Curtain Call (16 page)

The older of the two, dark hair slicked back from his forehead, looked over at him. ‘Enter,' he said, before resuming his conversation. Stephen sidled into the room, and plumped down on a desk chair against the wall. He took out another cigarette and lit it, at which the slick-haired one broke off from talking and approached him. Up close a pinkish scurf of acne bearded his jaw. He was perhaps no more than twenty.

‘Name?' he said, hands behind his back and chest thrust forward.

‘Erm . . . Stephen Wyley,' he said pleasantly.

‘Stand to attention when you talk to me,' he hissed, ‘and put that cigarette out.'

Stephen, smiling, rose slowly to his feet. ‘I think there's some mistake . . .' The martinet's expression darkened as he took in this nonchalance.

‘You find this amusing?' he shouted in Stephen's face. The other young man, with close-cropped hair and pinched features, looked in fear at his older comrade. Stephen felt it first as an involuntary giddiness in his lungs; then, unable to stop himself, he burst out laughing.

‘I'm so sorry,' he said, between gasps, holding up his hands in a gesture of appeasement. He sensed the youth getting ready to take a swing at him, but before he could do so another voice cut in.

‘It's all right, Franks, this chap's with me,' said Carmody, interposing himself. He was wearing a flannel suit, but with the same lightning-flash armband. Franks, lip curled in disgust, continued to glare at Stephen. ‘I'm afraid you've been misdirected to our recruiting office, Wyley. Young Franks here is rather zealous in the cause!'

‘So I see,' said Stephen, slightly shamed by his laughter. ‘Well, I'm sorry not to oblige you and the, er, Brigade.'

Carmody nodded, and with a hand on his shoulder eased Stephen out of the room and back towards the stairs. ‘My apologies,' he said in a low voice. ‘These young fellows get carried away with all the clicked heels and saluting.' There was in his tone something Stephen had not expected: it sounded like embarrassment. They were through the hall and descending the front steps just as a trio of blackshirts were coming up. Carmody hailed one of them, who detached himself from the others. He was a shortish man of about thirty with a pugilist's stance and a long scar down one cheek. He greeted Carmody with a forearm salute, and they fell into a brief muttered discussion. Stephen, standing to one side, was evidently not to be introduced, though he had a vague memory of having seen the man before.

Their encounter at an end, Carmody bid him farewell and the man, with a quick glance at Stephen, disappeared into the building.

Carmody, beaming again, said, ‘Shall we proceed?'

‘My car's just over there,' said Stephen, who waited a moment before saying, ‘I thought you'd quit Mosley's gang.'

‘Indeed. Tom and I have gone our separate ways.'

‘So what's this British People's Brigade? They look quite a lot like the Fascists to me.'

Carmody stopped and looked back at his offices. ‘It's our little piece of Britain, old chap. We're going to create a new spirit in this country, and we won't be asking Mussolini for any more handouts.'

‘By “we” you mean . . .'

‘Myself and the gentleman I was just talking to.'

‘Oh. The one who looked like a boxer?'

Carmody smirked back. ‘He's not scared of a fight, that's for sure. But he's also a formidable mind, and the best young orator I've ever heard. Joyce is his name – William Joyce.'

They had reached the car. Stephen, who had never sought out Carmody's company, even when they were at Oxford, now felt rather ill at ease with the man – he would really have preferred not to be seen with him. Too late now. He unlocked the passenger door, but before Carmody could duck inside he said to him, ‘One thing, Gerald. I don't think the club will let you in wearing
that
.'

Carmody glanced down at his side, and took in Stephen's meaning. After a moment's hesitation he removed the lightning-flash armband from his jacket.

Stephen resurfaced in the present to find most of his
boeuf en daube
still uneaten. Freya was just concluding an account of the life of Ruskin. He seemed to have missed something.

‘. . . and though at first I would have chosen Nightingale, I'm quite pleased to be in Ruskin.'

‘What d'you mean, “in Ruskin”?' asked Stephen, bewildered.

Freya directed a puzzled look across the table at him. ‘Have you not been listening to me?'

Stephen sought help from Cora, who gave him a forbidding frown. ‘Freya's been telling us about the school houses at Tipton. They're all named after – tell him, darling.'

Freya raised her eyes heavenwards and sighed at her father as a teacher might at the class dunce. ‘The school's got four houses, each named after a famous person – so there's Mill, Pankhurst, Nightingale, which is Rowan's house, and Ruskin, which is mine. He was a very distinguished man who wrote about painting and architecture, and he had a very great beard.'

‘Or was it just a grey beard?' asked Stephen.

‘I think Mr Mulhall said it was “great”.'

‘Eminent Victorians,' said Mr Hamilton, with a raised eyebrow that argued they were no such thing. Freya took the remark innocently.

‘Yes, you see, they all represent a different – er –'

‘Aspect?' supplied Stephen.

‘–
aspect
of life. Medicine, philosophy, art and, um, politics.'

Mr Hamilton stared into his wine glass. ‘I would have thought Gladstone a fitter representative of British politics than the Pankhurst woman.'

‘Which is why you were educated at Harrow and not Tipton, my dear,' said his wife smoothly, then turned to Cora. ‘And talking of eminent Victorians, we went to see the revival of that play you recommended the other night –
The Second Arrangement
. Awfully good.'

‘Isn't it!' said Cora. Stephen kept very still as he listened, wondering which facial expression of his would be the least incriminating. He observed their back-and-forth discussion of the play, a Wimbledon of psychological torture. Just when it seemed about to end Cora said, ‘The woman who plays Hester I thought was marvellous.'

‘Hester – oh, was that the lover?'

‘Yes. Stephen actually met her a few weeks ago – what's her name, darling?'

‘Nina Land. I met her at Henry's show. She bought one of his paintings, I think. Must have quite a good eye.' Why was he still talking? She had only asked for her name – just say it and shut up.

‘I got into quite a state during that scene with the letter,' Cora continued. ‘I couldn't help myself, could I?'

Stephen, with a lift of his chin, agreed. ‘The waterworks, I'm afraid.'

‘Poor Ma!' cried Freya.

‘Poor Stephen,' said Cora with a giggle, ‘I think I embarrassed him.'

Frantic for a diversion, Stephen looked over at Rowan's plate, the meat untouched. ‘What's wrong? Are you not well?'

Rowan shook his head, and said quietly, ‘You said we should always leave a little on the plate for Mr Manners.'

‘Yes, a little. Not every last morsel of beef.'

Freya, with a sidelong look, said, ‘He's decided to be vegetarian. Mr Mulhall says that meat isn't good for us.'

‘Good heavens,' said Stephen, ‘this Mr Mulhall is quite the oracle. Does he ever have an opinion that you don't instantly adopt?'

‘Rowan, darling,' said Cora, ‘I think it would be very rude to Granny if you left all that food. And to Mrs Arkwright who's gone to the trouble of cooking it.'

With a forlorn glance up the table, Rowan said, ‘I'm sorry, Granny.'

‘That's all right, poppet,' said Mrs Hamilton, cheery to a fault. ‘I don't much care for meat, either. Perhaps you'd come and help Mrs Arkwright with the pudding. It's Grandpa's favourite.'

Mr Hamilton, recovering from the unsuspected presence of a vegetarian, seemed mollified. ‘Guards' pudding,' he said. ‘The delight of my boyhood.'

‘It sounds grand,' said Stephen, looking at Freya. ‘Guards' pudding, eh? Nothing there to offend Mr Mulhall.'

‘Don't bank on it,' said Mr Hamilton with a grimace. ‘The man's probably a bloody pacifist as well.'

They all laughed, and Freya, sensing the rarity of her grandfather rousing the table to mirth, joined in. Stephen watched his daughter, and felt a desperate squeeze on his heart. She was somewhat mysterious to him. In her fair complexion and long limbs he could see Cora; no doubt her cheekbones would eventually follow suit. On the paternal side he wanted to believe he had passed on to her his equable temperament, and perhaps his watchful eye. But he wondered if he could claim that much credit – Freya's personality seemed cut from a quite different cloth. Who was this dark-eyed sprite they had created? He supposed there was always an element of the child playing at the role of adult, most obviously in her recent adoption of swearing, though what he found far more disconcerting was her absolute self-possession. He didn't have such poise as a twelve-year-old. He didn't have it as a thirty-five-year-old, come to think of it.

He sometimes considered what would happen if his affair with Nina were to be revealed, how Freya would react – how they all would react. Cora, he knew, would be hysterical. The irony of her sobbing at Nina's stage performance as the lover had not escaped him; what bitter tears might follow once it were known that the very same woman now occupied the role in real life, with her own husband? As for Rowan, he couldn't guess his reaction, having no idea what was going on in his head. He was an odd little boy, mopish, passive, neurotic, altogether lacking his sister's vivacious spirit. In truth Stephen already felt guilty about him; he had never imagined finding so little of interest in his own flesh and blood. He loved him, of course – how could he not? – but it seemed to him a love born of anxiety, and duty, rather than a deep genetic affinity. His sense of having failed with Rowan was counterpointed by the tender shock of Freya suddenly becoming the centre of his life. He didn't know how, or when, but there was no use denying it. Should it ever come out that he had betrayed them, he could imagine – no, he didn't have to imagine, he had already been visited in a dream about it. Somehow his secret was out, and the shame of it burnt through Freya's look of incomprehension, of disbelief, a look that said, You did this –
to us
? Nothing in the world could have pierced him as that look did.

In the first few seconds after waking he felt so disturbed by the dream's horrific unmasking that, even as relief flooded his nervous system, he vowed to himself that it must never happen – that he must end things with Nina, and quickly. Yet as the day wore on, he felt his panic subsiding, and he allowed that he may have been hasty in making resolutions. Cora had greeted him at breakfast with a face unclouded by the smallest suspicion. Freya was at school, in Hampshire, and a long way from uncovering the vault at the bottom of his heart. He was safe, still.

The goldish late-October light was receding from the Hamiltons' garden as Stephen, on a terrace deckchair, smoked a cigarette and doodled in his notebook. Its recent pages were filled with minutely different configurations of a group portrait, roughs for the one which would eventually adorn the wall of the Nines. Enjoying a few moments alone while Mr Hamilton dozed and Freya entertained the others at the piano, he started to sketch the contours of a face. How odd that his wife should mention Nina like that. It was as though she had inspected the recent turnover of his thoughts and plucked out the incriminating image almost to tease him. And yet she suspected nothing: why would she?

He was the least likely of adulterers. Thirteen years of marriage and not once had he strayed. He had friends who played away, one or two of them apparently proud of it, and he despised them. Cora had not given him any reason to look elsewhere. She was beautiful, and clever, good company, a fond wife and an excellent mother. She also had her own money, and filled their house with lovely things. He knew how lucky he was. So why had he allowed himself to start falling in love with someone else? He sighed, knowing the answer already. It was simply this: Nina was different, more self-assured, more
interesting
, a single woman who lived for late nights and fast company. With her
he
could be different too, no longer the dutiful husband and father but another, idealised self, a dashing individual who was his own man, not a creature pulled every which way by obligations and responsibilities. He wanted to recapture that thrill of being new and mysterious to someone, someone who didn't take him for granted. Was this how most men justified themselves in the business of betrayal? He didn't know, but it was what he felt. As he sketched, her face filled his mind's eye, and he felt a sudden pricking of desire.

A shadow loomed at his shoulder. ‘Who's that?' said Freya, peering down. He hadn't heard her approach.

‘I thought you were playing the piano?'

She shrugged, and continued to stare. Stephen, feigning a casual air, added a little cross-hatching to the sketch.

‘She looks nice. Who is she?'

Stephen paused. ‘She's an actress –'

‘Oh, the one you met recently?'

‘Yes. Her name's Nina. It was just your mother mentioning her that made me think . . . Anyway, you're right. She is nice.'

‘She's the lover. In the play. I know what a lover is, by the way.'

‘I see.' He closed his sketch pad. ‘So – school's all right, then?'

Freya nodded, folding her arms.

‘How are you off for friends?'

‘There's a girl called Cassandra. I like her. I'm not sure she likes me.'

Stephen, turning in his chair to face her, frowned. ‘I bet she does. Who wouldn't like you?'

‘I wonder,' she mused, ‘do you ever think of us, of me, when we're at Tipton?'