by Jessica Mann
Chapter Eighteen
Like Alice through her looking-glass, Rosamund felt that she had stepped through a television screen into a Saturday night thriller movie. Tamara Hoyland’s entrance marked, as it were, Act Two. The girl was more than capable, and drove smartly eastward with only the most perfunctory deference to Rosamund’s opinion. The great flat lands, the arching skies, seen from the passenger seat of a hard-pushed car, evoked in Rosamund’s memory the days when she had driven out of Cambridge with boys who were illicit owners of their own cars, and who wanted to show their mastery of the machines. And here was the site of a former American Air Force base, where twenty-five years ago, abandoned huts and lilac trees mysteriously flourishing, choked the concrete paths like Sleeping Beauty’s jungle; beneath their scented purple Rosamund had lain kissed into sleep. A factory stood there now.
On through the burnt stubble plains of East Anglia, on over canal bridges, through villages, around towns, until they came upon a caravan site which, unlike the others they had seen, was still open for the last of the season’s holiday-makers. Rosamund waited in the car while Tamara went in to negotiate terms.
‘They made me pay for a whole week.’
‘I hope you didn’t use a cheque card.’
‘Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to make print-outs of my expenditure.’
‘Your Ian won’t be looking for you?’
‘Certainly not. Don’t forget, I’m often away in the field, it’s part of my job.’
They drove slowly along muddy paths which had names like Blenheim Highway, and Chatsworth Avenue, until in Arundel Crescent they found the caravan to which Tamara had been given the key. It was primitively furnished and had been overused in the high season. Its artificial leather trimmings were torn, its plastics scorched, and it reeked of frying and bottled gas. But it was private, and when Tamara went off to buy food, Rosamund felt safe in folding down a bed, pulling one of the unlovely blankets over her, and falling asleep. She felt almost carefree. It was as though a knight in shining armour had galloped up to free her from the dragon. No doubt the dragon was in hot pursuit, stoking up its fire as it sniffed at hoof marks, but for the time being it was foiled. The maiden and her rescuer had done the equivalent of crossing running water, or muddying the scent.
Bacon and eggs; coffee and wine.
‘Ambrosia.’ Rosamund said.
‘Comfort food. Cigarette?’
‘I don’t much, but thanks.’
‘They go with conspiracy.’
Tamara had a clear, flawless complexion, her skin lightly tanned, her cheeks pink, her eyes brightly blue, with more faintly blue whites. Rosamund seldom noticed it when other people looked unwell, but now she thought that the adjective for Tamara’s appearance should be healthy. Above the stained sink was a fly spotted mirror. In it, Rosamund looked more than fifteen years Tamara’s senior.
‘Here.’ Tamara offered her a bag from a chemist’s. ‘I got you some make-up. I thought you might feel better with armour.’
‘Most women of my generation prefer their faces disguised.’
‘That’s what Thea says.’
Lipstick, mascara, eyebrow pencil. The silly gadgets did undoubtedly lift the spirit. Rosamund drank some more wine, and looked out of the window at the peeling caravans, the threadbare patches of greenery. It was as though someone in a profession opposite to her own, an anti-architect, had purposely created an environment inimical to beauty. She sighed and said, ‘At least I understand now how you found me; and how the Britton boys did too. Very cute.’
‘Ian Barnes is very cute indeed,’ Tamara said grimly.
‘I wouldn’t like to cause the end of your beautiful relationship with that cute young man, Tamara. Aren’t you going to be in trouble with him?’
‘He’s going to be in trouble with me.’ Tamara’s face wore an expression which in a dowager would have been called hauteur. ‘He shouldn’t behave like a thug. The trouble is he can’t make up his mind between duty and principle. Like most men, his education taught him to do as he was told, obey orders, play the game; when men like Ian are given orders they automatically obey them. It runs through the system, team games, prefects, all that stuff, and it has a rotten effect on the character. If anyone gives me an order my immediate impulse is to do the opposite.’
‘Luckily for me,’ Rosamund said. ‘But that isn’t enough in itself. Why are you here now? You don’t always go off when you disapprove of Ian, as you have today.’
Tamara blew some perfect smoke rings which hovered against the sagging ceiling. ‘I can’t quite analyse my own behaviour. It was partly impulse, of course, though I do try not to give way to it usually. But I was so furious to think of some mindless bullies nosing their filthy curiosity into Thea Crawford’s private affairs. And then, the more I read about you, the less Ian’s story seemed plausible. I felt there was a basic contradiction. As though someone had planted the wrong kind of sherd in an excavation cutting. Anyway, Ian is doing something wrong. If he does have a useful function at all, if we do need men in jobs like his to protect our society, their whole point is to keep people like Thea out of their shenanigans.’
‘I always wanted to be left out of them myself,’ Rosamund said. ‘I have spent my life running away from power politics. I detest the thought of the large scale manipulation of people, and when I was younger than you are now I copped right out. But what’s happening now serves me right for not having done what I should then.’
‘Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to,’ Tamara said. ‘I mean, I’m sure you’re not a terrorist, I’m sure you didn’t kill Steven Courtney or the people in Sholto House. What I can’t understand is why your brother-in-law wants people to believe you are.’
‘He wants either to prevent me telling, or to discredit, a story I should have come out with long ago … a squalid, miserable little tale that proves he’s unsuitable for high office. I didn’t even tell Phoebe until it was too late. I should have sent her the evidence long before.’
She should have passed it on to Phoebe straightaway, or at least five years after her marriage, when she was evidently not happy, chain-smoking, drawn-faced, and taking instruction before joining the Catholic Church. The two sisters met rarely then, for Rosamund would not go to Britton House, where Phoebe lived in the unsuitable setting of the stream-lined penthouse – the whole building was a monument to all that was worst in twentieth century taste. But Phoebe came to New York occasionally with the Britton entourage and slipped away if she could to Rosamund’s apartment. There was the time Aidan came to address the United Nations; the time he received the Friedlander prize; the ceremony of unveiling the memorial tablet to Sholto on Long Island; Rosamund had been in Kenya, on purpose, at the time.
Rosamund seldom glanced at the political or social pages of the papers, and did not always know when the Brittons were coming. Phoebe would telephone from the suite at the Pierre Hotel, hurriedly, as though she had to call when nobody happened to be within earshot.
Phoebe in the duplex in Riverside Drive, clutching at her new religion like a mascot.
‘You’ll have to start having children now, once a year,’ Rosamund teased her. ‘Is that what you really want?’ and Phoebe said, ‘If that were my only worry!’ and laughed, heaving and whooping until Rosamund did something she had read of in fiction, and slapped her on both cheeks. Phoebe was no more willing now than she had been as a child to discuss physical details, and Rosamund kept off the subject. But she could imagine that Aidan would have found ways to punish a wife who could not found his dynasty.
Other years, other places; a meeting on the Staten Island ferry once, another at The Cloisters; Phoebe visiting the apartment in Greenwich Village where Rosamund had lived with Joe Velikowski. He did not like Phoebe, nor she him, product as he was of one generation of New York Jews, wise-cracking against the all-English Phoebe with her Sloane Ranger voice and manners. The entourage of hired help already known as the Britton Boys had antagonised him
too, but that was the antagonism of envy and desire, and not very long afterwards Joe, by then secure in a United Nations post and, he thought, in the affections of Sholto’s daughter, began to say things like ‘I don’t like the guy but you can’t help admiring him’ and ‘You have to hand it to Britton as a politician.’ The working class Jew from the Bronx was an extreme right-winger by the time he and his White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant Rosamund parted.
Nor had Phoebe been much more attracted by Eddie Sullivan, for her adult experience had taught her to distrust professional politicians. She said that Sholto and his friends had been the last of the amateurs.
Eddie Sullivan talked to Phoebe about Ireland and its oppressed peoples’ need for freedom, and he reminded her of the Kennedy ancestry; and Rosamund watched as Phoebe withdrew into formal courtesy, but the affair was virtually over, and when Eddie left, the two women watched from the window above when he emerged from the basement door, and saw his furtive step suddenly change into his normal confident stride once he was safely in the uncompromising street. Rosamund laughed at him, and assured Phoebe that there went a face from the past.
That was Phoebe’s first visit to Rosamund’s present apartment, and her eyes skittered around the leaf-twined, glass bricked room, and on the birds which flew above them in the moist warmth. Rosamund had created a Persian garden at the top of the brownstone house, and her sitting room was her hothouse.
It was March; New York alternated between gusts of snow, and sunshine bright enough to tempt lunchers out onto terraces. Phoebe had called from a pay-phone at Sachs Fifth Avenue, and then crossed town in a cab, looking furtively around her on the sidewalk, eyeing the passers-by. She said triumphantly, ‘I lost them in kitchen equipment. Aidan doesn’t think I’m safe here without a bodyguard.’
This was not the identikit politician’s wife with expensive clothes and drawn face. Phoebe was less thin, even less elegant, and much happier. She moved more loosely, and sat unhunched, her knees not, as before, pressed nervously together.
‘I brought lunch,’ Phoebe said. ‘You just give me a drink.’ She emptied a bag full of unrelated delicacies onto the table, and started to nibble at once.
‘What’s come over you?’
‘Spring, perhaps.’ But the sleet was hammering on the glass roof, and when they looked upwards the little birds were bright against a steely sky.
‘You look like a woman in love,’ Rosamund said.
‘You should know.’
Phoebe had fallen in love, and discovered the pleasures of sexuality. ‘I had no idea. I’d always thought I was frigid anyway.’
‘You never mentioned …’
‘Would I, to you? You’ve always been so gloriously sexy. You never were embarrassed, or unsure of the proper words. How could I talk to you? Not that there would have been much point. There wasn’t anything I could do about it.’
‘A sex therapist?’
‘With Aidan?’ Phoebe laughed as she used to when they were children. She said, ‘I didn’t miss it anyway. After all, what you have never had … . It’s different now.’
‘Who is he?’
Phoebe rhapsodised about her lover, who from her account was a combination of Gregory Peck, Flash Gordon and the Man Who Loved Older Women. ‘What he’s taught me. I had no idea.’
Phoebe was not sure what to do. Aidan would not surrender his Sholto Connection at this stage in his career. Perhaps once he was at the top things would be different. ‘He could make things so difficult,’ Phoebe said, her face suddenly gaunt and anxious again. ‘You don’t realise how powerful he is already. He could cause a lot of trouble for Marco.’
Marco was an Italian waiter at a restaurant in West London. He spent his spare time working as a volunteer in the children’s ward of a hospital of which Phoebe was Chairman of the League of Friends. They had met over finger painting, and their acquaintanceship had ripened in a Hamburger Heaven, and come to full flower in Marco’s bedsitter in the Earl’s Court Road. ‘He wants to be a doctor,’ Phoebe said proudly. ‘He’s only doing this job temporarily to polish up his English.’
Future doctor or not, it was obvious that Aidan would not allow Phoebe to leave him for an Italian waiter half her age. The publicity was unthinkable.
‘I have to go,’ Phoebe said. ‘We’re due to leave for The White House. Wish me luck, Rozzie.’ She caught a cab, and directed it to go back to Sachs. ‘I’ll change cabs there,’ she whispered, as her cheek briefly touched her sister’s. ‘In case they ask the driver where I went.’
Phoebe never admitted that Aidan had forbidden her to visit her sister but Rosamund knew it. Phoebe’s picture was on television that evening, greeting the President at Aidan’s side, a remote, inhuman figure, two dimensional in the spotlights.
Rosamund sent Stefan Czernin’s packet to Phoebe at Middlewood, care of Aunt Anne, marking it, ‘Do not forward.’ She did not look at its contents herself, but they might be the price of Phoebe’s freedom.
Phoebe was never in New York again. A few weeks later she wrote a report of little progress. Marco came from a Common Market country and did not need a work permit, but the police had been harassing him in various ways and he wanted to go home. ‘I should rather like to live in Italy,’ Phoebe wrote. ‘Do you remember the time that Papa took us to Florence?’
No more letters. Only a message on the answering machine, which Rosamund heard when she stopped off between South America and Switzerland. Phoebe’s voice was interrupted by pips as she fed coins into a box somewhere on the far side of the Atlantic. ‘He’s dead. He was run over. Marco’s dead. Listen to me, Rosamund. If anything happens to me you’ve got to do what I would have done. I leave it to you. The chalet, Middlewood, the responsibility, everything. It will be up to you. And those papers of Stefan Czernin’s, that you said you hadn’t read. I have read them and I shall use them. If Marco and I had been able to leave together and get away from all this, I wouldn’t have cared, but now …’
The transatlantic line was crackling, and Rosamund could not hear every word. ‘… Gerald Greenfield … You’re the only one I can trust, Roz, all the rest are on his side. They won’t be safe anywhere here. You have to do this for my sake. For father’s sake … You’ll find it in …’ More crackling on the line, and another meal of coins for the machine. ‘… Wootton. Kenneth Hardman has got it. I’m leaving it to you, Roz. If only you could have met Marco. If only …’ This time when the pips went no more coins were fed in.
‘I listened to that many times over,’ Rosamund told Tamara Hoyland. ‘While I was bathing, and finding clothes to pack, I heard her dead voice, over and over again.’
‘Do you think that she killed herself after all?’ Tamara said.
‘I wondered. I wondered all the way across to Switzerland, all through that Catholic service. But she was devout. She would not have committed a mortal sin. And then when I was on the mountainside watching Aidan swinging that stick, I just knew that he had forced her over. She never jumped, or slipped.’
‘Because of Marco? But he was dead.’
‘Yes, and I wonder whether Phoebe knew that he’d probably been murdered at Aidan’s order. But no, I think not because of Marco. Because of what Phoebe told him she had in those papers. Stefan had written to me that Aidan had forced Maria to have an abortion, and that when he found her haemorrhaging to death, he took the opportunity to rid himself of an inconvenience and made sure that no help went near her until too late. By the time that Stefan wrote to me, Aidan and Phoebe were married and my father was dead. He didn’t want to land my family in the shit and nor did I.’
‘But Rosamund,’ Tamara said. ‘It can’t be true.’
‘I could hardly believe it then, though I did really. But now it seems only too horribly likely. Why else would Aidan go to such lengths to keep the story secret?’
‘It is a horrible story,’ Tamara agreed, ‘and it’s awful to think how many girls died from septic abortions before the 1967 Act. But it can’t have been Ai
dan Britton, surely? Whatever else he’s done since?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, he’s a queer, isn’t he? A homosexual.’
‘Of course not,’ Rosamund said. ‘I’ve known him for over twenty years. I would know if …’
‘Perhaps he’s ambidextrous. After all, your sister would have told you. But I once knew a boy who …’
In all these twenty years and more, Rosamund realised, never once, even before they were estranged, had Aidan spoken to her like a man who finds a woman attractive; not even in the way that a sexually powerful man speaks to any woman. She had not been vain enough to notice, let alone to mind. But there had never been any sexual current between them, not of the weakest kind, as there was between her, or any pretty woman, and their most platonic friends. It was just the kind of thing that inexperienced Phoebe would not have understood. That bitter laugh, when Rosamund had mentioned sex therapists: ‘With Aidan?’ she’d said, and Rosamund had taken her to mean that Aidan was too potent to need it, that the failing was all hers. Aidan had managed to convince Phoebe that it was she who was incapable.
‘He’s a clever man,’ Rosamund said now. ‘A clever, wicked man.’
‘But possibly not, after all, the one responsible for Maria Czernin’s death. So why does he need to suppress those papers? Just because mud sticks to politicians?’
Rosamund said thoughtfully, ‘You know, he had managed to convince my relations that I was a danger to him, and an enemy of his, even before I arrived at St Jean. He destroyed my credibility in advance.’
‘Your credibility would be irrelevant if there was material evidence.’
