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by Robert Barnard

  Yours sincerely,

  Jean Mannering

  Eve got up, snatched a short coat from the hall and set off for Huddersfield.

  CHAPTER 6

  Actress

  This morning there was no need for waiting and spying. The house was known, the object was known, the approach was decided on. Eve got out of her car, walked purposefully across the road and pushed open the iron gate. The three names on the doorbell at number 23 Portland Gardens were Naylor, Dougall and Mannering. No indication whether they were single women, single men, or couples—probably for security reasons. Eve, oddly, felt quite daring as she pressed the Mannering button. There was a silence, then the clattering of slippers on the stairs.

  “Hello. I’m not interested in buying—”

  The woman was smiling, but impersonally. Eve didn’t much like being taken for a cold caller.

  “Mrs. Mannering? My name is Eve McNabb.”

  “It’s Miss Mannering, and . . .” She blinked, and then the smile widened. “Eve McNabb. But I’ve just written to you.”

  “Yes, I got the letter this morning,” said Eve. “Thank you. It was very kind.”

  Jean Mannering shook her head.

  “It was a formal letter of condolence, and I did regret as I wrote it that it couldn’t be anything more. It is so very long since there’s been any contact. But do come in. Pardon me if I’m a bit nonplussed. I don’t really know what to call someone I last saw in a pram. Eve? Ms. McNabb? This way—I’m first floor. Come in and have some coffee. Be careful on the stairs. They’re rather steep.”

  They got to the first-floor flat and Eve blinked at the lightness of it: airy, sunny, with blinds instead of curtains and a general feeling of space and clean lines. Jean Mannering was well fleshed but also sensibly dressed—cashmere jumper, smart, olive green skirt—to make the best of her mature figure. Her face was round, cheerful and had probably been, when she was a young woman, decidedly attractive. Eve felt she was someone she could be comfortable with. She could smell the coffee, and it soon arrived with a plate of biscuits. So far so normal.

  “You must be so busy,” said Jean, sitting down and gesturing toward the other armchair. “I remember from my own mother’s death—just the cleaning out and sorting was horrendous. And it was down south, so I was in foreign territory.”

  “And there are all the letters. I don’t like replying with a form letter, but I may have to.”

  “Well, don’t even bother with that for me. You will have got a lot because your mother was a public figure—and a very popular one. Your visit is the best possible reply I could have.”

  Eve took a biscuit and began to relax.

  “It’s very nice to talk to one of my mother’s friends from long ago. I’ve found since arriving back in Crossley that there’s an awful lot that happened that I know nothing about.”

  “Of course there is! When do we start having memories, after all? When we’re about five, I suppose. And then the memories as like as not are of trivial things, trivial events, rather than important ones. My grandparents died in a car crash when I was seven, and I have no memory of that at all. But I have a sharp picture in my mind of a skirt I was bought at Marks and Spencer’s when I was six.”

  “Luckily there are lots of people in Crossley who can fill me in about my mother,” Eve went on, “especially on school matters. And there are neighbors, long-standing ones, who know things I don’t. You never taught at Blackfield Road, did you?”

  “Me?” said Jean, with an expression of horror. “I never taught anywhere. I just grew up in Crossley because my parents kept the village shop there. Long since gone, of course. I got to know May when I was working in the local Inland Revenue office in Halifax, and commuting to and from Crossley every day.”

  Eve thought.

  “You say you got to know May. Not May and John? Didn’t you get to know my father?”

  “John? Oh yes, I got to know him. Though perhaps know is too strong a word. We’d go to the local sometimes of an evening, maybe even drive out for a pub meal. He was around the house if I went there, maybe thinking up the bubble for the next day’s cartoon. That was about it really.”

  “Do you mean that my mother was the dominant partner?”

  Jean looked surprised that she needed to ask.

  “Oh, I should think so. No: I know so. You could simply tell in all their exchanges, in the way they organized their lives. John was probably the prime earner in the household: teachers were even worse paid then than they are now. John had his regular cartoon shot in the Glasgow Tribune, and he did a political cartoon for them quite often, when something struck home. He did a whole series of hard-hitting ones at the time of the Profumo affair, which were still being shown around years later when they both came to Crossley. He was technically a freelance, and was published all over, but he was still close to the Tribune. I remember that he occasionally did comment pieces—he was an artist first, but a writer second. In spite of all that, it was always May who made the decisions. That was her nature, I suppose. And his to accept it.”

  “Did they marry after she came down to Crossley?”

  “Oh no. They were married long before that, and you were not born until later. She’d stressed in interviews that they were anxious to have a child, and that John would be a sort of house husband and father. That was to show you were not going to be neglected, but I bet it fazed some of the governors! But she carried all before her. I wouldn’t describe it as just by force of character. She didn’t hector or bully—not then or ever. It was the force of her integrity. She was so obviously in love with her job, regarded it as a sort of mission. But there are other people closer to her at work who can tell you about that side of her life better than I can.”

  “Yes, of course there are,” said Eve, wondering how Jean knew so much. “I was particularly interested in what you said about her home life—her marriage, for instance.”

  “As I mentioned, I can’t really tell you much about that because I didn’t see a lot of it. Often John was away in Glasgow—the paper insisted on that. Or often we—May and I—would go out together to concerts, or maybe have a meal together, all the different things that young people liked to do then.”

  “It’s a long time ago,” said Eve neutrally. She was skeptical: was this really what the young women liked to go around doing in about 1970? “I was talking at the funeral to the only other family member there—Aunt Ada we called her, though she was really my mother’s cousin.”

  “Aunt Ada . . . Ada. Not a name you hear nowadays. It rings a vague bell. Was she a rather nasty and silly person?”

  “Yes, I think she probably is.”

  “Is, I should have said. There was at the time one of May’s relations who somehow got the idea that May and I were lesbians. That wouldn’t be her, would it?”

  “I rather think it would.”

  Jean became lost in reminiscent thought.

  “She had a quite extraordinary obsession about it. Actually followed us sometimes—to watch what we were doing. Once we realized it we put on a bit of a show for her. Then May got scared that she might be reporting back to the school governors, or the Halifax Council’s Education Committee, so we stopped that. I can’t imagine what Ada would be like as an old woman. Or rather, I can, but I prefer not to.”

  “Not a pretty sight. Not a pretty listen either. There certainly is an obsession or two at work there, not just about lesbians, I suspect, but pretty much anyone who steps outside the general run. I got no sense at all that she’d talked to the local bigwigs about this, but there was a mention of my granddad—May’s father. She didn’t say she’d told him of her suspicions, quite the reverse: I think she implied she had got her suspicions from him. But that could be a cover-up. She may well have reported to him.”

  Jean stretched her mouth in distaste.

  “All this seems quite extraordinary, so many years on.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it?”

  “And I think I do un
derstand why you wanted to talk to me.”

  “I hope so. I feel it’s an intrusion, but I hope it’s a justified one. And there was something else.”

  “Something else?” Was there a new tension in that plump, comfortable body sitting opposite her?

  “I’d got a letter several days before the funeral.” Eve rummaged in her pocket. She had brought only the first page of the letter, not wanting to show her hand too clearly, and particularly anxious not to bring into the open the mentions of what was done to “John.” She handed the page over, and Jean Mannering spent some time studying it. Finally she put it down on the table.

  “Was my name at the end of this?”

  “The name was ‘Jean,’ yes.”

  “No surname or address?”

  “No, not anywhere.”

  “But it’s not my handwriting, you know.”

  “It’s very like it.”

  “Yes. All girls of my generation were taught to write in this standard upright legible way. I suppose they were all destined for useful but not particularly important jobs where legibility was a definite plus: secretaries, schoolteachers. I remember your mother’s hand was pretty similar. Do you have the letter I wrote to you yesterday?”

  “I think so.” Eve rummaged again in her handbag. “Yes, here it is. I haven’t compared them, because it only came this morning. But it looks very similar.”

  “At first glance it does. But look at the ts on this letter: I never have the loop at the bottom: my ts are always straight down and cut off from the next letter. And this letter always does a Greek e in certain positions—after an s, for example.” She got up and went to the desk. “Look, this is a letter I’m in the middle of writing to the bishop. That’s the writing of the letter you got this morning. Compare it to the first letter. That was not written by me.”

  “But it is from someone who knows about you, isn’t it?”

  “Apparently so, yes. I don’t like the thought of that. I presume the first word on the next page is ‘dramatics,’ isn’t it?”

  “It is. She—this person, I should say—knows parts you have played.”

  “Does she or he? A Huddersfield person? It could be a ‘he,’ you know. It’s perfectly easy to imitate a standard woman’s style of handwriting—much easier than a man’s, which aims at originality, forcefulness, things like that.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. Have you any idea who might have done this?”

  “None at all. Aunt Ada occurs to mind.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of her. But it’s a clever letter. It gets the tone right. I don’t think Aunt Ada is a clever person. She would let her prejudices, her distaste, filter into the letter, and it doesn’t.”

  Jean thought.

  “The letter writer’s not always right, you know. For instance, May and I had not been in regular correspondence for years.”

  “But she wanted to convince me—she surely wrote knowing May was dead and it would be I who read it—that it was part of a continuing relationship.”

  “That does suggest Aunt Ada.” Jean looked suddenly and shrewdly at Eve. “But there was something else, wasn’t there, in the letter. Something you haven’t told me.”

  Eve now didn’t hesitate.

  “Yes . . . There is a passage of reminiscence about a lesbian affair.”

  “A lesbian affair we’d once had, May and I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolute nonsense,” said Jean, with authority in her voice. “But we seem to come back to Aunt Ada again.”

  “It does seem like that. Do you mind telling me: are you a lesbian?”

  Jean’s mouth puckered up into a moue.

  “Do we have to? Oh well, yes. I’ve had lesbian relationships. But not one with your mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? She wasn’t that way inclined.” There was something intense, almost fanatical, about her tone of voice that suggested rejection still rankled. “Can we recap? I need to know exactly the situation. After your mother’s death you received a letter from someone called Jean who apparently thought May, your mother, was still alive. That letter purports to be from me, or at least contains information that could lead someone to think it was from me, and it described lesbian—what?—practices?”

  “More situations.”

  “Right. So what we have here is someone—probably quite old, and male just as possibly as female—who has an obsession about lesbians, and probably gays as well, who knew about May and me and our friendship in the past, knew about my small successes in amateur drama, and—what? Wanted to make trouble?”

  “Maybe. If that was it, I wonder why she didn’t write directly to me.”

  “Someone with a sense of drama as well as of mischief. Someone who likes to go at things indirectly. So who could it be? All I can think of is Aunt Ada, but indirect she isn’t. And I suppose there’s the possibility of your father.”

  Eve gaped at her.

  “I was always told he was dead.”

  “Always? Since when?”

  “Since as long as I can remember. I suppose since I was about five or six.”

  “Well, I have no way of knowing if he’s alive or dead, but might there be reasons why she, May, preferred to consign him to the graveyard rather than admit separation or divorce?”

  Eve thought.

  “It meant I was never curious to see or meet him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It seems rather extreme to suggest that he was dead if he wasn’t. And my mother was not an extreme sort of person . . . You’ve missed out one possibility, by the way: that you wrote the letter, genuinely thinking that my mother was still alive.”

  Jean Mannering looked at her pityingly. Eve had a strong sense of reactions practiced in advance, perhaps by someone who accepts the popular image of an actress.

  “Eve, you may feel you have to consider that possibility, but I don’t. I know I didn’t. And I think if you go further into this, if you agree that the handwriting isn’t mine, and that I haven’t had any contact with your mother for many, many years—almost as many as your age, I would guess—then you’ll see that the idea is a nonstarter.”

  “I expect you’re right.” Eve got up, and Jean Mannering followed her lead sharply. “I really should apologize for coming to see you, and for practically accusing you of—something, I’m not sure what.”

  “Don’t mention it.” She went again to the desk. “Let me give you my personal phone number, in case you want to get in touch again. The one in the book is for the professional me. And thank you: you’ve given a little bit of spice to an otherwise pretty routine sort of existence.”

  Eve wondered how sincere she was.

  “I suppose my mother would have found retirement pretty dull.”

  “Don’t you believe it. She would have gone on committees, organized a Crossley Festival, taken up watercolor painting, stood for the local council if you have one. That was the May that I knew anyway.”

  “That was a long time ago. But you’re quite right.”

  “And what about you?” Jean Mannering’s eyes were fixed on Eve shrewdly.

  “Me? Well, I am wondering about a change of direction.”

  “Excuse my boorishness—I haven’t even asked what you do.”

  “It’s not very interesting. I’m a PR person—the PR person for a chain of supermarkets.”

  “Ah. Well, I can see that might not be the chosen life’s work for a child of May’s. How did you come to take it up?”

  Eve had often wondered that herself.

  “I suppose I fell into it, really. I’m good at my job, but it’s not a job I’m proud of being good at.”

  “Well, remember: don’t give up your present job until you’ve got a new one, and if possible a better one. I’ve had countless friends who ignored that simple rule and regretted it.” They were at the flat’s door now, and Jean let Eve out down the narrow flight of steps. Jean’s voice followed her. “The only thing I rem
ember about your father’s leaving you and May was that he was ordered abroad for his health—to somewhere sunny.”

  “Really?” Eve had swung around. “Thank you for telling me. You don’t remember where?”

  “I don’t. Where would it have been at that time? The Caribbean? Florida? I suppose Spain would be the most likely, wouldn’t it? Holidays there were common, though still a bit of an adventure. Worth investigating, though the fact that it was for his health doesn’t suggest you’re likely to find him alive, does it?”

  And she shut the door.

  Eve strolled in watery sunshine back to her car. There was something odd about Jean waiting until their parting words to hand her this piece of information. Or misinformation. Did Jean want to direct her attention to her father because she knew it would be a dead end? Or did she realize that she was bound to go in that direction before long, and wanted to send her haring off at a tangent?

  Thinking it over sent Eve further into a state of doubt. Was Spain really the most likely place to settle on in a search for sun at that time? It was geographically close, but the period was the early seventies. Wasn’t Franco still alive then? And even if he was dead, wasn’t democracy pretty fragile there in its early years? Eve had the feeling that the British colonization of unfortunate parts of Spain didn’t get under way until later. Her trust in Jean, her inclination to believe what Jean said, which had begun to be established in the first part of the interview, was beginning to crumble. Even the perfectly good advice not to leave her job before she had another to go to began to seem like a shove designed to send her back to the Midlands.

  If Jean knew her job was in the Midlands. And that might depend on whether or not she and May had been completely out of touch with each other in the years since Eve’s childhood.

  That night Eve rang Rani again.

  “I’ve talked to Jean Mannering,” she said.

  “And what did she tell you?” When she had finished a rather rushed précis of what had been discussed he said: “And did you believe her?”