by Annie Dalton
Hurray, the train is moving again and the lecherously staring man has gone off to the bar …
20 minutes later
Our train has just managed to crawl into Cheltenham station. Now we are sitting helplessly in our icy cold carriages waiting to find out what will happen next. An engineer has been sent for, but apparently we could be stuck here for hours. Several of the more prosperous passengers have chummed up with each other to share taxis to wherever they’re going. I shall simply have to wait until either the engine problem is resolved or another train comes along.
I thought I might as well occupy myself by describing an unusual event that happened last term. Earlier I mentioned ‘illicit adventures’. I’m not supposed to tell anyone about these things, but I feel one should be allowed the odd indiscreet entry in one’s private diary. (This isn’t Stalinist Russia after all.) About three weeks before the end of the Michaelmas term, I got a typically enigmatic summons from Tallis to go to the Randolph for what he described as an ‘unrepeatable opportunity’ to meet ‘kindred spirits’.
Tallis has a way of making quite innocent things seem thrillingly cloak-and-dagger, but I did think this sounded positively shady! However, since this meeting was taking place at the rather stuffy and grand Randolph, I decided to take it on trust that he wasn’t trying to lure me into some kind of secret sex club and set out with a distinct frisson of excitement!
I was hoping to write about my evening in full but my hands are so cold that I’d need to write with my woolly gloves on and it’s almost impossible to write with thick woolly fingers, the horrible woolliness sets my teeth on edge. So I will just say that I liked almost all of my fellow guests at the Randolph, particularly the beautiful James, but the person who intrigued me most of all was a painfully shy girl called Isadora. The rest of my news I shall have to save until I get back to my cosy little room at LMH.
SIX
‘… It is my privilege to have been asked to conduct this ceremony composed of words and music which reflects the life of James Lowell, particularly the music he loved. While this is an immeasurably sad day, let our ceremony today not only be an opportunity to say goodbye to James and to grieve for him but also to remember and celebrate his life and all that he did.’
The heating in the chapel seemed not to be working. Anna was grateful she’d thought to put on an extra layer under her not very substantial black dress. She and Isadora had found vacant seats at the end of a row. Appalled at the notion of a humanist funeral (‘But James was a practicing Roman Catholic! Why did he want some soulless service in a crematorium!’), Isadora had warned that she wanted the option of simply walking out if things got too dreary. Anna had mentally translated this as, If I get too upset.
On Tansy’s instructions, Anna had arrived at Isadora’s house three-quarters of an hour earlier than arranged, to vet their friend’s outfit for stains, dog hairs and general suitability. Since James’s attack Anna and Tansy had been alarmed to see their friend’s appearance slide past ‘eccentric’ and edge perilously close to ‘bag lady’. But when Isadora opened the door she was dressed with the kind of head-to-toe glamour that could have taken her to the funeral of a minor royal. ‘Wow, Isadora! You look like you’ve stepped off the cover of Vogue!’ For the first time in weeks it seemed, Isadora had given her a ghost of a smile. ‘I thought I should make an effort, if only to counteract this hideously brutal venue.’
Knowing that James had no close relatives, Anna had imagined that attendance at his funeral might be sparse, but the chapel was almost full of soberly dressed academics. The only person there under sixty, not counting Anna, was the celebrant, a tall fair-haired woman in her middle years. Isadora had already shot several withering looks in her direction. Anna suspected she was longing for the celebrant to say something sick-makingly trite or worse, split an infinitive, so she could despise her along with this shabby excuse for a funeral.
‘I appreciate that some of you may be more accustomed to a different form of service,’ the celebrant said with a smile, as if she’d divined and sympathized with Isadora’s distaste, ‘so there will be a reflective time later which you may choose to use for private prayer.’ She paused, looking around the assembled mourners, including them all in her steady gaze. ‘When someone dies so violently, and, to all intents, pointlessly, it’s not surprising if we struggle to deal with the shock. We can rage at the waste, the unfairness, the loss of all his friends’ and colleagues’ hopes for him, but from what I have learned about James Lowell, the last thing he would have wanted is that we spend our time together today feeling sad or angry …’
Isadora unfastened then refastened both of the buckles on her bag, then began twisting her antique silver rings around her fingers. On the way over she’d talked nonstop about anything and everything except the funeral they were on their way to attend. Her son, Gabriel, and his wife, Nicky, were off to Australia to spend Christmas with Nicky’s family. Isadora didn’t know if she should take their gifts round before they left. ‘I still make up Christmas stockings for them, just silly little gifts. I used to love doing stockings for Gabriel. I simply couldn’t bear to give it up. For years I’ve been telling myself I should stop. I know it just makes him even more embarrassed by his ridiculous mother. But then last year Nicky announced that she’d finally embraced the whole stocking concept, and then she emailed me – emailed can you believe! – their fucking wish list! I’m talking cashmere bed socks, Jo Malone candles!’
Needing all her attention for negotiating Oxford’s ring road, Anna had confined her responses to sympathetic noises, knowing that Isadora needed to keep talking so as not to raise the one topic that was uppermost in both their minds: would any of the surviving members of the group, which Anna had privately christened the Oxford Six, turn up to the funeral? Isadora had admitted to Anna and Tansy that since the advent of the Internet she’d several times googled her friends’ names hoping to discover what had become of them. She’d learned that Piers Courtenay had died, far too young, of a heart attack. Robert Keane was still very much alive; he had gone on to marry money, not to mention earned huge amounts on his own doing something in the City. Catherine Hetherington, however, had apparently disappeared without trace. Isadora had been unable to find her in any UK records. ‘What about your handler bloke?’ Tansy had asked her curiously, ‘Didn’t you ever think to look him up on the internet?’
‘Given his line of business and the fact that he undoubtedly used a false name in all his dealings with us, I think I’d have more luck looking for the Scarlet Pimpernel. Besides, he’s probably in the ground by now,’ Isadora had added with one of her dark laughs. ‘He must have been ten years older than me at least, and he smoked like a blast furnace.’
Anna sneaked a surreptitious glance around the chapel. There were a number of unfamiliar faces but none of them looked as if they might qualify to be the Scarlet Pimpernel, she thought, and had to fight a nervous desire to giggle.
The celebrant had finished her introduction. ‘Elspeth Gildersleeve from Walsingham’s music society, of which James Lowell was an active member, will now play “The Lark Ascending” by Vaughan Williams,’ she told them. An elderly woman rose from her seat. Anna heard the soles of her shoes squeak faintly as she went to stand by the coffin. She lifted her violin from its case, checked the tuning, adjusted a couple of pegs, then she closed her eyes and began to play.
While Anna listened, another part of her drifted back to the puzzle of Hetty Vallier’s diary. Isadora had sent Anna away with the photocopies, saying brusquely, ‘You girls can read them, if you like. I simply can’t bear to have them in my house.’
That evening when Tansy arrived back home, Anna had told her about the diary excerpts, saying she wasn’t sure if they should read something so personal. Tansy had looked at her as if she was nuts. ‘How can you not want to read diary entries by Isadora’s mysteriously murdered best friend?’
‘You’re right,’ Anna had admitted sheepishly. ‘I do want to. I on
ly feel like I shouldn’t!’
She and Tansy had curled up in opposite corners of the largest sofa swapping photocopied pages between them as they struggled to decipher Hetty Vallier’s somewhat eccentric handwriting. As she read, Anna could almost hear Hetty striving to maintain her larky upbeat tone as she described her Christmas in her father’s haphazard and overcrowded household.
‘I wish whoever it was had sent Isadora the whole diary,’ Tansy had commented, frustrated, when they’d finished. ‘Hetty sounds like a real character. I loved the stolen ball dresses! Her father was a prize shit, though, and I’m the world expert on shitty fathers!’ She’d briefly returned to Hetty’s last entry. ‘Can you honestly imagine a “painfully shy” Isadora?’
Once upon a time, Anna would have agreed. The Isadora they’d met three months ago had seemed like a confident woman of the world. But these past weeks had taken a heavy toll, bringing that insecure younger self dangerously close to the surface.
The violin soared and soared. Anna saw Isadora dab at her eyes. It seemed she wasn’t finding this funeral so soulless after all. Anna caught herself imagining how she’d describe the event to Jake, and how she kept sneaking hopeful looks around the chapel in case a member of the Six burst in to make a Hollywood-style last-minute arrival.
Anna suspected that Jake would tell her she was using Isadora’s troubles as a distraction from the Max issue. Having arrived safely in the UK, he had managed to fit in a flying visit to Oxford. It had been lovely to spend time with him, but Jake was not a man to tiptoe around a tricky subject. ‘You should absolutely meet up with him,’ he’d said firmly, when she’d told him about her call from Tim. ‘You’ve said yourself he’s a decent guy.’ Anna knew this to be true. These days, Tim worked as an investigative journalist. He could have sold her family’s stories to the tabloids any time he wanted, but he hadn’t.
Anna heard the squeak of the violinist’s shoes as she returned to her seat. The Principal of Walsingham College, a tall, thin, balding man who always reminded her of a heron, delivered a short eulogy, regretting both the shocking manner of Professor Lowell’s death and the loss of one of the finest minds he’d had the privilege to know, but insisted that his books would be his legacy to future generations. After the Principal, a procession of colleagues and acquaintances came up to relate their memories. After enduring four or five of these, Isadora hissed, ‘Who is this dull old fart they’re all talking about? James wasn’t some tame old academic. He burned, Anna, he burned with love and hope.’ Anna could feel Isadora being torn between her long-ago promise to keep silent and an almost overwhelming need to leap up and declare her connection with this dead man.
The celebrant had returned to the front, holding a faded orange paperback. Anna could see a strip of bright pink paper marking her place. ‘I’m going to read a poem by Robert Frost, which had powerful associations for James Lowell.’
In one of those super-lucid, out-of-body moments that she associated with extreme panic, Anna knew even before she heard the title that it would be same the poem Tim’s mother had attempted to read at Anna’s family’s funeral. Jane Freemantle had collapsed sobbing before she reached the end. Tim’s father had helped her back to her seat, then taken his wife’s place at the lectern to read the remaining lines in a trembling voice.
Doped up on tranquillisers, Anna would have sworn she hadn’t taken in a word that was spoken, either inside that church or later by her family’s gravesides. Yet, maybe five years afterwards, she’d gone to a screening of the Outsiders in whatever city she was living in at the time, and had had to flee from the cinema when Ponyboy began to read the same poem.
Now Anna felt each word pierce her heart until she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. Somehow she forced herself to stay in her seat until the last line had been spoken, then she whispered to Isadora that she was going out for a minute.
The chapel gardens still glittered from an overnight frost, as if some invisible confectioner had sifted icing sugar over them. Anna walked along the paths, blindly at first, then, as her heart rate slowed, she began to register the memorial plaques and floral tributes. She could still hear Robert Frost’s words. Nothing gold can stay. She pictured her little sister, Lottie, her brothers, Will and Dan; so full of noise and mischief. She hadn’t considered them as golden or even particularly precious. They were just her family. She’d assumed they’d be around to annoy her for ever. At sixteen she’d had more important claims on her time; Max Strauli, for instance. The night they were murdered she’d stormed out to a friend’s. She had known she was missing her little sister’s birthday party, yet she hadn’t felt a flicker of guilt.
Anna made herself stop and read the words on the nearest plaque, as a way of bringing herself back to the solid physical present.
Beryl Harris
1922–2005
Beloved Mum and Gran. Never Forgotten.
Not ‘Beloved Wife’, Anna thought. She let herself imagine the life of this unknown woman, widowed, divorced or simply abandoned, valiantly bringing up her children alone.
Calmer now, she became aware of other people wandering through the gardens in ones and twos. They’d probably arrived early for the next funeral. The celebrant had explained the necessity to keep to a strict timetable and Anna had felt Isadora bristle at the implication that James’s funeral service was just one on a continuous conveyer belt of death.
Anna noticed a young woman, her cheeks pink with cold, pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair towards her. She noticed wheelchair users now because of her grandfather, but she thought she would have noticed this striking white-haired old man regardless. Dressed all in black, with a matching fedora, he emanated world-weary elegance. An actor, Anna thought, or an old jazz musician. With his leather-gloved hands clasped together on his lap, he endured his rattling progress along the paths with a bland expression that gave nothing away. Yet, as they passed each other, he surprised her with an ironic tip of his hat.
Sufficiently composed to return to the chapel, Anna managed to slip discreetly into her seat. Isadora whispered, ‘You’re just in time for the Bach. James adored this piece.’
The violinist was still playing as the coffin began slowly sliding out of sight. Anna heard Isadora say softly, ‘Shalom, darling boy,’ then she covered her face with her hands.
People were buttoning up their coats, getting out of their seats, the start of a civilized exodus. Anna heard the Principal thanking the celebrant, inviting her back to Walsingham, ‘So we can all raise a glass in memory of Professor Lowell. Our chef always puts on an excellent buffet. You’d be very welcome.’
‘Do you recognize anyone at all?’ Anna whispered to Isadora.
She looked up, her eyes red-rimmed. ‘You know the really sad thing? Even if any of them were here I probably wouldn’t recognize them, any more than they’d recognize this saggy old bag as Isadora Salzman.’
‘You’re not a saggy old bag,’ Anna said fiercely. ‘Don’t talk about yourself like that.’ She glanced around the almost empty chapel. ‘People will be waiting to come in. Do you want to go back to Walsingham with the others, or would you rather go home?’
Isadora felt she should go to Walsingham. ‘I owe it to James.’ She laid her hand on Anna’s. ‘You don’t have to come. I can easily get a cab.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Anna said. Though Isadora had been the only member of the Six to show up at James’s funeral, it was still possible that one of the others might make it to his wake.
When they arrived outside the college buttery which had been co-opted for the occasion, Isadora said, ‘Can you point me in the direction of a cloakroom? I need to touch up my ghastly visage. Maybe you could go and find us some drinks.’
Isadora was gone so long that Anna wondered if she’d changed her mind and slipped off home. When she eventually appeared, Anna hurried over to put a glass of red wine in her hand and caught a tell-tale whiff of tobacco. Isadora must have smoked a crafty roll-up to calm her nerves. As Isa
dora’s fingers closed around the stem of the glass, Anna heard her sharp intake of breath and a good half of its contents slopped on to the floor.
‘I’ll get you another glass,’ Anna said. But Isadora seemed not to notice her spilled wine or the woman who swiftly arrived to mop up the mess.
‘Isadora?’ Anna said, touching her arm.
‘Robert’s here,’ Isadora said in a faint voice. She was gazing in wonder and dismay at a well-dressed, clearly well-fed man, standing with his back to the buffet table. With a half-empty glass of brandy in his hand, he seemed to be surveying the room, though without any real interest. He had a faint smile on his face as if entirely satisfied with his own thoughts. Seeing him, it was easy to imagine that this was Robert Keane’s habitual pose in social situations.
Isadora knocked back what was left of her drink. ‘“A sixty-year-old smiling public man,”’ she quoted in a hoarse whisper. ‘Hetty always thought he’d go that way, but sometimes people can surprise you.’ From the flicker of sorrow in Isadora’s eyes, Anna knew just how much she’d been longing to be surprised.
Robert seemed to sense he was being watched. He suddenly glanced in Isadora’s direction and Anna saw startled recognition in his face. ‘He’s coming over,’ Isadora hissed. She was visibly shaking. ‘Oh God, Anna, I don’t think I can do this!’
