I was in the habit of putting in a few hours at the showroom on Saturday afternoons. If there was such a thing as a passing trade in classic convertibles, that was the time for it. You wouldn’t have known it that Saturday, though. A week had passed since Tabitha’s and Dominic’s dinner party, a full month since their wedding. Autumn had announced itself in a succession of wet and windy days, which can’t have made anyone eager for open-top motoring. The leaves were yellowing on the trees across the road and there was a chill edge to the breeze. It hardly promised to be a classic afternoon for business.
And so it proved. Depressingly so. Until a smart red MGB GT pulled into the forecourt. Sports cars driven by attractive young women are an ad man’s ideal of glamour, of course, but this particular example didn’t quite conform to type. The woman who got out was certainly young thirtyish, I reckoned and strikingly attractive, with short dark hair that only seemed to magnify her large sparkling eyes, but she was dressed in a strangely formal black suit and white blouse, as if for the office. Though not the outer office, if the cut of the suit and the flashing gold of pendant and brooch were anything to go by. She didn’t look like anyone’s assistant but her own. The self assured expression on her face suggested she knew the impact she made.
She paused by my lovingly restored Bentley Continental which Dominic’s father claimed he was still seriously considering and ran an approving glance over it. I rose from my chair and went out to meet her.
Somehow, I already knew we weren’t going to be discussing cars.
“Thinking of trading up?” I ventured.
“Hardly.” She peeled off one of her pale kid gloves and the thought flashed through my mind: how many women of her age still wore gloves to drive in? Approximately none. But then she wasn’t in the least like anyone else. She seemed both older and younger than I’d have said she was, and she had a smile that was effortlessly superior and winsomely appealing all at the same time. “You’re the proprietor?”
“Of Napier Classic Convertibles, yes. Chris Napier.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Napier.” We shook hands. “Pauline Lucas.”
“Of course, if it’s new you’re interested in, Miss Lucas ‘
“No, no. Actually, it’s you I’m interested in, Mr. Napier.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You’ve been running Napier Classic Convertibles for some time, haven’t you?”
“Eight years. But I don’t ‘
“It looks as if you’re doing well. The showroom. This beauty. And the other ones tucked away up at Bowershaw Farm.”
“You’ve been to the workshop?”
“Yes. Mark didn’t seem to mind showing me around.”
“I’ll bet he didn ‘t, I thought. But what I said was: “Are you a buyer, Miss Lucas?”
“No.” “Then what?”
“A solicitor. Acting on behalf of your ex-wife.”
“Miv? What the hell does she want with a solicitor?”
“Why don’t we sit down? Then I can explain.” She smiled sweetly, as if I were being obtuse. I was certainly grateful that there were no customers about and that Les, the Grayson’s salesman, was busy on the telephone. I hadn’t heard from Miv token Christmas cards apart in years, and I hadn’t expected to. Certainly not through a legal intermediary.
We sat down and she handed me a business card. Pauline A. Lucas, LLB
(Hons), with an address in Llandudno. The solicitor who’d handled the divorce for Miv was based in London, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d found a new one in North Wales. But as for setting her on me, that did surprise me.
“Mark said you live and breathe classic cars.”
“Did he?”
“He also said business was booming.”
“He doesn’t see the books.”
“No. But then neither does your ex-wife.”
“Why should she? It’s my business, not hers.”
“That’s not entirely clear, Mr. Napier, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, didn’t she put up some of the capital?”
“What if she did? It was a gift. A parting gesture of goodwill.” Miv had always been generous as well as forgiving. She’d been awash with royalties from “Lover Come Back’ at the time I’d set up Napier Classic Convertibles. She’d known I couldn’t turn to my family for help, so, she’d stepped in. And I’d been grateful. She’d made it clear, after all, that it was a gift. Not a loan of any kind. But she hadn’t had a legal adviser like Pauline Lucas then. “You’re not going to tell me she wants the money back?”
“No. I’m not.”
“What does she want, then?”
“The point is that her gift, loan, call it what you will, constitutes a share in the business a stake in the profits.”
I gaped at her. “You’re not serious.”
“Completely. Of course, she doesn’t want to play an active role, but as, in effect, your sleeping partner, she’s certainly entitled ‘
“She’s not entitled to a thing!” I instantly wished I hadn’t shouted.
Les was staring at me across the wide expanse of the showroom, telephone mercifully still clamped to his ear. “This is absolutely ridiculous.”
Pauline Lucas cocked an insouciant eyebrow. “Do I take it you deny she’s entitled to a share of the business proportional to her original contribution?”
“Yes. Please do take that.” I leaned across the desk for emphasis.
“As my last word on the matter.”
“I fear it’s unlikely to be that.”
“It was an outright gift. With no strings attached.”
“Not according to my client.”
“Fallen on hard times, has she?”
“I can’t discuss her financial affairs with you, Mr. Napier. But certainly your own prospects are considerably rosier than hers.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
She lowered her voice. “I’m referring to the Carnoweth inheritance.”
I suddenly felt sorry for Miv. That she should have been reduced to carping about what might or mightn’t come my way when my parents died, given the contempt she’d always expressed for the moneyed classes in general and my relatives in particular, was little short of pathetic.
But pathos clearly wasn’t going to cut any ice with Pauline Lucas. She was there to see what she could get for her client, and I honestly didn’t know which to offer her: a pay-off, or the bluntest of rejections. I ended up somewhere in the middle.
“When Miv and I got divorced, Miss Lucas ‘
“I wasn’t acting for her then.”
“Perhaps that’s just as well.”
“Perhaps it is for you.”
“Tell her if there’s something she wants to talk to me about, then that’s what she should do talk to me.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “Well, this visit was really only intended to clarify the situation in my mind. It’s certainly achieved that.”
“Oh, good.”
“I’ll pass on your comments. And then …” c “Yes?”
“I’ll be in touch.” She rose effortlessly from her chair and smiled again. “Goodbye for now, Mr. Napier. And thank you for seeing me.”
I watched her walk back out to the MG, slip elegantly into the driving seat and start away. As the car flashed out of sight beneath the railway bridge, Les ostentatiously cleared his throat. He was no longer on the telephone.
“Wife trouble, Chris?” he asked with a sympathetic grin.
“Ex-wife trouble, if you must know.”
“Ah. The worst kind. At times like this, you must regret giving up the booze.”
“Very funny.” But it wasn’t, of course. Not at all. It was actually far truer than it was funny. By a long way.
In a sense, I’ve lived my whole life in the shadow of the Carnoweth inheritance. There was a time when I knew nothing about it, and ano
ther longer time when I didn’t care about it, but it was always there. I was always involved in it, wittingly or not, willingly or not. I remember telling Miv once how grateful she should be that there was no money in her family. She’d thought I was satirizing her politics, but not so.
It wasn’t Uncle Joshua’s fault. He was simply trying to share his good fortune with those dearest to him. It’s hardly an unworthy motive. Why shouldn’t he put the Lanyons before his own family if he wanted to?
Gran would have said blood ties were indissoluble, but if her brother had returned penniless from Alaska and looked to her for charity, she might have changed her tune.
Ironically, it’s possible Uncle Joshua did decide to feather-bed our futures as well as the Lanyons’just before the end. Maybe he’d been mulling it over for years. Maybe, as the two families grew closer together and old age softened his differences with Gran, he came round to thinking of all of us as his beneficiaries. If so, it would explain what he’d meant the last time I ever spoke to him. Which was also the last time any of us spoke to him.
It was the afternoon of Thursday 7 August 1947, steamily hot and languidly still. The cathedral shimmered in the haze. Doves cooed in the trees around the lawn at Tredower House. Life itself seemed stunned into slow motion. Nicky and I were playing tennis at walking pace, too drowsy even to dispute points, when Uncle Joshua ambled down from the house and waved to us. He was wearing a three-piece linen suit, an open-necked shirt, a straw hat with the brim turned down and the stout boots he favoured in all weathers. He looked if anything older than he was, on account of his snowy white beard and alder-manly paunch. But his walk was that of a much younger man firm and jaunty, with his shoulders pushed back. He never carried a stick and I’d never had to slow down to let him catch up. That measured stride of his had a momentum of its own. It bore the strength of his past.
“Your mother wants you, Nicky,” he called.
“What for, Uncle Josh?”
“For a good reason,” he said gruffly. Then he grinned. “It could be to ask what you’ll be wanting to take to Nanceworthal next week. Why don’t you go and find out?”
“Righto, Uncle.” As Nicky scampered off, I shouted after him that I’d probably set off home for tea before he came back. He waved an acknowledgement and went on.
“I’ll walk with you into town if you like, Christian,” said Uncle Joshua. “I’m going that way.”
So it was agreed and we set off down the drive. I asked what he was going into town for and he tapped his nose, grunted and eventually delivered a one-word answer.
“Business.”
“Dad says it’s too hot for business.”
“He’s right. But this has waited long enough. I’ll not postpone it just because the mercury’s rising.”
“I hope the fine weather lasts all summer.”
“It probably will. Looking forward to starting up there next month?”
He nodded towards the outline of Truro School on the south-eastern horizon.
“I think so.”
“Hah! You’ve got it about right there, young ‘un. The future’s a two-edged sword.” He sighed. “But you can’t always be leaving it in the scabbard, can you?”
“I don’t know, Uncle.”
“No. And why should you, eh? Don’t listen to me. I’m just an old man rambling on.”
No more was said until we’d descended the hill into Truro and started along St. Austell Street. The silence was by no means uncomfortable.
It was congenial and utterly normal. Despite what he’d said, Uncle Joshua was never one to ramble on foot or in speech. He always had a direction in mind. But he didn’t always reveal what it was. When we stopped outside one house in a drab terrace and he gazed fixedly at the front door, I realized it must be the house where the Lanyons had once lived. But why he’d stopped there and what he was thinking1 couldn’t guess. He scratched his beard and tilted his hat back and gave a soulful sigh. And then we went on, round by Old Bridge Street into Cathedral Close, where we paused again in the welcome shade. There he lit a cigar and puffed it approvingly into life. He was the only man I knew who smoked such a thing. Woodbines and foul-smelling briars were the norm among the postwar manhood of Truro. Uncle Joshua’s cigars were just one more proof that twenty-three years away from Cornwall had left their mark.
“I need some advice, Christian,” he said at length. “Reckon you could give me some?”
“Me, Uncle?”
“Why not? You’re young enough to be impartial.”
“Nobody’s ever asked me for advice before.”
“Then it’s time somebody did.”
“What’sit about?”
“It’s about the difference between family and friends. Who do you put first?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well, imagine your sister Pam was in some kind of trouble. What would you do?”
“Help her out of it.”
“And if your friend Nicky was in trouble?”
“Help him out of it.”
“But if they were in trouble at the same time, who would you help first?”
“Well, I… I mean …”
“Tricky, ain’t it?”
“I know.” I grinned triumphantly. “I’d find a way to help both of them … simultaneously.” And my grin broadened with pride at being able to slip in such an exotic adverb.
Uncle Joshua laughed and patted me on the shoulder. “That’s a good answer. Mind you remember it. I will.”
“Is it valuable advice, Uncle?”
“Yes, young ‘un. I reckon it is.” He wedged his cigar between his teeth and we wandered round into High Cross. “Are you going home or to the shop?”
“Shop.”
“Then we part here. I’m for Lemon Street. Give my best regards to your parents. And to Lady Fan Todd, of course.” He’d started applying this humorously disrespectful dialect nickname to Gran since her move into credit drapery. “Tell her…” But he seemed to think better of asking me to pass on a message. He smiled. “It can keep. Off you go-‘
“Bye, Uncle.”
“Bye, Christian.”
I’d covered no more than a few yards when he called to me. “What is it, Uncle?”
“Nicky said you and he wanted to see the Wyatt Earp film they’re showing at the Plaza.”
“My Darling Clementine! Gosh, yes, we do.”
He grinned and tossed me a coin from his waistcoat pocket. It flashed silver in the sunlight. As I caught it, I saw that it was a half crown.
“Mind you get the best seats, then. No sense skimping.”
“Crikey! Thanks, Uncle.”
“Now be off with you.” He gestured with his cigar in affectionate dismissal, then turned and strode away along Cathedral Lane, while I made off towards River Street.
I never did get to see My Darling Clementine. Somehow, I hadn’t the heart to spend Uncle Joshua’s half crown so frivolously. Not when I knew I’d never see him again. The police traced his movements later and established that he’d called at his solicitor’s office in Lemon Street just after five o’clock, only to find that Mr. Cloke had gone to visit a client at Chacewater and wouldn’t be back that day. He’d made an appointment to see Cloke at eleven o’clock the following morning. He hadn’t said what he wanted to discuss, so nobody can ever know whether it concerned the terms of his will, because the appointment wasn’t kept. Joshua Carnoweth was murdered that night.
Moving to Pangbourne in 1970 had turned out to be one of my better decisions. Miv and I had just split up and I’d realized that if giving up alcohol was to be anything more than a vainglorious boast, I’d have to get out of London. Drink had already cost me my driving licence, so it was by train that I’d begun exploring the Thames Valley for a cheap but comfortable hideaway. The one I’d found and still lived in eleven years later was number four, Harrowcroft, an end-of-terrace cottage in The Moors, a potholed lane off the High Street, with a lean-to garage for the Triumph
Stag I’d promised myself at the end of my suspension and a small garden running down to the banks of the Pang.
It was no more than a five-minute walk from Grayson Motors and I should think I made it in about three that afternoon. Les’s presence had prevented me telephoning Miv straight after Pauline Lucas’s departure, but I didn’t propose to wait long before demanding an explanation from her. Fortunately for my blood pressure, she answered the first time I rang.
Beyond Recall Page 10
