Original Sin (11 page)

When they reached the station and had left her in the care of one of the nurses on duty, he had turned to Claudia and said: “I think we deserve a drink. I need one anyway. Shall we find a pub?”

She had told herself that there was nothing like a common peril followed by a shared benevolence to promote intimacy and knew that it would be wiser now to say goodbye and be on her way. Instead she had agreed. By the time they finally parted she knew where it would end. But she had taken her time. She had never begun a love affair without the private assurance that she was in control, more loved than loving, more likely to cause pain than to be hurt herself. She couldn’t be sure of that now.

About a month after they had become lovers he had said: “Why don’t we get married?”

The suggestion—she hardly regarded it as a proposal—was so surprising that for a moment she was silent. He went on: “Don’t you think it would be a good idea?”

She found that she was treating the suggestion seriously without knowing whether to him it was just one more of the ideas he occasionally put forward without expecting her to
believe them, and apparently not much caring whether she did or not.

She said slowly: “If you’re serious then the answer is that it would be a very bad idea.”

“All right, let’s get engaged. I like the idea of a permanent engagement.”

“That’s an illogicality.”

“Why? Old Simon would like it. I could say ‘I’m expecting my fiancée.’ He’d be less shocked when you stay the night.”

“He’s never shown the slightest sign of being shocked. I doubt whether he would care if we fornicated in the front room provided we didn’t frighten the customers or damage the stock.”

But he did occasionally speak of her to old Simon as “my fiancée,” and she felt she could hardly deny the description without making both of them seem foolish or giving the whole thing an importance which it didn’t merit. He didn’t again mention marriage but she was disconcerted to realize that, with part of her mind, the idea was beginning to take hold.

When she had arrived that evening from the crematorium she had greeted Mr. Simon then gone straight into the back room. Declan had been peering at a miniature. She enjoyed watching him with the object with which, however transitory the affection, he was momentarily enthused. It was a picture of an eighteenth-century lady, her décolleté bodice and filled chemisette painted with great delicacy, the face under the high powdered wig perhaps too sweetly pretty.

He had said: “Paid for, I imagine, by a wealthy lover. She looks more like a tart than a wife, doesn’t she? I think it could be by Richard Corey. If so, it’s a find. You do see, darling, how I had to have it?”

“Where did you get it?”

“A woman who had advertised some drawings she thought were originals. They weren’t. This is.”

“How much did you pay?”

“Three fifty. She would have taken less. She was pretty desperate. I like to spread a little happiness by paying slightly more than is expected.”

“And it’s worth about three times as much, I suppose.”

“About that. Lovely, isn’t it? The thing itself I mean. There’s a strand of her hair curled in the back. I don’t think this should go into the front room, it could be nicked in a second. Old Simon’s eyes aren’t what they were.”

She said: “He’s looking pretty ill to me. Shouldn’t you encourage him to see a doctor?”

“No point, I’ve tried. He hates doctors. He’s terrified they’ll send him into hospital and he hates hospitals even more. For him hospitals are places where people die and he doesn’t like to think about dying. Not surprising when the rest of your family have been wiped out in Auschwitz.”

Now, turning away from her onto his back and staring up at the patterned silk on which the bedside lamp shed a soft glow, he said: “Have you spoken to Gerard yet?”

“No, not yet. I’ll do that after the next board meeting.”

“Look Claudia, I want this shop. I need it. I’ve made it. Everything that’s different about it is because of me. Old Simon can’t sell it to someone else.”

“I know. We’ll have to see that he doesn’t.”

How strange it was, she thought, this urge to give, to satisfy the lover’s every desire as if propitiating him for the burden of being loved. Or was there a deeper irrational belief that he deserved to get what he wanted when he wanted it simply by virtue of being lovable? And when Declan wanted something, he wanted it with the insistence of a spoilt child, without
reserve, without dignity, without patience. But she told herself that this particular want was adult and rational. The freehold comprising the two flats and all the shop would be a snip at £350,000. Simon wanted to sell, and wanted to sell to him, but he couldn’t wait much longer.

She said: “Has he spoken to you recently? How much longer can we have?”

“He wants a decision by the end of October, but the sooner the better. He yearns to go and lay his old bones in the sun.”

“But he wouldn’t find another purchaser in a hurry.”

“No, but he wants to put it on the market if we don’t give him a definite answer by then. He’ll ask more, of course, than he’s asking from me.”

Claudia said slowly: “I’m going to suggest to Gerard that he buys me out.”

“You mean all your shares in the Peverell Press? Can he afford to?”

“Not without difficulty, but if he agrees he’ll find the money.”

“And there’s no other way you can get it?”

She thought, I could sell the Barbican flat and move in here, but what sort of solution would that be to anything? She said: “I haven’t got £350,000 sitting on deposit in the bank, if that’s what you mean.”

He persisted again: “Gerard’s your brother. Surely he’ll help.”

“We aren’t close. How could we be? After our mother died we were sent away separately to school. We hardly saw each other until we both started work at Innocent House. He’ll buy my shares if he thinks it’s to his advantage. Otherwise he won’t.”

“When will you ask him?”

“After the board meeting on October the fourteenth.”

“Why wait until then?”

“Because then will be the best time.”

They lay for minutes in silence.

Suddenly she said: “Look, Declan, let’s go on the river on the fourteenth. Why don’t you call for me at six-thirty and we’ll take the launch down to the Thames Barrier. You’ve never seen it after dark.”

“I haven’t seen it at all. Won’t it be cold?”

“Not particularly. Wear something warm. I’ll bring a thermos of soup and the wine. It really is worth seeing, Declan, those great hoods rising out of the dark river towering over you. Do come. We could put in at Greenwich for a pub meal.”

“All right,” he said. “Why not? I’ll come. I don’t see why you have to fix it now, but I’ll come as long as I don’t have to meet your brother.”

“I can promise you that.”

“Six-thirty then at Innocent House. We could make it earlier if you like.”

“Six-thirty is the earliest. The launch won’t be free until then.”

He said: “You make it sound important.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is important, important for both of us.”

Gabriel left Frances as soon as the game was finished, a game he easily won. She saw with compunction that he looked very tired and wondered if he had come up out of compassion for her rather than from his own need for company. The funeral must have been worse for him than for the other partners. He was after all the only member of staff for whom Sonia had appeared to have any affection. Her own tentative attempts at friendship had been subtly rebuffed by Sonia, almost as if being a Peverell disqualified her for intimacy. Perhaps alone among the partners he was feeling a personal grief.

The game had stimulated her mind and she knew that to go to bed now would only result in one of those nights of alternate restlessness and brief periods of sleep which brought her to the morning more tired than if she had never been to bed. On impulse she went to the hall cupboard for her warm winter coat then, putting out the light, opened the window and stepped outside onto the balcony. The night air smelt cold and clean with the familiar tang of the river. Grasping the rail she felt as if she were suspended, disembodied in air. A cluster
of low cloud lay over London, stained pink like a lint bandage which had soaked up the city’s blood. Then, as she watched, the clouds moved slowly apart and she saw the clear blue-black of the night sky and a single star. A helicopter like a jewelled metallic dragonfly clattered upstream. This was how her father had stood night after night before going to bed. She would be busy in the kitchen after dinner and would come into the sitting room to find it in darkness except for the one low lamp, and would see the dark shadow of that silent motionless figure standing there looking out over the river.

They had moved to number 12 in 1983 when the firm was expanding in one of its periods of comparative prosperity and extra office space was needed at Innocent House. Number 12 had been let to a long-standing tenant who had conveniently died, freeing the property to be converted to provide a top flat for herself and her father and a smaller one at the bottom of the house for Gabriel Dauntsey. Her father had accepted the need to move philosophically, had indeed seemed almost to welcome it, and she suspected that it was only after she joined him in 1985 on leaving Oxford that he began to find the flat restrictive, almost claustrophobic.

Her mother, never strong, had died suddenly and unexpectedly of viral pneumonia when Frances was five and she had spent all her childhood with her father and a nurse in Innocent House. Only in adult life had she realized how extraordinary those early years had been, how unsuitable the house as a family home, even for a family diminished by death, to the two of them, father and daughter. She had had no young companions; only a few remaining Georgian squares in the East End which had survived the bombing had become fashionable enclaves for the middle classes. Her playground was the glittering marble hall and the forecourt and here, despite the protective railings,
she was always closely supervised, permitted no bicycle or ball games. The streets were unsafe for a child and she, with Nanny Bostock, was taken, occasionally by the firm’s launch, across the river to a small private school in Greenwich where the emphasis was on gentility rather than the development of questioning intelligence, but where she had at least been given a good grounding. But on most days the launch was needed to pick up members of staff from the Thames pier and she and Nanny Bostock would be driven to the Greenwich foot tunnel, and always accompanied on their subterranean walk by the chauffeur or by her father for extra safety.

It never occurred to the adults that she found the foot tunnel terrifying and she would have died rather than tell them. She had known from early childhood that her father admired courage above all virtues. She would walk between them, holding their hands in a simulation of childish meekness, trying not to grasp the fingers too hard, keeping her eyes down so that they couldn’t see that they were tightly closed, smelling the distinctive tunnel smell, hearing the echo of their feet and picturing above them that great weight of slopping water, terrifying in its power, which one morning would break the tunnel roof and begin to seep through, at first in heavy drops as the tiles cracked and then, suddenly, in a thundering wave, black and evil-smelling, sweeping them off their feet, swirling and rising, until there was nothing between their fighting bodies and screaming mouths but a few inches of space and air. And then not even that.

Five minutes later, they would come up by the lift into the daylight to see the gleaming magnificence of Greenwich Naval College with its twin cupolas and gold-tipped weathervanes. For the child it was like coming out of hell and having her eyes dazzled by the celestial city. Here, too, was the
Cutty Sark
with her
tall masts and slender lines. Her father would tell her about the East India Company’s monopoly of trade with the Far East in the eighteenth century and how these great clippers, built for speed, would vie with each other to bring to the British market in record time the perishable and valuable tea of China and India.

From her earliest years her father had told her stories of the river which for him had been almost an obsession, a great artery, endlessly fascinating, constantly changing, bearing on its strong tide the whole history of England. He told her of the rafts and coracles of the first Thames voyagers, the square sails of the Roman ships bringing cargo to Londinium, the Viking long boats with their curved prows. He would describe to her the river of the early eighteenth century when London was the greatest port in the world and the wharfs and quays with their tall masted ships looked like a wind-denuded forest. He told her of the raucous life of the waterfront and the many trades which drew their life from this bloodstream: the stevedores or lumpers, the watermen who worked the lighters which provisioned the vessels as they rode at anchor, suppliers of rope and tackle, boat-builders, ships’ bakers, carpenters, rat-catchers, lodging-house keepers, pawnbrokers, publicans, marine store dealers, rich and poor alike, drawing their life from the river. He had described for her the great occasions: Henry VIII in the gold-crested royal barge being rowed upriver to Hampton Court, the long oars sweeping upward in salute; Lord Nelson’s body taken upriver in 1806 from Greenwich in the barge originally built for Charles II; river festivities; floods and tragedies, She yearned for his love and approbation. She had listened dutifully, had asked the right questions, had instinctively known that this was an interest he assumed that she would share. But she realized now that the deception had only added guilt to her natural reserve and timidity, that the river had
become the more terrifying because she could not acknowledge its terrors and her relationship with her father more distant because it was founded on a lie.

But she had made for herself another world and, lying awake at night in that glittering, un-cosy nursery, curled womb-like under the sheets, she would enter its gentle security. In this imaginary life she had a sister and brother and lived with them in a large country rectory. There was a garden with an orchard and a fruit cage and vegetables planted in rows separated by neat box hedges from the wide green lawns. Beyond the garden was a stream, only inches deep, which they could leap across, and an old oak with a tree house, snug as a hutch, where they sat and read and scrunched apples. The three of them slept in the nursery, looking out over the lawn and rose garden to the church tower, and there were no raucous voices, no river smell, no image of terror, only tenderness and peace. There was a mother too: tall, fair, with a long blue dress and a half-remembered face, walking towards her across the lawn, arms outstretched for her to leap into because she was the youngest and the best-loved.