The Shell Seekers (14 page)

"I can't leave her what I haven't got. I simply hope that by the time I drop off the hook, she'll have found herself a rich husband."

They had been arguing, but without heat. When he came out with this, however, all Olivia's instincts rose to the boil and she lost her temper.

"Cosmo, don't say things like that, don't talk in that ghastly archaic Victorian way, condemning Antonia to dependence on some man for the rest of her life. She should have money of her own. Every woman should have something of her own."

"I didn't realize that money was so important to you."

"It's not important to me. It never has been. It's only important if you haven't got any. And because it buys lovely things; not fast cars or fur coats or cruises to Hawaii or any of that rubbish, but real, lovely things, like independence and freedom and dignity. And learning. And time."

"Is this why you've worked all your life? So that you could cock a snook at the arrogant male, the Victorian paterfamilias?"

"That's not fair! You make me sound like the worst sort of Women's Libber, an aggressive great lesbian with a foul placard."

He did not reply to this outburst, and she felt instantly ashamed, wishing the angry words unsaid. They had never really quarrelled before. Her quick rage died and reason took its place. She answered his question, her voice deliberately calm. "Yes. It is one of the reasons. I told you my father was a lightweight sort of man. He never influenced me in any way. But I am always deter-mined to emulate my mother, to be strong and independent of everybody. And, as well, I have a creative need to write, and the sort of journalism which is my profession fulfils that need. So, I'm lucky. I do what I love to do, and I get paid for it. But that isn't all. There's a compulsion somewhere, a driving force that's too strong to fight. I need the conflict of a demanding job, decisions, deadlines. I need the pressures, the flow of adrenalin. It turns me on."

"And does it make you happy?"

"Oh, Cosmo. Happiness. There's not a Blue-bird, an End to the Rainbow: I suppose what it boils down to is that if I'm working, I'm never totally unhappy. And if I'm not working, I'm never totally happy. Does that make sense?"

"So you haven't been totally happy here?"

"These months with you are different, like nothing that's ever happened before. It's been like a dream, stolen out of time. And I'll never cease to be endlessly grateful to you for giving me something that no person can ever take away. A good
time
. Not a
good
time, but a good time. But you can't dream forever. You have to wake up. Soon, I shall start getting restless and probably irritable. And you will wonder what is wrong with me and so shall I. And I shall make a small private analysis of the problem and discover that it's time I went back to London, picked up the threads, and got on with my life."

"When will that be?"

"Next month maybe. March."

"You said a year. That's only ten months."

"I know. But Antonia comes out again in April. I think I should be gone by then."

"I thought you enjoyed each other's company."

"We did. That's why I'm going. She mustn't expect me to be here; I mustn't become important to her. Besides, I have a lot of problems waiting for me, not least sorting out a job for myself."

"Will you get your old job back?"

"If I don't, I'll get a better one."

"You're very confident."

"I have to be."

He sighed deeply, and then, with a gesture of impatience, flung the half-smoked cigar into the fire. He said, "If I asked you to marry me, would you stay?"

She said hopelessly, "Oh, Cosmo."

"You see, I find it hard to contemplate a future without you."

"If I married any man," she told him, "it would be you. But I told you, that first day I came to Ca'n D'alt. I've never wanted to be married, have children. I love people. I'm fascinated by them, but I need my privacy too. To be myself. To live alone."

He said, "I love you."

She crossed the small space that lay between them and put her arms around his waist and laid her head against his shoulder. Through his sweater, his shirt, she could hear the beat of his heart.

She said, "I made tea, and we never drank it and now it will be cold."

"I know." She felt his hand touch her hair. "Will you come back to Ibiza?"

"I don't think so."

"Will you write to me? Keep in touch."

"I'll send you Christmas cards with robins on them."

He put his hands on either side of her head and turned her face up to his. The expression in his pale eyes was immeasurably sad.

"Now I know," he told her.

"Know what?"

"That I'm going to lose you forever."

4

NOEL

At half past four on that cold, dark, wet March Friday, while Olivia threatened her Fiction Editor with dismissal and Nancy wandered bemusedly around Harrods, their brother Noel cleared his desk in the futuristic offices of Wenborn and Wein-burg, Advertising Agents, and took himself home.

The office did not close until five-thirty, but he had worked there for five years and reckoned that the occasional early departure was no more than his due. His colleagues, used to his ways, raised not so much as an eyebrow, and if he chanced to encounter one of the senior partners on his way to the lift, he had his cover story ready: he was feeling lousy, probably getting flu, and was going home to bed.

He did not meet one of the senior partners and he was not going home to bed, but to drive to Wiltshire for the weekend, to stay with some people called Early, whom he had never met. Camilla Early was an old school friend of Amabel's, and Amabel was Noel's current woman.

"They're having a house party for the local point-to-point on Saturday," Amabel had told him. "It might be all right."

"Have they got central heating?" Noel asked cautiously. At this time of the year, he had no intention of spending so much as an hour shivering over an inadequate log fire,

"Oh, heavens yes. Actually, they're loaded. They used to fetch Camilla from school in an enormous Bentley."

It sounded hopeful. The sort of place where one might meet useful people. Going down in the lift, he put the problems of the day behind him and let his mind go nosing ahead. If Amabel was on time, they should be out of London before the Friday-evening exodus of traffic. He hoped that she would bring her car, so that they could make the journey in that. His Jag was making strange knocking sounds, and if they went in her car, there was always the possibility that he wouldn't be expected to pay for the petrol.

Outside the office, Knightsbridge streamed with rain, and stood solid with traffic. Usually Noel made the journey back to Chelsea by bus, or even, on summer evenings, walked down Sloane Street, but now, gripped by the bitter cold, he damned expense and flagged down a taxi. Halfway down the King's Road, he stopped the driver and got out, paid him off and turned into his own street to walk the short distance to Vernon Mansions.

His car stood parked at the pavement—an E-type Jaguar, marvellously macho, but ten years old. He had bought it from a chap who had gone bankrupt, and so had got it for peanuts, but it was only after he got it home that he discovered the copious rust on the underside of its chassis, the dicey brakes, and the fact that it absorbed petrol like a thirsty man drinks beer. And now that knocking sound had started. He paused to glance at the tyres and give one of them a kick. Soft. If by some unhappy chance he was compelled to use it this evening, he must stop at a garage and put in some air.

He left the car, crossed the pavement, and let himself in through the main door of the building. Inside it smelt stale and stuffy. There was a small lift, but since he lived on the first floor, he went up the stairs. These were carpeted and so was the narrow passage that led to his own door. He unlocked this and went in and closed it behind him, and was home. Home.

It was a joke, really.

The flats had been designed as pieds-a-terre for business men finally defeated by the sheer exhaustion of commuting daily to the depths of Surrey or Sussex or Buckinghamshire. Each had a tiny hallway, with a cupboard where you were meant to keep all your City clothes. Then there were a minuscule bathroom, a kitchen the size of a galley in a small yacht, and a sitting room. Here, a pair of louvered doors folded back to reveal a sort of kennel totally taken up by a double bed. This was not only impossible to make, but, in summer-time, hideously airless, so much so that in the warm weather Noel usually ended up sleeping on the sofa.

The decor and the furniture had come with the place and were included in the hugely inflated rent. All was beige or brown and incredibly dull. The living room window faced out over the blank brick wall of a newly erected supermarket, a narrow alley, and a row of lock-up garages. The sunlight never penetrated, and the walls, which had once been cream, had darkened to the colour of old margarine.

But it was a good address. To Noel, that mattered more than anything else. Part of his image, like the showy car, the Harvey and Hudson shirts, the Gucci shoes. All these details were in-tensely important, because in his youth, due to family circum-stances and financial pressures, he had not been sent to a public school, but educated at a day school in London, and so had been deprived of the easy friendships and useful connections of attending Eton or Harrow or Wellington. This was a resentment that continued, even at the age of almost thirty, to rankle.

Leaving school and finding a job had posed no problem. A post was ready and waiting for him in his father's family firm, Keeling & Philips, an old-established and traditional publishing company in St. James's, and for five years he had worked there before moving on to the infinitely more interesting and lucrative business of advertising. But his social life was a different matter altogether, and here he was thrown back on his own resources. Which were, fortunately, legion. He was tall, good-looking, clever at games, and even as a boy had learned to cultivate a sincere and open manner that swiftly disarmed. He knew how to be charming to older women, to be discreetly respectful of older men, and, with the patience and cunning of a well-trained spy, infiltrated with little difficulty the upper circles of London society. For years he had been on the Dowagers' lists of suitable young men for Debutante dances, and during the Season he scarcely slept, returning from some ball in the early sunlight of a summer dawn, stripping off,his tails and his starched shirt, taking a shower, and going to work. Weekends saw him at Henley, or Cowes, or Ascot. He was invited to ski in Davos, fish in Suther-land, and every now and then his handsome face appeared in the glossy pages of
Harpers and Queen, "enjoying a joke with his hostess
."

It was, in its way, an achievement. But all at once, it was not enough. He was fed up. He seemed to be getting nowhere. He wanted more.

The flat crouched around him, watching like a depressed relation, waiting for him to take some action. He drew the curtains and switched on the lamp and things looked marginally better
. 
He
 took 
The Times
from his coat pocket and tossed it on the table. Pulled off his coat and flung it across a chair. He went into the kitchen and poured a strong whisky and filled the glass with ice from the fridge. He went back to the sitting room and sat down on the sofa and opened the paper.

He turned first to the stock-market prices and saw that Con-solidated Cables had gone up a point. He turned next to the Racing Page. Scarlet Flower had come in fourth, which meant that he was fifty quid down the drain. He read a review of a new play, and then the sale-room news. He saw that a Millais had gone, at Christie's, for nearly eight hundred thousand pounds.

Eight hundred thousand.

The very words made him feel almost physically sick with frustration and envy. He laid down the paper and took a mouthful of whisky, and thought about the Lawrence Stern, 
The Water Carriers
, which was coming up for sale at Boothby's next week. Like his sister Nancy, he had never had any opinion of his grandfather's work, but unlike Nancy, he had not missed out on this extraordinary resurgence in the art world of interest in those old Victorian painters. Over the last few years he had watched the prices in the sale rooms slowly rising until now they had reached these mammoth sums that seemed to him out of all proportion.

The top of the market, and he had nothing to sell. Lawrence Stern was his grandfather, and yet he had nothing. None of them did. At Oakley Street there had only been the three Sterns, and these his mother had taken with her to Gloucestershire, where they dwarfed the low-ceilinged rooms of Podmore's Thatch.

What were they worth? Five hundred, six hundred thou-sand? Perhaps, against all odds, he should make some effort at talking her into selling. If he did manage to persuade her, the profits would, of course, have to be divided. Nancy, for one, would insist on her share, but even so, there should be a good chunk for Noel. His imagination nosed cautiously ahead, filled with brilliant schemes. He would chuck his nine-to-five job with Wenborn & Weinburg, and set up on his own. Not advertising, but commodity broking, gambling on a superscale.

All that was needed was a prestigious address in the West End, a telephone, a computer, and a lot of nerve. He had plenty of that. Milking the punters, buttering up the big investors, moving into the big time. He knew an almost sexual stirring of excitement. It could happen. All that was missing was the capital to set the exercise into motion.

The Shell Seekers
. Perhaps, next weekend, he would go down and visit his mother. He hadn't seen her for months, but she had lately been unwell—Nancy, in doomlike tones, had given him this news over the telephone—so this would give him a-good excuse for calling in at Podmore's Thatch, and then he could ease the conversation gently around to the subject of the pictures. If she started making excuses, or bringing up such objections as Capital Gains Tax, he would mention his friend Edwin Mundy, who was an antique dealer and an expert in flogging stuff in Europe and stashing cash away in Swiss banks where it would be safe from the insatiable maw of the Inland Revenue. It was Edwin who had first alerted Noel to the enormous prices being paid in New York and London for the old allegorical works so fash-ionable at the turn of the century, and once even had suggested that Noel come into partnership with him. But Noel, after some thought, had demurred. Edwin, he knew, sailed dangerously close to the wind, and Noel had no intention of spending even so much as a week in Wormwood Scrubs Prison.