by Jessica Mann
A mild Christmas preceded a biting new year. The Czernins were interested in the artificial snow and celluloid holly berries. Maria made iced gingerbread stars to hang from the tree, and she and Rosamund decorated it together. Everyone except Sholto himself went to midnight mass in the Catholic Church, and the next morning even the Czernins came to matins in the village. After lunch they all went with Sholto to the hospitals, where the sitting member wished his constituents a healthier new year. Before 1957 was out, he and Maria were dead.
Maria died in June, during the tripos exams. At the end of term, Rosamund went on a charter plane to America, not then a boring routine, but an adventure. She spent the vacation travelling round the continent in a Greyhound bus, out of reach of letters and messages. In the rootless, classless freedom conferred by anonymity, Rosamund fell in love with the country. She made friends with another English student, a pitman’s son from the Welsh valleys. They stopped together in New Orleans, and trekked together in the Arizona desert; they parted amiably in Santa Barbara, and Rosamund sent him home with a letter to James Sholto Kennedy, her judicial uncle, who helped him to a pupillage and later to a seat in Chambers, in spite of his dangerous accent and membership of that suspect institution, the London School of Economics. Robert was a Queen’s Counsel by now, and would probably end up a Law Lord. He had married an ambassador’s daughter, and sent overprinted Christmas cards every year, with a crest on the front, and updated photographs of his three children and two dogs in front of a Tudor-style house in Weybridge.
Going east again that summer, Rosamund had camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and at the top of the Rockies. She dined in splendour overlooking the Golden Gate, later in squalor in Harlem. She saw the Niagara Falls and the Everglades, and a Red Indian village where the chief sold beaded bags to tourists. Nobody recognised her. Nobody took candid camera shots of her. Nobody asked her father’s view on political issues. Nobody knew her father’s name.
With a French boy she met in Salt Lake City, Rosamund went down to Mexico. When she returned to what she by then derisively called civilisation, she heard that Sholto had had a stroke, and that Phoebe had married Aidan Britton. She flew back to England and found her father paralysed and speechless, her sister veering between anxiety and adoration.
Sholto died six weeks after he had been struck, and a fortnight after Phoebe’s marriage. By the time that Rosamund came home, Aidan was installed as the man of the house. Though he had been as fond of Sholto as he was able to be fond of anyone, on the day of the funeral he was a happy man. The eyes of the world were upon him.
Later Mr Hardman performed the ceremony which Rosamund had supposed was a novelist’s invention. He did not exactly sit in Sholto’s library and read the will aloud to a background of disappointed legatees’ hysterics, but he joined the family for drinks and a discussion of the day, and announced its provisions.
Rosamund had refused the lot. ‘I am going to live in America and be myself. No more guff about my father’s daughter for me. No more ceremonies. I shall finish my training and be off.’
So Phoebe kept Middlewood and the chalet. She conformed to the specifications of a bride in every particular. Transformed by her trousseau, which Aidan had chosen, into elegance, by love into self-confidence, and, at least temporarily, by self-confidence into efficiency, she performed easily the role for which she had been trained, that of a politician’s helpmeet. She knew how to present prizes and open fêtes, how to chat to geriatrics in retirement homes and to tots in nursery schools. It was her charm as much as her father’s name which won Aidan the nomination for Sholto’s seat.
Rosamund returned to America to start the year’s practical work in an architect’s office, before finishing her degree course at Cambridge. Re-forwarded several times, Stefan’s package reached her when it was far too late for her to do anything about it. She did not even read the contents. What was the point? Phoebe was happy and Maria was dead. She wrote to Stefan that she was grateful for his forbearance. Wouldn’t it be best if they both tried to put the whole thing out of their minds?
For years she had put it out of her mind. She recalled the affair only to offer it to Phoebe. It was still not her responsibility, she still need not think about it. Even now, it was probably the personal threat, she thought ruefully, not any feelings of public duty, that had involved her as she had been determined never to be involved. In the end, that banished personality, Sholto’s daughter, stirred, to take action against the man so wrongly described as Sholto’s heir.
I’ll have to stop him, she had thought, standing in the church in St Jean; I’ll have to stop him, she re-affirmed, as she saw how he had pre-empted her position with her own family. It was clever to have made James and Anne believe that she, not he, had betrayed all the principles represented by Sholto. It was even plausible. Given that Rosamund had rebelled against all the traditions of her upbringing, there was no reason why she should not also rebel against her country’s government and give her active support to a terrorist enemy. Indeed, for a time, Eddie Sullivan had exerted a mesmeric charm on her, and at the beginning of their affair she might have performed errands for him in London, protected by her own passion from any qualms. Her only interest was in him, not in his objectives. She wondered who else had been told by Aidan Britton that Sholto’s daughter was a traitor; not many people, probably, lest the disgrace rebound on him. But his spies would all be out looking for her now, not only his own gang of bully boys, those respectable looking men known as his political advisers, but other people too, sober and decent men, activated by commendable motives, the kind of public servants she had often met when she was young.
What would they do to her? A carefully arranged ‘accident’ to kill or disable? An asylum? Or would it be enough to ensure that she was utterly discredited in advance of anything she might say, not only with her own family, but with the whole world?
The black and white television above the bar was describing, for the third time since Rosamund came in, the explosion at Sholto House. Was that the first of a chain of circumstances designed to defame Rosamund Sholto? Or was it a device to ensure that she could go nowhere without being recognised?
Here at least seemed relatively safe, for the cafeteria was self-service, and the only customers drunk or dormant. The staff were depressed immigrants pushing filthy rags across tables and filthy mops across the floor. Nobody had paid either Rosamund or the television screen any attention. But one could not stay in a station buffet indefinitely. Soon the only people still around would be those whom the authorities might suspect of being drug addicts, runaways or down-and-outs.
Rosamund had no luggage, and almost no resources except for Miss Esmée Stoughton’s credit card. She had spent far more of her remaining cash than she expected on a cup of coffee. She left the buffet, and went to the telephones. Gerald Greenfield’s home number was in the book, and his telephone was answered, but the voice was youthful, and the background babble of voices and contemporary music almost drowned the reply; Gerald Greenfield was out for the evening.
In the old days Aunt Anne always gave the girls tea at the Station Hotel. There would be currant buns, and little pink cakes. Rosamund walked through the passage to the Hotel. A busload of belated guests was struggling to register and get room keys. They came from Quebec and their suitcases were labelled with maple leaves. ‘A real bad flight,’ they repeated to each other. ‘That was a real bad flight.’
Rosamund slipped up the stairs to the first floor, where the ballroom was visible through an open door. A blackboard outside it had the next day’s date marked with moveable plastic letters and the words ‘Convention of Bathing Pool Managers, Inaugural Address, 10 a.m.’ A uniformed porter was closing the door, and he pushed the blackboard into position in front of it. He brushed his hands together sharply, as though saying with his gesture, ‘That’s another job out of the way,’ and hurried down the stairs. The landing was furnished with armchairs and low tables. Nobody was in sight,
but Rosamund could hear the lifts running continuously up and down, taking the weary Canadians to their rooms. Rosamund looked into the conference-cum-ballroom. It was dark, warm, furnished with rows of hard chairs and a projector and screen. She pulled an armchair through into the big room, pushing it behind the door, arranged another chair as a footrest, and screwed up her coat as a pillow. Within minutes she was asleep.
Chapter Twelve
Tamara and Ian managed to meet for a quick lunch in the canteen. Both had been working hard all morning, Tamara trying to clear her desk in preparation for her working holiday, Ian reading, as he disconsolately said, through files, files and more files.
‘I asked the old man; why me?’ he said.
‘And?’
‘He said it was because I was in on the story already. Limit the numbers who knew about it. And I’d actually seen her. I told him she seemed perfectly ordinary to me. He said I’d be able to understand the situation better than a person who came to it cold.’
‘Could he have been trying to imply something?’
‘I did wonder. It’s a comment in itself that I seemed to be alone on the job, from this end.’
‘Perhaps he doesn’t actually want to achieve the objective.’
Tamara was employed by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, which, like the other branch of the state’s archaeological services, the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, was housed in Fortress House, an outpost of the Department of the Environment. Other sub-sections of that huge, amorphous department shared the building in Savile Row, and it was easy for people who had worked there throughout the whole of long careers never to have met or conversed. Visitors of all kinds came throughout the day. It was extremely convenient for a secret organisation.
Tamara had no strong feelings against secret organisations. She was prepared to believe that information is a necessary part of defence, and presumably the information had to be collected and analysed by somebody. She could approve underground methods to track down underground enemies. Ian’s job seemed to her no more and no less deplorable than if he had been an officer in the armed services. He had been employed on a five year contract of which nearly four had been served, and intended to transfer to the conventional diplomatic service at the end of it. Since Tamara intended to give up full time work and marry him when she was thirty, that was very convenient. Her plan was to have two children, write three books, and return to full time work in seven years’ time.
They had met three years before. Ian had come to sit at Tamara’s table in the Fortress House canteen one day, and asked, ‘Didn’t I see you at a lecture at the Society of Antiquaries last week the one about sunken trimarenes?’ He was a keen amateur archaeologist.
Thinking about him now as she sat over her coffee, after he had gone back to work, Tamara counted the days until he could get out of his present job. She was afraid that he, a good man, would be forced to behave like a bad one; or, which would be equally if differently disastrous, that he would refuse to do something which his conscience disapproved of, and be punished for it.
She knew that Ian was loathing his present assignment. She wished he were well out of it.
The afternoon was too busy for her to think of anything but her work, and by the time she could get away it was after six. Ian’s bicycle had gone, so she unchained her own and rode home alone through Mayfair and Hyde Park. The flat was on the top of a cream stucco house overlooking a communal garden. The other tenants were the editor of a fashion magazine, some Arab diplomats and a stately home owner from Cumbria. Next door a politician of fluctuating success lived in the whole five storied house. Sometimes a police constable was stationed at his door, and a government car would clog the morning traffic, double parked. At other times he would be seen mooching idly round the block, accompanied only by his dog. At present he was in favour, and the policeman helped Tamara to carry her bike down the area steps.
‘It’s a dull job for you,’ she said, ‘standing around in South Kensington for hours.’
‘Better safe than sorry. You never know. When we get a tougher government things will improve.’ A torrent of dogma about law and order, and sleeping safely in her bed, followed Tamara into the house.
Ian had brought home stacks of paper, but said they told him nothing and had spent some time making a Chinese stir-fry dinner instead.
‘I get the feeling that the old man is half-hearted about this,’ he said.
‘How do you know that she hasn’t just gone to stay with friends?’ Tamara said. ‘She should have plenty to choose from.’
‘She had lunch with Gerald Greenfield yesterday, he’s a permanent assistant secretary in one of the ministries. He was a friend of hers at Cambridge. She was a chum of Thea Crawford’s too.’
‘I don’t remember Thea mentioning her. But I suppose they must have been contemporaries at college.’
‘And then, she knew the man who runs Hunger. Steven Courtney. Have a look if you like, it’s on the table.’
The computer paper had printed out potted biographies:
Gerald John Greenfield, son of Harold Greenfield and Morna, formerly Timpson. Wyggeston Grammar School, Leicester, Royal Engineers, commissioned Second Lieutenant, National Service 1951–3, Christ’s College Cambridge, class II, division I, English Language and Literature. Entered Civil Service 1957. Writes science fiction short stories. Divorced. Heterosexual. Lives with son born 2.2.63. An address in Bayswater. No known political affiliations.
Steven Courtney, formerly Stefan Czemin. Research geologist with a company in Aberdeen, took executive position with UNESCO in 1969, since 1974 managing director of Hunger. Married to Lynn Peters, divorced, two children who live with their mother. A member of a list of organisations known to have a political bias. Home address in Cambridge.
Even Aidan Britton had been described, with his political positions listed. He had been born in Shrewsbury in 1933, son of Cuthbert Britton (killed at Dunkirk, 1940) and Mary Britton, formerly Johnson, later married to Peter Brand Levi II of Chicago. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge (King’s College). Part one Medical Sciences, part two English Language and Literature. Third class degree. Entered Budapest in 1956 with a relief organisation. Married to Phoebe Sholto 1957; became managing director Brittons Foods and Groceries 1958, elected as MP 1958, and so on and so on.
‘None of this seems very useful,’ Tamara said.
‘I quite agree. And look, there are heaps more. The Earl of Dorset. A man called Hugh Christie. Robert Smith QC. And your friends the Crawfords.’
‘Theodora Crawford, formerly Wade.’ Tamara skipped her education and background. ‘Goodness, Clovis must be nineteen,’ she said. ‘And when you think how distinguished she is, it’s funny they can’t find more to say about her work than lecturer at London University, Professor at Buriton.’
‘Where would you hide, if you were Rosamund Sholto?’ Ian asked.
‘I should skip the country.’
‘She hasn’t been through any port or airport.’
‘Well then, I suppose I’d try to get ideas from books. You know that people like me always look everything up, it’s a fault of our education. Very destructive to spontaneity. But do you think that Rosamund Sholto reads thrillers? I mean, she might have gone to ground in the Scottish Highlands, or disguised herself as a tramp or something.’
‘Even in John Buchan’s day they had spotter aircraft.’
‘Or some hide-out in the countryside? She was brought up in Kent after all. If it were me, I could probably find some den in Devonshire.’
‘You’d be far more likely to be recognised there than anywhere else. And if you’d been away for years, as she has, you couldn’t be certain that a motorway or an airport hadn’t been built on the very spot.’
‘I know,’ Tamara agreed. ‘And in fact there’s a fallacy in the wide open spaces theory. In my experience you only have to get out your ranging poles and spirit levels in the middle of nowhere for someone t
o pop up and take an interest.’
‘Of course, there’s the old scheme of travelling round and round on the Circle tube.’
‘Even that stops at night though. Anyway, she’d be recognised. Her face has been all over every screen and front page today. Do you suppose that Special Branch are looking for her too? Or is her IRA connection and the Sholto House explosion a pure coincidence?’
‘It seems remarkably cold-blooded about her own brainchild if she really destroyed it herself,’ Ian commented. ‘Though of course, she would know better than anyone else where to put the explosive.’
‘Perhaps it was her ritual initiation as a terrorist,’ Tamara suggested. ‘The kind of thing they do to prove their commitment. Or so we are told.’ She scooped up the last strands of bean sprout, and looked hopefully at the side-table to see whether Ian had laid on pudding too. She tried to visualise the woman whose picture she had studied, skulking around with deadly devices in the building which marked her first professional success. ‘I tell you what. I don’t really believe it. Any of it.’
