by Jessica Mann
She was unmarried; had had a series of liaisons with various men, including a peer, to whom she had announced her engagement, and its breaking off, when she was eighteen. No evidence of homosexuality. Until a year ago, she had had a stable relationship for seven years with a Jewish attorney called Joseph Velikowski, who was now married to a much younger woman and running for Congress on a Republican ticket. Currently attached to Senator Edward Sullivan.
The computer had found little else to print out, except a list of serial numbers; Rosamund Sholto’s passport, British, renewed in 1978; National Insurance card, lapsed; driving licence, clean; accounts at some London stores, but all inactive, and one in regular use, at Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge; life membership of The National Trust, The Portia Club, the London Library; current and deposit account held at Buxton’s; subscriptions paid by standing order to The Architectural Association, the RIBA, Oxfam, Shelter, The National Council for Civil Liberties, Amnesty International, The Consumers Association, The Guardian Overseas Weekly Edition, the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, the Friends of the Earth, and the Contemporary Art Society.
‘She sounds just like us,’ Tamara said.
‘Well, like you. That’s why I thought you might have some good guesses about where she’d choose to go.’
‘She sounds like a rather sympathetic character. Not like a terrorist.’
‘A very unprofessional reaction,’ Ian said fondly.
The file also contained a sheaf of still pictures clipped from newspapers and magazines. Rosamund Sholto’s hair had always been straight and medium length, even when the fashion had been for crimps and curls; her clothes looked conventional and cosmetics restrained.
‘A denim lady,’ Tamara deduced. ‘Fisherman’s jerseys. Caftans. Clogs. Might even be a vegetarian.’
‘That’s a lot from this data!’
‘An inspired guess. Isn’t that what you need from me?’
‘If we weren’t both so tired I’d want something quite different from you,’ he said, yawning and stretching. ‘In books agents never seem to sleep, but I’m dead.’
‘Me too. Where are you going to start tomorrow?’
‘God knows. You’d have thought that with a face like hers she wouldn’t be able to lie low for long.’
‘Always assuming that the people who recognise her know that anyone is looking for her.’
Tamara slept deeply, but Ian was uneasy in his dreams, and woke her early to complain about them. He had been re-tracing his steps over the mountain, hunting for Sholto’s daughter, most of the night.
‘Your subconscious is telling you something,’ Tamara said. Her unremembered dreams had, as so often, presented her with conclusions upon waking. ‘You are doing something you are ashamed of.’
‘I can’t say I enjoy it, no.’
‘Well, you know what I think. I’d rather distrust Britton than Sholto’s daughter.’
‘We shall never agree about politics,’ he said, heaving himself up from the mattress that served as bed, sofa, table and chair. ‘Perhaps I’d sleep better on a proper bed,’ he grumbled. Tamara propped herself on her elbow to watch him through the open door, as he padded round the kitchen boiling water and measuring coffee grounds.
‘The trouble is, Ian, you oughtn’t to be doing this work.’
‘We have had this out before. Without people like me the world wouldn’t be safe for scholars like you.’
‘Up to a point I agree. And your usual job is all right. It isn’t so personal. It isn’t so close to home.’
Some dignitary was paying a State Visit to London that day, and even bicycles were held up by the jammed traffic. Tamara and Ian waited in a crowd of commuters, all cursing the antique flummery which halted normal life. ‘Could you lay off?’ Tamara asked. Her yellow hair blew across her face and she pulled its strands away from her lips. A lorry driver leaned enthusiastically out of his cab, but he caught sight of Ian’s bruiser’s face and withdrew. ‘It’s your nose. Nobody would respect you if you hadn’t broken it so elegantly.’
‘When we’re at your dig everyone will think I’m one of your conscript convict workmen.’ They leaned against each other. Most of the drivers had turned off their engines, and through the radio channels competing through open car windows, the commands of officers and clatter of hoofs and armour could be heard.
‘I do hope you’ll make it to my dig,’ Tamara said.
‘Perhaps I really will be a convict by then,’ he replied, gesturing at the black crown-stamped briefcase which was strapped to his carrier. ‘Tried and sentenced in camera. Solitary confinement. The prisoner in the iron mask.’
Tamara looked gravely at him. She said, ‘We are out of our depth.’ In all his previous work in the three years since they had been together, most of it, admittedly, routine, there had been a common purpose shared by Ian and his bosses, and by Tamara, as a knowledgeable representative of the public it was his duty to protect; the methods he had learnt and used had never been so deplorable as to cease, in his view, to justify his ends, and his ends had been unarguably, to him, desirable. But he had considered the problem of thoughtless obedience, and discussed it with Tamara too. He had resolved that his adherence to command would never be blind. He would not justify wrong doing on the grounds that superior authority had ordered it, and he believed that a questioning intelligence was probably valuable to his secret, authoritarian, almost-outside-the-law branch of the public service.
Ian Barnes had been recruited when he came down from university. He had taken examinations for entry to the Foreign Office, and undergone interviews over a period of days in a country house, where he had tried to show himself an embryo ambassador. The offer to transfer to a nameless and secret service had been made in one of those traditional rooms so familiar to television viewers, with oil paintings, leather books, mahogany furniture and a quiet man in a blue suit who offered him dry sherry. Ian had felt like an actor; sometimes he still did. But fictional heroes never questioned their duty.
‘I shall ask them to convince me,’ he said.
The shining cars, the glittering guards, crossed the waiting traffic, and then the policeman lowered his arm to wave it on. A huddle of pedestrians surged across the road, women wearing headscarves and dark glasses, men in anoraks, arabs in robes and yashmaks. One’s greatest friend could be unidentifiably disguised.
Chapter Ten
Sholto House dated from the period before the oil crisis of 1973 had reminded the western world that wealth was finite. The brief for competing architects had been generous, to design apartments in which families could enjoy family life. The council, which was the client, had commissioned a survey to produce one of those blinding glimpses of the obvious so typical of market research. The residents would like to have room to swing a cat and escape from a teenager. They would want somewhere to sit in the sun, dry their washing and grow their prize-winning sunflowers. They wanted privacy without loneliness.
Rosamund Sholto had entered the competition for practice, and won. Fifteen years later the building was a shrine for architectural pilgrims. It was twenty-one stories high, but did not look like a tower block because of the angled arrangement of the wings. It was surrounded by other council developments and overlooked an urban motorway, but because of its hanging gardens seemed to be protected from much of the neighbourhood’s noise. After a few years the council decided that the flats were too desirable to be used for clearing the waiting lists any more, and let them out for economic rents instead.
In the late summer and autumn, the gardens were thick with climbing plants and creepers. White roses dangled to meet the claret coloured Virginia creeper from the balcony below, and bay trees flourished in the smoky air, so that their top leaves met the passion flower of the barrister who lived on the top floor. The windows reflected the rich vegetation, and passers-by would stand in a specially constructed bay on the pedestrian bridge over the motorway to gaze at the remarkable building. Journalists were never certain whethe
r it had been called after the architect or her father.
The viewing bay was nearly always occupied. Busloads of Japanese tourists would click their cameras at this example of high density development. Architectural students would come to criticise.
This evening it was not too crowded for a good view. Satchiko found everything in England fascinating. Her glance darted from the busy highway below, to the passing English gentlemen in their city clothes, swinging their umbrellas. Her boyfriend said, ‘See how the reflection of the clouds makes the building itself seem to move.’
‘But there aren’t any clouds,’ Satchiko said.
The reflections on the glass did look as though there were movement, and, as they watched, people on the north corner ran out onto their balconies. One of them was pursued by a wave of orange flame.
‘Fire!’
The tower, naturally, was provided with fireproof doors and floors, and, when the smoke detector sensed the fumes, doors throughout the building swung automatically closed, sprinkles of water from ceiling grilles began to fall, and sirens wailed. Satchiko and her friend rushed towards the tower, their instincts highly trained by experience at home, but the fire brigade arrived before they could get down from the bridge and across the road. Foam in ragged arcs sprayed up towards the terrified people now leaning from their windows and balconies.
Just as more property is damaged by foam than by the fire it extinguishes, so more victims are killed by jumping than by being trapped to burn to death.
Two women, an old man, three children and a young mother died in the fire at Sholto House. It was all over in less than one hour, the foam still hissing onto hot stones, the escaped tenants gawping and shivering in the street, the traffic stopped, the cameras going. On the west and south sides, there was nothing to see; Satchiko could still have taken an impressive photograph of urban architecture. But on the north corner, the structure had folded in upon itself. It looked like a building made of Lego, abandoned, and kicked by juvenile feet, so that a corner sagged and gave way, its horizontal blocks hanging at anarchic angles, its roof torn away from one corner and dangling free.
The pictures caught the last editions of the evening papers, and were the lead story on the television news. Questions were asked in Parliament about the safety of modern building techniques. Aidan Britton, answering for the Government, assured the House that no efforts would be spared to trace causes and attribute blame. A normally docile back bencher on the government side demanded that those responsible for this tragedy should be brought to book.
The late news asked who was responsible. The newspapers, the next morning, had found their culprit. The flats had been designed by Rosamund Sholto, and if an explosion in the central heating ducts had sparked off the fire, it must be her fault. Rosamund’s photograph was on all the front pages except The Financial Times; the subtitles were as lucid as the day, but not quite defamatory, proving that all the deaths were her fault.
By the evening, the sensation was that Rosamund Sholto could not be found. She had entered England, and not been seen since. The articles did not print the words, ‘Have you seen this woman?’ as though she were a fugitive or an amnesiac; but their implication was obvious.
Chapter Eleven
Captured or killed? The lunacy of her instinctive, almost thoughtless, premise, kept Rosamund Sholto motionless where she sat at a cafeteria table.
Such melodramatic concepts had never entered her head during fifteen years of living in one of the world’s most violent cities, nor in all her experience of living and breathing high politics in her father’s house. The words should not be in the same sentence as the name of a Cabinet Minister. This, she thought, is England.
Yet the fear that had trickled into her mind on the mountainside above St Jean would not leave her now. She had stood above that drop, watching her brother-in-law swinging his shepherd’s crook, and not diagnosed her own quickened breathing and prickling flesh. The identification of her feelings came almost later than the action she took on them.
Fear. She was afraid. Afraid that Aidan had caught and twisted with that hooked crook, forced Phoebe over the mountainside to fall and die. For Phoebe, even though she preferred to stay in the meadows and sketch, had as good a head for heights as her father and sister, and a foot as sure. If she had been giddy, she would have stepped backwards.
Phoebe had feared her husband for himself, and later for his political intentions. And now Phoebe was dead, and Rosamund was afraid.
He’s gone too far for me to stop, she thought, despairing. A few years ago, perhaps … but a few years ago she had shut her eyes to what now she knew was her duty.
Childhood evenings with Sholto out or away, weekends in attendance as vote-catchers, had innoculated Rosamund against politics. At school she had ignored the mock elections, at Cambridge refused to join political societies. Of course, in those days, the place of most females who did take part in them was, both metaphorically and literally, to make the tea, and the Union Society itself did not then admit women at all. To its annual dinners, the President and officers invited suitable girls, and Sholto’s daughter, whose company would boost a young politician’s reputation, was invited more than once. The Union was a step on the way to a successful career; president in Cambridge, Cabinet Minister at Westminster, a well-mapped route to governing the country. Aidan Britton, having been an officer of the Cambridge Union, jumped many of the hurdles in one leap by marrying Phoebe. In fact, Aidan’s career had depended on his initial friendship with Rosamund. It was her fault that he had met Phoebe.
Though she now saw nothing to like in him, Rosamund could not blame herself for having been attracted by a charm which later years had shown was irresistible to masses of voters and political supporters. Not that it had been necessary actually to like a young man to enjoy his company.
Aidan Britton was in his last year when Rosamund was in her first. She met him at a cocktail party given by a young don who had been to Middlewood to discuss his book about appeasement with Sholto. Aidan was already very self-confident, and already displaying that ability, peculiar to politicians, of seeming at once to be interested in the people they are talking to, and to be doing them a favour by their attentiveness. Why had experience not made Rosamund immune?
So early in her first term she had not begun to discriminate. By the second year one saw only the undergraduates one liked, and by the third, there seemed to be time only for friends. But that Michaelmas term, in 1956, Aidan took her to dine in King’s Parade, and she did, she had to admit that she did like him.
They met again very soon, after Aidan’s dashing adventures in Hungary. Even Rosamund could not ignore current affairs that term, what with the Hungarian uprising, and Suez.
That was the first awareness of politics for many undergraduates, for activism had been out of fashion. Now Cambridge seethed. Marches, in the days before marches were as regular as rugger practice; speeches, soapboxes, petitions, motions of censure. Rosamund’s tutor told her girls that she had not been so ashamed since Munich, eighteen years before. There was not much they could do about Suez except protest. When the Russians marched into Hungary, and the refugees fled out of it, at least there was some practical help to offer. A few undergraduates, Aidan among them, went into Hungary like Scarlet Pimpernels, and helped the escapers. In Cambridge somebody had organised a reception centre, and Rosamund went along with Gerald Greenfield, in answer to the appeals for co-operation on all the college notice boards.
The reception centre was in a church hall in one of the suburbs not previously visited by Rosamund, very dusty, with dim, naked light bulbs and a crowd of miserable looking youngsters waiting for someone to tell them what to do and where to go. Rosamund found herself in a kind of syndicate, which adopted, as it were, Stefan Czernin and his younger sister Maria. Twenty years on Rosamund found herself more sorry for a victim she had not considered then, the mother, ignorant in Budapest of whether her children had escaped, and, if they had, whether
she would ever see them again.
Gerald housed Stefan in his college, and Thea Wade and Rosamund looked after Maria until a room could be found for the Czernins together. And Aidan came back a hero. He escaped just before the briefly opened borders were sealed, and gave modest accounts of minefields, dog patrols and sentry posts. He was much admired, and written about not only in Varsity but also in The Cambridge Evening News. Maria developed a schoolgirl crush on him when they met, and cut his picture from the paper to carry around with her. Stefan carried a picture of a Russian tank burning in a Budapest street.
At the end of term it seemed natural for Rosamund to invite not only the Czernins to Middlewood for Christmas, but also Aidan and Gerald, Thea and Sylvester. The Czernins had come from a two-roomed flat in a Budapest tenement. Within a day they were at ease in the twenty roomed luxury of Rosamund’s home. How were they to know it was not typical of capitalist society? Sholto was genuinely interested to talk to them, but, even if he had not wanted to know about daily life behind the Iron Curtain, his gift of attention had thawed more frozen conversationalists than these. His daughters’ friends were always gratified to warm themselves at the fire of Sholto’s personality.
Sylvester made secret notes on Sholto’s table talk every evening, and then, ashamed of this breach of hospitality, hid them among his socks. Ten years later, with Rosamund’s approval, he published them in book form. Gerald was gathering experience of another class’s behaviour; his father was the works manager of a small factory in the Midlands which produced a kind of enamel for work surfaces, and went bankrupt when it was superseded by laminates but, by then, Gerald was on the Civil Service ladder and unaffected by the troubles of ‘private sector manufacturing industry’. Aidan hoped to impress himself upon his host’s memory. He had started training as a doctor, but changed subjects when he decided to earn his living in the family food firm; but he was already planning his political future. Thea took days as they came. Her only ambitions were academic. And Phoebe had been there, of course. She was already thinking of herself as the lady of the house, or perhaps as something less authoritative, like the housekeeper, and she was incessant in her offers and suggestions, being both nervous and altruistic. After they were married Aidan quickly broke her of interrupting conversations with offers of food or hot water bottles.
