Authors: Jonathan Coe
He said: ‘It isn’t too late to tell you now, is it? You’re still interested?’
Personally, I don’t think she could hear him by this stage. That’s my theory. But he carried on anyway. He was the persistent sort.
He said: ‘It was a Friday night. We’d booked a table for two, for eight o’clock. Mum had come down about five. I thought she seemed a bit edgy, for some reason. I mean, she’d just had a long drive and everything, but it was more than that. So I asked her if there was anything the matter, and she said yes, she’d got something to tell me, some news, and she wasn’t sure how I was going to take it. I asked her what it was and she said it was probably best to wait till we got to the restaurant. So that’s what we did.
‘Well, you know how busy the Mandarin gets, especially on a Friday night. It was pretty full. The food was a long time coming but she insisted on waiting for the main courses before saying whatever it was she had to say. She was getting very nervous. I was getting nervous, too. Finally she took a breath and told me that there was something I had to know about my father. Something she’d been meaning to tell me ever since he died, but had never had the nerve because she knew how much I worshipped him – how he’d always been my favourite, out of the two of them. Of course I denied this at the time, but it was true. He used to write me these letters when I was little. Made-up letters, full of all these silly jokes. They were the first letters I ever got. My mother would never have done anything like that. So, yes, it was true: he was my favourite. Always had been.
‘And then she started telling me about how they’d met, how they’d both belonged to the same badminton club, and how he’d courted her for months and kept asking her to marry him and she’d kept refusing. I knew most of this already. But what I didn’t know was the reason she finally accepted, which was that she was pregnant. Pregnant by another man. She was three or four months pregnant by then and she asked him if he would marry her and help her to bring the baby up and he said yes he would.
‘So I said: Are you telling me that the person I called my father all those years wasn’t my father at all? That he had nothing to do with me?
‘And she said: Yes.
‘So I said: Who knew about this? Did everybody know? Did his parents know? Is that why they never wanted to speak to us?
‘And she said: Yes, everybody knew, and yes, that was why his parents had never wanted to speak to us.
‘We’d both stopped eating by now, as you might have guessed. My mother was crying. I was beginning to raise my voice. I don’t know why I was starting to feel angry: maybe it was just because anger was so much easier to deal with than the emotions I should have been feeling. Anyway, I asked her, in that case, could she possibly see her way clear to telling me who my real father was, if it wasn’t too much to ask. And she said his name was Jim Fenchurch, and she’d met him twice, once at her mother’s house in Northfield and once again about ten years later. He was a salesman. She’d been on her own in her mother’s house and he’d come round to sell her a vacuum cleaner and after a while they’d gone upstairs and that was when it had happened.’
The nurse came back at this point. She tapped Michael on the shoulder and put a cup of coffee on the table next to the bed, but he didn’t seem to notice, and carried on talking in this low, murmurous monotone. He was gripping Fiona’s hand quite hard by now. The nurse didn’t leave, she just stepped back a few paces and stood in the shadows, watching.
‘So then I started losing my temper. Then I started thumping the table and sent a couple of chopsticks flying, and I said: You went to bed with a
salesman?
You went to bed with a man who came to sell you a
vacuum
cleaner? Why did you do it? Why? And she said she didn’t know, he was so charming, and so nice to her, and he was handsome, too. He had lovely eyes. Like your eyes, she said. And I just couldn’t stand it when she said that. I shouted: I do not! I don’t have his eyes! I’ve got my father’s eyes! And she said: Yes, that’s exactly it, you’ve got your father’s eyes. And that was when I got up and walked out, only you know how close together the tables are in the Mandarin, I was so angry and I was in such a hurry, I bumped into this couple’s table and knocked their teapot over and I didn’t even stop or anything. I just walked straight out into the street and didn’t look to see if my mother was following. I walked straight out into the street and didn’t go back to the flat for hours, not till some time after midnight. And my mother was gone by then. Her car was gone and she left a note for me which I never read and a few weeks later she sent me a letter which I never opened and I’ve never heard from her since. After that night I just stayed in my flat and didn’t really go out or speak to anyone for two, maybe three years.’
He paused. Then his voice was even quieter: ‘Till you came along.’
And then, quieter still: ‘So now you know.’
Then the nurse stepped forward and put her hand on his shoulder. She whispered, ‘She’s gone, I’m afraid,’ and Michael nodded, and bowed his head, curling in upon himself. He might have been crying, but I think he was just very very tired.
He was like that for about five minutes. Then the nurse made him let go of Fiona’s hand, and said: ‘I think you’d better come with me.’ He stood up slowly and took her arm, and they walked off the screen together, to the left of the frame. And that was the last I ever saw of him.
As for me, I stayed right there in my seat. I wasn’t going to move until Fiona did. There seemed no point in leaving the cinema, this time.
PART TWO
∗
‘AN ORGANIZATION OF DEATHS’
CHAPTER ONE
Where There’s a Will
THE short January afternoon was fading into premature dusk. Thin, silent rain fell drearily. A dank, clinging fog had risen from the river, and was creeping furtively over the city. Through this grey pall the familiar roar of London’s traffic penetrated, persistent, yet with an eerie, muffled effect.
Michael turned away from the window and sat down in front of the silently flickering television screen. The room was dark, but he didn’t bother to turn on the lights. He picked up the remote control and switched idly from one channel to another, settling finally for a news bulletin which he watched for a few minutes with bored incomprehension, dimly aware that his eyelids were beginning to droop. The radiators were on full, the air was thick and heavy, and before long he had slipped into a light, uneasy doze.
It had already become his habit, in the two weeks since Fiona’s death, to leave the front door of his flat unlocked and slightly ajar. He had taken a resolve to stay on closer terms with the other residents, and this gesture was intended to express the character of a friendly, approachable neighbour. Today, however, it had another effect, for when an elderly stranger, clad from head to foot entirely in black, arrived at Michael’s threshold and received no answer to his inquiring knock, he was able to push the door noiselessly open and make his own way, unseen, into the darkened hallway. Proceeding into the sitting room, the stranger positioned himself next to the television set and stood a little while in impassive contemplation of Michael’s slumped, recumbent figure. When he had seen all that he wanted to see, he coughed, loudly, twice in succession.
Michael awoke with a start and brought his sleepy eyes into focus, whereupon he found himself staring at a face which would have struck terror into the heart of many a stronger man. Gaunt, misshapen and unhealthy, it expressed at once a meanness of spirit, a slowness of intelligence and, perhaps most chillingly of all, an absolute untrustworthiness. It was a face from which all marks of love, compassion, or any of those softer feelings without which no man’s character can be called complete, had been viciously erased. It had, one might have thought, a touch of madness in it. It was a face which gave out a simple, dreadful message: abandon hope, all you who look upon this face. Give up every thought of redemption, every prospect of escape. Expect nothing from me.
Shivering with disgust, Michael turned off the television, and President Bush disappeared from the screen. Then he switched on a nearby tablelamp, and looked for the first time at his visitor.
He was not a man of forbidding aspect: the austerity of his clothing and steadiness of his gaze made him more severe than sinister. He was, Michael surmised, very much on the wrong side of sixty; and he spoke flatly, with a Yorkshire accent, his voice deep, cold and expressionless.
‘You’ll forgive me for intruding, unannounced, upon your personal domesticity,’ he said. ‘But as your door had been left ajar …’
‘That’s quite all right,’ said Michael. ‘How can I help you?’
‘You are Mr Owen, I take it?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘My name is Sloane. Everett Sloane, solicitor, of the firm of Sloane, Sloane, Quigley and Sloane. My card.’
Michael struggled into an upright position and took the proffered instrument, which he examined blinkingly.
‘I’m here under instructions from my client,’ the solicitor continued, ‘the late Mr Mortimer Winshaw, of Winshaw Towers.’
‘Late?’ said Michael. ‘You mean that he’s dead?’
‘That,’ said Mr Sloane, ‘is precisely my meaning. Mr Winshaw passed away yesterday. Quite peacefully, if reports are to be believed.’
Michael received this news in silence.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said at last, remembering his visitor.
‘Thank you, but my business can be kept very brief. I have only to inform you that your presence is requested at Winshaw Towers tomorrow evening, for the reading of the will.’
‘My presence …?’ Michael echoed. ‘But why? I only met him once. Surely he wouldn’t have left me anything?’
‘Naturally,’ said Mr Sloane, ‘I am not at liberty to discuss the contents of this document until all the concerned parties are gathered, at the appointed time and place.’
‘Yes,’ said Michael, ‘I can see that.’
‘I can count on your attendance, then?’
‘You can.’
‘Thank you.’ Mr Sloane turned and was about to leave, when he added: ‘You will, of course, be staying the night at Winshaw Towers. I would advise you to bring plenty of warm clothing. It is a cold and desolate spot; and the weather, at this time of year, can be uncommonly fierce.’
‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘Until tomorrow, then, Mr Owen. And don’t worry: I can see myself out.’
∗
There was a strange sense of expectancy in the air the following day, which had nothing to do with Michael’s impending journey to Yorkshire. It was January 16th, and at five o’clock that morning, the United Nations’ final deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait had expired. The allied attack on Saddam Hussein might be launched at any moment, and every time he turned on the radio or the television, Michael was half-expecting to hear that the war had begun.
Boarding a train at King’s Cross station late in the afternoon, he glimpsed some familiar faces among the other passengers: Henry Winshaw and his brother Thomas were both taking their seats in a first-class carriage, along with their young cousin Roderick Winshaw, the art dealer, and Mr Sloane himself. Michael, needless to say, was travelling second class. But the train was not busy, and he was able to spread his coat and suitcase over a pair of seats with a clear conscience, while he took out an exercise book and attempted to make notes on the most important passages from what was obviously a well-thumbed volume.
I Was ‘Celery’,
published by the Peacock Press in late 1990, had turned out to be the memoir of a retired Air Intelligence Officer who had worked as a double agent for MI5 during the Second World War. Although it offered no direct information about Godfrey Winshaw’s disastrous mission, it did at least explain the meaning of Lawrence’s note: BISCUIT, CHEESE and CELERY, it appeared, had all been the codenames of double agents controlled and supervised by something called the Twenty Committee, established as a collaborative venture by the War Office, GHQ Home Forces, MI5, MI6 and others in January 1941. Might Lawrence have been a member of this committee? Very likely. Might he also have been in secret radio communication with the Germans, supplying them not only with the names and identities of these double agents, but with information about British military plans – such as the proposed bombing of munitions factories? This would be difficult to establish, fifty years after the event, but the evidence was beginning to suggest that Tabitha’s worst accusations about her brother and his wartime treachery were very close to the truth.
As the train sped on through the grey, mist-shrouded landscape, Michael found it harder and harder to concentrate on this puzzle. He laid the book down and stared vacantly out of the window. The weather had hardly changed in the last two weeks. It was on just such an afternoon, some ten days ago, that Fiona’s body had been cremated in the drab, cheerless setting of a suburban funeral parlour. The ceremony had been sparsely attended. There had been only Michael, a forgotten aunt and uncle from the South West of England, and a handful of her colleagues from work. The hymn singing was unbearably thin, and the attempt to convene at a pub afterwards had been miscalculated. Michael had only stayed a few minutes. He had gone back to his flat to pick up an overnight bag, then taken a train up to Birmingham.
His reconciliation with his mother, too, was less than he had expected it to be. They spent an awkward evening together at a local restaurant. Michael had presumed, rather naïvely, that his very reappearance would fill her with such delight as to compensate fully for all the pain he had inflicted by breaking off communications for so long. Instead, he found himself called upon to justify his conduct, which he attempted to do in a succession of halting and poorly argued speeches. In effect, he maintained, his father had died twice: the second, and more devastating death being when Michael learned the truth about his parentage. He now believed that his two or three years’ subsequent withdrawal from the world could be seen as a period of sustained mourning – a theory supported, if support were needed, by Freud’s essay on the subject, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. His mother seemed less than convinced by this appeal to scientific authority, but as the evening wore on, and she saw the sincerity of her son’s contrition, the atmosphere nevertheless began to thaw. After they had arrived home and made two cups of Horlicks, Michael felt emboldened to ask a few questions about his lost parent.