The Partridge and the Pelican

by Rachel Crowther

  They had lunch in a pub on the sea front and talked about the boys. About Tom’s university offers and Benjy’s move to senior school, the fortunes of Angus’s football team and Alistair’s band. About extending the house, converting the loft, building a workshop or a music room in the garden. This was a property of marriage, Olivia thought: having so many things to talk about that you could avoid talking about anything in particular. She took Robert’s hand across the table.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s been a lovely few days.”

  But as they walked back up the beach the lure of Shearwater House grew stronger again. Robert kept his gaze away from it as they approached, but Olivia couldn’t help staring, letting the chalk-blue paint settle into her mind. The door was shut now, the whole house closed up against the uncertainties of the weather and the sea. But the sun had moved inland so the sky no longer filled the windows, and she could see inside: she could see the fireplace in the sitting room to the right of the front door. She remembered those few blissful, rainy days when she and Eve were alone in the house and things were easy and peaceful, Eve reading on the sofa while she tried to light the fire. She remembered the lumpy beds, the ramshackle dresser in the kitchen, and the weight of nostalgia filled her belly with stone.

  Robert put his arm around her shoulder as she turned away, and pressed the remote to unlock the car doors.

  “So who was she, that woman?” he asked, when they were safely away, heading out towards Snape and the A12.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you knew her name.” He knew it was all right to question her now, too. How did he know that?

  “She had the same name as someone else,” said Olivia. That was all: a simple coincidence. She might not be anything to do with the family, this Amelia.

  “Then why …” Robert stopped. Olivia could see him processing, evaluating.

  “When I stayed there with James and Eve,” she said, “James talked about his family one evening. About how his two little boy cousins had drowned, years before, and his uncle and aunt had another child afterwards. A girl.” It was easy, after all.

  “Amelia?”

  “Yes. But that Amelia had Down’s Syndrome. So this must be another Amelia.”

  “I see.”

  “It threw me, that’s all. The whole thing threw me, coming back and finding the house a different colour. It used to be pink.”

  Robert drove in silence for a few minutes, then he said, “As a matter of interest, did he get you into bed, this James?”

  Olivia looked sideways and saw the inward curl of his lip, the downward curve of the corner of his mouth.

  “No,” she said.

  Strange; on this score she was blameless, but even so she had felt guilty, all these years. She had never proclaimed her innocence, even when Eve had seized her chance to accuse.

  They halted at the junction with the A12 and turned north towards Southwold.

  “Not that it’s any of my business,” said Robert.

  “I saw James not long ago,” Olivia said. “The day I was attacked.”

  Robert turned so sharply that the car almost swerved off the road.

  “The day you what?”

  She had forgotten – how had she forgotten? – that she had never told him about the assault.

  “You were away,” she said. And then, because that sounded as though she blamed him, “it was nothing. Some lad thumped me in the arm while I was wheeling my bike over the canal bridge. There was a man running along the tow-path who came to make sure I was all right, and I realised after he’d gone again that it was James.”

  “Were you hurt?” Robert asked. He stared straight ahead at the road; either because he wanted to avoid another near-miss, Olivia thought, or because he wanted to avoid her eyes.

  “Not really. Just a bruise.” Her heart was beating fast. She had the sudden feeling that despite all they had come through, all he’d forgiven, they might be in jeopardy now. “I didn’t realise it was James until he’d gone,” she said. “I’m still not entirely sure it was him.” Except that she was, of course. Sure of that, but not of why she was in deep water suddenly.

  “Perhaps we should go back,” Robert said.

  “Back where?”

  “To the house. To speak to that woman.”

  Olivia’s scalp tingled. “Why?”

  Robert turned towards her for a moment, and she saw that his expression was troubled rather than angry. Had she expected anger? Or suspicion?

  “Because otherwise you’ll keep wondering,” he said. “Won’t you? This whole thing – it’s not just the baby, is it? It’s all of them. James and Amelia and the lot of them.”

  “No,” said Olivia.

  “Come on: you’ve had more on your mind today than the baby.”

  “Because I was confused,” Olivia protested. “Because of the coincidence over the names.”

  “Is it a coincidence?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Olivia was riled now. “What on earth does it matter who she is, anyway? She’s nothing to me. To us.”

  There was a layby just ahead, and without speaking Robert slowed and pulled into it. Olivia’s heart thumped. When the car had stopped Robert turned off the engine. For a minute or two there was no sound except a periodic rush and shudder as cars sped past, heading up the coast or down, making for home as the light drained from the winter landscape.

  “Olivia,” he said eventually. “Forgive me if I’ve got this wrong. But it seems to me that this thing – what happened that summer – is too important to let it go. I need to be sure we’ve laid it to rest. If you still hold a candle for this James, I’d like to know. If there’s still some mystery somewhere, let’s look into it. I want to get back all of you, when we’re done with this. I don’t want to be floundering among things I don’t understand for the rest of my life. I want you to tell me things. Everything.”

  “Oh, Robert.” Olivia put a hand on his knee, and he laid his own over it, calmly, conceding nothing. Her mind was a muddle, loose ends flailing. Every time she seized on a fragment it dipped out of sight again.

  “I may be wrong,” he said.

  “No,” said Olivia, “And yes. I don’t know. I feel so – confused, lately. I can’t work out what matters, any more.”

  “I matter,” said Robert. “Just tell me something. Anything.”

  Olivia shivered; the heat was starting to seep out of the car. Perhaps she wasn’t quite innocent as far as James was concerned, she thought. She’d resisted temptation that night, but she’d regretted it afterwards, for longer than she might have anticipated. Perhaps she should tell Robert that when she imagined James taking other girls to Shearwater House and cooking them sea bass and samphire, she wondered whether she should have ignored her scruples. Perhaps she should admit that part of her believed the ghost of the phone box baby would have been banished sooner if she had accepted James’s offer, that the ache of loss might have been silenced before it could take hold of her. Perhaps she should confess that she had thought these things again, in the last few weeks.

  “James has nothing to do with the baby,” she said at last, “not really. Except that we were staying at Shearwater House when it happened, and we went back there afterwards, and that night, after Eve was in bed, he told me the story about his cousins, the little boys and Amelia. He told me to make me feel better, because he’d stood on the beach while his cousins drowned, but instead it made me feel worse.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was blameless and I wasn’t. Because I wanted him to think well of me, but I knew I didn’t deserve it. Because I knew people would go on feeling sorry for me, and I wouldn’t ever tell them the truth.”

  “And because you liked him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you went on liking him.”

  Olivia shrugged. “He was unusual, among the people I knew back then. Cultured, witty, sure of himself. He was very kind to me. I suppose I measured myself again
st him and saw I wasn’t worthy. I imagined how different things would have been if he’d been with us when we found the baby.”

  “How different things would have been if you’d judged yourself worthy of him?”

  “God, Robert, what are you saying?” She turned to face him, feeling something different suddenly: out of nowhere, a powerful erotic charge. The knowledge of being desired. “My love, you were the one who rescued me. Who keeps rescuing me.”

  That was the truth of it: James had offered her nothing, just as he had offered nothing to Eve, whose claim was so much greater. And how could she imagine, even if he had, that anything else could have been better than what she had?

  “Good old Robert.”

  “Wonderful Robert,” she said. “Truly wonderful Robert. I don’t care about any of them, James or Amelia or the wretched aunt and uncle. Let’s for God’s sake get back to the hotel now, and let them stew.”

  Chapter 37

  The taxi carried Olivia around the top of Regent’s Park and past London Zoo, where the aviary rose beside the road like a giant meccano model. It must be five years, she thought, since she last took the boys to the zoo – since the time Benjy fell and grazed his knee so badly that she’d spent half an hour at the first aid point with him. She remembered him limping proudly towards the penguin pool to rejoin his brothers afterwards, his spindly legs ludicrously pale, with an over-sized bandage tied around his knee like a cartoon child.

  Five years had transformed Benjy, but the image was still sharp in Olivia’s mind, and the outline of the aviary as familiar as something she passed every day. Where had they gone, those years? How had they slipped out of her grasp? The past was collapsing behind her, she thought, telescoping like some ingenious device designed to store her memories tidily. Like whole shelves of photograph albums condensed onto a single CD: a reminder that the space occupied by human lives was a temporary anomaly, out of proportion to their importance. And what about Georgie, who had no memories to speak of? What space would her life occupy in a world of gigabytes and cyber-reality?

  The thought of Georgie brought Olivia back to the task in hand, and her heart skipped a beat or two as the taxi turned into the network of streets northwest of Primrose Hill. Towards Clive Thomas Edwin Shotter, a man who had borne, all his life, the names of two of Georgie’s closest relatives – her father and her brother-in-law – but whom she had never met. A man whose existence Georgie was unaware of, and who was almost certainly unaware of hers.

  Olivia had found Clive Shotter hard to place, on the phone. He sounded younger than seventy, a man still hanging on to the prime of life. Well-spoken, witty, with a flirtatious edge to his voice and an easy manner that made Olivia feel more than usually tongue-tied. An actor, perhaps, with those rounded vowels, that impression of vigour? A roguish Falstaff, preserved by good living?

  “You don’t know me,” she’d said. “I wanted to talk to you about a family matter.”

  “That sounds intriguing.”

  “It’s rather difficult to explain on the phone. I thought …”

  “Come and see me, then,” he’d said, brisk, cheerful. “I’m laid up, so to speak. Knee replacement. Pottering around. Happy to receive visitors.”

  So here she was, pulling up outside an immaculate Victorian terrace of white stucco and red brick, paying off the cab, ringing the doorbell. And here he was, Clive Shotter, opening the door, leaning on a stick as though it was an amusing accessory. Not a trace of Georgie in him, thought Olivia. He was twice her size: a big man, in every sense of the word. His presence filled the doorway, spilled down the broad steps and onto the pavement to surround Olivia.

  “Hello!” He lifted the stick in a sort of salute. A pug peered between his feet, implacably comic. “Olivia? Bang on time. Come in.”

  The house bore the signs of recent arrival – or at least, Olivia thought, of its occupants not having moved in fully. There was almost no furniture in the sitting room they passed (a single armchair; a coffee table stranded in the middle of the polished oak floor) and Olivia caught sight of a couple of packing boxes stacked behind the door. The walls had been hung with pictures, though. They looked incongruously well populated, looking down on half-empty rooms.

  “My watercolours,” Clive said, following her gaze.

  “Are you a painter?” Olivia asked, though she realised almost immediately that the question was foolish; the pictures weren’t recent. Clive didn’t laugh: she warmed to him for that.

  “Just a collector, but like all true passions it verges on obsession. That’s why my ex-wife got the furniture.” He smiled genially, held a door open for her. “My den.”

  The room looked to Olivia like a cross between a student bedsit and a don’s study from an episode of Morse. Clive had evidently crammed most of the furniture left to him in here: an old-fashioned desk; a sofa large enough to sleep on; a couple of high-backed chairs. A heavy sideboard in the corner housed an elaborate hi-fi system and a full-sized Italian coffee maker. The walls were almost completely lined with books; in the only empty space, above a small fireplace, hung a watercolour of London Bridge.

  The pug trotted ahead of them and settled itself on the hearth rug.

  “Like to have all my kit around me.” Clive chuckled, surveying his territory with satisfaction. “Coffee? It’s my speciality. New toy.”

  “Thanks,” said Olivia.

  “Do sit: no booby traps.”

  Olivia chose the chair nearest the fireplace, which had a view of the garden. A city garden: paving and gravel flanked by easy-care shrubs, and in one corner a shapely tree (a cherry, Olivia thought) which must be pretty in the spring.

  “It’s nice of you to see me,” she said. “I’m sorry to have been so mysterious.”

  “Woman’s prerogative.” Clive was busy with the coffee, tamping down grounds and pressing buttons. The machine began to growl and splutter, filling the room with a rich smell of Arabica beans. Expensive coffee, Olivia thought.

  “It’s about your aunt,” she said.

  Clive turned. “Lydia?”

  “No.”

  He frowned. “I only have one aunt,” he said. “Had, rather. She died last year. Game old bird, almost ninety.”

  “You have another aunt, as it happens,” Olivia said. “Georgiana Quickshall. Your mother’s sister.” She hesitated. “Your mother was Eliza Quickshall?”

  “Née Quickshall, but no sister. Brother, Henry: no sister. Here, pooch!” Clive opened a lacquered tin and took out a bone-shaped biscuit. The pug cocked his head hopefully but didn’t stir, and Clive laughed. “You’ll have to do better than that. Lazy so-and-so.”

  Olivia smiled; a public smile, steeling herself to go on. “You must think I’m mad, arriving on your doorstep and claiming you have an aunt you’ve never heard of. A complete stranger. I’m sorry to launch it on you like that.”

  “No, no; don’t apologise. I like aunts. Rather short of relatives, in fact. Long on ex-wives, short on solid blood relations. How d’you like your coffee?”

  “Just as it comes.”

  “Espresso?”

  Olivia nodded. Clive manoeuvred himself across the room with some awkwardness to deliver Olivia’s coffee, then settled himself with a sigh on the sofa.

  “Shouldn’t really have more, myself. Doctor’s orders: too much caffeine. Better than breaking out the Scotch at this hour, though, eh?”

  Olivia had the feeling that if she let the subject drop Clive wouldn’t mention it again, that he’d pretend he hadn’t heard, or that it had been Olivia’s little joke. She imagined he might talk pleasantly about watercolours and play games of temptation with the dog all afternoon, if she let him. But she was wrong.

  “So Ma had a sister?” he asked, after a moment.

  “Yes.”

  “Still alive, you said?”

  “She’s ninety-one.”

  Clive pondered. “Separated at birth, or something?”

  “Later than that.”

  �
�Emigrated?”

  Olivia shook her head. “It might come as a bit of a shock, this,” she said.

  Clive downed his espresso in one gulp, then grinned at Olivia. “Ticker’s solid,” he said. “Gippy knee, but the rest of me’s sound. Won’t pass out on you.”

  “Let’s hope not. First aid’s not my forte.” Olivia smiled back, took a sip of coffee. “Your mother had a younger sister who was – disgraced. She got pregnant when she was eighteen and the family disowned her.”

  “I say.”

  “Mmm.”

  “So where’s she been all these years? She and this long lost cousin of mine? She did have the baby, did she?”

  “She was locked up,” said Olivia. “In an asylum. It was what they did, in those days. 1935.”

  Clive’s eyes widened. “And she’s still there?”

  “No, she was released in the early eighties. Rehabilitated, to an extent. She lives in sheltered accommodation in Oxford now.”

  “Well, bugger me.” Clive shook his head. “That’s quite a skeleton in the old family closet. You sure about this?”

  “Absolutely sure. I’ve checked all the facts, seen the documents. Birth and death certificates.”

  “And the child?”

  Olivia hesitated. “Did you have a sister?” she asked.

  Clive nodded. “Isabella. She died young.”

  “In her twenties? A car crash?”

  “That’s right. Terrible thing.”

  “And she would have been – what, three years older than you? Born in 1935?”

  Clive stared at Olivia. “Are you telling me Isabella wasn’t my sister?”

  “I’m not sure,” Olivia admitted. “I haven’t looked up the adoption records. But I think she was probably your cousin. Your aunt Georgiana’s daughter. I think your parents adopted her.”

  Clive was silent for a few moments. He reached his stick to prod the pug, which stirred itself with a grunt and waddled over to its master. Clive scooped the dog onto the sofa beside him and it settled its head affectionately on his knee. It was an attractive creature, Olivia thought, despite its unprepossessing physiognomy.