* * *
No letter came for Charlotte, no postcard from South Africa. We learned, through Betty Curnow and Lily Tonkins, that Mrs. Tolliver had gone to spend a few days with a friend at Helford. Which made three people who had run away.
We constructed furniture for the doll’s house out of empty matchboxes; we painted wallpaper. We raided Phoebe’s rag bag and made carpets from scraps of tweed with fringed ends. Just like real, said Charlotte when we laid them, and she closed the door of the dolls’ house and put her face to the window, loving the smallness of everything, the little, safe, miniature world.
* * *
One night, “I can’t bear to see you looking so unhappy,” Phoebe told me, but I pretended that I had not heard her, because I did not want to talk about Daniel.
He was gone. Back to his nomadic, searching, restless life. Back to his painting, his exhibition, Peter Chastal. Perhaps, by now, back to America. Much later, when he felt able, maybe he would send me a postcard. I saw it, dropping through the letter box of my front door in Islington. A brightly coloured picture of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps, or the Golden Gate bridge, or Fujiyama.
Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Daniel.
There was a future. My future. My job, my flat, my own friends. I would go back to London and pick up the threads again. But on my own, as I had never been alone before.
I had the dream again, the swimming dream. It was the same as before. The water first shallow, and then deep and warm. The racing current. The sensation of being swept along by this flood, not struggling but acquiescent. Not dying, I reminded myself at the end of the dream. Not dying, but loving. So why did I wake with tears wet on my cheeks?
* * *
The passing days had lost their names, just as I had lost all sense of their passing. Then suddenly it was a Tuesday and time to be practical. Phoebe had decided the previous evening that I should drive her and Charlotte into Penzance, where we would buy the new navy-and-white school uniform. Perhaps, as a treat, we would have lunch in a restaurant or go down to the harbour and see if the Scilly Islands steamer was in.
But these plans did not come off, because early that morning Lily Tonkins rang to say that Ernest, her husband, had been taken poorly. Phoebe answered the telephone call, and Charlotte and I stood around and listened to the quaking voice over the line.
“Up all night,” Lily told Phoebe.
Phoebe said, “Oh, dear.”
Lily enlarged on the details. Phoebe’s face took on an expression of horror. “Oh, dear.” After this she hastily agreed that on no account was Lily to abandon her ailing husband until the doctor had seen him. She rang off. Lily was not coming to work today.
We hastily changed our arrangements. I would stay at Holly Cottage to do a bit of sketchy housework and cook the lunch, and Mr. Thomas, in his trusty taxi, would be asked to make the trip into Penzance with Phoebe and Charlotte.
Charlotte was slightly indignant about this.
“I thought we were going to have lunch in a restaurant.”
“It wouldn’t be any fun without Prue,” Phoebe told her briskly. “We’ll do it another day, when I have to go and see the bank manager or have my hair done.”
A telephone call was duly made, and Mr. Thomas turned up in ten minutes with his chauffeur’s hat on his head and the wheels of his car encrusted in pig manure. Phoebe and Charlotte clambered in, and I waved them away and then returned indoors to deal with the morning chores.
They were not very arduous. Lily cleaned the house so thoroughly every day that once I had made the beds, scoured the bath, and cleared the ashes out of the sitting room grate, everything looked more or less as usual. I went into the kitchen, made a cup of coffee and started to peel potatoes. It was a grey, still day, with rain in the air. When I had finished the potatoes, I pulled on a pair of rubber boots and went down to the vegetable garden to cut a cauliflower. As I returned to the house, I heard the sound of a car coming down the road towards the house. I looked at my watch and saw that it was only an hour since Phoebe and Charlotte had set off. There was no way that the shopping expedition could be over so soon.
The car came over the railway bridge, and I knew then that it was heading for Holly Cottage, for we were the last house on the road, and at the end of it lay only the dead end, the padlocked iron gates of the old shipyard.
I hurried back inside. In the kitchen I laid my knife and the cauliflower on the draining board, and then, still wearing Lily’s apron and my boots, went through the hall and out the front door.
There, on the gravel, was parked an unfamiliar car. An Alfa-Romeo, long and sleek, dark green and travel-stained. The driver’s door was already open, and behind the wheel, his eyes on my face, sat Daniel.
On that still, misty morning, there was little sound. Then, from far away, I heard the scream of some gulls flying low over the empty sands of the estuary. Slowly, he climbed out of the car and straightened himself cautiously, arching his back, and putting up a hand to massage the back of his neck. He was wearing his usual strange assembly of clothes, and there lay the dark shadow of stubble on his chin. He shut the car door behind him, and it closed with a solid expensive-sounding thud. He said my name.
That proved it was true. He wasn’t in London. He wasn’t in New York. He wasn’t in San Francisco. He was here. Back. Home.
I said, “What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“Who’s car is that?”
“Mine.” He began to walk stiffly towards me.
“But you hate cars.”
“I know, but it’s still mine. I bought it yesterday.” He reached my side and put his hands on my shoulders and stooped and kissed my cheek, and his chin felt rough and scratchy against my skin. I looked up at him. His face was colourless, grey with tiredness, but his eyes were bright with secret laughter.
“You’re wearing Lily’s apron.”
“Lily’s not here. Ernest’s ill. You haven’t shaved.”
“Didn’t have time. I left London at three o’clock this morning. Where’s Phoebe?”
“She and Charlotte have gone to do some shopping.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
“Yes … yes, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that you were the last person I expected to see. Come along. I’ll make you some coffee, or bacon and eggs if you want something to eat.”
“Coffee would be fine.”
We went back indoors. The house felt warm after the chilly dampness outside. I led the way through the hall and heard him close the front door behind us. In the kitchen I saw the cauliflower and the knife by the sink where I had left them, and for a moment, so disoriented was I, found myself wondering what I had intended doing with them.
I filled the electric kettle and plugged it in and switched it on. When I turned around, I saw that Daniel had pulled out a chair and was sitting at the head of the long scrubbed pine table. He had an elbow on the table and was rubbing his eyes with his hand, as though it were possible to erase exhaustion.
He said, “I haven’t driven so far or so fast in my life, I don’t think.” He took his hand away and looked up at me, and I had forgotten the darkness of his eyes, the pupils round and dark as black olives. He still looked exhausted, but there was something else about him, an exhilaration, perhaps, that I could not fathom, because I had not seen it in him before.
I said, “What made you buy a car?”
“I wanted to get back to you all, and it seemed the quickest way.”
“Have you found out how the heater works?”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but it helped break the tension.
He smiled. “Not yet. Like I told you, I’ve only had it for a day.” He crossed his arms on the tabletop. He said, “Phoebe told me, you know. About Annabelle and Leslie Collis and Mrs. Tolliver.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And Charlotte.”
“Yes.”
“Was Charlott
e disappointed about the picnic?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t stay, Prue. I had to get away. By myself. Do you understand?”
“Where did you go?”
“I went back to Porthkerris. I walked back, over the dunes and along the cliffs. When I got back to the Castle Hotel, I packed my suitcase without any clear idea of what I was going to do next. But then, when it was packed, I picked up the telephone and rang Lewis Falcon. I’d been meaning to get in touch with him ever since I got down here, but somehow with one thing and another I’d never got around to it. He was great. I told him who I was and said that we’d never met. And he said that he knew who I was, because he’d heard about me through Peter Chastal, and why didn’t I come out to Lanyon to see him? So I said I’d do that, but what I needed was a bed for a couple of nights, and he said that would be okay too. So I checked out and got a taxi to drive me to Lanyon.
“He’s a marvellous man. Immensely likeable, totally uncurious. With him, I found I could switch off; as though I were pulling down a great fireproof safety curtain between myself and everything that Phoebe had told me. The psychoanalyst’s seventh veil, perhaps. He showed me his studio, and we looked at his work, and we talked shop as though nothing else existed for either of us.
“That was all right for a couple of days, and then I knew that I had to get back to London. So he drove me to the station and I caught the morning train.
“When I got to London I went to the gallery to see Peter. I was still in this extraordinary state of mind … it was like being insulated from reality. The curtain was still down, and I knew that Annabelle and Charlotte were behind it, but for the time being they had simply ceased to exist, and all I could do was carry on with my ordinary life as though nothing had happened. I didn’t say anything about them to Peter. The exhibition is still on, the gallery still full of visitors. We sat in his office and ate sandwiches and had a glass of beer, and watched them through the glass of the door as though they were goldfish in a tank. Those were my pictures they were looking at, but I couldn’t relate myself either to the pictures or to them. Nothing seemed to have anything to do with me.
“Then I left Peter and I went out and started walking. It was a beautiful afternoon. I walked for miles along the embankment, and eventually I realized that I’d reached Millbank and I was standing outside the Tate Gallery. Do you know the Tate?”
“Yes.”
“Do you go there?”
“Often.”
“Do you know the Chantrey collection?”
“No.”
“I went up the steps and into the gallery. I made for the room where the Chantrey collection is hung. There’s a picture in it by John Singer Sargent. It’s an oil. Quite big. Two little girls in a garden at night, lighting Japanese lanterns. They’re wearing white dresses with frilled collars. There are lilies growing and pink roses. It’s called Carnation Lily, Lily Rose. One of the little girls has short, dark hair and a very thin, delicate white neck, like the stem of a flower. She could be Charlotte.
“I don’t know how long I stood there. But after a bit, very slowly, I realized that that safety curtain was going up, and little by little I was being flooded with—extraordinary instincts I’d never known I possessed. Tenderness. Protectiveness. Pride. And then anger. I began to be angry. Angry with all of them. Annabelle, and her husband and her mother. But most of all angry with myself. What the bloody hell was I doing, I asked myself, when she was my child, and I was her father, goddamn it. What the bloody hell was I doing, unloading all my responsibilities onto Phoebe? The answer was painfully simple. I was standing there doing nothing, which was what I had been doing for the past three days. Running on the spot, we used to call it at school. Getting nowhere. Achieving absolutely bugger all.
“I left the picture, and I went downstairs and found a telephone. I rang Directory enquiries and got Mrs. Tolliver’s telephone number. And then I rang White Lodge. Mrs. Tolliver wasn’t there…”
“She’s visiting a friend in Helford,” I told Daniel. I might just as well not have spoken.
“… but her housekeeper answered the telephone and I told her that I was a friend of Leslie Collis and I wanted to get in touch with him, and she was able to give me the name of the firm where he works in the City.”
The kettle was boiling, but we both seemed to have forgotten about coffee. I switched it off and then went to pull out a chair and to sit at the other end of the table, so that Daniel and I faced each other down its long scrubbed length.
“So, another phone call. I rang Leslie Collis. I said I wanted to see him. He began by saying that it wasn’t convenient, but I insisted it was urgent, so he finally said that he could give me fifteen minutes or so if I could come right away.
“I went out of the Tate and got a taxi and went to his office. The City was looking very beautiful. I’d forgotten how beautiful it is, with all those ponderous buildings and narrow streets, and everywhere sudden unexpected glimpses of St. Paul’s. One day I must go back and do some drawings…”
The words died. He had lost the thread of what he was telling me.
“Leslie Collis,” I reminded him gently.
“Yes, of course.” He put up his hand and ran his fingers through his hair. He began to laugh. “It was the most ludicrous interview. In the first place, I was looking even more reprehensible than I usually do. Again, I don’t think I’d shaved, and I was wearing the shirt I’d worn on the train, and a pair of sneakers with holes in the toes. He, on the other hand, was all resplendent in his City gear, starched collar, pinstripe suit. We made the most incongruous pair of antagonists. Anyway, I sat down and started to talk, and as soon as I mentioned Mrs. Tolliver and Charlotte, he immediately decided I’d come to blackmail him, and he was on his feet, shouting me down, threatening to call the police. And then I started shouting, too, just to try and make myself heard, and for a moment or two there was total pandemonium with both of us accusing each other, claiming responsibility, disclaiming responsibility, blaming each other, blaming Annabelle.
“But finally, just as I’d decided he was going to keel over with a heart attack and leave me with a corpse on my hands as well as everything else, it got through to him that I wasn’t a villain come to bleed him white. After that things got a bit better. We both sat down again, and he lit a cigarette, and we started all over.”
“You didn’t like him, did you?”
“Why? Didn’t you?”
“When I saw him that morning on the train, I thought he was the most horrible man.”
“He’s not that bad.”
“But saying he never wants Charlotte again…”
“I know. That’s rotten. But, in a way, I see his point of view. He’s an ambitious man. He’s worked his butt off all his life to make a lot of money and achieve his ambitions. I think he probably genuinely adored Annabelle. But he must have known all along, from the very first, that she could never be faithful to him. Even so, he stuck to her, gave her everything she wanted, bought the house in Sunningdale so that the boy could be brought up in the country. She had a car of her own, a maid, a gardener, holidays in Spain, total freedom. He kept saying, ‘I gave her everything. I gave that woman bloody everything.’”
“Did he know from the first that Charlotte wasn’t his baby?”
“Yes, of course he knew. He hadn’t seen Annabelle for three months, and then she came back from Cornwall and told him that she was pregnant. And that’s a pretty good kick in the balls for any self-respecting man.”
“Why didn’t he end it then?”
“He wanted to keep the family together. He’s devoted to his son. He didn’t want to lose face with his friends.”
“He never liked Charlotte, though.”
“It’s hard to blame him for that.”
“Did he say he didn’t like her?”
“More or less. He said she was sly. He said she told lies.”
“If she did, it was his fault.”
“Th
at’s what I told him.”
“That must have gone down well.”
“Oh, it was all right. By then we’d reached the stage when all the cards were on the table, and we could insult each other as much as we liked, with no offence given or taken. It was almost as though we’d made friends.”
It was hard to imagine. “But what did you talk about?”
“We talked about everything. I told him that Charlotte was going to stay with Phoebe, and in the end he finally admitted that he was grateful. And he was also quite pleased to hear that she wasn’t going back to that school. Annabelle had chosen it for the child, but in his opinion it had never been worth the massive fees he’d had to fork out each term. I asked about the boy Michael, but Collis seemed to think that he was no problem. He’s fifteen and apparently mature, well able to look after himself, do his own thing. I think the general feeling was that he’d outgrown his mother and, considering the way she was carrying on, would be better away from her influence. Leslie Collis is going to sell the house in the country and get a place in London. He and the boy will live there together.”
“I’m sorry for Michael.”
“I’m sorry for him, too. I’m sorry for everybody in this unholy mess. But I believe he’ll probably be all right. The father thinks the world of him, and they appear to be the best of friends.”
“And what about Annabelle?”
“He’s spoken to his lawyer, and divorce proceedings are already underway. Leslie Collis is not a man to let the grass grow under his feet.”
I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t, so I said, “Which leaves us back at square one. What’s going to happen to Charlotte? Or didn’t you talk about her?”
“Of course we talked about her. That was the whole object of the exercise.”
“Leslie Collis knows you’re her father?”
“Sure, that was the first thing I told him. And he doesn’t want her back.”
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