‘They say it’s an omen, a bird caught inside. They say it means a death. I dunno ’oo says it, but it makes sense, don’t it? Someone’s always dying, aren’t they?’ She paused, as though awaiting an answer, but Quentin didn’t know what to say. She turned to leave. ‘I’ll start with your father’s office. Cheerio, young Mr Castle.’
He could not bring himself to say cheerio to a woman who, along with her broom and bucket and bruises, her talk of the certainty of death, had filled the narrow room with inchoate misery. He was about to put the bottle of olive oil back in the darkened cupboard to keep company with the Dewar’s. But first he took another sip. He ran his tongue along his lips, and again words eluded him, but his feeling of hunger sharpened, broadened, till it gave the sensation of sadness, the impression of a vast, unfamiliar emptiness that could not be assuaged.
CHAPTER FOUR
FIGS AND THISTLES
Like a dinghy alongside the Titanic, Quentin took Rosamund’s arm and helped her out of the taxi.Florence took Rosamund’s other arm as they aided her, in baby steps, through the garden gate. Rosamund had a horror of falling; she made little short gaspy sounds as the gate squealed open and clanged shut behind them. With Florence’s soothing encouragement, they negotiated the few broad stairs to the landing where Albert flung the door open. ‘Ah, Fair Rosamund!’
Albert had been greeting Rosamund Phillips as Fair Rosamund, that ill-fated beauty of legend, for twenty-five years, though her mountainous flesh bulged out of her shoes and tested the seams of her second-best dress.
‘Dear ones! How lovely to see you!’ Quentin’s mother placed a fleeting kiss on each of their cheeks, and ushered them inside quickly. Margaret Castle was broad-shouldered and lanky as her younger son. She wore her grey hair marcelled in the style of twenty years before. A bit of fallen lining peeked at the hem of her tweed skirt. Her long, loose cardigan over a grey blouse smelled tired. Her face was the image of Quentin’s, save for her continual expression of vacant beatitude. ‘Come into the sitting room where it’s nice and warm.’
The sitting room was one of those timeless places, at once comforting and cloying, as is family in general. Quentin’s parents had moved here in 1924, before he was born, but it seemed much older, overstuffed, everything padded with a profusion of small pillows to muffle every sharp edge. Blue-veined marble framed the fireplace and mantel and topped the tea table that sat before deep wing chairs. The wireless was the newest piece of furniture, handsome in its impressive oak cabinet. The walls swarmed with heavy-framed pictures, watercolours all executed by Margaret. She had painted most of them the summer of 1920, in St Ives when Robert was just a little boy. Over the mantel there hung a watercolour of little Robert in a sailor suit and St Ives sunshine. Beside it another watercolour, Robert in his officer’s uniform taken from the photograph. The telegram announcing his death had stayed atop the mantel till 1947. Quentin had no idea who had taken it down, or where it had gone, and he had never had the courage to ask. The war had been over for five years, but the blackout curtains remained up, unused, but there.
The room was warm, well lit, the gas fire and wains-coting providing insulation against the thrash of rain and wind, and snow, and the velvet drapes were half drawn. Quentin brought in a fifth chair for himself, upright and unyielding, while the others sat in the wing chairs, sipping pale sherry with a plate of stale biscuits. Margaret had also cut the crusts off thin ribbons of Hovis bread, smeared them with prawn paste, and put them out, dignifying them with her best china. All this was as it should be. The planets-in-their-orbits Sunday lunch began with sherry at one and lunch at two.
The ladies chatted amiably about household matters, the costs, the queues, about Rosamund’s longtime gardener thanklessly demanding higher wages for his services, and how they all hoped the working classes would not be calling a General Strike as they did after the first war: no longer the Great War, just the first. Albert and Quentin talked shop, much as they might have at the agency, including new and more urgent demands from the FMB. Albert railed against Francis Carson’s irresponsibility, not in leaving his wife without funds, but in failing to respond to Albert’s telegrams and telexes.
‘Oh, I know what he’s doing out there in California. Oh yes, it doesn’t take a great imagination.’ Albert’s eyebrows did an expressive dance around his forehead, indicating that his imagination was certainly equal to the task, but nothing could be said in front of the ladies.
A useless bit of chivalry since Rosamund remarked, ‘He is a totally unpredictable drunk, given to singing sentimental songs, reciting poetry, and being rude to the women.’
‘Wherever did you hear that, Mother?’ asked Florence. ‘He hardly travels in our circles.’
‘I did not hear it. I saw it with my own eyes. So did you, Florence. He was invited to my book-launch party a year ago, simply because we share the same agent.’ Rosamund shot an evil look to Albert, who shrugged and smiled, guilty-as-charged, and muttered something about having inadvertently mentioned it at lunch when both he and Francis were wonderfully afloat on a sea of cocktails. ‘He came with a woman not his wife.’
‘I think he came with Lady Sybil Dane,’ said Albert. ‘She’s something of a patron of his.’
‘Oh yes,’ Rosamund remarked, ‘a woman utterly outré, all her flowing peacock robes and her beady, narrow eyes, dark and darting, always as though she is looking for …’ Words failed Rosamund.
‘For something to eat,’ offered Quentin, who had met Lady Sybil Dane at the launch party. They all three regarded him quizzically.
‘I remember Francis Carson now,’ said Florence. ‘Not exactly handsome, but full of—’
‘Drink.’ Rosamund quaffed her sherry in one bolt. ‘Drunk when he got there, drunker when he left, and he seemed to think he’d been invited just to sing music hall ditties and recite lines about daffodils.’
‘ “I wandered lonely as a cloud”,’ offered Albert. ‘He does a fine Wordsworth.’
‘He offered to kiss my golden toes,’ said Florence, giggling.
‘What!’ Rosamund and Margaret said in unison.
‘Yes. He actually asked me to take my shoes off!’
‘Cheeky beggar!’ snorted Rosamund.
‘Yes, Mummy, but I told him I was engaged to Mr Castle’s son, and there was an end of it.’
‘Authors are a pesky lot,’ said Albert sagely.
‘That may be,’ Florence replied, ‘but Quentin handled that Louisa Partridge so well. She was tame as a kitten when she left his office.’
‘I never said that.’
‘Oh yes,’ Albert said, ‘how did that go?’
‘Not as you’d expect,’ said Quentin.
Albert looked alarmed. ‘I wouldn’t know what to expect from Louisa Partridge.’
‘Louisa Partridge,’ Rosamund scoffed, ‘is nothing but a housemaid with a pen rather than a feather duster.’
Quentin looked up swiftly, the strip of shrimp-paste Hovis hovering at his lips.
‘She can be very outspoken and unpleasant,’ said Margaret.
‘Is that why she wasn’t invited to our wedding?’ asked Quentin, feigning both ignorance and innocence, the bread going limp between his fingers.
‘We didn’t think it necessary to invite her, did we, Rosamund?’ asked Margaret. She fretted a pearl necklace at her throat, and glanced at her husband, who studiously regarded a watercolour depicting a palm tree at St Ives.
Oh yes, thought Quentin, Albert and Louisa. The petite affaire de coeur was an absolute certainty. This seemed as good a moment as any. Quentin brought a bag out of his pocket, and the four figs tumbled out across the marble-topped tea table. ‘Louisa Partridge brought me these. She said if I tasted them, I would understand her new book.’
‘Figs!’ cried Margaret. ‘Wherever did she get figs this time of year?’
‘She’s resourceful,’ said Quentin.
‘They look positively …’ Florence faltered. ‘Positively.’
‘I thought we should share them,’ said Quentin.
‘There are only four,’ said Rosamund.
‘I ate mine.’
‘How does one eat them?’ asked Margaret.
‘One peels them. With a fruit knife. On a saucer,’ said Rosamund, somehow impugning Quentin’s having put them on the table, bare naked.
‘I don’t think so,’ he disagreed. ‘You can slice them, of course, or just pop them, squash it in your teeth. Really. That’s what she says in her book. Or you can peel the thin rind back and see the pink and green flesh, or slice them and see the teeming insides.’
This odd statement convinced Rosamund to pop hers without slicing; the bulge in her cheek was especially comic. Margaret followed suit; her expression was distrustful. Albert chomped three times and swallowed. But Florence peeled hers in tiny black ribbons, using her fingernail; she nibbled the pink-and-green flesh, visibly allowed herself some sense of pleasure. That made Quentin happy. ‘That’s what her book is about,’ said Quentin.
‘Figs?’ said Margaret.
‘About opening up your life to imagination,’ said Quentin.
‘What on earth does that mean?’ asked Rosamund.
‘I have no idea,’ Quentin confessed.
‘Did you get her to revise it?’ asked Albert.
‘No. She refuses. I shall send it out as it is.’
‘When will this dreadful winter end?’ asked Rosamund, in her whining way.
‘Good luck getting it published,’ said Albert.
‘If anyone can, Quentin can,’ said Florence loyally.
‘My bursitis is acting up again,’ said Rosamund.
The conversation then meandered down the usual paths: Rosamund’s pout assured, Margaret’s sympathies expected, Albert’s good nature heightened by drink, and Florence’s girlish laughter enlivening talk of the weather, and small domestic fracases. At quarter to two Quentin and Albert escorted the obese Rosamund into the dining room where they placed her close by the gas fire. At Margaret’s request, they said a long prayer. In the years since Robert’s death, Margaret had become progressively more devout, going to church weekly and without fail, and erecting a small shrine in his room, which remained as it was when last he had slept there. When Quentin had moved into the Bloomsbury flat, three months before his wedding, his room was instantly given over to the sewing machine.
Prayers finished, his father ladled up the consommé; that’s what his mother called it, but really the soup sprang from a cube and hot water garnished with chopped leek. Margaret had a hired cook right up until 1940 when the old girl quit to make more money in a munitions factory. She had not been replaced. Margaret’s own cooking was as usual: a shrivelled joint of beef, baked potatoes with marge, cabbage. The awful food too was part of the Sunday tradition. Quentin thought of Louisa’s book, as he looked up from his plate to the window where ice hung from the branches of the copper beech. He wondered idly what would happen if one planet plunged or lunged or whatever planets do. Would the others go on in their orbits without it, or would they fall too?
That night as soon as Quentin and Florence got into bed, his wife turned to him, brushed her lips to his, smiled and turned out the light. They made love; long, fine, easy-going love leading up to moist little cries that Quentin had never heard from her, and her cries unleashed from him a torrent of words wrapped in sounds he did not know he could make.
Afterwards, enjoying a fine sense of physical peace, and the warmth of her arm flung over him, her breath sweet and even, he lay awake, pleased. How wonderful that she had come to him, wanted him, expressed desire, and revelled in affection. He kissed her forehead and she murmured, turned to him, brushed her lips along his bare chest.
‘Lovely, darling,’ she whispered.
‘Yes, it was.’ He smoothed her hair.
‘Are you happy, Quentin?’
‘Of course, dearest.’
‘I am too.’ She kissed his chest again, her lips lingering on his nipple, and her body yet willing and eager again. As was his. A deep, complex surge of peace and excitement overtook him, of contentment and connection, a sense of what marriage should truly mean. He wondered, before he fell into a deep well of dreams and sleep, if he could somehow fasten a ribbon to that insight, and keep it always as one might a key to open a secret door.
The telephone’s ring pierced his dream, again and again, and in the dream he answered it – Hello, hello – but it continued to jangle. Hello, hello. Quentin awoke, but Florence groaned and turned away from him. He fumbled by the bedside for his glasses, and reached into the drawer for the torch he kept there. Shivering, he lit his way to the small hall table where the telephone continued to burst in noisy volleys till he picked it up.
‘Quentin!’
‘Father? What is it? Mum? Is it—’
‘No, no, worse than that – no, not worse, excuse me, Margaret, no, I didn’t mean that at all – oh, damnation, Margaret! Leave me alone, will you?’
‘Father?’
‘Quentin, I’ve just had a call from California. Francis Carson is dead. The stupid sot!’ spluttered his father. ‘A whole brilliant literary career ahead of him, and he …’
His father rattled on, heaping invective on Francis Carson, on McVicar the mountain climber, and careless writers in general. Quentin, naked and freezing, shone his torch on the mantelpiece clock. ‘I’m very sorry to hear about Francis Carson, but it’s four in the morning, and what can I do about it?’
‘You have to go to Oxford. You have to get there before the press. You have to tell her.’
‘Go where? Tell who?’
‘The FMB! Don’t you listen? Didn’t I just get through telling you? She has no phone. She can’t hear this from the press, and they’ll all be up there as soon as they get wind of it. I asked them to hold off a public announcement, but I don’t trust them.’
‘Who is them?’
‘Whoever called me from California. Roy someone from Regent Films. Don’t you see? We have to protect her.’
‘We do?’
‘Oh. you are dense, Quentin! We have to protect ourselves! As soon as they announce his death—’
‘Who is they?’ he asked again.
‘How do I know!’ Albert shrieked. ‘Francis is dead and now we have to answer to her! Oh, goddamn that goddamn Francis. No, Margaret, no I will not apologize! You must go to Woodstock, Quentin. Protect our interests. You must be the one to tell her. On behalf of the firm.’
‘Why me? He was your client.’
‘You are the junior partner and you will do as I say. Get dressed, get to the station and take the first train to Oxford.’
‘This is ridiculous. You should go. You are the—’
‘It’s not ridiculous if I tell you to do it.’
They wrangled some more, but it was a foregone conclusion that Quentin would obey. He woke Florence briefly to kiss her goodbye, tell her he was off, and why, promise to be home soon. It was all but ordained that in the brutal predawn cold, he would shave and dress in his first-best suit, befitting the sombre occasion. As he was about to turn out the bathroom light, some fleeting second thought made him take his toothbrush from the glass and put it in his leather bag before snapping it shut with emphatic finality.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE FOUL-MOUTHED BEAUTY
The meter ticked off the miles merrily away as the cab lurched and rattled over country roads in the sluggish winter dawn, skidding on the ice, getting lost time and again as the driver sought out the vague Harrington Hall nr Woodstock. It was all Albert had by way of an address. Quentin, flung from side to side in the cab, fought off both nausea and hunger. His watch said nearly half eight when finally the cab chugged in front of a wooden slatted gate, surrounded on either side by high, ivied rock walls, and a tiny brick inset with letters that read, cryptically, Ha ngt n H l . The driver grumbled, got out and tried to open the gate, but it was locked. Shivering, he got back in the cab and pointed to the outrageous fare, adding that the
re ought to be a fat tip for all the petrol he had wasted.
‘You’re the one who has blundered all over Oxford-shire,’ retorted Quentin.
‘Oxford, mate. I picks ’em up at the Oxford station just like I picks you up, and I takes ’em round Oxford. See? Not out here in the bloody back of nowhere.’ He nodded curtly and roared away. Quentin stood there in a swirl of exhaust and bad feeling, the trousers of his first-best suit splattered with mud. He cursed the driver, and then regretted dismissing him. Beyond the gate a lane led to a half-timbered house, only part of which could be seen. Smoke rose from one of the many chimneys. A milky fog lay over all, swathing, softening, rendering everything around him indistinct. He heard scuffling in the underbrush behind him. What if this were not the home of Francis Carson? And even if it were, he knew for a fact the FMB had no phone. How would he get back to Oxford? Back to London? He was a confirmed urbanite and the surrounding countryside – its naked trees and icy ruts, its eerie quiet, save for the wind knocking bare limbs one against the other – struck him not as pastoral, but empty and ominous. He rattled the gate, called out, ‘Hello, the house!’ but it was at some distance, and no one emerged. The high walls on either side cut off his view, but the gate itself was only chest high. He climbed up and over the wooden slats, and started towards the house.
A dog tore out of nowhere, racing down the path, barking furiously, fangs bared. Quentin hustled back to the gate, climbed up and perched there while the dog yapped at him. Quentin was still there a few minutes later when a boy of perhaps ten came out of the house and called the dog off.
The boy wore a much-patched jacket and a cap pulled low over his ears. The dog continued to bark, and the boy patted his head.
‘What you want? Who are you? You look bloody strange up there on the gate.’ The boy started to laugh raucously, as though he and the dog were being entertained.
His pride stung, Quentin called out, ‘Is this the home of Francis Carson?’
‘My question first.’
‘I need to speak with your mother, Mrs Carson.’
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