How It All Began (15 page)

“Oh,” said Rose, whose mind was elsewhere.

“Rather amusing, it should be. One will have to decide on a theme. Walpole, possibly—stick to one’s particular field at this stage.”

Rose surfaced. He was on about this television thing, it would seem.

“They want to do it, then?”

“Of course,” said Henry. “Just a question of sorting out the details now. Let’s write to Miss Canning, Ms. Canning, that is—we must observe the conventions. ‘Dear Ms. Canning, I am delighted . . .’ ”

Good grief, thought Rose. His lordship on the telly. Some mistake, surely?

“She must be out of her mind.” Marion told Jeremy. “Even
thinking
of it. Uncle Henry! I thought at first he was making it all up. Not that she’ll go through with it, once she sees him in action.”

Jeremy has never been much interested in Uncle Henry. He is not now. He has his own matter of the moment.

“The bloody solicitor’s behind it, of course,” he told Marion “Or her sister. Or both. Stella knows I can’t afford it, haven’t got the dosh. Christ, I’m paying the mortgage, aren’t I?”

Money was required, apparently. Maintenance. A considerable sum of maintenance. Jeremy was to pay up, in monthly installments.

“I’m maintaining already till I’m blue in the face. I paid the house insurance last week, and now she’s claiming they need a new boiler, all through Paul fucking Newsome—sorry, darling. ‘My client instructs me to tell you that . . .’ It’s a stickup. They’ve got her drugged to the eyeballs, no doubt—I know Stella when she’s on the pills, zombie isn’t in it—and she’ll be signing up to anything. If only I could
talk
to her.”

Marion sighed. Here we go. They were in a Turkish restaurant that they hadn’t tried before. Here I am, she thought, discussing with my lover how he can be reconciled with his wife. And I’m not sure about this lamb kofta—rather too spicy. She pushed it aside.

Jeremy put down his knife and fork, reached out and took her hand in both of his.

“I adore you,” he said. “No, don’t look at me like that—I know what you’re thinking—I adore you, and you’re such an angel to put up with me, and you’re keeping me sane through this slough of despond, and I agree with you about the lamb kofta—I’m not finishing it either. We’ll go back to the French bistro next time.”

She laughed. You had to. This was always happening. She’d be deciding that really, she had to end it sooner rather than later, and maybe sooner . . . And then he’d cut the ground from under her feet.

“There,” said Jeremy. “No more lamb kofta, and no more Paul sodding Newsome either, or Stella. I promise you won’t hear another word. But listen to this . . .”

He had been up north. This amazing Victorian place. Heard about it on the grapevine—got in and sweet-talked the developers just as they were gutting it for a country house hotel. Some fantastic stuff, this paneling . . .

He exuded enthusiasm and energy once more. The lamb kofta was removed; baklava arrived, and was seriously good. She had forgotten her irritation, was enjoying herself; later rather than sooner, no need to rush into anything.

“Some general reflections on the historical process,” Henry told Rose. “My ideas on the wayward nature of the past—why things happen as they do. Rather nice for a taster, don’t you think, to open the series?”

Rose nodded. Whatever.

“So if you would just type it up. No—let me read it to you first. The piece is after all designed to be spoken. To camera—that is the term, I think.” He cleared his throat, addressed Rose in a resounding tone, with stagy pauses for effect. “I myself have a soft spot for what is known as the Cleopatra’s nose theory of history—the proposal that had the nose of Cleopatra been an inch longer the fortunes of Rome would have been different. A
reductio ad absurdam
, perhaps, but a reference to random causality that makes a lot of sense when we think about the erratic sequence of events that we call history. And we find that we home in on the catalysts—the intervention of those seminal figures who will direct events. Caesar himself. Charlemagne. Napoleon. Hitler. If this man or that—no, this person or that—had not existed, how differently could things have turned out? Focus upon a smaller canvas—England in the eighteenth century, or, indeed, any other century—and we find again that it is personalities that direct events, the human hand that steers the course of time. The ebb and flow of power; the machinations of politics. A decision is made in one place, and far away a thousand will die. There is an analogy, I understand, with a process that interests the physicists—chaos theory. The proposition that apparently random phenomena have underlying order—a very small perturbation can make things happen differently from the way they would have happened if the small disturbance had not been there. A butterfly in the Amazon forest flaps its wings and provokes a tornado in Texas.” Henry inclined his head and smiled. “A rather nice image, don’t you think?” But he was not addressing Rose
now; he spoke to a camera, to a vast invisible audience, watching enthralled from their sofas. “Mind, I find the physics hard to follow—I’ll admit that—but I’m intrigued to apply the theory to the historical process. This happens, and triggers that, which leads to something unexpected. But what, indeed, can be expected at all? We can only apply the wisdoms of hindsight—for once the cliché is appropriate.”

Henry dismissed the camera, the nation’s sofas. He returned to Rose, benignly inquiring, “How does that sound?”

Loud, thought Rose. I’d have been turning the volume down.

But Henry was not really seeking comment. “Quite a telling little introduction, I feel. We’ll send it to Ms. Canning as the script for the pilot. So two copies, please, Rose—one for her and one for the file.”

One had impressed, it would seem. That young woman had recognized the impact of age and experience. The weight, if you like. As opposed to young chaps scrambling up hillsides.

Henry had felt at a disadvantage with Delia Canning and had had to summon up all resources to overcome this. He had felt old, actually. He did not normally feel old. Old was of course a condition, and a condition from which one suffered, but the dignified and expedient thing was to dismiss it, as far as possible. It was annoying to find oneself getting out of breath on even a mild slope (hillsides out of the question); the digestion was more unreliable than in the past. Worst was this fearful and betraying tendency to lose entirely some name—names so familiar that they were second nature. The Elder and the Younger Pitt, for heaven’s sake. Well, a lesson had been learned, there. But one had no need to go climbing hills, and going easy on Corrie’s cream and brandy trifle was perhaps a possibility. Those occasional twinges in the chest were to be ignored. Henry had always been impatient with people who fussed over their health; they were the ones who kicked the bucket first, by and large.

Senior citizen was the term now, apparently. Smacked of the French Revolution—
citoyen
. Who dreamed up such expressions?
Some civil service apparatchik.
Citoyen
Gladstone,
citoyen
Bismarck,
citoyen
Churchill—plenty of senior citizens directing the course of history. In early societies the elders were respected and consulted, for good reason. The cult of youth is an entirely modern phenomenon, and a tedious one at that.

In his own youth, Henry had made sure to cultivate the elders; you never know who might give you a leg up. Always wise to see to it that the right people know who you are. In due course, comparable young had come knocking on his door, and Henry had rather liked that; a little circle of clever young men was an appropriate attribute for a scholar of substance. These had rather fallen away nowadays, though a few still kept up, especially when they were applying for some post and wanted a fresh reference. One had one’s uses. But the young as such were really out of sight now, so far as Henry was concerned, except of course the ubiquitous young, yowling out of radios and hurtling along pavements on their bikes, doing their best to run Henry down. Today’s young needed to be put in their place, not made into a cult. Bring back mandatory apprenticeship; there was something to be said for child labor.

“No,” said Delia Canning.

Henry laid the script down on his desk, adjusted the phone. Had he misheard?

“
No?
”

“None of it, I’m afraid. It’s—well—wordy. Not the sort of thing.”

Henry blinked. Wordy?

“You wouldn’t be doing yourself justice,” said Delia. “We need something much more immediate. One of our young researchers here is going to draft a script, and then he’ll go over it with you before they film. You’ll like him—he’s got a history background. Did history at—um—Manchester, I think. You’ll hear from me when I’ve seen the pilot. Bye now.”

Henry put down the phone.
Wordy
? The cheek of it. But one will have to play along with them, if this thing is to go ahead.

Marion had had to redesign the bathroom entirely. Much time. Indeed, this flat was gobbling up time. Just as well that she didn’t have other commissions on the go. The Poles were delightful and hard-working but did require maximum supervision. There could be misunderstandings, linguistic confusions; the nephew had to be sent for more than once. He treated his uncles with kindly tolerance as wayward children who could not help their deficiencies. “They do a really good job,” he told Marion. “It’s just a nuisance they can’t get their heads around the language.” His own speech was pure London.

“How did you come to be brought up here?”

He smiled. “Oh, my dad came here to do a computer course when he was twenty, and never went back. He’d rather seen that IT was the place to be, even back then.”

She enjoyed the company of the Poles, which was cheery and undemanding. They sang and whistled, and plied her with mugs of tea or coffee. They talked much to each other. Could have been saying anything: “Persnickety bitch—fussing over every light fitting.” Probably not.

Actually, the flat was the biggest job she had done for some time. It was the garden floor of a big old building in a prime part of Hampstead; in the flat above, the halogen lights and the wood floors were already in. Range Rovers and BMWs stood outside. In the local eateries, expensively clad young women whiled away time over coffee at an hour when most people of that age are working; in the High Street, it was easier to buy designer gear than a loaf of bread. The place smoked affluence. What did the Poles think of this? Nothing much, perhaps; it blew work their way, and that was all they cared about. And me too, thought Marion. Who am I to complain? I depend on people who have money to spare. That said, I prefer the Poles to the glossy girls in Carluccio’s and Maison Blanc. And I can’t afford a little item from Hobbs to lift the spirits so I am not even going to look.

Marion’s clients were way out of her league, financially. She did
not feel particularly envious or resentful, merely a bit impatient with all that spending power. It did not seem to make them extra happy; most of the trophy wives appeared either edgy or vaguely mutinous. Presumably the status itself required staying power: you could be traded in at any moment.

She wondered if George Harrington had a wife. If so, she had never featured. Marion would have liked to have a further word with him about the bathroom, but the secretary said he was abroad and unavailable for a week or two. The fact was that his volte-face over the chosen suite had set Marion back considerably in terms of time; she thought of mentioning this, and decided not to. There might be further commissions coming from that direction; best to appear flexible and accommodating.

He was unusual, as a client. Most of her clients arrived through word of mouth recommendation, not because she happened to sit next to them at a lunch. Fortuitous, you could call him. Usually, one satisfied client had brought in another; the Web site helped, no doubt, and a couple of years ago she had had a stroke of luck with a feature in a Sunday newspaper magazine—that led to a period that was quite frenetic. She had even taken on an assistant for a while.

No call for that now, so be thankful for the fortuitous George Harrington, and indeed for Uncle Henry and that trip to Manchester, tiresome as it had seemed at the time. Why was it that one had had to stand in for Rose? Oh, something to do with her mother—some accident. Well, it had turned out providential in a way—at least there was work to be going on with.

These thoughts prompted a sudden warmth toward Uncle Henry. Standing in the sunny window of the Hampstead flat, with the Poles hammering and singing behind her, Marion took out her phone. “Uncle Henry? Just thought I’d check in, see how you are . . . Oh, you’ve done it, this pilot. How did it go?”

He had imagined some appropriate setting—maybe they would be taking him to the Soane Museum, somewhere like that. In the event,
there had been a curt call from someone who was very much an underling to say that they would be coming along to his house tomorrow, to film there. “A quiet room,” said the underling. “That’s all they’ll need.”

“Coffee, I suppose,” he told Rose. “Four of them, I gather. And we’d better tidy my desk.”

“Flowers,” said Rose.

“
Flowers?
”

“Cheer the place up a bit.” She went to the local florist and came back with a bespoke bouquet in golds, creams and russets (thirty quid—he wasn’t going to like that). Henry was astonished. Lansdale Gardens was not normally graced with flowers. Rose arranged them in a vase on the small table beside his big armchair. The room still looked very brown, but she could think of no further remedy.

They arrived, and immediately set about moving all the furniture. Henry protested: “No, no—the desk is never over by the window.” The woman who was evidently in charge took Rose aside: “Could you sort of get him out of the way until we’ve finished setting up?” Rose lured Henry upstairs with the proposal that actually a lighter tie would be more effective than the one he was wearing.

Henry felt sidelined, in his own house. Everything was in the wrong place, his study was full of people, once again he found himself confronted with a commanding young woman. This one was tall and fair as opposed to Delia Canning’s small and dark, but clearly they came from the same stable.