This statement is true, as far as it goes, but it does not go far. Frieda draws a little sun on the page, in red waterproof de luxe uniball micro, and adds rays. Then she inks in the sun"s...o...b.. She tries to remember Andrew Palmer as she had seen him then, sent to her with Hilda"s dangerous blessing. Handsome, heroic, yellow-haired, in his RAF bomber jacket.
She"d been too young to be allowed in the pub. He"d led heir back to Hilda"s billet. She"d been thrilled by Andrew. Well, she was only sixteen, and there was a war on. Should she blame herself for what had happened? Or should she blame Hilda for setting it up? Or should she blame Andrew for weakness, for vanity, for taking advantage, for playing sister off against sister? There hardly seemed to be any point in blaming Andrew Palmer. He"d been a bit player, a n.o.body. The father of her three children. The pieces had all been in place before Hilda had met Andrew. Before the war broke out. Nothing was Andrew"s fault. She could see that now. Is he alive or dead, she wonders, or is he still skulking in the Orient? Last heard of in Singapore.
Reduce, reduce. Everything dwindles, everything shrinks. A blue ballgown hangs limp on a bra.s.s rail in an Oxfam shop. It has had its last outing.
Those had been the days of clothing coupons. She had married in a white dress cut out of parachute silk. The days of peace and austerity. But why bother to remember all of that? Tinned cream, tasting of white chalk paste.
Andrew wasn"t even seriously interested in women. That had been one of the ironies. He had destroyed one, and done his best to destroy another, but he hadn"t wanted either of them. He had run off to Ceylon with a German film-maker. Andrew had been a clever boy, a mathematician, a talker, a spark. A weak and pretty face, as she now remembered it. He"d been a trouble-maker. He had loved trouble. Vain, dependent, narcissistic, androgynous. What had he thought he was playing at, with the Haxby sisters? They were not his style. They came from a different, a bloodier, a more matriarchal mythology.
The three Palmer children had shown little curiosity about their absent father. They had smelt dishonour and wanted none of it. Frieda has warped them all by her silence. It is too late now to advertise for Andrew Palmer, to set the detectives on to him. She sometimes wonders if he has followed her career. Hard to remember that she had once suffered over his infidelity and his disappearance. Although he loved trouble, Hilda Haxby"s death had been too much for him, and he had run away with Otto Weinberg, who made movies about oil-wells. A coward and a traitor. Maybe he was long dead.
It hardly seems worth recalling his successors in her affections. Yet at the time they had been important to her. After Andrew, she had favoured more fleshly men, men of substance. Some of them had died corpulent deaths. Some lived and flourishedthe Swede still sent her postcards from his many conferences, and recently an ageing Irish lover had written to her, out of the blue, after two decades of silence, asking if she remembered the night they"d spent together in Heidelberg so many many years ago. Did she remember that they had ordered Steak Tartare, not knowing, in their innocence and ignorance, what it would prove to be? And had she been sick in the night because of the rawness of the steak, or because of him? Could she please let him know? It was important to him.
And, her memory thus prompted, she had recalled in detail this long forgotten night. They had arrived late at the inn. Neither then spoke German, and tourism had not then invaded the Rhineland. The menu had been uncompromisingly German, and they had ordered steak, expecting at worst a chunk of charred tough meat with large white boiled potatoes. But there on their plates had reposed a small dome of red raw flesh, surrounded by a necromantic circle of strange little chemical pyramids of peppers and spicesgreen, red, black, yellow, crystal white. A golden raw egg yolk in a halved eggsh.e.l.l had topped each frightening b.l.o.o.d.y pap. They had stared in mutual alarm, yet they were hungry, and had eaten bravely and stubbornly, ignoring the condiments, consuming the meat. After the meal they had taken themselves to their room, where they had found their bedding as foreign, as unaccommodating. A high wooden bed, a rigid bolster for pillow, a feather duvet of vast sighing dusty mountain ranges for their covering. It had taken courage to plunge into that structure, but they had forced themselves, for their desires had been overwhelming. And then, when what had to be done had been done, Frieda had got up and taken herself to the bathroom and vomited up the lot. The meat, the beer, the man.
How could she have forgotten this disgraceful episode, and why had he remembered it? She wrote back, warily, telling him that as far as she could recall it had been the unfamiliarity of the repasthad there not been sauerkraut on the side?that had produced her nausea, not his s.e.xual activities. But she would not go into more detail until he told her why he wished to know. And he had written back, from Bellagio, saying that he wished to set the record straight. "I am writing my memoirs, here in Bellagio," he had informed her. "And I wished to know the worst. So write to me again, Frieda sweetheart, and tell me all you know."
She had replied tersely, on a postcard: Til leave you out of my memoirs if you leave me out of yours. That"s a fair offer. F.H.P."
And indeed she had so far left him out, and all the others: at this snail"s pace she would never reach him, even though he had figured so early in her amorous career. (Her German, now, is quite pa.s.sable.) Is she the same person as that woman who had sweated and moaned with multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms in that vast antique Germanic feather bed? Is it this body that had eaten that meat? She sometimes wonders. The problem of continuity perplexes her. Has she split off for ever from that rapacious, relentless girl who had devoured and spewed out Andrew Palmer, after s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g three children out of him? A memoir should establish continuity, but sometimes she wonders if the links exist. Can she be held responsible for crimes committed so long ago? Can Hilda? Can Andrew? Were they the same people then as they are now? Hilda is long dead, so her mortal being has stayed the same, fixed at the age of thirty-two in her final act of cruelty, of selfishness, of Pyrrhic victory, of who knows what fleeting angry despair. But Andrewis he, if he lives, the man who fathered the children, the youth who flew an aeroplane and got back alive, the boy whose grandfather had served in India? Would they recognize one another if they were to meet now? Is any of their flesh the same as that flesh that touched, and rubbed, and fused?
And what about teeth? Surely these teeth are the same teeth? She runs her tongue against her bridge, lifts it, joggles it. She still has most of her own left. She detests her bridgework.
Her mother, Gladys Haxby nee Bugg, had been keen on continuity. She had invoked Vikings and Norse G.o.ds and longships. She had claimed for her children a Nordic inheritance which, who knows, may well have been fact, not fiction. The Haxbys and the Buggs must have come from somewhere. Frieda and Hilda had imbibed a good deal of dubious folk history from their mother, a package of disinformation from which Frieda had been rescued by an exceptional history teacher at Scalethwaite Grammar School, a teacher whom Frieda, if she were more generous, could credit with much of her later success. It was Miss Mee, not Gladys Bugg Haxby, who had set Frieda on a true course. Nevertheless, Frieda owes some of her intimations to her mother. She has had moments of ancestral recognition, when facing a certain combination of blue sky and low golden gra.s.sland and blue water, when laying her hand on an old stone, when gazing at a brown furze upland, or an iron crag, or a fjord. She had not been lying when she had told the disc jockey about her mystic moment by the runic stone.
In recent years, Frieda has taken the trouble to check some of the fanciful notions which her mother had imparted. And she had discovered that there had been Haxbys in Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire for a few centuries, though none of them had been in any way remarkable. Ernie Haxby had been a farm labourer, not a Viking. The Buggs had been Lincolnshire folk, and Frieda had been pleased to note that the word "Bugg"Danish, Old Norse?was said to mean crooked, swollen, bulging, officious and proud. Pleased also was she to discover that one of her mother"s favourite grammatical constructions, involving the strongly stressed terminal preposition, was derived from the Scandinavian: every time Gladys declared, "If you don"t stop crying I"ll give you something to cry for," she was recalling the linguistic roots of her race.
Oh, yes, there had been an inheritance. A handful of phrases, an old colouring book of the Norse G.o.ds with sub-Burne-Jones ill.u.s.trations, very badly inked in by Hilda. A pre-war rag book of nursery rhymes. A rare Bank Holiday outing to Bayard"s Leap, near Sleaford, with her father, to see the marks of the leap of the famous horse. (Ernie had brought her home from the fields a lucky horseshoe once. She had it still.) And Frieda had been drawn to the northto its words, its music. (Wagner, so late in the day, had been a revelation.) Why else had she been so dangerously attracted to the Iron Coast, and to Queen Christina? She can blame Gladys and her blood for this.
But what, Frieda asks herself, is all this mish-mash of the past? What does it mean? Can she stick it all together, or is it too late? She thinks it is too late. Each time she sorts out one strand, others entangle her. The world must spin on. Europe has had its day. Better to cut the links, better to stop thinking, better to liberate the young, to set them free. Well, she has done her best to see to that. She has made her will. They won"t like it one bit.
Frieda Haxby, an old rationalist, an enlightened one, a lateral thinker, has come here to get rid of thinking and of reason. And here she has heard voices and dreamt dreams. She is trying to will herself into another medium.
She gets up, crosses to the sideboard, pours herself another three fingers of Scotch, adds a dash of water from a brown jug. Will Paine watches her intently. He cannot hear what she is saying, but he can see her lips move. She is talking to herself.
She sits again, and begins to move the cards.
She is speaking to herself of her dreams.
She had dreamt, the night before, both of evolution and of death. In the evolution dream, she had watched one of the little nameless fish that come up with the high tide clamber out of the water on to the shingle. It had grown legs, as does a tadpole, then had risen on its haunches, and grown larger, and hairier, until it was larger than a man. In her dream she had labelled it "a dangerous species". Fierce, grim, hairy, primitive, it had loped off into the woods, and she had woken, pleased with her dream logic.
The second dream, the death dream, which came towards dawn, had been less pleasing, and more realistic. She dreamt of her friend Patrick Fordham, the actor. He was dying, and he was holding court upon his deathbed. Frieda had been solemnly received at the ceremony of farewell. Patrick was bald and emaciated, and he knew that he had precisely one day to live. The next day he would die. He was surrounded by monks or courtiers, obsequious, attentive. They ushered her into the presence. Patrick was lying on a draped litter. She forced herself to bend over him, to try to say something meaningful, on this, the last day of his mortal life. What could one say in the presence of certain death? She had uttered, "You know how much our friendship has always meant to us, Patrick," but to her horror he gave a horrible little sneer in response to this speech. Then she bent over him, and kissed his bare skull, knowing that this was what she had to do, and he winced and turned away and said, "I"m sorry, I"m so tired, I"m so tired." And Frieda knew that she had offended, and indeed she herself had offended herself, for both her words and her action had been hollow. She had valued his friendship, but not much, and her reluctance to kiss that diseased skull had been more powerful than her affection. But she had to stand there, as his attendants discussed his imminent death, and the disposal of his body. He would be buried the next day in Tadcaster, and his body would lie there for a year and a day, and then it would be transported to its final resting place at Bury St Edmunds. To Frieda"s surprise Patrick seemed to find this information soothing, more soothing than he had found her own efforts, and she despised him for taking comfort from it. The pomp of his deathfor clearly there was great honour in lying for a year and a day in Tadcasterhad rea.s.sured him. Even here, with less than a day to live, he had been pleased to find himself surrounded by ceremony and flattery. He who had played the king would die deceived like a king.
As Frieda had stared at his bone-thin death face, she saw that his skin, before her eyes, was taking on a different colour. He was turning turquoise. Not corpse green, but a bright, strong, burnished, ornamental turquoise, like a Mexican deathmask. He had willed himself to mineral and metal. Frieda turned away from him, and woke.
But the dream had stayed with her, as clear and as uncomforting as truth.
"AIDS and leprosy, status and vanity," she says to herself, aloud, as she turns up the cards. Why does she dream so much of death? Her dreams are omens sent from the other world. Does she fear death? Patrick is only sixty, but she believes that her dream means he is doomed. Is she also doomed, and is she afraid? She cannot find it in her to think that she is. Patrick had been afraid, but she thinks she is not.
Resignation, indifference, despair. Calm of mind, all pa.s.sion spent.
Of course, in a novel, she tells herself, this is the moment at which she would discover herself to have a mortal illness, an illness which would inspire her with a new desire to survive, to triumph over the Black Ace. And she has been coughing rather a lot lately.
It is not an illness that stalks her, but Will Paine from Wolverhampton. He has been round to what he takes to be a front door, and knocked. He is not surprised that she does not answer: how could she have heard him? He tries a sidedoor, in the wall of the arch, the door that Benjamin had discovered. It stands half open, and looks promising. Again, she does not answer, but he has roused an old, mild, shabby black and white sheepdog, which approaches him, wagging its tail, lowering its head in deference, showing the humble whites of its eyes. Will is nervous of dogs, but manages to pat this one: the dog cringes gratefully and lets out a very low servile whine.
Will is at a loss. Shall he enter the house and track her down, noisily announcing his presence as he goes? Would that count as trespa.s.s, as breaking and entering? Is it illegal to walk through an open door? He decides it would be wiser to approach from the garden side. And so it is that Will, closely followed by Bounce, finds himself crossing the expanse of tufted gra.s.s that was once a lawn, towards the window where Frieda Haxby sits. And still she does not look up.
He is obliged to tap upon the window.
Frieda looks up, sharply: so she is not deaf.
She sees a young dark handsome elfin stranger with a bare short-cropped head, an earring and a carpet bag, wearing a denim jacket and a white T-shirt bearing some half-concealed slogan. He is tapping at her window-pane.
She certainly does not look afraid, notes Will nervously: she looks furious. There may have been a pa.s.sing flicker of alarm, but it is replaced by a glower of angry and haughty indignation, the sort of expression that middle-cla.s.s people reserve for beggars and travelling salesmen selling ironing-board covers and yellow dusters and absorbent floor cloths made of industrial shoddy. Maybe she thinks he is a travelling salesman?
He mouths at her, through the gla.s.s: "Are you Mrs Haxby?"
Her expression changes from defensive contempt to a wary wrath: this, she decides, is some mad fan, come all the way to Ashcombe to annoy her. But she crosses to the window, opens one of its large damp-swollen wet-rot reluctant panes, and stares down at him as he stands below her on the sunken lawn. There, with him, stands Bounce, bowing and grinning, putting in a mute plea for this luckless companion in misfortune.
"Mrs Haxby?" says Will, in his utterly distinctive Black Country nasal tw.a.n.g.
"Miss Haxby, in point of fact," says Frieda, ever pedantic, standing on ceremony. "Or Mrs Palmer. If you prefer. What can I do for you?"
Will Paine coughs, clears his throat. "I wondered I just wonderedif there"s any work going?"
This question seems to annoy her. "Of course there isn"t," she snaps. "Whatever kind of work would I need, down here?"
Will stares around him. It seems evident to him that a lot needs doing. There had been a lot to do at Patsy Palmer"s, and her place had been as neat as the Archbishop of York"s compared with this wilderness.
She is about to show him the door, and he hasn"t even got in yet. The thought of climbing that f.u.c.king great mountain back to the A39 brings sweat to his brow and a lump to his throat. He tries again.
"I"m a friend of your grandson Simon. And of Emily," he says, stretching a point or two.
He has her attention now. "Oh, are you?" she says, relenting slightly.
"I spent a bit of time in the sunyner with them," he embroiders. "Oh, G.o.d," says Frieda. "I suppose you"d better come in."
"How do I get in?" he asks.
The scene is ridiculous.
"Oh, I"ll come and get you," she says. "You stay where you are."
And he stands there, patting Bounce hopefully, until she appears, round the corner of the building. The sun has sunk behind the hill, and the air grows colder.
She lets him in. She offers him a whisky. He declines. She makes him a cup of tea. He does not much like tea, but he accepts, out of politeness. She offers him a 20 note. She wants him to go away. She wants to be alone.
"n.o.body ever gets this far," she says, as he drinks his tea. "You gave me a fright, knocking on the window like that. n.o.body"s ever been here except the Jehovah"s Witnesses. They made it. You have to admire them, don"t you?"
"I"m not a Jehovah"s Witness," he says. He pauses, tries again. "I"m sorry," he says. "I didn"t mean to intrude. I just thought you might have some odd jobs."
"I like to be alone," says Frieda.
"And I thought I ought to tell you about Simon," says Will, improvising.
"What about Simon?"
"He"s not well," says Will, in a tone of pity and censure. "He"s on crack. And worse. He"s cracking up."
"Oh, is he?" says Frieda, taking another swig of her stiff whisky. "Well, that"ll teach him a thing or two. And how"s little Emily?"
"Emily"s OK, so far," says Will cautiously.
"What do you mean, so far?"
Will shakes his head and says nothing.
"So social worker Patsy took you in, did she? And then she kicked you out? Well, she"s bigger-hearted than me. I"m not even going to take you in."
Will Paine looks forlorn, and sniffs. He reaches for his bag. The dog, seeing the defeated movement, whines in sympathy. The homeless homing pigeon rattles its tin lid.
Frieda concedes.
"Oh, all right," she says. "Just one night, mind you, and off with the dawn. And don"t bother me. You"re not to bother me. I"m not much of a one for conversation. I like my own company."
Will smiles, his face irradiated. He"s a very nice-looking boy.
"Just a bed for the night," he says. He knows he is in with a chance. He"s very good at not being a nuisance. Or so he thinks.
A BEAST IN VIEW.
Autumn advances, and a date for the next election is mooted. It will be in the spring. David D"Anger pays many visits to his dentist and works overtime. He is ubiquitous. His party pledges this and unpledges that. David speaks on social justice and race relations and the food industry here, there and everywhere. He even speaks on social justice and race relations in Middleton. Gogo D"Anger continues to study the neurological conditions of an increasing number of customers and to complain about the decreasing funding of the National Health Service. Her private practice grows. She and David D"Anger ensure their own health privately and at some expense. David finds he cannot insure his teeth. As he doesn"t in principle approve of insurance, this pleases him. But it doesn"t please him very much.
Benjamin D"Anger studies the causes of the Second World War and writes an essay on the Romantic poets and opts to take geology as a subsidiary subject. He draws crystals and synclines and anticlines and lies at the bottom of the bath each night in deep water, seeing how long he can hold his breath. His breath control improves.
Patsy Palmer surprises herself by finding she is obliged to view a p.o.r.no video which makes her feel slightly uneasy. She had thought she was past such niceties. She also surprises herself by finding herself in bed with a chap from the Home Office. She can"t think how it happened. She hopes Daniel Palmer will not notice. He does not. Daniel Palmer is involved in a protracted case concerning pollution in the River Wash, a river which flows through South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and some of Cheshire. n.o.body seems to want to claim it, but somebody will have to.
Little Emily Palmer is far away in Italy, where she is, in principle, learning Italian in Florence; in practice she is hanging out, and very happy with it.
Simon Palmer is not so happy. He has bad dreams. He dreams of toads and crabs.
Nachan Herz dreams nightly of the white hand of Belle. She torments him by night and comforts him by day. He has never learnt to swim. He is afraid of deep water. Her white hand beckons him.
Rosemary Herz runs around too much to notice anything. She is busy working out lottery schemes, millennium schemes. The rapid triviality of her life is exhausting but it keeps her from thought. She has successfully numbed all introspection, all reflection. Her life glitters with surfaces. It has no darkness and no depth. This is the way she likes it.
They are all too busy to think much about Frieda Haxby, and have to be called back into line rather sharply by Cate Crowe.
Cate Crowe has been to the Film Festival in Lisbon. She had not attended this increasingly glamorous annual event in her capacity as literary agent, but in her new role as partner of Newbrit filmstar, Egg Benson. The Egg"s new movie, Crates of Ivory, was being premiered, and Cate Crowe had dropped all at the office to accompany him. The Crowe was herself something of a glamour-figure, a Vanity Fair trader, and she felt quite at home amongst the stars and starlets. Famed for her ability to drive a hard bargain, and her Marlene Dietrich legs, she justified her trip by telling herself that somebody had to keep an eye on the high-earning Egg, who was given to intermittent bursts of spectacular misbehaviour, and by a.s.suring her partners that she would keep her ear to the ground to see if any talent was zumming along down there.
Cate Crowe had never been to Portugal before, and she liked it. She particularly liked the hotel where she and the Egg were installed, high up in the hills at Sintra: palatial, enormous, and fit for royalty. Vast empty frescoed rooms ornately furnished and full of floral masterpieces led down to yet more vast empty frescoed rooms, and there late at night she and Egg would wander, astonished, like children in a fairy story, like dreamers in a trompe-l"oeil opium dream. Though both had struck the jackpot in life, neither had been reared in luxury, and this whole edifice seemed insubstantial, magical, like a filmset that would be dismantled at any moment before their eyes. Yet it was real. The marble was solid, but the s.p.a.ce was not. Usually it"s the other way round, as they both have discovered.
The films on show at the festival were not so easy on the eye, for the fashion of the year seemed to be for black humour, violence, decapitation, dismembering; cannibalism featured not only in the Egg"s own movie but in several other pieces from small nationalist movements through Europe and beyond. There was a Scottish film of singular ferocity. (Cate Crowe had already seen this movie in London, and hadn"t understood a word of its dialogue; the Portuguese subt.i.tles were a great help, even though Cate couldn"t speak Portuguese, and whoever wrote them deserved, as she said several times, an Oscar.) The Croatian and Romanian contributions were also on the cheerless side, and Cate resolved to play truant and skip the rest of the official programme, apart from the banquets and parties; she"d have one last shot, and condescend to attend the film about which everyone was talking. Then she"d take herself back to the real world of the Palacio in Sintra.
The buzz film of the year, Dangerous Exchanges, was scripted and made by a young, unknown, art-house Australian called Claudia Cazetti. It was a philosophic fiction about time travel, in which a group of characters was granted the opportunity of residence in any period of the pageant of history: they were invited to choose, then had to test the consequences of choice. The joke was that they all kept making silly mistakes like forgetting to specify what age or cla.s.s or even what species they would belong to, and in the end they all got sick to death of their own stupidity and opted for the one remaining choiceto die, or to be reborn as themselves in exactly the spot they"d started from, the spot from which they"d been so keen co get away in the first place. This was Brisbane, 1996. (They all chose Brisbane rather than death: all but one.) Cate Crowe couldn"t follow the intricacies of the plot, as she"d had several gla.s.ses of Portuguese red before settling down to the viewing, but she admired the costumes and the special effects, and was much taken with the performance of the princ.i.p.al actress, who played the Fairy G.o.dmother in charge of the exchanges. This actress, as everyone had been saying, had star quality. She was cool, icy, intelligent, superior. She surveyed the panorama of history and the follies and littlenesses of man with a divine indifference. She was rumoured to be Cazetti"s lover. She looked a bit like Greta Garbo.
It was when the name of Garbo surfaced in the sludge of Cate Crowe"s memory that she remembered where she had seen the name of Claudia Cazetti. It wasn"t just the sympathetic alliteration that made it seem familiar: it was Cazetti who had faxed her, months ago, about the film rights in Frieda Haxby"s Queen Christina. Hadn"t Garbo played Christina, a thousand years ago? Cate Crowe knew she"d better get hold of Cazetti. She"d better get hold of Haxby"s book. There might be something in this after all.
Cate Crowe had never read her client"s latest work, and had felt little need to do so. She hardly knew Frieda Haxby, whom she had inherited from Bertram Goldie, an older member of the firm, now retired. She had regarded Haxby as a sleeping investment, a quiet, steady-little-earner whose 10 per cent from those old cla.s.sics, The Matriarchy of War, The Scarecrow and the Plough and The Iron Coast, was well worth harvesting, and whose lighter works (a heterogeneous mix of popular sociology and rogue political pamphleteering) had proved surprisingly resilient. But she hadn"t read Christina. She"d read the reviews, and that had seemed more than enough. Maybe she"d been wrong?
It wasn"t easy to get hold of a copy in Lisbon. Cate got on the phone to London and told her a.s.sistant to dig out the letter from Cazetti, and then set off in a taxi to scour the bookshops. After two hours of unsuccessful trawl, and risky parking, on tramlines and cobbled streets and precipices, her driver suggested the Biblioteca of the Inst.i.tuto Britanico, and there indeed she found at least a trace of a copy: the librarian said she had purchased one, but it was out. On further investigation, she discovered it had been out for some four months. Could it be recalled instantly, asked Cate. The librarian seemed unhappy at first, but, succ.u.mbing to Cate"s air of urgency and high talk of film, she agreed to ring up the borrower, a Miss Parker-Sydenham, who lived, as it happened, in Sintra,just down the hill from the Palace Hotel. Cate herself spoke to Miss Parker-Sydenham, who sounded abashed at having kept the book for so long, and agreed to allow Cate to call round and collect it. "I"ve nearly finished it," she repeated, apologetically, several times.
Cate took the obliging taxi all the way back to Sintra and went to wrest her client"s novel from Ms Parker-Sydenham"s keeping. The lady proved to be not the tax-evading expatriate Salazar-supporter that her name had evoked, but an impoverished English-language teacher aged thirty who came from Huddersfield. "I"m awfully sorry," she said, yet again. "Don"t apologize to me," said Cate, and swept off to the hotel with her trophy.
She didn"t have time to tackle it that night, as the Egg rolled home in a right state and needed some handling, but the next morning the sun shone pleasantly enough for her to sit out with it in the gardens below the lemon grove. Two hours into the text, after much skipping, she thought she could see what Cazetti had seen in it. At the very least, there was a fine vehicle here for a leading lady, and plenty of opportunities for feminist deconstruction of the past. Lesbianism and espionage, rape and a.s.sa.s.sinations, art and abdicationswhat more could you want? Amazing that the subject hadn"t been snapped up before. Clever old Haxby. Cate Crowe, retrospectively, grew indignant with the reviewers. What had the ignorant little oafs been complaining about? This was a cracking good story, plenty of action, glamorous settings, strong characters. Was there a part for the Egg? Not really, for the Egg was hopeless in any kind of cla.s.sical rolehe was a bald brute of the nineties, he"d never be able to play Gustavus or Magnus. (His attempt at Jane Austen had been risible.) But the absence of Egg in the script was the only defect Cate Crowe could see, and she was full of plans as she made her way in from the lemon grove to see if the man had come round yet.
On her way in she was arrested by the concierge at the desk, a squat and swart and elderly man of some dignity.
"Miss Crowe," he said, "I see you are reading a book by our old friend Miss Haxby."
Cate was surprised and pleased by this recognition: she gave him the book to inspect. He turned the pages carefully, and paused over Frieda"s portrait on the back flap.
"Yes," he continued. "Miss Haxby was a regular visitor here. Also members of the Swedish royal family. Also we have received Agatha Christie and Marguerite Yourcenar and Sir Angus Wilson."
Cate explained that Miss Haxby was one of her most distinguished and valued clients.
"A very nice lady," said the concierge. "And how is Miss Haxby? We have not seen her for two-three years now. She used to sit here in the garden to write. Maybe it was this book she was writing."
Cate said that as far as she knew Miss Haxby was alive and well and living quietly in the country. Writing, it was rumoured, her memoirs.
Frieda Haxby"s memoirs seemed a more interesting proposition today than they had seemed yesterday. So did Queen Christina. Cate resolved to pursue.
Cate Crow"s fax from Portugal reached Rosemary Herz on a bad day. She had arrived late at her office after spending an hour at the Nightingale Hospital undergoing various tests: a routine health check for insurance purposes had recently revealed startlingly high blood pressure which had required further investigation. Today her blood pressure was still up. Were these two freak results, or was there something wrong with her? And if so what could it be? She was not overweight, and she did not smoke, she drank only moderately. Surely Nathan was more of a high blood pressure candidate than she? But his was said to be steady and low.
Stress she did have, and this news had caused more of it. Her Private Patients Policy already cost her a fair sum, Jonathan"s school fees had just gone up, there was talk of removing tax relief on various parts of her pension. Worse than all of that, her job itself was at risk. She had been sitting pretty for three years and had lulled herself into a sense of security. But there had of late been turmoil in the arts world. Resignations, sackings, venom in the press. Robert Oxenholme, one-time Minister for Sponsorship, had denounced the vacillations and pusillanimity of his own department and taken himself off to Bologna for a year to write a book. It was all very well for some. Her budget had been cut and cut again, and her Board was said to be very unhappy about hostile publicity for the last season"s programme. There had been a particularly controversial installation involving live molluscs and crustaceans which had been deplored by some as cruel and by others as political. She had been called to meet members of the Board to review the situation. Maybe she would be asked to leave. Should she ring up her accountant to ask advice on redundancy pay? Probably not. Every time she rang her accountant it seemed to cost her three hundred quid plus VAT.
This situation was enough to give anybody high blood pressure, that invisible and intangible complaint. Could she feel it coursing round her body, throbbing in the veins at the back of her neck, knocking like a death drum in her temples? She was far too young to suffer from such an ailment. This the specialist had implied, as he probed her genetic inheritance. Did high blood pressure run in the family? Did her mother and father suffer from it? This question in itself was enough to make her pulse race. How could she tell this expensively neat old boy that she had hardly known her father, and that her mother had gone mad? Was her work stressful, he had inquired. Yes, she had said. Yes.
Rosemary, reading her morning"s post, drinking a strong black coffee brewed for her by her PA, heard echoing in the back of her memory some words from an otherwise forgettable Leader of the Opposition at some party conference nearly two decades ago. What was it he had said? "I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old"? It had been a fair warning. Was Rosemary right to suspect that even her PA had looked at her this morning with a certain levity? Were people talking about her, laughing at her, waiting for her departure? Treachery was in the air. Would she come back from lunch and find her desk cleared, her paintings stacked with their faces to the wall? Would she find herself dispatched to Hadrian"s Wall, or jobless altogether?
And here, freshly arrived, was a fax from Cate Crowe, asking about her mother. "I really need to get in touch with her urgently," said the blotchy curly sleek fax paper. "Have you any suggestions? Did your brother-in-law ever manage to make contact with her? I"ll be back in London tomorrow, do get in touch. I need to speak to her soonest. I need a signature."