A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4) Read online

  Viola Hutber’s career was well documented, right up till she was demobilised. She had married her emigré Pole and lived a very private life. But she said herself, ‘My life’s an open book.’ She waved modestly at the wall of shelves on which Hilary Vivian’s editions were ranked.

  Tamara had been given the routine tour. In the accompanying commentary, she recognised several of the phrases she had already read about Dame Viola’s life-style, typical day, or garden. Tamara genuinely expressed admiration of the roses, the vegetables, the view, the interior decoration. Dame Viola strolled with her along well-weeded paths. Beyond the beech hedge that enclosed the lawns was a field that had been stinkingly manured. Wrinkling her nose, Dame Viola mentioned agricultural progress, but went on to point out birds and list the animals she had seen here. She loved nature, she said. ‘I am a very domestic creature myself, you see.’ They went back towards the house. A tray had been set out holding a decanter of curiously yellow wine with two glasses. ‘Elderflower,’ she said, ‘Do try it.’ Tamara sipped unwillingly but politely. ‘I bake my own bread too. We have to return, you see, to the eternal verities. To tried and tested ways for human societies. Experiment can go too far. It has gone too far.’ She handed Tamara a copy of a pamphlet about eternal verity. ‘And have you seen this one?’ She passed over a copy of Watchwomen’s brief life of their founder. An account of Dame Viola’s career was printed in decorated italic script on heavy cream coloured paper. The text was bordered with pansies, in soft blue and green.

  ‘The suffragette colours,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Like them, at least in that, we go shoulder to shoulder into the fray.’

  ‘I wonder why you waited so long, Dame Viola, before you involved yourself in public affairs?’

  ‘My late husband would not have approved.’

  ‘There’s no indication in your books that you were interested in anything like politics.’

  ‘Not politics, Tamara, you know that. You were told that when you joined us. Watchwomen don’t support any party. We simply endorse individual candidates if we approve of their attitudes to the subjects we hold dear.’

  ‘Even that . . .’

  ‘Tell me, my dear, have you read any of my books? My novels?’

  ‘I certainly have, nearly all of them.’ Tamara had undergone an extensive course of popular fiction in the last week. She had read Hilary Vivian’s books under the desk at the age of thirteen, but now, getting on for thirty and seldom having time for fiction, she had expected to hate them. She was ashamed to be seen buying them and handed over her money to the cashier in Smith’s as furtively as if she were buying glue to sniff or sex manuals to study. Nor would she have liked her friends to notice them in her flat. It would have been going too far to cover them in brown paper, as she had done to deceive school teachers, but she put them between academic journals in the piles on her coffee table.

  Tamara was dismayed to find herself enjoying the novels hugely. One had to hand it to the author. She hit the spot – even in an over-educated rationalist like Dr Tamara Hoyland. The books were written in a simple style with short words, and without much adornment or description. The reader needed to contribute nothing in the way of imagination or response, but was led unresistingly along. After reading four in one evening Tamara felt exactly as though she had devoured a whole box of soft centred chocolates or been shut up for the evening in a room full of pre-Raphaelite paintings. One of Hilary Vivian’s books on its own, though, gave simple, if – to a reader who always felt that Latin verbs or mathematical formulae should be occupying the attention devoted to Hilary Vivian – deplorable pleasure. ‘Yes indeed,’ Tamara assured her, ‘I have read your books.’

  ‘Then you must know that their implicit standpoint is very like that of Watchwomen.’

  Hilary Vivian’s popular fiction was not designed to change attitudes. The picture of life was sentimental. They were not crusaders’ manifestos. But they did affirm the formal values of Western society. They implied that there could be happy endings in real life; they promised that virtue would be rewarded and wickedness punished. Sex was never mentioned.

  Tamara checked the gauge on her tape recorder and held the microphone closer to Dame Viola.

  ‘I wonder whether you have any explanation for Watchwomen having so much more of an impact than other organisations?’ She did not name them, having forgotten to check with the producer about knocking copy, but later she could edit in the names of the Moral Majority, the Festival of Light, Virtue Victorious, and the other pressure groups that were dedicated to returning a cleaned-up society to old standards.

  ‘Good question,’ Dame Viola said with her famous smile. ‘But don’t you think it might be something to do with our speaking for ordinary people? We are ordinary people, after all. We are typical of everyone who doesn’t follow trends. We know that public figures who claim to speak for us are wrong. They have judged us wrong. They gauge the public temper wrongly, because they never meet the public.’

  During her research Tamara had come across a profile of Dame Viola that explained her appeal as the result of a hyper-sensitivity to her listeners’ reactions. She moulded her message to her audience. She disarmed opposition by understanding and anticipating it. She always seemed to see the other side of arguments, even her own, and was never hurt or surprised. Now she seemed to sense a disagreement that Tamara had been careful not to imply.

  ‘You dissent so far, my dear?’

  Tamara switched the tape off, and said, ‘But Dame Viola, you know I’m a member of Watchwomen myself. That’s why Noelle suggested these programmes.’

  ‘Part of you is uncommitted. You must think about what I say without prejudice. I know how hard that is for clever, modern young women like you, the whole of your education and life have tended in the other direction. That’s the tragedy of this era. But listen to me: don’t you agree that children need to grow up in a stable and caring home? Don’t they need to be protected when they are small and guided as they grow?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And I can’t believe that you would want to see that precious responsibility assumed by an impersonal State? You look like a girl whose own childhood was happy? Brothers and sisters, united parents, a harmonious home?’

  Making a mental note of the efficiency of Watchwomen’s own research, Tamara said, ‘Yes, I did. Very happy.’

  ‘And isn’t that what you would wish for every child? And how are we to achieve it without good parents? And how will there be good parents without marriage followed by fidelity? I wonder whether you would have become the successful person you are with an unmarried mother, single parent as they say these days. What if you had spent your early years crowded into a day nursery, if later on nobody had been there to welcome you home from school? Do you think it right that young men should prefer their own sex to you? Or if they think of you as nothing better than a one-night stand? It’s all the same.’

  A deviation from the Socratic method; all the same, put like that, there was a certain logic in Viola Hutber’s argument and Tamara was glad that it was no part of her role to dispute it.

  ‘As for freedom,’ Watchwomen’s leader went on. ‘Freedom. I know that cry. It means freedom to be selfish, freedom to grab. Freedom to take not give. Freedom to get as much as you can out of this life because you don’t believe there will be another.’

  Dame Viola fixed her blue gaze on Tamara, almost irresistibly compelling on account, perhaps, of the unusual combination of grandmotherly charm and the missionary fervour. She was plump; the word would have been fat, except the effect was too pretty for that. Her cheeks were still pleasantly full and her throat hardly wrinkled. Her complexion was pinkly soft and such lines as had accumulated round the eyes and forehead radiated horizontally, as proof that only smiling had caused them. Her manner was conciliating, not browbeating, and she giggled readily. Her voice was high and clear.

  Tamara, almost under the famous spell, struggled against it like Sleeping
Beauty’s household against their hundred-year sleep. She consulted the list on her clipboard for another question, resisting the temptation to confess that Dame Viola was right, quite right about everything, and had shown Tamara the error of her ways. For Tamara’s life, though in some respects unusually parallel to those of Hilary Vivian’s intrepid heroines, had not, by those standards, been virtuous. She switched the recorder on and said, ‘May we turn to your own upbringing? Was it the ideal one you describe? Harmonious home, brothers and sisters?’

  ‘I never knew my eldest brother. He was killed before I was born, in the First World War. My surviving brother is the headmaster of St Uny’s in Carmell.’

  ‘Your home town.’

  ‘Yes, my father was the doctor there.’

  ‘And you were sent to school at St Margaret’s?’

  ‘I see you have done your own homework.’

  ‘Yes. It seems to show that you left St Margaret’s when you were only thirteen.’

  ‘My mother died, and it seemed best. It wasn’t unusual in those days. Girls didn’t expect so much education then.’

  Tamara Hoyland, whose mother, grandmother and even one great-grandmother had been university graduates, said, ‘No, of course not. So what did you do when you left school in 1928?’

  ‘My dear, you’re talking about a world that is quite gone. Girls didn’t need to train for careers, not like you splendid creatures nowadays. I just kept house for my brother. And then when the war was coming I joined the Wrens, and do you know, it’s dreadful to admit it when really it was such a sad time for so many people, but I had the most fascinating few years.’ She began to explain the organisation of the women’s branches of the armed services and did not notice that the tape was no longer turning. That was not what Tamara’s listeners would find interesting.

  Chapter Six

  For Lawrence Cory the visit to England, his first since going to America with Zoe, was not entirely enjoyable. When friends asked what he was up to now he said he was working on a book, but it hardly rang true to his own ears, and his stepfather, who prided himself on candour, explained, ‘He means he’s unemployed.’

  Lawrence’s mother had never hidden the fact that he came a poor last in her affections after her second husband, family and even dogs, but she said quickly, ‘Nonsense, it’s a marvellous idea. What is it about?’

  But when Lawrence explained she was less pleased. ‘I don’t think that our leader would like the sound of that. I’ve become an active Watchwoman, you know, since you were last at home.’

  ‘I doubt if your leader will ever have a chance to see it,’ Lawrence said gloomily.

  ‘Never mind anyway. Darling Larry can keep himself busy scribbling. Zoe earns enough for them both.’ And that did not help to give Lawrence a happy Christmas either.

  On Boxing Day Lawrence and Zoe went to see his father who lived alone in west London. He was painfully proud of his only child. Lawrence’s academic successes seemed extraordinary to him, who had gone into the army as a boy soldier aged sixteen, and been married and earning a living for his wife and baby by the time he was twenty. ‘There must be brains in the family after all,’ he would say. If he had not been so carefully undemonstrative a man, he could have been accused of doting.

  As Zoe said, Allan Cory did not seem to have much else to care about. He worked at a dull job in a dull firm (accountant for importers of motor parts), he lived alone and always seemed to be in to answer the telephone. His house was furnished impersonally. He had no hobbies, few books and a small, paved back garden. What did he do with himself, when he was not working at his hopeless, obsessive search for his and Lawrence’s blood relations?

  Allan Cory had been taken in as a new baby by foster parents, an elderly couple who lived in a mining village in Derbyshire at the time. Herbert Cory was a Methodist minister who gave the child his name by deed poll but never adopted him because the mother could not be traced to give her consent. Of her, nothing whatever was known, except that she had rather obviously perjured herself to the Registrar of Births. The name on the certificate was Mary Smith. The father’s name was blank. The place of birth was a nursing home in Nottingham that no longer existed when Allan was old enough to make enquiries. The fostering had been arranged by a local lady as an act of benevolence of a kind not uncommon at the time.

  Allan had always supposed that he was just the result of a young girl’s, and her boyfriend’s, carelessness; a mistake. When he and his own girlfriend were caught out in the same way he had been only too glad to marry her. He wanted to show someone – anyone – what ought to be done in the circumstances.

  Lawrence Cory had lived with his mother and her second husband. He felt a painful, guilty pity for his lonely father, and an unadmitted irritation for his lust for a bloodline.

  Allan Cory’s most cherished possession was a battered box file labelled ‘Family’. In it were useless letters, some kind, others curt, replying to his ill-directed pleas for clues that might help him to trace a girl who called herself Mary Smith in 1929. Allan’s interest had become a passion after Lawrence married. His first words to Lawrence and Zoe on this visit were on that subject.

  ‘I am getting somewhere at last. I’m on the track.’

  ‘We are what we are, Father. I don’t need a family tree,’ Lawrence said wearily.

  ‘You wait until you have children, you’ll understand the need to know what went into them. Won’t he, Zoe? Say what you like, there must be something in heredity. You must get your brains from somewhere, my dear boy. It must mean something. Think of horse breeding. Greyhounds. Even budgerigars – you accept that their ancestry matters. Why should it be so different for human beings? I want to have something to show you in time for the next generation.’

  Allan Cory’s cleaning woman was equally interested in their prospects of breeding. She had come on an unscheduled visit because she wanted a good look at the heroine of Stacey’s Sleuths.

  ‘Time you two started a family, Lawrence. You don’t want to leave it too late. None of us are getting any younger.’ She peered at Zoe’s face, searching out signs of decrepitude. ‘Elderly prim, that’s what they’ll call you, having your first so late. Mind you, I suppose you’d have to stop being Stacey if you were in the family way.’ She rambled on about maternity leave.

  Lawrence and Zoe had always meant to have a family one day, when Lawrence got another job, when Stacey was written out of the cast – there was plenty of time. Zoe just wished that other people wouldn’t go on about it all the time. The day after they had visited Allan, the Corys went north to Carmell, and there Zoe began to feel that everyone thought she was a monster, selfishly depriving her husband of status and descendants. Since she knew better than anyone that Lawrence deserved affection, Zoe could only be glad that his friends showed it. All the same, it seemed hard to be put on the defensive because she earned their living. It wasn’t as though she had done anything to prevent him from doing it.

  Lawrence was very different from most of the men a model-turned-actress met. It was that very difference that attracted Zoe to him, but she could not persuade Lawrence that a teacher’s status or salary would keep her happy and when he was offered a job in industry he took it. He was in charge of the training department of a firm of educational publishers whose managing director had been impressed by Lawrence’s handling of a difficult son. Lawrence was impressed by the salary and perquisites on offer. A company BMW convertible seemed much more suitable for Zoe than a battered Ford, as did a flat in Kensington than one in Streatham.

  The publishers went bankrupt just at the time when teachers of English literature were as unsaleable as educational books to schools without library budgets, and at the time when Zoe’s agent was playing that big fish, the role of Stacey Stewart. Everything had worked out very well. It was just that Zoe felt obscurely apologetic about it all in Carmell.

  The Corys had been invited to stay with Lawrence’s former headmaster, whom Lawrence had always admired
and kept in touch with. Zoe had not read the letter Lawrence had written from California, but guessed that it had been a desperate appeal for help, since the reply was solicitous. ‘Come and stay up here when you are next in England. I may be able to suggest something. And I’ll be glad to see you again.’

  The school, St Uny’s, was housed in what had been a pre-Reformation abbey, an antique and venerable building.

  ‘And unfortunately the plumbing is as antique as the rest of it,’ Basil Hutber’s son Rainsford explained when he met the Corys at the railway station forty miles from Carmell. The bitter weather had frozen the water in the pipes. It was always happening. ‘But it’s too cold to snow,’ Rainsford said. ‘Sorry about it. Nasty if you’re used to California.’

  Zoe huddled into her fur coat in the back of the car, occasionally wiping mist off the window to peer at the dark wasteland outside.

  ‘You won’t be able to see much. It’s what we call a freezing fog.’ Rainsford Hutber drove with lawyer-like deliberation.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling, the Abbey can’t be as cold as it was in the dormitories when I was a boy,’ Lawrence said.

  But it turned out that they were not to stay in the Abbey after all. ‘The heating won’t work when the pipes are frozen. Couldn’t inflict it on you. You’re coming to us.’

  ‘You remember Gillian, darling, at our wedding.’ Lawrence prompted.

  ‘Of course. How kind of her to have us at such short notice.’

  ‘Not a bit. The children are delighted to think of meeting Stacey Stewart.’

  By the time they reached Carmell it was dark as well as freezing and foggy. The harsh air startled Zoe as she scuttled between evergreen bushes from the car to the house and she saw nothing of its gaunt granite massiveness, or the other imposing houses that bordered Carmell’s main street. As Rainsford had already said, he and Gillian lived in what had been his Hutber grandfather’s house when he was Carmell’s doctor. Now a discreet brass plate advertised Hutber and Co., Solicitors. His office was in the old coach-house and stables.