He had seen very little of his mother over the years; just the occasional letter or even surprise visit to school, always with a time limit, a train to catch, someone to meet, perhaps once or twice a year; usually Christmas presents, always birthday presents, but by post. That she did not try to see him more hurt him horribly. It wasn’t until he was much older that he had understood that she was kept from him by law until his eighteenth birthday, when she had returned to his life, sought him out at his rooms at Oxford, bearing ridiculously extravagant gifts, all brought from Paris – a long silk scarf from Hermès, an exquisite leather attaché case from Galeries Lafayette, and an amazing panama hat with a wide floppy brim which she had found in the flea market one Sunday morning and having found it, she said, could only visualise Ned’s face beneath it.
‘Now come along,’ she said. ‘Time we became friends again, you and I.’
And half unwillingly, half intrigued, he had let her take him to lunch at the Randolph, very aware of the interest she caused, so chic and so beautiful still, with her cloud of dark hair and great brown eyes, so like his.
It took a while, but eventually she began to make inroads on his hostility and his hurt, explaining that Sir James had put upon her all manner of legal restraints, and threatened her and her lover with physical violence should she even try to see Ned. Many years later, she told him, her artist lover, insanely jealous of the beautiful little boy she wept over nightly and begged to be allowed to see, had threatened to leave her.
‘And are you happy, my darling?’ she said. ‘Are you in love, is there some beautiful girl I should know about?’
He said there was not, but that he was very happy. She stared at him intently for a moment or two, then said, ‘Or some other sort of beauty, perhaps? You can tell me. Of all people I will understand.’
He had blushed furiously, said he didn’t know what she meant. ‘Darling, of course you do.’
‘Mother—’
‘It’s all right. I won’t breathe a word, of course.’
‘Well, you won’t,’ he said, suddenly angry at this entirely unwarranted invasion into his most private life. ‘Because there is nothing to breathe a word about. Please, can we stop this at once? Or I shall have to leave and that would be a pity.’
‘It would. But if ever you do need to talk to me about anything, anything at all, then please remember my view of life is not quite the same as most of the people you are surrounded by. All right? Oh, you look so handsome in that scarf,’ she added, winding it round his neck. ‘Now, tell me, what sort of a doctor do you want to be? A surgeon, like your father?’
And he had explained that he might want to be a paediatrician. ‘That’s a doctor who looks after children.’ And she had said how wonderful, and then, said that she and the artist – ‘Michel as he is known in Paris, although of course he is as English as you or I, and really it’s Michael’ – were thinking of coming back ‘quite soon’ to England to live.
‘This awful war business, so worrying, it’s spoiling everything for everybody. Anyway, we’re not prepared to risk our lives, and we think we’ll go and live in Cornwall; there are lots of artists and artists’ colonies there, and Michael will be very happy. He’s too old to be called up, of course.’
‘And will you be very happy?’ Ned asked and she looked at him and said probably not, but she had little choice really. ‘I can hardly leave him, I don’t have any money. Anyway, we rub along together very well …’
That had been the last he had seen of her for many years. Impatient and even bitter at the new desertion, for he had hoped to see more of her after the birthday conversation as he thought of it (although it had contained subject matter that had frightened him considerably). Then one evening, there was a ring at his new Chelsea doorbell and there she stood – a little older, a little grey in her wild dark hair, her clothes neither fashionable nor unfashionable, but the usual riot of flowing layered multicoloured fabrics, her arms outstretched, and impossible to turn away. She had got the address, she explained, from the housekeeper at his father’s home. ‘Dear Mrs Ellis, she was always very fond of me …’
He asked her in, stiffly at first, but it didn’t last – it couldn’t against her enthusiasm, her exclamations of delight at the pretty house. ‘And my bed! Oh, how lovely to see it again, Ned, and to know that you liked it so much. I would never allow your father into it,’ she added, absent-mindedly pulling the counterpane straight. ‘It was mine, my refuge, my queendom.’
It was his turn – after more than a dozen years as he pointed out – to take her to dinner; they went nowhere smart or famous but to one of the small restaurants on the King’s Road that were becoming fashionable, and she told him that Michael had died. ‘Quite suddenly, of a heart attack.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said and she smiled her conspiratorial, enchanting smile and said, ‘I don’t think I am. He was just as much a bully in his way as your father. I only went off with him because he was an escape, and I only stayed with him because I had no alternative. He’s left me quite a lot of money – they sold well, those chocolate-boxy pictures of his – so I shall be all right. I shan’t come back to London. We have a pretty house in Cornwall, near Fowey, very nice, lots of friends, and I shall stay there.’
‘Right,’ said Ned, with a rather unfilial stab of relief, for the thought of Persephone becoming a part of his daily life was alarming. ‘But what will you do?’
‘Oh, darling, I have a little business of my own – I make cushions. You have no idea how much people want cushions; in fact, they want mine so much I have had to find people to help me make them. I enjoy it very much. Now, talking of being alone, how about you? Any girlfriends? Fiancées? Wives?’
‘No.’
‘Ned, you’re in your thirties …’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I simply haven’t had time. I’ve done nothing but work ever since I came back from the war.’
‘Ned, darling, there is always time for love.’
‘Not for me there hasn’t been.’
‘And still nothing else, no one else?’
‘No,’ said Ned, angry suddenly. ‘Mother, please. I don’t want to have to leave you here, but—’
‘All right, darling. I’m sorry. So, these poor sick children you look after – what are they suffering from?’
‘Oh, so many things,’ said Ned, feeling himself calmer as he talked. ‘In the hospital we get the acute cases – convulsions, appendicitis, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and of course this dreadful thing, leukaemia, which is cancer of the blood. I have been doing some work on that, and I’ve discovered that in some cases, simply a fresh blood transfusion will bring them into a remission.’
But she was looking round the restaurant, smiling at people at other tables; and he gave up, resigned, wondering why he had thought for even a moment that she would really be interested in anything he had to say.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Was there a wild mutiny with the doctors when this new arrangement, the National Health Service, began?’
‘There wasn’t,’ he said, adding, ‘I’m surprised you even know about it.’
‘Well, of course I do. I was once a doctor’s wife, after all – it interested me. All the stories in the papers, this man Bevan, wildly attractive I thought, telling the doctors what to do, they can’t have liked it.’
‘Well, in the end they – we – didn’t mind. Now, shall I walk you back to your hotel?’
‘No need,’ she said, but he did and then wandered home slowly, reflecting on her visit, on all her visits, so rare, so irritating and yet for all that, so special.
The launch of the National Health Service really had been something of an anticlimax: after all the headlines and the speeches and the BMA voting against it, it had been launched that summer and in the hospitals, at any rate, on that day, 5 July, you would have been hard-pressed to know anything important had happened at all. Doctors and nurses arrived, looked after their patients as they had always done, perfo
rmed operations, ran clinics, delivered babies, and at the end of their day left again.
Ned couldn’t remember anyone saying, ‘Oh, my God, the Health Service has started’; nobody said we won’t be doing it like that any more; nobody even said thank God for the Health Service. It just happened.
It affected the honoraries, like his father and him, hardly at all. In fact, privately, away from the headlines, where many of them thundered about not allowing the government to tell them what to do, they were arguably happier and certainly better off.
They had always given their services free to the hospitals, sometimes paid an honorarium, hence their title of honoraries – sometimes not, making their money from their private practices. Now they were paid by the NHS as well, per session – eleven in each week maximum – and beyond that could do as many or as few as they wished. It suited them very nicely. Even Ned’s father could find little to complain about. The much-vaunted spectre of government busybodies standing in operating theatres and by patients’ beds, telling the doctors what to do, had disappeared like so much hot air.
Now, Ned thought, he had everything he had ever wanted: work he loved and was absorbed by, a pleasant lifestyle, a good income. But he made a decision that night, as he walked home through the long summer evening, shaken by the conversation with his mother. It was, as his father and his friends, his colleagues and his superiors, all kept telling him, time he got married.
If Ludo Manners could raise a large and happy family, then maybe so could he; but it was a terrifying prospect. Could he do that – live a lie, pretend to everyone, even to himself – make such a marriage work? But the alternative, carrying on as he was … suspicions would arise, the occasional lapse was fraught with huge danger, and as a life, it was a terribly lonely one.
He sank into his big easy chair when he got home, poured himself what must have been a triple brandy, and tried to concentrate on his dilemma. As always his mind absolutely refused to focus on it.
‘Well, wasn’t that lovely?’ Diana collapsed onto the sofa in her parents’ drawing room, kicked off her high heels and took the glass of champagne her father had passed her. ‘Thank you, Daddy. Funny how it can revive you, when you’ve already had too much.’
‘It was a perfect day,’ said Caroline. ‘Darling Betsey! Daughters-in-law can be such hell, and here are we, sent this angel. Her parents are so nice too. Lovely house. I do like Berkshire – if I ever had to choose another county, that would be it.’
‘God forbid,’ said Sir Gerald, irritable with a growing hangover, picking an argument as he was inclined to do on such occasions, ‘that we should even think about living somewhere else.’
‘Oh, darling, I know. And I’m not. I just said I liked it.’
‘Betsey’s dress was wonderful, wasn’t it?’ said Diana, oddly exasperated by the comparison of two counties she would have killed to live in, banished as she was to the wretched wilds of Yorkshire.
‘And darling, may I say again, yours is quite lovely,’ said Caroline. ‘You looked beautiful. Didn’t she, Johnathan?’ she added, as he came into the room. He looked distracted.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said Diana looked – looks – beautiful in that dress?’
‘Oh, yes. Well, she always does. Now – darling – I don’t know if you heard the phone just then?’
‘No,’ said Diana, a sense of alarm creeping over her. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Well, it was Mother. She, well, I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to have to leave first thing tomorrow.’
‘Oh, Johnathan, no!’ Diana looked at him, unable to disguise her horror. ‘I thought we were going to stay a few days.’
‘We were. And of course you may, if you like. But Father’s taken a turn for the worse. Mother fears a stroke – only a small one, but she’s terribly worried.’
I bet she is, thought Diana, terribly worried that her darling son is away from her, possibly even having a nice time, with his wife and son, a few days’ break he had certainly earned,
‘Oh, Johnathan,’ said Caroline, flashing a warning look at Diana. ‘I’m so, so sorry. Of course you must get back. We can put you on an early train, and you and Jamie too, of course, Diana …’
‘I – but I have a few arrangements for next week,’ said Diana helplessly, seeing it all disappearing, her trips to London, lunching with friends, going to a matinee with Wendelien, leaving Jamie behind with his grandmother and his nanny, treats in prospect that had sustained her sanity for the past month or more. ‘I …’
‘Well, Diana, they hardly matter, surely?’ said Caroline. ‘Not if Vanessa needs you all back at Guildford Park.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t need all of us,’ said Johnathan hastily. ‘She did specifically say she didn’t want to spoil Diana’s plans.’
‘Well, that’s exceedingly generous of her,’ said Caroline. ‘Isn’t it, Diana?’
‘Exceedingly,’ said Diana.
Next morning, Johnathan safely on the train to London and thence to Yorkshire, Diana most willingly accompanied her parents to church. As they drove away, they passed a tall, gaunt figure walking down the hill towards the churchyard.
‘Oh, look,’ said Diana, ‘it’s Tom Knelston, isn’t it? He looks dreadful.’
‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Caroline. ‘Diana, I completely forgot to tell you, how awful of me. Poor, poor man, the most dreadful thing, absolute tragedy.’
‘What?’ said Diana, craning her neck to look back at Tom, who she could now see was carrying a huge armful of wild flowers,
‘His wife and baby both died.’
‘Died? Both of them? How terrible. I wish I’d known, I’d have written …’
‘I’m sure you would. I’ve been so distracted, this year, with the wedding and everything. I am sorry. Yes, it was just before last Christmas.’
‘Last Christmas! Oh, Mummy, that’s appalling, you should have told me! Why, how, whatever happened?’
‘Some freak gynaecological thing, his mother told me. Everything seemed fine, she was three weeks away from having the baby, and …’
They had reached the Manor House by the time Caroline had relayed the tragedy; Diana jumped out of the car. ‘I’m going back. I must speak to him, he must have thought none of us cared. Honestly, Mummy, I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’
‘Well, darling, I’m sorry,’ said Caroline, slightly irritably now. ‘It’s not as if he’s a friend or anything. I didn’t think you’d be so upset—’
‘It doesn’t matter that I’m upset. It’s him, for God’s sake. Anyway, I’m off to find him. Don’t wait lunch if I’m not back. And tell Nanny to make sure Jamie has his cod liver oil. I think it got forgotten yesterday in all the excitement. Oh, here, take my hat, would you?’
‘If I didn’t know it was impossible,’ said Caroline to her husband, looking after Diana as she strode down the drive, ‘I’d say she felt something more for that boy than sympathy.’
‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous,’ said Sir Gerald. ‘She hardly knows him. And he’s the postman’s son, for God’s sake.’
Tom was just getting up from where he had been sitting by Laura and Hope’s grave when he heard Diana’s voice. He tried to visit them most Sundays; being so near to her was comforting. He would sit actually on the grave, his hand resting on the headstone, the lovely headstone, so simple, no angels or flowers or crosses, just the words that he had spent so many hours and so much heartache getting exactly to his satisfaction. Laura Knelston, it said, beloved of Tom Knelston. And Hope, their daughter, beloved of them both, and with Laura for ever.
People had queried the wording, had said endlessly, surely he meant to say ‘beloved wife of Tom Knelston’ but he said, no, the fact that she had been his wife was of no real importance, what mattered was that she had been his beloved; had filled his life with happiness, with tenderness, with joy. It was important that people should know about Hope too, that she, although no one had known her, except him for the briefest while,
was a part of him, and of Laura, and even while taking her mother away from him, she was important; she had made them a family, however briefly and sadly. For a while, she had been so very much alive; she had lain in their bed at night, a small important presence, albeit unborn, moving, kicking, making them laugh, a promise of their future, of the family they would shortly be. He would never forget, ever, he knew, the hour he had spent with her, holding her, looking at her small, peaceful face, her perfect, beautiful self; he would never know more of her than that, but he did have it, the memory of that presence, that beauty, and it was a great deal more than nothing, lying beneath the earth in her mother’s arms.
He would talk to Laura, telling her everything he had been doing, how much he missed her, who he had seen, what they had said, that without her he was only half himself. He tried, tried so hard, to live on as she would have wished. He could imagine her impatient disdain if he spent all his days grieving, spreading sorrow: ‘For goodness’ sake,’ she would say, ‘is this all you can manage for me? I’m really not very impressed, Tom.’
What he tried to manage for her was something quite different, requiring a courage he could not have summoned without her, without having lived with her and loved her and known her: the courage to smile, to talk to people, to care about all that they had shared together, the ideas, the ideals, the plans, the future, to show that she had not lived in vain. That was her legacy, through him; and he refused to squander it through grief.
He told her if he had enjoyed something, if someone had made him laugh, would give her the most minute details of political meetings, anything ridiculous, or pompous, of any new members, especially ones he thought she would like. He told her about days in the office, about how hard Betty tried to cheer him up, about how continuingly upset Mr Pemberton was.
A Question of Trust Page 17
