by Weldon, Fay
Wildlife conservationists, as well as social workers, had long tried to gain access to Lodestar House. Bats – protected by an Act of Parliament and a rarity in London – nested in the folly at the end of Lodestar’s garden. A barn owl had been sighted in the line of ragged trees – once a neat hedge that had divided the orchard from the paddock, but now grown into rampant and crude disorder. It was absurd, Sara said, and Tully agreed, and not only absurd but unnatural and disagreeable; firstly that nature should have this hidey-hole in an urban area, secondly that no one was allowed in to supervise, let alone make a profit from it.
The Physic Garden down the road from Lodestar at least put its few acres to good purpose, cultivating natural medicinal herbs according to scientific principles, showing visitors round for a fee, attracting tourists. But Lodestar’s garden had simply been let go, and cities could not put up with neglect for long. Every year that passed, the environmental lobby became more powerful, inquisitive and interfering, and if old Lady Wendy wasn’t careful, didn’t act soon or, better still, die soon so Sara and Tully could take over, some law would be passed making it illegal to turn urban green into concrete, or giving bats precedence over human beings, and Tully’s plan to build studio apartments facing the river would come to nothing.
‘And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head,’ said Sara Toffener.
‘And he knocked again upon the door a second time.
“Is there anybody there?” he said.’
Now Sara took off her high-heeled shoe and banged it upon the door of Lodestar House, this place of crumbling turrets and dried-up moats within the head.
‘And no something something something,’ Sara went on, at the top of her voice. Who would hear? A woman could be raped in this hooded brick doorway and no one be any the wiser. Or she could be swept away by sudden floods. If Sara had anything to do with it, this entrance would be boarded up, the old front door restored. Down here was just a Black Hole of Calcutta, whatever that might be.
‘No voice from the something stairs –’
Why hadn’t her grandmother, the vampire bat, just given her daughter a couple of shillings and not made her dance for her money, learning lines. It had been humiliating. Her whole childhood had been humiliating; a training in bohemian family traditions she wanted no part in.
‘Open the door, you stupid old bats,’ yelled Sara Toffener through the little grated window in the door. The spring in the letterbox was heavy: it might have snapped back and trapped her lips. This was safer. ‘I’m family. I wish you no harm.’
Sara knocked again upon the castle door. What goes to make an obsession? She had been born in this house and cast out of this house before she was three: her mother Una prevented from returning, for reasons as clear as a pikestaff, whatever a pikestaff may be, which Sara refused to see, and why should she, for it was no fault of hers that she was the daughter of her grandmother’s husband Mogens, and at her mother Una’s clear instigation, not her father’s. Una did the seducing, not Mogens. Sara saw herself cast out for no good reason, out of spite and whim; this door hers to open when she chose, and as she chose; this house to burn if she so decided.
You couldn’t see in. The windows were too clouded with dirt.
What I’d like to do this very moment, thought Sara, is to bring a bulldozer to bear on this problem. How pleasant to charge the door with heavy iron, driven by clanking gears: to just burst in, carrying lintel and frame along with the giant shovel; to open up; to beckon in teams of policemen, social workers, psychiatrists, dustbin men, rat exterminators, cleaners; to set to work, to clear the house of its present occupants, its past, ghosts; to rid it of trauma, dirt, pests, vermin; to throw out everything broken, chipped and dusty, human and inhuman; to clean the place out, hose it out if necessary – as one of Wendy’s cousins had allegedly been hosed out of a rear gunner’s cockpit in the Second World War. Only the antiques would be spared from the cleansing onslaught, and a team of restorers and valuers would come close behind – Tully would insist. He couldn’t bear waste, let alone scandal. If Wendy and Congo survived, they’d be well looked after in a nursing home, given the psychiatric care they needed. That would take money.
Tully was in the House of Commons. It was a late-night sitting. Whenever was it not? It was Sara’s custom, when Tully was away, to drink a bottle of wine or, if there was nothing else to do, to go round and visit her grandmother. Or so she described it to friends. She was a very family kind of person. She said so, often. What she normally did was what she planned to do tonight: to bang upon the door and make her presence felt, and go. But the moon was full, the tide was high, so tonight she quoted poetry.
The hate, the resentment, the discordance of body and mind that Wendy’s behaviour gave rise to, Sara revealed to no one except Tully, who, amazingly, understood. Only Tully, pink in the face, tight in his body to the point of bursting, seemed to understand the power and purpose of indignation, outrage, when it related to principle. It was not right, simply not right, that Wendy Warby, although in her nineties, should refuse to make a fortune when all that was needed was for her to sign a simple piece of paper. A fortune which Tully and Sara would then inherit. Something is due from family: if not love, why then possessions.
A window on the first floor opened and Congo stuck his head out and shouted in his hoarse old voice:
‘Go away, or I’ll call the police. This is private property.’
‘But whose property?’ called up Sara. ‘Shall I just come up and we’ll discuss it?’ She spoke as sweetly as she could manage, remembering Tully’s advice. If you act as loving family should, you’re not likely to end up disinherited, no matter that the deceased had willed the wealth away. Courts can, and often do, override the wishes of the departed in the interests of the living. As in matters of alimony, so in inheritance law; those who have most get most. Let’s all speak well of the dead: their shekels are more likely to be ours.
The old man was gibbering and pointing down at the wall behind her. Sara looked. Only bricks, pavement and weeds which shouldn’t be there: no flood water. He beckoned her closer. She gazed up at him. She feared spittle might fall from his barely-toothed mouth.
‘You brought them in with you,’ he hissed.
‘Brought who?’
‘Arabs,’ he said, more calmly. ‘Twenty of them behind you. Don’t look now but they’re sitting just behind you. Men, women, children too. The women are wearing black, the men are in white. What do they mean? What do they want?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Sara. ‘They didn’t tell me.’ Encourage him in his delusions: the sooner he’d be certified insane.
‘They’re waiting for me to die,’ said Congo. ‘But why Arabs? Why the robes? What will happen to Wendy when I’m gone?’
He scraped open the door for her. Sara pushed past him and went up the wide staircase to see her grandmother. Cobwebs brushed her face. It was like being in the Ghost Train. Una had once taken her to a funfair; that was the day before she left for ever. The smell in the vaulted room was oppressive – vomit, urine, stale food, alcohol, acetate upon ancient breath. But Wendy sat upright in bed against yellowed Victorian cushions; she seemed a long way from death. She waved her glass about, cheerfully.
‘Who are you?’ asked Wendy.
‘I’m your grand-daughter Sara,’ Sara said.
‘What big teeth you have,’ said Wendy – and indeed Sara had protuberant teeth and a bad bite. Una had given up on Sara’s looks early on: there was hardly enough to work on, as she’d told Mogens, in Sara’s hearing.
‘I have no grand-daughter. I had one once called Sara, but I didn’t like her, and anyway she died.’
Sara tried not to be hurt, tried to stay angry; noted that the refrigerator in the bathroom had grown so much ice the door no longer closed and counted the empty vodka bottles on the floor, the better to build up her dossier for the Social Services, for when the time came to send for the men in white sui
ts and a compulsory order for their admittance.
Do not suppose that just because a young woman with the sweet name of Sara knocks upon a door and has difficulty gaining entrance, and quotes poetry, and visits her grandmother, that the young woman has a sweet nature. If I were Congo, I just would not have opened the door. My husband’s defection has taught me to trust no one: Brian Moss’s files confirm the lesson.
6
Trouble Brewing
‘I don’t like Sara Toffener much either,’ said Jelly into the tape recorder, ‘but I’ll try. She’s a woman and I must do my best for sisterhood. I daresay she, too, is what marriage has made her.
‘The File Room at Catterwall & Moss is in a mess. I like to sit there and consider my situation. Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I mix up the files still further. Will anyone care?
‘Stapled to Toffener v. Toffener (Tully and Sara) divorce documents – Tully started and withdrew divorce proceedings five years back, on the grounds of Sara’s adultery – vigorously denied – were further depositions and statements relating to the Musgrave family, all of them illuminating, none of them particularly happy, but suggesting why there might be grounds for forgiving Sara who, before she became Toffener, was a Musgrave.
‘The dusty filing cabinets of solicitors’ offices bear witness to the energetic and tumultuous nature of human relationships, which no amount of legal language – as it sucks out the sweat of passion, best and worst endeavour, sexual indiscreetness, misadventure, good will and malice – can render dry of import. Attempt to fit us all nicely in under one law, render ruly the unruly, and you must in the end fail: diversity triumphs for ever over the law’s desire to universalise the ordinary, contain the exceptional.
‘1899. Violet Musgrave begat Wendy at the turn of the century, who begat Una at the beginning of the Great Depression, and Una was clearly a trouble to everyone, and begat Sara, whose father was described as “unknown” – being married to her grandmother and therefore unclaimable – on her birth certificate. When Sara was five, Una sued her residential nursery for damages: they had given Sara meat to eat and the child was a vegan. The nursery’s defence was that Sara was returned to them so pale and thin after the Christmas holidays they felt it necessary to feed her up with whatever came to hand. Sara had been at the nursery for two years, returning home only for three weeks every Christmas. Una lost her case.
‘There in the file was the Deed of Gift by which the property at Lodestar Avenue was given to Violet Musgrave in 1904, in token of Sir Oscar Rice Musgrave’s natural love and affection. Oscar Rice Musgrave was Violet’s cousin: Wendy no doubt Violet and Oscar’s child, in spite of his being married to one Alice.
‘Wendy grew up to believe that property was theft. She had lived through the age of Marx: she thought that sacrifice on her part would somehow make others happy. Perhaps Wendy’s ardent socialism was what made Violet disinherit her: perhaps these views of hers were held to spite her mother, to diminish any sense of maternal achievement, rather than existing as a cool and disinterested conclusion as to what to do about society. Men do it often enough – the stockbroker’s son throws a million dollar bills from the top of the Empire State building, to prove the inconsequence of money: the old hippie’s son goes into the SAS – why not women?
‘There in the file was Violet’s Deed Poll changing her name from Bonham to Musgrave in May 1903. There was Alice Musgrave’s action contesting the Deed of Gift after her husband’s death in 1915. That failed, too.
‘Finger through the yellowing sheets and find Oscar’s death certificate. Killed in Action in 1915. Alice didn’t manage to get hold of that, either. Una’s birth certificate – Mother, Wendy Musgrave: Father, Philip Grace, medical practitioner. The one and only mention, but at least he must have turned up in person to declare himself the father, thus lessening the force of the illegitimacy. In 1935 Wendy married one Mogens Larsen, a Danish engineer. In 1949 she divorced him, changed her name back to Musgrave and left Lodestar House. Mogens continued to live there with Una, his erstwhile stepdaughter. Sara was born. Three years later Una left Lodestar; two months later Wendy returned. Tied in ribbon, a bundle of love letters written by Gerald Catterwall to Una in the late nineteen fifties. Una was clearly a goer.
‘Gerald Catterwall’s portrait hangs in the waiting room. The painter’s art has done little to disguise his piggy eyes and flabby chin. Perhaps the artist was underpaid? It was perfectly likely. Catterwall & Moss – Gerald Catterwall was one of the founders of the firm – are not known for their handsome payment of staff; on the contrary, and I wonder if this was one of the causes of the firm’s general incompetence. If you underpay the filing clerk you must expect files in such a state as these. Jelly, of course, now deliberately adds to the confusion.
‘Holly, the accountant in charge of paying tradesmen’s bills for various scions of the Rice family and now inadvertently meeting my hotel bill, once told Jelly that Gerald had taken his own life some twelve years earlier, being in financial difficulties to do with the clients’ money. The circumstances of his death had been understandably hushed up. He was seventy-eight at the time, and still practising. He saw retirement as defeat.
‘Then I came across, and unfolded with difficulty, a document so seriously faded I doubted that anyone other than myself had referred to it since the turn of the century. It related to the issuing in 1899, to Oscar Rice Musgrave by the Rice Estate, a hundred-year leasehold on the Lodestar property. The Deed of Gift, by which Oscar so generously passed the freehold property on to Violet, presumably after Wendy’s birth, do not allude to the forms of tenure, it being a mere leasehold. “Have it, my dear. Take it, for you and your child,” no doubt sounded a better phrase than “Have it for ninety-five years, my dear; hang on a minute while I consider the legal implications.”
‘In 1954 Violet had innocently bequeathed the house to Una, bypassing her daughter Wendy for reasons as yet unknown, but obviously adding to Wendy’s discomfort. Wendy had lost her husband to her daughter Una. In 1965 Una had, generously or otherwise, given her mother a thirty-five year tenancy; taken it neatly to the millennium, no doubt, as people tend to do; not thinking “but mother might still be alive! What then?” What then, indeed? She had not in the past shown much mercy to her mother.
‘Gerald Catterwall, who had drawn up various of these transactions, deserved to die. He was a perfectly dreadful solicitor. Nowhere in the Rice Estate schedule of assets, which I know by heart, observing, fascinated, the mechanisms by which Sir Edwin’s interests are protected from Inland Revenue and wives alike, is there any mention of Lodestar. The property has simply dropped from sight, as is the fate of many large old houses in a state of disrepair, when lived in by the elderly and administered by incompetent lawyers.
‘The more I perused the documents in my lonely room at The Claremont, “News at Ten” on with the volume right down, silent images of war, famine and disease reproaching me for my self pity, the more convinced I was that Tully had less time than he thought to get his hands on the tenancy. This would not revert back to the freeholder, the Rice Estate, in four years’ time: no, by rights it would go to the leaseholder in a mere two years: whoever that leaseholder might now be: the heirs of the heirs of Sir Oscar Musgrave. Some taxi-driver, perhaps, or artist in a garret, who had no idea of his legal rights, and never would unless I called the matter to his attention. I would refrain from doing so, but enjoyed knowing a secret of such significance.’
7
Closer To Congo
‘Keep your fingers on the keyboard, keep your eye on the screen, and keep your disapproval till it counts,’ sang Jelly Lamb to herself, to the tune of ‘Seven little girls a-sitting in the back seat, a-kissing and a-hugging with Fred’, dabbing her Ram-roughened cheek with a damp tissue. This morning there was a scrawled letter from Congo Warby in the post, the decrepit but valiant husband of Tully Toffener’s even more decrepit, even more valiant grandmother-in-law Wendy, once Lady Musgrave, now Mrs Warby.
Dear Moss, it read, in a quavery hand.
My wife and I are puzzled by your letter. We have no intention of going into a home, certainly while I have life and limb left to fight the ghosts. I am sorry to hear of Mr and Mrs Toffener’s difficulties in finding suitable accommodation. As he is, I believe, a Minister of the Crown, albeit a junior one, couldn’t the Crown provide? As he is well aware, Wendy and I are Republicans. We don’t see that Lodestar House would be a suitable residence for the Toffeners, if that’s what they’re after. Sara always told Wendy that she hated the place, and you have to have a clear mind and a good heart to fight the ghosts, and Tully has neither, as the poor people of this country know to their cost. From the look of him on TV, the fact that Lodestar Avenue is within walking distance of Westminster would not be helpful to him – two yards at a brisk walking pace would kill him. Does he think we’re senile? Sara was always a greedy, heartless little bitch, worse even than her mother – it seems she’s married a man just like herself. Please stop bothering us; we are old now and need some peace.
Jelly copied the letter for the file she would later take home to The Claremont for deeper perusal, and put the original in the ‘Today’s Post’ folder for Mr Moss.
‘I’m tempted just to pass Warby’s letter to Tully,’ said Brian Moss as Jelly sat poised with her shorthand pad. ‘Not bother to construe tactfully.’ Most middle management these days, including solicitors, compose their letters and memos directly on to the word processor and have them checked over by others for compromising statements, but Catterwall & Moss still preferred to work in the old way. ‘Then Toffener would have apoplexy and we’d be free of him.’
