She remembered how before she left Coromandel, on the way to the ferry with her two suitcases, she had crept into Arthur’s
garage and lain on her back in the dust and sawed at the brake cable of the Mercury with a kitchen knife. It hadn’t gone through
but had probably weakened it a good deal. For all she knew Arthur was dead and she had killed him. It had been simpler when
she was called Rosa. If she was Beverley there were too many things to remember. On the other hand she realised she felt more
like herself.
Richie, aged nine, wept copiously for his father for a time and she had to make herself weep too, to keep the child in good
face. He was a good-looking, bouncy, cheerful boy, but more Maidment than McLean, as obsessed by sport, cricket in particular,
as his father had been with world revolution. She was fond of him but not involved with him and the feeling seemed to be mutual.
‘Why? Why?’ she asked Dionne.
‘Because if you don’t love the father why on earth should you love the child? I daresay daughters are different – but with
the son all you’d see was the way their father slurped spaghetti, or scratched his feet, the kind of traits that annoy you
if you haven’t had enough sex with him recently. I’m never going to have children. It’s all much too complicated.’
Beverley at once felt defensive of Richie: he was his own person, just in some way remote from her. As it was he drifted off
towards his father’s family, and seemed more at home with them than he did with her. She thought even then that when he grew
up and left home he would go a long way but not have much to do with her, or only out of politeness.
In the meanwhile Alice, seventeen and unmarried, was pregnant and needed her attention, and was asking questions about her
father.
The inhabitants of the basement are getting really restless. They keep intruding into my thoughts. Scarlet in particular,
of the fiction al ones, is impatient. She has to get to her lover in Costa’s. (I just wrote Castro’s and had to go back and
correct it – that’s poor Winter coming through from the fictional dead. All that folly and virility gone to waste. I actually
seem to mourn him.)
But I can’t leave Beverley yet. I have a special duty to her. I can’t leave her stranded and a widow, to play into the common
belief that no woman’s life is really interesting after they get to be forty, and that’s pushing it. Why else are parts for
women over thirty-five so thin on the ground, and novels about older women so hard to sell, though they are the bulk of the
readers? No one wants to know is the brutal answer. I wrote my autobiography once and stopped when I got to thirty-seven.
After that, really, who was going to care? Scarlet, Lola and the others will just have to wait. I’ll proceed with Beverley,
whom I have certainly set up for an interesting future life.
I have got Beverley the would-be parricide to Robinsdale and explained why she is as she is, and will certainly tell you presently
about the other husbands: Batcombe, the architect, and Marcus Fletzner the famous right-wing journalist and drunk, and how
Beverley was implicated in those deaths too, and how the kehua in
the flapping of their wings can drive one to drastic action, more sometimes than just an imprudent running away.
It is suddenly really hot up here. We are in the middle of a heat-wave, and I’ve been going out into the garden sometimes,
and walking amongst the daisies; yesterday I was brave enough to look in through the window of the basement room and see the
mauve wrap which Vi gave me still over the back of the typing chair which seems to be just waiting, and think, all that ghost
stuff is nonsense, I’m going to go and work down there where it’s cool.
But then I overhear Rex, who is talking to his old soldier friend Martin the picture-restorer, describe Janice as the kind
of person who turns the milk sour when she passes by a churn. Where did he get that imagery from, I wonder? It feels a bit
Victorian to me. It’s the kind of thing Mr Bennett would say of someone. Worse, it’s how I had Scarlet think of Lola. All
this energy is bouncing about from person to person, the dead and the living, the fictional and the flesh-and-blood, and won’t
lie down. Like Arthur seeing little Beverley’s bloody footsteps, I have the feeling it’s all my fault.
Uneasy it makes me too that the floors of Yatt House no longer seem much of a barrier. Even that protection is dissolving.
Lately there have been odd disturbing incidents upstairs: the whiff of a cigar once or twice in my lovely, airy office. It
can only be Mr Bennett. This fine room was after all once his and hers, the very bedroom in which for a time he was not allowed,
lest a further pregnancy should kill his poor wife; so that red-blooded man – I know, I got a glimpse of him, and he was certainly
macho enough to even flutter my papers – will have stomped up and down smoking of an evening when she had retired, and then
come up to force himself upon her instead of going downstairs to find Mavis.
I don’t suppose Janice has to put up with cigar smoke in her
nice new bungalow. At least she invites the other side in, they don’t come unasked.
Another thing is that yesterday I heard the sound of panting from the corner, and looked up from my computer, and there was
Bonzo, stretched out under the window trying to cool down. I looked out to see if Martin’s old Rover was in the drive but
it wasn’t, so I thought oh, we must be dog-sitting again. And when I looked again Bonzo wasn’t there. He must have slipped
out, which was rather clever of him in the time available. When I went downstairs next I said to Rex, ‘I see we’ve got Bonzo,’
and he looked surprised and said, ‘No, Martin’s not been round.’ So there you are, make of that what you can.
If these phenomena are indeed to do with global warming, sudden extremes of weather, snow or wind, storm or swelter, the deliverers
are soon going to be doing a brisk business.
The deliverers, you will remember, are the ones the church sends in to do exorcisms. Knowing my luck, the one that turned
up would probably be back from the Bennetts’ time, someone wearing a top hat, sent from the now decommissioned church across
the road, bell, book, candle and all. And they’ll be trying to exorcise me. I don’t suppose I’m in danger, but people do just
drop dead sometimes, like young Michael Jackson.
And what about Cristobel Bennett? Now she’s propped up in bed in my office, clamouring for attention. I can’t see her, or
hear her, she’s just dictating what I write:
Oh, Mr Bennett, Mr Bennett, leave Cristobel alone!
Mary Stopes the birth-control heroine didn’t come along till a decade or so later to explain that every time a woman has
a baby she doubles her chances of dying. The men, bishops, judges and legislators, didn’t want to know – you could go to prison
for advocating contraception – so it was a brave thing for
a woman to say. Childbirth is not a nice way of dying, and takes a long time. I expect this nice office of mine, so pleasant
for me, once echoed to screams, and any number of servants could not help. Downstairs Mavis haunts, upstairs Cristobel.
Robinsdale, that gentle home, was so much younger than Yatt House and had not had much time to accumulate real distress in
its walls. Though I daresay the kehua perched in its trees and looked mournfully around the Antipodean foliage and longed
for the darker greens of home, and for Beverley and her kin to react as they should: that is, go home and perform the necessary
rituals. Slim chance we have, they must have thought, but they were in no position to do much of anything but flap and rattle
and precipitate action that might be as harmful as helpful. The Furies can chase you with guilt until you take to your heels
and jump over a cliff, but the kehua are not like that. They just want you home where you belong, with the whanau.
After Winter died the North-West Cadre dissolved and re-formed elsewhere – its members so well trained in the ways of Gramsciist
entryism that now they hold positions of power in many of our institutions, playing a significant role in the non-elected
European Council, turning Europe into the Soviet Union Lite, as was always their intent. Or so Beverley’s third husband Marcus
was to insist, and though bright and witty enough, he was a noted conspiracy theorist. In the end, indeed, his mind was so
muddied with drink, drugs and paranoia that he couldn’t even dodge a train when he saw it coming. Beverley could not possibly
be blamed since she was in Paris at the time, but it is possible to manipulate events from a distance.
An eligible and attractive widow with a good house and an agreeable nature is never going to be short of suitors. Nor was
Beverley. Some she entertained, some she did not. Like women everywhere she hoped that true love would come along and solve
all her problems, sweep her away on waves of certainty and overwhelm her with transcendent emotion, that sort of thing, but
when after a couple of years she had not been so swept away she settled for Harry Batcombe, a slight, good-looking man with
no personal baggage to drag around that she knew of: kind, gentle and well read – not in fact unlike the man Scarlet would
later choose as a partner – and
very useful when it came to controlling the builders Bev had just hired for her new conservatory.
Harry worked at Buckingham Palace and saw the Queen in person every month or so to discuss the redesign and restoration of
the galleries there, and frankly, Marxist Beverley was as much a sucker for royalty as anyone, and impressed by his Palace
connections. Another bonus was that Harry got along well with Cynara, Alice’s daughter by the Unknown One.
Beverley could never quite forget Rita’s dictum that most men would not want to take on another man’s child. She’d assumed
that Winter, in taking on Alice, had been a kind of enlightened exception – yet here was another one. Children, the Pill having
created a shortage of the little creatures, had become prizes to be valued, rather than seen as an expense, a blight on a
busy man’s life, and a usurper of the mother’s emotion.
When Alice became pregnant at seventeen, just as she was off to study marine biology at Leeds – she liked fish and was good
at science – she pressed Beverley more closely about her father and her grandparents.
‘Your father was a medical student,’ Beverley said. ‘I met him on holiday but he gave me a false name and disappeared. That
was the kind of thing young men did, even nice ones, in those days. And your grandparents? Well,’ and she told Alice a version
of the truth, about murder and suicide and tiny bloody footprints. She didn’t mention Arthur. She never mentioned Arthur.
If she thought of Arthur these days, which was rarely, she imagined his Ford Mercury crashing down the hillside near Kennedy
Bay and him meeting his death in a fireball. The fuel tank on those cars was huge.
How the kehua congregated, flapped and squawked that day when Beverley told lies to Alice. They have a strange soundless
squawk which makes you think the pressure in your ears has changed, and which made Alice so fearful she ran to the abortionist.
But Beverley ran after her and dissuaded her from the vile deed, saying she Beverley would look after the child for ever more
if she let it live. Kill one, save one.
So now Alice lived in Leeds studying fish and little Cynara lived in Robinsdale, where the vibes were good, apart from the
strange creatures hanging batlike in the trees, which I daresay would show up when lightning played over Highgate. But few
would be looking. A stray one hung up on a beech tree near the biological sciences faculty at Leeds, but Alice was young and
her immune system was good, and whenever it told her to run back to her mother she managed to discount it.
Why should I, she said to the voice in her head. The less I see of family the better. Forget the family in the past, the one
in the present was bad enough: there was all that business with her stepfather Winter and the North-West Cadre: and she’d
seen Beverley, with her nightie torn, leave the spare room where Joey Matthews was sleeping, one early morning when her stepfather
was not home.
Not the kind of thing, if you were Alice, you could forgive and forget. But that unforgiving tendency could have come down
to her from anywhere – Walter McLean, or possibly Arthur – Walter would have had a more broody kind of temperament to begin
with, than his cousin Arthur. The McLeans were a family of dour Scots from Inverness, whose family had arrived in Dunedin
on the good ship
Numidian
in 1863 (probably with a kelpie or two), and moved up to Canterbury and a gentler climate, there to farm sheep and multiply.
Alice declined to tell anyone who her baby’s father was. What business was it of theirs? But mother love is strong, so she
got down
to see Cynara quite a bit, in a formal kind of way. She had a cool, observant,
Alice in Wonderland
nature, which suited her looks: wide-eyed, blonde and still, always the illustration, never quite the real thing.
Anyway Beverley married Harry and Harry moved in and all went well, in a sexless kind of way, which was something of a relief.
She had to learn to put the tops on jars properly and remember to lock up and how to use the new alarm system, but these were
useful virtues, she told herself. Richie drifted over to the Maidment side of the family where his cricket skills were properly
appreciated, then he became interested in film, for which Beverley was blamed as representative of the artistic side of the
family. Beverley, never having seen herself as particularly artistic, was baffled.
The
News of the World
, having taken an interest years back in the goings-on in the North West Cadre, and in Beverley, of whom they kept in the
files a few ‘compromising’ snaps from her early days, just in case, were delighted by her new royal connections.
They took to following Harry about and unearthed the fact that he was having an affair with a young pastry chef who worked
in the Palace kitchens. On and on the headlines went: ‘
Rent Boy Serves Up Royal Stew
’, and so forth. Beverley ‘stood by him’ – she had long since guessed – but Harry was found hanged, fortunately not in Robinsdale
but in the Garrick Club’s men’s lavatory. But it was all unpleasant enough. Beverley could see from those early photographs
the tabloid had reprinted of her and Dionne at the Mayfair Photographers’ Club – she in black bra and pants, Dionne in nothing
at all – that if it hadn’t been for her Harry would still be alive.