A Natural Curiosity (35 page)

Clive Enderby has not missed his wife, has not noticed her absence from the throng. He has been too busy talking about urban regeneration grants, while at the same time trying to keep half an eye on Liz Headleand and half an eye on his sister-in-law Janice, who has been drinking far too heavily and looks as though she might say or even do something unforgivable at any moment. He can tell that Fanny Kettle could not care less if one of her guests were to rip off her clothes and dance naked on the table, indeed she would probably applaud loudly, but he has his professional reputation to consider as well as his poor brother’s poor health. Clive is trying to keep a firm grip of things, but has a sense that he has already let go of one or two ends, and that bits of plot and machinery are beginning to speed up and unravel in an unintended way. Who could have predicted, for instance, that either Liz Headleand or Joanna Hestercombe would be at this mad party? Does either of them have any idea who the other is? Bemused, as he chatters on about 420,000 square feet of industrial and commercial units, he wonders if his speculations are correct, and if he is guilty of criminal negligence in concealing them. ‘I think the U D A should speak to the U D C more openly,’ he hears himself saying, as Besserman nods sagely. Clive has no idea what he is talking about. He is mildly obsessed by the purple apparition of Liz Ablewhite. He senses drama, disaster, revelations.

Joanna Hestercombe is now talking to the Vice-Chancellor about Simon Blessed and his paintings. She knows them well and indeed has loaned some to the exhibition. He is pretending to know them. Joanna is an unmarried horse-riding, dog-owning woman, a woman happier in gumboots than in court shoes. Her steel-grey hair is scraped severely back from a high forehead and a central parting, and pinioned by a mother-of-pearl comb on either side, above the ear: below the combs, wiry tufts burst out vigorously, almost like a little girl’s bunches. There is both innocence and worldliness in her face, her manner. She is thin, bony, finely drawn. Her teeth are prominent. She speaks of Simon Blessed’s painting of one of her grandfather’s horses, Archangel. The texture of the coat, the ripples of muscle under the chestnut skin are magnificently rendered, she says. Magnificently. She speaks precisely. She does not sound ridiculous. She knows what she is talking about.

Across the room a woman called Marcia Campbell (also, like Liz, a stranger to most of the gathering) is talking to Fanny Kettle about Ogham Abbey, the anchorite and Eastwold Grange. Fanny is telling Marcia what they got for the Grange, what they paid for this new Northam house, what they might have got for the Grange had it been in a less out-of-the-way part of the country. Marcia nods, smiles, encourages, volunteers that she has always liked that flat part of the country by the Humber, that she thinks it has its own desolate beauty. Too desolate by half, says Fanny. I was going mad, out there. Mad. And the damp, I can’t tell you. It’s under sea level, you know. Marcia nods again. Fanny prattles on. She has no idea who Marcia Campbell is, and has no recollection of having invited her, but as she arrived with Joanna Hestercombe of Stocklinch, she must be all right. So reasons Fanny, if reasoning it could be called. And Marcia is a good listener, patient, attentive. She does not let Fanny notice that her eyes keep straying towards that other uninvited guest, to Liz Headleand in her purple dress.

It is easier now for Cliff and Marcia Campbell to keep an eye on Liz, for the party is thinning out a little. Groups of people are sitting on settees, perched on arms of chairs, leaning against bookshelves. The amorous glimmer of the Pharsalian Pink is beginning to dim, and Susie and Blake Leith have emerged from the conservatory. Fanny’s guests are staider than they were in the old days, Ian Kettle notes with some relief: the only real troublemaker is Janice Enderby, who is having a boring high-pitched altercation with some unfortunate young academic from the polytechnic. ‘Nelson Mandela House!’ she cries, indignantly. ‘Stuff Nelson Mandela!’

Ian Kettle himself is engaged in conversation with Perry Blinkhorn, Brian Bowen and old Beaver. They are talking about the Celts and the Romans, about imperialism and aggression, about the cults of Vercingetorix, Arminius and Boudicca. Do superior cultures really vanish without trace? Perry Blinkhorn argues that they may. Perry Blinkhorn, rightly suspected of being religious, has been reading Simone Weil, on the French Resistance, on the German war machine. But the Germans lost, Kettle points out. And who knows, the blood of the Parisi may still flow in your veins, in mine. We are both of local stock, you and I. What is defeat, what victory?

Blake Leith is talking to Liz about his home at the sea’s edge. There is a strange look in his eyes, an exalted glitter, and a sea sex smell to him, a salt tang. On the red cliff’s edge, he says. On the edge of the North Sea. He lights a French cigarette with trembling fingers. Liz has noticed that she herself is giving off a strange odour, an odour not her own: it must be the stale reactivated vegetable dye of the Mexican dress. She too smells, of fibre and fish. Of murex. Of magic. Of brew. And as she stands there, talking idly to this shabby handsome villain, she begins to feel a strange prickling in the back of her neck, a tingling, a premonition. Her scalp crawls, and she turns, a half second before Marcia Campbell touches her lightly on the shoulder.

‘Hello,’ says Marcia. ‘Forgive my interrupting, may I introduce myself? I think you must be Elizabeth Headleand. And I think I am your half-sister Marcia Campbell.’

Liz’s mouth drops open. She stares.

What she sees is a plump, smiling, pretty woman in her fifties in a loose black soft dress, with thick white hair in a bun held by a gold pin. She wears gold earrings, a gold necklace, and is carefully made up, with violet eyes, dark lashes, a dark-pink pencilled mouth, a fair clear skin. She holds out a hand, this smiling sociable apparition.

Liz holds out her own hand, uncertainly. The other woman grasps it, warmly, firmly. She smiles, encouragingly, and speaks again.

‘Well, what I
mean
is,’ she says, reasonably, ‘I
know
I’m Marcia Campbell, well, in so far as I know anything, and for what
that
means, and I
think
I am your half-sister. If you see what I mean.’

This speech, despite its apparently hesitant qualifications, is entirely coherent and comprehensible to Liz, who manages to find a voice.

‘Yes,’ she says, rather faintly. ‘I do see what you mean.’

They are left looking at one another. Blake Leith stares at them both for a moment, then mumbles excuses and melts away. He thinks they are playing some game with him. His mind is on other things.

‘I wasn’t sure, to begin with,’ says Marcia. ‘But then I did think it must be you. I mean, the you that I think you must be.’

‘This is all very strange,’ says Liz.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ says Marcia. ‘Shall we sit down? It’s even stranger than you think. Or than I thought, perhaps I mean. I don’t
know
what you thought, do I? Shall we sit down?’

And slightly tranced, Liz follows her new half-sister to a small settee, a two-seater, where they sit side by side. They engage in conversation. Watching them from afar, Clive Enderby wonders what these two strangers can have found to talk about, that it should engross them so completely. They nod, fall silent, speak. They clasp and unclasp hands. Then, from afar, he sees Liz Headleand lift one hand, and gently, wonderingly, touch the other woman’s brow, touch her white hair, touch her round cheek. The two women lean slowly towards one another, and slowly kiss one another on the cheek, slowly, ceremoniously. Then they fall once more to deep talk, earnestly, gravely, courteously.

And so might quietly have talked for hours, had not a diversion distracted and disrupted them and forced them into action. Howard Beaver, across the room, struggling to his feet from his armchair in order to potter off to the lavatory, let out a loud groan and fell gradually but heavily full length upon the floor. At first Liz and Marcia merely glanced in his direction and returned to their dialogue, assuming normal party drunkenness, but the ensuing panic made it clear that worse had befallen: ‘Liz, Liz,’ shouted Alix, who had made her way instantly to Beaver’s side, and Liz, equally fast in her reactions, was there in seconds, pinching Beaver’s mouth open, bending over him, breathing into him, massaging, pumping. ‘Ring for an ambulance, quick,’ she said, ‘quick, quick,’ as she pummelled and breathed, as Beaver let out low deep inhuman groans of struggle, of mortal combat, of pain.

‘Oh God,’ said Alix, ‘oh God.’

‘Is there another doctor here, a proper doctor?’ cried Liz, as she paused dishevelled, from her task, and then resumed it, as Beaver groaned again. He was a big man and had fallen awkwardly, one leg crumpled beneath him: ‘Pull him straight,’ Liz, breathless, half weeping, said to Brian, ‘help, pull him straight, has anyone rung for the ambulance?’

Beaver was still breathing when the ambulance arrived, breathing loudly, stertorously, terribly. ‘I’d better go with him,’ said Alix, who was pale with fear, with reluctance, with a kind of horror. No, no, I’ll go. I’m more used to this kind of thing than you are, said Liz, bravely. The look of relief on Alix’s face was undisguised. Yes, yes, that’s OK, I’ll be fine, said Liz, as she followed the stretcher out on to the dark street. Hop in, said the ambulance men, and Liz hopped in: as she settled herself on the blanket-covered bunk, she saw Marcia Campbell on the pavement, tapping at the closing door. I’ll follow you, said Marcia. I’ve got my car here, I’ll send Joanna home in a taxi, I’ll follow you. Tell them to let me in, won’t you? Liz nodded, and the door slammed shut, and the ambulance, bell ringing, accelerated down the silent dark streets past the twitching curtains towards the Royal Infirmary, where Liz and Shirley had been born, where Rita Ablewhite, mother of Liz Headleand and Shirley and of Marcia Campbell, had died.

After the disaster, Fanny Kettle’s party broke up quite quickly. Even Janice Enderby fell silent and agreed to be led away. Alix burst into tears of shame, and cried all the way home, saying she had let down both Liz and Beaver, that it was all her fault for letting Beaver go to the party, for letting him have too much to drink, for not forcing him to leave earlier. She cried so much that Brian told her to shut up, which made her cry all the more bitterly. They were parking the car before they remembered they’d forgotten Sam: where the hell had
he
got to? Neither of them could remember having seen him for hours, not since the early pink phase of the party, and they were wondering whether to go back and look for him when he opened the front door and welcomed them home. Relief at finding him there cheered Alix, and they all sat down with a cup of tea to what they feared might prove to be literally a
post mortem
. ‘But after all,’ said Alix, recovering her spirits, ‘he is over eighty. He’s had a good innings. There’ll be some good obituaries.’ Then her face suddenly fell. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘I’ve just remembered. He said he’d made me his literary executor. Let’s all pray for a full recovery.’

Back at the house-warming, Ian Kettle wandered from room to room, collecting cold plates smeared with mayonnaise and ash and cream, salvaging cigarette butts from pot plants and bookshelves, retrieving half-empty wine bottles from behind armchairs. Beaver, in his falling, had brought down a small table and some glasses: the new beige carpet was stained wine-red. He dabbed at it, and gave up. He collected a pink plastic earring, a small red leather lady’s evening bag, an address book, a cigarette lighter, and put them carefully on the mahogany sideboard. Pausing at the conservatory door, gazing into the darkness, he saw a faint white gleam on the paved floor: a lace handkerchief. He added it to his collection. Small, female, perishable relics. Party relics. Fanny would be in bed, fast asleep, dead to the world. The warmed house grew cold and quiet, it ticked quietly, and Ian Kettle quietly paced, thinking of rites and rituals, of ceremonies and drinking customs. Ian Kettle had been, was, a serious archaeologist, but he had been seduced by the television cameras, he had been talked into popularizing his mysteries. Was this wrong? He stooped, picked up the thin brown filter of a thin menthol cigarillo, sniffed it cautiously, and paced on. Howard Beaver had achieved eminence. Lasting eminence. Immortality, against all the odds. Dead or alive, he would live on. How had he managed that?

Up the stairs goes Ian Kettle, but when he opens his bedroom door, he sees that the bed is already fully occupied. A pair of black lace knickers hangs from one of the four poster’s brass knobs, there are clothes strewn all over the floor, and the bedside light is still on, though the couple occupying the bed is fast asleep, way, way out, dead to the world. He smiles, slightly, a little ruefully, and makes his way, as he has done many times before, to the narrow bed in the study.

At home in Hansborough, Susie Enderby took off her new shoes, and gazed at the bright wet well of blood.

Liz and Marcia sat up through the night, in a dim waiting-room, waiting for news of Howard Beaver. He had had a stroke, he was in a deep coma, he might or might not recover. But for Liz’s prompt action, he would have been dead. If he were to recover, Liz could foresee all sorts of difficulties for Alix, but these were not the matters that she and Marcia discussed.

They resumed the conversation of the two-seater settee. They had a lot of ground to cover, and they covered it fast.

Marcia was, and indeed always had been, the oldest daughter of Rita Ablewhite, born out of wedlock a year before Liz herself was born. Marcia had been adopted as a baby, and had always known she was adopted. Her parents ran theatrical digs in Sheffield, and it was only when her mother died that Marcia thought of tracing her ‘real’ parents. ‘It seemed a bit disloyal when she was alive,’ said Marcia, ‘but I knew Dad wouldn’t mind, he isn’t the sort, and then that Bill was passed, you know, making it legal, and my psychotherapist said it would do no harm to ask. So I asked. And here I am.’

She laid a plump jewelled hand once more on Liz’s.