Biting back the remarks yelling to be uttered, I said quietly, ‘There are other rooms in your section. What do you keep in there?’
‘Same as in here, of course. Place just sort of silts up. Well, you know how it is.’
‘So as soon as one room gets dirty, you –’
‘Never bother with a bit of dirt. Supposed to eat a peck of dirt before you die, or some such thing.’
‘There’s dirt and dirt.’
He looked sheepish. ‘Well, if you want to cast your eyes over some of my dirt, we’d better have another little drink. That bottle you brought – should be chilled now. Mind you, young lady,’ he added, ‘I need more than one bottle a day. Sold any of that stuff yet?’
‘Not yet. It’s going to take time. I told you, I did sell the egg cup you gave me, which is how I was able to afford your microwave and your ready-meals.’
‘Ah. A bit of quid pro quo. Awfully decent of you, Lena, to think of an old buffer like me. A present, too,’ he said, ambiguously.
‘As for your stuff, properly preparing items like that takes more than a quick dunk in lavender scented soap.’ It was as if he was young, I an old, wise teacher. ‘Now, the most useful thing for me would be to see the first room you used. Then we can sort of work up.’
‘Suppose that’d be my old bedroom.’
I’d meant down in this wing, of course, but I’d take in what I could, when I could. I nodded.
‘Means braving the lumpen proletariat.’
If I wasn’t careful I’d tell him what I thought of his snobbery. But I didn’t think film researchers were supposed to yell at their subjects. ‘Do visitors see it, then?’ As if I didn’t know the answer already.
‘Good God, no! Only the state bedrooms: Queen Elizabeth slept here, that sort of thing. She didn’t, of course. Wrong period. No evidence that Victoria did, either. But Edward did, while he was Prince of Wales. Him and Mrs Keppel. And, before you ask, Joe Public doesn’t see their room. The Vultures talk about light levels and damage to the hangings. Tight-arsed lot. Just want to spoil other people’s innocent pleasures. What are you waiting for – we’ll go through the passage Edward’s valet would have used.’
The house was so big and sprawling that we didn’t see anyone, not even a guide. But then, as he said, we went through servants’ territory, emerging through one of those hidden doors.
‘There.’ He pulled the curtains.
For one used to gods and goddesses disporting themselves, or heroic scenes of military triumph immortalised in tapestries, these hangings did come as a bit of a shock. I knew that giggling was the wrong response – far too immature. But what else could you do, when confronted with men quite so keen, and women equally eager? In the company of a man not just old enough to be my father, but possibly just that?
‘Many’s the good session I’ve had in this bed,’ Lord Elham said. This was the first room I ever had sex in. I don’t know which tickled the girl most, the sight of all those cocks up there or the real thing in front of her. Thirty-two bedrooms in the place.’ He sank on to the bed, putting his hands behind his head. ‘Shagged in all of them. Shagged in each one, then started again here.’
‘Thirty-two women! That’s terrible.’
He pulled himself on to one elbow. ‘No such thing. It was positively expected.’ By now he was sitting upright. ‘You know about old things. Where’s your sense of history? Seventies – Flower Power. Drugs and sex. Shag all you like. Especially a man in my position. Maybe it’s different these days, with AIDS and goodness knows what else.’
‘But –’
‘I treated them well. Fresh bed linen for every woman, dinner and decent wine. Breakfast.’ He nodded as if he’d proved his point. ‘Got round again, another thirty-two.’
My voice sounded hollow even to me. ‘Didn’t you ever sleep with the same woman twice?’
‘Oh, yes. Managed twenty a night with one woman.’
‘I meant, didn’t you have long-term relationships?’
‘Oh, I get you. Oh, one or two. But I’d always roger her in the same room – I had to maintain my standards, you see.’
‘What about marrying?’
‘Having too good a time for that, my God!’ He threw his head back and laughed. Then his face slid into sadness. ‘Always thought I’d find a decent woman when I was in my forties and have an heir. Didn’t work out. So all these Vultures will get a little bit of the place. Bastards.’
I tried to sound journalistic. ‘When you say it didn’t work out – was there someone special and she wouldn’t have you?’ I swallowed painfully. Could that be my mother?
‘Never found anyone special enough to ask. Tried to go round the thirty-two rooms again, but things were different in the eighties. More materialistic, that sort of thing.’
It was better to keep up with the conversation than to have a pick at my feelings. ‘Materialistic?’
‘Girls started making all sorts of demands.’
‘Wanting commitment before they –’
‘Pretty nearly. Said I had to use a johnny – imagine that? Putting a bloody Wellington boot on the old man. Not having any of that, and so I told them. Nude bathing or nothing.’
My swallow hurt. ‘All this nude bathing. What about – the consequences?’
‘Clap, you mean? Pox? Oh, a couple of times.’
‘I meant – babies.’
‘God bless my soul, I suppose there must have been. Forgotten all about them. Hey, somewhere downstairs is that little book I told you about – we’ll go and find it, shall we?’
Putting my feelings into words had always been beyond me. There were a lot of feelings going wordless here. My knuckles were white from being crushed against each other. They wanted to smash or punch or – I didn’t know what. My face, because I came back again and again, just like one of his favourite bedfellows? His lovely china and glass because he didn’t deserve them? The man himself? It’d be so easy to grab one of those heavy cut-glass candlesticks and smash it through the skull under the wispy hair. One blow. Finish him for good and all. No one knew I was here. I could just do it. No one’d notice for weeks. I could rid the world of a bastard, cram the car with loot and be in France before midnight. Or just go home, actually. No one had catalogued his goodies. I could just sell them bit by bit. And be surprised at the news when it came. I grasped the candlestick more tightly.
The man was a dopehead. Everything about him said so. Could I blame him for being so immoral, any more than I could blame that kid at school with Asperger’s for swearing? There was another word: Griff had tried to explain the difference when he was talking about Lord Byron. Not immoral, but amoral. Perhaps that was the word for this noble lord, too. And yes, thanks to Griff I knew words like irony and sarcasm, and that was what I meant when I called him noble.
Delicately, I replaced the candlestick, giving it a little polish for good luck.
By the time I’d caught up with him, he had got back to his wing and flung open the doors to a couple of his other rooms. Aladdin’s Cave, that was what I’d got in front of me. Aladdin’s Cave times two. If the kitchen could have kept me in funds for six months or more, what about these? Following him, I scanned the first and the second. He’d obviously moved furniture down here before the Vultures got a look in: I didn’t know enough to identify makers, but quality leapt out at me.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not in here. Let’s try this. You see,’ he said, gesturing at a table laden with china and crystal, ‘I thought if I had this it would spare me washing up.’
Selling it would have spared me working for five years.
‘No. Not in here. Let’s try this one.’ He opened another door.
There was the grey marble fireplace, the deep windows – and all my memories. I reeled. ‘Lord Elham,’ I managed to croak, ‘I think you might be my father.’
‘Do you?’ he asked, as flat and unexcited as if I’d told him my watch was running slow. ‘I suppose we could always find out. It’ll be
in that book.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Whatever I’d expected, this wasn’t it. It was all so flat and ordinary. I’ve known blokes watch the football results with less emotion than this guy presented with a possible daughter. Maybe the heir he’d wanted.
‘It’ll be in the book. And that’ll be somewhere in here,’ was all he’d say.
I scooped a pile of sheet music – music? I’d not seen any anywhere else – off the big sofa and sat down hard. It was the room all right. Fireplace, desk – completely covered, these days, with heaps of paper – and the lovely windows. You could push them up and step straight out on to what must have been a lovely terrace. Now it was green as far as I could see, with balustrades cracked down to their iron cores. Urns overflowed with what looked like weeds: I might be living in the country these days but I hadn’t caught up with things like that yet. When my legs could work again, I’d make it to the windows themselves to see if the Vultures had cleaned up the bit the public could see.
But my legs might have been made of water for all the good they were doing me. Off in yet another room I could hear Lord Elham bustling round, muttering under his breath. More loudly, in my head I could hear raised voices, Lord Elham’s and my mother’s. And instead of this ancestral mess, all I could see was the book on my lap. What had it got me into?
‘Lena? It’s time for Countdown!’
Eventually – I’ve no idea how long it took – I must have dragged myself into his living room. Sticking my hand out for the champagne glass he was offering me, I sank it as if it were water. He might have been taken aback: he topped me up with no more than half an inch, before scuttling back to his seat and staring at the screen. If I sat down and let myself compare the champagne drinking I’d fantasized about and this, I might cry. Or smash that tower of glasses. He might notice that.
As it was, it was easier to lick my lips, dry despite the drink, and ask, ‘What sort of book am I looking for, Lord Elham?’ Clearly not the one I had been looking for originally. But Natura Rerum was pretty low in my priorities now.
‘Oh, a little thing,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘Smaller than an exercise book. Greyish green. Probably marked French Vocab. In there somewhere.’ He waved a vague hand.
Griff said he used to have a vocab. book. He’d suggested I have one. And now my – and now Lord Elham turned out to have one too. All this interest in words. If only I could find some that would describe what I was feeling. Halfway describe – I didn’t need any fine tuning.
Taking my glass with me, I peered into the room he’d been rooting about in. The room. Where on earth to start? It was like the kitchen all over again, even to the mouldy plates and glasses. This must have been his pre-Pot Noodle period, when he’d still used china. In this case, ironstone – a Mason’s dinner service, not the most expensive in the world and some pieces badly chipped. Perhaps it had been servants’ hall ware. I’d heard of people wringing their hands, and this was what I found I was doing, kneading my palms and thumb pads, grinding the bones against each other. Where should I start looking? In this topsy-turvy world, the bureau was much too obvious. My nose wrinkled at the thought of opening drawers, sifting through pigeonholes. And my head told me that a bureau was a place for precious things and that Lord Elham hadn’t considered this book precious.
Lord Elham. Possibly Dad. I’d not used his name, apart from the first time we’d met, all the hours we’d spent together. Maybe I’d expected him to tell me to do the usual casual thing first-name thing. But he hadn’t. Ever. And the first time I get a really good clue that he was who I always thought he was, I call him, formal as you like, Lord Elham. He hadn’t, even then, said, ‘If you think we’re related, you’d better call me Rupert.’ He just went on watching daytime TV. Was this a father I wanted?
But I couldn’t leave it alone. If only I were a true divvy, and could dowse my way to it. If I sat and emptied my mind, as I sometimes did at sales for Griff, maybe, just maybe, I’d come up with something.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Lord Elham greeted me. ‘Found it yet? Missed a jolly good programme.’
‘I’ve no idea where to start.’ My spread hands said it all. ‘But I’ve an idea – I get them sometimes – that it might be not in this room but in the one to this one’s left as you go out.’
The look he shot me suggested that there were still one or two grey cells functioning in that dopey brain. What on earth had I said?
‘No. It’s in here. Have you tried the bureau? Why on earth not?’
‘I thought it might be private.’
‘Private?’ He shook his head. ‘Or you might not have tried the bureau because you didn’t have the key. That might be the real reason, mightn’t it?’ I could have smacked his cunning face.
‘If I’d wanted to open it, I could have used one of these,’ I said, jiggling a little set on a ring.
‘What are they?’
‘If you go to an auction, you want to be able to look inside wardrobes and so on. Very few have keys.’
‘Let’s see. And these can get you into anything?’
‘Most things. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they didn’t have all that many different types of locks, not for everyday furniture: well, they weren’t expecting burglars and if a servant had been caught red-handed –’ I gestured a cut throat.
‘Well I’m blowed. Let’s see if they work on this, shall we? Which do I try first?’ He poked and twisted. At last the lock yielded. He pulled down the fall-front – to reveal more lottery tickets than I could ever imagine. ‘Never won. Well, I might have done. Never got round to checking. I don’t suppose there’s a list of past winning numbers anywhere, do you?’
‘You could try Ceefax? It’d be like matching needles in haystacks, though.’ And I was more interested in that book.
Suddenly, leaving tickets drifting down like pink snowflakes, he half closed the bureau and left the room. Equally abruptly he returned. ‘Here it is. It was there all the time.’ I never did learn where there was. He slung it to me, for all the world as if it was the evening paper. I caught it: I suppose it was about seven inches by four, with the greenish-grey cover he’d described and, yes, the words French Vocab on the cover.
‘This is confidential.’ How about that for a stupid response?
‘Suppose you’re right. Right, what name am I after?’
‘Townend. Helen Townend.’
He pulled a face. ‘Hmm. Doesn’t ring any bells. I’d have remembered a Helen. All those jokes about a thousand ships.’ He ran a finger down the first page. ‘See, I’ve got quite a system. Columns. Surname; Christian name; when and where and how. Offspring if any. Diseases if any. Payments if any. God, shocking writing. You’d have thought a decent school would have knocked a decent fist into me.’
I had to look. ‘Are you left or right-handed?’
‘Ah, that’s something they did knock into me. I wanted to be left-handed, but they thought it was too sinister. Sinister – get it?’ He roared with laughter, I’ve no idea why.
‘Did you spell badly?’
‘Well, you can see.’
One of my mates who’d been just like Lord Elham had been diagnosed as dyslexic. No, not just like him. A good deal brighter. They’d given him special tuition and he’d got an A Level in Maths.
My eyes travelled down the lines. Words like pox and clap peppered the pages. And here and there the letter M or F.
‘These are babies?’ I prompted. So I was reduced to being a mere F.
‘Yup. An A means we had to get rid of it. Privately, of course. No queuing in line for an NHS quack.’
‘How very decent of you,’ I muttered.
He didn’t notice the irony. Or was it sarcasm? ‘Well, noblesse oblige, you know. Flowers, champers, a private room.’
‘What about the Ms and Fs? Did you keep in touch them and their mothers?’
‘What? All thirty of them?’
‘Thirty?’ I hoped my voice sounded steadier
than my legs felt.
‘Give or take a couple.’ He ran a grimy fingernail down the Offspring column, muttering as he did so. ‘Thirty-one, actually. Assuming they’re all alive.’ He peered at me. ‘And you think you’re one of these Fs? Are you like your mother? You don’t favour our side.’
Thank God for that. ‘My mother died when I was very young. But she brought me here once. I remember sitting looking at a book while you talked.’
‘Extraordinary. Fancy your remembering that when I haven’t a blind clue. This room?’
‘The fireplace – it’s a different colour from most of the others, isn’t it? And those windows. Imagine what it was like for a toddler, being able to step through windows into the sun!’
As if to check for himself, he walked over to them, dodging piles of books. ‘Hmph. Like Alice.’ He opened one, stepping out and then back in.
I nodded. ‘Wonderland. I’m sorry – I forgot to bring the books back.’ It was just a matter of honour: they weren’t first editions, not even good editions, so I wasn’t robbing him of a fortune.
He waved an airy hand. ‘Plenty of books – you can see that. Come over here. Let’s have a proper look at you.’ As I feared, he gripped my chin, turning my head this way and that. ‘Are you sure your name’s Townend?’
‘It’s the one on my birth certificate. I was born on Bastille Day, 1984.’
He dropped his hand sharply and made a hex. ‘You’re not going to send me to the guillotine, I hope? Or get Big Brother to watch me? Let’s check by dates, then. You don’t look twenty, I must say.’ He opened the book again, muttering the names he read: ‘Carter, Lane, Greenaway – God, she had the most wonderful tits. Ah! Tunnell. Does that say Tunnell? But it could be Townend. Possibly. You’re sure she was a Helen, your mater?’
I nodded.
‘Seems you may be right. Well I’m blowed. How do you do?’ He only wanted to shake my hand!
Drawing the Line Page 23
