This Private Plot
Page 31
And he waited. He’d allow her a few stumbling denials if she wished, and then he’d counter with his observations. Not evidence maybe, but impressions. The brigadier’s report of her intense dislike of Dennis Breedlove, backed up by her indifference to his death. Her initial assistance when Oliver mistakenly thought Breedlove was himself a blackmail victim, followed by her peevish opposition when he realized the truth about the old man. And Breedlove’s odd and fatal change of habit, when he’d asked his stooge Eric Mormal to hand-deliver Toby’s first blackmail letter, fearful that if it landed on the Swithin family doormat, it might be opened by somebody else in the house who’d recognize that square penciled handwriting.
Chloe laid her brush and palette aside. Then she sat up straight on her stool and fixed her eyes on the horizon.
“All right, I admit it. Dennis was blackmailing me.”
Oliver stood up. “Let me guess. You revealed a great secret to Breedlove in a confessional moment, because he convinced you he was someone you could trust?”
She let out a short breath of laughter at the memory. “Exactly. We’d had him to dinner. We often did back then. I felt sorry for him, living alone, no family. And he was always cheery, a thoughtful guest, a good raconteur, an even better listener. Bob had gone off to bed, as he does. Dennis and I stayed at the table, finishing a second bottle of a rather good St. Emilion. I revealed something amusing from the past, thinking my secret was in safe hands. Oh, he was most apologetic when he later demanded money for his silence. He’d fallen on hard times, apparently, and blackmail was his only source of funds. My sins may even have inspired him to start.” She took the sheet of paper from the easel and screwed it savagely into a ball. “I suppose you want to know what it was all about.”
“Not if you don’t want to tell me,” Oliver lied. But he did want to know. It was the ultimate solution to that mystifying line in the blackmail letter, Breedlove’s in-joke that Toby’s capitulation would turn out to be a “little family secret,” even if the blackmailer himself was the only one to know why. That the son had joined the mother in his panoply of victims. Dennis’s private plot.
Chloe tore a fresh sheet from her tablet and clipped it into place, tilting the easel away from her.
“I’m not Chloe Swithin,” she announced.
“You’re not my mother?”
“Of course I’m your mother, you dull ass! But my name isn’t Chloe. It’s Phoebe. Phoebe Mallard.” She picked up a wide brush, and started to apply a faint blue wash to the white surface. “And Phoebe is really Chloe. We swapped identities.”
A bee landed on Oliver’s shoulder. He ignored it.
“Why?”
She looked toward the sun, closing her eyes. “Do you remember the story about my meeting your father? We’d taken the magic show to Cyprus, to entertain the troops. It was my turn to eat in the officers’ mess that night, while Phoebe had to stay hidden in the civilian guest quarters in Episkopi, to maintain the pretense that there was only one assistant. According to family legend, I met Bob and fell in love on the spot with this handsome, confident, charming captain in his early thirties. Well, that’s all true. Chloe did. But I wasn’t Chloe then. I was Phoebe. I was the one who spent the evening holed up with the latest Tom Sharpe novel and dinner on a tray. My twin sister, the real Chloe Winsbury, met Bob first. And fell in love with him.
“Of course, we had to let Bob know there were two identical Winsbury sisters. When I met him, I could see why Chloe had been so taken with him. I found Bob very attractive too, but Chloe was my sister—she and Bob were soon engaged—and there are rules you don’t break.”
“Let me be clear,” Oliver cut in. “We’re talking about Brigadier Bob, right? The foul-tempered old misanthrope who can barely manage a conversation with his children unless it treats of violence? He managed to charm not one, but two sisters?”
“Don’t be cynical, Oliver.” She removed her straw hat and briefly fanned her face with its broad brim. “He was a different person in those days. And he’s still an honorable man.”
Oliver snorted. “Go on with your story.”
“Well, I was the one who first met Tim Mallard—I’m still Phoebe at this point, remember? Tim and Bob had a lot in common back then. They were both good-looking, both kind and intelligent and considerate, both courageous when they had to be. Tim asked me to marry him, and knowing by then that I could never have Bob, I agreed. The four of us had a summer double wedding.”
“This isn’t going to get kinky on the honeymoon night, is it?”
“Do you want to hear the story or not?” She started to add new colors to the landscape, wet in wet. “One day, perhaps thinking that marriage had carried us to safe ground, your aunt privately confessed to me that she’d been very impressed with Tim when I first brought him home and may perhaps have chosen him over Bob, if she’d met him first.”
“It is going to get kinky.”
“No, dear. Well, we talked. I mentioned my constant fears for Tim’s safety, she seemed almost to relish the excitement of his stories of the London criminal classes. In turn, she complained of the uneventfulness of life on an army camp, I said how I envied the quiet predictability of peacetime life. And eventually, we both confessed we were more attracted to each other’s husband. So we decided to swap places.”
“Just like that?”
“There and then. On the spot. I became Chloe Swithin. My identical twin sister became Phoebe Mallard. It was the best thing we ever did.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, very early on. Only three or four months after the wedding. Before your time.”
“What about the Brigadier? What about Uncle Tim? Surely, they noticed the difference?”
“They each ended up with a wife who loved them more than before. If they detected anything in those newlywed days, it was only that it suddenly became even better.”
“But Breedlove threatened to spill the beans.”
“Yes. He was going to tell our husbands that for more than a quarter of a century, they’d been, well, ‘living in sin’ without knowing it. So I paid up. Anyway, now you know what he knew. Your aunt and I are the interchangeable Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”
Oliver stood still with his hands in his pockets, attempting to redraw the family tree in his head. His mother looked down the hillside ahead of her, spotted something, and reached for a pencil.
“Wait a minute!” he cried.
“Yes, dear?” she answered, focused on the picture.
“Me!” he said. “My birthday!”
“No dear, it’s not your birthday. This is May, and your birthday’s in August. You’ll just have to be patient.”
“Exactly,” he spluttered. “My birthday is in August. One year after you got married!”
Chloe added a tiny daub of ultramarine to the painting. “Well?” she said eventually.
“What if you were already pregnant when you swapped places!”
“Oh, you spotted that, did you?”
“Which means that, unlike Eve and Toby, I may not be the offspring of Brigadier Bob. My father could be my uncle-by-marriage Timothy Mallard! And Brigadier Bob…”
“Bob’s your uncle.” She smirked. “It does explain a lot, doesn’t it?”
“Oh my God! I’m not really Oliver Swithin. I’m a bloody Mallard!”
“You’d better duck.”
“This isn’t time for a joke!” He stood in front of her, blocking her view of the landscape. “When were you planning on telling me this, Mother? If that is your real name.”
She put down the brush. “There may be nothing to tell you. I didn’t know I was pregnant until I was happily ensconced with your father. The brigadier, I mean. Yes, Tim could be your birth father, if you were a late arrival. But so could Bob, if you were early.”
One idea surfaced from the boiling stew of impli
cations. “Does Brigadier Bob know he may not be my father?” Oliver demanded. “Does that account for his coldness to me?”
“Oh no, he doesn’t suspect a thing. He just doesn’t like you very much. It’s nothing personal.”
“And this was the man you preferred to Uncle Tim?”
“I love Bob. And you owe him your respect—he did play his part in nurturing you.”
“Uncle Tim had more to do with me when I was growing up than Bob Swithin ever did.”
“Then this should be good news. Besides, darling, think what would have happened if you’d been Oliver Mallard. They’d have called you ‘Quackers’ at school.”
Chloe reached out to take his hand, but he stepped away and began to pace a circle around her.
“Oliver,” she said, “you’ve just discovered that a man you’ve never had time for might not—I say might not—have been your biological father. Meanwhile, the one man who’s acted like a surrogate father to you all your life could well be your real father too. Tim and Bob have the same blood group, so you’d need a DNA test to find out the truth. But what difference does the truth make, when you’ve already reaped its benefits?”
“What difference?” Oliver patted his chest with both hands. “I want to know whose DNA runs through my body. I want to know if Swithin is my bloodline, my ancestry, my descent, or if it’s just an arbitrary label, with no more meaning for me than, than… my pen name, ‘O.C. Blithely.’ I want to know who I take after, who I look like. These are all things that make me me. I’d say it makes quite a difference.”
Oliver stopped, staring over his mother’s shoulder at the picture on her easel. A tiny figure had been painted in, a woman in blue, far away down the hill. He looked up into the real landscape. Effie was halfway up the slope, her blue dress bright in the afternoon sunlight.
“I was going to ask her to marry me,” he whispered.
“About time. You’ll never do any better, although God knows what she sees in you. Just make sure she isn’t really Tim’s daughter, no matter how much he treats her like one.”
“You don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head again. “How can I ask her to have me when I don’t know who I am?”
He waved to Effie. She waved back, smiling that smile of hers.
Notes
My thanks to my friends in the South Shore Writers Group, who patiently and insightfully reviewed this book at the speed it emerged, and especially to the group’s founder Maureen Amaturo and my fellow founding member Suki Van Dijk.
Thanks to Linell Nash Smith and Frances Smith, daughter and granddaughter of the extraordinary Ogden Nash, for their kind permission to use his limerick as an epigraph.
Special thanks, too, to Dr. Thomas MacDonald, associate professor in the Environmental Management department of the University of San Francisco, for advice on the challenges of tunneling under rivers. If the scene rings true, it’s because of Tom’s generous help; if there are errors, they’re where I blatantly ignored his expert suggestions.
Of the many books about Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon that I read in researching this story, I particularly want to express my indebtedness to the late Samuel Schoenbaum’s masterly and fascinating William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, published by Oxford University Press.
At the time of writing this novel, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford is undergoing major reconstruction. Since we can’t have Hamlet performed on a building site—although Humfrey Fingerhood has undoubtedly considered it—the reader is asked to imagine the story taking place in a parallel universe in which the old theater was allowed to stay up a little longer.
Every piece of information that Toby presents to support his Two Shakespeares theory is true, but I held back one fact. The written-in bequest to Heminges, Condell, and Burbage was certainly a puzzlingly late addition to Will’s final will, which was drawn up about a month before his death—probably not, at age fifty-two, because of any fatal premonition, but to add specific protection for his daughter, Judith, who’d just married a complete rotter; but the annotation was already in place when the will was transcribed for probate, a matter of days after his death. If Toby is right, any attempt to forge a posthumous connection between the two Wills must have begun much earlier than he implies. There have been other interpretations of these oddities, of course—many of them leading to even more unlikely claims about the true identity of the author of Hamlet, a play that has enriched our language like no other.
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