by Jessica Mann
Eventually Rosamund came upon a direction pointer which mentioned the Isolation Wing, and she found its red painted door, labelled with the traffic signal that means ‘No entry’. It was not locked. Inside all was dark and unused. Rosamund closed the door, and flattened the slats of the Venetian blinds, so that she could turn on the lights unnoticed.
Four single bedrooms, a bathroom, sluice room and tiny ward kitchen; blankets, sheets and towels, patterned all over with the words ‘Isolation’ were stacked in polythene wrappings in a cupboard. The mattresses too were shrouded in plastic, and the smell of disinfectant was powerful. When Rosamund unwrapped some sheets, she saw that their bags were marked ‘Decontaminated’.
The bed was hard and the coverings thin, but Rosamund was probably the only person ever to have a peaceful, undisturbed night in a hospital.
Chapter Fourteen
The journey was abominable. The plane was late in the first place, and when it landed at Calcutta none of the superficial cleaning done before the new passengers embarked could disguise the smell of the drinks the previous batch had spilled. Steven Courtney had seen the baseball teams unloading. They reeled across the tarmac, and two of them had virtually to be carried. He marvelled at the advertisement they made for Western civilisation.
Over Iraq, one of the air-conditioners failed. After a fueling stop at Rome a fault was found in one of the wing flaps; the passengers, belted into their seats, waited in the excruciating heat until they were sent into the milling airport and re-assigned to other flights. Steven’s, a Lufthansa, turned out to be overbooked. He was bumped onto a Sabena to Brussels, where what had been a hot Indian summer in Italy was an unfruitful autumnal mist. Eventually he took a train to Ostend, a ferry to Dover, another train to London, and arrived at his office when his secretary was putting on her coat at the end of the day.
Nobody would work for Hunger’s salaries who was not committed to its work. The girl rang her boyfriend and told him to go ahead to their madrigal evening without her. She had piles of papers accumulated in his absence to show Steven.
‘Had a bad trip?’ she asked sympathetically.
‘Awful. And a bad journey back home too. Have you arranged for me to see the Foreign Secretary tomorrow?’
‘He can fit you in for a drink before dinner.’
‘So late?’
‘How were things out there?’
‘Bad. Very bad. You can go on for just so long, seeing the suffering and believing that you can help. But it’s impossible. We stave off the inevitable for another day or hour. I don’t know what the hell I have spent all these years doing.’
‘If you have only helped to save one life …’
‘It’s worth the effort. Or so we always say. Fine talk.’
‘Everything will seem brighter after a night’s sleep. You’ll see. Why not leave all this until the morning? Look, these are the only things you really should look at.’ Several matters should have been decided yesterday, or last week, or last month; office organisation was a permanent problem. Steven agreed the form of the next appeal, which could now be sent off for printing. He decided how best to correct a political blunder in Indonesia made by a member of staff with more enthusiasm than diplomacy. He listed the questions their tame members were to ask in Parliament.
‘Take a taxi to the station this once. Let me ring for one,’ the girl pleaded, but Steven could not bring himself to squander enough money to buy a whole week’s food for a hungry village.
‘Here’s a message I forgot to show you.’
Steven shouldered on the coat he would need to counteract the climatic change of the last twenty-four hours. ‘Not another?’
‘A woman called Rosamund. She didn’t give her surname. She wanted to see you urgently. I said you’d be going straight home today and wouldn’t have time to see anyone.’
‘What did she sound like?’
‘Very classy, deep voice. Self-confident. In a hurry.’
‘Rosamund Sholto!’
‘Goodness! Do you actually know her?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I once knew Rosamund Sholto.’
‘There has been a lot about her in the news. What with her sister dying, and then that block of flats. Did you know Phoebe Britton too?’
Steven did not reply. He was reading the front page article in that day’s Guardian about the explosion at Sholto House. Then he looked through The Sun’s version. Rosamund’s face stared up at him from the page.
‘You have to hand it to Aidan Britton, don’t you think?’ his secretary said. ‘I mean, one may not agree with his views about everything, but he does seem to get things done.’
Yes, Aidan Britton got things done, Steven thought, not doubting for a moment that by commission Aidan had done to Phoebe what by omission he had done to Maria. He was glad that, after all these years, Rosamund Sholto wanted to speak to him. He was sure he knew the subject.
It would have been nice, he thought, as the train rattled towards Cambridge, to expect a welcome, a meal, the comfort of his family after the sight of so many starving children. It was nearly a year since Lynn, Nicolas and Barbara had gone. He would have to think about selling the house soon. Meanwhile, it would smell of disuse. Perhaps he had left some food out and would find it stinking in the kitchen. His bed would be as he left it, unmade, three weeks ago; his dirty clothes would be unwashed still. There was nothing to tempt him on into the house. He dropped his suitcase in the hall, and stood at the semi-circular table leafing through his mail, and dropping most of the envelopes unopened. Envelopes addressed by a machine, or with cellophane windows, were no more enticing than the neglected house itself.
Nothing from Lynn. Nothing from the children. Only one package had a handwritten direction: italic style, black ink. That might be from Rosamund.
He tore the envelope firmly across the top. Its contents exploded instantly, killing Steven Courtney and igniting the paper. By the time the rescue services arrived, the ground floor of the house was vigorously ablaze, and when the fire was extinguished, the handwritten envelope, along with most of the Courtneys’ belongings, and Steven Courtney, once Stefan Czernin, himself, were nothing but ashes, charcoal, and more appalling substances.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Are you holding out on me?’ Tamara said.
‘What about?’ Ian replied.
Tamara got up to fetch the baked apples from the oven and looked at him over her shoulder. He was slumped at the table, his chin on his hand, and he did not meet her eyes.
‘Do you mean about Rosamund Sholto?’ he said. ‘There hasn’t been any development.’
‘Investigations are proceeding. A man is helping the police with their enquiries. The patient is as well as can be expected. Any more clichés?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He took his steaming plateful across to the television, and sat down to watch figure skating. Tamara pushed apple skin and core around her plate, and then, without finishing her helping, busied herself clearing the supper away. It had been her turn to cook, and she did not do it as well as Ian. She scraped a lot of goulash into the dustbin.
Tamara had seen that expression on Ian’s face before, most recently when he told her about being attached to Aidan Britton’s staff for a month. He was embarrassed; perhaps even ashamed. He went to bed early, hunched in the covers with his back to the room. He said that he was getting a cold, but his sneezes were unconvincing.
When Ian was snoring, Tamara opened his briefcase and took out the file of papers in it. Today he had brought home little to read, apart from an office memo which Tamara had also received about the price of canteen meals, and an appeal for money from his old school. Sandwiched between these two were a couple of photocopied sheets which were the transcript of a telephone call, and Tamara realised at first sight what had inhibited Ian. The tap had been on Thea Crawford’s telephone, Tamara’s former supervisor during her postgraduate years at Cambridge, now professor of Archaeology at Buriton University. The
y must be tapping the lines of all the Sholto woman’s friends.
Rosamund Sholto had been in a telephone box. ‘There is a call for you from a Cambridge call box, will you accept the charge?’ A red pen had underlined the word Cambridge.
Thea Crawford had thought it must be her son calling, and the first few sentences were of jumbled explanation; they were followed by delighted exclamations on the one side, impatient answers on the other.
Tamara could imagine Thea’s voice, crisp, incisive, self-confident. She had seemed a frightening figure even to a student who had a respectable first degree, as Tamara had, from the University of Edinburgh. Thea was teaching then at one of the colleges which form part of London University, and was to help Tamara with work that was outside the field of any of the Cambridge dons at the time. Her name was familiar, of course, from numerous publications, and Tamara had looked forward to meeting someone middle-aged, distinguished and even motherly. Thea had turned out to look about twenty-five, and to be dressed with intimidating elegance, usually in Jean Muir dresses. One day she mentioned that she was almost as interested in the typology of modern clothes as of ancient pottery and metalwork. The conversation at her dinner table was of international politics and high finance, and the guests had faces and names familiar to television viewers. She was married to an influential and feared journalist, who begun by making Tamara feel a fool, and went on to make a pass at her. By the end of three years work, Tamara, now entitled to call herself Doctor Hoyland, was deeply attached to the whole Crawford family.
No wonder then that Ian, still looking forward to a social visit to Buriton to be shown off as Tamara’s bloke, had not cared to mention the intrusion on Thea’s privacy to which he had been party. It shamed Tamara even to read the transcript; but she read it.
‘Any chance of speaking to Sylvester?’
‘Oh Roz, no. He’s away at a conference in Ankara. He won’t be back for a few days. What’s it about?’
‘I hoped for his help. I daresay you have seen in the papers …’
‘You know that I don’t read the papers. I thought you didn’t either. Is it something political?’
‘I suppose one could ring Sylvester in Turkey?’
‘I don’t know where he’s staying. If he rings me I’ll get him to … or look, why don’t you come down to stay? It’s quite nice here at this time of year. Believe it or not I have quite taken to the place. Why not come?’
‘It might be just the thing, I suppose. But I don’t want to land you in the shit too.’
‘Are you in trouble Roz?’
‘Read a paper and you’ll see.’
‘So where are you now?’
‘You’ll never guess. Or come to think of it, you actually might. Do you remember that year I was up to the knees in sewer pipes and you in middens? That year we bunked together at the Gatehouse. Oh dear, how easy everything seemed then. I suppose in a way I’m retracing our youth. Trying to see old Stefan at the moment. Do you remember him and Maria?’
(Laugh: slightly hysterical? Noise in background – police siren?)
‘Do calm down. I don’t know what you are talking about. Couldn’t you tell me about it? I mean, I might be able to get at Sylvester through a friend or something?’
‘Wait till I’ve seen Stefan. I’ll ring again. Bye.’
Tamara re-read the transcript. She could not see that Rosamund Sholto’s eavesdroppers would learn much from it, but it told her more than she wished to know. A surge of primitive fury made her blood throb, her teeth bare. How dare they? How dare they intrude their odious political amorality into the private life of a scholar? Of, in particular, Thea Crawford? If such were their methods, what were they protecting? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards?
After a while, Tamara grew calm. Ian was still asleep and she replaced the papers in his briefcase. She wondered whether he would dare to ask her in the morning what he had obviously funked asking her this evening; presumably he had intended to enquire whether she could throw any light on the conversation of a woman she knew well. If he did bring himself to ask, she did not intend to answer, although she had an answer to give.
Tamara had heard of the Gatehouse on one of these agreeable evenings in Canonbury, sitting with Thea over drinks while they waited for Sylvester to come home. The pupil-teacher relationship had rapidly become that of equal friends, and Tamara spent far more time at the Crawfords’ house than her work demanded, or, indeed, than Thea was paid to see her. They would chat in the long basement kitchen, amiably peeling potatoes or shelling peas together; or sit in the first floor drawing room and sew nametapes onto Clovis Crawford’s socks. Thea told Tamara about her own early experiences as an excavator. She was just down from Cambridge, it was her first site as excavation director, and it was back in those dark ages when people actually paid to be allowed to go and help on digs, living in their own tents, and providing their own trowels and eating irons. Tamara had grown up to a profession whose diggers were paid at union rates, and downed tools unless they were provided with living accommodation fully fitted with modern conveniences.
The excavation at the Gatehouse was unspectacular. It turned up a certain amount of useful confirmatory evidence, and there was only time for one season before the bulldozers rolled in, so Thea published her results in an obscure journal and regarded the exercise as good education. But you can learn more in a way from a small dull site, she had warned Tamara; it’s not a glamorous profession.
The new hospital was already started at that time, and as soon as Thea finished her work a nurses’ home was to be built on the excavation site, demolishing Thea’s tidy trenches, a row of derelict pig sties, and a long disused Jewish cemetery, which was enclosed behind a high wall, with a little room over its entrance: the Gatehouse. Thea had camped in it. She could have biked into town every evening, but liked to be on the spot. ‘I was terrified that the building contractors would demolish everything “by-accident-on-purpose” if they had half a chance. I slept with one ear open.’
For some of the time, Rosamund moved into the Gatehouse with Thea, and luckily stayed on after Thea had gone off to London. A bulldozer, scraping its way forward into the yellow clay, had halted when the men went off for lunch, its shovel just short of a metal rim. Rosamund had climbed down into the trench, dug the soil away, and picked up a small silver dish with animals chased on its base and chains to suspend it. It was in the Fitzwilliam Museum now: the Gatehouse hanging-bowl.
Ian Barnes’ interest in archaeology was sincere but amateur. He mostly concentrated on work done under water. He would not be likely to connect the word Gatehouse with anything he might once have seen in a museum. However the clue was not beyond the wit of an informed source to elucidate; the question was, how long would it take?
At breakfast, Ian was still avoiding Tamara’s eyes. He blew his nose and swallowed aspirin, and read The Guardian studiously. He did not point out to Tamara the paragraph about the murder of Steven Courtney. Police, it said, were seeking information about a tall grey-haired woman who was seen in the vicinity of his house during the afternoon. He had been killed by a letter bomb. The IRA had ‘claimed’ responsibility.
Tamara left early for the office, saying, which was true, that she was snowed under with work. Once there, she began to ring Thea Crawford, but even before she heard the ringing tone, put her receiver down. It would be silly to ring over a tapped line. And presumably Thea’s mail was being examined also. How was she to be warned to keep Rosamund Sholto away from Buriton? It was a small town, not all that far from Tamara’s own home on the other side of the river Tamar near Plymouth, and Tamara knew it would offer no prospect of concealment.
Tamara rang Thea’s secretary at the university. She said that she wanted Professor Crawford’s opinion on an ornamental belt buckle from a site in the Cotswolds. It was too fragile to trust to the mail, she would put the parcel onto the train herself, the Cornish Riviera Express, at Paddington, and would be grateful if it co
uld be collected from the station at Buriton and given straight to the Professor. Could the Professor be warned that it was a little urgent?
‘Certainly, Dr Hoyland, I’ll see to it myself.’
Tamara wrote a letter to Thea in as guarded terms as could be made comprehensible. It was a thousand pities, she thought, that Sylvester was out of reach. He always picked up nods and winks which were unnoticed by one whose attention was concentrated on the first millennium before Christ.
Tamara found a metal object at the back of her desk drawer, actually a piece of military equipment dating from the Civil War, but to any uninformed eye it would look suitably ancient and important. She folded her letter into a small square, enclosed it in cotton wool, and placed it on top of the metal in a small perspex box. She wrote a formal covering letter suitable for any prying eye, and put the whole lot into a padded envelope. She went to Paddington by tube, and found that the guard was as helpful as people usually were to Tamara; clever as she was, her looks were her trump card.
Back to the office for a slightly sticky interview with a baffled boss. Her desk was piled with papers, her in-tray with unanswered letters, her out try gaped its empty maw for their answers. But the urgency of archaeology was relative. Tamara was impelled by the unfamiliar force of moral indignation. As well, she felt a complicated shame, both for Ian’s behaviour, and for her own in regard to him. There was a poison between them, but it must be the poison of the loathsome affairs to which she and Ian were only peripheral. She believed that the quickest antidote would be in her own reaction.
‘Where would you hide a leaf?’ Father Brown had asked, and given his own answer: ‘In a forest.’ Leaves of a species would choose forests which matched them. Tamara felt that she was the same kind of person as Rosamund Sholto. She would probably have chosen a similar forest herself.
