House of the Lost (11 page)

After Theo left Cambridge he avoided the family as much and as politely as possible. His absence was noticed and commented on, of course, and apparently became the subject of considerable conjecture. Opinions ranged from the possibility that he had become entangled with some disreputable adventuress who could not be introduced to anyone (Aunt Emily’s belief ), to speculation that he had taken to drink or drugs or both (Nancy), and the suggestion by a mild-mannered aunt on Helen’s side of the family that he might be contemplating a religious retreat from the world. According to Theo’s mother, who attended a fortieth birthday party for Lesley’s mother, this last idea caused much ribaldry among the bluffer uncles who said what about the vow of chastity, ho ho, and added that hell would freeze and pigs would fly before Theo would enter a monastery. Guff thought the absences might be due to Theo having been enlisted by the government to work in a secret capacity, and pointed out that Burgess and Maclean had been Cambridge men.

‘They were also double agents,’ said Nancy, tartly.

‘Yes, but Theo wouldn’t be a double agent.’

‘So there you are,’ said Petra, recounting all this to Theo. ‘You’re either in the hands of a gold-digger, you’re an alcoholic or a drug fiend, you’re about to become a monk or you’re James Bond.’

‘I’ve just had a bit too much of family,’ said Theo, hating himself for deceiving her.

‘A little of them goes a long way,’ agreed his mother, apparently accepting this with perfect equanimity.

‘But I expect I’ll wander back into the Kendal bosom at some point.’

‘I expect you will,’ she said, as if it was not important. ‘One usually does.’

In time life became slightly more endurable. His Footlights’ sketches had caused a few ripples in the world that existed beyond Cambridge’s rarefied atmosphere, and some review work came in, along with the acceptance of a couple of articles for one of the heftier Sunday papers. In the wake of this was a modest commission for a series of four short radio plays.

‘And very good they were,’ said Guff, who had written to the BBC to praise the plays and had received a very nice reply from a young production assistant whom he intended to take out to lunch.

The radio plays led to scripting work for a couple of TV documentaries, which was gratifying and enjoyable. None of it provided a huge amount of money, but for the moment there was enough on which to live and it was possible to view the financial future with a degree of optimism. With some trepidation, Theo embarked on a full-length novel, and after a few false starts and some rejections, his first novel was published when he was twenty-six. When he received the call saying it had been accepted, he found himself longing to tell Charmery, and to see her eyes glowing with admiration and delight for him. He tried not to mind when she did not so much as send him a note or even an email of congratulation.

There were congratulations from other quarters though, because the book received considerable acclaim. ‘Dark,’ said the critics. ‘Dark and dense, and although not entirely comfortable to read, very compelling indeed.’ When it won a small, but prestigious award, they all said they had foreseen it, and began to talk about the Man Booker Prize as a future possibility.

On the strength of this Theo scraped together a deposit for a tiny sliver of a house on the northern outskirts of London, and tried not to think how he would be shackled to the building society for the next twenty-five years.

But his new life was not so bad; there were agreeable contacts in the world of publishing and radio and newspapers, and there were a few girlfriends along the way, although he never viewed any of these relationships as serious. Once again this was because none of them were Charmery. He wondered if he would ever stop thinking about her and wanting her.

And then, five years after that never-forgotten autumn afternoon at Fenn House, midway through an ordinary working morning in the little north London house, he answered a knock at the door and she was standing on the step.

Theo’s emotions spun in wild confusion, but when she said, ‘I can come back later if this isn’t a good time. Of if you’re just going out?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Theo.

She came into the comfortable untidy room which was strewn with his books, and sat down as easily as if they were back at Fenn or in her parents’ London house at Hampstead.

‘This isn’t quite as I visualized it,’ she said, looking about her. ‘But it’s nice.’

‘Did you visualize it?’ Theo could not take his eyes off her. He could not say any of the conventional things about whether she would like a drink, or what she was doing here. Half of him wanted to pull her against him and kiss her until they were both dizzy, but the other half kept replaying that autumn afternoon. ‘It’d be a really exciting secret to be lovers . . .,’ she had said.

‘Oh yes, I often visualized it,’ she said. ‘Masses of times.’ Her eyes went to the shelf with Theo’s book on it, and to the desk where the proofs of his second book were spread out. ‘You’re almost famous, aren’t you?
The Times
and the
Independent
are saying what a brilliant writer you are. I’ve read your book. It’s very good – I didn’t realize how good a writer you’d be. All those years ago, I mean.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m here because there’s some bad news,’ she said, ‘about my mother and Desmond. I wanted to be the one to tell you.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Well, it’s all frightfully traumatic,’ she said. ‘They were on the M25 – driving too fast as usual, you know what Desmond was like, and there was a pile-up.’

‘A crash? God, what happened?’

‘Oh, they’re both dead,’ she said. ‘Right out of it, completely gone.’ She shrugged and blinked several times, and if there had been a sudden glisten of tears, they vanished. ‘Terribly sad, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, Charm, I’m so sorry . . .’

‘Yes, well,’ she said, in a brittle uncaring voice.

Theo waited, but when she did not say anything more, said, ‘I really am dreadfully sorry. Does that mean you’ll be in this country more now?’

‘Actually I’m often in this country,’ she said. ‘I always go to Fenn in the spring – didn’t you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But where I go now rather depends on you.’ She had been curled up in the armchair, like a luxurious Persian cat; now she came to perch on the arm of Theo’s chair. Her mouth was on his before he realized it and his lips opened involuntarily. She tasted sweet and warm and five years dissolved into nothing as Theo’s body responded with the familiar hard longing. When she stopped kissing him, her eyes were wide and shining. ‘So,’ she said, ‘it
is
still the same for you, as well. I wasn’t absolutely sure if it would be.’

The beloved and familiar curve of her cheek and the scent of her hair were like tinder igniting a fire that had never quite died, and Theo wanted to make love to her more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. But he fought down his emotions, and said, ‘Charmery, what’s going on? I’m truly sorry about Helen and Desmond, and I’ll do everything I can to help you through it. Practically and emotionally, and—’

‘Emotionally,’ she said, in a soft silken voice. ‘Ah yes. That’s the thing, isn’t it, Theo?’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Theo, but in a corner of his mind, he did understand.

Charmery said, ‘Don’t be dense, darling. The two people who knew the truth about us are both dead. No one in the world knows. We can be together.’

They looked at one another.

‘We can’t. Charmery, I’m sorry. I still love you just as much – I think I always will – but no.’

She recoiled as if he had struck her. ‘I thought it would be all right,’ she said, and for a moment it was not the flippant tone she had used earlier; it was the uncertain voice of the real Charmery.

‘No,’ said Theo again.

Her eyes darkened briefly, but then she sat up straighter. It was as if she had reached once again for the enamelled surface and the slightly bored flippancy.

‘Oh well, worth a shot. Quite a day for me – I’m not used to encountering rejection. But then you always hit a nerve with me that no one else has ever found since. I’d better go, hadn’t I?’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I think I do. Goodbye, Theo, darling. Maybe one day . . .’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘Or maybe not,’ she said, and went out, quickly and gracefully. There was nothing to show she had ever been in the house, except for a slight dent in a cushion and the faint drift of her scent. That, and the feeling that a knife had been plunged into an old wound that had just started to heal.

Theo’s mother asked Theo to accompany her to the double funeral. ‘I know you haven’t had much to do with the family for a long time, but I’d like to have you there if you could bear it,’ she said.

‘Of course I could bear it.’

‘Helen was very kind to me when I came into this family,’ she said. ‘The Kendals didn’t really approve of me in those days.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, because they thought I was different. Or they wanted your father to marry somebody with a lot of money. I had no money at all, of course. But Helen was a good friend to me,’ said Petra. ‘I feel as if a large piece of my life has suddenly vanished.’

There would probably never be a better moment to open the subject of the man who had been Charmery’s father as well as Theo’s. Theo framed several approaches in his mind, and found he could not say any of the words.

He sat at the back of the church during the funeral, and managed to slip out through a side door before he could get caught up in the wake that Lesley’s parents had arranged. He spoke briefly to Great-aunt Emily, congratulated Lesley on having been accepted at the Slade, which had just happened, and exchanged a brief word with Lesley’s brothers. But the only glimpse he had of Charmery was a remote, elegant figure at the front of the church, wearing expensive-looking black.

‘Nancy seems to think Desmond was cooking the books,’ said his mother when she telephoned him that evening to report on the wake. ‘I said it didn’t matter now if he’d cooked them until they boiled over onto the stove.’

‘Trust Nancy to home in on the finances,’ said Theo. ‘I’ll bet if Desmond did any cooking it was to keep pace with Helen and Charmery’s lifestyle. Aunt Helen might be easy-going but Charmery must be very high maintenance.’

‘You might be right about struggling to pay for the lifestyle,’ said Petra thoughtfully.

After the death of Helen and Desmond, the half-serious prophecy Petra had once made about Charmery seemed to come true. She apparently lived a darting, butterfly life, going from one party, one smart weekend to the next, occasionally modelling clothes or cosmetics for the smaller fashion magazines, once or twice getting her name or her photo in gossip columns. She had a small flat in Pimlico – Lesley, now in her second year at the Slade, had stayed with her once or twice and when asked, said Charmery’s life seemed hectic – but she apparently spent every spring and often part of the summer at Fenn House. This worried Guff, because Fenn was so solitary, but Nancy said Charmery was not likely to be solitary at Fenn or anywhere else, and the pity was that she did not invite some of her family to stay at Fenn, and continue the tradition her parents had started.

‘But I daresay we’re too dull for her smart friends,’ said Nancy, tartly.

There were vague reports of love affairs between Charmery and a series of more or less eligible, semi-famous men. The younger members of the family regarded this with envy and Lesley’s brothers were popularly supposed to have conceived a romantic passion for this glamorous cousin whom they only distantly remembered from the Fenn House holidays. But the older ones pursed their lips, said they had never heard of any of the men and it was to be hoped Charmery was not going to bring shame and disgrace on the Kendal name. Or even, said Nancy, to meet some appalling fate – and they might all laugh and look incredulous but you heard of these high-flying girls getting tangled up with gangsters and the like, thinking crime was glamorous, and ending on a mortuary slab, their names headlines in the newspapers. In light of what eventually happened to Charmery, it was later agreed to be unfortunate Nancy had made that remark about headlines in newspapers and mortuary slabs.

But in the end, Charmery was not a butterfly but a mayfly. Four years after her parents’ deaths, Charmery herself was dead and Theo came back at last to the remote Norfolk house which held so many memories. The house that had its own air of secrecy, and that against all logic, he was starting to believe might be haunted.

Haunted. Since returning to Fenn House the word had kept coming to the forefront of Theo’s mind. Haunted, he thought. Something’s haunting me.

It occurred to him that the portrait of Charmery might be responsible for his jumpiness, but he could not bring himself to remove it. His emotions about her were a complex tangle, but he was unable to shut the sketch away in a dark cupboard. But whenever he looked at it, he thought the artist had over-emphasized the slightly slanting eyes, and missed the manipulative charm.

If anything was really haunting Theo, it was Matthew.

Matthew never really felt entirely safe, even when all the doors were locked and his father was at home. After the men had asked him to spy on his father he felt even less safe than before.

His father never talked about the men and Matthew did not talk about them either; he was afraid of finding out that what they said was true and his father really was a traitor. He did not think anyone would have seen the jeep driving up to their house because it was in a lane that did not lead anywhere much. Wilma was not very likely to tell people about it, because she had known Matthew’s mother as a child and would do anything for Matthew and his father.

Two days after the men’s visit, Wilma came stumping into the kitchen to say that his friend had vanished. She had heard it from the milkman.

‘Friend?’ said Matthew, who was getting ready for school. ‘Who?’

‘That Mara from Three Lanes Cottage,’ said Wilma, banging pots around on the stove.

The words of the man exploded in Matthew’s head. ‘You’d want to help your friends,’ he had said. ‘You’d want to make sure they were safe . . .’