A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  ‘My father? Oh, you know … So-so.’ Joe asked quickly, ‘And what about you? What family do you have?’

  ‘Mine? Ah, I’m like you, Joe. We’re two of a kind, with only a father to our poor orphan names. Though mine’s what you might call absentee. Absent in mind and spirit, that is. The bodily part makes the odd nightmare appearance now and again.’ At this, his slightly hooded eyes took on a rather demonic slant.

  ‘Sisters and brothers?’

  A pause during which Chetwood seemed to lose focus. ‘Oh, enormously,’ he murmured at last.

  Moving on uncertainly, Joe asked Chetwood where - he lived. But this subject didn’t seem to sit much more easily with him than the one before.

  ‘I don’t live anywhere,’ he announced at last. ‘If I do anything at all, I probably camp.’

  The conversation halted as the food was slapped down onto the table in front of them. Chetwood plunged a knife straight into his egg yolks. ‘Tell me something, Joe,’ he asked in a voice that had regained all its former thoughtfulness, ‘what do you hope to get out of your time in this place?’

  ‘Apart from a decent degree, you mean? Well—’

  ‘I have to say I’d count a degree as one of the more dubious benefits.’

  Joe gave an unconvincing laugh. ‘Trick question, was it?’

  ‘Not at all. No, if you say that’s the main purpose…’

  Upending the ketchup bottle, Chetwood traced an elaborate crimson ribbon over his food. ‘Okay, so apart from this degree, what else will you get from being here?’

  ‘Hell… I don’t know.’

  ‘But you must know.’ This was delivered in a tone of polite rebuke.

  ‘Well, I suppose I’m hoping to enjoy the course. And to have a good time. Play some football. Meet a few people. And waste huge amounts of time. All the things students usually do.’

  At this, Chetwood abandoned his knife and fork and said in a tone of pained reason, ‘But, Joe, just a generation ago students felt bound to question society’s assumptions. They didn’t arrive at college like they do now, deeply middle-aged and deeply middle-class, with a complete set of received values picked up at Comet, along with the new TV. They didn’t pride themselves on being moral apostates. They didn’t come to university with the sole ambition of getting jobs that would make them obscene amounts of money, exhibiting their greed like a badge of honour.’

  Trying to remember what apostate meant, Joe said, ‘But most of us have got to get good jobs to pay off our loans.’

  ‘Sure. But does that mean leaving all the important issues to the multinationals and the drug companies and the arms traders and the stock market? Because don’t kid yourself, Joe, we’re letting the robber barons shape our society, take all the important decisions.’

  It was a long time since Joe had tasted such good bacon, and it was all he could do not to exhibit unrestricted greed, albeit of a non-mercenary kind, while Chetwood progressed his argument through Africa, India and the developed world via the scandalous patenting, of life-saving drugs, the short-termism of the City, and Western support for corrupt regimes.

  ‘We’ve lost our spiritual values,’ Chetwood concluded with passionate despair. ‘People are happy to live in a moral and ethical void. They’ve lost all sense of mystery and gratitude and wonder. They talk about fulfilment when they mean self-gratification. They talk about balance when they mean having it all. They talk about love when they mean control.’

  ‘But there’re plenty of people who care about the world,’

  Joe ventured at last.

  ‘Are there, Joe?’ Chetwood asked earnestly. ‘Just tell me where they are, because I don’t seem to meet any of them.’

  ‘Well… Greenpeace has a huge membership.’ ‘

  ‘That’s just Middle England getting cosy about whales, surely?’

  ‘What about the huge numbers of people who do voluntary work then? The thousands who do something for nothing every day? You don’t have to have a formal belief system to be a good person.’

  In one of those rapid changes of mood that was to be so characteristic of him, Chetwood blinked and gave the ghost of a smile. ‘So it’s enough to do, is it, Joe? Is that what you’re saying? That we should all stop our whingeing and go out into the world and do?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘By your deeds shall you be known. Is that it?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘What should I go and do then?’

  Joe shrugged and wolfed down his bacon. It wasn’t until a couple of days later, when he found Chetwood waiting in his room, picking unenthusiastically through his small collection of novels, that Joe realised he was serious.

  ‘You’re right, Joe,’ he remarked, as if no time had passed since their last talk. ‘The doing is everything. But the what - that’s everything too. And that’s the bloody problem.’

  Over the next few weeks Chetwood returned to the idea spasmodically, usually late at night after a party or a meal at the local curry house, after the rest of the group - nearly always Joe’s friends - had drifted away. Joe couldn’t remember their conversations now; only that, once launched on the subject, Chetwood worried at it like a loose tooth, coming at it from different angles, unable to leave it alone. Even at his most gregarious - and, stone cold sober, Chetwood could be as silly as the rest of them - Joe sensed that the issue of ‘what to do’ was never far from his mind.

  Two other conversations from that autumn stuck in Joe’s memory. The first when Chetwood glanced down at Joe’s open wallet and saw, among the concertina of photographs, a picture of Jenna.

  ‘Girlfriend, Joe?’

  ‘More of a sister. We grew up together.’

  ‘A sister. Will we meet her?’

  ‘Probably not. She’s in Manchester. At the Royal Northern.’

  ‘Ah. And what does she play?’

  ‘She sings.’

  ‘She sings.’ He seemed enchanted by the idea. ‘So, not just the face of an angel, but the voice too.’

  ‘We think so,’ said Joe, laughing, though he couldn’t have said why.

  ‘But trapped in the cold north.’

  ‘She might come down in the summer. She wants to go to Glastonbury.’

  With a last look at the photograph, Chetwood appeared to lose interest. ‘Perhaps it’s better if angels don’t travel.’

  The second conversation came in the all-night cafe, when they were eating egg and chips after a late film. Chetwood announced he was going climbing in the Lake District at New Year.

  ‘What, parapet-walking on sheet ice?’

  Chetwood frowned at him. ‘Parapets have never been my thing.’

  ‘You said you’d done it before.’

  The dark eyes narrowed. ‘It was roofs. When I was a kid roofs.’

  ‘Stargazing?’

  ‘At seven? Don’t be ridiculous. No, it was the only place I could be sure of not getting any stick. I’d go up there in the evenings. Though I did an all-night stint once, as a protest against being sent away to school. Problem was, no one knew I was there, even at bedtime, so the point was rather lost. All that happened was I got pneumonia.’ Then, in the closest he would ever come to a confidence, he muttered, ‘The crazy thing was, I couldn’t wait to get away. I can’t imagine why the fuck I made such a fuss about it now.’

  ‘So you went to school?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And?’

  The frivolous expression that Joe was to recognise so well slid across Chetwood’s face. ‘I became a disgustingly amenable little schoolboy, I’m afraid. Quite outstandingly repulsive.’

  Five minutes after leaving the main road Joe was lost in a tangle of twisting lanes and unmarked crossroads. It was past three, and already the dusk was thickening around the hedgerows.

  Reaching a signpost at last, he found no mention of Coin Rogers, nor indeed any other Coin, of which the map boasted at least three, and in the absence of any other information drove straight on.

&n
bsp; He’d set off from London at noon, fifteen minutes after making the decision to come. Persuaded by Sarah’s argument to pursue the family connection, prompted by the realisation that he wouldn’t have another opportunity to get out of town until Christmas, he had paused only to get the Chetwoods’

  number from directory enquiries. Even the airy response from Mrs Chetwood - ‘I can’t absolutely promise who’ll be around’

  - hadn’t put him off, not till now, as Chetwood’s roof-sitting conversation came back to him, and he began to think of several reasons not to have made the journey.

  He came to a junction with signs to two of the Coins, and, entering a small village which he took to be Coin Rogers, turned left only to find after two miles that he’d reached a main road going the wrong way. He turned left again, onto a switchback lane that rose gently onto higher ground. Rounding a bend, he almost missed the farm entrance. Only a glimpse of a sign reading Weston Manor Farm in blue letters above a trio of wheatsheaves prevented him from shooting past.

  He had been here once before, on the way back from a party near Oxford. Chetwood had wanted to pick up some belongings - books or papers, he had been characteristically vague. At the start of the journey, Joe had put Chetwood’s silence down to lack of sleep and his meandering driving to inattention, but as they’d got closer to the house Chetwood’s face had become increasingly grim and his driving positively erratic.

  There was a tall gate with a cattle-grid, which Joe had forgotten, and an unmade track between white paddock-rails, which he remembered quite well. The track continued straight for a hundred yards or so before dipping away into a fold of the hills. It was at the end of this straight that Chetwood had said, ‘Best wait in the car.’

  As the track dropped gently away, a cluster of barns and stables came into view, and beyond, the roofs and chimneys of an L-shaped house, set amid a landscape of ploughed fields.

  On that first visit, Chetwood had roared into the stable yard and stopped with a jolt. ‘If you do get dragged inside, you should be warned - this is Indian territory. No hostages taken.’

  But no one had dragged Joe inside, and the only person he’d seen was a girl of thirteen or fourteen in riding boots and quilted jacket, who appeared from a loosebox with an armful of straw. She was fair-haired and pretty and shy; when she caught his eye she blushed and walked quickly on.

  Passing the yard entrance now, he saw no people and no horses. Ahead was a stark windswept garden, with stone pathways and beds of raked earth and clumps of harshly pruned roses and a gaunt pergola supporting a tangle of bare twigs. Rounding the end of the house, he saw a traditional farmhouse, perhaps a hundred and fifty years old, built of flint and brick, with white paintwork and bare-stemmed climbers reaching up to the eaves. Three cars and a mud-spattered four-wheel drive stood on the gravel. Walking towards the door, Joe saw people huddled around a dining table and caught the muffled babble of conversation.

  The door was answered by a slim woman in her forties, well-groomed in the high-shires style, with no obvious makeup, greying blonde hair worn in the simple shoulder-length fashion of her youth, and a cashmere sweater with a single row of pearls.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ she said in a studiously cordial voice.

  ‘Won’t you come in? I’m Susan Chetwood.’ Closing the door, she gestured with a gracious unfurling of one hand for Joe to follow her across a low, flagstoned hall with raspberry-coloured walls and oak furniture and sporting paintings in heavy gilt frames topped by brass picture-lights. A pass-door led into the more austere regions of the kitchen quarters. At the end of a short passage Susan Chetwood paused in a doorway to switch on some lights before ushering Joe into a study. ‘My husband will be along in a moment,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’m interrupting your lunch.’

  ‘Not at all.’ She gave the smile of an accomplished hostess for whom nothing short of complete catastrophe could ever justify the slightest show of bad manners.

  She made a graceful exit, and Joe looked around a low-ceilinged room dominated by furniture made for a much larger house: a huge kneehole desk that would have satisfied the ego of a dictator, and, taking up almost the entire length of two walls, matching mahogany bookcases in the monumental style, with columns, pediments, and diamond-paned glass doors.

  Beyond the desk, on either side of the window, were photographs of three golden-haired blue-eyed children, two girls and a boy: on ponies, with and without rosettes; running around a swimming pool; in school photographs and sports teams. In a couple of the shots Susan Chetwood appeared with her children, and you didn’t have to be a genealogist to spot the likeness.

  Beside the door were pictures of smiling fishermen standing on river banks, and shooting parties with shotguns, panting dogs and dead pheasants.

  There were no photographs of Chetwood.

  The sharp rap of heels resonated in the passage. Joe stood back as the door opened and a moth-eaten golden labrador waddled in followed by a tall figure of about sixty, of upright bearing, with a long mottled face and lugubrious slightly bloodshot eyes. He wore a tweed jacket, twill trousers and country-check shirt, a little tight around the collar. His thin greying hair was combed back, with no attempt to disguise the bald heavily freckled crown, and his boots shone like chestnuts.

  His handshake was brisk and distinctly hostile.

  ‘McCarthy Never met, have we?’

  ‘McGrath, actually. No. I was a friend ofjamie’s. We were at university together.’

  ‘University? But he only stuck it a week.’

  ‘Well… a couple of terms.’

  The hooded eyes measured Joe unenthusiastically. ‘My wife tells me you have some idea of finding him.’ He made this sound like a thoroughly offensive proposition.

  ‘I’m going to try. I was wondering if you could suggest anyone he might have stayed in touch with.’

  ‘What exactly is the purpose of this search?’ There was something in the way the older man spoke, a slight sibilance, a peculiar emphasis, that made Joe suspect he was well fortified from lunch.

  ‘Jenna’s family have asked me to look. They’re desperate to find her.’

  Mr Chetwood lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes.

  'Jenna?' Then, affecting to hazard a guess: ‘Ah, the wife - is that it?’

  Joe was careful not to dignify this with an answer.

  ‘She stuck it out then, did she? Well, well.’

  Selecting a neutral tone, Joe asked, ‘So … is there anyone you can think of?’

  Mr Chetwood slotted both hands into his jacket pockets, bar two precisely angled thumbs, and canted his elbows backwards like a turkeycock. ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Anyone Jamie might have kept in touch with, anyone he was particularly close to?’

  ‘Can’t help on that score. In fact, not on any score. James was a stranger in this house.’

  ‘What about when he was growing up? Friends in the neighbourhood?’

  Mr Chetwood raised a scornful eyebrow. ‘None that he didn’t offend or insult at the earliest possible opportunity.’

  They stood facing each other across the gloomy room.

  Somewhere in the passage a door banged, a woman gave a rich laugh.

  ‘What about at school?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Whenever he spoke, the older man had a way of lifting his chin and squinting down his nose, as if sighting down a barrel.

  ‘His housemaster then. Could you give me his name?’

  ‘Never met the man.’

  Joe made an incredulous face. ‘Never?’

  ‘He had his job to do. I assumed he got on and did it.’

  A stubbornness came over Joe then, a determination not to be bullied. ‘Friends who came to the house, then? Who came to visit him?’

  ‘Merer

  ‘Yes.’

  The chin came up double quick. ‘James went his own way from a young age. I didn’t care to meet his friends.’

  Choosing to take this as a
compliment, Joe gave a slight bow. ‘What about his brother and sisters?’

  ‘He has no brothers or sisters.’

  Joe corrected himself diligently. ‘Well, half-brothers and sisters.’

  The drooping warrior-eyes regarded him unblinkingly.

  ‘James has no place in this family,’ he announced with biting precision. ‘He forfeited it many years ago. He does not belong here. He is not welcome here. I’d turn him away if he came begging at my door. I think that answers your question!’

  Joe gazed into the stony face and said, ‘But he used to be a member of your family.’

  ‘In the sense that he was fed, housed and educated by me.

  One does one’s duty. In my case, one does substantially more than one’s duty.’ Mr Chetwood snapped his mouth shut with something like fury, and, dropping his hands from his pockets, braced his shoulders. ‘I think that concludes the matter, Mr … McCarthy. I have guests waiting.’

  He made a move towards the door, the dog scrabbled to its feet and lumbered forward, but Joe in his indignation was there before either of them. ‘Perhaps you could tell me, Mr Chetwood - I’d really like to know - what did Jamie do that was so bad? What was his crime exactly?’

  The old man’s eyes seemed to bulge a little. ‘Not something I choose to discuss!’

  ‘But tell me - I’m curious - did he hurt someone?’

  The old man’s stare hardened.

  ‘Did he rob a bank? Make off with the silver?’

  The chin rose, the watery eyes glowered from under deeply hooded lids, and in that instant Joe was startled to see in the ravaged face a disturbing resemblance to Chetwood.

  ‘What did he do?’ the old man repeated with a deathly pleasure. ‘What he did was to be a bad lot from the day he was born. From the day he was brought into this house.

  Devious. Disruptive. Dishonest. Lazy. Took every privilege and repaid it with ingratitude. Took every chance and threw it back in my face.’ He added, ‘In the blood, you see. Always will out.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Bad blood. Always will out in the end!’

  Joe said, ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ though he feared he did, all too well.