He faced Andy, letting the words sink in. 'Remember I said you were late for a reason? You didn't receive that PS17 million for free. Look on it as an advance that's been shelled out for a book you haven't written. Showing up was securing the contract. Since when, you've been doing what every charlatan author does: spending your advance. But you need to do some legwork. You need to sweat a bit in order to write your way out of whatever pit you've created.'
Part of David's cleverness was not to seem clever. Andy was trying to follow his line of thought when David said: 'This is something you've got to work out, Andy. I am not ghostwriting it for you - although I may be able to help.'
David made a quick inventory of the material he had amassed. He had the excitement of a boy talking about his collection of soccer cards. He was prepared to hand it over.
'I can give you most of the plot and the main characters. But I haven't been able to crack it all. There's Maral Bernhard. She won't talk to me. But you need to see her. She's the key who can make sense of this. What's more, there's an outside chance she might speak to you - being Madigan's only other Attender.'
The crowd had thinned and the barman was bawling last orders when David looked at Andy in a significant way. 'You realise that in everything you've told me tonight there's one name you haven't mentioned.'
'Who?'
'Are you seeing Jeanine?'
Andy drained his glass. 'What makes you think that?'
'Stop blushing like a spanked bottom.'
'David, what makes you think that?'
'Ivo has this interesting idea that's why you haven't been in touch. Historically -'
'I haven't seen Jeanine since the night you and I sat at this bar and you threatened to rip my arms out of their sockets with the assistance of the Dry Heaves if I so much as got up off my chair.' He was seething. It just got to him.
'No bull? Not that I care whether you are seeing her.'
'I am not bullshitting you,' a little too quickly.
'Come on, lads. Door's thataway.'
Uninfluenced by Andy's inexplicable change of mood, David stood up. 'That stuff I've got - I'll dig it out when I get home. I can get you at your Kensington address?'
5
A NDY DROVE TO C LARENDON Crescent the following evening. But when he opened the gate, his courage failed. It was a colder night, and the white stuccoed house, shuttered and dark, looked more forbidding than on the previous occasion when he had stood here. Until his mother's words came back: 'Want to catch a fly, clap hands above it.'
He walked up the steps, pressed the bell.
The trees rustled in a breeze. But nothing moved behind the stained-glass door. He felt slightly uneasy.
Andy had already been in touch with Vamplew, who reminded him that he and Maral Bernhard were due to inherit this house at the end of the month - the date set for Mrs Bernhard to move out. Even were she in residence, she would be unlikely to answer the door, mistaking him for his obsessive friend.
He pressed again. Light from a lamp across the street fell on a row of tiles that he had not noticed before, glazed with the name 'Villa Marash'.
Andy turned the handle. Locked.
He walked around to the walled garden at the back. No one watching. He heaved himself onto the wall and sat catching his breath, peering at the copper beech.
A crack of light through the topmost leaves.
He jumped down, landing on a thick bed of grass, and began walking towards the house, expecting at each step an alarm to go off, security lights to blaze. But the only sound, the leaves rustling; the only light, in that window high up.
You didn't only inherit Madigan's money, you idiot . He started to understand what David meant as he approached the house. There was some fragment of his childhood in the walk across the garden, the pots of herbs and flowers, the unmowed lawn with its sundial on which he grazed himself after tripping over the roots of the tree. He reached the back door and knocked.
No answer.
He shuddered, rubbing his elbow. It was going to be an icy night.
The back door was locked as well. He looked for something to throw at the window. Only long, thick grass. Common sense and fear urged him to leave, but what he did was grab hold of a branch and pull himself up the copper beech.
He could see Jeanine before him as he climbed the tree. He gripped the next branch tighter. Ever since Ponte all'Asse, he had tried to shut her out, his back turned, deliberately avoiding her eye, this person who nonetheless had determined his behaviour by dint of the fact that his every action, every thought was predicated on not thinking about her.
Andy rose level with the window and crawled along a branch until he could see down into the room. He had decided that the house was empty and was not expecting what happened next. Below, a noise like a cough, and then a figure edged into the light.
That sight! His heart beat faster. Pale and drawn with a thin nose and a face lined with wrinkles as though too long in the water. And wearing a skimpy green dressing gown the colour of pine mulch.
He inched further along the branch.
She had inherited PS17 million, but she looked crushed.
'Mrs Bernhard!'
She came to the window. In the moonlight he could see her, the dragon to Christopher Madigan's Hesperian garden.
His heart thumped faster than a voodoo drum. Was he serious about wanting to beard this creature in her den?
'Maral Bernhard!'
She pressed her face closer to the pane. A round mouth puttering to itself and two eyes gaping.
What was the matter? Didn't she recognise her name? Did she think he was a squirrel? 'Maral! Maral!'
She arched her eyebrows until they disappeared beneath her hairnet into her sparse grey hair. 'Krikor . . .' She stared at him. 'Krikor . . .' bare-gummed, with a look of indescribable anguish. His grandmother with her teeth out never scared him as much.
'It's me,' he waved, mooned on a branch, looking down at her through the leaves. 'Andy Larkham. Your fellow Attender.'
Maral Bernhard unlatched the back door and let him in.
'I thought you were him,' she panted, looking at Andy with a frightened, furtive expression.
She turned and slopped across the floor, barely raising the soles of her feet. He followed her bent shape, along the passageway, into a spacious hallway stacked with twenty or so plywood tea chests, marked 'Books', 'Papers', 'Paintings'.
'It's all right, I'll be gone by the end of the week,' she said in a strained voice, and shivered. 'Upstairs is warmer.'
She was so weak that she could take one step only at a time.
'Here,' he offered, 'give me your arm.'
'No, I can do this,' snatching it back.
Very slowly, she climbed a broad winding staircase that divided into two on the second floor, and into the room that he had gazed down upon from the copper beech. She sat in a small wicker chair after failing to shut the door. Staring at the brass doorknob, the light reflecting on it from the bare bulb overhead.
A wooden crate was the only other furniture. He dragged it over.
Andy's focus to this point had concentrated on getting into the house to speak with Maral Bernhard. Now that he was here, he had no idea what to say. It demanded little clairvoyance to see that she was in no fit condition to talk about Jeanine's father.
Her face was cracked like his mother's hands. He had an urge to stroke it.
'You must be sorry to go,' he began. 'How long have you lived here?' Once again, this strange sensation of wanting to be her friend, when so clearly he was repugnant to her.
Maral Bernhard looked down. The room smelled of feet and red wine. 'Twenty-nine years,' she said in a defeated voice, and rubbed her thin ankles as though she had cramp.
She was exhausted. She could hardly speak. The stress of leaving home, he supposed. Of having to pack up three decades of objects - in order that the house might be sold, along with those plywood boxes and their contents.
Climbing tha
t tree had made him almost as shaky as her. He felt colder inside the house than out, and, stirred by the smell of alcohol in the room, unbearably thirsty.
'Do you have anything to drink?'
She volunteered to get up, but he said, 'No, just tell me where.' She mumbled something about the kitchen being across the landing, and he went in and found a light and turned it on. All that was left was a crate of wine with five bottles missing and a bottle half full with a cork in it and a glass upside down on the enamel drainer. He took the glass and bottle and came back in and he said, 'Petrus 1982 - do you realise how much this costs?' and she said, 'I don't know, I was hungry,' and he said, 'Want some?' and she shook her head, so he poured himself a glass and sat there reading the label.
How long he sat there, drinking that superlative wine, Andy could not have said. It tasted as if the whole year and a half - since the first time he stood outside the Villa Marash - had filtered down into his glass, and he was tasting it neat.
Presently, he looked around. A high empty bookcase. Pale spaces on the walls where paintings had hung. And cold as the tomb. Funny, this was the sort of place he had envisaged for himself. Not any longer. It was like the inside of somebody's skull.
'It's a big house for two people to rattle around in,' he remarked after a while.
'He slept in the tower,' was all she said.
The wine was working its effect on him. He felt generous.
'Why don't you stay here?' he said suddenly. 'I don't need the money. Keep the house.'
She stared down between her legs.
'I don't want to stay.'
Her white ankles protruding beneath her dressing gown resembled the splayed claw-feet on his school bathtub.
'Where are you going to live?'
'I had plans,' she said, but very vaguely.
'Tell me.'
She looked up. Her dragon eyes on him, uneasy-making. His father had the same expression. Lying on his back on the front lawn, his eyes reflecting telegraph wires. His fingers raised on the grass in a tense claw before he scuttled away.
'You don't know, do you?' Andy said softly. 'You haven't a clue.'
Her chair made a noise as she sat forward. Murmuring something Andy did not understand, snippets of another language.
He reached out, took her hand. Icy. 'When was the last time you ate?'
Was she dying? The veins on her wrist like the insides of an old book and her face all hollowed out, as it would be if you had been living for weeks on Chateau Petrus, even a 1982.
'Maral Bernhard, when was the last time you had a meal that wasn't wine?'
He noticed that she was not listening. Something about the look in her eye, it got to him. He put down his glass. 'You haven't been taking care of yourself. You need to see a doctor.'
'No, no doctor,' shaking her head. Nervous, she spoke louder.
'Listen, you need help.' He had made up his mind. 'You have to eat. You have to get some fresh air into your lungs. What about a trip to the seaside?' He did not know what made him say it.
A groove deeper than the rest appeared in her brow, large enough to lay a pencil into. 'The seaside? I haven't been to the seaside.'
Andy helped Maral Bernhard on with her fur coat and strapped her into his car and put her up for the night in his flat. And in the morning walked her to a cafe in Thackeray Street, where she ate a full breakfast, saying not a word as she gulped down a pint of fresh orange juice, next assaulting a croissant, then two soft-poached eggs.
Later that morning, he drove her back to Clarendon Crescent so that she might pack a suitcase. It joined his own on the rear seat, and the holdhall in which he had tucked Missing Montaigne , plus the diary given to him by his sister and Rian. As he was loading the car, at the last minute, on impulse, he grabbed it.
A large white removal van arrived as he pulled away. In his boot: those seven bottles of Petrus 1982, plus the crate of rare Sassicaia Tuscan red that he had sat on and another crate of Colares that he had discovered in the hall. He was going to inherit half of this wine anyway. He was only taking what was coming to him.
They headed out along Hammersmith Grove, past his old office, to Cornwall. Maral Bernhard wrapped in her Siberian polecat - or maybe it was camel or caribou, it had a colour unlike any animal he knew, it was like the dust of the blown earth - and staring at the countryside, not saying a word, even as they passed Stonehenge. The only thing she said upon reaching St Buryan five hours later: 'You know, mister, you are a very, very bad driver.'
He had booked them into a B & B. From his bay window upstairs he had a view of a slate-roofed farmhouse less than half a mile away across a ploughed field.
The owner was all he would have guessed from her telephone manner: a bustling ex-librarian and Radio 4 addict with hair dyed the shade of her lemon marmalade.
She took them for grandmother and grandson. It was too complicated to disabuse her. As well, it felt right. The two of them strangely, inevitably, linked by Christopher Madigan's inheritance.
6
S EPTEMBER 23 . A SHFIELD G UEST House, St Buryan.
4.30 p.m. Am writing this to keep myself occupied while Mrs Nettlefold makes tea.
We've done little, these past two days. I've been bogged down in Furnivall, making notes, going around in circles for a way to salvage his manuscript. Maral Bernhard is tuned out, too busy recuperating to say anything. Right now she's sitting beside me in the conservatory - a green blanket over her lap, staring at the hedgerows, arms folded in anticipation of the tea trolley and Mrs N.'s home-made flapjacks, stored in a tin with a joyful Prince Charles and Lady Di on the lid.
She's still mistrustful, unrelaxed. Yesterday Mrs N. asked her: 'And how do you like your tea?'
'Tea?' in a brusque voice that made the biscuit tin jump up in fright. 'It tastes like tomcat piss.'
'No, dear, I mean how do you take it?' and poured an imaginary pot in the air.
Twice, I've caught her frowning at me, muttering under her breath, as though she can't work out who I am. I've been careful not to probe. One time I did raise the subject of Christopher Madigan, she called me a bloody fool and burrowed deeper into her moody silence. 'There's no need to be so unpleasant,' I said. Haven't yet asked about Jeanine.
September 24.
Today, the sun came out. She raised her face into it, like a crumpled old map, and inhaled. 'Soon as the sun shines, it's a different place,' to no one in particular.
This afternoon, I helped her into the car and we went for a walk above Lamorna. She let me hold her arm and we climbed in silence. The breeze dropped as we reached the edge of the cliff and she stood very still, feeling the sun warm on her skin and losing that boss-eyed look she has. 'So this is the seaside . . .' and closed her eyes. In that moment, her wrinkles were rays and I caught the flash of a vivacious, open-faced woman.
'How old are you, if you don't mind my asking?'
'I'll be sixty-five in a minute. Next question.'
We turned to go, and for the first time it occurred to me that what we were looking at was Stuart Furnivall's landscape, and that he was the reason I chose this part of Cornwall - an opportunity to make it up to him in however small a way. To walk his cliffs, smell the salt air, watch the boats thumping through the swell to Newlyn, their holds slithery with the Dover sole that we have for our dinner.
Mrs N. continues to refer to my grandmother.
Spent the evening on my own trying to get to grips with Furnivall's manuscript.
September 25.
This morning I left MB asleep in the conservatory and followed Mrs N.'s directions, past a row of farm buildings, to a 1970s brick cottage set back on its own with a view of the sea. Mrs N. says that she knew Furnivall by sight and reputation only. She well remembers his curly-haired figure plunging along the paths, lost in gorse and thought, but never had occasion to stop and speak with him. I hadn't anticipated the emotion I would feel standing before his house. I was taking it all in - orange leaves in the trees, a rin
g of standing stones, the thud of sea against cliff - when a strong-faced woman came out of a low door, straightened to her full height and glared at me. 'If you're hoping to see Tricia, her dad's had a fall and she's had to go to Zenna, but looking as you left no number we couldn't call back.' I told her I wasn't hoping to see Tricia. 'Then who do you want?' she said sourly. I explained that I knew the person who lived here before. 'Well, he doesn't live here now.'
Drove back to Mrs N.'s where I found MB in an agitated state. She wanted to know where I'd been, who I'd seen. I blurted out about Stuart Furnivall, his importance in my life and how I had failed him in the one thing that he asked me to do. Failed myself, too. This seemed to pacify her. She looked at me and listened, suspicion and curiosity sparring in her eyes, saying nothing except 'So you are Andrew Larkham . . .' She said it two or three times. Who did she think I was?
September 26.
MB didn't appear for breakfast. At ten o'clock I went upstairs and found her in her room sitting at a dressing table. On it, various items she'd unpacked. A short stick about a foot long; a fragment of what looked like brick; plus a stack of photographs.
She held up a small black-and-white photograph and sniffed. 'He was so alone in his coffin. He wasn't wearing the yellow jersey I knitted him. I told him he must wear it when he got up and went to the lavatory at night.'
I stepped closer. On the brink of seeing him for the first time.
A young man astride a motorbike: light-framed, lean, about eighteen. His face beneath the dark eyebrows watchful and smiling, with the clean features of a marathon runner.
'Madigan?' my pulse quickening.
'Probably the best-looking man I ever saw.'
Next to this photograph, one of a much older man dressed in a cardigan and suit. His father?
'That's before. That's after,' she said.
'After what?'
'After Jeanine was taken away.'
I could see the tension in her hands. I was tense, too. I wanted her to tell me everything. But I had a feeling like vertigo to say something provocative.
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