How It All Began (7 page)

Something more emerges. There is something else, in the crevices of what he says, or rather, of what he does not exactly say. He has no family; no children, and his wife has left. Charlotte senses someone whose world is all awry. At one point he shrugs: “I come to England because…because it not matter where I am. Perhaps I can start new.” Then he becomes embarrassed; he is here to be taught, not to unload his personal problems. He takes a hasty gulp of his tea, tells Charlotte that he is now quite a tea addict: “Before, always coffee. I learn tea on the building site and now I like. But this tea is different?”

“Earl Grey,” says Charlotte. “No builder would touch it.”

“It is good,” says Anton. “I shall buy.”

They set to work. They study words in isolation—nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, connective words. They move on to a few simple sentences: the day is fine, I go to the shop, what is the time? Anton struggles, intense in concentration. He sits on the sofa alongside Charlotte, staring at fragments of language, at sequences of language, frowning, pursing his lips, breaking into a smile when he has triumphed over a word, a clump of words. Charlotte has met many adult literacy students, but she has seldom come across one more determined, more fervently applied to the problem. He does not find it easy; he can be stumped by some new combination of letters. “Chair,” he cries angrily. “Chair, chair, chair.” “I sit on the chair.”

They take a break, and some fresh Earl Grey. Anton picks up the book on the coffee table, Charlotte’s book, and tries to read the title. “The. The house. The house of…”

“Good,” says Charlotte.

Anton scowls.

“Mirth,” says Charlotte. “
The House of Mirth
. That’s a hard word. It means…laughter.”

“What is it—the book?”

“It’s a novel—a nineteenth-century novel by an American writer. Edith Wharton. Set in New York. I enjoy her work very much—I’m reading this for—oh, for the third or fourth time.”

Anton picks up the book, opens it, turns over the pages, tries to read a line, sighs with frustration.

He is a reader, he tells Charlotte, he reads a lot of fiction, he likes crime fiction, he has read P. D. James in translation (“This is English writer, yes?”), but he is eclectic in his tastes, he has enjoyed John Updike and Ian McEwan. He reads home-grown, he reads in translation. “I like story,” he says. “I read for story.”

Of course, thinks Charlotte. Many of us read for that. Most of us, even. That is how children learn to read, why they do so. You reach them through stories, you lure them on with story.

And here is Anton having to plod on with The day is fine, I go to the shop, thinks Charlotte. And she experiences the first faint smolder of an idea.

But the afternoon has rushed by. Far more than the statutory hour has passed, and here now is the sound of the front door. Rose is back. Oh, dear.

Rose comes in, slung about with carrier bags. She looks frazzled. An afternoon at the Brent Cross shopping mall would annihilate anyone.

Anton leaps to his feet. Charlotte apologizes. “We’ve finished. Anton is just going. I forgot the time. This is Anton, Rose. My daughter Rose.”

Anton holds out a formal hand, which Rose takes, a touch awkward.

“Thank you for I come to your house,” he says.

“That’s all right,” says Rose. “Don’t feel you must rush off. I’m desperate for a cup of tea, that’s all.”

She moves toward the kitchen, but Charlotte waves the teapot. “This is still hot. Just get a cup. Don’t go, Anton. I want to give you some work for next week.”

Rose returns, sinks into an armchair with the reviving tea.

Charlotte sorts out some homework for Anton. He is greedy for it. “Some more,” he says. He lays a hand on
The House of Mirth
. “Perhaps in the end I read this.” He looks toward the well-stocked bookcase in Rose’s sitting-room, and then at her. “You have many books. You like to read?”

“Well, yes,” says Rose. “Of course. I mean, I could hardly not, with my parents being what they were.”

Anton looks confused, and Charlotte has to explain that both she and her husband were teachers of English literature. Anton has clearly been assuming that adult literacy instruction was her trade. He is much impressed. “Ah,” he says. “Ah. I did not understand.” He gets up. “May I look?” he asks Rose, and goes over to the bookcase. Rose watches him, interested. She glances at Charlotte, eyebrows raised.

Anton is studying the shelves. He pulls out a book. “This name I know. I have read translation. R…rut…Ree…Ree…”

“Ruth Rendell,” says Rose.

He looks at Charlotte in satisfaction. “Nearly I read that. I see the name and I know I have seen before.”

Rose says, “It must be so frustrating—because you speak English well.”

Charlotte explains to her that Anton is an accountant; once he can read and write English with confidence he can aim for an appropriate job.

“With your mother I learn,” says Anton. “Better than the class. I learn better.” He beams.

“And it’s good for Mum to be able to do something,” says Rose briskly. “She was bored to tears.”

Sidelined, Charlotte inclines her head gracefully.

Rose seems well disposed toward Anton. She asks where he is living. He describes the compatriot enclave, amusingly. “We live like
student. They eat out of tins and I am cross—the nasty uncle. I am too old for this. Soon I must find a bed-sit.”

More emerges of his circumstances. He has an eighty-year-old mother to whom he sends money. He would like to send her some clothes—everything is so much better here, she would be delighted. “But it is difficult. I look in the shops and I do not know what size, what is good.”

Half an hour or more has passed in talk. Rose has apparently recovered from Brent Cross. Then Anton gathers up his things, his homework books stashed carefully away in a rucksack. He thanks Charlotte warmly, turns to Rose. “And thank you for your nice house.” He goes.

Rose carries the tea tray through to the kitchen. Charlotte follows her, saying, “Sorry about that. We overran. I’d meant him to be gone before you got back.”

Rose says, “He seems a nice guy.” A pause. “Amazing eyes.”

So she too saw the forests, thinks Charlotte. The castles. That elsewhere.

It was on the fourteenth of April that Charlotte Rainsford was mugged. Seven lives have been derailed—nine if we include the Dalton girls, who do not yet realize that their parents are on the brink of separation. Charlotte, Rose and Gerry are thrust into unaccustomed proximity; Charlotte is frustrated and restless. Henry Peters—his lordship—has been chagrined and humiliated and is desperate to reestablish himself. Stella Dalton is taking five different kinds of medication, phoning her sister twice daily, and instructing a solicitor. Jeremy Dalton is writing placatory letters to Stella, nervously inspecting his accounts, and trying to sell an eighteenth-century overmantel for an exorbitant sum. Marion Clark is soothing Jeremy while wondering if in fact this relationship is really going anywhere; she is meeting George Harrington for lunch next week—a potential business partner looks suddenly more interesting than a romantic fling. She too has been preoccupied by her accounts.

Thus have various lives collided, the human version of a motorway shunt, and the rogue white van that slammed on the brakes is miles away now, impervious, offstage, enjoying a fry-up at the next services. Just as our mugger does not come into this story, not now, anyway—job done, damage complete, he (or she) is now superfluous.

S
tella Dalton is distraught, she is in a state of nervous prostration—her sister fears for her mental stability—but she is also curiously focused. Deep within, she is experiencing an unusual calm, a strange sense of acceptance and of purpose. Now that it has happened, the catastrophe that she has always expected, and she knows its nature, she can grab hold of the lifebelt and swim for shore. Jeremy has betrayed her, he is a liar and an adulterer; but the girls are not under a car, the house is still standing. In between bouts of tears, hysterical tirades to her sister, raids on that phalanx of pills, she is almost steady. She can look the thing in the eye—divorce—and while it is scary, unthinkable, taboo, it is also her own initiative, something she has set in train all by herself, albeit powered by the inevitable—what else could she do, after what has happened?

And she is bolstered now by Mr. Newsome. Paul Newsome. He sits behind his desk, in his cool quiet office with its filing cabinets and its glass-fronted bookcases, and nods sympathetically. He has the most eloquent nod. When he talks, what he says is cool and quiet and practical; he makes everything sound sensible and routine and normal. Paul Newsome was recommended by a friend of a friend of Stella’s sister, who had had a beast of a husband who tried to take her to the cleaners and Paul Newsome sorted everything out quite brilliantly. So Stella made that initial fraught and nervous phone call and he couldn’t
have been nicer, and now here she is in that office, time after time, and really he is becoming her lifeline, the shoulder on which she leans.

Paul Newsome is not one of those divorce lawyers whose first move is to urge some counseling, a visit to Relate, a cooling-off period. He is an old hand and he is in this business for a living. Divorce is divorce. When one comes along you buckle to and do your job which is to get as much as possible for your client. Occasionally, you hit the jackpot when there is a cash-heavy couple; more usually you’re engaged in a tug of war over a three-bedroom semi and a bite off some not very impressive salary.
Dalton v. Dalton
looks on the face of it much like that: excitable wife, half-million-quid house, child maintenance, guy who runs a reclamation business and there will no doubt be a problem getting any sort of income estimate out of him. There you go; another day, another divorce. Another slice of bread and butter; dab of jam if you’re lucky.

That may be Paul Newsome’s interior view, but in person he comes across quite differently. Stella finds him understanding and supportive, in every way. He never makes overt criticism of Jeremy, but you know that he thinks Jeremy is a rat. It is clear that he has the girls’ interest very much in mind. It is equally clear that he is aware of what Stella is going through, and will do all that he can to make this wretched divorce process (oh, that word . . .) as smooth as possible, with Stella left as well cushioned as is her right.

Stella realizes that she should have married someone like Paul Newsome. Jeremy has always been a bit flaky—his precarious way of earning them a living, his tendency to do wild, risky things, like the restoration workshop that was to be a productive sideline and came unstuck because the so-called restoration expert was a fly-by-night immigrant, and the ruined manor house for which he paid far too much and then couldn’t sell on. Way back, at the start, Stella had thought all that rather glamorous and unconventional, when her friends were setting up with guys in the city or in industry. And Jeremy had seemed so positive, someone you could rely on, the supportive partner that Stella desperately needed. He had been so insistent, too; he had shown up and noticed her in a big way, and wouldn’t take
no for an answer. Not that she had said no. And he is very charming and good-looking, Jeremy, all her girlfriends said so. Have other women been saying so, for years, to Jeremy himself? Has he swept up others in the way that he swept her up? This Marion Clark woman—is she just the latest of a series?

Stella knows that she is needy. She is only too conscious of her own erratic personality, this wretched tendency to flip, those times when she just cannot hold herself together, when she seems to have no control over what she is saying or doing. Gill says she has been like that right from when she was small, their mother couldn’t do a thing with her sometimes, and aunts and grannies used to mutter about tantrums and spoiled, but of course it wasn’t like that at all, she couldn’t help it, can’t help it. There’s something wrong. Gill has always said this, Gill has been there for her all along. Gill found the analyst person when Stella was in such a terrible state a few years ago, not that that solved much—Stella didn’t really like him, you never felt that he was on your side, that he
sympathized
, he was always so detached and dispassionate, with his questions, and then just sitting there while you talked, not even a nod, unlike Paul Newsome.

She’d rather have had Paul Newsome as an analyst, but of course he is a solicitor, which is another matter entirely. But he is being awfully good for Stella’s morale, whatever. He keeps her informed as to how things are going. They aren’t going very far at the moment, which he says is usual, at the start. Apparently Jeremy refuses to instruct a solicitor himself. He replies to Paul Newsome’s letters by saying that he doesn’t want a divorce anyway, and he wishes only to talk to Stella and sort things out. When Paul writes to say that his client declines to enter into discussion Jeremy fires back a shirty letter accusing him of coming between man and wife, or words to that effect. Paul reports this to Stella, with an expression of pained regret. The word “unreasonable” is heard, and Stella feels vindicated. Paul Newsome has never met Jeremy but he is clearly alive to what he is like, his refusal to face facts, his elusive quality which has been shown up in this horrid infidelity. Stella no longer feels so alone; she has someone alongside in this awful traumatic time.

Jeremy thought he had a buyer for the overmantel—a couple who seemed dead keen, coming back tomorrow with their architect, and then never another word from them. Not that five thousand quid would have dealt with the financial problems, but it would have helped, and would have made him feel he was getting something done. He has had to put the plans for the customer reception area and the parking bay on hold, but the bank is still breathing down his neck. It is too bad, just when he thought he was all systems go with the marvelous new site and a doubling of his stock and potential turn-over. He is having to work all hours, because the guy he is employing to help out at the warehouse and be there when Jeremy is off in pursuit of new items is proving somewhat inadequate. Admittedly he is cheap—an amiable but dopey young Irishman prepared to do it for the minimum wage. Maybe one should have aimed higher and paid more, but all expenditure has to be pruned back at the moment.