A Natural Curiosity (16 page)

‘Now that cannot be quite true,’ said Clive.

‘No, of course it isn’t true, it’s an exaggeration, of course they love me. But you know what I mean.’ The gin and tonic, on an empty stomach, had gone to her head, the memory of her mother had momentarily demented her. ‘And you, Mr Enderby, how many children do you have?’

‘Two,’ he said. ‘And do call me Clive.’

‘Two. And how old are they?’

‘Eight and six. A boy and a girl. William and Victoria.’

‘A model family.’

‘Yes, a model family. And we live in a four-bedroomed house with a double garage and an au pair girl attached. And my wife works part-time. Mr and Mrs Average Professional Couple.’

‘There’s no such thing as the average professional couple,’ said Liz.

‘No,’ said Clive, echoing Liz, ‘maybe not. But you know what I mean.’

They gazed at one another, appraisingly. Clive smiled, Liz smiled. They had spoken to one another, in human voices, across a great divide, and both were surprised that this had been possible. They contemplated the nature of that communication, of that surprise. It was tinged with sex on both sides. Clive put it to himself that he fancied Liz. Liz fancied Clive, though she did not put it to herself so clearly or so crudely. There he was, a young man still in his thirties, looking at her with admiration, and expressing that admiration. It has been a long time since she had solicited or been aware of receiving such attention. She responded to his interest with interest. A small excitement, pleasurable, containable, stimulating, like a mild sweet breeze, stirs the carefully regulated office air. As Clive helped Liz into her grey cashmere coat, he smelled her odour, she smelled his. He patted her shoulder, as she settled the coat fabric, and she felt the weight of his hand. He touched her arm as he opened the door for her. He stood by the lift, his hand on the button, and smiled at her. When they shook hands on parting, both hands lingered slightly, warmly, in a friendly professional clasp. A little warmth flickered and glowed between them, a small animal bodily knowledge. Cliff Harper was dead and Shirley Harper had vanished, but Clive and Liz (as they now called one another) were alive.

Celia Harper lies prone on her bed in her room in north Oxford, wrapped in a rug against the cold, with a woollen hat on her head and a scarf around her neck. She has run out of fifty-pence pieces for the meter and cannot be bothered to go out in search of more. She is too absorbed to move, despite a sore throat and an incipient chill. Surrounded by books she lies. Books in many languages. The bed of Babel. Greek, Latin, Russian. Open before her lie volumes of the poems of Joseph Brodsky, in both Russian and English, on top of an open Homer. ‘Letters to a Roman Friend’. ‘Odysseus to Telemachus’. She has been picking her way through them patiently, finding odd words she recognizes in the Russian text. Now she is reading Tacitus. The murder of Galba. She reads of the death of Piso, dragged from the Temple of Vesta and slaughtered by Sulpicius Florus and Statius Murcus. She reads that Otho studied Piso’s severed head ‘with peculiar malevolence, as if his eyes could never drink their fill’. She can read Latin quickly, thanks to her excellent classical education at Northam Girls’ High School. She races on, through the dreadful annals, fortifying herself on nibbles of Kendal Mint Cake.

Neglected on the floor lie two letters delivered by hand from college, at the request of the porter. One is from her brother Barry, the other from her uncle Steve. They ask her to get in touch because her father is ill. The phrasing in each is slightly different but the import the same. Celia pays no attention to them. She feels safe, safely out of touch. The cold dull breath of home cannot touch her here. Home, where nothing ever ever happened, where tedium reigned supreme. If they really want her, they will have to come and get her. She does not believe that her father is ill. They are just annoyed with her, she speciously reasons, because she forgot his birthday. She is glad there is no telephone in the flat, for if there were, they would surely be nagging at her. She can’t afford to let them get at her. They will slow her down, rust her up, paralyse her. She banishes them, exiles them from her attention. She will read Tacitus until 5.30, then allow herself half an hour more of Brodsky, then a little Aeschylus, and then she will bicycle into hall for her supper. After that, who knows, she may go to a film at the Film Society with Anna and Pat. This is the real world, the world she has created for herself. She does not wish to be pulled out of it by her father’s illness. She eats another square of mint cake. These days, she eats and eats, and stays as thin as a pre-puberty child. She eats and eats and reads and reads. She is devoured by greed. She devours.

Shirley Harper walks along the beach, gazing at the distant headland and the sea. She remembers this little bay. It is called happiness. She takes off her shoes, rolls down her tights, steps delicately on the cold ridged wet sand. Lug worms. Razor shells. Her naked instep aches with imprinted memory.

Steve Harper sits at the kitchen-table with his head in his hands. His wife Dora is ironing pillowcases. The kitchen is filled with the soothing smell of hot wet cotton, but Steve is not soothed. Dora is crying, quietly, stoically, her plain kind broad friendly face blotchy with misery. She grieves for her husband. She worries about Shirley. She worries about Celia. She cannot forgive Cliff. She refuses to see her mother-in-law. She is sorry for old Mrs Harper, but she cannot bring herself to see her. Mrs Harper does nothing but complain. Even now, in these sad days, Mrs Harper blames Shirley, blames Cliff’s partner Jim, blames the boys, blames Celia, blames Oxford, blames Cliff. Given half a chance, she would blame Dora. Moan, moan, moan. No, Dora cannot bear it. Somebody else will have to comfort Mrs Harper for the death of her son.

Shirley settles her boarding-house bill, surprised by how little her out-of-season night had cost. True, the bed had been narrow, the room tiny, but it had been a bed, in a bedroom. With a washbowl, although no soap. And a small electric fire. She had slept little. Images of childhood had drifted through her drowsing. A loneliness, an oppression, a desire to escape, a craving for the normal. She had failed to find the normal. She had been marked out. Marked from birth. In a little terraced house on a desolate seafront she lay listening to the waves, in utter solitude. Nobody knew where she was. Nobody but this landlady, to whom she now offers a ten-pound note, from whom she now waits for change. The landlady is loud-voiced, stout, falsely jolly, chatty. She seems the most normal person in the world. But who knows, thinks Shirley, who knows what oddities, what longings, what past crimes, this large mobile acrylic-cardiganed bosom may conceal? Human nature, since Cliff’s death, has gone soft and shapeless, has melted into an amorphous mass, an unpredictable uncorseted lump of matter. Shirley cannot tell where it will break out next. What lumps, what growths, what abnormalities, what liquifyings, what solidifyings? The bosom heaves with laughter at its own joke. It is a wild morning, and the sea crashes against the sea wall.

Alix Bowen, sitting in Beaver’s attic sorting out a box of papers, wonders where Shirley has gone to, and whether she herself will ever find Paul Whitmore’s mother. People don’t disappear, she tells herself. Even Beaver’s famed disappearance had been only figurative, for during it all sorts of people had known perfectly well where he was and who he was. His colleagues, his wife, his children, his parents, his bank manager, his friends from the pub, his neighbours, his barber. Even his not very enthusiastic publishers.

She wonders about Stephen Cox, and Cambodia. In Cambodia, people disappeared. But not in Britain, in the late twentieth century.

Beaver’s papers are wonderfully inconsequential, defiantly lacking in chronology. A Final Notice dated 12 December 1978 from the Electricity Board in glowing red, demanding £24.89, is clipped to a handwritten letter from Faber & Faber dated 5 June 1939, explaining the absence of royalties. A vicious anonymous review from
The TLS
of a volume by Geoffrey Grigson with the note ‘I wrote this’ is paper-clipped to a restaurant bill, dated 1932, from Bertorelli’s for £2 2s. 6d. What appears to be a fragment of a poem is written on the back of a draft of a letter to
The Times
, noting that Our Queen has been forced to take part, surely against her will, in the rubber-stamping of the execution of a young man in Jamaica. ‘I protest, on Her Majesty’s behalf, and on behalf of a country that has wisely seen fit to abolish capital punishment, against this indignity committed in her name,’ declares a Beaver of the late 1960s. Alix wonders if he ever finished the letter, ever sent it, ever had it published? Would a biographer have to follow up such clues? What a nightmare, thinks Alix. Occasionally Beaver hints that it would be convenient if Alix herself were to become his recording angel. She finds the idea faintly obscene.

I have become a detective, thinks Alix, as she wonders how to file what appears to be a pile of old reports from Hansborough Secondary School. They have so far been lovingly preserved, as though Beaver had been proud of his classroom prowess. Number of Pupils in Form, 23, Place in Form, 1. Occasionally he was beaten into a humiliating second place by a character called Maud Hand, but most of the time he was on top. His childhood sweetheart (later his wife), Bertha Sykes, hovered supportingly in the middle ranks. Maud must have been a thorn in Beaver’s flesh. Alix wondered what had happened to her. Dare she raise her name, one day, over lunch, as a diversion from the ex-mistresses and the ill-used, lamented Bertha?

Class places, examination marks, marks for everything. Naked competition. At the bottom of each page, in red print, it was stated that ‘On the withdrawal of a pupil from school, a term’s notice, in writing, addressed to the Headmaster or to the Clerk, is required. In default, a term’s fees are payable.’ How had they paid, what had they paid
with
, these sons and daughters of South Yorkshire miners? Alix had been under the illusion that education, in the 1920s, had been free. She knows she knows nothing.

Alix opens another little bundle. It is full of references for the young Beaver, hopeful and frequently disappointed applicant for teaching posts in schools up and down the country. Some of the references strike Alix as inattentive or lukewarm. There is one from that great classical scholar, Hubert Hawkins. On it, an older Beaver has scribbled, ‘Couldn’t remember me from Adam, could he?’

There is something mournful about the bundle. Alix drops it, and for light relief picks up a dusty but much more recent box of slides. She has a slide viewer to hand (Bertha had been a keen and hopeless photographer), and she starts to peer at coloured images of the fifties and sixties. They are all jumbled up: scenes of Swiss mountains alternate with Hadrian’s Wall, Rome is mixed up with the Rhine, and a wholesome array of Scandinavian barns is enlivened by a good (museum-bought) shot of the Bog Man of Tollund, smiling his sweet smile of everlasting anguish, of enigmatic resignation. There is a sequence of ill-shot views of the sea, showing bits of boat rail and sloping deck and occasionally a small distant object on the horizon—a rock, a lighthouse?—and slipped amongst them a view of a formal Italian garden with statuary and white peacocks and a fountain and a distant lake. She continues through the box, and is rewarded by a shot of Bertha Beaver sitting on a beach in a deck-chair in a plastic rainhood, by a shot of the broad backside of Beaver as he leans to stroke a dog of which only the tail and a quarter of the rump are visible. And here is Beaver standing in a garden, wearing a ridiculous scarlet and black furred robe and a medieval hat, and here is a snap of a tortoiseshell cat. And who are these figures, sitting in the sun and wrinkling up their eyes against the light? That is Bertha, her legs planted wide apart, her skirt rucked up to let the sun get at her knees, and that is Beaver, dark-glassed, in a Panama hat, and that, surely, is Robert Graves? Today, when Alix descends from her attic to join him for lunch (cold baked beans, tomatoes, salami, many slices of white bread, and a banana—his choice), Beaver wants to talk about the woman in Pallanza, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, the woman who is the queen of his Novara sequence. Alix says she has found no snaps or slides of her.

‘She didn’t like having her picture taken,’ says Beaver. ‘A captivating creature. But my God she was plain.’

‘Then why was she captivating?’ asks Alix, spreading her bread with a novel highly coloured polyunsaturated spread: Beaver, in his eighties, has suddenly stopped eating butter because of its cholesterol content.

‘Her conversation,’ says Beaver. ‘She could talk. And talk and talk and talk.’

‘Sounds awful, to me,’ says Alix, who is permitted liberties, is encouraged to take liberties.

‘She was awful,’ says Beaver. ‘But she was rich.’

‘So it wasn’t her talk,’ says Alix. ‘It was her money.’

‘They make a stunning combination,’ says Beaver. They both laugh. Then he falls a little silent, as he chews on his salami and then vigorously with his buckled fingernail extracts a bit of rind from his surprisingly fierce teeth, and lays it, spittle-covered, on the plastic tablecloth.

‘Bertha,’ he says, reflectively, ‘Bertha, she was neither rich nor talkative nor pretty. You never met my Bertha.’

‘No,’ says Alix.

‘Bertha was the love of my life,’ says Beaver, mournfully, sentimentally, spearing another slice of salami. He sighs, chews, sighs. Alix says nothing, rather loudly. This too is her liberty.

‘Well, never mind,’ says Beaver, reaching for his banana. ‘Let’s talk about something cheerful. Tell me some more about your murderer.’

Clive Enderby is on the phone to his brother Edward. ‘But I thought Janice knew Shirley Harper quite well,’ he insists. Edward repeats his denial: Janice and Shirley were acquainted, their daughters had been at the same school, they had greeted one another at school concerts and Parents’ Evenings, but that was about it, there was no more to it than that.