by Annie Dalton
Everybody hated checking these databases (except possibly Nadine), and nobody liked uploading on to them. Some of the more antiquated professors were downright phobic about it. Then there were the inevitable one or two who considered themselves far too important to faff about with these kinds of tasks. It was Anna’s job to explain that this was not some Kafkaesque requirement devised specifically to upset academics’ lives; it originated from the lofty heights of the Dean’s committee. Everyone, without exception, was now expected to comply with the new Best Practice Guidelines as laid down by the UEIA (University Excellence in Action). ‘If you have not yet complied,’ she typed, wondering if it would be too cheeky to emphasize ‘not’, ‘may we remind you that with very few days to go till the end of the Michaelmas term this is now a matter of some urgency.’
Partway through the morning, Anna was cheered to discover an email from Jake saying he’d switched a few meetings around and hoped to be heading to the UK sooner than he’d thought.
At lunchtime, she and Kirsty went to Georgina’s in the covered market for coffee and a bagel. The popular upstairs cafe was a relaxed, sometimes downright noisy, venue where it could sometimes be hard to hear yourself speak. Periodically Anna had to put her head close to Kirsty’s to hear her latest instalment of her life post-Jason. She had finally taken Anna and Paul’s advice and gone to a solicitor to initiate divorce proceedings. ‘I should have listened to you guys earlier,’ Kirsty said. ‘I feel so much better for getting everything started.’ Anna offered to treat them both to dessert but Kirsty said she was on a mission to secure this season’s all-important toy for Charlie.
‘The trouble is, every other parent of a pre-school boy is going to be after the same toy,’ she said, buttoning her winter coat. ‘So this could get ugly. I’m thinking, concealed nail file up my coat sleeve, what do you reckon?’
Anna laughed. She couldn’t picture herself ever being prepared to fight to the death to acquire some trashy piece of mass-produced plastic, but possibly Kirsty hadn’t been able to picture it either, pre-Charlie. Love changed you in ways you could never have imagined.
She arrived back at the office to find Paul sitting by her desk, looking oddly blank. ‘Paul? Is everything OK?’ Her voice pulled him out of his reverie and he shook his head.
‘I just heard that Professor Lowell has died. He never regained consciousness, poor old guy.’
Anna saw again the professor’s blood-streaked face, parchment-white under the oxygen mask. ‘Oh God, how awful!’ She began hunting for her phone. She needed to tell Isadora.
Paul took off his glasses, passing a hand across his face. ‘Now he’ll never finish his book. That sounds like a stupid thing to say, but his writing meant everything to him. I think it had become his life.’
‘The poor man,’ Anna said as she punched in Isadora’s number. ‘Sorry, I need to tell somebody, someone who is – was – a close friend of his,’ she explained.
‘No problem. I’ll leave you to it.’ Paul got to his feet. ‘Can I leave you to tell Kirsty as well?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Anna said, waiting for Isadora to pick up.
‘Anna?’ Isadora’s voice was audibly shaking. ‘Oh, Anna, I’ve been hoping you’d ring. I’ve had such a strange and terrible day.’
Anna’s heart sank. ‘You’ve already heard. I wasn’t sure if you knew.’
‘About James, you mean? Yes, my friend called and told me.’
‘Would you like me to …?’ Anna paused, then rephrased her question as a statement of intent. ‘I thought I’d come over to see you after work.’
Isadora sounded ready to weep with gratitude. ‘Oh, darling, would you? I’m rather floundering to be honest. I just don’t know what to do or think.’
Anna arrived at Isadora’s home in Summertown just as Sabina, one of Isadora’s new lodgers, wheeled her bike out through the gate, nibbling a piece of what looked like dry toast. Isadora’s decision to take in lodgers was originally prompted by the need to pay for repairs to her rambling red-brick house. Anna suspected Isadora had secretly hoped for late-night suppers while they all engaged in the lively debates she remembered from her undergraduate days. Instead she’d found herself sharing her home with a shy mathematician from South Korea, and an equally reserved girl from Geneva who was studying International Business Management at Oxford Brookes.
Wrapped in a sky blue pashmina, her hair braided into a long strawberry-blonde plait, Sabina gave Anna a preoccupied half-smile before she rode off on her bike, still nibbling hamster-like at her toast.
Isadora opened the door accompanied by Hero. ‘The kettle’s on.’ Isadora looked and sounded terrible. James Lowell’s death had obviously hit her hard. Her little dog followed them through into the kitchen, where she positioned herself under the table, staring fixedly at Anna through her Betty Paige fringe.
Isadora hadn’t made too many concessions to her lodgers, Anna thought, glancing around her friend’s kitchen. Apart from the counters, which were always pristine, every available surface was heaped with books, papers, and other fascinating detritus, including, Anna noticed, a kit for building a birdhouse. ‘Earl Grey?’ Isadora asked in a lifeless tone.
‘Lovely,’ Anna said, noticing the vodka bottle on the table and wondering how much of its contents were now inside Isadora. She had known Isadora for several months now. She’d seen her tenderly covering a dead woman’s face with her own silk scarf, she’d seen her convulsed with laughter, and drunk and grieving, but Anna had never seen Isadora like this. All her life force, all her passion, had gone out of her, leaving behind a ghost of her former self.
Anna cleared some books off a chair so she could sit down. ‘I brought food.’ She’d made a point of stopping off at Marks and Spencer on the way back from work. ‘But you probably don’t feel much like eating?’
‘Maybe later, darling.’ Isadora managed a wan smile. She sloshed boiling water into the tea pot, spilling a fair amount on the floor. Definitely been knocking back the vodka, Anna decided. Seeing Isadora bearing down on her with the steaming tea pot, she quickly made space. She couldn’t tell if Isadora actually wanted her there.
Isadora poured their tea and Anna waited, nursing her cup between her hands, inhaling calming bergamot fumes and wishing that Tansy were here. Tansy almost always knew the right thing to say. ‘I’m really so sorry about Professor Lowell,’ she tried awkwardly, but was silenced by Isadora’s incredulous look.
‘This isn’t just about James! Did you think this was just about James?’ Isadora jumped up and went out of the kitchen, coming back with a large padded envelope. ‘First that terrible letter, and then, this morning, I found this in my postbox.’ She gingerly slid out a pile of handwritten pages. They were photocopies, marred with fuzzy lines and smudges. Isadora looked down at them in a kind of mute horror.
‘What is it?’ Anna said.
Isadora swallowed. ‘It’s an excerpt from Hetty’s journal.’
Anna said, puzzled, ‘Sorry, who’s Hetty?’
Isadora collapsed back into her chair. ‘Who was Hetty Vallier?’ she said with one of her dark laughs. ‘Darling, that’s the kind of question which only someone who never knew Hetty would ask!’ She began furiously stuffing the pages back into the envelope as if she couldn’t bear to look at them for another second. ‘Who could possibly have sent this to me? Who would do such a thing?’
Feeling out of her depth, Anna tried tentatively, ‘Maybe Hetty wanted you to see it for some reason?’
Isadora went so white that Anna thought she might faint. She grabbed at Anna’s hand across the table, and Anna felt her friend’s terror go jolting through her own body. ‘That’s simply not possible. Hetty was murdered fifty years ago.’
FIVE
18 January, 1966
I’m sitting on a train in the middle of nowhere. We’re stuck somewhere between Bath and Cheltenham and nobody seems to know why.
These are not the life-changing sentences with which I’d hoped to sta
rt my brand new diary but I’m trying to discourage the unwanted attentions of the man sitting opposite. I can only assume he’s just been released from an extremely long prison sentence, since I’m not looking remotely feminine, being bundled up like an old babushka in just about every garment I own (not counting the three stolen ball dresses which are squashed at the bottom of my suitcase). I’m wearing my Persian carpet coat (that’s what Felix calls it, in his delightfully belittling brotherly way!) also stolen from the attic at Daddy’s, over the darling little dress that Maeve bought me at the start of the holidays, over two pairs of woollen tights. Under the dress, I am wearing two thermal vests. Over my coat, I am muffled in a long woollen scarf that my little stepsister Phoebe knitted me for Christmas. Despite this, and the fact that my fingers and possibly my nose are now turning dangerously indigo, the man is still giving me alarmingly lecherous looks. So I am now madly scribbling in my book doing my best to look like a budding novelist who has been seized with a sudden fit of inspiration and is absolutely not to be interrupted!
I am actually feeling a little bit like crying. I was exactly the same when I had to go back to school after the holidays. I think it’s this frightening inbetweenness that I can’t stand. In theory, you see, there’s nothing to stop me getting off at the next station and hitching a lift back to Daddy and everyone at the Mill House. I could give up the entire project of studying for a degree. I could run away to London, rent a room in South Ken or somewhere, and find myself a job, something fun, like designing theatrical costumes.
The thing is, I’m not actually sure Daddy has even properly taken in that I’m up at Oxford. It’s hilarious when you think about it. I’m about to start my second year, and Daddy still hasn’t noticed that I’ve taken to disappearing for eight weeks at a time! (This would also explain why he never gets around to paying his share of my grant. Maeve has promised to talk to him for me. I can’t bear to seem needy and whining. Daddy loathes people who are needy and whining. He says he has to block it out or he can’t work, and painting for Daddy is like breathing to everyone else … )
My father does this wonderfully convincing impersonation of someone who is listening with passionate intensity to everything you say, when in fact he’s several millions of miles away envisioning his current painting and hasn’t heard a word. I seem to remember that he was in the middle of his big triptych at the time I got the letter, plus I think it was about then that he had started to get serious with Saskia, so it’s perfectly understandable really if one of his daughters getting into Oxford didn’t quite make it to the top of his list of concerns. Also unlike normal fathers, Daddy has very little time for formal education. He believes in art and foreign travel. I honestly think that if I told him I’d decided to drop out, he’d just say, ‘Do whatever makes you wake up smiling, Hetty my darling.’
Did I ever wake up smiling? I’m not sure anyone does that in real life, do they? Not after the age of three or four? Not even Daddy and, apart from the rare days when his painting is going badly, he’s the happiest person I know. It’s strange that someone as warm and lovable, adorable really, as Daddy can also seem so detached from the very people who love him. It really is one of life’s riddles.
As I was writing that last sentence the conductor just went striding past our compartment with the kind of hunted expression that positively defies you to ask what’s wrong! I noticed him blink slightly at the sight of me in my Persian carpet coat. Needless to say I hadn’t planned to wear it in public in its current state. It still has dozens of moth holes which I eventually plan to embroider into exotic flowers and birds – but just now I need it to stop me freezing to death. My feet were already blocks of ice from waiting so long in the (unheated) station waiting room at Exeter. Now I can’t seem to feel them at all.
I’ve lost my thread. Yes. Inbetweenness. Every time I have to leave the Mill House it feels as if I’m physically tearing myself free from some powerful magnetic field. It’s an absolutely terrifying sensation, as if, deep down, I’m not sure I’m capable of surviving outside it.
But then, as I get closer and closer to Oxford, I can feel the equally strong magnetic pull of my new life, with my dear little room at Lady Margaret Hall, and my friends. So, though at this moment I am longing to just jump off the train and hitch home to Devon, I also know that as soon as I walk in through the porter’s lodge at LMH I’ll feel that excited bubbly feeling of being back in Oxford, in the glorious glittering centre of things. (Not to mention the occasional illicit adventure to keep me on my toes!) But at this moment, stranded like a little stray iron filing between my two worlds, I feel lost, as if my life has absolutely no point.
Rereading those last lines, I have JUST remembered why I gave up keeping a diary!! It always makes me depressed! I end up writing things that even I don’t understand (for instance, comparing myself to a lonely little iron filing!). So I shall stop writing about my boring feelings and write about my fabulous Christmas holidays with my father’s chaotic and ever-increasing ménage.
I actually get on really well with all Daddy’s ex-wives and girlfriends, though ‘ex’ is not a term that anyone has ever heard my father use. The thing about Daddy is, he never subtracts people, he just adds – and adds! He delights in big family get-togethers where he can gather together all the people he cares about under his roof, and this Christmas just about everybody was, apart from my mother – she’s still in an ashram in India somewhere. My favourite ex-stepmother Maeve was there, with Felix and Bella, who I feel every bit as close to as my real sister, Carrie, even though Felix seems permanently grumpy these days. Lalla was there, with my two half-sisters, my two stepbrothers and her new husband, Raphael. Nina typically got hopelessly lost on the way, finally rattling up the drive in her Morris Traveller well after midnight, minus one of her headlights, her exhaust pipe trailing by a thread and a crate of Veuve Cliquot in the back (more of that crate later!).
Obviously Saskia was there, with the new baby, Effie, who is just a perfect little pearl of loveliness. Saskia never has much to say for herself, but wafts around in fetching assemblages of camisoles and Victorian petticoats, apparently oblivious to the freezing temperatures. One time Maeve said, exasperated, ‘Saskia, please do put some proper clothes on over those amazing breasts of yours or I’m going to fling a blanket over you myself!’
The Mill House is always cold but it was exceptionally freezing this Christmas. Daddy said he’d forgotten to order logs, but Felix reckons he still owes for the last two loads and they’ve quite rightly refused to deliver any more until Daddy coughs up. Luckily, Felix and I found some dry logs in a forgotten wood-store and wheeled them back to the house in a squeaky old barrow. Clem and Felix also chopped up a wormy old blanket chest, so we were able to have a fire last thing on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day itself but after that we just had to endure the steadily deepening cold.
On Boxing Day, seeing us all turning blue and morose in our coats and scarves, Daddy said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, you lot! Where’s your fucking spirit of enterprise?’ Whereupon he shepherded us all into the ballroom, made Felix, Clem and Toby help him set up a net, and got us all playing indoor tennis! Everyone took turns playing, even the little ones, and we all ended up warm and glowing and laughing. Even Felix agreed it was the best fun he’d had in ages, and Felix can be darkly resentful of Daddy sometimes. I just loved seeing Daddy at the centre of everything, like a tangle-haired but still wonderfully handsome Father Christmas, with everyone adoring him. He’s in his fifties now and still has more energy than people half his age.
I’ve talked about the lack of heat. I should probably mention the food which was the usual mad mix of feast and famine. Lalla lives in France now with Raphael, and they had generously loaded up their car with stinky cheeses and pâté and bottles of wine for everyone. This was lovely of them but not terribly Christmassy. Someone had given Daddy a brace of pheasants which Maeve cooked beautifully with bacon and some of Lalla’s wine but in the end there were so
many people crowded around the table that no one got more than a couple of mouthfuls.
Luckily Lalla had made bread for everyone a day or two before. (Lalla is into artisan bread-making.) No one had fancied it previously (it is extremely worthy bread) but late that night when all the littlies were asleep and the older ones had staggered drunkenly off to bed, Felix confided that he was suffering such violent hunger pains that he might have to stab himself in the eye with one of Daddy’s paintbrushes to distract himself. So Carrie and I went to investigate Lalla’s bread but to our dismay it had become absolutely rocklike. We agreed that it might just be tolerable if it was toasted, but toast was obviously impossible without a fire. Then Phoebe said, ‘The lumber room! We could chop up those old chairs!’ So Felix and Clem sneaked up to the lumber room and brought down three broken kitchen chairs that have been up there waiting to be mended forever, and smashed them into pieces and got a beautiful blaze going in the fireplace.
Carrie and I managed to saw off slabs of Lalla’s rocklike bread and we all took turns to toast them over the flames. There wasn’t any butter to be had, sadly, but clever Phoebe found a jar of home-made quince jelly. It had become so solid with age we virtually had to chip it from the jar but it tasted delicious! We sat around the fire (the parts of us nearest the fire scorching, every other part chilled to the bone), eating lumps of toasted bread spread with quince jelly, and then Felix suddenly remembered the case of Veuve Cliquot which everyone else had apparently forgotten and all us Vallier offspring got rip-roaring drunk, because while there is never enough food in our father’s house you can almost always find plenty to drink!
I’m thinking of Daddy’s Christmas present to me now, snuggled in between the stolen ball dresses. It’s the most extravagant and wonderful thing he’s ever given me. We all got madly extravagant presents this year, but I love mine the most – a tiny but genuine Picasso sketch of a horse. When Felix saw it, he went into one of his dark moods. Later he said, ‘You’re not seriously going to keep it? Hetty, just sell it, for fuck’s sake! You’re completely broke. All of us are completely broke!’ I couldn’t explain that I would never dream of selling one of Daddy’s presents, even if I had to live off raw potato peelings to survive which fortunately, being in halls, I don’t. Whether they are wildly extravagant like the Picasso, or silly and funny like that Ze’ev caricature of the snail, I treasure every one of my father’s gifts to me like stardust …
