by Jonathan Coe
∗
There was a strange sense of expectancy in the air the following day, which had nothing to do with Michael’s impending journey to Yorkshire. It was January 16th, and at five o’clock that morning, the United Nations’ final deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait had expired. The allied attack on Saddam Hussein might be launched at any moment, and every time he turned on the radio or the television, Michael was half-expecting to hear that the war had begun.
Boarding a train at King’s Cross station late in the afternoon, he glimpsed some familiar faces among the other passengers: Henry Winshaw and his brother Thomas were both taking their seats in a first-class carriage, along with their young cousin Roderick Winshaw, the art dealer, and Mr Sloane himself. Michael, needless to say, was travelling second class. But the train was not busy, and he was able to spread his coat and suitcase over a pair of seats with a clear conscience, while he took out an exercise book and attempted to make notes on the most important passages from what was obviously a well-thumbed volume.
I Was ‘Celery’, published by the Peacock Press in late 1990, had turned out to be the memoir of a retired Air Intelligence Officer who had worked as a double agent for MI5 during the Second World War. Although it offered no direct information about Godfrey Winshaw’s disastrous mission, it did at least explain the meaning of Lawrence’s note: BISCUIT, CHEESE and CELERY, it appeared, had all been the codenames of double agents controlled and supervised by something called the Twenty Committee, established as a collaborative venture by the War Office, GHQ Home Forces, MI5, MI6 and others in January 1941. Might Lawrence have been a member of this committee? Very likely. Might he also have been in secret radio communication with the Germans, supplying them not only with the names and identities of these double agents, but with information about British military plans – such as the proposed bombing of munitions factories? This would be difficult to establish, fifty years after the event, but the evidence was beginning to suggest that Tabitha’s worst accusations about her brother and his wartime treachery were very close to the truth.
As the train sped on through the grey, mist-shrouded landscape, Michael found it harder and harder to concentrate on this puzzle. He laid the book down and stared vacantly out of the window. The weather had hardly changed in the last two weeks. It was on just such an afternoon, some ten days ago, that Fiona’s body had been cremated in the drab, cheerless setting of a suburban funeral parlour. The ceremony had been sparsely attended. There had been only Michael, a forgotten aunt and uncle from the South West of England, and a handful of her colleagues from work. The hymn singing was unbearably thin, and the attempt to convene at a pub afterwards had been miscalculated. Michael had only stayed a few minutes. He had gone back to his flat to pick up an overnight bag, then taken a train up to Birmingham.
His reconciliation with his mother, too, was less than he had expected it to be. They spent an awkward evening together at a local restaurant. Michael had presumed, rather naïvely, that his very reappearance would fill her with such delight as to compensate fully for all the pain he had inflicted by breaking off communications for so long. Instead, he found himself called upon to justify his conduct, which he attempted to do in a succession of halting and poorly argued speeches. In effect, he maintained, his father had died twice: the second, and more devastating death being when Michael learned the truth about his parentage. He now believed that his two or three years’ subsequent withdrawal from the world could be seen as a period of sustained mourning – a theory supported, if support were needed, by Freud’s essay on the subject, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. His mother seemed less than convinced by this appeal to scientific authority, but as the evening wore on, and she saw the sincerity of her son’s contrition, the atmosphere nevertheless began to thaw. After they had arrived home and made two cups of Horlicks, Michael felt emboldened to ask a few questions about his lost parent.
‘And did you never see him again, after that one time – the day it happened?’
‘Michael, I told you. I saw him once again, about ten years later. And so did you. I told you that already.’
‘What do you mean, I saw him? I never saw him.’
His mother took another sip of her drink and embarked upon the story.
‘It was a weekday morning, and I was in town doing some shopping. I felt like a bit of a break, so I went to Rackham’s, to get a cup of tea in the café. It was quite full, I remember, and I stood there for a while with my tray, wondering where I was going to sit. There was this gentleman sitting by himself at a table, looking very gloomy, and I was wondering whether it would be all right to join him. And then suddenly I realized that it was him. He’d grown old, he’d grown dreadfully old, but I was sure that it was him. I would have known him anywhere. So I thought about it for a minute, and then I went over to the table, and I said, “Jim?”, and he looked up, but he didn’t recognize me; and so I said, “It’s Jim, isn’t it?”, but all he said was, “I’m sorry, I think you must be mistaken.” And then I said, “It’s me, Helen,” and I could see it beginning to dawn on him who I was. I said, “You do remember, don’t you?”, and he said yes, he did, and then I sat down and we got talking.
‘He wasn’t much fun to talk to: just a shadow of the man I’d met before. He seemed very angry with himself for never having settled, for not finding someone he could build a home with and start a family. He seemed to think it was too late to do any of that now. So then when I began talking about myself, I just couldn’t help it. I had to tell him about you. I thought perhaps it might mean something to him. And of course he’d no idea. He was completely flabbergasted. He wanted to know all about you, when you were born, what you looked like, how you were doing at school, all that sort of thing. And the more I told him, the more he wanted to know; until in the end, he asked me if he could come and see you. Just the once. So I thought about it and to be honest I didn’t really like the idea, but finally I said all right, but I’ll have to ask my husband, thinking of course that he’d say no, and that would be an end to it. But you know what Ted was like, he could never deny anybody anything, and when he got home that evening I did ask him, and he said yes, he didn’t mind, he thought it was the least the poor man deserved. And so later that night, after you’d gone to bed, he came round to the house and I took him up to your bedroom and he stood and looked at you for about five minutes, until you woke up and caught sight of him and started screaming fit to bring the roof down.’
‘But that was my dream,’ said Michael. ‘That was my nightmare. I dreamed that I was staring into my own face.’
‘Well you weren’t,’ she said. ‘It was your father’s.’
For some time Michael said nothing. He was too astonished to speak – until, brokenly, he managed to ask: ‘Then what?’
‘Then nothing,’ said his mother. ‘He left and none of us ever saw him again. Or heard from him.’ About to take another sip, she hesitated. ‘Except that …’
‘Yes?’
‘He asked if he could have a photograph. I can still remember how he described you – “the only trace of myself I’ve managed to leave behind these last twenty years” – and when I heard that, I didn’t feel I could refuse him, very well. So I gave him the first one I could find. It was the one you always kept out, the one of you and Joan, writing your books together.’
Michael looked up slowly. ‘You gave him that picture? So I never lost it?’
She nodded. ‘I meant to tell you, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t think of any way to tell you.’
His capacity to absorb these revelations almost, but not quite, exhausted, Michael said: ‘When was all this? When did it happen?’
‘Well,’ said his mother, ‘it was in the spring. That I do know. And it was before your birthday, the day we took you down to Weston. You were never the same after that day. So I suppose it must have been … 1961. It must have been spring, 1961.’
∗
It was already dark when Michael disembarked fr
om the train at York. The three Winshaws and Mr Sloane, without noticing him, immediately hailed a taxi and drove off into the city traffic. Having established that the fare would leave him little in the way of change out of seventy pounds, Michael decided that he would have to forego that means of transport, and waited instead for a bus, which was due to depart in forty-five minutes. He passed the time consuming two packets of Revels and a Curly-Wurly in the station waiting-room.
The bus journey lasted for more than an hour, and for almost half of that time, as the tired, spluttering vehicle carried him along ever darker, narrower, wilder and more tortuous roads, Michael was the only passenger. When he left the bus he was still, by his own calculations, some seven or eight miles from his destination. The only sounds, at first, were the forlorn bleating of sheep, the soft moan of a gathering wind, and the falling of a thick rain which looked ready to settle, before too long, into a steady downpour. The only lights came from the windows of a few isolated houses, scattered and remote. Michael buttoned his coat up against the rain and began walking; but after only a few minutes he heard the distant rumble of an engine, and turned to see the twin beams of a car’s headlights, no more than a mile away and advancing in his direction. He put down his suitcase and, as the vehicle approached, stuck out a plaintive thumb. The car braked to a halt.
‘Going anywhere near Winshaw Towers?’ he asked, as the driver’s window was wound down to reveal a dark, clean-shaven man wearing a flat cap and green Barbour.
‘I go within a mile of it: and I’ll go no closer,’ said the man. ‘Get in.’
They drove for several minutes in silence.
‘It’s a poor night,’ said the driver at last, ‘for a stranger to be lost on the moors.’
‘I thought the bus might get me a bit further,’ said Michael. ‘The service up here seems rather erratic.’
‘Deregulation,’ said the driver. ‘It’s a crime.’ He sniffed. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t vote for the other lot.’
He dropped Michael at a crossroads and drove off, leaving him once again at the mercy of the wind and the rain, which already seemed to have doubled in intensity. Nothing was visible in the surrounding darkness but the rough, stony road ahead, fringed on either side by a narrow strip of moorland, ever alternating between black, naked peat, straggling heather, and piled, weirdly shaped rocks; not, at least, until Michael had been walking ten minutes or more, when he became aware that the road had begun to run alongside some sort of man-made lake, illuminated at one end by parallel rows of lights which called to mind an airport runway. He could even distinguish the outline of a small seaplane parked at the water’s edge. Shortly after that, he came upon a patch of thick woodland, cordoned off by a long brick wall which was interrupted, at last, by a pair of wrought-iron gates. They creaked open at his touch, and Michael guessed that his journey must nearly be at an end.
By the time he emerged from the seemingly endless, mudcaked and densely overgrown tunnel of blackness which constituted the driveway, the golden squares of lamplight shining out from the windows of Winshaw Towers might have seemed almost welcoming. This impression, however, could not survive even a cursory glance over the bulk of the squat, forbidding mansion. A shudder passed through Michael’s body as he approached the front porch and heard the ghastly howling of dogs, protesting at their confinement in some hidden outhouse. To his own surprise he found that he was muttering the words: ‘Not exactly a holiday camp, is it?’
The line should have been Sid’s, of course: but there was no Sid to keep him company now. For the moment, he would have to keep the dialogue going by himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Nearly a Nasty Accident
As soon as Michael attempted to lift the immense, rusty knocker, he found that the door promptly swung open of its own accord. He stepped inside and looked around him. He was in a huge, dingy, stone-flagged hall, lit only by four or five lamps set high in the wood-panelled walls, with badly weathered tapestries and oil paintings adding to the crepuscular impression. There were doors leading off on either side, and, directly in front of him, a broad oak staircase. He could see light coming from beneath one of the doors to his left, and from the same direction occasional voices could be heard, raised in desultory conversation. After hesitating briefly, he put his suitcase down near the foot of the stairs, brushed the wet and tangled hair away from his eyes, and advanced boldly forward.
The door led into a large and cheery sitting room, where a log fire burned merrily, throwing antic, dancing shadows over the walls. In an armchair beside the fire sat a tiny, crook-backed woman, wrapped up in a shawl and squinting with intent bird-like eyes at her knitting needles as she worked them dexterously with busy fingers. This, Michael guessed, was Tabitha Winshaw: her resemblance to Aunt Emily, the deranged old spinster played by Esma Cannon in the film What a Carve Up!, was unmistakable. Opposite her, on a sofa, staring phlegmatically into space with a whisky glass in his hand, was Thomas Winshaw, the merchant banker, while at a table on the far side of the room, nearest the rain-spattered window, Hilary Winshaw was quietly tapping away at a laptop computer. Reaching the end of a paragraph, and looking around the room in search of further inspiration, she was the first to notice Michael’s appearance.
‘Hello, who’s this?’ she said. ‘A stranger in the night, if ever I saw one.’
‘Not quite a stranger,’ said Michael, and was about to introduce himself when Thomas broke in with, ‘For God’s sake, man, you’re dripping all over the carpet. Call for the butler, someone, and get him to put that coat away.’
Hilary stood up and pulled on a bell-rope, then came to take a closer look at the new arrival.
‘You know, I have seen him somewhere before,’ she said. And then, addressing Michael directly: ‘You don’t ski at Aspen, do you?’
‘My name’s Michael. Michael Owen,’ he answered, ‘and I’m a writer. Among my unfinished works is a history of your family: parts of which you might even have read yourself.’
‘Why, Mr Owen!’ cried Tabitha, putting down her needles and clapping her hands in delight when she heard this news. ‘I was wondering if you’d be able to come. I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you. Of course, I’ve read your book – your publishers have been sending it to me, as you know – and read it, I must say, with the greatest interest. We must sit down together and have a long talk about it. We really must.’
Thomas now rose to his feet and pointed at Michael accusingly.
‘I remember you. You’re that damned impudent writer fellow. Turned up at the bank one day and started asking a lot of fishy questions. I was obliged to throw you out, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Not mistaken at all,’ said Michael, extending his hand, which Thomas declined to take.
‘Well what the deuce do you think you’re doing here, turning up at a private family get-together? This is tantamount to breaking and entering. You could find yourself in very serious trouble.’
‘I’m here for the same reason as yourself,’ said Michael, unruffled. ‘I’m here for the reading of the will: at your late uncle’s invitation.’
‘Poppycock, man, pure poppycock! If you expect us to swallow a story like —’
‘I think you’ll find that Mr Owen is telling the truth,’ said a voice from the doorway.
They all turned to see that Mr Sloane had entered the room. He was still wearing his black, three-piece suit, and he had with him a slim briefcase, gripped firmly in his right hand.
‘It was Mortimer Winshaw’s specific request that he should be present this evening,’ he continued, coming to warm himself at the fire. ‘We shall not know why, until the will itself has been read. Perhaps if Mr Owen were now to go upstairs and refresh himself, that happy event might be expedited.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Michael.
‘And here’s your taxi,’ said Hilary, as the ancient, shambling figure of Pyles, the butler, came unsteadily into view.
He and Michael proceeded slowly up the stairca
se together. Not having much experience of making small talk with servants, Michael waited some time before venturing his first sally.
‘Well, I can’t say I think much of the climate up here,’ he said, with a nervous chuckle. ‘Next time, I think I’ll bring a sou’wester and wellington boots.’
‘The worst is yet to come,’ said Pyles curtly.
Michael thought about this.
‘You mean the weather, I take it.’
‘There’ll be storms tonight,’ he muttered. ‘Thunder, lightning, and blinding rain enough to soak the dead in their very graves.’ He paused briefly, before adding: ‘But to answer your question, I did not mean the weather, no.’
‘You didn’t?’
Pyles put the suitcase down in the middle of the corridor, and tapped Michael on the chest.
‘It’s nearly thirty years since the family were last met together in this house,’ he said. ‘Tragedy and murder visited us then, and so they will tonight!’
Michael stepped back, reeling slightly from his close contact with the butler’s alcoholic aura.
‘What, erm … what did you have in mind, exactly?’ he asked, picking the suitcase up himself, and continuing down the corridor.
‘All I know,’ said Pyles, limping after him, ‘is that dreadful things will happen here tonight. Terrible things will happen. Let us all count ourselves lucky if we wake tomorrow morning, safe in our beds.’
They stopped outside a door.
‘This is your room,’ he said, pushing it open. ‘I’m afraid the lock has been broken for some time.’
∗
The walls and ceiling of Michael’s bedroom were panelled in dark oak, and there was a small electric fire which had not yet had time to warm the dank air. Despite the light from this and a couple of candles which stood on the dressing table, a sombre gloom shrouded every corner. The air of the room, too, had a strange quality: a suggestion of mouldering decay, a cold damp mustiness such as is found in underground chambers. The one tall, narrow window rattled unceasingly in its frame, shaken by the storm until it seemed that the glass would splinter. As Michael unpacked his suitcase and arranged his comb, razor and sponge-bag on the dressing table, a mounting sense of unease began to steal over him. Preposterous though the butler’s words had been, they had planted in him the seeds of a shapeless, irrational fear, and he started to think wistfully of the downstairs sitting room, with its blazing hearth and promise of human company (if a roomful of Winshaws could be said to offer any such thing). He changed out of his damp clothes as quickly as he could, then closed the door of the bedroom behind him with a quiet sigh of relief, and lost no time in attempting to retrace his steps.
