Two Loves (6 page)

After the description, the story. Ageing poet falling in love with the young beauty fate had sent his way, finally marrying her a year before his death. A mention of Joss – ‘the charming pencil drawings of him are not on sale' – hinting at joyous consummation. The paintings themselves were praised rather ponderously, the word ‘impressive' much used, so that they sounded worthy but dull. Prints of the five photographs the art editor had chosen were included, one of her looking rather sulky by the schoolroom door, one of the studio, showing the high Gothic windows and the long table with the painting paraphernalia on it, and three of the actual paintings – predictably Anthony's Gate in its two variations, one entitled
In Love's Day,
the other
In Love's Wake;
the last was the small painting Ingrid had particularly liked, entitled
Pastoral.
The whole article was bland and overwritten, but neither unkind nor indiscreet.

Ingrid had enclosed a short letter.
‘I told you I wouldn't be able to do justice to your paintings. I experienced them – and you – too deeply. However this article, unless there's something you'd like altered, will find its way into
Country Homes
in one of the next issues.'
As a postscript she'd added:
‘
PLEASE
come up to stay with me.'

Rosamund had feared that Ingrid might have been more acerbic; once or twice she'd caught her looking at her with what seemed like pity or even scorn.

*   *   *

It was a delightfully warm afternoon and Rosamund, still in a restless state, decided to walk the two miles down to the village to call on her mother, realising that she ought to warn her about the possible publicity regarding Anthony's poems.

Brian was in the front garden of their new house, brushing up fallen cherry blossom as though it were lethal fall-out. Their garden could probably have won a prize for the neatest in the whole world; everything in it savagely trimmed and pruned and disciplined. Brian made her mother seem a daredevil. ‘How are you, Brian?' she called out in a chummy voice she never used except to him.

‘Mustn't grumble,' he said. ‘My back isn't as bad as it was last spring. Not yet, anyhow.' He straightened up with a faint but audible groan.

‘Take care, now. Don't overdo it.' She waggled her fingers at him as she walked up the path.

She rang the bell, opening the door at the same time. ‘Come in, dear,' Marian said. ‘I was just going to stop for a cup of tea. I've been doing a spot of spring cleaning. These Swedish blinds, dear.'

‘Is that a new rug?'

‘Yes. Do you like it? I don't suppose so.'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘We never like the same things, do we? Never mind. Go and call Brian, dear, while I make the tea.'

‘Can I talk to you first?'

‘Good gracious, what about?'

‘About Anthony.'

Marian sighed her relief. A dead husband seemed less worrying than almost anything else. She made herself comfortable on the oversized sofa.

‘When Anthony was married to Molly he had a mistress called Erica Underhill and he wrote her some very private poems. Anyway, she's now short of money and she's having her autobiography written, which will include the poems, and some of the papers will publish extracts from it. I think there may be a fair bit of publicity. And I thought you should know about it beforehand.'

‘Good gracious. When you say private poems, do you mean pornographic, dear?'

‘Erotic, anyway.'

‘Good gracious. Well, I only hope I'll be able to understand them. I haven't understood much of his work so far.'

‘I think there could be quite a fuss. You know, because he's considered an important poet. I suppose he'll come in for quite a bit of criticism about his private life and so on. Perhaps some of his other mistresses will discover some other poems. There may be a certain amount of mud-raking.'

‘I wonder how it will affect Joss.'

‘Joss? I don't suppose he'll understand much of it, will he? He's not ten yet.'

‘That boy understands far too much, dear. The things he insists on watching on the television! And if I pretend not to understand something, oh, he explains it to me. I blame all this sex education they have nowadays. I didn't know anything about erections, dear, until I started nursing, but Joshua…'

At the same moment they both realised that Brian was standing at the open door of the lounge – in stockinged feet, of course – and listening to them with some interest.

‘I came in for a cup of tea,' he said, ‘but don't let me interrupt you.'

‘Come and sit down, Brian. Rosamund's a bit worried because Anthony had been writing some rather risqué poems to one or two of his mistresses and now they're going to be published. There'll be quite a little scandal, Rosamund says.'

Brian seemed to come to life. ‘Fancy that, now! That'll be something to live up to in the George, won't it? What relation is he to me, Marian? My late stepson-in-law? Yes, my late stepson-in-law. Harvey, have you read those little verses by my late stepson-in-law? All right, aren't, they? What are they like, Rosamund? “There was a young man of Khartoum…” How does it go? That was a good one.'

‘That's a limerick, dear. Not the same thing at all. And no, we don't want to hear it.'

They had tea and some home-made lemon cake, Marian and Brian seeming very lively, Brian telling them about the time he did National Service and knew a thing or two, and Marian recalling her three months on Men's Surgical when she did her nursing training.

‘I must get back or Joss will be home before me,' Rosamund said after her second cup of tea. ‘And by the way, Mum, I love the new rug.'

*   *   *

A few days later, Anthony's son Alex contacted her. Rosamund and Alex had always treated each other warily; he resented her, with the result that she was nervous of him. ‘I'm ringing on my mother's behalf,' he said stiffly. ‘My father's agent has been in touch with her about something rather worrying.'

‘Is it to do with Erica Underhill?'

‘How did you know? Did Giles contact you?'

‘No, of course not. He's completely loyal to your mother, still regarding me as an interloper.'

‘So how did you know? Erica Underhill's been in touch with you?'

‘I've never spoken to her in my life. Nor heard from her.'

There was a long pause before Alex decided to continue.

‘Giles had a phone-call from a journalist who asked whether he could have access to my father's private papers as he intended to write his biography. He was a little suspicious since there'd been two official biographies already, so he said he'd need a written application with full details of his proposal, the name of his publisher, etc. etc. And in the meantime he heard from a friend, another literary agent, that Erica Underhill had been making enquiries for a writer to ghost her autobiography. Naturally he warned my mother not to speak to anyone however plausible he might seem. And naturally she's in a state about it. You can imagine how Erica Underhill's autobiography would upset her.'

Rosamund sighed. ‘No, not really,' she said. ‘It's all so long ago, and anyway Erica Underhill was the guilty party. Your mother would have nothing to fear.'

‘She's thinking of my father's reputation.'

‘His reputation seems in pretty good shape.'

‘It's all very well to say that. Up to now his biographers have been very circumspect. They naturally mentioned his divorce, but not the circumstances leading to it. They've been very civilised.'

‘They even made his marriage to me sound fairly innocuous.'

‘You had nothing to do with the break-up of my mother's marriage. She doesn't feel any animosity towards you.'

‘That's magnanimous of her.'

‘She's got a proposition to make to you.'

On this occasion again Rosamund was silent so that Alex had to continue. ‘She wants you to write a book about him. Your personal recollections. She knows you'd be careful of my father's reputation and she's confident you'd be fair to her, so it would be an answer to Underhill's. She also thinks you should be in a position to make money from it – as well as his mistress and some cheque-book journalist. She knows you weren't very adequately provided for.'

‘She's right about that.' There was another long pause before Rosamund added, ‘And it's kind of her to think of it.'

‘My mother's not an ogre, whatever my father might have told you.'

‘He mentioned her very little, as a matter of fact.'

‘Will you think about it?'

‘Yes, I'd like to. I'm at a stage of my life when I'm restless and on the lookout for some new project, though I've no idea whether I'm capable of writing a book. Anyway, will any publisher be likely to be interested in a further book after Erica Underhill's?'

‘Giles thinks so. He thinks hers will have whetted the readers' imagination so that yours could be a real money spinner. My mother would let you have access to all his private papers and she'd give you permission to quote from any of his poems. She owns the copyright of all his poetry, as you probably know.'

‘Though I suppose Erica Underhill would own the copyright of the poems he sent her.'

There was another pause. ‘She has poems of his? Love poems, presumably?'

‘Yes, love poems. And I think they'd be the reason her autobiography would be rather well received.'

‘You've read them? These poems?'

‘Yes. Anthony kept copies of them, but asked me not to have them published until twenty years after his death.'

‘So that they shouldn't upset my mother?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Perhaps you could inform Erica Underhill of that.'

‘She may need the money, though. She must be quite old by this time. Well, I may go to see her. I suppose I'll have to if I take this on. But I really can't see that I can ask her not to include the poems. They're erotic but very beautiful, and they'd be the book's main attraction, wouldn't they?'

*   *   *

That night in bed Rosamund went over the last weeks of Anthony's life. He was very weak and frail, and unhappy, too, knowing that he was dying. Occasionally she would read aloud some of his poems, hoping they'd comfort him, remind him of his achievements, but he didn't seem to think much of them. ‘I didn't read that very well,' she'd say. ‘Shall I try it again?'

He'd shake his head feebly as though all his most famous lines meant nothing to him now. To Rosamund it was unbearably sad. That he had nothing to say and nothing he wanted to hear.

During the last days, though, he seemed to rouse himself and want to talk. He gripped Rosamund's hand, though she wasn't sure that he knew who she was, ‘I'll tell you,' he said over and over again, but without saying anything else.

At last she guessed what he wanted. She got a pad and pencil and said, ‘Right, I'm ready to take it down,' and then he dictated a few sentences to her – the beginning, she realised, of his life's story. Less than half a page it turned out to be, before he lapsed into sleep again.

Rosamund had kept that page in a cardboard box with Joss's baby clothes, and that night she got out of bed to fetch it. She hadn't looked at it for years, hadn't thought of it for years:
‘When I was two or three years old, my nurse would take me past the grounds of a mansion where there were soldiers convalescing, soldiers wounded in the First World War. They would come over to the gate as we walked past. Some of them had only one leg and walked on crutches, but the ones I was really frightened of were those with bandaged heads. I was afraid the tops of their heads would fall off. I used to dream of those men.

‘I was very fond of my nurse who was called Florence Maud. She was a large pretty girl with dark eyes. Her breasts would bob up and down when she ran downstairs. One night I woke up and went upstairs to the attic to find her and discovered my father lying on top of her and hurting her. I said, “Papa, Papa.”'

That was the last thing Anthony said. ‘Papa, Papa.' He repeated it several times over.

Chapter Five

Rosamund and Erica Underhill sat at the window looking at photographs of Anthony. He was certainly handsome when he was young, Rosamund thought. She wished she'd known him at that time.

She'd expected at least a measure of hostility when she'd first contacted Erica, but there'd been none; Erica had agreed to a meeting as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I expect you've heard about the book I'm planning to write,' she'd said on the phone. ‘I hope you're not worrying about it. I won't have anything bitchy to say about Anthony, I promise you. You see, I loved him.'

‘Do you live on your own these days?' she asked Rosamund when they met.

‘Apart from my son who's almost ten now.' She described Joss; his charm, his forthright manner, his dark eyes and hair.

‘I'd have liked Anthony's child,' Erica told her, ‘but it wasn't possible. In my day it was one thing to have a lover, quite another to have a baby outside marriage. Anyway, I still hoped to get married at that stage. I needed to get married. I needed money. All my life I've needed money. Such a bore. I've never had a proper job, just odds and ends.'

Was she apologising for publishing the poems, Rosamund wondered. If so, there was no need for it; she already felt both pity and affection for her.

Erica had great style, even now. A grey jersey suit, a bottle-green blouse exactly matching her eyes, peacock-blue glass beads, elegant shoes. Rosamund, who had made an effort with her appearance, subduing her natural enthusiasm for too many colours, too many patterns, had only managed to look neat in a cream linen suit her mother had chosen for her.