sofa, pictures the Brownings had acquired or been given over the years except for the ones they really liked, a lot of dark, flowered wallpaper and a piano. But the real life of the place happened in the kitchen, where an Aga and a selection of small electric fires kept areas of the room warm in winter, although you had to know where to sit. A long table took all the clutter of the house, and a big dresser at the back held plates, dried flowers, old, interesting bottles, Annie’s mother’s and grandmother’s jewellery – in a biscuit tin – and other odds and ends. Juliet, who had been sitting beside Howard on a sofa at the far end of the room, watching a small television, stood up and came towards her. Her father looked up from his book. ‘Annie!’ he exclaimed. Annie sadly put down her small suitcase and a plastic bag containing Christmas presents bought in happier times.
When they were all round the table, Annie drinking soup and her parents some of Howard’s powerful blackcurrant wine, her mother told her, ‘Jas looked in earlier. She’s invited us up to the castle for Boxing Day lunch. I couldn’t really refuse. I hope you don’t mind. I told her about Julian by the way. She’s very upset. You needn’t come to the lunch if you don’t want to – Mary will understand. Jas is popping across tomorrow to say hallo.’
‘How is
she?’ asked Annie. ‘I haven’t seen her for months. She sent me a postcard from the West Indies but I couldn’t read her writing. I think she’d got something on the card – suntan oil, I expect.’
‘She’s still delighted with life,’ Howard said. ‘She and Mary are going round the village visiting the poor, though, of course, there aren’t a lot of the poor left since Bernard sold off so many expired leases to his pals in the City. The real poor are all over on the council estate outside Cottersley.’
‘Mary goes there, too,’ Juliet told him. Her husband, even though his daughter Jasmine had married Nigel, son of Sir Bernard and Lady Mary Fellows, of Durham House, which stood half a mile over the fields from his house, was still in principle rigorously opposed to the Fellows family and all their doings. His wife, though, was a friend of Lady Mary.
‘Isn’t there usually a meet on Boxing Day?’ Annie asked.
‘Called off due to lack of foxes,’ Howard reported with satisfaction.
‘And the old MFH died last month,’ added Juliet.
‘Of a broken heart, I expect,’ Howard said remorselessly.
‘Your father’s been canvassing the local farmers, with some success. They’ve been trapping the foxes on the sly too.’
‘That’s still not much fun for the foxes,’ Annie said.
‘Better than being hunted down by a pack of yobbos on big horses before being torn to pieces by dogs,’ Howard told her. ‘And at least people don’t have to put up with their chickens being killed all the year round, and cats and everything else that moves. They might be in mourning for old Gilbert and the foxes at Durham House but people are pretty relieved they won’t be out the day after Christmas knocking down their fences and galloping through their gardens.’
Howard looked thoroughly pleased with himself. Nearing seventy now he was still very strong and vigorous, hardened by his activities on the small area behind the house, where he grew vegetables, and fruit, and kept goats and chickens in the wooden hut he had built with his own hands so as to have a study away from the house while the children were growing up. Ironically, since they had, he had not written another of the novels which had made him fairly famous in the fifties and sixties, while Juliet, who had painted in the big kitchen during the period when her daughters were at home, putting down her brush to stir a stew on the Aga or find a missing kitten, was still at work, respected, though never very highly paid.
Annie sometimes wondered how her parents managed for money, even though they spent very little. Juliet referred to this obliquely when she warned Annie, ‘There’s a man staying at Durham House I’d like you to avoid if you go there. He’s an academic called Dr Sam Anstruther and seems to be quite a friend of the family. An American. Ever since Jas casually mentioned we’d found an old suitcase upstairs with what looks like some stuff of Aunt Christian’s in it he’s been after us like a ferret down a rabbit hole. He works for a large firm in New York which deals in old books and manuscripts. He wants to look over the contents and offer a price. Only we don’t want to let him. Jas thought he was a medical doctor at first but it seems he’s a doctor of literature.’
‘Why don’t you just tell him you can’t be bothered?’
‘I’ve tried, but he won’t give up,’ Howard said.
‘What’s in the case?’ asked Annie.
‘It looks like letters and manuscripts and a poem in Dorian Jefferson’s handwriting,’ Howard explained. ‘We’d never have found it at all if I hadn’t had to go through the attic to get at a leak in the roof. While I was scrabbling around up there I saw this small suitcase stuck behind a pipe. I think Dorian must have left it behind – he came down here to escape the bombing in 1942 after he’d been staying with Christian and her husband. He was drunk when he arrived and I think he must have been too drunk when he left to remember it.
‘Christian and James had had a terrible time – he came down with two girls, one an art student and the other a WAAF who was overstaying her leave. They couldn’t work out who was sleeping with who, they ate everything in the house and, obviously, food was very scarce at the time – they didn’t even bring ration books. Then there was Dorian’s drinking and vomiting all over the place, the WAAF declared she was pregnant, Christian was in despair – writing at the time, I suppose – and finally James, showing no courage or conscience at all, managed to persuade them to move off here. Dorian arrived without the girls and departed, if I recall, with my only two warm shirts. They were wool, and I missed them bitterly throughout the war years. I got some more towards the end but they were French and not as good as the others.’ Howard never referred to his career in British Intelligence during the Second World War, nor to active service in France, before the invasion. Now he looked at his daughter and said, ‘Annie. You’re looking very thin. Juliet – cut her a sandwich. You’re not eating enough.’
‘I don’t want a sandwich, really,’ Annie said.
‘Julian’s left home, Howard,’ his wife reminded him. ‘I don’t suppose she feels much like cooking. Have you forgotten what it’s like when something like that happens?’ She looked at Annie and said, ‘I think he has. Extraordinary, considering how many times it’s happened to him – well, I haven’t forgotten. Is there another woman, Annie?’
‘Yes. A client – Tamsin Bell.’
Juliet shook her head, ‘Doesn’t seem familiar.’
The room was very quiet. It was lit by a few lamps. On the walls Annie saw paintings and drawings by Juliet and others, on the big dresser, the collection of old ladles, from very small to huge, which she and Jasmine had played with when they were toddlers. The electric fire standing not far from them, on the flagstones, failed to warm and Annie was glad of her thermal vest and socks. Here in the silence she felt emptied and was not sure she welcomed the feeling.
When Juliet had wondered if she might have heard of Tamsin Bell she was not being unrealistic. In spite of thirty years of semi-rural life, the Brownings were still in touch with a larger world, though not, Annie reflected, Tamsin’s or Julian’s. Her parents had never got on with Julian. The Brownings had been astonished, on a visit to the Vanes, by the big house in Surrey, set in manicured grounds, with its own swimming pool. Howard had little in common with Julian’s father, a well-off solicitor, and Juliet even less with Julian’s mother. ‘What does she do all day?’ They had been surprised by Julian’s job, producing artwork for large companies and advertising agencies, rejigging corporate images, even advising on the décor of offices. They had been amazed by the amount of profit in it, once the firm had got on its feet. Annie’s claim, that the firm was only successful because Julian was so good at his job, had been received by them with astonishment. Annie had been furious with both of them as they expressed childlike interest and surprise which she knew to be masking distaste.
‘Is this really a final break?’ Howard was asking. ‘People do come and go, after all.’
Along with the plain living and high thinking at Froggett’s, Annie recalled, there had also been a lot of affairs, her parents’ and everyone else’s. When she was five a young woman had tried to hang herself in the orchard. Annie had found her dangling and choking and run in to tell her mother. They’d cut her down in time. ‘She was in love with Howard,’ Juliet had explained. It made no sense at the time. Now she frowned, uncertain whether the concept of coming and going, well understood at Froggett’s, really applied to herself and Julian. She certainly thought Julian’s departure had been final.
‘Come and live here for a bit until you decide what to do,’ Howard offered.
If Julian wanted to come back, thought Annie, he would never come to find her here, at Froggett’s, where, he said, he was made to feel like a baby-eater or a Nazi. She said, ‘Thanks – but I think I’d better start making a life for myself in London.’
She slept well in her cold room and woke with sun coming through the window. She’d needed to sleep but felt odd as she went downstairs, a jersey over her nightdress, as if her head were full of c
old air and her legs full of lead. In the kitchen sat Jasmine, wearing make-up, in a smart tweed skirt, expensive country shoes and a cashmere twin set, her longish blonde hair held back with a barrette. Also at the table was a tall man in a tweed suit. His skin being more biscuit-coloured than red and his easy posture in his chair made Annie suspect he was the American book dealer.
Annie got some coffee from the stove, feeling embarrassed about her jersey and nightdress. Jasmine came over and kissed her cheek, whispering, ‘Poor thing – we’ll talk later.’
‘You look like a picture in Harper’s, Jas.’
‘Have a roll,’ Jasmine said, handing her one. ‘Sorry – Home Baked, Day Three.’
How they’d longed for a sliced loaf from the baker’s as children. How they’d hated Day Three bread, a unique combination of utter toughness and crumbliness. Annie succeeded in cutting it, tried to put butter on it. It crumbled.
Howard came through the back door, caught sight of the party, put down a bucket and left, saying he had to look at one of the goats.
‘This is Sam Anstruther, Annie. He’s a partner in Watney-Aspell in New York. They deal in old books and manuscripts. He’s after some stuff in the attic they think belonged to Great-Aunt Christian. Sam – this is my sister, Annie Vane.’
‘I’d love to take a look at the suitcase, Mrs Vane. Two American universities are already excited by the thought of some new writings by Christian Cunningham.’
‘I couldn’t work out what was in the case,’ Annie said. ‘I suppose somebody’s looked?’
‘They just opened and closed it,’ Jasmine said. ‘But they could see it wasn’t the poet’s socks – the luggage of the man who left it here in the first place—’
‘If it was Dorian Jefferson who left it here,’ Anstruther countered.
Anstruther seemed keen but cautious. The whole set-up – an old-fashioned house, the off-hand attitude of the residents to what, in scholar’s terms, was a crock of gold and which, if sold, would certainly pay for some central heating, perhaps a new house – could be some brilliant British con-trick. ‘All I’d want to do initially is take a look, perhaps photocopy a page or two and consult my partners in New York.’
In Search of Love, Money & Revenge Page 4