An agent from another rival firm planted himself at Quentin’s side. ‘I hear there is a posthumous novel.’
‘Really?’ said Quentin.
‘So the wife has control of everything now. Be staying with the old firm, will she?’
‘Where did you go to subtlety school?’
The man laughed good-naturedly and took himself off with one of his own authors, leaving Quentin to the comfort of Sir Sanford Dane’s fine Scotch. The meandering crowds shuttled and obscured his view of Claire, still rooted between Sybil and Sir Sanford.
Michael Carson, squirming finally from under Sybil’s embrace, bolted, and found his way to Quentin. ‘I don’t s’pose you’d give us a sip of that whisky, would you?’
‘What? You’re only ten.’
‘I’m disgusted.’ The boy crossed his arms over his chest grimly.
Quentin regarded him with affectionate understanding. Michael was pudgy and unlovely, though he had not seemed so when Quentin first met him. At Harrington Hall he had seemed quite the man of the place. Perhaps because at Harrington Hall he was in his own element. Here, he was in the Danes’ element. Quentin wondered how many years would pass before Michael Carson found his own element again. But all he said was, ‘It’ll all be over soon.’
‘It’ll never be the same.’
‘No,’ Quentin conceded, ‘it’ll never be the same. How do you like Dragon School?’
‘I hate it. And that won’t be over soon. That’ll go on for bloody years.’
‘Yes.’ Quentin watched Lady Sybil Dane accepting the sympathies of an especially voluble writer. ‘That’s likely to go on quite a long time.’
Claire, too, eventually managed to break away from the reception line. She had taken off the veiled hat, and her bright hair wound tight atop her head made her look like a candle moving across a sea of darkness. When people accosted her, she swayed towards them, listening, nodding, shaking hands, accepting air kisses, back pats and praise for her late husband. Some were friends from their old Chelsea days, some the very critics who had reamed Hay Days, some from Sir Sanford’s papers who had praised it, some were translators, and some had no discernible connection with Francis Carson and were here for the spectacle, the food and drink. When she could disentangle herself, she gave a wan smile to Quentin and Michael. Each thought the smile was for him alone. Her progress towards them was slow, but they both knew she was coming. Each thought to him alone.
When she at last stood before them she placed a gloved hand lightly on Michael’s head, and handed Quentin the snowdrop bouquet. ‘Please get rid of this for me, will you? Sybil’s idea of … something. Too bizarre. Like a wedding with the dead.’
He took the bouquet, and dropped it in the potted palm behind him. He sent Michael off to get his mother a drink. ‘See you don’t spill some,’ he added, assuming the boy would drink half before he got back to Claire.
‘I should have put Frank’s ashes on the bookshelf, and left him there,’ said Claire, peeling off the black gloves. Quentin held his hand out for the gloves, and then tossed them into the potted palm as well. This amused her.
‘Sybil looks terrible,’ he offered, happy to heap abuse on their hostess.
‘Mourning doesn’t suit her. She looks much better in flowing peacock robes.’
‘But here she is the star of a play. I think it’s called The Beloved Mistress.’
‘As opposed to the inconvenient wife.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve made a grave error, Quentin.’
‘You mean burying him here, all that? All this?’ He waved his arm around to the lively, literary crowd; voices were louder now, laughter more persistent; even the vicar and the organist were jolly under the amber influence of whisky and sherry. ‘I agree with you, Mrs Carson. This was an error of the gravest sort.’
‘I thought I was past all the pain associated with this place, and I’m not. Frank seems to me more present here than he ever did at Harrington, as though he better belonged here with her than with me.’
‘Well, he’s here now,’ said Quentin, ‘forever.’
‘Yes, I have stupidly delivered Frank into the hands of my enemy. I certainly shan’t be coming back, I can tell you that. Sybil’s car came for us yesterday, chauffeur and all, making a big bloody fuss on Polstead Road, and once here, servants led us to a lovely suite of rooms on the second floor. Can I do this for you, madam? Can I do that? Revolting. The girls thought it was all great fun, tea in that massive library. Michael was a complete ass, sulking through everything. And then we had to sit through that awful service at the mausoleum.’
‘Last night? What was that we just sat through?’
‘That was the public one. Last night they put my old carpet bag with Frank’s ashes into the marble tomb and sealed it up. Just us, Sybil, Sir Sanford, the vicar and a string quartet. The girls went berserk, no one could calm them. They screamed the whole way back here, and Michael was roaring through the place, slamming doors, and swearing like a trooper, and then the servants insisted I leave the children and go down to dinner with Sybil and Sir Sanford. They awaited me. Can you imagine how ghastly that was?’
‘I can, but I’d rather not.’
‘The whole day, beginning to end, was just unspeakably awful.’
‘Worse than what we just sat through? What we’re doing here now?’
They watched as Sybil moved through the crowds, collecting condolences as if sympathy could be minted into small bright coins to be showered upon her outstretched hands. She looked both tragic and joyous, and Quentin noticed that someone had brought her a glass of champagne which the waiters were now circulating.
‘Is that champagne?’ asked Claire. ‘What is she celebrating?’
‘She’s won,’ he observed.
Michael joined them and thrust a half-filled glass into his mother’s hand.
‘Oh, Michael, thank you for the drink, dear.’ She smoothed his hair away from his eyes.
‘I’m famished,’ he said. ‘When’ll we eat?’
‘Whenever Lady Sybil finishes holding court,’ said Quentin.
‘That’ll be forever,’ he grumbled.
‘Yes,’ Quentin agreed, ‘she will not be finished for a very long time. Years, I should think. Perhaps we should all get used to it.’
‘Why are you being unkind?’ asked Claire. ‘It’s not like you.’
‘I’m angry.’
‘At?’
‘Everyone. Forgive me. I’m a stupid sod.’
‘Ha ha ha!’ Michael crowed. ‘You said it, you sod!’
‘Michael! Go find the girls and go into the kitchen,’ said Claire. ‘The cook there will remember you. Tell her you’re hungry and she’ll feed you. Go on. Tell her Lady Sybil said you were to be fed anything you like.’ She turned back to Quentin when he left. ‘You’re not a stupid sod.’
‘A cad, then.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ he muttered.
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘Of course I’m angry with you. I’m an aspidistra, the kind you despise, all tidy and contained in its little pot behind respectable lace curtains, and I never knew it till I met you.’
Her blue eyes widened. ‘And what are you now?’
‘A bloody fool. Drunk too, but no longer the potted aspidistra. No, madam—’ He set his empty glass in the potted palm ‘—I’m an ass, I know, but a newly minted one, and now that I know I’m not an aspidistra, I am truly an ass, a fool, and I can say I could take you away from all this. No, really, I have a chariot outside. A Morris chariot. I could say your chariot awaits, madam. I can drive now.’
‘And where would we go?’
‘Mexico. Baja.’
‘Mexico! Is this part of the play?’
‘You mean The Beloved Mistress, that play? No. This play is called The Fool’s Confession, written by some lesser talent, some dreary hack. Me. I am the fool. My lines are: Time’s winged chario
t awaits you, and I am at its help, I mean, helm. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace,’ he went on, knowing his tongue had been unhinged by alcohol, and flinging himself into folly nonetheless. ‘I could say that Frank is gone, but I am here, and I love you, Claire. I loved you from the moment I first saw you. Sorry to muddy up the whole bloody farewell, but on a day like this one thinks of love and death, and nothing else. At least I can think of nothing else. Love and death. I’m afraid I will always love you, and I have to say it before I die.’
She was momentarily quiet. ‘Why afraid?’
‘Because love is an uncharted territory for me, wholly and completely new. What I feel for you I’ve never experienced before. I keep thinking of old McVicar, up on some peak where the air is cold and thin, and he can hardly breathe. He knows he’s looking at undiscovered country, and his heart must have constricted with excitement, knowing that everything he’s seen before is small, diminished now that he’s seen this. That nothing will ever seem quite so grand or fine as this, and he could reach out his hand, and …’ Quentin reached out his hand, and Claire took it. He snatched it back. ‘I’ve had too much to drink. You can ignore me if you want. You should. In any case, I’m hopeless. I mean, I haven’t any hope that you … And I couldn’t expect you to. I don’t expect it, but I don’t want to die without saying it. I’m a fool. Forgive me.’
She placed her hand lightly on his arm. ‘I don’t need to forgive you. I want to be with you. Will you come to me, Quentin? Will you?’
He focused his attention on her eyes, forced himself to look only into their blue depths, and for a man with so little experience reading women’s eyes, he saw there clearly, truth plain, love unsullied. ‘When? Whenever.’
‘Shall I come to you?’
‘Yes. Where? Tomorrow? Shall I come to Oxford tomorrow?’
‘Today. Now. There is a suite of rooms on the fourth floor, north wing. Where we used to live. They’re empty. The whole wing is empty. Meet me there. There’s a small lift. You’ll find it at the back of the central staircase. Take the lift and go to the fourth floor and turn to your right. The second door on your right.’
‘Now, Claire? Do you mean it?’
‘Now. I’ll follow.’ Her blue eyes gazed into his, and an expectant smile tugged at her lips.
She turned and left him, taken up by the soggy embrace of a writer from the old days in Chelsea.
The fourth floor was preternaturally quiet, abandoned, no sounds floated up. The room itself was furnished only with a high, hard, canopied bed of ancient origins, a rug rolled up leaving the heavy wood floor bare, and a portrait of a glowering be-wigged clergyman pointing at a Bible. He was the very embodiment of austerity, save for his heavy, fleshy jowls. Quentin stood at the window, waiting for her, fearful she wouldn’t come, half wondering if he had dreamed her words, looking out over gardens, and beyond the woodlands for which the place was named, swathed in fog. From this window he could see the distant folly, an airy gazebo in marble with fine columns and a domed top. He smiled to himself. Footpath to folly. He was ready to tread that footpath, dance down it, embrace folly in all its glory and consequence.
He came down in the lift, mercifully passing no one except an overburdened housemaid who ignored him. The green and gold drawing room was empty, save for a corpulent editor drunkenly passed out on a settee. A waiter collecting glasses directed him to where luncheon was being served at the other end of the wing, a different drawing room, this one in blue and gold.
Quentin had roused his every appetite and now he needed sustenance. He was positively starving. The many tables were, most of them, only half full; people had trains to catch. Quentin seated himself with a couple who introduced themselves as neighbours of Sir Sanford and Lady Sybil, lord and lady names Quentin didn’t bother to remember. They were delighted to meet Francis Carson’s literary agent. A tired-looking waiter offered him food which he ate, not knowing or caring what it was. Another waiter offered some wine. Quentin declined anything to drink.
He wanted nothing to blur the moment, nothing that might soften the tingling awareness that shot through his body, head to toe in sweet little jolts. He needed every ounce of concentration to play his role. Calling on all his skill in undergraduate amateur theatrics – which, at long last were not useless – Quentin Castle put on the performance of his life: to persuade this fatuous couple and others in this unsuspecting audience, including his father and Miss Sherrill, that he was the same man who had sat in the church that morning. However, Quentin was absolutely not that man, and never would be again. That man had never known the passion Quentin had experienced, the madness, the sheer act of devouring and being devoured in another, of reaching with his body what his heart and soul and spirit had always longed for, exulted in, wanted to proclaim. Instead he asked the Danes’ neighbour if she might pass him the salt.
Quentin Castle and Claire Carson had made love in their own fine and private place, on that ancient bed and in full view of the disapproving cleric whose expression darkened with every endearment, with every piece of clothing that fell to the floor. Quentin and Claire had no time for languor, or long lovers’ talks, no time for the lilt and ease, exploration, tease, but here, now, swift, stolen, delicious, tender and intense. Quentin’s every corpuscle seemed to rejoice, his flesh – and hers – seemed transcendent when Claire’s lips slid down his chest, when he brought his mouth to her nipples, across the creamy expanse of her torso, that she had rolled over him, sat astride him, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, making little sounds that fell on his ears like grace notes. I love you, Quentin wreathed his heart in happiness. I love you, Claire, I love you… . And when he held her tousled hair in his hands, his cheek to hers, and urged her, body and soul, to meet him, that final jolt of joy, to be with him, and in him, and part of him forever.
Lord and Lady Whoever-they-were spoke highly of the Danes’ tennis courts. Quentin listened, bringing his napkin to his lips to inhale the smell of her still on his fingers. He played his role to perfection so that these people should never guess he had rested his head against Claire’s belly, and risen from that bed, laughed and given the American kiss-off to the grim, be-jowled cleric pointing to the Bible and promising hellfire. Quentin and Claire could have come together and perished right there, in flames, and been happy. Quentin knelt before his lover, and kissed her pliant thighs before he rolled each stocking up her long legs. She had begged him to go downstairs first, pressing herself to his chest, impressing herself there forever, and brushing his lips with words of love so sweet he could still taste them, words far more confectionery than the elegant fruit-studded cake placed gleaming on a dish before him.
When finally Claire came down to lunch, Quentin dared not look at her. She made her way to the table where the Danes and Bernard and some left-wing journalists sat. She asked them to excuse her absence, that she was overcome with emotion, that she had a headache. Sir Sanford patted her hand, and said everyone understood. She gave her attention to a journalist, a woman with frowsy hair and nicotine-stained fingers who hoped to publish something posthumous of Frank’s. Claire said all such requests had to go through the agent, and pointed out Quentin to her.
A fine and private play indeed. The Fool’s Confession became The Beloved Mistress. They acted their parts well.
The last scene: at the end of that very long day, and after a lavish tea (also garnished with alcohol for those who wished to imbibe), when only those few people who had cars remained. Quentin, his father and Miss Sherrill were among the last to leave. Their car was brought round, and they collected their coats in the high and airy hall. Albert was clearly very drunk, and Miss Sherrill very tired. Quentin was very grateful to Lady Sybil Dane – she would never know for what – and offered his formal farewells to Claire.
‘Yes, goodbye, Quentin, and thank you for all your help.’
‘You’re most welcome.’
‘Can you come to Oxford, do you think? One day la
ter this week to talk about the book? Or shall I come to London?’ she said, pressing his hand.
Quentin could only gulp and nod, and be grateful he had his Burberry on, such was the surge he felt from the mere pressure of her hand. ‘I’ll come to Oxford.’
‘Francis didn’t mention any new book to me, a’tall,’ Albert sulked, ‘and I’m his agent. I take it as a damned insult.’
‘An oversight, Albert,’ Enid soothed.
‘He wrote like mad these past few years,’ said Claire, speaking to anyone nearby, including their hostess, ‘since we moved to our lovely country place. Harrington Hall was so good for him creatively. He was so hard-working and productive.’
‘But he wasn’t always able to write there,’ said Sybil, ‘what with all the distractions. Sometimes he had to come to London just for the peace of it.’
‘Peace indeed!’ snapped Albert. Enid delivered him one of her practised jabs. Albert, muted, gazed up at the cavorting nymphs in the dome.
Lady Sybil turned to Quentin. ‘Was he writing in Los Angeles?’
‘Yes. All the time. Every day. Every night at the Garden of Allah. He had his own typewriter there.’ Quentin was such a happy actor he wanted to say Frank had fallen head first into his typewriter and drowned there in a sea of inky ribbons and a swathe of keys, letters imprinted across his face.
‘I have all his many letters from California.’ Sybil’s dark eyes shone. ‘He was so dispirited at what they’d done to Some of These Days. I buoyed him as best I could. I’m so delighted there will be one last novel.’ Her brightly ringed hand splayed across her breast. ‘An Inconvenient Wife, though I’m sure the title was a figure of speech,’ she added with a look of consummate pity for the widow.
Three Strange Angels Page 24
