A Natural Curiosity (6 page)

‘Anyway,’ said Charles, ‘at least they didn’t break my teeth. They cost a fortune, my front teeth. I’ve spent a fortune on these teeth.’

He bares them at Carla, in what passes for a smile.

Shirley Harper finally plucked up her courage and made an appointment to see Clive Enderby, solicitor and executor of her mother’s will. It was not the will that worried her, but her husband’s business. She could tell Cliff was in trouble: his little empire of wing mirrors and picnic sets was rusting, unassembled, as the bills poured in. What if he went bankrupt? Where would that leave her? She had consulted her sister Liz Headleand, with whom she was not on intimate terms, but for whose financial sense she had some respect: Liz claimed to know nothing about money at all, but she always seemed to land on her feet, and Shirley thought that must mean something. One did not live comfortably in a handsome freehold house in St John’s Wood by chance, thought Shirley. Liz had suggested Clive Enderby. ‘And while you’re at it,’ she had said, ‘you can ask him about probate on Mother’s estate. It can’t still be dragging on, can it? It sounds to me as though you could do with the money.’

The scheme had seemed sound to Shirley, but it was nevertheless with a heavy heart that she made her way to Hansborough to keep her appointment. Enderby & Enderby had moved to new premises. They had abandoned the poky but rather charming little early-nineteenth-century house in Dilke Street, with its pretty little stained-glass windows where swans floated amidst water lilies. They had moved uphill and up-market to an office in a fine new building, deep carpeted, air-conditioned. It was smart, functional, unwhimsical, for the quainter fancies of Post-modernism had not yet hit Hansborough: in fact, its modernity was already a little old-fashioned, but Shirley did not recognize this, and neither, yet, did Clive Enderby, who rather liked its grey steel and sheet-glass and large windows.

These large windows survey one of the most spectacular views of dereliction in twentieth-century Britain. From the fifth floor, where Clive sits, one can see all the way from Hansborough to Northam, across the waste land of demolition. It is a beautiful view. Clive Enderby has plans for it. He regrets the failure of the Enterprise Zone Scheme, of the Rate Reduction Incentive, of the scores of variants of YOPS and TOPS and Restarts and Job-bangs and Youth-boosts and Community Programmes that have tried, piecemeal, to rescue the area, but he is not surprised by their failure. Messy, confused, contradictory, piddling little schemes, doomed to disaster. Clive has his own Master Plan, his own Operation Pegasus. He can foresee that whatever happens at the next election (and he confidently predicts a handsome Tory victory) something will have to be done about dereliction and the inner cities, and Clive means to make sure that Hansborough will be in a position to get what is going. From this rubble will arise the winged white horse of new industry: the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the right-wing Chamber of Commerce will work hand in hand with the left-wing Council. The right hand shall know what the left hand is doing, in Clive Enderby’s scenario, and a glittering new high-tech industry, clean and sparkling, will arise from the ashes to employ the redundant hordes and to dazzle the envious soft hearts of the lascivious south and the less forward-looking dumps of Tyneside and the Black Country, of Liverpool and South Wales. It is a vision of a fabulous rebirth. Clive Enderby, in his own way, is a dreamer.

But his dream is in the future, and will not much help the struggling small businessman in trouble. Shirley now sits before Clive Enderby, with her back to the view, and listens patiently as he explains about her mother’s will. He assures her that everything is in order, that the house in Abercorn Avenue is sold, and that cheques will be on their way to Shirley and her sister Dr Headleand in a month or two at most.

‘These things always take time,’ he says. ‘You did receive the interim statement I sent you, didn’t you?’

Shirley nods.

‘I’m afraid we’ve been a little held up in our regular work by the removal.’ he says, conversationally, as she continues to say nothing. ‘It was shifting the papers that was the problem. Mountains of stuff, going back to my grandfather’s day. You can’t throw it all away without looking, though, can you? Some of it probably has historical interest, if you go in for that kind of thing. You know, local history. Archives. But most of it went into the shredder, I’m afraid.’

‘It was the same with the stuff at my mother’s house,’ says Shirley, with an attempt at interest, at politeness. ‘The things people hoard. We burned boxes full of paper.’

‘Really?’ Clive looks at her with sudden acuteness.

‘Boxes,’ repeats Shirley, dully. The very thought makes her feel tired.

‘Lucky she kept the will in a sensible place,’ says Clive, slightly probing.

‘Yes, very lucky,’ says Shirley, bored.

Clive explains to her the capacities of his new shredding machine, but she does not listen. Gradually she works the conversation round to Cliff’s ailing business, to her own liabilities as a director.

‘I was so worried,’ she says, blushing slightly, ‘that I went round to the Information Centre at the public library. And they gave me this leaflet. And frankly, it worried me even more.’

She hands over the leaflet. It is entitled ‘Implications of the Insolvency Act 1986 and the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986’.

‘I mean,’ says Shirley, ‘what about our house? And all my personal assets? Can they be included in the company assets? I’m a non-executive director, I know, but look, it says the Acts make no distinction between executive and non-executive. I don’t know what it all means. To be frank with you I don’t even know what the word “executive” means. I don’t know where I stand. At all.’

‘Hmm,’ murmurs Clive Enderby, playing for time. He asks for the name of Cliff’s own solicitors, for the company’s name and registration number, for the names of its other directors. He scribbles them down on a piece of paper and looks knowing. Then he tries to explain to her the distinction between wrongful trading and fraudulent trading, but she is not listening, she cannot follow, she takes in only one word in ten. He explains that he cannot offer useful advice in the absence of more detailed information about the company’s liabilities. He encourages her to call a meeting with the other directors.

‘But Cliff is my
husband
,’ says Shirley. ‘How can I call a
meeting
with my
husband
? He won’t speak about these things, anyway. He’s very depressed At least,
I
think he’s depressed. He won’t admit it. But he is.’

‘Perhaps you should get him to see his doctor,’ says Clive, brightly, eager to shift responsibility for the Harpers’ financial and marital problems on to another profession. After all, they aren’t even his clients. They are small fry, little victims of recession, tiddlers.

Clive watches Shirley closely, as she promises to speak to Dr Peckham. He’s not surprised that she can’t follow her husband’s affairs, but frankly he
is
rather surprised that neither she nor her clever sister Liz has spotted the intriguing anomaly in their mother’s financial statements. He had noted it at once, and it had led him to an interesting revelation. Now, of course, he does not know whether or not to share it. It is, arguably, of no importance, better left sleeping. Neither Shirley nor Liz has shown the slightest suspicion.

‘Give my regards to your sister,’ he says, as he ushers Shirley to the lift.

Perhaps women never read account sheets, financial reports. Women are interested only in the bottom line, and they can’t always find that. Women will sign anything—hire-purchase agreements, life insurance policies, applications for shares, joint mortgages with defaulting husbands—and they never read the small print, as Clive knows all too well. And even if they try to read it, as Shirley has just demonstrated, they do not understand it.

They shake hands, outside the gleaming lift. Shirley voices her thanks, but the interview has left her more worried than before.

And Clive too, trying to put her from his mind, feels a certain unease. The images of Janice and Susie swim, unsummoned, towards him. Wives, women, marriage. The voicing of dissatisfactions. The crumbling of loyalties. The breaking of bonds. Where will it end? He opens a desk drawer by his left elbow, and stares at a new brown legal envelope in which lies a rather grubby document, a Deed of Covenant dated 23 December 1934. Should he have handed it over? He shuts the drawer, and lets it lie there, inert.

Alix Bowen stops her two-finger typing of a draft of a letter to one of old Beaver’s one-time correspondents and looks up to gaze at her snowdrops. They jostle in the wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglassful rearranges itself, with inimitable, once-only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.

‘If you do happen to have kept any of Howard’s letters,’ Alix types, ‘we would be so grateful for photocopies of them. As I am sure you will appreciate, they would be of great value to any future biographer, and there may be the possibility of a volume of
Collected Letters
at some point in the future.’ She crosses out ‘in the future’ as tautologous, crosses out the ‘future’ in front of ‘biographer’ on the same grounds, and then puts it back in again, as the sentence looks a little too bare, a little too definite, without it. There is no certainty that there will be a biography, no certainty that Beaver’s recent renaissance of reputation will last, although he clearly believes it will. It is Alix’s task to set his papers in order, a task with which Beaver himself co-operates only intermittently. A Herculean task, for the disorder is considerable. But Beaver seems to like Alix, and does not mind her rooting around in his upper rooms.

Alix does not know whether or not she likes Beaver. ‘Liking’ does not seem to be relevant to what she thinks about him, feels for him. Indeed, the word is not wholly applicable to Beaver’s feeling for Alix either. She is useful to him, in more ways than the way in which she is paid to be useful. She is company, she is a welcome irritant, she shops for him sometimes, she sometimes does his washing up.

He is a dreadful mess, is Beaver. An egg-stained, tobacco-stained, shabby, shapeless mess. A
memento mori
. Alix, who does not find the company of old people easy, is frequently disgusted by him. He eats noisily, slopping and slurping his food, and blows his nose violently, and spits in the sink. Coarse, fleshly, decaying.

Grammar-school educated, university educated, the son of a miner, once destined for a life as a schoolmaster, read Classics, waylaid for some years by poetry. A brilliant mind, he must have had, reflects Alix. There is little evidence of that brilliant mind now, for Beaver has engineered and capitalized upon his return to popularity by cultivating a deliberate boorishness, an aggressive provincialism. Alix is the only person to whom he speaks of literary matters, and even with her he sometimes relapses into a gross mockery of the mind, a philistine, snook-cocking, infantile savagery. Alix cannot tell whether it is all a pose, whether he thinks that this is how a working-class northern intellectual ought to behave, or whether he has relapsed into behaving like this because he finds it more comfortable, and no longer cares. Is he copy or archetype? She cannot tell.

His career has been curious, enough to drive anyone into eccentricity. After a year or two of schoolmastering in Wakefield, he had taken off for London and lived the life of a literary hanger-on, working in publishers’ offices, writing reviews when permitted, scrounging review copies, copy-e’diting, borrowing money, publishing the odd poem. He had then vanished to Paris for a couple of years in the late twenties, where he claimed to have got to know the American expatriate literary community and to have worked as assistant editor on
transition
—although Alix finds this period of his life suspiciously ill documented, and his knowledge of French is now rudimentary and rusty in the extreme. (But he may be joking, that awful accent may be a fake, a stage prop, like that custard-stained check waistcoat and that cloth cap.) He had returned to England, and had become, in the thirties, briefly, successful. References to him and his work during this period were easy to uncover in the little magazines, in the review pages, in the now published letters and diaries of his then eminent contemporaries. ‘Met Howard at the Roebuck.’ ‘Saw Beaver walking along the Embankment with Rose Feaver.’ ‘Discussed Pound with Howard Beaver.’

And then, after this fragile notoriety, he had vanished. He had vanished utterly, into obscurity. He had returned north, and taken an office job with a company that published technical journals and children’s comics. He had married his old school friend Bertha Sykes, and had children, and grown old. He had missed out on the vogue of provincialism that had swept Britain during the 1950s. He now claimed that he had not even known that it had existed. Kitchen sinks, Angry Young Men, no, he had never heard of them. He lived in the past, in the past of the 1920s that had been his own twenties, in the distant past of Greece and Rome and Ancient Britain.

Now he has been rediscovered, a living fossil. He has been televised, recorded, reprinted, honoured. He is seen as a sort of missing link in literary evolution, a coelacanth hauled up from the depths of a cultural Continental shelf.

Or is he, as Alix sometimes wonders, Piltdown Man? A hoax?

Well, he can’t be a
complete
hoax, because somebody must have written his poems, and by all accounts that somebody seems to have been him. It seems unlikely that this crusty old relic could have produced such work, but somebody must have done, and it must have been either him or the person that used to live inside him. Alix sometimes peers at him to see if she can see any sign of that delicate, shy and vanishing spirit, but Howard Beaver, in his robust eighties, glares defiantly back, his red-rimmed bloodshot eyes mocking her curiosity, her disbelief.