Hearts and Diamonds (31 page)

‘Homicide?’ suggested Kayley.

‘No, it’s a different one, and you can’t kill Lawrence Harville cos the thing is, that’d be it. The thingy-cide.’

‘Shut up, Ma, if you can’t talk sense. This is between me and Jen.’

‘When you kill your brother,’ shouted Linda over the top of him. ‘What’s it called when you kill your brother?’

There was a moment of silence.

‘What do you mean?’ said Jason.

‘Fratricide,’ said Jenna helpfully, though she was sure now that Linda must be raving, out of her mind with champagne.

‘I ain’t got a brother,’ said Jason.

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Linda, as if she had been patiently explaining something for a long time. ‘You see. You can’t kill Lawrence Harville cos it’s – what she said – icide.’

‘You’re not making sense,’ said Jason, and Jenna nodded her agreement, though a creeping kind of sick feeling was unfurling in her stomach.

‘No? Well, make sense of this. You’ve got the same dad. You and him. He’s no better’n you. Never was.’

‘This . . . Come on, Mum. This is bullshit. You’ve had too much to drink and you’re making up stories. Go and have a lie down, yeah?’

‘Don’t you talk down to me, son!’ she shouted, suddenly furious. ‘Don’t you call me a liar! I’ve sat on this for near-on thirty years and it’s killed me, d’you hear? Killed me, not saying anything. Killed me!’

‘Then why didn’t you say it?’ Jason shouted in return.

‘Please, can we keep it down?’ begged Jenna, picturing a dozen hidden hands with tape recorders around every corner.

‘Because I was scared to,’ she said, suddenly breaking down in tears. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I wanted to. I couldn’t do it.’

‘This is
bollocks
,’ said Jason, rolling his eyes. ‘You’ve told me so many different stories about my dad, I can’t believe a word you say any more. First he’s this bloke, then he’s that bloke, then you don’t know, it could be anyone – and now it’s Lord fucking Harville? Well, excuse me for not falling for it, but I’m sick of being spun all these lines. Fuck it, I’m going back to find Tabitha. I need some sanity. Jen, come with me. Everyone’s asking for you.’

‘Oh. I’ll be there. Give me a minute. I’ll just take your mum up to bed.’

‘Let Kayley do it, for God’s sake.’

‘No, it’s OK,’ said Jenna. ‘I want to. Tell Tabitha I’ll be out in a minute.’

Jason stormed off with Kayley at his heels, leaving Jenna with a wailing, champagne-swigging Linda.

‘Here.’ Jenna handed her a tissue from her handbag. ‘You . . . Did you mean that?’

Linda nodded, catching her breath.

‘I’ve never told him. At first, I daren’t. I thought I’d lose him. Harville would have him taken off me. That’s why I made out like I’d had five different fellas it could have been. When I got pregnant, it put him off the scent. But there weren’t no one else. Only George. Harville, that is.’

‘How did you . . .? I mean, you can’t have moved in the same circles.’

‘At the Gala. I were with a group, majorettes. I were only sixteen. You wouldn’t know it, to look at me, but I used to turn heads.’

Good God, was Linda really only forty-five? Jenna had to look hard, to see the girl she must have been.

‘I mean, I used it,’ said Linda. ‘Won’t claim I were an angel. My looks were all I had in life, so I got the most out of ’em. If I fancied a lad, I had him, and that were that. So George wasn’t my first, not at all.’

‘Surely he was married?’

‘Yeah, with a little lad, three years old. But that wasn’t going to stop him taking what he liked the look of. Took me up into the attic, he did, the old servants’ quarters. I felt like Lady Muck, even though it was a dirty little secret thing. We met up a few times after that, in the fields, or down by the reservoir. Then I fell pregnant with Jason and I got scared. I told him it were over. He didn’t argue with me. A few months later, he sent me a letter, said he’d heard I was pregnant and I’d better not say a word to anyone about us or he’d have the kid taken off me and adopted by a childless couple he knew. I told him the kid probably weren’t his, and he seemed happy about that.’

‘And you never told Jason?’

‘I was going to tell him on his eighteenth birthday. But by then, he was so angry and everyone was so anti-Harville. I thought it’d only make things worse.’

‘I see. Yes. Fancy growing up on that estate and then finding out you were related to your worst enemies. Oh, Linda. What a thing to carry around with you all these years.’

Linda staggered gratefully into Jenna’s embrace. As she hugged the woman, her mind raced. This was crazy. Jason was a Harville, possibly even conceived here at Harville Hall, in the very attic where she had first found him.

‘God knows,’ sniffed Linda, ‘I don’t like the shower of bastards any more than the rest of Bledburn does. But they’re his family. What am I going to do?’

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Jenna. ‘Leave it now. The decisions all lie with Jason. Oh
God
.’ The little outburst was brought on by the repeated thought that Lawrence Harville was Jason’s half-brother. It was hard to say which of them would be more revolted by the idea.

‘Tell you what,’ said Linda. ‘I could murder a good strong brandy.’

And I could murder you
, thought Jenna grimly.
Turning Jason’s big night into some kind of alcoholic
Jeremy Kyle
turn
.

Instead, she escorted the shambolic Linda to the back staircase and helped her up to the only bedroom that was properly habitable at the moment – hers and Jason’s.

Leaving her half-conscious on the bed, she went back down the front stairs to do the mingling she had once been looking forward to.

But how difficult it was to be charming and effervescent when her mind swarmed with thoughts of Lawrence Harville’s and Jason’s parentage. She went to stand by Jason, to join him amidst a crowd of potential investors from eight different countries.

He seemed to have shaken off his mother’s words and he laughed and joked with the art dealers as if nothing had been said at all.

As the group broke up so that Jason and Jenna could pose for magazine photographs, she spoke to him, low and without altering her expression.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Your mum . . . what she said . . .’

‘Pack of lies. Bound to be.’

He smiled for the camera, remembering everything he had been taught in his modelling session three weeks earlier.

‘And if you turn out to be a Harville?’ she said, once a variety of poses had been captured for posterity.

‘I’m not. It’s not happening. Drop it, eh, Jen?’

His tone suggested that to do otherwise would be unwise.

‘Get yourself a champagne and let’s try to get these freeloaders out of here,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I want you upstairs, as soon as I can. Mum, Lawrence Harville, and everyone else can all bugger off. I need to be alone with you.’

Jenna was taking a flute glass from a tray when the doorbell rang.

‘A latecomer?’ she said, frowning, as Kayley went to answer it.

There was a mad battery of flashbulbs and a man strode in, followed by a panting and apologetic security guard.

‘I know he’s not on the list but . . .’ the security guard managed to blurt, before the newcomer spoke on his own behalf.

‘I didn’t think you’d mind,’ he said, looking around the room until his eyes alighted on Jenna, at which point he broke into a perfectly dazzling smile. ‘After all, I am your husband.’

Jenna sat down on the bottom step of the staircase, overwhelmed.

‘Deano,’ she said.

‘Angel!’ he replied, all emotion and enthusiasm. ‘I’ve come home to you.’

A SMALL CROWD
was gathered outside the premises of Thos. Stratton, Antiquarian and Dealer in Rare Books, of Holywell Street, Strand. Largely composed of legal clerks taking their lunch hour, it jostled and catcalled beneath the Elizabethan gables from which one still expected to hear a cry of ‘gardy loo’ before slops were emptied onto the cobbles.

Some would argue that the shop itself was little better than those aforementioned slops, an abyss of moral putrefaction and decay. Despite the passing of the Obscene Publications Act some ten years previously, many windows still displayed explicit postcards and graphic line drawings. The object of the crowd’s interest today was a tintype image of a young woman. She was naked and sprawled in an armchair, luxuriant flesh hand-tinted to look warm and inviting. One of her legs dangled over a chair arm, revealing split pinkened lips beneath a dark bush of hair. Her nipples had been touched up, too – in a figurative sense – improbably roseate against alabaster skin. Most shocking was the positioning of her hands, one of which cupped a breast while the other delved inside that displayed furrow. If she had derived any pleasure from her explorations, it did not show on her face, which was blank and stony. But nobody was looking at her face.

A woman, smartly but not showily dressed all in black, cut a path through the grinning throng. The young men fell back naturally, tipping hats and begging her pardon. A less formidable-looking woman might have found herself joshed or even groped, but nobody would have dreamt of doing any such thing to this lady.

She paused to evaluate what had been creating the sensation and the men around her looked away or to their boots, suddenly sheepish.

‘For shame,’ she said, then she put her hand to the door of the shop and entered to the dull jink of rusty bells.

A pasty young man whom nobody had cautioned against the excessive use of pomade double-took at the sight of her.

No woman had ever crossed the threshold of the shop before.

Panicking, he came out from the behind the counter.

‘I think you may have the wrong address, madam,’ he said, placing himself between her and a display of inflammatory postcards from which a portly woman wielding a whip glared out.

‘I wish to speak with Mr Stratton.’

‘Oh.’ The youth found himself at a loss, his eyes darting wildly around the room at all the potentially feminine-sensibility-violating material on display. ‘He is out.’

‘When do you expect him back? I am able to wait if he will not be too long.’

Two of the clerks entered, throwing the shop boy into worse throes of confusion.

‘Oh dear, customers. Perhaps you might wait in the back room? But it is not comfortable and . . . oh, it is not a place for a lady. Pray, put that down, please, gentlemen, it is not for common perusal.’

He spoke the word ‘perusal’ with absurd emphasis, as if bringing out a rare jewel from the duller stones of his workaday vocabulary.

‘What, is it too dirty for the likes of us?’ said one, sniggering.

‘Please bear in mind that there is a lady present,’ begged the shop boy.

The lady in question simply swept onwards into the back room.

Oh, if the clerks could have come in here, then they would see how tame, how positively innocent the self-loving young lady in the window display was.

The woman in black sat by the grimy back window and cast her eye over a box of postcards. Far from averting her gaze, she picked one out and examined it. A woman in a form of leather harness knelt behind another, younger, girl. This one smiled sweetly and broadly towards the camera whilst on her hands and knees. And behind her, the other woman pivoted her hips forward, ready to drive a thick wooden phallus directly into the rounded bottom of her playmate.

The visitor’s lips curved upwards.

‘Lovely,’ she breathed.

The rooms above the shop had been used, over the years, for various purposes. They had been stock cupboards, brothels and family dwellings but never, until that late spring day in 1865, had they been used as a schoolroom.

On that afternoon, however, James Stratton had tidied away all the ink-stained papers from his well-worn desk and replaced them with a slate and chalk and an alphabet primer, with which he was doing his utmost to teach the buxom young woman beside him to read.

‘I do know me letters, though, Jem,’ she said, declining to place her finger beside his underneath the
A
. ‘I can tell that much. It’s just putting ’em together I ’as trouble with.’

‘So if I wrote a simple three letter word, such as this . . .’ He paused to write the word
cat
in as perfect a copperplate hand as the sliding chalk would allow. ‘You could tell me what it said?’

She leant closer to him, very close, so that he could smell that cheap musky perfume all the fallen girls wore, mixed in with sweat and last night’s gin and last night’s men and, way beneath it all, a faint whiff of soap. He knew why she was doing it. She wanted to distract him with her breasts, and very fine breasts they were too, but today he was fixed in his purpose and he intended to achieve it.

‘Why, that curly one’s a
c
, I think, and the middle is definitely an
a
. Yes, definitely. The one at the end, I don’t know, it might be an
f
or a . . . but
caf
don’t make sense, so it must be a
t
.
Cat
!’ She spoke the word triumphantly, beaming up at him with teeth that were still good, lips that were still soft and plump.