The Carousel (18 page)

"Yes. I know."

"And Charlotte."

"Yes."

"Was Charlotte disappointed about the picnic?" "Yes."

"I couldn't stay, Prue. I had to get away. By myself. Do you understand?"

"Where did you go?"

"I went back to Porthkerris. I walked back, over the dunes and along the cliffs. When I got back to the Castle Hotel, I packed my suitcase without any clear idea of what I was going to do next. But then, when it was packed, I picked up the telephone and rang Lewis Falcon. I'd been meaning to get in touch with him ever since I got down here, but somehow with one thing and another I'd never got around to it. He was great. I told him who I was and said that we'd never met. And he said that he knew who I was, because he'd heard about me through Peter Chastal, and why didn't I come out to Lanyon to see him? So I said I'd do that, but what I needed was a bed for a couple of nights, and he said that would be okay too. So I checked out and got a taxi to drive me to Lanyon.

"He's a marvellous man. Immensely likeable, totally uncurious. With him, I found I could switch off; as though I were pulling down a great fireproof safety curtain between myself and everything that Phoebe had told me. The psychoanalyst's seventh veil, perhaps. He showed me his studio, and we looked at his work, and we talked shop as though nothing else existed for either of us.

"That was all right for a couple of days, and then I knew that I had to get back to London. So he drove me to the station and I caught the morning train.

"When I got to London I went to the gallery to see Peter. I was still in this extraordinary state of mind ... it was like being insulated from reality. The curtain was still down, and I knew that Annabelle and Charlotte were behind it, but for the time being they had simply ceased to exist, and all I could do was carry on with my ordinary life as though nothing had happened. I didn't say anything about them to Peter. The exhibition is still on, the gallery still full of visitors. We sat in his office and ate sandwiches and had a glass of beer, and watched them through the glass of the door as though they were goldfish in a tank. Those were my pictures they were looking at, but I couldn't relate myself either to the pictures or to them. Nothing seemed to have anything to do with me.

"Then I left Peter and I went out and started walking. It was a beautiful afternoon. I walked for miles along the embankment, and eventually I realized that I'd reached Millbank and I was standing outside the Tate Gallery. Do you know the Tate?"

"Yes."

"Do you go there?"

"Often."

"Do you know the Chantrey collection?"

"No."

"I went up the steps and into the gallery. I made for the room where the Chantrey collection is hung. There's a picture in it by John Singer Sargent. It's an oil. Quite big. Two little girls in a garden at night, lighting Japanese lanterns. They're wearing white dresses with frilled collars. There are lilies growing and pink roses. It's called Carnation Lily, Lily Rose. One of the little girls has short, dark hair and a very thin, delicate white neck, like the stem of a flower. She could be Charlotte. 

"I don't know how long I stood there. But after a bit, very slowly, I realized that that safety curtain was going up, and little by little I was being flooded with—extraordinary instincts I'd never known I possessed. Tenderness. Protectiveness. Pride. And then anger. I began to be angry. Angry with all of them. Annabelle, and her husband and her mother. But most of all angry with myself. What the bloody hell was I doing, I asked myself, when she was my child, and I was her father, goddamn it. What the bloody hell was I doing, unloading all my responsibilities onto Phoebe? The answer was painfully simple. I was standing there doing nothing, which was what I had been doing for the past three days. Running on the spot, we used to call it at school. Getting nowhere. Achieving absolutely bugger all.

"I left the picture, and I went downstairs and found a telephone. I rang Directory enquiries and got Mrs. Tolliver's telephone number. And then I rang White Lodge. Mrs. Tolliver wasn't there . . ."

"She's visiting a friend in Helford," I told Daniel. I might just as well not have spoken.

"... but her housekeeper answered the telephone and I told her that I was a friend of Leslie Collis and I wanted to get in touch with him, and she was able to give me the name of the firm where he works in the City."

The kettle was boiling, but we both seemed to have forgotten about coffee. I switched it off and then went to pull out a chair and to sit at the other end of the table, so that Daniel and I faced each other down its long scrubbed length.

"So, another phone call. I rang Leslie Collis. I said I wanted to see him. He began by saying that it wasn't convenient, but I insisted it was urgent, so he finally said that he could give me fifteen minutes or so if I could come right away.

"I went out of the Tate and got a taxi and went to his office. The City was looking very beautiful. I'd forgotten how beautiful it is, with all those ponderous buildings and narrow streets, and everywhere sudden unexpected glimpses of St. Paul's. One day I must go back and do some drawings . . ."

The words died. He had lost the thread of what he was telling me.

"Leslie Collis," I reminded him gently.

"Yes, of course." He put up his hand and ran his fingers through his hair. He began to laugh. "It was the most ludicrous interview. In the first place, I was looking even more reprehensible than I usually do. Again, I don't think I'd shaved, and I was wearing the shirt I'd worn on the train, and a pair of sneakers with holes in the toes. He, on the other hand, was all resplendent in his City gear, starched collar, pinstripe suit. We made the most incongruous pair of antagonists. Anyway, I sat down and started to talk, and as soon as I mentioned Mrs. Tolliver and Charlotte, he immediately decided I'd come to blackmail him, and he was on his feet, shouting me down, threatening to call the police. And then I started shouting, too, just to try and make myself heard, and for a moment or two there was total pandemonium with both of us accusing each other, claiming responsibility, disclaiming responsibility, blaming each other, blaming Annabelle.

"But finally, just as I'd decided he was going to keel over with a heart attack and leave me with a corpse on my hands as well as everything else, it got through to him that I wasn't a villain come to bleed him white. After that things got a bit better. We both sat down again, and he lit a cigarette, and we started all over."

"You didn't like him, did you?" 

"Why? Didn't you?"

"When I saw him that morning on the train, I thought he was the most horrible man."

"He's not that bad."

"But saying he never wants Charlotte again . . ."

"I know. That's rotten. But, in a way, I see his point of view. He's an ambitious man. He's worked his butt off all his life to make a lot of money and achieve his ambitions. I think he probably genuinely adored Annabelle. But he must have known all along, from the very first, that she could never be faithful to him. Even so, he stuck to her, gave her everything she wanted, bought the house in Sunningdale so that the boy could be brought up in the country. She had a car of her own, a maid, a gardener, holidays in Spain, total freedom. He kept saying, 'I gave her everything. I gave that woman bloody everything.' "

"Did he know from the first that Charlotte wasn't his baby?"

"Yes, of course he knew. He hadn't seen Annabelle for three months, and then she came back from Cornwall and told him that she was pregnant. And that's a pretty good kick in the balls for any self-respecting man."

"Why didn't he end it then?"

"He wanted to keep the family together. He's devoted to his son. He didn't want to lose face with his friends." "He never liked Charlotte, though." "It's hard to blame him for that." "Did he say he didn't like her?"

"More or less. He said she was sly. He said she told lies."

"If she did, it was his fault."

"That's what I told him."

"That must have gone down well."

"Oh, it was all right. By then we'd reached the stage when all the cards were on the table, and we could insult each other as much as we liked, with no offence given or taken. It was almost as though we'd made friends."

It was hard to imagine. "But what did you talk about?" 

"We talked about everything. I told him that Charlotte was going to stay with Phoebe, and in the end he finally admitted that he was grateful. And he was also quite pleased to hear that she wasn't going back to that school. Annabelle had chosen it for the child, but in his opinion it had never been worth the massive fees he'd had to fork out each term. I asked about the boy Michael, but Collis seemed to think that he was no problem. He's fifteen and apparently mature, well able to look after himself, do his own thing. I think the general feeling was that he'd outgrown his mother and, considering the way she was carrying on, would be better away from her influence. Leslie Collis is going to sell the house in the country and get a place in London. He and the boy will live there together."

"I'm sorry for Michael."

"I'm sorry for him, too. I'm sorry for everybody in this unholy mess. But I believe he'll probably be all right. The father thinks the world of him, and they appear to be the best of friends."

"And what about Annabelle?"

"He's spoken to his lawyer, and divorce proceedings are already underway. Leslie Collis is not a man to let the grass grow under his feet."

I waited for him to go on, but he didn't, so I said, "Which leaves us back at square one. What's going to happen to Charlotte? Or didn't you talk about her?"

"Of course we talked about her. That was the whole object of the exercise."

"Leslie Collis knows you're her father?"

"Sure, that was the first thing I told him. And he doesn't want her back."

"What about Annabelle? How does she feel about Charlotte?"

"She doesn't want her either, and even if she did, I don't think Leslie Collis would let her have the child. Call it sour grapes if you will, but it's the best thing that could happen to Charlotte."

"Why?"

"Because, my darling Prue, if Leslie Collis doesn't want Charlotte and neither does Annabelle, then the way is clear for me to adopt her as my own."

I sat still as stone, staring at him in incredulous disbelief.

"But they won't let you."

"Why not?"

"You're not married."

"The law has changed. Now a single person is allowed to adopt. It takes longer to get through the courts; there's obviously a bit more red tape to be cut, but it is eventually perfectly possible. Provided, of course, that Annabelle agrees to it, and I honestly don't see why she shouldn't."

"But you haven't got a house. You haven't got anywhere to live."

"Yes I have. Lewis Falcon is off to the south of France to work there for a couple of years, and he said he'd rent me his house at Lanyon and the studio if I wanted them. So I'll be around. I don't suppose I'd be able to have Charlotte to live with me until the adoption is through the courts, but I'm hoping that Phoebe might be able to continue as her official foster mother until then."

"It sounds . . . Oh, Daniel, it sounds too good to be true."

"I know. And as I said, the extraordinary thing was that by the end of all this, it was almost as though Leslie Collis and I had made friends. We seemed to understand each other. Finally we went out to lunch together, to a scruffy place where none of his colleagues would spy him with a down-and-out like me. And at the end of the meal, there was another ludicrous pantomime while we both ] tried to pick up the bill. Neither of us wanted to owe the other anything. So in the end we split it down the middle and each paid half. And then we went out of the restaurant, and we said good-bye, and I promised to be in touch. And he walked back to his office, and I got into a taxi and went back to the gallery to see Peter Chastal.

"I knew I had to get a good lawyer, and I've never even had a bad one, because Peter's always done everything for me. I've never even had an accountant, either, or a banker, or an agent. Peter's handled everything ever since that first day when I went to him, raw and inexperienced, sent by Chips. He was marvellous. He put me in touch with his own lawyer, and he went and found out how much money I had put away, which is about ten times more than I thought I had, and then he said it was about time I matched up to this new family-man image and got over my dread of anything mechanical and bought myself a car. So I went out and did. And then Peter and I had dinner together, and after that I knew I couldn't wait another moment to see you all, so I got into the car and drove back to Cornwall."

"And now Phoebe and Charlotte aren't even here. " I couldn't bear it for him. 

But he only said, "I'm glad they're not. Because the most important thing I've got to tell you concerns you. Actually, it's not so much telling you as asking you. I'm going to Greece. For a holiday. In about ten days' time. I've told you about the house on Spetsai, and I've already asked you to come with me, but now I'm asking you again. I've got two seats booked on a flight to Athens. If Lily and Phoebe can cope with Charlotte, will you come with me?" The sugar-cube house that I had told myself I would never see. The whitewashed terrace with the geraniums, and the boat with a sail like the wing of a gull. "Come with me, Prue."

My mind raced ahead. I would have to do things, arrange things, tell people. My mother. Marcus Bernstein. And, somehow I should have to write a letter to poor Nigel Gordon.

I said, "Yes."

Down the length of the table our eyes met and held. He suddenly smiled. He said, "How little we know each other. Was it you who said that, or I?"

"It was you."

"After two weeks in Greece we'll know each other so much better."

"Yes. I expect we will."

"And after that—after we get home—perhaps we could think about coming back to Lanyon together. We'd have to get married first, but we don't need to think about that just now. It's better that way. After all, we don't either of us want to commit ourselves, do we?"