Rogue's Gallery

by Robert Barnard

  She rummaged in her handbag and found a pair of nail-scissors which, with protest, allowed her to attack the sticky tape and open the box. There in four neat little piles, were the handwritten pages of what looked like a series of letters. Miriam went into the main bedroom, where the light was better. She took what seemed to be the first letter – the opening to the novel she supposed; it had no date on it, nor even any name for the fictional recipient of the letter. ‘My dear boy’ it began:

  I can’t tell you how happy you made me today. The assurance that you felt the same attraction to me, had felt it for a long time, made my heart leap for joy. Your feelings betray a maturity beyond your youth. But do remember that our feelings are ones that could easily be misinterpreted. They are our secret, and that is how it must remain.

  Miriam frowned. This was not quite what she had expected. She flicked ahead through the first pile of letters. ‘My dearest boy’, ‘Dear lad’, ‘My best love’, ‘My own one’ – these were the superscriptions. The events did not seem to progress in the orderly manner of a novel. ‘I love your bright eyes, the sight of your delicious, unruly fair hair.’ Why should her father be writing a homosexual novel? She had never for a moment suspected her father of nourishing such thoughts. Was it some kind of crime novel, where the reader is offered information but in a way calculated to mislead?

  Eventually the awful, inevitable thought struck her. This was not a novel. This was her father, writing himself, writing personally. It was a correspondence of which he had kept only the one side – his own. These were his own real, deeply-felt thoughts. She began to sweat with embarrassment. She took up the second pile. The tone of the top letter was very much that of the earlier ones.

  My beloved boy,

  As always our games yesterday – so private and perfect, such lovely recreations for both our bodies – were wonderfully perfect and satisfying. How happy the last few years have made me. These letters are my ‘thank you’, without which the fun and satisfaction would not be complete.

  Miriam’s eyes were awash. She could not rid herself of the feeling that only in this relationship had her father had real joy and fulfilment. It made her feel that his had been a life misused, only half satisfying. The combination of love and school-masterliness in the tone of the letters only added to this feeling.

  She wiped her eyes and burrowed for the very last letter.

  My dear, still dear, boy,

  I cannot tell you the pain I suffered when I read your last and found that you feel it is time, now you are leaving school, to take up a new sort of relationship. Never before have you told me that what we have had was not enough for you. But I must not reproach you – you who have given me so much. I must wish you well and let you go. Please remember how dangerous this love has been, particularly for me. Please, please, Leslie: pack up the letters securely and return them to me. Those letters would be the end of my career, perhaps of my life …

  Miriam found she could read no more. Now it all became clear: why her father had opposed so vigorously her marriage, why he and Leslie (Ernest was the only man who used his full name) had never, in spite of having so much in common, come fully to trust each other. She understood the pain he must have felt, seeing his lover as the lover of his daughter, but felt painfully that her father had not done himself justice in that last letter, while Les had had to take hard decisions for his father-in-law’s sake, and had loyally stuck to them, however painful his silence must have been for him.

  She went into the kitchen, into the muddle of cupboards and drawers, and found her own roll of freezer tape. The box must be the basis of the first garden bonfire in the new house. It would represent for her a thorough and complete destruction of the most important relationship in her father’s life. But it was what he would have wanted.

  A SLOW WAY TO DI

  There was no question about when the wedding day would be: it had to be July 29th 1981. Both David and Julia were agreed about that – had hardly, indeed, needed to discuss it. And when the vicar demurred they presented a united front.

  ‘But nobody will turn up,’ he protested.

  ‘Oh but they will,’ they chorused.

  ‘Everyone wants to watch the royal wedding,’ he countered (he wanted to watch it himself). ‘You’ll find that a lot of the guests will simply stay away, or trump up an excuse.’

  ‘They won’t, because they’ll want to watch it on the giant screen at the reception,’ David said complacently. ‘That’s going to be the big pulling point. Oh, and we want the wedding early – nine o’clock.’

  ‘Nine o’clock?’

  ‘That’s right. Then the reception can start round about ten, and we can follow the day through. Oh, people will come all right: two weddings for the price of one.’

  The vicar did not like it at all, but his congregation at St Michael’s included all too few young people, so he was unwilling to antagonise two of them. And he certainly had to admit afterwards that he had been wrong. So many near-friends and business contacts angled for invitations that in the end Julia’s father was persuaded to hire a second marquee. Even the vicar was cajoled into watching the coach procession to St Paul’s with David and Julia and their guests, though he was steadfast in his determination to slip away and watch the actual service in the more dignified privacy of his vicarage.

  Julia made a pretty bride. Not lovely, not stunning – but then she was not going into this in a spirit of competition. She could sit in the central position at top table and watch the nation’s bride and her heart would seem to stop at the beauty of her, just as everyone else’s did. Somehow she seemed herself to be part of that beauty. David was, if anything, rather better-looking than the Prince of Wales, but who bothered to look at the bridegroom at a wedding? The age difference between him and Julia was only eight years, but the fact that there was one, and that people commented on it, made a further bond between them and the royal couple.

  That bond had been formed when David had proposed to Julia on a brief holiday in Brighton. They had got back to their hotel, holding hands and very happy, to find that the royal engagement had been officially announced to the nation. ‘They can’t be any happier than we are,’ said David, as they sat on the bed and watched the TV screen. The bond was further strengthened at the reception, when the best man, taking advantage of one of the hiatuses in the television coverage when nothing much was happening, talked (his speech somewhat slurred) of ‘the nation’s sweetheart’ and ‘the queen of our hearts here in Beckersley’. Bonds – that was what that day was all about: forming bonds.

  That night, which was admittedly no first for them, David rolled over on the bed and said:

  ‘It couldn’t have been more wonderful. Everything was perfect. I hope it’s been just as good for them.’

  No one could deny they made a lovely couple. The congregation of St Michael’s all said so, and so did their colleagues at their various workplaces. Quite soon they became something special in the small town of Beckersley. They were people who were pointed to, with an odd sort of pride. When the marriage was blessed with children, people’s happiness was in an indefinable way crowned, and they smiled knowingly. It didn’t matter that the first child was a girl.

  ‘We wouldn’t want to be a carbon copy,’ said David, when people commented. ‘We love her for what she is, and I’m sure they do the same for William.’

  It was nice, though, when the second child was a boy. Both parents had an obscure feeling that David had to have an heir.

  Of course those years had their downs as well as their ups. David was the more serious of the pair, the more intense. He liked going to plays and art exhibitions, and sometimes he taxed Julia’s powers of concentration. Julia was a wonderful mother, as everyone recognised, but her tastes ran more to parties and dancing, and she took a lot of time over her appearance, feeling she owed that to all those people for whom she was something a little special. David didn’t resent this. In fact he gloried in it, often remarking that he felt
it an honour to play second fiddle to such a wonderful woman. He was rather pleased, though, when she bought a tape of Grieg’s Piano Concerto and played it on her Walkman when she was out shopping with the little ones. It showed she had a serious side, he said, which would strengthen and mature with the years.

  When did it start to go wrong? People often asked that, in hurt and bewildered tones, in later years.

  ‘It was after the birth of Edward,’ David used to say. ‘Somehow things started falling apart then.’

  Nobody noticed that at the time, though. Some suggested he was using the benefit of hindsight, even making it up to form one further link in the chain that bound them to the royal couple. It was only later that David’s workmates at the building society and Julia’s young mother friends began to notice telltale signs of disharmony. This was after the newspapers began to have stories of eating disorders, rows, duties pursued separately rather than together, birthdays spent apart. Julia certainly had no trouble with anorexia or bulimia. She had always eaten heartily, and continued to do so. Still, David was out alone more often: not so much at the pub, though he enjoyed the occasional pint with friends, but at the theatre in nearby Peterborough, at meetings on conservation matters, at adult education classes. Julia insisted on a quid pro quo, and David babysat the children while she had strenuous sessions at her favourite gym, or went with friends to London, to the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber piece.

  ‘You don’t have to be in each other’s pockets the whole time,’ she said. ‘That’s not my idea of marriage.’

  Probably the people who knew best how badly things were going wrong were the children, though they knew rather than understood. Marina was later to say that her parents were together physically in the spick and span new Barrett home where they lived, but that she always thought of them as apart. Colleagues at the building society where David worked commented under their breath that he mentioned his wife less frequently than he used to. Comment even became malicious, because public taste is fickle and sentimental affection can turn sour.

  ‘I think Princess Julia is in for a nasty shock,’ said an elderly worshipper at St Michael’s. ‘Her prince is going to move out.’

  That happened, in fact, a few months before the prime minister announced the ‘amicable’ royal split. It certainly wasn’t a nasty shock, though, for Julia. She had seen it coming for some time, and it came as a relief and a release.

  ‘I’m fed up with him moping and emoting around the house the whole time,’ she told her father. ‘Now I’ll have a bit of space to myself.’

  ‘Is he having an affair?’ her father asked.

  Julia shrugged.

  ‘Not as far as I know. Good luck to her if he is. At least I can be more open now.’

  Julia’s father didn’t ask her what she meant by that. Over the years he had become just a little in awe of his daughter.

  They sold the house and split the proceeds and the property. Julia got a job in a dress shop in Peterborough and bought a small flat for herself and the children. David stayed on in Beckersley, first living with his parents, then, when he had his priorities sorted out, renting a glorified bedsitter. He had an affair or two, mostly with older women, but none of them worked out.

  ‘He’s too neurotic,’ one of them said later. ‘Too driven. Sometimes it was as if I wasn’t there.’

  Certainly the divorce went through a very bad patch. For a long time they communicated by note, arranging times for him to take the children out by faxes from his office to her shop. When he had taken them to the cinema, the pleasure park or the zoo, he would leave them at the main door of the little apartment building where they lived, never on any account going up the stairs with them to the first floor flat.

  This went on for a long time – several years. Then one day, due to a misunderstanding caused by a fax machine which said it had transmitted a page when it hadn’t, both turned up at Marina’s school’s parents’ day. It was touch and go when they saw each other. David certainly wished he could turn on his heels and march out of the gate. But in the end a sense of what was expected of them both saved the day. He went over, put his hands on Julia’s shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek. They talked for several minutes, and later sat together for the little play the children put on.

  ‘In our position you can’t always do what you want,’ said David later to his mother.

  So after that things went better. They talked when necessary on the phone, met when David picked up the children, borrowed books or tapes that the other had taken when possessions were divided up (David had taken the Grieg then, but he lent her the Tchaikovsky at this period and she said she enjoyed it). The children were pleased at developments, and their parents were not unhappy.

  But David had difficulty with the fact that Julia had boyfriends. She never considered marriage again, and the affairs were usually of short duration, because she was happiest on her own. But boyfriends she did have from time to time, and David confided in a colleague at work how hard he found it to cope with the idea.

  ‘It’s not the thought of her sleeping with other men,’ he said. ‘Not as such. It’s the feeling that she’s letting everyone down and it’s not the done thing.’

  His colleague refrained from mentioning the widow and the married women David had been involved with, but later he said to his wife:

  ‘Basically he thinks it’s lèse majesté. The king’s wife sleeping with another man commits treason. I expect he’d like to do to her what Henry VIII did to Anne Boleyn.’

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ said his wife. ‘He’s got his head screwed on better than that. You can’t stomach his leapfrogging over you at work.’

  And David was indeed doing very well at the building society. Renting that bedsitter meant he had money to spend on things that impressed people: Italian suits, good restaurants, a fast car. There was an awful moment, or awful few months, when the society was merging with another and converting to a limited company. Branches were to be closed, redundancies were in the air, and it looked as though David, high up though he was, was one of those whose services were to be dispensed with. But he put on a furious display of energy, showed everyone the brilliance of his financial judgment, and put the new company in his debt by saving it from some very bad policy decisions. When the new organisation was finally launched he was one of its deputy chiefs, and everyone agreed that the only way for him was up. But his best friend at work said there was still something withdrawn about him, still something driven and intense.

  That was how things stood in the summer of ’97. The children were growing up, and he didn’t ‘take them out’ any longer. But he had a fine new apartment in a converted Victorian industrialist’s house, and one or other of the children was calling on him all the time, to ask his advice, get him to help financially with something ‘everyone else’ had at school, or just to chat. He would have liked to ask about their mother and her doings but he was too much the reserved Englishman, and anything they told him in the course of their conversations was marginal or trivial. The fact that Marina and Edward were growing up, starting to lead their own lives, meant he saw Julia even less.

  So when, in the early morning of September 1st 1997, Julia was wakened by the sound of gravel on glass, the last person she thought of was David. As a matter of fact she had heard that sound before – the summons of a long-ago boyfriend to leave the family home on warm summer nights – and for a moment it really took her back. She slipped out of bed, then pattered through the hallway and living room to the kitchen. The window opened easily and she looked down towards the gravel path under the bedroom.

  ‘David! What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

  He turned and came over towards her. Her hand switched on the kitchen light, and as he looked up at her, her first thought was that he looked ill, her second that he was distraught. His face was red, and behind his glasses his eyes looked puffy.

  ‘Julia, I’ve got to talk to you.’

  ‘Talk to
me? At this time of night? … What time is it?’

  ‘About half past four.’

  ‘You must be out of your mind.’

  ‘No Julia, it’s important. We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘We are talking. And probably all the neighbours are listening.’

  ‘No they’re not. Nobody’s stirred. But we can’t talk like this. Come down and we can sit in the car.’

  His eyes strayed towards his smart black BMW some yards away on the road.

  ‘David, we’ve been divorced for five years. What on earth can we have to talk about sitting in your car in the road in the middle of the night?’

  ‘I tell you, this is important. You haven’t heard, have you? I’ll tell you in the car. This is the most important thing that’s ever happened to us.’

  Julia caught a glint in his eye, reflecting the light from the kitchen. She thought that, if she hadn’t known him better, she might have guessed that he was mad.

  ‘“Us” doesn’t exist,’ she said brutally. ‘It did, it was good for a time, then less good, then nothing at all. Now it’s less than nothing.’

  ‘But it isn’t. We’ve still got … bonds. Still got responsibilities.’

  ‘The children. And even them we won’t have for long.’

  ‘Julia, I can’t talk about it like this. Come down, we’ll go for a little drive, and then you’ll understand.’

  ‘A little drive? In my nightie? Not on your life!’

  ‘Julia, this is something so … so big, so awesome … You’ve got to come down so I can explain.’

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t said that it’s bigger than both of us.’

  David’s face screwed up in distress.

  ‘Don’t be like that, Julia – not satirical and bitter, not at a time like this. It is bigger than both of us. That’s exactly it.’