‘So what can be done to protect our friend here?’
The other said, ‘To call a spade a spade,’ waving at the implement I’d propped by the garden door, ‘we’re going to be no use whatsoever to Mr Malik.’
He trotted it all out. Scotland Yard were taking care of the book’s author but it was costing a bomb and there was no way they could do the same for those, as he put it, ‘peripherally involved’. He was in touch with the protection team. They had given advice, which he had now passed on. Selim might be a prominent target in Pakistan, but were any nutters (his word) planning mayhem in this country they would be looking for the author, and if they couldn’t find him, they would go for his publishers and agents. Bookshops. Easily identifiable and accessible targets. Selim should keep his head down. He was leaving various telephone numbers and he wished Mr Malik well. In other words, you’re on your own, mate, sink or swim. It was pretty much what I would have expected, but I disliked the relish with which he refused to help. Selim was gazing at him like a drowning man watching while the lifeboat wheeled round and chugged back to shore.
As soon as we’d put the man on the London train, Selim said, ‘I wonder, Antony. Could the people you’re in touch with help at all? I mean I’d just love to know that someone was watching over Sunita and the boy. And my parents. I just don’t want to walk out on them and not do anything.’
I kept a straight face. I said, ‘Well, my only Foreign Office friends are on the cultural side – you know, negotiating the exchange of artworks, visiting ballet dancers, that sort of thing. I don’t think they’d be much help.’ He was still sitting in the back and I watched him in the rear-view mirror. I saw him do a sort of double take – a sort of come-off-it and then a perhaps-I shouldn’t-have-said-that. I suppose Nell told him – I know they’ve been exchanging letters. But who told her?
I thought, I met this man years and years ago, just once or twice, and he’s been living the other side of the world ever since. This is just about the first conversation I’ve ever had with him. Is there no one who doesn’t know all about me?
*
BY FAX
Memorandum
From: The Editor
To: Jamie McAteer
You don’t have to tell me how big this story is. Another five thousand Ostdeutschen crossed into Austria this morning. But I like to know my reporters are human beings. Anna can cover it. I salute your dedication, but now you’ve got to get on that plane. Go to Nell. I’ll see you at the funeral.
Lil
There isn’t a word for the parents of dead children. Widows and orphans – those words carry so much melancholy freight they’ve actually become ridiculous; a catchphrase of sentimental philanthropy; or the punchline of a cynical joke. I’m an orphan, I used to say when my parents died, trying out the word facetiously. I really didn’t feel sorry for myself at all, then. Sad, yes. I was fond of them. But losing them didn’t leave me depleted. Freer really, to expand into my place in the world, to throw off little Lillian and become Lil. Oh, you know Lil, people have always said, as though the name gave me an all-purpose amnesty. Lil’s up for anything. Lil can’t abide bores. Lil gets away with blue murder.
But what to call myself when Fergus died. No name for it, no role prescribed. I stopped eating for a bit, and everyone seized on that as though with relief. Mrs D making tiny tomato soufflés in the gold-glazed cocotte pots – fluffy pink food for a silly sad woman. Christopher riding all the way across the forest to Leafield and coming home with pockets full of Mrs Goodyear’s famous mulberries, only slightly squashed. Even Chloe, who’d just arrived at Wychwood and who – as I didn’t yet realise – never, ever cooked, came over one day with pheasant pâté and crystallised fruits. The point was that getting me to eat was something at least worth trying. They couldn’t stop the sadness. They couldn’t do a thing about Fergus being dead. But it made them feel better to fret about how many mouthfuls of lunch I’d swallowed. I thought it was a bit much to burden me with their emotional needs. But you learn after you’ve been kicked about by a few bereavements that that’s an essential part of the job. Mourning. It’s not just a state of mind. It’s a task.
Chloe is good at it. She went into full black immediately, which is so far from obligatory nowadays it’s eccentric. Of course lots of women wear black all the time – but she never has, so it makes a point. She writes letters punctiliously. She holds up. No one has seen her cry. She knows all Hugo’s favourite hymns. Actually everyone in the parish does – he got the vicar to go for them over and over again. He loved reading the lesson and so on. I wonder whether he believed in God. I wonder whether he ever gave the matter a moment’s thought. I doubt it.
When he was dying in the hospital Chloe was there pretty well around the clock, with only Nell and Dickie and her in-laws allowed to visit, so it is as though she’s been in the valley of the shadow and came back to us having left him there – Orpheus without Eurydice. Ahimè! She’s always been withdrawn. I used to think it was a form of selfishness. Actually I still do. But it’s a strength too.
So now we’re both widows. For this grief there is a name. It has another meaning too. Chloe told me yesterday that printers use it to describe an annoying word at the end of a paragraph that runs on to an extra line. She goes into Oxford two days a week to dogsbody for a publisher. She knows that sort of thing. Get rid of the widows, they say, and it’ll work nicely. It’s the closest I’ve heard her get to self-pity. And then I saw her aghast at herself. It’s four years since Christopher died. She once told me that when she is with other people she’s never free of self-consciousness. She’s always thinking, ‘What will they think of me?’ ‘If only I could just not care about other people at all, I’d be much more friendly,’ she said. And so of course she was thinking, ‘Does Lil think I’m getting at her? Does she think I’m saying she’s a redundant adjective? Will she hate me? Does she think I hate her for taking over Wood Manor?’ How draining. No wonder she’s the cat who walks by herself.
In reply to the last question, I do think she has a bit of a grievance. But it was Chloe who was set on buying the house in the village, on owning their own roof. So now I sleep in their bedroom, in their carved Indian bed that was assembled here by Hubert the carpenter and was too big ever to take away downstairs. Christopher’s gone and I’m in Hugo’s bed at last. Does anyone else ever think how shocking that is? When I moved in I found a pair of his old shoes, all furred with dust, in the bottom of the walk-in cupboard. There was a flowerpot stuffed full of cigarette butts in the greenhouse. Chloe wouldn’t let him smoke, pretended she didn’t know that’s what he was doing out of doors. His garden grows up around me. He’ll never see it mature.
We are both widows. And I am widow to both, to her husband and to mine.
Selim
I won’t be going to the funeral. I met Hugo Lane only a handful of times: to join the mourners as though I was a close friend would seem to me presumptuous. And I don’t want people seeing my foreign face and asking ‘Who is that?’ I was afraid that Nell might think me uncaring, but when I told her I preferred to stay away she seemed relieved.
Instead I honoured her father by telephoning my own. He talked at length about Cicero. I honestly don’t see many points of comparison between my case and his, but to hear my father rolling Latin names around his mouth was comforting. Even when he got to the great orator’s assassination – his severed head and hands displayed in the forum, the termagant Fulvia stabbing his dead tongue with her hairpin – the horror of what he was saying was nullified by the majestic pomposity with which he said it. My father can be up to date. He is the only person of his generation I know who has an Amstrad at home. But his mind is so lavishly furnished with classical tags and ancient instances that there is simply no place in it for strident twentieth-century opinion, or the sheer nasty brutishness of twentieth-century violence. Not that there is anything refined about a hairpin through a tongue, but it does at least have a certain symbolic precision.
What might happen to the author is unlikely to be so artistic. I have pretty well ceased to believe that anything bad is going to happen to me. But why then am I so afraid?
*
Jamie was in time for the funeral, but only just, so that Holly Slatter – Holly Goodyear now – who should have been with her family, had to pick him up from the station off the last possible train. Nell turned briefly, as he slipped into the pew behind her, and looked at him as though from a great distance.
The organ worked like a bellows. Air had to be driven into it by pedalling, to be exhaled in gasps as music. It was as though the church itself was sobbing. Mark Brown played, with his eldest daughter helping pump the pedals, and somehow he managed to lead the singing simultaneously, some sixty choked or feeble voices jostling to keep up with his boom.
On the Ro-ock of Ages founded
Whaaaat can shaaake thy suuure repose?
A deep intake of breath. A gathering of power for the mighty leap upscale. Bullockish head butting with the beat.
(fortissimo) Wiiiith salva-a-ation’s walls surrou-ounded,
(diminuendo) Thou may’st smile o-on all thy-y foes.
Brian Goodyear read the passage about the new heaven and the new earth and no more weeping. Benjie read from The Pilgrim’s Progress. Then Dickie was in the pulpit. He looked better than he sometimes did, but that wasn’t saying much. These days he’d go from being fat and pasty to being gristle-thin. This was a thin stage. He was sweating. His mother and sister, and his wife, Soo Yung, all tensed, all willing him to get through this.
He said, ‘People used to say I looked like my father. I used not to like it. No teenager wants to be a poor imitation of his dad. But now I’d be just so proud if I could believe it was true.
‘Perhaps it once was. It isn’t any more. I’ve messed up, as most of you know. I never properly apologised to him. I’ll never get over that. My fault.
‘My father and I used to fight. Or rather I fought with him. He was always pretty reasonable. He just didn’t get what I was up to.’
Nell and Chloe were both remembering a Saturday afternoon when Dickie had come up the drive, his car swerving so as to cut scalloping curves in both grass verges, staggered out from behind the steering wheel and passed out on the patch of lawn in front of Wood Manor. He’d smelt sweetish, like a piece of rotting fruit. The two of them had sponged him down with water from a washing-up bowl as he lay there, and when he began to gibber they’d managed to haul him into the house. He’d snored and muttered on the sofa until after it was dark, and then insisted on getting in the car again, and driving back to Wychwood. All that time Hugo had been out in the garden, hacking and pruning. No, he didn’t get what Dickie was up to then. Nor did any one of them.
He said, ‘I know I’m not here to talk about myself. But the point is that I’m an awful come-down compared with him, and I’m not trying to make excuses, but I do think the Wychwood I was part of was an awful come-down compared with the one he ran.’
Chloe kept her hands folded in her lap, head down, but Nell glanced across the aisle and met Flora’s stricken look. After the concert, all those years ago, Dickie refused to apply for university. He got work as a tourist guide in London, but when that petered out, and he still hadn’t become a rock-star, he didn’t have anything else planned. Flora took him into Wychwood and made him Ariel to her Prospero as she set about turning the place into an artsy kind of commune. There were a lot of people passing through, and most of them enjoyed making a pet of Dickie – charming Dickie, pretty Dickie, Dickie who was always at a loose end and ready for a long talk about nothing much over the meals that merged into each other through the long aimless afternoons around the dining-room table.
Sometimes Nell was there, but he’d avoid her. He had quite a few girlfriends in those years, most of them older than him. He wasn’t a cynical lover. He was desperately smitten with each one. It was only later that he’d wondered about those liaisons, when Guy – of all people – said, ‘You know, Dickie darling, at least rent-boys get paid. What do you get out of being available gratis at Chateau Wychwood?’ At night he’d take charge of the record player and, increasingly, of cooking-up. His parents’ home was less than two miles away, but he hardly ever went there. When he saw his father crossing the yard from the estate office he’d slip off upstairs.
When his breakdown came Flora was no help. She just sent him back, as though, as Chloe said, she’d only ever had him on approval, and decided against. He went through the Priory. He did the twelve steps. When he was out the other side of all the therapy he wasn’t anyone his family knew. He certainly wasn’t Ariel. Nor was he the musician he’d been set on becoming. He’d been in Never Never Land through the years when he might have been growing up, so his adult self felt a bit makeshift. Hugo had a word with someone he knew, and the someone fixed Dickie a job as an estate agent in Cheltenham. He tried to quit after a month, but by that time he’d met Soo Yung and she wasn’t going to let him go under again, or indeed to let him go. She was his boss: she got him back to work, and pretty soon after that, to his parents’ wonderment and relief, she married him.
Flora dropped in – the Lanes had moved down to the house in the village by then – and offered Wychwood for the wedding. She didn’t seem to understand why Chloe walked out of the room, her face tight with rage, and never so much as said no thank you.
Now Dickie said, ‘I can’t talk about him. I honestly feel I’m not good enough even to understand what he was. I’ve just got some poems he liked.’ He read them haltingly – Housman, Kipling, four lines of the dirge from Cymbeline, and then, very deliberately (‘Take it slow,’ Nell had said. ‘Remember his rule about reading the lesson – HALF the pace that feels natural, and NO expression’), he fumbled out the last piece of paper, and read, ‘He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.’
*
When the service was over Jamie took Nell’s hand and walked beside her to the grave. ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ The little graveyard was packed with people. Everyone who had ever worked for Hugo had shown up. Chloe had insisted they had prior claim to places in the pews, so the crowd of those who hadn’t got a seat in church included a number of bigwigs – local landowners, Hugo’s old friends down from London, a Lord Lieutenant – unaccustomed to being so relegated. No one complained. A man at the back of the assembled mourners – formally dressed, black wool suit that must have been uncomfortably hot – produced a hunting horn and blew a long wailing note.
‘“Gone away!”’ said a familiar voice. ‘These archaic instruments pierce one to the quick, don’t they?’
‘Guy!’ muttered Jamie. ‘I didn’t expect …’
Guy, always thin, was dwindled to a spray of dried rushes, tied at the neck with a knitted silk scarf. His hands shook on the chased-silver knob of his walking stick.
‘The Pink Pimpernel. They seek me here they seek me there. I never disclose my future plans. But Hugo was a duck. You remember the concert you did your best to sabotage? He was splendid over that.’
Jamie stood in son-in-law position two paces behind Nell while people he’d never laid eyes on took it in turns to reach across her immense belly to peck her cheek or enfold her in a bear-hug. There would be tea at Wychwood, but no one wanted to leave the churchyard because to do so would be to admit that Hugo’s life among them was over. Eventually Lil took Chloe’s arm and the two of them climbed into the immense green Bentley, and sailed off up the lane. Dickie was driving, Soo Yung in the back with their twin children, moon-faced and solemn in black romper-suits, wedged between her and Lil.
Nell turned to her husband and stared at him wordlessly.
‘You look wiped out,’ he said.
‘Take me away,’ she said.
‘Don’t you have to be at this do?’
‘Come on. I’ve got the car. Let’s go back to Mummy’s. Just for a bit.’
Ten minutes later they were surro
unded by the furniture of her childhood bedroom, but the room had a spare-room’s forlornness. She took off her shoes and slumped into a wicker chair. Jamie hovered.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come yesterday.’
Nell opened her eyes. ‘It didn’t matter.’ She closed them again. ‘Let me just sit for a bit. We’ll go along there soon.’
Jamie lay down on the bed.
‘I wish he’d met the baby,’ he said after a while.
She began to gasp, as though her breathing was obstructed. For a moment he thought it was labour, but it was only sorrow. He stood behind her and stroked her hair roughly, as though he was stroking a dog. She leant her head back into his hands.
They arrived at Wychwood simultaneously with the last guests, a contingent from the hunt who’d failed to find the church. ‘We just stopped the car in this muddy track and said Our Father anyway,’ said a woman with a wind-roughened face. ‘A bit like missing the meet but having a jolly good day all the same.’
‘He’d have liked that,’ said Nell. Over and over again, that afternoon, with no conviction, she and her mother said those words.
*
A tall woman with very short white hair came and found Selim. He was sitting on a bench reached by a path between two tall black hedges. Opposite the bench there was a gap and a view over the park. She said, ‘Sorry to intrude, Selim. People always seem to choose this spot when they need to be alone.’
She sat down beside him nonetheless.
He said, ‘Were you hoping to be alone?’
‘No, I was hoping to find you.’
He looked worried.
‘I’m not an assassin. I just thought you might like some company,’ she said. ‘You’ve forgotten me. Helen. I picked your brains about Mughal gardens once.’
‘Slim pickings, I expect.’
She laughed. ‘True. I ended up teaching you.’
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