The Caverel Claim

by Peter Rawlinson

  ‘Very. When they were sitting for their portraits, my ancestors were being shipped out to Van Diemen’s Land in chains.’

  Oliver looked at him. Greg laughed. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘my family went out in the 1860s, bringing a carriage and a cow.’

  Oliver smiled.

  ‘Are there portraits of all the Caverels?’ Greg added.

  ‘Every Lord Caverel, except for the last two.’

  ‘So there’s no portrait of the one who was killed in the accident?’

  ‘Robin? No, neither he nor his father, Walter. No one bothered to paint Walter Caverel – a very disagreeable fellow – and, sadly, his son, Robin, did not live long enough.’

  ‘Is Caverel a common name in England?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Not very, but I expect you’d find some in the telephone book.’

  ‘Do you know if there was one called Julian?’

  Oliver Goodbody looked at him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Somebody mentioned a Julian Caverel to me recently.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I just seem to recollect the name.’

  There was silence. Then Goodbody said quietly, ‘Yes, there was a Julian Caverel. He died many years ago. He’s not much talked of in the family.’

  He turned away. ‘I must get back to the party,’ he said over his shoulder.

  Greg remained for a moment in the hall. What relation could Julian Caverel have been to the little boy’s father, Robin? And what would he have inherited which had so interested the American girl who called herself Fleur Caverel and who had once been known as Sarah Wilson?

  He went back into the salon to find Sandys and tell him he had to get back to London. They pushed their way through the throng to find Andrea who had Francis by the hand.

  ‘Nicholas says he wished you’d been playing for us,’ Andrea said to Greg.

  ‘I’d have been very happy to. I’m a mercenary.’

  ‘Have you managed to have a look around the house?’

  ‘Some of it. But I have to get back to London.’

  Andrea put out her hand and Greg took it. ‘Goodbye, and thank you for your hospitality,’ he said.

  In the hall Greg waited for Sandys, looking again at the portraits. A fine bunch of villains, he thought.

  ‘You’re in a damned hurry,’ Sandys grumbled when he had joined him.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I have to get back.’

  From the steps outside the front door, Oliver Goodbody watched as the young man who had spoken about Julian Caverel crossed the park on his way to the car.

  6

  On the Monday Jason West came to the offices of Goodbody’s in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to discuss with Oliver Goodbody a development project in Covent Garden in which both firms were involved.

  When Jason was about to leave, Oliver said casually, ‘I met a young relative of yours at the cricket at Ravenscourt yesterday, Greg Rutherford.’

  ‘Gregory? Yes, he’s my sister’s boy, from Sydney. He’s with me for a few months so that he can get some knowledge of international dealing before starting in his father’s business in Australia.’ He paused. ‘He’s a rather provocative young man.’

  ‘He’s a very good cricketer. I was interested because he told me someone had been speaking to him about the Caverel family. Do you know who that could have been?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ West replied. Then he remembered. ‘Oh, yes. A young woman came to see him a few days ago. A rather extraordinary young woman, I seem to remember. Gregory told me it was something to do with the Caverels.’

  When Jason had gone, Oliver returned to his desk and began to make a note.

  Ever since he had become the senior partner at the age of forty-five, more than twenty-five years ago, Oliver Goodbody had looked after the affairs of the Caverels, as his father had before him. There were now few in the direct line but many distant connections, and there was little in the lives of any of them of which Oliver Goodbody was not aware. He drafted their marriage settlements, advised on their divorces, made their wills, and guided some through their bankruptcies. He made it his business to know as much as possible about all of them and anything of any interest, even gossip, was carefully recorded in his files. Some items were quite trivial; a young second cousin who’d got drunk at a Commem ball at Oxford and been banned from driving; an older even more distant cousin in difficulties with Lloyd’s. Other matters he noted were of more importance, such as Robin Caverel’s affair in Rome four years ago while his wife, Andrea was at her father’s home in Shropshire for the birth of their child, Francis. Andrea had not known of it, certainly not at the time. But Oliver had – and it too had been recorded in his neat handwriting and filed away in the safe in his office. Now he added to the file his conversation with the young Australian at Ravenscourt and the suggestion by Jason West that the Australian’s enquiry about Julian Caverel had been prompted by a visit from a young woman. When he had locked it away, he collected his hat and stick and went slowly down the old wooden staircase to the taxi which regularly took him from the office at the end of each day. He directed the driver to take him to Eaton Square.

  Oliver Goodbody spent weekends at his home in Whitchurch in Hampshire, an early Victorian rectory which he much loved. He had lived there with Jennifer, his wife. There were no children and it was there that Jennifer, by then a chronic invalid, had died five years ago. But for twenty years, on every Monday and Thursday evening, Oliver Goodbody visited an apartment in Eaton Square. In the old days he would spend the night. Now he only dined before going on to his own small flat in Kensington.

  A tall, handsome woman, her dark hair shot with grey, opened the door and kissed him on both cheeks.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said.

  ‘It’s been a long day.’

  In the small library off the hall, she poured him a whisky-and-soda. ‘A difficult one?’

  ‘So, so. Something I’ve learnt has worried me a little.’

  Anne Tremain waited in silence. Then as he said no more, she continued, ‘About your precious Caverels, I suppose.’ He looked at her in mock surprise and she smiled. ‘Is it ever anything else? You’re obsessed by that family, Oliver.’

  ‘They’re a part of my professional life, an important part.’

  ‘They’re more than that, and you know it.’

  She was right, of course. The Caverels had been more than that to him ever since as a schoolboy he’d been taken by his father to Ravenscourt before World War II. They had dined with a footman behind every chair and he’d sat silent, observing. At the head of the table was the old Lord Caverel, the last of the family to have sat in Cabinet. To Oliver, he was awe-inspiring, magnificent in his green velvet smoking-jacket. At the other end of the long table lounged his son, Walter. When the men were alone, the schoolboy with them, and the port was being circulated, Walter had lit a cigarette.

  ‘If my port is so inferior you feel you must smoke while you drink it, you might at least remember to pass it.’

  The words and the tone of the old man had imprinted themselves on Oliver’s memory. Walter had flushed and pushed the decanter to Oliver’s father on his left. But to the schoolboy son of his friend and family solicitor the old man had been kindly, walking him past the family portraits, telling him about each of them and of the part they had played in the country’s history. Ever since that evening, Oliver had been under the spell of Ravenscourt.

  ‘It’s not so much the people,’ he said at last to Anne, ‘it’s Ravenscourt. I care lest it be turned into an institution for I care who lives in it. I grieved when Walter shut it up and it stood empty and neglected. I used to go down from time to time, just to look around. I made the excuse that I’d come for documents from the muniments room, and the caretaker would open up the library for me. When I was alone I used to talk to the empty place which for three hundred years had been the centre of so much life, and I promised that some day it would come alive again, that some day the famil
y would return.’ He looked down into his glass. ‘I suppose Ravenscourt does obsess me, as you call it. I would like to think of Caverels in the house their ancestors built and where at one time great matters of state were discussed and decided.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘No, not since the turn of the century. Until then, they had all played a great part.’

  ‘Walter ended that?’

  ‘He did. Robin, unlike his father, was agreeable enough. And he had the sense to open up the house. But he had no great talent. There’s no place nowadays for the family except in the county.’

  ‘I never understand why you worry so.’

  ‘I think it’s my sense of history, of tradition. I like to think of them there, the descendants living where their ancestors had lived, and now that Nicholas has taken charge, the family should be there until well into the twenty-first century. That’ll see me out.’

  ‘The good and faithful servant.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘The good and faithful adviser.’

  ‘Then what’s worrying you?’

  ‘Someone’s been enquiring about them.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘It’s just a little odd. I had what I can only call a premonition that after Walter Caverel died there’d be trouble.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Julian?’

  ‘Yes, but when Walter did die, and when Robin succeeded and then was killed in that accident, there was nothing. Everything seemed settled. My premonition was proved false.’

  ‘And now you’ve heard something?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve heard that a young woman has been making enquiries.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘I don’t know – yet. But it’s strange, and it has disturbed me.’

  7

  Later that same week, a tall, sandy-haired man in a dark blue lightweight suit checked in at the BA Club Class desk at Gatwick airport. At eleven thirty, he boarded the flight.

  Several hours later, after changing aircraft at Charlottesville, he disembarked at Charleston and took a taxi to the Four Seasons Hotel. When he entered the foyer, a tall, thin man with a white moustache and over-long white hair rose from a chair to greet him.

  ‘Jed Blaker. You’re from Willoughby Blake?’

  The newcomer nodded and was led to the desk. ‘Mr Jameson’s room, please,’ the thin man said.

  ‘Certainly, Judge,’ the clerk replied.

  * * *

  Ten days after his arrival in Charleston, Richard Jameson was shown to his room in Claridge Hotel, Buenos Aires. He was handed a message. He looked at his watch. It was mid-afternoon. He should be able to catch Michael Stevens at his office in London before he went home. Jameson made the call.

  Next morning he took a taxi to a modest house in the suburbs. He rang the bell and a maid showed him to a sitting-room and told him to wait. He wandered round the room inspecting it. He picked up two photographs in silver frames standing together on a small table and examined each in turn. The first was of a dark, handsome young man in breeches and riding-boots astride a polo pony; the second of a young woman, inclined to plumpness, her figure well displayed in a minuscule bikini, standing under a sun umbrella on a beach. He put them back on the table and went to another in the far corner of the room, a photograph of a child with long blonde hair. He could not tell if it were a girl or a boy. After half an hour a short elderly woman, very stout and heavily made-up, came through door.

  ‘Jameson,’ he said as he got to his feet. ‘From London. I telephoned earlier.’

  The woman looked at him and then waddled across the room to a sideboard. ‘Want a drink?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ he replied. He heard her throwing the ice into the long glass and saw her reach for the vodka bottle. She turned and came slowly back to where he was standing. She looked him up and down and drank before she flopped into an armchair. ‘Sit down,’ she said and drank again. He noticed her fat arms and the swollen wrist and the fingers covered in bangles and rings. Fakes, like the glass beads round her neck. She had a mean, narrow mouth which she had tried to enlarge with lipstick.

  ‘They say London’s bloody awful now,’ she said. ‘Rapes, muggings, strikes.’

  ‘The streets are not so safe as they were.’

  ‘It’s a lifetime since I was in London.’ She whirled the ice in her glass with a finger and drank. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘We knew your married name.’

  ‘I didn’t think anyone did.’

  ‘What I’ve come about is important.’

  ‘It may be to you, my lad, but is it to me? That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, ain’t it?’

  ‘I think you’ll find it will be.’

  ‘Maybe. How did you get my name?’

  ‘From the divorce papers.’

  ‘Which? The first, from that shit, Walter? That farce? They gave me the divorce, think of that. Me!’ She laughed, her chin quivering over the flesh of her neck. ‘You couldn’t’ve got my name from that. It must’ve been from the second.’ She stared at him over the rim of the glass. ‘That mattered. That was from the horseman.’

  He was surprised to see a look of pain on her grotesque features.

  ‘No one ever mattered except him.’ She jerked her head towards the table with the photograph of the man in riding-boots.

  ‘It was from the particulars of that divorce that I was led to you here.’

  ‘So you got it from the lawyers? Bloodsuckers. Sell anything for money, after they’ve stolen all yours.’ She held out her glass. ‘Fill it up, sonny. Vodka, on the rocks.’

  He took the glass and went to the sideboard. He’d been told he’d better come before lunch, that it would be useless to come later.

  ‘They were good times, those days with the horseman.’ She took the glass from him. ‘And the nights, specially the nights. He had imagination, that one did. I was thin then. Can you believe that?’ She jerked her head again to the table with the photographs. ‘That’s me.’

  She lay back in her chair. ‘So you’ve come all the way from little old London town just to see little old me. It’s a bloody long way. And a bloody long time ago.’ She drank and looked at him over the rim of her glass.

  ‘So you want to know about my boy, Julio?’ she said at last. He nodded. ‘That little bugger.’ She eyed him again. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  8

  Nicholas Lawton was in Brinkley’s wood, high up at the top of the down, with Headley, the head forester. It was raining, a fine late August rain, the first since the drought of June and July.

  ‘We needed this badly,’ Nicholas said to Headley.

  ‘Not enough,’ Headley replied.

  ‘The forecasters say it’ll keep up.’

  Headley spat. ‘Can’t trust them forecasts.’ He looked up at the sky between the tops of the trees. ‘It’ll clear soon.’

  Nicholas wanted to get rid of George Headley. He was a trouble-maker and a drinker, but Headleys had worked for Caverels at Ravenscourt for generations and the fellow’s uncle had been head forester before him. George had got the job during the time of the Salisbury agents and had been left by them to do as he liked. Which was as little as he could. Nor had Robin Caverel given him any trouble. Everything had been fine, until Major Lawton had taken over. In the village pub, the Caverel Arms, where he drank with Peachey, the head gardener, and Mason, the male half of the couple in the house, George Headley had made himself the leader of the circle of grumblers. Several nights a week they sat together in the bar, joined by those whom the Lawton reforms had made redundant and by others who feared their jobs were under threat.

  As the two men pushed through the wet undergrowth, Nicholas pondered how soon he would be able to replace the surly, lazy Headley with Rowley, a serious young man just back from an apprenticeship on a neighbouring estate. Headley was thinking how he’d get his own back were he to be sacked. Emerg
ing from the belt of trees, they came to a point where the ground fell away steeply to a cart track far below. The rain poured off the brims of their caps and down their waterproof capes as Nicholas pointed to the plantation of spruce on the slope on the opposite hill and said it ought to be thinned, implying neglect. Suddenly, on the track far below them, they saw a small car coming from their left, travelling fast, throwing up mud and water from the ruts and pot-holes, leaping and skidding as it careered down the track.

  ‘Who is that maniac?’ Nicholas said. ‘Whatever is he doing?’

  Headley’s eyes were sharper. ‘It’s her ladyship,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not her car,’ Nicholas protested.

  ‘No. It’s Mary’s.’ Mary was one of the cleaners who came from the village to help in the house. ‘She must’ve taken it. She’s in a hurry. Something’s up.’

  ‘She’ll be looking for me,’ Nicholas said.

  He turned and, followed by the forester, broke back through the trees and undergrowth towards the point where the track would enter the wood after winding up the hill. Well before they reached it, they heard the noise of the engine in low gear as the car laboured up the hill. When they emerged from the wood, they could see it coming over the brow three hundred yards away, sliding and slipping in the narrow ride between the trees.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Nicholas said. ‘She’ll skid off the track and hit a tree.’

  He stood in the centre of the ride, pulling off his drenched cap and waving it; he stepped back into the bushes as the car slithered to a halt a few yards from him. Andrea put her head out of the window. ‘Nicholas,’ she shouted, ‘Nicholas.’

  He trotted towards her, the rain pouring from his unprotected head. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

  ‘Get in,’ she said. When he had lowered his wet frame on to the seat of the small car, she thrust a letter at him. ‘This came this morning.’

  Headley had remained where he was, watching. Something’s up all right, he thought with satisfaction.