Three Strange Angels

by Kalpakian, Laura;

  ‘There,’ she said, placing a small tea tray on the table between the chairs. The milk jug, cups, and pot were all chipped, like doughty veterans of old battles. ‘I’m ready. I think.’

  He sat down across from her. ‘I tried to write to you from California, but everything I put on paper sounded trite and stupid. I needed to see you,’ he said, tucking two truths into one. ‘I think I understand what happened to Frank out there.’

  ‘His dying?’

  ‘No, not that, but how he must have …’ He paused, knowing he was speaking of himself, not Frank. ‘Nothing could have prepared him for all that glamour, all that … bright, hard, unforgiving light. He had no allies. No friends. Nowhere to turn with his ambivalence and confusion. Those people are all so gorgeous and desirable, so patently false.’

  ‘Are you talking about those Hollywood tarts? About Linda St John?’ she scoffed. ‘His latest Hollywood tart. One might even say his last.’ She regarded him defiantly. ‘I read the papers. Was she with him when he died?’

  ‘He was alone when he died. He was very drunk. He came back from a party at her house – her husband is the director on Some of These Days.’

  ‘A husband never stopped Frank. Look at Sybil Dane. He was bedding her in Sir Sanford’s own house.’

  ‘After the party the chauffeur drove him to the Garden of Allah and dropped him off. No one saw him fall in the pool. They found him in the morning.’

  ‘I suppose there was a lot of police and all,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Yes. There’s a proper coroner’s report. Accidental drowning.’ He patted the leather case by his side. ‘I have all the papers here. The death certificate.’ His failures twisted his innards like a sword dual-edged with trite and stupid. Explaining failure was worse than the failure itself. ‘I have it all in my case. There is a life insurance policy too.’

  ‘Frank didn’t have life insurance.’

  ‘The studio bought it for him. They do it for all the principals on any film. The studio is the beneficiary in these cases, since it’s their loss if the person dies. Roy Rosenbaum, the studio head, had the policy assigned over to you. It’s double because it was an accident.’

  Her eyes grew wide, and her jaw dropped, and when she heard the phrase ‘twenty thousand American dollars’, she put her face in her hands and wept. The thick, gold wedding band gleamed on her hand. His once-atrophied instinct for human empathy did not fail him this time. Quentin moved to sit beside her, to put his hand on her shoulder, but she stood abruptly, kicked a nearby box, and eked out a metallic bit of laughter.

  ‘Oh, that Frank, he dwelt in irony, didn’t he? I’ve lost him, lost everything I loved about him, but I’ll have twenty thousand American dollars. How ridiculous is that, Quentin? Don’t you want to just fall over laughing?’ Her eyes filled with tears as she walked among the chaos, moving towards the curtain of red geraniums where she put her hands over her face and wept.

  Quentin followed, handed her his own freshly ironed handkerchief, and waited while she wiped her eyes. He took her hand, and led her back to the chair. ‘There’s more.’

  ‘More money?’

  ‘No. I think they destroyed the second suitcase, the one with his manuscripts. It was gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s the truth. The suitcase I brought you—’ He nodded towards the door ‘—that has only his clothes.’ He did not say he had worn some of these clothes. He wondered briefly if the truth shorn and shaped is still the truth. ‘Everyone denied there ever was a second suitcase. I did my best, I even did my worst. I threatened them. It was not enough. I failed you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ he said again, hoping to hear her say she forgave him.

  ‘But why? Why would they care about a bunch of papers? Drafts?’

  ‘He told lots of people he was going to write a novel about all of them. He was taking notes. Did you know that?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps they just wanted everything scrubbed clean and no trace of him, the scandal. When I came to the Garden of Allah the place was cleaned out, and there was nothing of Frank left. Your letters, letters from my father, everything, gone. The rent was paid for the rest of the month, and I stayed there those few days.’

  ‘You stayed in Frank’s place?’ Her blue eyes widened. ‘Didn’t you think that was strange?’

  ‘I did. It seems even stranger on reflection, doesn’t it? They said they would take care of everything …’ His throat constricted, and would not clear.

  ‘And tell me who “they” are.’

  ‘The studio. Regent Films. Roy Rosenbaum and his son-in-law, Aaron Reichart. Before I got there, the studio took care of everything. I regret to say … they did … I’m sorry to … they …’

  ‘Oh, please just get it out, and don’t be so bloody English!’

  He reached into his leather case and took out the black velvet box and placed it on the low table. ‘I’m sorry, Claire.’ She stared at it, mouth agape, unable to speak or understand. ‘This is how I found him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘Frank?’

  He nodded meaningfully towards the box.

  ‘That’s Frank! That’s Frank’s… !’

  ‘His ashes.’

  ‘They … they had him cremated? They did that without …’

  ‘Yes. They did it without asking your permission, or anyone’s authority, and all I can tell you is that …’

  She burst into long, gasping sobs. He moved to kneel at her chair with his arms around her, and let her weep against his shoulder, her cheek against his as he murmured her name again and again.

  Finally she sat back, and wiped her eyes, not with the handkerchief but with the heel of her hand. ‘They are dirty bastards, aren’t they?’

  ‘They are.’ They both stood. She put her hands on his shoulders; he reached up and held them. She searched his face, and he brushed a lock of tawny hair away from her face. Adulterous cad that he was, he wanted to kiss her lips, to drown in the depths of her blue eyes. Though he did not succumb to these impulses, he blamed – or thanked – Frank Carson for having them at all.

  ‘Excuse me, I need a moment.’ She left the room, and he heard a door slam, and her long, prostrate sobs.

  Quentin stared at the black velvet box. Claire’s tears had totally vitiated that spasm of outrage he had felt in Aaron Reichart’s office when he had tried and failed to get justice for Frank. Frank didn’t deserve justice anyway. Why should Quentin be here absorbing the sorrow, the anguish that Frank Carson had wrought? Why should Quentin be powerless to make right what Frank had done wrong? Quentin stared at the black velvet box. Damn you, Frank. ‘It’s your damn fault, you stupid bugger.’ It was Frank’s fault he had met Claire in the first place, Frank’s fault he’d met Gigi, went to bed with Gigi. Frank’s own fault too that he didn’t regret his sins. He recognized, with a dyspeptic twinge, that he and Frank would be somehow fundamentally forever linked. Friends and nemeses. Fellow sinners. Fellow bloody fools.

  He heard the toilet flush and the taps run and thumping, as if boxes were being dropped. He wanted to go to her, but didn’t. This was not a failure of empathy, but respect. Twenty minutes passed. He went into the small hall, to the one door that was closed, and knocked. She came to the door. She had washed her face, refreshed her hair, and changed clothes. She wore boots, trousers, and a black sweater that intensified her pallor and her tragic blue eyes.

  ‘If we stay here, I will fall to pieces, and that won’t do anyone any good. If we stay here I won’t be able to live without a cigarette. Let’s walk. We have hours before the children are out of school.’ She put on her maroon coat and floppy velvet hat, and took her keys and together they walked down the stairs and towards the river.

  Winter’s eventual defeat lay hinted at everywhere, tiny shoots of green, snowdrops here and there, crocuses in narrow front gardens, the stubs of early bulbs pushing up, a forsythia branch glowing a te
nuous yellow. The trees remained stark. Frail sunshine had burnt off most of the fog, though it still lay in lavish banners across the river Cherwell itself. He was unaccustomed to walking beside such a tall woman with such a firm stride.

  ‘Talk to me, Quentin. Tell me anything that isn’t Frank Carson. I need to breathe apart from him, apart from his death. Tell me something about yourself.’

  For the second time in less than a week, Quentin Castle opened up his life to a sympathetic woman. Unburdening himself to Gigi required that he be specific; her sunlit past was so totally different from his, she required elaborate explanations. Claire was easier. Though she was some five years older than he, she had lived in the country where he had lived, lived through events that he had lived through. The grey-green river itself offered a watery narrative thread as he told her something of his Oxford years as they walked the paths.

  ‘You speak as if it’s all ancient history, Quentin,’ she chided him, ‘as if you’re an old man looking back. Your whole life is in front of you!’

  ‘Not really. I sometimes think I was born old. I’m not like Frank, or you, not one of those people who are or become what they want to be, who take risks, and rue them or not, they’re shaped by what they dared to be. I love to read novels about people like that, about all their gnashing and uncertainty, their struggles, like the characters in The Moth and the Star, or Some of These Days, but I have no especial gifts, no driving passions. From the time I was a schoolboy, I always knew the job I would have, even perhaps the woman I would marry.’

  ‘Tell me about your wife. You and I are such good friends and I don’t even know her name.’

  ‘Florence,’ he said, pleased that Claire, too, believed they were good friends.

  ‘Is she pretty?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘I can’t remember a time I didn’t know her.’ He talked at length about Florence, their long affection, their lovely wedding last June.

  ‘We got an invitation to your wedding, but Frank was in California, and I wasn’t about to go alone, though I must admit I was tempted to, just to see the people from the office that Frank described – long-nosed nasty Miss Marr, and eagle-eyed Miss Sherrill. Frank did such funny imitations of all of them. He would have me and the children in stitches when he came back from London. He used to do an imitation of your father with his pipe, telling a story about a second-best umbrella, and that old humbug, Thaxton.’

  Quentin felt a twinge of bruised loyalty for his father. Albert would not like it that Frank had used him to comic effect. ‘Why do you think Thaxton a humbug?’

  ‘Oh, Frank thought he was just a mediocre writer with a streak of luck. Nothing more. Frank judged other writers harshly.’

  ‘Most writers do. From what I know, or what I’ve heard, it’s a friendless profession. The greater your gifts, the fewer your friends.’

  ‘That was certainly true of Frank. But I don’t want to think about him. Tell me about your gifts.’

  ‘I told you. I have none. Robert had all the gifts.’

  By the time they sat down to lunch in a tiny unpopulated fish and chip café in the central market, he had told her all about Robert, his vibrant life, his distant death; he had told her about his mother, Margaret, and the telegram that stayed on the mantel for five years, the blackout curtains still in the windows. The dreary lunch they ordered brought to mind Louisa Partridge, and her insistence that the British diet was killing the Britons. Even Claire knew The Book of British Housekeeping, though she dismissed it as total tripe, and hated its berating tone.

  ‘Louisa thinks the same thing,’ he explained. ‘She’s completely repudiated that book. This new book, Apricot Olive Lemon, is something entirely different. Entirely new. I was totally confounded by it. I still am.’ He floundered about for fifteen minutes trying to describe the book while greasy steam condensed on the café windows. Finally he gave it up, confessing, ‘I don’t know what to do next. All three publishers returned the book to me. Everyone knows that Selwyn and Archer have made piles of money off her. Why would Bernard decline if the book didn’t somehow …’

  ‘Stink.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said miserably. ‘Louisa will blame me if it doesn’t sell. She thinks it’s a masterpiece. She won’t revise.’ He picked up a chip with his fingers; the news-paper they were wrapped in was bleary with grease. ‘This is the very sort of food the new book rails against.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re presenting it in the wrong way.’

  ‘That’s obvious.’

  ‘You say it’s a cookery book.’

  ‘Not exactly. There are recipes, but it’s like being on holiday, and then looking up from the page, and here you are in London again. It’s unsettling. She says the book is about appetite, not sustenance.’

  Claire mopped her fingers on a paper napkin. ‘Well, no doubt the people you sent it to are eating fish and chips just like we are. Maybe you have to translate it into experience for them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Translate the words into experience. Think how long we’ve lived this way, Quentin, the shortages, the queues, the austerity, the rubble, the sense of loss. Since 1939. Ten years. Maybe to get them to understand her book, you have to offer them not just something to read but something to experience.’ In the distance college bells tolled. ‘Oh, look at the time!’ Claire glanced at her watch. ‘We must get back. The girls will be coming home from school. Michael stays all day, but they don’t.’

  They caught a crowded bus up Banbury Road, and stood clinging to the pole, their hands touching, their shoulders brushing as the bus lurched. They jumped off and walked swiftly up Polstead Road. Assorted school-children and mothers were already moving up the sidewalks.

  ‘Quickly,’ said Claire, dashing up the stairs. ‘They mustn’t see that box!’

  Once in the flat, she ran to the table and picked the black velvet box up, and took it down the hall. He heard childish voices and feet clamouring up the stairs. The door burst open and Mary and Catherine tumbled in. Catherine was the stronger, sturdier of the two, with her father’s dark hair and eyes but Mary was fair like Claire. They both regarded him suspiciously. They did not say hello.

  Claire came out, brushing tears from her face; she took off her own coat and hat and helped them with theirs and scolded them for making so much noise on the stairs. ‘You remember Mr Castle, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ they said in unison, and ran off.

  ‘I’m sorry, Quentin. They’re very rude.’

  ‘I think the word is hoyden, and that’s not so very bad.’

  ‘I put the box in my room. On the desk overlooking the back garden.’

  ‘What will you tell them, the children?’

  ‘The truth. I’ll have to. What else is there, finally? But not just yet. Not just now. They’re all still so angry, dazed, leaving Harrington, losing the pets, the horse. They haven’t yet absorbed the loss of Frank. He was gone for such a long time. Oh God, how can I describe cremation to a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old? How can I possibly explain that their father’s body is in that box? Frank! So physical, so full of life! Reduced to ashes?’ She gulped back tears, and wiped her nose. ‘And Michael! How can I tell him? It’s worse for Michael. He’s older and he understands the finality of death. He’s been beastly ever since we moved. He reminds me of my old Granny Dunstan. He’s said hateful things to me. He hates Oxford, hates his school, hates everything. And now, to see the box! Imagine, if I am that undone to see Frank in a box, ashes …’

  ‘Claire, I’m sorry, I should have written, warned you. I—’

  ‘Oh, how could it make any difference?’

  The telephone rang, jangled insistently, and Claire answered it. Her back was to him, and her replies were short and succinct. ‘Yes, it’s true, they cremated him.’ A long tract of silence. ‘Please, calm down. No, I don’t know why … Yes, I have the box with his ashes.’ Silence. ‘There is no rush now.’ More silen
ce that seemed to Quentin to be interminable. ‘Shall we talk later? No. Yes. I understand. No. No marble urn. No. Absolutely not. I’m going to put his ashes in the carpet bag I brought from America, Sybil. There’s an end to it. Yes, I’m very clear on that. I don’t need time to … Look, can we discuss this later? I have someone here.’ She hung up, turned and faced him. ‘Sybil Dane.’

  ‘My father said you’d agreed to have Frank buried at Woodlands. I didn’t believe it.’

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  ‘But why, Claire?’

  ‘The schoolmaster’s son to lie among the nobles, the landed mighty? It would make Frank happy, the silly sod. Of course these glorious dead aren’t Sanford Dane’s family. He bought Woodlands off some poor busted-up aristocrat whose family had owned the place for three or four hundred years. That’s what Frank thought he was doing buying Harrington Hall. It’s all such rot.’ She moved among the boxes, picking up toys, righting nothing. ‘But it mattered to Frank.’

  ‘But to have him buried there at Woodlands where you were so unhappy? Every time you want to see him, you’ll have to return there.’

  ‘See him? There’ll be no more seeing him! He’s gone. I won’t be taking my children to lay flowers on marble headstones. I’m not the sort of person to be making pilgrimages to graves, laying wreaths. Stone angels, the old family burial ground? I don’t give a damn about any of that. I’m an American. Life matters to me. I have my children, and I am going to look after them. If Sybil wants to immolate herself on Frank Carson’s grave, let her, to throw herself over the family mausoleum, let her.’

  ‘Is that really why you agreed?’

  ‘It’s nothing to me.’

  ‘You sound very bitter, Claire.’ He picked up his case to leave. ‘You despise her. Don’t you?’