A Kind of Healthy Grave (Tamara Hoyland Book 4) Page 5

  The front door opened on to light and warmth. The decorations were perfect, copied, Gillian said at once, from illustrations in Homes and Gardens, with great swags and vases of red and green silk, with plastic berries and silk flowers. ‘You can’t tell the difference, can you?’ Gillian said; and went on to introduce her two children before banishing them at once to the nursery.

  The whole house was in shades of beige and pale green. Gillian took Zoe up to the guest bedroom, past the open door of her own impeccably tidy room, and of Rainsford’s dressing room in which, she said with mock ruefulness, they might hear him practising his golf-swing before his bath.

  Downstairs, the Christmas tree was made of silver foil, and beautifully wrapped presents awaited the Corys underneath it: soap and aftershave. Zoe had brought a box of Belgian chocolates for Basil Hutber’s domestic help. She presented it to the Hutbers instead, and Gillian said that Fiona and Nigel might have two every day, after lunch.

  Basil Hutber came to supper at his son’s house. Much of the evening was taken up with Gillian and Rainsford’s attempts to persuade him to stay the night. ‘Cold . . . loneliness . . . isolation, burst pipes . . . what would people think?’

  Basil Hutber was in his eighties but he still ran his school as he always had done, and showed no physical signs of great age, his back straight, his eyes bright. He greeted Lawrence with warm affection and Zoe with enthusiasm. ‘Charming. Lawrence, my dear, your wife is charming. Come here and sit beside me, Zoe, and tell me about the new series. I’m longing to see what Stacey gets up to next.’

  Lawrence’s hero-worship for his former headmaster had not led Zoe to expect a man who had time for soap opera, and she wondered whether he was being sincere, but he went on to discuss the programmes in detail, reminded of some episodes by his grandchildren, reminding them of others. It was not until Nigel and Fiona had been sent to bed (giving unwilling and unwelcome pecks on the cheek to the guests as well as to their family) that Basil Hutber opened the subject that had brought the Corys there: Lawrence’s future.

  Lawrence had applied for thirty-one teaching posts in London, for twenty-three jobs in industry and the public services. He had been interviewed for about a quarter of those he applied for, come as second choice for one and been offered only one job, a junior position in the very branch of the Department of Employment where he was registered for work.

  ‘I want you to think about coming to St Uny’s,’ Basil Hutber said.

  He was offering a job. There would be no competition for it. It would not be advertised.

  ‘Father . . .’ Rainsford began.

  ‘You know how fond of you I have always been. I think we could work happily together,’ the old man said.

  He wanted Lawrence to come as his assistant; to be his successor. ‘I don’t suppose that I shall be able to carry on for ever. Better to have an eye to the future.’

  ‘But Father, you can’t be sure that . . .’

  Gillian offered round a plate of home made meringues. ‘No? Try my chocolate roulade instead then. Surely, Lawrence, that should be the solution. A job back here.’

  ‘It would be difficult for Zoe,’ Rainsford warned.

  They were all looking at her. Zoe said, ‘I do know how good it is of you, Mr Hutber, but . . .’

  ‘I think it was one of my father’s spur-of-the-moment ideas,’ Rainsford said. ‘It would take a good deal of thought. But surely, Father, with your contacts, you could help Lawrence to find something that wouldn’t disrupt Zoe’s life to the same extent.’

  ‘I want Lawrence here.’

  ‘But Father, you haven’t ever mentioned this before.’

  ‘I have been thinking about it for a long time.’

  ‘But there are practical considerations . . . financial matters . . .’

  ‘I own St Uny’s,’ Basil Hutber said. ‘Lock, stock and barrel. The place is mine, the school is mine. No trustees. No encumbrances. If I choose to have Lawrence back here who’s to stop me?’

  ‘Surely you’d be pleased, Zoe?’ Gillian Hutber said. ‘I’m sure it isn’t very nice for you, going out to work. Lawrence’s career has to come first, surely. You will have to let him come.’

  ‘It is not a question of me letting,’ Zoe said.

  ‘Lawrence could try out all his ideas, all those theories you used to have about education.’ Gillian Hutber had been a good listener, and could still quote some of the high-flown words Lawrence had used years before when he had been an enthusiast at the beginning of his working life and she was a young wife and mother, her pretty, neat features attentive to the men’s comfort and conversation.

  Basil Hutber had clearly thought carefully about the offer. He spent the evening describing the future as though it were definite. Zoe went to help Gillian in the kitchen. They could hear the men talking as they sat lordly with their whisky. Rainsford was going on about something he called ‘the bottom line’.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Zoe said.

  ‘Let me see, casserole in the oven – I simmer them overnight – potatoes peeled, sprouts prepared, sandwiches cut, perhaps you would wrap them up for me. Six for Nigel and four for Fiona.’ The sandwiches were crumbly home-made bread, and filled with a balanced mixture of protein and vitamins. ‘The children are going to be out all afternoon at a pony-club meet,’ Gillian explained. ‘That’s while we are at the ceremony.’

  Basil had especially fixed the Corys’ visit to coincide with his installation as a Freeman of Carmell, that marked the fiftieth anniversary of his being elected to its council.

  ‘Could you face doing the same thing for fifty years?’ Zoe asked.

  ‘I hope I shall,’ Gillian said energetically. ‘There’s no more creative work for a woman, I always say, than running a home and family.’

  ‘Not for half a century, surely.’

  ‘Why not? After all, what about your work? Surely it couldn’t matter as much in the long run.’

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude.’ Gillian began to arrange crystallised fruit on top of a trifle. ‘But you can’t really compare acting and teaching, can you? I mean, it won’t make any difference in the long run if there’s one more television serial. Anyway, you could probably be replaced.’

  ‘Only too easily.’

  ‘Now being the head of a school like Hutber’s that’s what it’s usually called round here – running Hutber’s, forming young minds . . .’

  Rainsford’s voice came through the open serving hatch. ‘You shouldn’t ask Lawrence to make such a decision at short notice, Father, there are so many peripheral considerations. Who knows what . . .’ They went round and round and were still repeating themselves when Basil’s taxi arrived.

  ‘You’ll come tomorrow?’ Basil said, pressing Lawrence’s hand and kissing Zoe on the mouth.

  ‘Of course. Wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

  ‘Silly affair really. But it will give you some idea . . .’

  Rainsford shut the front door on the harsh night. ‘I shouldn’t take my father too seriously, if I were you, Lawrence. He tends to get funny ideas at his age.’

  ‘But Rainsford, it’s a brilliant idea,’ Gillian exclaimed. The Corys listened as husband and wife discussed it. They reminded Zoe of the tough cop and the friendly one in a police movie. Even after Lawrence and Zoe had gone up they could hear the Hutbers still talking about it. Rainsford mentioned valuable freehold property. Gillian’s voice floated up the stairs as she chained the front door. She mentioned the ancient family home. The Corys shut their door on it. Very quietly, because they did not want to offend their hosts, they pushed the two mahogany beds together.

  With Zoe close against his back, parallel like spoons in a silver canteen, Lawrence was quickly asleep. After a while Zoe rolled away from him and switched on the lamp.

  The house was silent. No traffic passed outside. Zoe would have liked a hot drink or an alcoholic one. At home she would have gone down to listen to music. She felt ill
at ease in this cold, quiet, dim place.

  There were no books in the room and Zoe, who seldom read anything but scripts, had not brought one. She picked up Lawrence’s book, the autobiography of a minor political figure called Lord Munvies. Lawrence had bought it in London, because Munvies had once known Rex. Wrapping herself in the eiderdown, Zoe began to turn the pages.

  The blurb told her that Peter Munvies was the son of a wealthy iron founder. He had been a socialist, and had begun a left-wing weekly. He was given a life peerage under the Labour government in 1970. In 1972 he took the Conservative whip in the House of Lords. He had known all the interesting people. Zoe thought that he sounded odious; she had learnt from her father to disapprove of people who used egalitarian principles to get themselves to the top of the ladder, and then chose to kick it away from others at its bottom. Although public affairs had never interested her much, even when she lived with her father who was involved with them professionally, she remembered that conversation, because her father had approved of her contribution to it. She had drawn the analogy of an elderly man who was notorious for making passes at girls like her, and who, once incapable, became a Roman Catholic amidst blazing publicity, confessed his lost pleasures and was promised paradise. Zoe’s mother had been a Roman Catholic. Sometimes Zoe wondered whether she was damned herself for the sins she had committed in her wild young days, but she would scorn to repent only when it was too late to repeat them. Virtue as the result of incapacity would be no better than sin. Anyway, Zoe thought, not for the first time, if I repented I’d have to wish I’d never done it; and I don’t. I don’t repent. I’ve changed my habits, that’s all. All the same, thoughts of purgatory and hell-fire tended to surface in the small hours. With an effort of concentration Zoe settled down to read.

  Ancestors, babyhood, private school, public school, Oxford; a chapter each, one third of the book before the man was even twenty.

  London in the twenties. Peter Munvies had thrown off the shackles of his conventional background. ‘I was free, bold and ready to experiment,’ he wrote. He described the hand-to-mouth life of his amusing friends. He had gone from their bed-sitting rooms to his father’s mansion in Mayfair to change into a white tie and tails and dance his way through the peace.

  Dancing and drinking ad nauseam. Peter Munvies had been a Bright Young Thing. Evenings at night clubs, mornings spent sleeping it off. A guinea a year to join the Ham Bone in Soho if you were an artist. Three if you had any money. ‘They took me for an artist,’ the author boasted. Drinks all round at the Fitzroy Tavern, cocktails at the Café Royal. Their motto was ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’.

  Huxley. Lawrence. Carrington. Aldington. Munvies dropped the names of celebrities who, alive, might have wondered whether they knew him.

  Londonderry House. The Dorchester. The Spread Eagle at Thame. Albany. The life was too like, and too unlike, what Zoe remembered from her own younger days, to be a pleasure to read about.

  ‘Of course my first love was literature.’ Before his socialist weekly, Munvies had used his father’s money to start one of the many ‘little magazines’ of the period. Like The Little Review, The Celestial Visitor, Black and Blue Jay, Munvies’s efforts had not been long lived.

  He collected first editions of authors then unfashionable, buying treasures from Christopher Millard who, as he carefully related, had featured in many of the memoirs of the period. He was the brilliant, enigmatic polymath who had introduced A.J.A. Symons to the works of Baron Corvo; he was the apparently pathetic neighbour of the novelist Anthony Powell’s parents. He was a socialist Jacobite, a worshipper of Oscar Wilde, the beneficiary of Wilde’s friend Ross and (in Munvies’s word) a pansy.

  Here were the few pages for which Lawrence had bought this whole, dull book; here was the first name, in all those carefully listed and footnoted, that Zoe recognised.

  ‘I shall never forget my first sight of Rex,’ Munvies wrote. He had come into Millard’s room to find Rex perched on a precarious contraption of tea-chests painting Millard’s emblem on the ceiling. It was a rose growing from a pierced heart. Munvies had quickly made friends with the dashing Rex, begun to imitate his style, and often lent him money. Having been so crass as to mention it, he added that Rex rarely repaid him. Rex drew a strip cartoon of Munvies’s probable progress; they expected him to end up as editor of The Times.

  Abroad with Rex in 1928: a new chapter. Paris, with bugs in the beds, and Poles and emigré Russians in Montparnasse. The French countryside, traditionally romanticised. Munvies and Rex had joined the group of young men clustered round Gertrude Stein and followed her to Bellay (trout fresh from the river), to Artemare (écrevisses) and Aix-les-Bains (ombres chevaliers and a bed on straw above a smithy).

  Cafés on the Riviera, where Egyptians drained their red wine, saying ‘Let us imagine that this is the blood of an English baby.’

  Vienna, full of golden prostitutes and wizened old clients.

  Italy, where men wore black shirts.

  Berlin, with machine guns in the streets, where boys solicited in the Kurfürstendamm for a fee of one postage stamp. Rex was writing Tumuli in Berlin. ‘It wasn’t comfortable, but by God you were alive,’ he had said, his work infused with vicious energy.

  Munvies mentioned Rex only to describe himself, contrasting his own innocent sense of fun with Rex’s wickedness. Zoe preferred the sound of Rex, though she was only as interested in him as she would be, if Lawrence had a different time-filler, in model trains, cricket or pottery. As for Munvies, he was even more boring, she thought, than lying awake on a silent night; so she switched off the light and snuggled close to her husband.

  Chapter Seven

  On her return to England after nearly forty years Chantal Digby rented a flat in St James’s, where service was provided on weekdays. She had thought of taking a suite in a hotel where she could entertain influential friends, modelling herself on a grande dame of the twenties called Lady Colefax, whose dinners, known as ‘Sybil’s ordinaries’, were frequently mentioned by diarists of the period. In the busier eighties it was not so easy to attract the right people to an old woman’s table. Those who agreed to come were not those she wanted, and their company in the dining room of the Dorchester or the Savoy lent her no lustre. Soon she decided that the spirit of the times required more discretion. She would whet the appetites of gossip writers by seeming to hide from them.

  After her death those gossips would write that Chantal Digby had been a pathetic figure. While she was alive to resent their neglect, they did not think her pitiable, but referred to her only in private and as an old hag, bag, or – on account of her numerous press releases – nag.

  Lady Digby had employed a public relations consultant, a glossy young woman with an impervious armour of cosmetics and couture and a determined disregard of snubs.

  Angelica Hamilton Routley (‘Everyone calls me Annie’) contracted to get Lady Digby fame. She failed to deliver even notoriety. Afterwards she said that she was sure nobody else could have done any better, but she was bound to be defensive about achieving publicity for a client only when it was too late. ‘Actually,’ Annie said, ‘you couldn’t really expect to stir up much interest in someone that old.’

  But while Lady Digby was alive, Annie had been full of the blanket coverage she would ensure her client. ‘Six months, that should do the trick. Two thousand pounds down, but you’ll get some back in appearance fees, and it’s a tax loss.’

  Chantal had paid in advance without demur. One bought clothes, plastic surgery, legal advice, so why not editorial coverage on page and screen? When Lady Digby died the contract had six weeks to run. The results so far consisted of one television appearance in a programme about the Undervalued Painters of the Twenties, two inaccurate references in Private Eye and a not quite defamatory account in the Daily Mail of the source of Chantal Digby’s money.

  Annie herself might have been featured in articles about the modern working girl. She was never seen in
a dress bought more than eight weeks previously, her hair was always prophetic. She was certain that publicity was an unmitigated benefit and that it could be acquired through the services she offered. Her weapons, which were glossy ten-by-six photographs, adulatory press releases, incongruous stunts, ingenious gimmicks and the creation of synthetic ‘pegs’ on which to hang a news story, were, she was sure, invincible.

  She would reel off to prospective clients the names that had become known through her efforts. As it happened, Chantal Digby knew none of them, since she had for so long been absent from the hub of Annie’s universe, but she was easy to convince. Just before the end she believed it was all beginning to happen. Annie rang with the news that she had fixed up a chat show for the day after Boxing Day on Radio Middle England. ‘They don’t pay much,’ she warned, but Chantal was indifferent to money and Annie did not mention that Radio Middle England was having an Old Folks Week to show concern over the Festive Season.

  On the morning of December 27 Annie drove round to St James’s in the flashy two-seater that had been payment in kind from a garage she had publicised. She parked on the double yellow lines, surprised that Chantal Digby was not waiting outside, as they had arranged, and raring to go.

  The apartment block, a modern building, had been designed like a fortress to protect the rich tenants who alone could afford to live there. There was no porter or resident caretaker. Lady Digby said that it was restful to live without resident staff. As she had explained, ‘One got so tired of them in South America. Always so many poor relations hanging around, always doing things very very slowly. And dishonest. You can’t imagine.’ She said she had been in constant fear for her very life. One of the attractions of this London block for her was its so far impregnable security. An entry phone, with television screen; a mortice lock downstairs and no fewer than four locks on the door into the flat itself, consisting of a pair of Banhams whose key would be copied by the makers only at her personal request, a Yale to unlatch it, and a stout bolt inside. Rubbish was dropped down a narrow chute to the basement five floors below and there was no back door for a careless cleaner to leave open. ‘I shall be safe at last’, she said, jangling her famous pearls.