Sweets From Morocco

by Jo Verity

  Lewis took her to the station. The London train was delayed by twenty minutes and they were glad to forsake the draughty platform for the sanctuary of the station buffet.

  ‘So what’s this job you’re doing at the moment, Tessa?’

  How typical of Lewis to save his cross-examination until the last minute.

  ‘It’s with Ward & Cox, the publishers. In the editorial department.’

  ‘Is it permanent?’

  ‘I did a couple of weeks there as a temp and then this job came up.’ She was unsure where his questioning was leading. ‘I’m general dogsbody at the moment – typing, filing, running errands. But they’re a fun crowd and I’m learning useful stuff about the book trade.’

  He nodded then continued, ‘Have you ever considered doing some exams? Getting a few qualifications?’

  ‘Lewis, I know you mean well but I’m not one of your pupils. I don’t need careers advice. Let’s talk about something else, shall we?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘News. Scandal. Gossip.’

  He tugged his ear lobe. ‘Actually there is something. I meant to keep the paper but what with everything… It was about that bloke you used to know. Tony Rundle.’

  It was a long time since she’d thought about Rundle and she was surprised how the mention of his name caused her stomach to lurch. ‘He was a real bastard.’

  ‘Mmmm. Well now he’s a real rock’n’roll star, too. According to the article, his band had a record in the charts. At number thirty-seven, I think it was.’

  ‘Big deal.’ She took a sip from her mug of tea. ‘What’s the band called? Or the song?’

  Lewis couldn’t remember but promised to keep any further cuttings he came across. ‘Now.’ He folded his arms and lent forward, clearly relishing what he was preparing to divulge. ‘What d’you call something that comes from Morocco?’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Answer the question. What do you call something that comes from Morocco?’

  She shrugged. ‘Moroccan, I suppose. But I don’t see—’

  ‘Yes, Moroccan. Or,’ he paused theatrically, ‘Moorish. More-ish.’

  She raised her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, God. How could we have been so slow?’

  ‘Come on, Tess. “Moorish” isn’t exactly an adjective in common usage amongst ten-year-olds, is it? Another thing. Mr Zeal wasn’t her lodger. He was her cousin. I’m not sure how, or why, they ended up together in that big house.’

  Mr Zeal with his wavy hair and his fussy manner flashed into Tessa’s mind. ‘D’you think he was a queer? There was something very … cloying … about him.’

  The station announcer apologised that the London train was delayed by a further ten minutes.

  ‘It looks like I’m stuck here.’ Tessa regretted her quip as a look of hope crossed Lewis’s face.

  ‘Perhaps I can come up to London for a weekend soon,’ he said. ‘Observe you in your natural habitat.’

  Tessa pictured her second-floor bedsit in Camden Town; single bed with saggy mattress; gas fire and the clothes airer permanently stationed in front of it; brown carpet and flimsy chest of drawers, its top scorched by careless cigarettes. By the time she paid her rent and fares to work, ate one decent meal a day and made sure that her clothes were clean, there was nothing left for theatre visits or concerts or meals in Italian restaurants or stylish clothes.

  ‘That’d be fun. But why not leave it until the better weather? Easter or Whitsun.’

  The train arrived and they went out on to the platform. They hugged, mumbling ‘take care’ and ‘look after yourself’. Lewis helped her onto the train, making sure the door was properly shut.

  As the train pulled away, Tessa pushed the window down and leaned out, watching Lewis, hands stuffed in his overcoat pockets, get smaller and smaller until he was indistinguishable from the other figures on the platform.

  Chapter 17

  It was hot in the train and the misted windows obscured the lights of towns and villages as the train sped on. Tessa leaned her head back against the prickly upholstery and closed her eyes.

  So that was it. Gran was gone … puff. In Tessa’s mental snapshots of the family, Gran was always there in her ‘pinny’ making sure everyone had a cup of tea. How could a person – a life force – be there one second and not the next? It was too brutal.

  The shadowy phantom of Gordon stirred. He, too, had been there one moment then gone. When their mother brought him home, Tessa had seen him as a human cuckoo chick, edging her and Lewis out of their comfy nest. Was he a planned baby or a ‘mistake’? A mistake might be forgiven, whereas a conscious decision to alter the family set-up – well… It was odd how little she remembered – really remembered – of life before he was born. Christmases and seaside holidays, birthdays and outings to the pantomime, yes, but the ordinary days, dozens and dozens of them, what had they been like?

  ‘Tickets, please.’

  The guard came through the carriage and, opening her handbag to find her ticket, she saw the diaries. The volumes differed slightly in size, none of them larger than six inches by four. Each was bound in leather – dark red, green or navy blue – with gold-edged pages, and two of them had miniature pencils concealed in their spines. The dates, embossed on the covers, revealed that the earliest was 1904 and the latest, 1916. She fanned them out on her lap, staring at the scuffed leather. It wasn’t as if she were prying into a current life – that would be inexcusable. No. Whatever was recorded in the little books had taken place sixty years ago and was more or less ancient history. What harm could reading them possibly do?

  Jay Costello was waiting in her room. Overcoat on, he was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed, reading the Evening Standard.

  He looked up from the paper and smiled. ‘Hi. You look tired. Was it grim?’ He nodded towards the half bottle of vodka and two packets of cigarettes on the table. ‘Help yourself.’

  ‘It was okay. Better than I thought.’ She poured generous measures of vodka into two glasses. ‘I’m glad I stayed the night.’

  ‘I’m not. But you’re here now.’

  Jay was no good for her, coming and going like he did, making other men she met seem lacklustre in comparison. From the beginning, he’d made no promises, given her no false expectations, but his honesty didn’t make matters any better because her failure to end the affair implied that she accepted his terms. Guilt might have pushed her into finishing it but Jay and Liza had ‘an open marriage’. ‘He’s a great lover, isn’t he?’ Liza had said the first time she saw them coming out of Tessa’s room together. And, to make sure Tessa understood the rules of the game, she gave her the low-down on his several other current lovers.

  Jay never banged on about what she ought to do with her life, unlike other men she met, who, after a few dates, started to chip away, telling her that she was too bright, too clever, to be drifting in and out of mediocre jobs. Lewis was as bad. They all wanted to improve her whilst Jay seemed happy with her as she was. Recently, however, it had occurred to her that his reasons might not be completely altruistic. After all, it suited him to have her trapped in dead end jobs, never meeting anyone more interesting that the doorman or the office junior and therefore grateful for his intermittent attentions.

  After they had made love, Jay told her about his meeting with the owner of a Bond Street gallery – his reason for being in London.

  ‘He’s talking about putting on a show of my stuff. Sounds pretty keen. That’d be terrific. The cash from the sale of the house is long gone. And,’ he kissed her forehead, ‘it would mean that I’d be spending the summer in London, setting it up.’

  ‘Wonderful.’ She was pleased for him. He was a good painter and he deserved recognition but she couldn’t suppress a niggle of envy of his success.

  Tessa had skimmed through a couple of the diaries on the train. Each page had held a surprising amount of information but the poor illumination in the carriage and the feint pencil script had mad
e it difficult to decipher the entries. It wasn’t until the weekend, after Jay had returned to Ireland, that she found time to study them properly. She laid them out, seven in all, in chronological sequence. 1904, 1905, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1915, 1916. Lewis had said that Mrs Channing was almost ninety. So she must have been – what? – in her mid-twenties in 1904, the very age that Tessa was now.

  Reading them was as tantalising as hearing one side of a telephone conversation. There were references to the weather and to family birthdays, the sort of thing Tessa noted in her own diary, but much was unexplained, people and places referred to by initial letters. Understandable. Mrs Channing hadn’t intended them to be read by anyone else. Can’t bear it. A. sleeping in guest room. Doctor says nothing’s amiss. Tessa became intrigued and frustrated in equal parts. The cryptic phrases were like the points in a dot-to-dot puzzle. For a picture to be revealed, she would need to join them up.

  Lewis spent the Easter weekend in Manchester, with Kirsty. They went to the cinema, the City Art Gallery, read the papers, cooked for each other and went for a long walk. Their lovemaking was as satisfying as ever. They talked and laughed and did the things that they always did. But once or twice Kirsty seemed distracted, losing the thread of what she was telling him.

  With a week before school started back, Lewis decided to go to Cranwell Lodge. Mrs Channing needed more gummed labels for her boxes and, after a morning at school working on lesson plans for the coming term, he raided the stockroom, picking up a selection of pens, envelopes and paper along with the labels.

  ‘It’s only me,’ he called, letting himself in through the back door.

  The house was silent.

  ‘Hello?’ he called again as he went into the breakfast room, expecting to find her sitting in her armchair, tackling the crossword.

  The remains of yesterday’s fire lay, grey and cold, in the grate but there was no sign of her. He returned to the kitchen. An unwashed bowl stood on the draining board, porridge caked on the inside of it, like pebble-dash on the wall of a house.

  Had she gone out? Her grocery shopping was delivered weekly and, because she had been a good customer for so many years, the soft-hearted grocer also brought her regular order – a chop, a slice or two of liver, some sausages – from the butcher. She kept a well-provisioned larder and boasted that she could manage for a month ‘…as long as I don’t tire of oxtail soup or sardines…’ were there to be a bad snowfall, like the one a few Christmases ago. Whenever she needed to visit the bank or go to the hairdresser, she went by taxi, but these were infrequent occurrences requiring pre-planning, and she invariably mentioned things like that to Lewis.

  He found her in the bathroom lying, fully clothed and face-down, on the black and white chequered linoleum. It was obvious that she was dead and while it was too late be classed an emergency, not knowing what else to do, he dialled nine-nine-nine.

  The doctor thought that she had probably been dead for two or three days, although the Coroner would have to verify that. The police asked lots of questions. What time had he found her? What brought him to the house that particular day? They seemed unable to understand why, as he wasn’t related to ‘the deceased’, he was in possession of the keys to her house. When he explained that he and Mrs Channing had been friends, they listened stony-faced, their disbelief apparent in their, ‘You are twenty-three, sir, and you say the deceased was … eighty-nine?’ They took down his details – name, address, occupation, when he had last seen her alive. The dead pan manner in which they delivered the questions made him fear that he might, unwittingly, have broken the law, a fear irrationally reinforced by the bag of stolen stationery still lying on the table. After an hour or so, they told him he was free to leave, adding that they would need to talk to him again. He was sure they would, because it couldn’t be long before the penny dropped and they dug out the files from fourteen years ago.

  He cycled slowly home, delaying the moment of getting there. He would have to come clean with his parents and admit that, for the past five years, he had been slinking off – that’s how his father would see it – to visit Mrs Channing. In their eyes, Mrs C was in some way linked with Gordon’s disappearance, although it had been proved otherwise. Lewis wouldn’t expect them to understand why visiting her had become so important to him. When he was at Cranwell Lodge, he became a more interesting person. He couldn’t understand why but he did and, for the first time since finding her in the bathroom, he reflected on what he had lost, and somewhere between Cranwell Lodge and home, he sat on a garden wall and wept.

  Dick Swinburne made a great song and dance about his son’s covert association with Mrs Channing. ‘How could you, Lewis? After all that went on there.’ Nothing had ‘gone on’ there but Lewis could see how, once the police arrived asking more questions as they surely would, their stolid insensitivity and persistence would dredge the whole business up. It was bound to because his own head was already swirling with thoughts of his brother.

  Gordon wasn’t dead because, for fourteen years, Lewis had been keeping him alive. At first he’d created a parallel existence for the Swinburne family, a life in which his father returned from the shops with the baby and the newspaper, and the five of them lived in idyllic harmony. But, as time went on, Lewis could no longer square this whimsical account with his credo. Science, not science fiction, provided the blueprint for life on earth, forcing him to come up with an explanation that complied with the laws of chemistry and physics.

  Gordon was fine. The woman who had taken him from his pram on that November day in 1954 was beautiful, kind, rich and well-educated. Her soldier husband had been absent, on service in Cyprus, or Malta, when their son was born. Unfortunately that baby had died and, temporarily deranged, she had snatched a replacement. Gordon – although he would have been re-named something like Christopher or Jeremy – was fourteen now and at public school. He was a good all-rounder, excelling at maths and sport. He could ride a horse and sail a dinghy and play the cello. And he bore a startling resemblance to Lewis. Christopher had a younger brother. Perhaps a sister, too. The family home was in Devon, or the Cotswolds, and they lived in sunny tranquillity. Yes, he was fine.

  He wasn’t sure that Tessa would like the idea of Gordon’s new life. Her goal had, or so it seemed, been to loathe their father and the catastrophe only really satisfied that need if Gordon had ‘gone to a better place’, and not as in Devon or the Cotswolds. So for fear that with a few ugly sentences she would annihilate Christopher aka Gordon, he kept his hopeful conviction to himself. Neither was the topic mentioned by his parents, who seldom spoke about the past or anything connected with it. Bereaved families found consolation in recalling happier days, when the family circle had been complete, but the Swinburne circle had been irreparably fractured and looking back would be like asking them to take comfort from a car crash.

  The post-mortem revealed that Mrs Channing had suffered a massive stroke and would have died instantly. Lewis was glad. It was a relief to know that she had not lain on the bathroom floor for hours, cold and frightened, waiting to die. The police informed him that they had tracked down and notified her next of kin – a second cousin who lived not far from Ipswich. This was no more than a formality as Mrs Channing had taken steps to ensure that no one should turn up and railroad the final proceedings. She had set her affairs in immaculate order, down to the details of her funeral. Humanist. No flowers. No mourners – not even Lewis Swinburne. And where her ashes were to be scattered: in the River Wye, near Symonds Yat – I’ve always liked the sound of that name.

  Three weeks after Mrs Channing’s death, Lewis came home to find a letter waiting for him. The unnecessarily large envelope was franked ‘Richardson, Rolf and Newman’, the town’s most prominent firm of solicitors. The letter inside requested that he contact them.

  ‘Any idea what it’s about?’ he asked the secretary who answered his phone call but, as he anticipated, she was unable to help him.

  To be truthful, the communicati
on didn’t come as a complete surprise. Once or twice, Mrs Channing had hinted that she intended leaving him something as a remembrance of Cranwell Lodge. There was, of course, no question of his ever forgetting the place but he liked to think that she might bequeath him the ebony elephants or the walking stick with the handle carved in the shape of a snake’s head or the painting of the Indian dhow floating on the purple ocean.

  But, when Mr Newman gave Lewis a copy of her will to read, it wasn’t the elephants or the stick or the picture. Mrs Channing had left Lewis the house. She had left him Cranwell Lodge and its contents.

  ‘There is, however, one very unusual condition.’ Mr Newman’s voice was deliberate and rather too loud, as if he wanted to ensure that his words penetrated even the thickest skull. ‘The house is yours on condition that you occupy it for the next ten years. Thereafter it is yours to do with as you see fit. This condition will be overseen by a board of trustees appointed by my late client.’

  ‘And if I don’t want to?’ Lewis’s question sounded petulant, the terminology inexact.

  ‘If you “don’t want to” or if you live there for one single day short of ten years, the property and its contents will be sold and the sum realised donated to a charity.’

  ‘Which one?’ Lewis didn’t see Mrs Channing as a philanthropist and he was intrigued to hear which charity she’d chosen.

  Mr Newman flicked over the pages of the document and adjusted his spectacles, and it occurred to Lewis that the man was probably the leading light in some amateur dramatic society. ‘The International Society for the Welfare of Parrots.’