A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4) Page 2
‘Stacey’s Sleuths is a big mistake,’ wrote the Financial Times critic. The Listener asked whether this was the best we could do. But the audiences adored it. Another six programmes were made and shown and then another ten. It was entertainment. It was soap opera. It was a cult.
Chapter One
When Viola Hutber came out of seclusion and began her campaign, she used Zoe Meredith’s picture in Toys and Teases and Rex’s cartoon-style books as her chief examples of depravity. She rapidly acquired fans. Some were real fanatics, others merely fantasisers. All acclaimed her public appearance and publicly stated principles.
Hilary Vivian’s books had broken records since the first one appeared in 1955. The author’s identity and even gender had been quite secret, and the books appealed equally to male and female readers. Their formula, as foiled copyists found, was inimitable, and spanned the categories of adventure, romance and mystery. The books were mocked by fashion leaders and despised by intellectuals, but their popularity proved that most people were neither. They were translated into every language that has an alphabet and their sales equalled those of Agatha Christie, if not those of the Bible and Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Nobody claimed that Hilary Vivian wrote improving literature, but sometimes at moments of crisis readers might remember how a heroine had endured or a hero acted, and take the courage to emulate them. Popular journalists and learned academics had tried to analyse Hilary Vivian’s appeal by expounding his or her implicit morality or exposing his or her prejudices. Investigators probed the pseudonym, but the publishers knew that they would lose their golden eggs if they let anyone find the goose, and until Viola Hutber appeared as Hilary Vivian in 1977, the secret was perfectly kept.
‘I felt forced to speak out. The state of our society prevented me from keeping quiet any longer,’ she would say later as her reason for emerging into the blaze of publicity that greeted the equation of Hilary Vivian with the retiring, domesticated widow who cultivated her garden in the provincial north Midlands countryside at Whitaker Episcopi.
It was a scoop for the BBC, and created worldwide interest. Whitaker Episcopi was besieged. Fame came like an explosion.
Who’s Who, 1979: Vivian, Hilary see Hutber, V.L.
Hutber, Viola Louise, author (as Hilary Vivian) b.5 Nov. 1915; d. Of Dr Edwin Hutber and Constance Amelia Hutber, née Rainsford, of Carmell.
Constance Amelia Hutber had given Dr Edwin the two sons he wanted and was horrified to find herself pregnant twelve years later within weeks of hearing that her elder son had been killed in Belgium with the British Expeditionary Force. Even then, even in Carmell, somebody might have been able to explain the impulse that drove the bereaved parents to bed together for the first time in years, but Dr Edwin Hutber called himself a doctor of the old school. He knew nothing about psychology and would not have believed a word of it. The menopausal baby, as he termed it, was unwelcome.
Educ. St Margaret’s School. WRNS 1938-46.
The terse entries in such directories are written by their subjects. Viola Hutber did not mention her famous experience as a heroine on Duaman.
*
Women did not go to sea with the Royal Navy. They wore their fetching uniforms at desks and behind driving wheels but handled no weapons. Industry and obedience were enforced, self-sacrifice expected, but never feats of arms, even though women in resistance groups all over the world were fighting and enduring beside their men.
Viola Hutber’s war was spent as an administrator. She was a uniformed office manager, very trim in her navy blue suit, her stocking seams straight up her calves, her carriage erect. The war did her and many of the other girls a lot of good. It was to establish another office that Viola Hutber was posted out to Singapore after the fall of Japan. She travelled by ship, train and flying boat. On the last leg of the journey she was allotted a place on a transport aircraft. Since neither the pilot nor the navigator survived, it was never explained how it happened to go off course or why it crashed. Three passengers were killed outright. The other eight suffered a variety of injuries, ranging from a broken back to Second Officer Hutber’s own gashed forearm.
Duaman was a small island in the Bay of Bengal. The plane came down in the jungle near a beach. The crash did not draw any natives, or any of the Japanese who were still on the island. At that stage of the war there were good reasons for lying low. There were also acceptable reasons for the Allied authorities not to have traced the aircraft. Duaman could have remained isolated for weeks or months, even for years.
Nine days after the crash, an American plane flew low overhead. The next morning rescuers arrived, to find six of the eight original survivors left alive. The two dead officers were a man from Intelligence and Viola Hutber’s senior officer. Both had been killed that very night, during their uneasy sleep. Natives, or Japanese soldiers, or outlaws, had crept out of the jungle to batter two of the party to death. So close to rescue, so long after the crash, it was tragic; but it was wartime, and the event was accepted without much surprise. In fact the surprising thing was that even six people had survived. They had rigged shelters of blankets and branches, built a fire, broken open the medical kit of the dead doctor; they had even found a supply of drinkable water. The dead Wren, First Officer Cormack, was the chief heroine of the adventure. All the others spoke of her calm courage, her resourcefulness, her sympathy. It was a welcome tale at a time when most news, apart from the very fact that hostilities had ceased, was frightful. Day after day the papers and newsreels told of the aftermath: the dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the half-dead from the camps, the war criminals who escaped death.
The name, Duaman, became understood as one that went with gallantry and endurance. A fictionalised version was filmed by the Ealing Studios. One of the survivors wrote a book with that title. The Poet Laureate dashed off a verse on the subject.
It was not mentioned, however, as part of the life history of Viola Hutber. Perhaps it had been so traumatic that she preferred to forget the whole episode.
M. Georg Kaminski (s. of Pavel Kaminski & Valentina, née Gromecki, Warsaw) dec. March 1973.
One of the passengers marooned on Duaman, Georg Kaminski was an outsider from the party of British service personnel, attached unwillingly and unwelcome to them. He had been in the camps; but before the war, working for the Polish Foreign Service, he had learnt not only Japanese but something of two Indonesian languages. He had been sent out as an interpreter.
Kaminski became an unsuccessful writer, his novels published in small editions, seldom reviewed, never profitable. He wrote many letters to many papers about the hardships of an author’s life; he listed the injustices, the poverty, the interruptions, the indifference of others. He was an embittered man whose grievances showed through his prose. No wonder it did not sell. No wonder his wife needed to make money, and no wonder that when she made it by writing best-sellers they kept quiet about it.
When Georg Kaminski’s widow created Watchwomen and faced the world, she reverted to her maiden name. Both it, and her pseudonym, were suitably British for that patriotic organisation.
Publications: seventy-six novels, as Hilary Vivian. As Viola Hutber: A Thousand Ways to Happiness, 1980; A Better Place, 1983.
Founder (1978) of Watchwomen; Life President, 1979.
Watchwomen: the voice of the silent majority, the reactionary backlash, the movement of those who knew that permissiveness had failed and that old standards of decency must be revived; the movement that pressed for the restoration of the old values implicit in Hilary Vivian’s novels. Viola Hutber, her two identities still mentioned together, though very soon either would be enough to identify her and would become useful to the compilers of crossword puzzles, spoke at the national meetings of women’s organisations and was televised in the Albert Hall, in the Winter Gardens at Blackpool, at Wembley Stadium. At one meeting the formation of a new movement was advocated from the floor. At another Viola Hutber was nominated to lead it. At a third its name was chosen.
Who’s Who 1982: Hutber, Viola Louise, D.B.E. (1981).
She accepted the title although she said it made her feel like a character in pantomime. She told David Frost about her hobbies (wine-making and natural history) and chose her best books of the year for Christmas editions of the Sunday papers (a life of Florence Nightingale and The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady). She argued on discussion programmes against prison reform and soft sentencing. She campaigned against easy abortion and contraception for children.
Address: The Gamekeeper’s Cottage, Whitaker Episcopi, Lodworth. Club: Portia.
An appearance of candour, but a secretive entry. It did not provide much for the managers of political campaigns to go on when it began to seem that Watchwomen, and their leader, could deliver a lot of votes.
Where there is political influence enquiries are bound to follow. Even someone with as open seeming a life as Dame Viola Hutber, the heroine of Duaman, the best-selling author, will become the subject of data that never appear in Who’s Who. Details will be checked and expanded, assumptions will be tested, actions will be recorded.
Analysis will cause unexpected connections to be made. Research will be undertaken. Investigations will proceed.
Chapter Two
Zoe Meredith, now Zoe Cory in private life, over in England for the Christmas holidays, went to the opening of an exhibition called Undervalued Painters of the Twenties with her husband Lawrence Cory.
Lawrence had been invited because he was known to be writing a book about Rex’s life and work. He had advertised the fact, staking his claim to the subject, with a notice in the Times Literary Supplement asking for information and for the sight of any pictures in private ownership. Responses had been few, and of them few had been useful, even though Rex’s work no longer seemed particularly shocking in a society long inured to more blatant pornography. The Tate Gallery had for a while hung its Rex painting; the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh had shown one of the ‘Stella’ series of pictures of a nubile girl with a star marked on her thigh, and one or two drawings had been offered in well publicised auction sales. A sketch of George V knighting a kneeling satyr had fetched as much money as a Gwen John portrait. It was rehabilitation time for Rex.
Television cameras were at the private-view party, filming for an arts programme. Many of the guests pretended to ignore them. It was a gathering at which most generations were represented; no-longer-young feminists with aggressively frizzed hair wore their identifying livery which took the form, that season, of maxims on their clothes. One knitted purple dress had a sentence in green and white letters spiralling up its expanded fabric: ‘All women are oppressed so all women must join together’. Younger women took their feminism more for granted. In this world of urban achievers they were as successful as their men and dressed like them, in suits, with briefcases instead of shoulder bags.
Zoe Meredith dressed the part of a successful young actress, in clothes designed by an Italian from a French-owned shop in an English pedestrian precinct. Lawrence Cory looked like the schoolmaster he had been when she first met him, as indeed he did during his brief experience of being in business, and still did now that he was unemployed and living in California. His personality required corduroy and shoes that could not take a shine. Zoe loved him more in spite of than because of his differences from her. Her education had been perfunctory, her homelife unstable and her experiences derived from the overlapping worlds of international diplomacy and the stage. Lawrence was not comfortable in either of her environments, preferring what he had taught her to enjoy too, a private life in the company of uncompetitive people. At this party, to which Zoe had come only as Lawrence’s appendage, she was recognised and he was not. All the same, the young publisher who had expressed cautious interest in Lawrence’s research did remember to introduce him to Lady Digby.
Chantal Digby: a fashionable hostess of the inter-war years, talent spotter, snob. She filled her house with artists from backgrounds that she would never admit to recognising. Her mantelpieces were decorated with signed photographs of minor British royalty and deposed foreign monarchs, and when she travelled her progress from yacht to palace, from grousemoor to spa, was charted for the delectation of the proletariat. She flashed through the social world of the period like an express train between the tunnels of war.
In 1939 Chantal made the wrong bet. Finding herself out of the firing line in Argentina, where she had gone to watch her current husband play polo, convinced of the cataclysm to come back home, she stayed where she was. She ostensibly, and ostentatiously, collected comforts for the Allies; in fact she provided them for their enemies.
Having lived by gossip Chantal Digby was destroyed by it. The secret did not take long to reach London. After the war she tried to make a come-back in the society that once before, as a newcomer from Baltimore, she had conquered, but now she suffered the results of defeat. Only the wrong people accepted her invitations to enjoy black-market luxuries. On a visit to Deauville there was talk of shaved heads and tarred feathers. Later in that year she returned to Buenos Aires.
Old scores die hard, but they do die. By the eighties Chantal’s name was mentioned without acrimony in memoirs of London half a century earlier. An account of her famous parties appeared in a fashionable magazine, by the socialist life peer Peter Munvies who had been patronised by Chantal Digby in his youth and was now able to pay the insult back with interest. He wrote scathingly of her entertainments, drawing a nasty little vignette of guests mocking their hostess across a crowded ballroom. He recounted a tale that had already become a legend of the period, about Lady Digby paying a gang of her Bohemian protégés to disrupt a fancy-dress ball given by her rival, Mrs Smith. He described Lady Digby herself arriving at a ducal house for an evening with royalty, drunk, and turned away by the footmen. It was an unpleasant piece that matched the snide, denigratory tone of the magazine’s other editorial comment, and was commented on by other magazines. One claimed that Lord Munvies was repaying an ancient debt; Chantal Digby in her prime had rejected his advances. Later, in his, Lord Munvies had gleefully rejected hers. A visit to the Argentine, an invitation, a bitter, much quoted snub. He was heard to boast that his rejection by that voracious female was a distinction in itself.
A voracious female, then, and so at close range she looked, though from the far side of the gallery, seen from behind, a blonde woman, very thin, wearing red satin below bare shoulders, with a tiara; she looked young.
She explained her dress. ‘A gala performance at Covent Garden,’ she said with a flickering gesture of diamond laden fingers.
‘I suppose I’d better introduce you to her,’ Paul Dillon said with a sigh. ‘Do you want to come, Tamara?’ The young publisher’s companion, at first sight a bit of juvenile fluff, turned out on closer inspection to be at least old enough to have acquired the title, doctor. ‘Tamara Hoyland,’ Paul Dillon had said. ‘We are together,’ and Dr Hoyland had made a just perceptible gesture that made it instantly clear that she and Paul Dillon were together only in public and only for the evening.
‘I think I’ll have a look at the pictures,’ she said. ‘They are much better than I expected. I’d love to have that “Stella” nude over there.’ She pointed towards a terracotta sketch on
pinkish paper, a transparent, almost floating impression of a girl combing her hair. ‘They are way above my means though.’
Lawrence edged through indifferent backs towards Lady Digby. She clasped his hand in both her own, which felt intensely smooth and soft like kid, though her gloves were peeled back from the wrist leaving the liver spotted flesh uncovered. Every other visible inch of skin had been dealt with, and was smooth and taut, but one would not, Lawrence thought, say that she was ‘marvellous for her age’ or even wonder ‘how does she do it?’ Rather there was something sinister and repulsive about new flesh on old bones. Only the accent was unmodified by fashion.
‘Cory? I once knew some Corys, in Derbyshire, near my second husband’s place.’
‘My father came from Derbyshire originally.’
‘What was his first name?’
‘Allan. Allan Cory.’
‘Allan Cory,’ Chantal Digby repeated attentively, with her practised technique of seeming to concentrate on the men she wanted to attract. Her pale eyes stared into Lawrence’s.
‘Lawrence is writing a book about an old pal of yours, Chantal,’ Paul Dillon said. ‘About Rex.’
‘About Rex. Really.’ Her left hand still held Lawrence’s right, her right hand stroked gently against his. But she wasn’t thinking about me, he told Zoe later. It was just the way she treats men. Habit, nothing more.
‘I believe that you may be able to tell me something about Rex, Lady Digby,’ Lawrence said, wondering how many other names she had used since she last had a right to that one.
‘What can have given you the idea of writing about Rex?’ she asked, sustaining the air of enthralment.