A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4) Page 3

  ‘I always admired his work, ever since I found his books on my father’s shelves, and when I was a schoolboy I picked up one of his sketches in a junk shop. My headmaster rather liked it, oddly enough. He told me quite a lot about the painter, as much as there was to know, at least. After that I thought I’d try to find out more.’

  ‘Where did you go to school?’ That automatic English question; you’d have thought, Lawrence complained later, that she would have lost the habit of asking it.

  ‘I was at a small place in the north of England. St Uny’s, Carmell.’

  Lady Digby snapped herself into her next move. ‘Goodness, I had no idea it was so late. I must go. You’ve kept me so fascinated, you wicked young man.’

  ‘But you haven’t—’

  ‘I tell you what. Watch me on television.’

  ‘There is to be a programme to go with this exhibition.’ The owner of the gallery dropped Lady Digby’s sables over her shoulders. She turned to wave to Lawrence as she was escorted to the door, like a girl, laughing, resigned, torn by social duties from her lover’s side.

  ‘Disgusting,’ Lawrence muttered.

  ‘Pathetic,’ Zoe said equally softly. A prophesy of her own elderly self flashed through her mind. She would wear grey hair in a bun with pince-nez; a battle-axe, not a Peter Pan.

  ‘I shall ask you to dinner,’ Lady Digby called, her eyes flashing an old invitation to a new man.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Not the Women’s Movement. A women’s movement. We are women united in a common cause but women are not our cause.’

  ‘You can’t wonder at my wanting to join,’ Tamara Hoyland said.

  Watchwomen insisted on a formal entry procedure. Applicants came for interview and were asked questions to expose their motives; they filled in a multiple-choice test paper. ‘We have to protect ourselves against being infiltrated by the opposition. Now that the movement is so large we need to be careful. It would be easy to pervert our aims.’

  Tamara’s replies and references were impeccable. She was offered membership on the spot.

  ‘Don’t you have to refer back or get some authorisation?’

  But Watchwomen, she was told, was not like that.

  When women’s groups and feminist organisations were innovations themselves, their system of having no system was also revolutionary. They dispensed with chains of command, they managed without chairpersons, presidents, bosses and underlings, despising such masculine hierarchies. The revolution was to be of practice as well as principle.

  Watchwomen was a reaction against the women’s movement in that it was repressive rather than libertarian. Watchwomen said that feminism had been hi-jacked by the lesbian Left. One of its mottoes was ‘Women are Right’ and many of its members accepted all the senses of the word. All the same, it was a modern movement. Dame Viola Hutber as the conceiver, founder and inspiration was Watchwomen’s Life President, but all the other members were equal, sharing the work and rewards indiscriminately. Women who had time gave their work; women who had money contributed it; women who had ideas shared them. Every member, they insisted, whether new or of long standing, was equally valuable and equally influential.

  ‘I work as the Leader’s dogsbody, for example,’ Noelle Stephenson said. She came forward to kiss Tamara’s cheeks. ‘Welcome to Watchwomen. It changes lives. You’ll never regret joining.’

  ‘I hope to be of some use, though I’m not sure what good an archaeologist could be.’ Tamara worked for the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, whose task was to catalogue the material remains of the English past. She said apologetically, ‘In a way I’m just a sort of civil servant.’

  ‘Never mind, I’m just a sort of handmaiden. I ought to change my name to Ancilla,’ Noelle replied. Tamara, the only other person there with a classical education, smiled, and Noelle went on, ‘I fetch drinks and provide hankies and keep ready money in my handbag. All I wish is that I’d known I’d be doing it for Hilary Vivian when I was younger. I’d have died of happiness.’

  ‘Lucky you didn’t then,’ one of the other women said. ‘Novels are all very well, but the movement’s what matters. Now, Tamara, do you want to be an active member? Or just give moral support?’

  ‘I would prefer to help, in some way.’

  ‘Was it you that broadcast a programme about Gertrude Bell?’

  ‘Yes, it was one in a series. Five programmes about women archaeologists.’

  ‘So do another, about Dame Viola.’

  ‘It might not be easy to get a commission just for . . .’

  ‘No, I mean a series. Women of our time, or women of influence, something like that. We can work something out.’

  *

  The commission to write a series of programmes about women archaeologists had been wished, or passed, on to Tamara by Thea Crawford, once her tutor, now a colleague and friend. Thea Crawford had better things to do with her time. Tamara, who liked to be fully occupied, thought this would fill spare time nicely. Thea was objective and discouraging. She said, ‘I should think it will be deadly boring. Not the sort of radio I’d want to hear, let alone write. And no, you may not interview me.’

  Tamara had no previous experience of broadcasting and was excited. The research was easy, not being from original sources, and putting the results together even easier. Tamara wrote a popular book to appear when the programmes went out. It was full of dreamy illustrations of the deserts in which Gertrude Bell and Daisy Bates had worked, and of the vastness of Kathleen Kenyon’s Jericho. The front cover showed some of the gorgeous medieval jewellery that Joan Evans had studied. ‘I adore broadcasting,’ Tamara wrote in her Christmas card to the Crawfords that year, and Thea rang up on Boxing Day to warn that it was just because it was not her everyday work. ‘It’s fun because its only aim is entertainment,’ Tamara explained, and Thea said that on the contrary, the whole of archaeology was entertainment; its only function was to give pleasure. To enrich the mind? Tamara suggested, and Thea retorted that Tamara should be honest with herself. ‘You aren’t an undergraduate now. It has no practical purpose but pleasure. Nice work if you can get it.’

  Tamara did not believe that Thea Crawford, that most scrupulous of scholars, meant what she said; however, there was no need even to try to find a metaphysical justification for broadcasting. It was pure show-biz, and Tamara loved it.

  ‘And you were very good at it,’ Noelle Stephenson told her. ‘I’m sure the same sort of profile of the leader would be terrifically influential. It will be much more effective than overt propaganda.’

  Tamara managed to sell the idea of the new series to the producer of the last one; he sold it to the controller of BBC Radio 4. The series would be called The Feminine Influence, and its theme would be the influence that women exercised over public affairs through persuasion rather than overt power. Many Victorian wives believed that they were more powerful without a vote; many modern women thought they got further using pillow and table talk than they ever could by standing for election. ‘Softlee softlee catchee monkey,’ the producer said, and Tamara said, ‘Actually I rather disapprove of it.’

  ‘Which will make it all the better radio,’ he said, pleased.

  The series would be about five worthy women: Evangeline Smith, a Life Peeress who had been ennobled as a consolation for her politician-husband’s early death; Carrie Spearman, the wife of a bishop who said that he only preached sermons she had approved; Nan Roget, the driving force behind her husband’s efforts to break speed records; C.K.Isbister, whose research had been the basis for the seminal ideas of the psychiatrist Xavier Murphy; and Viola Hutber – an influence on countless voters.

  The research and recording was scheduled to take about a year. Tamara would be researcher, writer and presenter. ‘Let me know if you need any help,’ the producer said. But the only help Tamara required, Watchwomen could provide. The producer was anxious about the ethics. ‘You might not seem objective.’

  ‘I need the inside
view.’

  Journalists who joined witches’ covens or gambling clubs in order to expose them were frowned upon in the profession. But Tamara belonged to a different union.

  ‘You won’t get into trouble through me; and I can take care of myself.’

  Chapter Four

  After dinner, which they had at the Ritz, to the accompaniment of a singer and a jazz pianist from old-time Harlem, Lady Digby insisted on the Corys coming back to her apartment to see the video of herself on television.

  Zoe and Lawrence waited while she signed her bill.

  ‘Must we go back with her?’ Lawrence whispered.

  ‘Hadn’t we better? She still hasn’t come out with anything useful about Rex.’

  ‘Not that we’d have heard it if she had.’ The singer had drowned conversation; just as well, perhaps. In Lady Digby’s quiet apartment, the television programme was precisely audible.

  Lawrence and Zoe had not watched it, but had seen a trailer of some survivors from the twenties in an eighties-style studio with the camera aimed unkindly from below. There had been party scenes, which had offended the only reviewer who wrote about the programme.

  ‘How did civilisation come to be represented by ugly people in noisy rooms drinking degraded wine and nibbling unhealthy titbits?’ he rhetorically asked, and went on to grumble about his annual spate of invitations to publicity stunts, book-launching parties, and free entertainment that paid for a mention in print. He was reviewing for a weekly with a social conscience at the time, an unwise medium for his diatribe, which sparked off a spirited correspondence about his ingratitude, arrogance and luck to be invited to any parties at all. The topic went on trickling through the letter page for several issues, all rather peevish and dull and comprehensible only by regular subscribers. But as one of them had remarked early on in the argument, the television programme that started it was quite good, as such programmes go; and as such programmes go it went out of the minds of ninety-nine per cent of its viewers. All the participants, on the other hand, repeatedly re-ran the tapes.

  Lady Chantal Digby, Lord Munvies and C.K.Isbister, the last at least a well known name, for C.K.Isbister was regarded by some people as a symbol, by some others as a prophet. Her seminal work about housewives had been hugely influential in the sixties. Later she became a figurehead of the women’s liberation movement.

  C.K.Isbister said to the cameras that Rex had been an apostle of freedom. ‘A spokesman for a generation. It was our generation that broke the bounds, that blazed the trail for all of you – all you who have derived the benefit of our iconoclasm. It was we who were young then who initiated the revolution in awareness, we who understood that private lives were the key to public affairs. We were the first to consider the intérieur.’ She said the last word with agonising Frenchness, rolling the consonants against her soft palate and then, experienced in finding the camera’s red light, she faced her audience and went on, ‘You who have inherited the freedoms for which we fought and suffered, you, the heirs of the sexual revolution, you can never imagine the conventions against which we battled.’

  She had made the speech often before. The interviewer was a young, self-conscious provincial. He was rumoured to practise his non-metropolitan vowel sounds daily. He said, ‘Still plenty of conventions where I grew up.’

  C.K.Isbister did not care very much about the provinces or about men. ‘In this city, among thinkers, all of us free women, we smashed barriers of falsity and hypocrisy . . .’ The speech, its cadences and sentence structures perfected, its hand emphases rehearsed, earned money that was handed over by club secretaries after luncheons, folded into a discreet envelope. ‘Empathy, compassion, the caring society, all – all the consequences of our vision. The artist and the thinker, hand in hand.’ She paused and stared at the camera, the experienced mouth dropped a little open. That was the point at which she was accustomed to waiting for the applause to die down.

  ‘Sad for you,’ the interviewer said cheerfully. ‘To have been a spur of the new world and live as a reminder of the old one.’ He went straight on to read from the teleprompter the introduction of a less pathetic survivor. He quoted, without attribution, from the exhibition’s catalogue, saying that Chantal Digby had been an accurate barometer of talent. Promising writers she subsidised, promising actors she backed, promising musicians she invited to perform. Later she took credit for any successes; but as the interviewer said, ‘They didn’t have an Arts Council then.’

  Rex had been one of Chantal Digby’s young men and posterity would admire her judgement.

  The camera turned to Chantal Digby’s saurian smile, her lips like lizard skin, their red colour cracked in the heat. ‘Rex came to me as a simple, inexperienced boy, but he was endlessly inventive. I taught him a lot.’

  The film’s director was too skilled to insert direct comment. From a woman of Chantal Digby’s age the idea was truly obscene, enough to make a viewer celibate. ‘I was a partner in Rex’s experiments from the beginning,’ she boasted. ‘I invested in the Cavalier Press, and I was the taster of his notions.’ The film cut to some of the notions: a rapid superimposition of the drawings, explicit, excoriant, economical.

  ‘And you knew that country hide-out where he met his death?’

  ‘Oh.’ Chantal Digby’s intoned ‘oh’, long drawn out, descending, diminuendo, greeted people and remarks she chose to denigrate. It had resounded through the restaurants and ballrooms of pre-war London. ‘Oh, there’s a tale to tell of that, I promise you. So much that couldn’t be told. But perhaps it can. Perhaps it should and will be. I shall be brave. I shall set the record straight. I can tell you things about that day . . .’ Her face, caught in a moment of roguish triumph, turned fully to the lens.

  Marvellous television, Zoe thought, watching that greedy, experienced smile, the self-confident flash of the eye.

  ‘We’re all agog,’ the interviewer said.

  ‘Wait for my memoirs,’ Lady Digby’s already much trailed anecdotes, soon to be ghost written into a full-scale autobiography, were to be her passport back into the swing of London life. She was still eager and ambitious, and believed that time excused all misbehaviour. ‘I shall be candid. Revelations!’ she promised. ‘How lucky that there’s no libelling the dead.’

  The programme was not over but Chantal Digby turned the tape off. ‘I don’t appear again. Well, what did you think?’

  Zoe was practised in praising dreadful performances. Lawrence tried to persuade her to tell what she had hinted. ‘We won’t repeat it.’

  ‘I have to be very careful.’ Lady Digby twisted her pearls between scarlet tipped, diamond laden fingers. ‘The story of Rex . . .’

  ‘But he’s dead.’

  ‘And thereby hangs a tale.’

  ‘Won’t you tell it?’

  Half flirtatious, half solemn, she said, ‘Libel is the stumbling block. You see, the question is, is everyone dead?’

  ‘Rex? Surely—’

  ‘Rex . . . and the others . . . wouldn’t you like to know, young man? You would like to know. You really would like to know.’

  ‘I said so,’ Lawrence said.

  ‘I shall have to ask . . . someone else. Someone else I’m seeing here.’

  Zoe was bored by the heavy hints and promises. She stood by the window, peering out through the slatted blinds that hung between the double sheets of glass. The noise of the traffic did not penetrate into the flat, still, too hot air of the apartment. The atmosphere was not unlike a recording studio, where sound waves are muffled against padding. She listened to Lawrence wheedling and cajoling and wondered how he could.

  The old woman would not expand on her heavy hints. ‘It’s all hold-the-front-page stuff,’ she said, teasing.

  Later, welcoming the chill drizzle in Piccadilly, the Corys walked to the underground station. Lawrence speculated about the revelations to come.

  ‘Don’t be silly, there aren’t any.’ Zoe was certain that Lady Digby had nothing to tell. ‘It’s pat
hetic. Like a child hoping for attention. She’d do anything to get her name into the papers again, that’s all. You wait and see.’

  Chapter Five

  Tamara could not yet decide how to tackle the programme about Dame Viola Hutber, and was simply collecting material to arrange later. She began with the Hulton Picture Library and the archives of newsreels.

  Haggard, gallant men waved from their stretchers as they arrived back in Blighty from Duaman. Viola Hutber, in uniform, with her arm in a sling, was the only woman to survive, and the cameramen and photographers had aimed their lenses at her but, through shyness or inexperience, she kept her face obscured under a hand or a handkerchief, or turned away so that she could not have been recognised by anyone who knew her. And she did not turn up at the reunion a year later (shown in Picture Post) or to watch the senior officer leave Buckingham Palace with a medal on his lapel.

  There were tapes in the sound archives. The voice of a young parasitologist telling how the dead Wren Cormack had nursed him after the crash, and the same voice, gravelly after thirty years, telling of the work that had won him a Nobel Prize.

  Another man praised Viola Hutber. Those two girls performed miracles, he said. If it hadn’t been for First Officer Cormack knowing what to do, nobody would have survived. Dillon might not have made it anyway, even without the bandits who killed in the night. He’d been in a bad way, babbling, couldn’t stop talking, funny way for it to take a bloke who worked with secrets. On and on about some girl – well, they were all thinking about their girls just then. Latin, Greek, poetry, astronomy, and back to that blasted girl again. Sally? Susan? Awful thing to say, but he’d driven them all mad. He wanted to confide his secrets. Cormack was the only one who’d listen to him, poor girl. If ever someone deserved a posthumous medal . . . not like some.

  Another tape; the tearful voice of a mother thanking God for her son’s safety; and a later recording, with the traffic outside the Old Bailey rumbling in the background. The same woman, still tearful but not from joy, almost wishing her son had perished back there on Duaman. He had joined one of the gangs that terrorised East London and was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder and torture of a rival.