Mr Frankenstein

by Richard Freeborn

  ‘I’m glad they’re aware.’

  She snapped open a small clutch bag. Smart in an unobtrusive governmental way, as a respected PA should be, she seemed to him to reveal her true self, the one he truly loved, whenever she opened the neat bag she always kept with her. She would only open it to extract a paper tissue, a gift, a lipstick, or fill some unforgiving moment of embarrassment. This time she brought out a tissue and wiped her nose.

  ‘I think I caught something on yesterday’s flight from New York. Your problem is…’ her lips handed him a grin accompanied by a shake of the head as she tucked her tissue neatly away ‘… you don’t know how strong you are.’

  ‘You reckon that’s a bad thing, do you?’

  ‘No, it’s not a bad thing. But if you get known for it, you know what I mean?’

  The Byzantine world of ambiguous relationships between the covert and public domains involved them both, though her direct contact with government had begun it all. He had found himself invited on her initiative to monitor and report on what might be thought relevant to national interests at RGD, though he had not sailed readily to Byzantium, nor had he lately had any fixed dealings with that Byzantine hierarchy.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  Behind them, at the German table, there was sudden loud laughter.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to do this by myself,’ he said. ‘I gave a very solemn promise to someone that I wouldn’t let on to anyone. That’s why I don’t want the police involved.’

  ‘All right, Joe, you do it your way.’ The clutch bag was opened again. This time she took out a little mirror, peered into it and suddenly put it down. ‘Oh, I know I’ve said thank you already, but the flat, my flat, oh, it looks good, it really does! Your work as overseer really paid off! The builder says Mummy’s’ll be ready in two days’ time.’

  It was renewed acknowledgement of what he had been doing in her absence. Her large ground-floor flat in an Edwardian terrace, known as Inchbald Terrace, had undergone renovation and he had visited it several times to see how the work was progressing. Her mother’s basement flat had been receiving the same treatment.

  ‘It is ready now, isn’t it?’

  She met his query with a smile. ‘Yes, it’s ready. It’s just that I’ve got things to do to get it back to normal.’

  There were obvious signs around them that tables were emptying. Silvester, the proprietor, was issuing the sweetest Italian American ‘Nice night, sir! Goodnight, thank you! Goodnight to you, sir, goodnight to you, madam! Nice night, thank you!’ as he peered over the cash register.

  The imitation electric candles flickering on the walls between sparkling mirrors made Joe blink. He knew they had to leave, but he had to study her, the beautiful shining eyes and the classic relationship of cheekbone and wide, shapely mouth with pronounced, firm, kissable lips and the fine patina of the complexion in the shimmering light. The ache for her became so strong the little raised mirror she held towards her seemed deliberately to separate her from him as if it were as high as a wall.

  She lowered the mirror, popped it back in the clutch bag, snapped it shut and shared a further long look with him. ‘I promise I’ll try to let you know as soon as I get told. New York happened far too quickly, I admit. It came out of the blue.’ Then the smile returned, a delightful, candid, loving pouting of her lips. ‘You’ve got keys, haven’t you? So you know where I am. Mummy’s coming back the day after tomorrow, I think. Hopefully, the work’ll be finished. And I must get home. We’ll, you know… Next time. I promise. But not now. Mind?’

  Raised eyebrows semaphored her meaning and he grinned back at her. After paying the bill, he helped her into her raincoat and they went out into a conventional London downpour. They walked closely side-by-side under his umbrella. The smell of the damp night and the glisten of the rainy streets suddenly exuded nakedness to him. They seemed shameless places that Jenny’s closeness made sexually exciting.

  The crowds around them had the animated, shrill manner of people just out of theatres and cinemas, many hurrying, most streaming against each other beneath mushrooms of umbrellas. He realized it was later than he thought and he and Jenny must have spent almost three hours over their meal. Courtier Street was filled with the shapes of parked cars under street lamps glistening spectrally like smoothly washed granite rocks. It was one of those streets of pretentious nineteenth-century four-storey terraced houses with railings, stairwells to semi-basements and steep stairs to front doors. All the houses were now offices, but No 17, it seemed, enjoyed the privilege of having two flats on the top floor. He pointed the place out to her as they walked past, glancing upwards to see whether any lights were visible on the top floor, but it looked quite dark. Roland Salisbury and his young nephew were doubtless still busy in the back room.

  At the entrance to the Tube they kissed. It was a quick, but loving, reassured kissing and she held him tight for several instants as if she really wanted the embrace to melt quickly into undress and nakedness and lovemaking. Then she separated herself, looked away and turned from him with a hurried, embarrassed awkwardness. He watched her slim back go down the neon-lit steps of the tube entrance, saw her wave before she disappeared into the late-night crowd.

  All the anxiety of her New York absence had gone. But there was no going back to Courtier Street. He walked across Waterloo Bridge to the hotel by Waterloo East. In the rain he felt comforted and thought for a moment about something else. He had to do what he should have done earlier and more thoroughly, because Leo was now urging him to. He would search again for what his father had said was significant. He would try to find out who he really was.

  3

  Next morning as ever Big Ben and parliament were momentarily to be seen in sketchy focus between glass-and-concrete office blocks as the train curtseyed its way over points out of Waterloo station. It was a sight as bizarre as a Pre-Raphaelite watercolour revealed between slabs of Rothko. He had been intrigued by it throughout his schooldays and university years, knowing it would instantly be whisked out of sight and obliterated not only by buildings but more often than not by rain or mist, from right and left would come the flash of other trains passed or passing, the wheeling streets, the stacked, high-rise apartments, all things that loomed and vanished moment by moment to the wheels’ quickening clickety-click through Vauxhall, Clapham and Earlsfield. Droplets of rain or pennies of sunlight would flitter across the windows as the lightly rhapsodic singing note of the train’s increasing speed took him westward into a suburban imagery of rooftops, chimneys, aerials, bridges and vehicles on busy roads.

  The journey would have originally been predicated on his parents’ hopes for a good life. His father had more or less ensured such a modestly good life as a GP in a Wimbledon practice until what had always been a quarrelsome marriage unravelled and turned him into a forgetful, untidy drunkard. Joe accepted this and understood it, but it was a watershed. The trouble was his father’s fondness for secrecy. He had always refused to talk about his own father, the Richter from whom he received his surname, and Joe’s grandmother was the same. It was all wartime stuff. What is more, he had lost and gained on the stock market over twenty years. Soon after he died an old black, very battered tin box, known as the ‘bank box’, had been extracted from a bank vault and opened, because it contained what he had always referred to as something significant, ‘our Richter heritage’, but the only ‘heritage’ Joe could find in it were a lot of out-of-date certificates and guarantees, etc., along with a packet of singed and curled photos, two photograph albums, and a few letters and postcards relating to a century earlier.

  Home was still home, after all, where Joe knew he had inherited his past. But it was not the significant past his father had talked about. It was a past presently occupied by his grandmother, Mrs Shirley Greville, as she liked to call herself.

  ‘Why, Joseph dear,’ was her tremulous, disbelieving, surprised outcry the moment he let himself in through the front door and entered the sitting
room to find her in a wheelchair propped up by pillows at her back and neck, ‘you’ve grown, haven’t you! A kiss, please. Here.’ She pointed to her cheek and he kissed the slightly prickly cheek. ‘You didn’t tell us you’d be coming. And how you’ve grown! Why are you so big now?’

  He pointed out he had come three weeks before. ‘And I’ve not put on any weight.’

  ‘Three weeks! Didn’t you come last week? Emily, didn’t Joseph come last week?’

  ‘He didn’t, Mrs Greville.’

  Mrs Emily Boscombe, her carer, was thin, bony, elderly, rather short-tempered and put-upon. She rolled her eyes at being questioned.

  ‘Hasn’t he put on weight, don’t you think? You’ve put on weight, Joseph. I can see it.’

  He deferred to his grandmother’s opinion. It was simpler than disputing it. Her aggressive tone was a kind of defence mechanism against being asked how she was. She hated being asked how she was.

  Mrs Boscombe obliged. ‘Mrs Greville is much better today.’

  ‘Thank you, Emily, there’s no need to discuss my health. Any fool can see I’m in a wheelchair and propped up. No, it’s Joseph I’m worried about. So why aren’t you here?’

  He asked what she meant.

  ‘You have a bedroom here, don’t you? Why aren’t you here?’

  He had told her more than once he had been in a flat share. ‘Now I’ve rented a room in Courtier Street. I lost my job.’ He resented her interrogation.

  ‘Lost your job.’ She had never shown the slightest interest in his work and now the fact that he was out of a job seemed to elude her completely. ‘Oh, well, how’s that pretty girl of yours?’

  Her change of tack startled him because although he had brought Jenny on a visit he had not expected her to remember it. He told her she was back from New York. The stern, wrinkled mask of his grandmother’s face contrasted in its fixed lack of expression with the frolicsome carnival in the garden visible through the window where trees and shrubs waved their leaves in a vigorous late-summer breeze.

  ‘York, did you say?

  ‘New York.’

  ‘York. A very pretty place.’

  ‘No, not York! New York!’

  ‘Very windy today, isn’t it? Emily dear, is the central heating on?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Greville.’

  ‘I always have it full on when I’m home.’

  This was the reminder. His grandmother’s real home was a flat in Brighton overlooking the sea. She had made a habit over many years of renting it out for the summer months on the pretext that the money earned would help her for the rest of the year. As a result, she became a cuckoo in the nest of the Wimbledon home all summer long as of right. When Joe said the house would have to be sold to meet the terms of his father’s will, there had been elderly tantrums, resentment, complaints of being unloved and self-pitying claims that her own grandson, her own flesh and blood, was heartless and uncaring.

  That was the downside. To compensate for it she had at least been helpful the first time the ‘bank box’ was opened. Despite a good many senior moments she had managed to identify some of the un-named family members and friends whose faces peered anonymously from the pages of the photograph albums. References in one or two of the letters had also been cleared up. Of the singed and curled pack of old photos, she had simply been offhand:

  ‘I’m a Greville, you know. I was born a Greville and I’ll stay a Greville till my dying day. That’s all old Richter stuff. I don’t know anything about old Richter stuff’

  Old Richter stuff!

  There they had been, all spread out on a large tray, old sepia rectangular photographs of groups of women in long dresses and men in waistcoats and bowler hats, most so faded they were scarcely more than ghosts, with, scattered among them, a few studio portrait photos obviously posed against artificial scenery or high-backed chairs. The subjects were practically all unidentifiable. Mrs Shirley Richter dismissed them with a wave of the hand. She was indignant.

  ‘I don’t know any of these people. I can hardly see any of them, they’re so old!’ An irritable adjustment of her spectacles emphasised her disapproval. ‘A lot of rubbish, that’s what this stuff is! Joseph dear, get rid of it! I don’t know why all this stuff’s been locked away here. It was a stupid idea. And they’re smelly, they need burning!’

  Bearded, portly features were mistily visible in the majority of the portrait photos, presumably made in Switzerland or Germany since flowery salon titles and addresses were printed either on the front or back of each. One of them was French, with the address of a photographic studio in Cherbourg discernible faintly through what was obviously an attempt to erase it with strokes of rusty-brown ink. It depicted a woman, perhaps a girl, though the actual features had vanished into the shading of a wide-brimmed hat, with a man beside her, probably clean-shaven with thinning hair, whose oval face stared directly at the camera in sunlight so bright it almost bleached out everything apart from blots of eyes and a grainy background of what looked like distant waves. On the back of this curled, yellowing print was a handwritten dedication in the same rusty ink:

  A ma petite. J.

  Now, after running upstairs to his bedroom largely to reassure himself that nothing had been touched, he found the black tin ‘bank box’ still on the table by the window where he had left it. Opening it again, he realized his grandmother was right. A smell of something burnt and damp emerged the instant he lifted the lid. The packet of photos was as he had left it, topped by the photo of the couple. Were they perhaps, as he liked to imagine, his great-grandfather and great-grandmother on their honeymoon? If that were so, though, it seemed a pity it had been left in this ‘bank box’ to be damaged by incendiary bombs during the Blitz? Somehow that didn’t seem right. This was not the place where his ancestors should have been locked away. In any case, why was the dedication in French, who was J and why Cherbourg? And what was significant about it in terms of family heritage?

  His grandmother refused even to look at the photo when he showed it to her after returning downstairs.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know anything about that old stuff.’

  He asked her whether there had ever been any connection with Cherbourg.

  ‘I thought you were going to burn all that old stuff. No, I don’t know anything about Cherbourg. My grandfather Greville, Ambrose Greville, was a very rich man. He had a chateau. Near the Loire. But the Richters never had anything like that. Never.’ She exchanged an arrogant look with Mrs Emily Boscombe who sat beside her. ‘Emily will bear me out. I have a picture of it at home. How is your mother now, Joseph?’

  The question was so unexpected it came towards him like a threatening tsunami.

  ‘She is…’

  ‘Have you heard from her recently?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘So?’

  He sat down abruptly in his father’s old chair. The wave engulfed him.

  ‘So has she remarried?’

  ‘No.’

  She held her chin high and washed her hands. ‘She was never right for my son, your father. A very argumentative woman. He should never have married her.’

  An exchange of glances with Emily Boscombe produced a faint note of protest. ‘Oh, Mrs Greville, I don’t think you should…’

  ‘I am entitled to say what I think. Lois - or whatever she likes to be called - ruined your father’s life, Joseph, by leaving him. She was disloyal. I know your father could be difficult. I know family life here in this house was full of rows. But you stick together in marriage, you ride out the difficult times, you make do. It is the first rule of married life. And your father had enough to put up with in his practice without having to endure her disloyalty all those years. Well, has she finally married that – what was his name?’

  ‘Leo.’

  ‘Yes, Leo. Oh, yes, of course, Leo! Has she married him?’

  ‘No, as I said, she hasn’t.’

  ‘It’s a blessing, I suppose.’ She adopted a quite deliberately refl
ective mode. ‘It’s a kind of loyalty to keep your married name, I suppose. So is she better?’

  ‘She’s in remission.’

  ‘You keep in touch, I suppose.’

  ‘By email and phone calls. You know I visited two months ago.’

  ‘Did you? Oh, well.’ She pressed her lips together as a form of closure on the subject. Then she darted him a look. ‘Are you staying to lunch?’

  ‘No, granny, I’m not.’

  ‘You can if you like,’ Emily Boscombe said.

  He said no. It had been unwise to subject himself to another of his grandmother’s tiresome interrogations, especially as the visit had done nothing to answer any questions about his so-called ‘heritage’, his despised Richter heritage. ‘No, I won’t stay to lunch. I came to have another look in that box.’

  ‘Well then…’ His grandmother sniffed and stared out of the window. ‘At the end of the month Emily and I will be going back to Brighton, you know. I have this bad back. Which is why I am in this confounded thing.’ She lifted the rug round her knees to indicate the wheelchair. Another sniff. ‘I don’t like to talk about my health. All my life my health has been a nuisance, but I do not want to talk about it. I’ll get better with the sea air. And you ought to lose some weight, Joseph! You ought to be much slimmer!’

  As she spoke she wheeled herself in the direction of the kitchen, ordering Emily Boscombe to follow her. He watched her go. The abruptness of her action annoyed him.

  ‘Go to hell!’

  The wheelchair halted in the doorway.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She wheeled herself out of the room. The brand beneath his watchstrap suddenly started smarting. He shook his head.