In Search of Love, Money & Revenge

by Hilary Bailey

  HILARY BAILEY

  In Search of Love, Money & Revenge

  Contents

  1 In Mr Rothko’s Surgery

  2 George’s Café

  3 A Business Offer is Made

  4 The Borough of Kenton with Particular Reference to Foxwell and Little Plastic Trees

  5 Love, Money and Revenge

  6 Lunch at Durham House

  7 A Visit from David Pickering

  8 A Picnic in Savernake Park

  9 The Birth of the Arcadia

  10 Opening Night

  11 A Meeting at Bedford Square

  12 Mr Abbott Makes an Offer

  13 Public and Private Developments

  14 The Savernake War Begins

  15 Rivals

  16 A Sudden Death

  17 August

  18 Scandal

  19 Some Reconciliations

  20 Trouble at Durham House

  21 The Arrival of Twins

  22 The Savernake Vote

  23 A Country Fête

  24 Savernake Blues

  25 Poor Ruth

  26 Some Mysteries Revealed

  27 Carnival!

  28 The Temple of Mammon

  29 The Temple of Fortune

  A Note on the Author

  1

  In Mr Rothko’s Surgery

  ‘Is it hurting very much, Melanie?’ asked Annie Vane in her light, well-modulated voice, the informed middle-class tone of a Radio 4 interviewer.

  The girl sitting next to her said dully, ‘It’s not bad, really.’ But her plump face was badly swollen on one side and it was obvious she was in pain. Must be, thought Annie, with a face like that.

  Behind her white Formica counter the receptionist placed some papers in a grey filing cabinet and clanged the drawer shut. Turning round she swept the waiting room with a hostile look. She had already been cold to the three patients and a small child perched on plastic chairs, making it plain that those reduced to visiting the dentist on an emergency basis at this time of year must have been too feckless to have their teeth seen to at the proper time and were thus suffering the consequences of their own stupidity. It was that or they’d got themselves involved in some seasonal folly like a drunken fight or a car accident, or betting on how many walnuts they could crack without using the nutcrackers or had unwarily lost out in the traditional confrontation between a tooth and a sixpence in the Christmas pudding.

  Annie felt she must have brought Melanie up by hand on a diet of Coca-Cola and Mars bars, which was far from the truth. As far as she was concerned, Melanie and her mouth were just about the last straw. This wasn’t what she wanted or could cope with at the best of times. She sank down in her chair, glumly watching the young woman in the corner with a grizzling small boy sag visibly every time the receptionist looked at them. Giving her toddler a Smartie, the woman wheedled, ‘Come on, Alec, love. Be a good boy. Mummy’ll soon see Mr Rothko and then we can go home.’ The receptionist gave her a look like a dagger in the ribs.

  The child appeared pale and sickly like his mother, Annie thought, although the woman had that very fair skin which never has any colour anyway. Still, if he lived on Smarties small wonder he was ill-looking. Colourless and unhealthy the woman might be, Annie thought sadly, but she presumably had a home and a husband. She hadn’t been deserted. Tears of self-pity pricked Annie’s eyeballs.

  Pull yourself together, she told herself. He may come back.

  She stared sternly at the picture on the wall above the receptionist’s head, a gloomy watercolour depicting a range of broken rocks with a dark and turbulent stream below.

  Three weeks ago she’d been decorating the tree, their fifth Christmas tree, the third they’d put up in the bay window of the knocked-through sitting room of the small house in a narrow street running off Foxwell High Street in South London. As she stood on the stepladder putting the silver star with its trailing metal fringe at the top of the tree, reflecting as usual about the way the tree clashed with the big abstract painting which ran along most of the wall towards the little patio outside, she heard the front door open. Making a final adjustment to the star Annie called out, ‘Look – I’ve finished!’

  Julian made no reply. Annie got off the ladder and gazed at her husband. Tall and very good-looking he seemed pale and his face bore a sad, nervy expression. And something else was different – when they left for the office that morning he had been wearing his new suit, a wide-trousered, baggy-jacketed number, in pale brown to match his near-blond hair. Now he was in jeans and a dark purple sweater Annie had never seen before. Had she just forgotten it, she wondered, or had there been an emergency? Had Julian been obliged to change his clothes during the day?

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened? You’ve changed your clothes. Vodka? Glass of wine?’

  Still Julian said nothing. Annie went to the table at the far end of the room where a computer shared space with a telephone answering machine and a neat tray of drinks. It was a tidy room, containing only a brown leather sofa of modern design, a similar, cream-coloured chair and, opposite the drinks table, a black table on which stood a large green plant. Julian detested clutter. Although Annie always tried to avoid garish Christmas decorations, she knew Julian hated the tree and couldn’t wait to get it down on Twelfth Night.

  Standing by the table, waiting for his order she looked across the room at the tree and remarked, ‘I don’t like you much. You’re a boring, Victorian thing … Late Victorian,’ she added.

  Annie had got a first in history at Oxford and was the author of ‘Threpp Street, 1888’ to give her doctoral thesis its short title. ‘Threpp Street 1888’ was the close examination of one year in the lives of the inhabitants of a London street in the area close to Shaftesbury Avenue then known as Seven Dials, a district so notorious that policemen had to walk through it in pairs, then a sign of serious social disorder. Threpp Street had an infant mortality rate of forty per cent; only one child in five born there reached the age of five. Only half the male adults in Threpp Street were in regular employment; one woman in six was engaged in prostitution. Annie’s research, involving drains, social mores, medical dispensary books, legislation, and parish, prison and hospital records was accurate and probing and considered a model of its kind. It was also written to reveal the breadth of her interests and in skilful prose – Annie’s father was a well-known writer – and the thesis easily gained her a PhD, publication in a learned journal and the offer of a teaching appointment at her college, a rare distinction at a time of heavy government cuts in her field.

  Annie’s friends had thought her mad to refuse the offer of a university post in order to marry Julian Vane and spend the early years of their marriage helping him to set up his graphics firm. Almost the only people to support her decision were her parents, Howard and Juliet Browning, who both thought she might be broadened by contact with another sort of world, even if it was for a relatively short time.

  Now Annie reflected mildly on the unhappy fate of one William Knipe, tenant at 20 Threpp Street, who on 22 December 1888 was stopped by a policeman at four in the morning pushing a handcart of small firs poached from a farm near Brighton. His idea had been to sell them on the streets of London to relieve the want and suffering of his wife and seven children. He’d got six months’ hard labour. She looked at Julian a little guiltily, knowing she must have on her face the expression he described as ‘dreams of Threpp Street’ and asked again, ‘Julian – do you want a drink?’ He was still standing near the door.

  ‘Whisky,’ he said at last.

  She poured it, though whisky was an unusual thing for him to drink, especially at this time of day. Julian
reached out for the glass, as though he didn’t want to get any closer to her, took a long swig and advanced into the middle of the room. Then he swung round and looked at her consideringly. She was tall with long black hair in a loose coil behind her head, wearing a dark green tank top and black trousers with pine needles adhering to them, and now stood framed against the bright colours of the abstract painting she didn’t really like.

  ‘You know your trouble,’ he said. ‘Annie? You don’t live in the same world as everybody else. That family of yours pushed you out into the world without any sense of the way things really are.’

  Shaken by his tone, she stared at him. It was a criticism he often made, generally jokingly. Now it seemed like a grudge. She examined the proposition, not for the first time. Her father and mother, both bone-thin, long-faced and mild-natured, like as brother and sister, though they were not related in any way, lived in the country, did their work – or rather, her mother did, her father, a novelist, hadn’t written a book for ten years – looked after their garden and their chickens and goats, thought seriously about current events, listened to music, did no harm. Each time some criticism from Julian forced her to consider that her parents might have sent her out into the world, unworldly, academic, unable to cope with life, she instinctively rejected the idea. On the other hand, her academic training insisted that she, the subject of the criticism, was the last person able to come to an objective conclusion. Academically, she sought evidence.

  Now she said, ‘If I don’t live in the same world as everybody else, as you say, which I take to mean that I don’t share the common assumptions of our times, don’t understand the conditions, and so forth, you can’t really blame Howard and Juliet. You wouldn’t claim that Jasmine’s like that, would you? Yet she’s just as much the product of Howard and Juliet’s upbringing as I am.’

  ‘Your sister,’ Julian said, ‘reacted against your family’s vague ways, that’s all. She couldn’t wait to marry money, and start acquiring jewellery, giving parties, having fun and jet-setting round the world. And look what they think of her. Of course, they don’t say anything – they’re too tolerant, understanding and generally high-minded. But Jasmine knows perfectly well they think she’s the black sheep of the family—’

  ‘I don’t think it’s at all fair to go on as if Jas had married Nigel just because he was rich. She’d known him from childhood and I’m sure she loves him. And I don’t think Howard and Juliet are as condemnatory as you think – anyway, what’s this all about? Have I made a mistake at the office? Is something wrong?’

  Annie was patient about Julian’s habit of not making his points in a clear and logical way. She put it down to his more creative nature. Her own training, she knew, was dull and academic.

  ‘No,’ he said in a flat, rather depressed voice, ‘you’ve done nothing wrong, Annie.’

  Puzzled, she moved towards him, only to see him flinch as if she were going to attack him. She stopped.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, Annie,’ he said again.

  She sat down on the armchair and swung it to face him. She felt numb and faintly anxious. As he made no move and did not speak she swung the chair a little more and gazed into the imitation log fire under the abstract painting. They said you couldn’t tell the difference between a real fire and the gas version, but you could. For one thing, the gas fire did not smell. At Froggett’s, where her parents lived, the fire in the sitting room smelt, belched smoke, sometimes emitted sparks which landed on the carpet. She gazed round the clean white room with its clean-lined furniture and couldn’t speak. A hostile and terrifying silence waited for her words, questions, statements. Julian wasn’t going to say anything. Whatever bad news waited – and she was sure it was bad news – she would have to urge it from him.

  The phone rang into the silence. Julian jumped slightly, turned and went quickly upstairs. He’d taken a lot of calls upstairs recently, she remembered. But this time he offered none of his usual explanations as he left the room – ‘I’ll take it upstairs – won’t interrupt the music’, ‘I’ll take it upstairs – there’s a letter there I have to refer to’, ‘I’ll take it upstairs—’ This time, Annie crossed the room and picked up the phone, feeling furtive and ashamed of herself. She heard Julian saying, ‘There’s no question of me not telling her, Tamsin. Of course there isn’t—’ and then a woman’s voice, interrupting: ‘There’s somebody on the line. I heard the phone being picked up. Someone’s listening in—’

  ‘It’s me, Annie,’ said Annie.

  There was a silence. Then the woman’s voice said coolly, ‘Who else would it be? I’ll put the phone down.’ There was the noise of the connection being broken, then the purr of the empty line.

  Annie, too, put the phone down and stood staring at the computer in front of her. Tamsin – Bell, was it? – worked as an account executive at the advertising agency, Churchill, Bromberry and Barlow. Vane Graphics occasionally did work for them. Tamsin had been on the account of Martha Kildare Kitchen Spices for whom Vane Graphics had designed new packaging though at the last moment after some presentations by Julian involving several meetings with Tamsin, Martha Kildare (in reality Gerald Robinson) had decided not to proceed. He was too attached to his grandfather’s old packaging, reminder of the days when the product was called Robinson’s Family Pickle and eaten all over the country at kitchen tables by men in collarless shirts and braces.

  Stunned, Annie suddenly felt like a stranger in someone else’s house and struggled to remember her first and only meeting with Tamsin Bell at a party at the advertising agency. Tamsin had worn a cream suit, for power, a silk shirt with a lot of buttons open, for sex, and had big white teeth and red lips for gobbling things up. In spite of Tamsin’s grown-up appearance, Annie had immediately thought of hockey fields and seen Tamsin, with large red legs, pounding down the middle of the field, shovelling the ball along, then cracking it into the goal with a hefty swing. She wouldn’t have been above striking a crafty blow at a contender’s shin either, so long as it could be made to look accidental.

  There were sounds overhead, as Julian moved about. Annie didn’t know what to do. She heard the lavatory flush and feet on the stairs, then Julian came into the room, holding an airbag. He said, ‘I suppose you’ve gathered what’s going on?’

  ‘You haven’t had to tell me,’ she remarked.

  ‘Our relationship’s been going on for about six months,’ he said. ‘It began at that conference in Paris you didn’t come to. Anyway …’ he paused, ‘there it is. I think it’s best if I move out. We can talk later. Will you be going down to Froggett’s for a while?’

  ‘Why – what’s happening?’ asked Annie. ‘What are you doing?’

  This seemed to irritate him. He had had time to think: she had had no warning. Julian said quietly, ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it, Annie. Look – this thing hasn’t been working out for some time, has it? We’re not really that well suited, are we? It’s been getting plainer and plainer, so now – well, I’ve met somebody else. I think it’s best if I just go, for the meanwhile. We can discuss details later. So it might be better if you go down to Howard and Juliet’s, put a bit of distance between us, get away from this house – you do see, don’t you?’

  Annie stood there with tears rolling down her cheeks.

  He watched her. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in me staying.’ He turned quickly and went into the hall, calling back, ‘Ring Howard and Juliet, that’s the best thing to do …’

  Annie heard the front door open and close.

  She did not ring her parents, or anyone else, and for the next three days and nights did not even leave the house. During that time she ignored the phone, left the post on the doormat, cried, and tried to work out what had gone wrong. She had had a happy childhood and an adolescence dominated by two passions: one for learning, the other for her cousin, Tom Pointon. A scholarship had taken her to Oxford, where she’d been happy
for six years, had a couple of unimportant boyfriends and enjoyed acting. Then she had met and married Julian. Even when her cousin Tom had mysteriously disappeared to Paris without any explanation she hadn’t mourned like this. She had trusted he’d be back. He had always been there and she had believed he always would be. In any case, almost immediately after Tom’s disappearance, she’d gone off to Oxford and begun a new life. Nothing had really equipped her for this most commonplace of events – a happy marriage overturned, suddenly, because her husband had met and fallen in love with another woman.

  During the three days of suffering a pain she thought would kill her, if she didn’t kill herself first, Annie went over and over everything about herself, Julian, the time they had spent together, what the marriage had been like. Part of her wanted to escape the pain as she would have tried to evade a fierce dog. She could have gone to her parents, an old friend who lived in London (there had been few new ones, except those she shared with Julian) or just away, somewhere, by herself. But her instinct was to hide, to try and work out what had happened, and what was going to happen.

  Thoughts swirled round her brain, memories surfaced and withdrew. What shocked her most was that Julian had been able to do what he’d done. She hadn’t thought him capable of it, which meant, unless he’d gone mad and become a stranger to himself, she had never known him. She had not understood that he was a man capable of pretending to work late at the office, even at weekends, for six months, deceiving her all the time with someone she’d dismissed as superficial and not very bright. He’d been sleeping with them both too. She couldn’t understand. How had he been able to do it?

  Sometimes, as a long day turned into a long night, as morning came, and the sounds of traffic on the main road got louder, the milkman called, the postman left a few Christmas cards, she wondered how it was she had noticed nothing. Then she wished many things: that she’d never met Julian, that she’d had his baby, that he’d come back, at any moment, saying it had all been a mistake.