by Nicola Upson
‘Oh Archie, don’t be so bloody naive. How can I not blame myself when the very last time that you and I stood together in this room was after an inquest into another death that would never have happened had it not been for that wretched play?’
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‘We’ve been over this a thousand times. Elliott Vintner killed himself because he was a ruined man. He got lucky with one novel and spent the next ten years trying to do it again. When he found he simply didn’t have the talent, he tried to take advantage of yours. Nobody in their right mind would accuse someone of plagiarism over a piece of history – let’s face it, if that were a viable legal argument, Shakespeare would have spent his whole life in the dock. Vintner gambled by taking you to court, and he lost – end of story. If his life was so miserable that he had nothing else worth living for, that can hardly be laid at your door. By all means mourn for a girl you liked who died too young, but don’t waste a minute on that bastard’s memory.’
‘I know you’re right, but it doesn’t alter the fact that this afternoon I’m supposed to be signing a contract to license a tour of Richard, and perhaps even to make a film, when I really feel like putting a stop to the whole thing before anybody else gets hurt. I know it’s making everybody rich and famous, but I’m beginning to believe that the play is cursed and I don’t see why we need to inflict that on theatres all around the country. God, they’d be safer with Macbeth. Perhaps all doomed dramas come out of Scotland. It’s still not too late to pull out and knock this nonsense on the head once and for all. Everyone will be furious, of course, but there are more important things than taking two thousand pounds and half a dozen curtain-calls in Morecambe.’
‘Do whatever you need to about the play – that doesn’t matter.
It’s you I care about.’
‘I know, and I’m grateful – even if it doesn’t always sound like it. But you surely can’t believe – if everything was as carefully planned as you say it was – that the murderer would have overlooked the small matter of getting the right victim?’ Archie said nothing, acknowledging the logic of Josephine’s reasoning but unable to let it overcome his instincts as she continued, more gently this time. ‘You don’t need to waste time worrying about me but I will be careful, I promise. And there is something else you can do to make me feel better.’
‘And that is?’
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‘I’d like to see Elspeth’s family. Can I come with you this afternoon?’
‘What about your meeting with the boys?’
‘Like I said, there are more important things and I need to decide once and for all what I’m going to do before I see them. I’m sure Ronnie and Lettice would go for me if I asked them to, so at least I’ll know what happens. Look, I know it’s not normal procedure and I don’t want to be in the way, but I’d like to talk about Elspeth to someone who knew her, and it might help her family, too.’
Archie stood up, ready to leave. ‘I’ll pick you up at two.’ He kissed her briefly at the door. ‘It’s nice to see you,’ he said, smiling for the first time that morning.
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Four
It was turning into the sort of day that made even the most faithful of Londoners question their devotion to the city. An unyielding stretch of cloud settled heavily over the rooftops, draining the colour from everything it touched before dissolving, at street level, into a half-hearted, depressing mist. Even so, as he left the house in Queen Anne’s Gate, Bernard Aubrey savoured the rush of freedom that accompanied any departure from the four walls which were, but rarely felt like, home. This picturesque relic of Georgian London, built in the eighteenth century by the founder of the Bank of England, was an appropriate reflection of the aesthetic taste and sound financial judgement which had made Aubrey one of the West End’s most prosperous and influential theatrical managers.
Like its neighbours, from which it differed only in the pattern of a curtain or the choice of flowers in a vase, the house breathed success. It was a smugness which he shook off like an unwanted chaperone every time he shut the door.
With an amiable nod to the statue that gave the square its name, Aubrey turned his back on her mannered serenity and headed for the more worldly stimulus of St Martin’s Lane. He loved his work and was diligent in its undertaking, spending most of his waking hours in the two theatres which his parents had built and entrusted to him, theatres which he had developed beyond even their wildest hopes through an addiction to the challenge of balancing art with money. It was a business founded on risk and he was not infallible, but his errors of judgement were few and far between, and he had been blessed with a talent for anticipating what the public would look for next, as well as with the financial means to provide it. The 49
considerable fortune which he had amassed along the way had been wisely reinvested and his instincts were underpinned by a tireless energy: he spent as many nights in the theatre as any actor and, on Sundays, when the stage was empty in deference to the pulpit and the family table, he was invariably to be found at his desk, taking advantage of the lull in one achievement to plan for the next. To actors and playwrights unused to such commitment, he was a self-effacing benefactor; privately, he knew that his ability to make or break a career overnight was little more than a by-product in a quest to prove something to himself, a quest which was nothing short of an obsession. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. Looking back, he could not honestly say if his bond with his wife and child had been sacrificed because of it or whether, in sensing that the emotional commitment required for family life was not his to give, he had instinctively thrown his energies into something he was more certain to be good at.
Driven by pride rather than by ambition or greed, Aubrey was not the sort of man who contemplated failure easily, or who liked to be anything other than a few steps ahead.
Today, as usual, he rejected the convenient option of a ten-minute journey to work courtesy of the city’s underground railway and set off on foot. The peculiar atmosphere evoked by London’s tunnels was not for him, and he never failed to wonder at the willingness with which people now accepted darkness and confinement as a natural part of their day-to-day existence. For Aubrey, the lingering, acrid smell of those subterranean passageways brought back ghosts from a past he tried in vain to forget.
Too old at forty-five to take part in the trench war but with a distinguished military record behind him, he had spent those terrible years as a tunneller in the guts of the French earth and had no wish to return to its horrors in his waking hours as well as in his nightmares. A tunneller’s war required a different sort of heroism to the fighting above ground, and if the strength and bravery involved had been psychological rather than physical, the sacrifice was often the same. Thousands of miners had been killed underground in explosions which made the water in the tunnels run 50
with blood, and which rendered the precious air thick with the stench of death.
Four years of battling with earth and suffocation as well as with an unseen enemy played lasting tricks on the mind, and the fear and anxiety of those years had haunted Aubrey ever since. On one occasion, not long after the war had ended, his wife had endeavoured to free him of his crippling claustrophobia by persuading him to try the underground at Piccadilly Circus. Before he was halfway down the steps, he could smell burning hair once again, and the pounding of his heart sounded in his head like the muffled thud of a miner’s pick. Giving in to the panic which he had always managed to suppress when it mattered, he emerged choking and sobbing into a crowd of embarrassed shoppers. A cure had never been spoken of again, and his illness had only worsened with time: to mix with the crush of bodies in a confined space – even in a theatre bar or foyer – demanded from him the strictest self-control. A vast underground city had opened up beneath London’s pavements, expanding further as its open-air counterpart grew, but he was more than happy for it to remain out of bounds.
Pulling his hat further down against the rain which had begun to fal
l more steadily, and cursing the umbrella that was still in its rack in the hallway, Aubrey strode past the government offices in Great George Street and into Parliament Square, one of the wide open spaces that he blessed the city for preserving. Not even the shabby row of houses to the west of the square could mar the grandeur over which so many of the faces from the past presided. As he walked on, he looked up to see if a regular occupant of one of those dust-dimmed windows was sitting in her usual place. He was not disappointed: there she was, as still and indistinct as ever, but framed this morning in an oblong of yellow light which she had switched on to counteract the gloom of the day. In the last few weeks, this figure had become as much a part of his daily walk as the impassive statues in the square. Every morning, no matter how early the hour, she sat at that window with such reliability that he had begun to question whether she, too, were a statue, until one day he had seen her get up and move back into the room. He won-51
dered at the life she led in that faded building, too near the top to be the lady of the house and not high enough to be the maid –
although this was the sort of house in which a maid’s services were no longer required. There must be thousands of women like her in London now, widowed or single and long past the age at which marriage would be a realistic prospect, living in reduced circumstances in a bed-sitting-room, staring out at life rather than taking part.
He considered waving but decided, on reflection, that a greeting from a stranger, particularly a well-dressed and affluent stranger, might be regarded as impudent or condescending, so he moved on.
A quick glance at his watch confirmed that there was plenty of time to make a detour to Westminster Bridge for a view of which he never tired, no matter what the weather. For once he was in no hurry to reach the New Theatre, where a long and no doubt argu-mentative day awaited him. That afternoon, he was due to make the final arrangements for the provincial tour of one of his longest-running productions and to discuss the West End staging of its author’s new play. He normally looked forward to such meetings, sure of his decisions and confident that those involved would trust his experience, but trouble was brewing with Richard of Bordeaux. Admittedly, none of the problems were insurmount-able: his leading actor, who fancied himself – with some justification – as lord of the London stage, had changed his mind about the lure of the provinces in favour of the silver screen and wanted out of his contract, but Aubrey had no intention of releasing him; he would consider financing the film, perhaps, but only after John Terry had graced the likes of Manchester with his royal presence.
As for Josephine Tey, she was far too principled to be easy to deal with, although he admired and respected her writing and could see its long-term potential. In a reversal of his difficulties with Terry, the issue with Tey was getting her into the public eye, and that wretched trial had not helped. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for allowing it to happen. Knowing Vintner, he should have seen it coming.
In fact, those newer to the taste of success than Aubrey seemed to 52
have been transformed by their sudden notoriety – and not always for the better, in his opinion. The entire cast seemed to think that one hit play was enough to keep them in work for the rest of their professional lives, and all the bickering and tension was beginning to tire him; after all, he could usually find that at home. He knew he was perfectly capable of putting a stop to it, yet he felt uneasy about the confrontations ahead. If he had been a superstitious man, he might have said that to plan the play’s future before its current run was finished was to tempt fate, but he was far too old to start pandering to the more ridiculous notions of his profession. Having said that, perhaps tonight was the wrong time to indulge in a tradition of his own making. Whenever a play under his management entered its final week, it was customary for him to make a cameo appearance on stage, and tonight he was due to walk on as a guard in the final scene. The moment was supposed to be a celebration, the only part of the limelight that he ever allowed himself, and the idea – thought up in a frivolous moment by his favourite St Joan –
had always amused him. Today, it felt more like a curse.
His mood lifted briefly the minute he set foot on Westminster Bridge. He was by no means a fan of Romantic poetry, but he was willing to settle his differences with Wordsworth and concede that the earth had nothing fairer to show than this stretch of the river.
It had, of course, changed considerably since those words were written, but its beauty had not diminished: the view of the Houses of Parliament and Victoria Tower, with the majestic sweep of buildings which now lined Millbank as far as Lambeth Bridge, was truly splendid. Turning to look down-river, he admired in a different way the tall, grey outline of Victoria Embankment, dominated by a startling new clock tower and punctuated by the Savoy’s reassuring civility. His gaze fell on Somerset House in the background, and he was reminded that he really must track down the information he needed. The matter was becoming urgent.
As he stood there, Aubrey noticed how many people slowed their steps to appreciate the view. One young couple in particular drew his attention. They stood close together, holding hands under the cover of their coats and clinging on to an old umbrella as they 53
leaned over the edge to stare intently into the waters below. They spoke little, but when they did it was of hopes for the future; small things, perhaps, but the joy with which they looked forward to a life of intimacy was so unlike anything Aubrey had ever known that he felt the contrast physically, as a rebuke, and wanted that ordinary miracle so badly that he had to look away. His own marriage had never been the shared adventure of discovery that he had hoped for; neither had he and his wife settled into the easy companionship of middle age which often compensated for the boredom of earlier years. Left at home while he went to war or to work, she had had plenty of time to wonder why they were married, although she was far too well mannered ever to have asked the question aloud. Perhaps she hated to be wrong or was simply afraid of having to acknowledge that he was lonely too. Either way, the moment for second chances was gone, and a sense of waste had hovered between them for years. Worst of all, it seemed to have tainted the next generation. As far as he could tell from their sporadic and awkward communications, his son’s marriage was no more fulfilling than his own.
Maybe it was the gloom of the winter months, but he was frequently overwhelmed now by the feeling that his life had finally caught up with him, that the darkness which he had held at bay with the colour of stage artifice had, through that very medium, begun to return. This time, he sensed, the darkness would not be denied. Regret had long been the emotion with which he was best acquainted, but recently he had felt more than that: recently, he had felt afraid. How much of that fear was of his own making he was reluctant to admit but deep down he knew that he had risked too much, that the end could not always justify the means. In those tunnels he had seen damnation too often in the faces of others not to recognise it instantly when it stared back at him from the mirror.
He could stand the cold no longer, so retraced his footsteps along Bridge Street and turned into Parliament Street and Whitehall, where the morning was moving leisurely towards noon.
Before him, in the centre of the road and at the heart of a country’s grief, stood Lutyens’s extraordinary monument to the dead –
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quiet, dominant and bearing witness to the greatest emotion that England had ever felt. It was fifteen years and more since the last shot was fired – long enough for the memory to become lazy – but cars still slowed as they passed, men on buses continued to bare their heads, and parents brought their children to stand quietly at the monument’s flower-covered foot, transferring a muted sorrow to the next generation. Forgetting for a moment his worries about the future, Aubrey took the deep purple iris from the inside of his raincoat and placed it gently on the steps, removing the dying flower that he had left there a week before. After a minute or two’s reflection, he moved purposefully off towards the t
hin, dark figure of Nelson’s Column.
London could be hard on the lonely, thought Esme McCracken as she sat at her window and looked down into the square below.
Thank God she had never been susceptible to the pointless melan-choly that a solitary existence so often tried to justify. If she were, she would scarcely have lasted long in this run-down, worn-out hole, where the inhabitants of the other rooms seemed to have given up on life at roughly the same time as the wallpaper. At night, when she eventually climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor and crawled into an uninviting single bed, she lay awake until the early hours, attempting to restore its faded pattern in her mind’s eye as an antidote to the scenes and conversations that raced in her head and warded off sleep. It was the only time she really paid any attention to her surroundings: the sparseness of the room, the deficiencies of the furniture – a sagging armchair, put under further stress by piles of newspapers and books, and an ugly, fourth-hand table, scratched beyond the endeavours of any polish – never bothered her. Why should they? She had her eye and her thoughts trained firmly on the future.
It was the cold that she most resented, bitter and raw at this time of year. The bars on her small electric fire, inadequate at the best of times, had not glowed for many days now, as every spare penny she earned was spent on words rather than heat. Each morning, on her way to work at the New Theatre, she would steal 55
into the second-hand bookshops to pore greedily over the shelves of new arrivals. Sometimes she was lucky, and managed to slide a slim volume of Ibsen or Chekhov under her coat while the shop assistant’s attention was taken by another customer. Reading the book later, as she sat at prompt corner, she felt no remorse over such small acts of theft, knowing herself to be a worthy recipient of the ideas contained in those pages. Better that they should fall into her hands than be wasted on people with full pockets but empty minds, or left, forgotten, to gather dust.
