The Ways of the World (2 page)

Retirement was bound to reunite Sir Henry and Lady Maxted in due and problematical course. It came while the Great War was in its final months and Max was still a prisoner of the Germans. But by the time he was repatriated, in January 1919, Sir Henry was abroad on government business again. The British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference required the services of expert advisers in numerous fields. Sir Henry was asked to be one of them. He departed with what Lady Maxted later described as ‘alacrity’.

Who, in the circumstances, could blame him? Paris, even in the aftermath of the war to end all wars, was still Paris. He was hardly to know that death lay in wait for him there.

After a hurried explanation, Max left Sam to stall Miller as best he could and set off for Surrey.

He and his mother had never enjoyed the warmest of relationships. There were reasons for that they had never spoken of and probably never would. He was not her idea of what a son should be. Nor was she his idea of a good mother. Still, Sir Henry’s sudden death was an event which even Max acknowledged as a family emergency. His place, now if hardly ever, was at home. So, home he went.

The journey took longer than he would have wished, involving a
forced march to Hendon station, a train to St Pancras, a hectic crossing of London by Tube and another train from Waterloo to Epsom. The Tube he particularly loathed. The horror of confinement he carried with him from the camp meant his nerves were tested whenever he descended into the Underground’s malodorous depths. The services were busy that day, reminding him how uncomfortable he now was amidst any mass of humanity.

He was, of course, unduly familiar with death in numerous forms and disguises, thanks to the swathe it had cut through his squadron in France. But there were many men of his age carrying gruesome memories with them into the genteel peacetime world. He would have claimed no distinction on that account. He had fully expected to die himself. The expectation had aged him, he suspected. He was young, in the veritable prime of his life. But he did not always feel so.

Yet the depression that had claimed some had never touched him. ‘You’re a tough ’un and no mistake,’ Sam had once said to him, in the wake of a particularly heavy day of losses, when Max had been keener to discuss minor adjustments to the gun-mounting on his plane than mourn the comrades he had seen shot down in flames. But toughness was not quite it. Max knew that to allow himself to care would be fatal. ‘This is all just a joke we can’t quite see the funny side of, Twentyman,’ he had replied. And he had believed it. That was why he had laughed the afternoon his luck had run out behind German lines and, with a failed engine and a jammed gun, he had gone down like a falling leaf spiralling through the Flanders sky.

But his luck had not quite run out, not to the last morsel. The shots that had stopped his engine had missed his fuel tank by a matter of inches. And the ground was flat and soft enough to make some kind of a landing. He had emerged, to his own astonishment, in one piece.

And that astonishment stayed with him to this day, as an unsmiling light-heartedness, a blithe disregard for how others expected him to lead his life. It meant the news of his father’s death, though surprising, had not shocked him. He was not indifferent to such things, but he was well accustomed to them.

His mother had supplied little in the way of concrete information. Sir Henry had died in a fall from a roof, apparently. It was, Lady Maxted had emphasized, an accident. ‘A tragic and dreadful accident.’ How she could be sure of that she did not say and Max had known better than to ask. He would attempt to elicit more details when he reached Gresscombe. His brother would be there. He might be in possession of the facts. When it came to facts, Ashley could generally be relied upon.
Sir
Ashley, as he was now, of course. Max was going to find it hard to think of him as such, but he supposed he would grow used to it. Ashley himself would relish the status of the baronetcy, though perhaps not as much as his wife. Lydia had the prize for which Max suspected she had married his brother – and many years earlier than she could have expected. She would be mourning her father-in-law, but with secret satisfaction.

All in all, Sir Henry Maxted’s passing was unlikely to prompt an outpouring of grief among his relatives. For the last twenty years and more he had been largely absent from their lives. He attributed this, in one of his typically lofty phrases, to ‘the exigencies of the service’, and Lady Maxted never suggested it was otherwise. To Max, however, it seemed an arrangement that suited both parties to the marriage. How Sir Henry filled the waking hours not given over to the tireless and patriotic pursuit of British interests in foreign parts Max could only imagine. As for his mother, good works, Surrey society and occasional forays to London appeared to content her, though Max had cause to believe that had not always been the case, if indeed it was now.

Sir Henry’s death raised a delicate issue, however, one which Max turned over uneasily in his mind as the train steamed slowly through the countryside south of Wimbledon. He had not yet told Ashley of the agreement he had reached with their father and he doubted if Sir Henry had either, since there would surely have been some reaction to the news from his brother. The question now – the devilishly tricky question – was whether Ashley would honour the agreement, as the new owner of the Gresscombe estate. If not, Max’s plans for the future, along with Sam’s, would go badly awry. He had not mentioned this disturbing possibility to Sam. It had not
actually occurred to him until after he had left Hendon. Without the land his father had promised him, there could be no flying school. And the land was now in his brother’s gift.

‘Damn it all to hell, Pa,’ Max murmured under his breath as he gazed out through the window of the train. ‘Why’d you have to go and die on me?’

SIR CHARLES MAXTED
, Max’s grandfather, bought the Gresscombe estate following an early retirement from the diplomatic service funded by his prudent investments in mining and railway stock. The estate had suffered from decades of neglect. But Sir Charles had a keen eye for a bargain. He re-tenanted Gresscombe Farm and demolished the tumbledown Georgian manor house to make way for an Arts and Craft mansion of his own commissioning. Gresscombe Place was a red-brick house of multiple gables and parapeted bays, with high windows to admit as much light as possible in a vain attempt to recreate the dazzling brilliance of Mesopotamia, where he had served as consul for fifteen years. An abundance of Middle Eastern rugs and beaten copper were nods in the same direction, overwhelmed since his death by the more cluttered and heavier-curtained tastes of his daughter-in-law.

Max barely remembered his grandfather. He was only six when the old man died. Sir Charles’s greatest claim to fame was to have assisted Henry Rawlinson, his predecessor as consul in Baghdad, in his pioneering translation of cuneiform script. Max’s father was named in honour of Rawlinson and Sir Charles pursued his interest in Sumero-Babylonian languages to the end of his days.

Haskins, the chauffeur, had been sent to meet Max at Epsom station. He was a taciturn fellow at the best of times and Max knew better than to seek his views on what he described, uncontroversially, as ‘a bad business’. He would doubtless have said the
same, in the same neutral tone, if Max had been killed in the war. He was more sentimental about the internal combustion engine than the crazed doings of humankind.

Accordingly, there was nothing in the way of idle conversation to distract Max as they passed the flat quartet of fields west of the town where he planned to open his flying school. Sir Henry had agreed to their use for the purpose with disarming readiness. ‘Gladly, my boy,’ had been his exact words. But gladness was likely to be in short supply now at Gresscombe Place.

And so it proved. The family had gathered to discuss the sad news from France. None of the early-spring sunshine penetrated to the drawing-room where they were assembled: Lady Maxted, the Dowager Lady Maxted as she now was, with Ashley and Lydia, as well as Uncle George, Lady Maxted’s brother. There was a notable dearth of tears, though Max would not have expected his mother to be prostrated by grief, even if she felt it. She was rigidly self-controlled at all times. She considered any display of emotion to be an admission of weakness. And she was not weak. Nor was her daughter-in-law. Lydia was a woman of hard features and firm opinions, who spoke to her husband, her children and indeed her brother-in-law in the same tone she used to instruct her several dogs and horses.

Ashley was predictably subdued in the presence of the two women who dominated his life. He was shorter and bulkier than Max, with darker hair, a puffier face and a ruddier complexion. A knee mangled in a hunting accident ten years before had left him with a slight limp that had spared him frontline service in the war. Somehow he had acquired a captaincy by sitting behind a desk in Aldershot for the duration. He never referred to the contrast with Max’s aerial derring-do and nor did Max, but that did not mean either of them was heedless of it.

George Clissold had arrived hotfoot from an undemanding half-day in the City, where he was something (probably superfluous) in marine insurance. He was, as usual, not entirely sober, but sobriety had never suited him. Lady Maxted claimed to rely on him for advice in financial matters. For his part, Max would have
relied on him for nothing beyond the recommendation of a good malt whisky. But he was a genial and unobjectionable presence. And he did at least raise a smile at his nephew’s arrival.

‘Bit of a facer, what, James my lad?’ he said in his rumbling voice as he clasped Max’s hand.

‘A terrible shock, Uncle, yes.’ He turned to Lady Maxted. ‘How are you, Mother?’

‘It is a fearful blow, James,’ she responded. ‘But we must bear it.’

‘That’s the spirit, old girl,’ said George.

Tea was served. Lydia plied Max with an unsought account of how bravely little Hetty had taken the news of her grandfather’s death and the arrangement she had made for Giles’s housemaster to inform him of the sad event. Max knew convention demanded that he display some interest in the welfare of his brother’s children, but he felt even less able than usual to express any. Besides, Lydia was clearly only filling in until the maid left them to it.

‘I shall tell you what Mr Fradgley from the embassy in Paris told me, James,’ said Lady Maxted as soon as privacy was restored. ‘Heaven knows, it leaves much unexplained, but I do implore you all to guard against unwarranted speculation.’ She paused to let her request, which was more in the way of an instruction, sink in. There was already an implication that they should be guarding her good name as well as her late husband’s. ‘Some time last night, Henry fell from the roof of an apartment building in Montparnasse. Precisely when this occurred is unclear. No one seems to have seen him fall – that is, no one has yet come forward to say they did. He was found … in the early hours of the morning … by a group of people leaving a … well, some place of amusement. According to Mr Fradgley, there can be no doubt the fall killed him instantly, which is a blessing, I suppose. Mr Fradgley had already spoken to the police. They were satisfied the fall had been … accidental.’

Max assumed he was not alone in wondering how the police could be so swiftly satisfied on such a point. In the circumstances, suicide was surely a possibility, although not a likely one in his opinion. Sir Henry was hardly the self-destructive type and had been in notably good spirits when Max had visited him in Paris two weeks before. There was, of course, a third possibility. But he was
not about to mention it. Still, there was one obvious question he reckoned he could risk asking. ‘How can the police know Pa fell from the roof rather than a window on one of the upper floors, Mother?’

‘I don’t know, James. There must be … evidence pointing to that.’

‘But Mr Fradgley didn’t say what the evidence was.’

‘I’m sure the poor man didn’t want to burden your mother with the particulars,’ said Lydia.

‘But he was definite this occurred in … Montparnasse?’

‘Are you familiar with the area?’ Lydia asked sharply, as if unfamiliarity with Montparnasse would somehow disqualify Max from querying the point.

‘No, I’m not. But … his hotel was off the Champs-Elysées. That’s a long way from Montparnasse.’

‘Is it?’

‘You know he was always very keen on astronomy,’ said George.

‘That’ll be what got him up there. Someone offered him the use of their roof to admire the night sky. It was the equinox, wasn’t it?’

Into Max’s mind came a memory of his father instructing him in the distribution of the constellations one clear summer night around the turn of the century, when his home leave had briefly intersected with Max’s school holiday. Sir Henry had given him a cardboard-mounted chart of the heavens – a planisphere – as a late birthday present and shown him how to identify Perseus and Orion and the Great Bear. On the reverse was a chart of the southern sky, the one Sir Henry saw from his residence in Rio. Max had looked long and often at it after Sir Henry’s departure, imagining what it was like to be so far away that even the stars were different.

‘Please, George,’ said his mother, her words cutting through the memory. ‘This is exactly the sort of futile supposition I wish to avoid.’ She allowed herself a sigh of exasperation. ‘And it is why I want you and Ashley to go to Paris as soon as possible, James, to clarify the circumstances of your father’s death and to arrange for his body to be brought home for a funeral here in Surrey at the earliest opportunity.’

‘Really?’

‘I can’t see why we both need to go,’ said Ashley in his first contribution to the discussion. ‘I can perfectly well deal with … whatever needs dealing with.’

‘You must both go,’ said Lady Maxted, in a tone Max recognized as brooking no contradiction. ‘It is only fitting that his two sons should accompany him … on his final return to these shores.’

‘Well …’

‘You will do this for your father, won’t you, James?’ His mother stared expectantly at him.