The Cilla Rose Affair (34 page)

“I’m very shortly going to do myself an extremely serious injury, Woodford,” he warned.

Sara laughed as she focused the camera. “Hold still. Say Ouagadougou.”

“Ouaga
what
?” Robin shouted, nearly losing his balance, crossing his legs and hugging the branch in a desperate bid to hang on.

“How many languages, for instance?”

“Take the picture, Woodford,” Robin cautioned.

“I’ve done it. I want another. Tell me.”

“Two languages. Canadian citizenship. Good interpersonal skills and an ongoing interest in national and international affairs.”

“Spoken like an expert on the subject. How many languages does Ian have?”

“Five.”

“And your dad?”

“Only English. He’s covered by the Grandfather Clause. Can I get down now?”

“One more picture.”

“
Woodford
!”

“Perhaps I’ll come and visit you in Canada now that Harry’s been put out of business. Perhaps I’ll be a travel agent in Vancouver.” She looked up at him, mischievously. “Perhaps I’ll immigrate and take out citizenship and join the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.”

Robin dropped out of the tree, landing at her feet in a shower of twigs and leaves.

“You won’t be getting any references from me,” he said, bad-temperedly, picking himself up.

“Don’t he nasty, Harris,” Sara said, kissing him. “There’s our bus. Come on—”

She broke away from him and ran across the green towards the road, laughing. It was one of the older, two-man vehicles, with a driver and a conductor and an open platform at the back, and it was pulling away from the stop in a roaring cloud of black diesel.

“You’ll have to do better than that if you want to keep up with me, Harris,” she warned, as Robin leaped boldly onto the platform after her, grasping the pole with both hands.

Playfully, she looped her camera strap around his neck.

“Up top, Harris,” she commanded. “Follow me.”

Many years in the past, Emma Braden had arrived at the somewhat unsettling conclusion that if she was ever to accomplish her not-unreasonable goal of a readable and best-selling novel every two and a half years, she would require peace and quiet and, above all, solitude.

Towards that end, she had embarked upon a field trip to Stonehenge where, meditating upon the circles of sarsen and bluestone rock, she had found herself directed towards Quidhampton, three miles to the west of Salisbury.

The settlement itself owed its existence to the nearby town of Wilton, which had been the capital of Wessex in Saxon times, and which had to its credit a carpet factory, instigated by the Earl of Pembroke in the 17th century to save his fiefs from starvation. The estate at Wilton had also required farmworkers, and labourers for its chalk quarry, and these had been duly housed in the neighbouring hamlet, whose name was purported to mean nothing less charming than “Dirty Village”.

Emma discovered the population of Quidhampton to be both couth and literate, and the village’s proximity to London—90 minutes on the train to Waterloo—almost commutable.

She viewed, and subsequently purchased, a rather ramshackle cottage off the main road to Wilton, making it her primary base of operations; and she retained her town house in Belsize Park for those various occasions which required her presence in London.

Greenleaf Cottage had been built in 1730, a modest home for a farm laborer and his family, constructed in the local style of brick and flint. In its original state it had consisted of two rooms upstairs and two rooms down, and had been sited at a right angle to the road—to provide protection against dust and mud—on top of a small incline—to keep it dry—and huddled close to its neighbours—for warmth and protection.

Two bouts of rebuilding at 100 year intervals had rendered the cottage as Emma had discovered it—three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, two rooms, a kitchen and a small toilet and utility room below.

Bill Braden leaned back in his wooden chair, lazing in the sun. He was a regular at Greenleaf Cottage. His sister’s careful restoration had piqued his interest in all things antique, and he never tired of the new and interesting discoveries to be made about the place.

There was an interesting peculiarity, for instance, in the wall dividing the entrance hall from the dining room: a bricked-up window, complete with sill, left there after the first round of renovations.

Underneath the carpet in the dining room Bill had discovered original red and black quarry tiles, and built into another wall, a real inglenook fireplace, with a sitting ledge for cold winter nights, into which Emma had installed a wood-burning, cast-iron stove.

His sister was pottering about at the bottom of the garden, ruminating over her latest plot, involving the resurrection of Jarrod Spencer and something to do with sound cannons.

“The previous owners of this house,” she complained, with some disgust, “had absolutely no interest in horticulture. And the owners before them seemed to regard my little oasis as nothing more than a rubbish tip. I’m perfectly convinced they were of the opinion that broken pieces of blue willow pattern china are an ideal fertilizer. Look at this: I’m still turning up odds and ends of tableware.”

Bill smiled as he poured himself another glass of lemonade from the jug.

“This compost heap,” Emma continued, “has so far yielded up a cast-iron double boiler, a large scoop used by the Post Office to dig trenches for its telephone cables in the 1930s, a scythe, a heating iron and a mahogany stair rail. I ought to open a museum.”

Mark Braden’s father took his glass of lemonade and wandered down to the bottom of the garden to join his sister.

“And so you bested the beggar,” he said, standing in the sun, deliberately changing the subject.

Emma continued her tour of the compost heap. “Victor Barnfather, you mean.”

“I mean him, yes.”

“And Nora Darrow.”

“Ah,” said Bill. He affected a German accent and a stiff military stance. “Frau Darrow. Such a charming woman, is she not?”

“Only to some,” Emma replied, humorously. She paused to remove her straw hat and to wipe a line of perspiration from her forehead. “I certainly wouldn’t say no to a glass of that lemonade, Herr Lügner—if you’ve a mind to go back and fetch it for me…”

Anthony was on his way home.

He’d caught the last train north from Leicester Square, and had purposely ridden through Chalk Farm and Belsize Park and Hampstead. He’d got off at Golders Green, where the Northern Line rose to the surface, in the mood for a walk.

At this time of night, London could be quite beautiful. The air was still, and it was fresh and clean and cool. The roads were quiet.

He trudged back along North End Road. Somewhere around here, he knew, was the ghost of an incomplete tube station. He stopped, and took his bearings. Over there—Hampstead Way.

In the dawning years of the 20th century, as the Underground Electric Railway Company of London Ltd. was pushing out into the northern suburbs from the city, there came a considerable hue and cry from those residents of Hampstead who objected to the defilement of the nearby Heath with the jarring presence of a tube station—and the influx of low-life riff-raff that the extension of the Underground would presumably result in. Four stations were planned for the stretch of tunnel between Camden Town and Golders Green, but, in the spirit of compromise, only three were opened.

Plans for the fourth, between Hampstead and Golders Green, were in the end abandoned—but not before tunnels, platforms and stairs to the lower lift landing had been put in, 200 feet down.

No surface buildings for North End were ever built, no lift shafts sunk to connect bottom to top.

It was down there, Anthony thought, studying the pavement.

The best of his sources had located it on the north side of Hampstead Way, opposite what had then been known as Wyldes Farmhouse.

Well.

He glanced up at the darkened plateau of Hampstead Heath, off to his left.

North End, sometimes known as Bull and Bush. London’s deepest station. Used in the 1950s as London Transport’s emergency headquarters in the event of a nuclear attack. The old control centre for the Underground’s string of floodgates around the central core of the city. Side tunnels used for storage—permanent way supplies, sound insulation materials and discarded documents.

Now abandoned, property To Let.

Another entry for the logbook of curiosities.

He followed Hampstead Way around, and back to North End Road, and continued on his journey down to Hampstead.

When he was small, Anthony had imagined the place of his birth as being a terribly grand affair: rose gardens and high-wheeled grey prams, and sweeping driveways leading up to a wide, welcoming door.

Reality, unfortunately, had turned out to be somewhat more functional: clean red brick, iron railings, polite signs directing the expectant inside, at the same time warning that this particular establishment was not equipped to handle casualties.

He’d made the pilgrimage before. It wasn’t there anymore, the maternity hospital. It had been torn down and a block of flats put up, instead.

He walked by it, commemorating his history.

Here became one Anthony Quinn Harris, April 19, 1963. Four pounds, five and one half ounces, six weeks premature, making statements even then. Second son to Evan and Gwennie, younger brother to Ian. Conceived on board the R.M.S.
Queen Mary
, enroute to Cherbourg and Southampton from New York City.

His mother had the remnants of the crossing somewhere back in Vancouver, stored in a cardboard filing box. Passenger lists and deck plans with quaint, dated illustrations: “Afternoon tea on a sunny promenade deck.” “A corner of the elegant drawing room.” Subtle notices in a crinkled copy of
The Ocean Times
: “Passengers are kindly requested to remain in the accommodation allocated to the class in which they are travelling.” The crossword puzzle of the day, by special arrangement with
The Daily Telegraph
.

Clocks will be moved ahead one hour at midnight.

Perhaps that was when it had happened, he mused—his conception—in that oddity of a moment when 60 mid-Atlantic minutes had suddenly vanished.

Smiling, he continued on his way down Rosslyn Hill. At Pond Street he stopped to admire the gothic horror of the derelict church guarding the Royal Free Hospital, its west-facing clock stopped at 11:27, its northern counterpart at 11:50.

Midway down Haverstock Hill, on the right, was the block of flats where he’d spent the first three and a half years of his life, gloriously immersed in the business of being small. There it was: neat brown brick, with double doors opening onto ironwork balconies, surrounded by an oasis of lawn and trees. A sign posted on the garden wall advertised Luxury Accommodation for Sale or To Let.

They said you didn’t retain much in the way of memory before the age of three, but Anthony wasn’t so certain about that. He distinctly recalled one of those balconies, and sitting on it in his push chair, and wanting very badly to be let inside again, because he was cold. He could remember sitting on the floor underneath a round, drop-leaf table in the sitting room, and being frightened by a row of loose wires in the electric fire. He remembered a toybox that had for a cover an exotic cloth patterned with staring eyes, and that the eyes used to frighten him even more than the loose wires in the fireplace.

He remembered the nursery school where he’d fingerpainted black runny blobs and insisted they were elephants, and built crumbling castles from buckets of damp sand in a box, and consorted with other children whose parents were writers and sculptors and performers.

“Tell me about where we used to live,” he used to say, at bedtime.

And his mother would begin: “Well, Anthony, when you were very, very small…”

Sometimes she’d tell him about the flat, sometimes about going to the zoo with Ian, who was five years older and terribly fond of camels, sometimes about going on the tube, with the wind, for Sunday tea at Gran’s house.

“In Tooting!” Anthony would pipe, because he liked the way it sounded.

“Don’t say Tooting, darling, say Mitcham. Tooting’s rather common.”

Anthony crossed the road, and within a few minutes, was home.

As he stood in the shadows, digging out his key, he was aware of somebody coming up behind him. He turned around, startled, on the defensive, and then, just as quickly, relaxed.

“You,” he said, with a smile.

“Sorry,” his father answered, apologetically. He looked tired. “I was waiting for you to come home. You’re somewhat later than I expected.”

“I went exploring.” He jingled his keys. “Care for a spot of tea?”

Evan touched his son’s hand. “I feel the need for a walk.”

Anthony put away his keys.

“Come with me,” he said.

They walked together in silence through the deserted streets of the village.

Evan glanced at his middle son. “What?” he said.

Anthony shook his head. It took a moment before he was able to speak. “I was just thinking, that’s all. I was thinking…here we are…a couple of chameleons…schooled in the fine art of climbing into somebody else’s shell…taking on somebody else’s personality…able—upon the whim of a director—to shed all inhibition and pretence—”

He stopped. They had arrived at the gates of Primrose Hill.

“Up there?” Evan inquired.

“Up there,” Anthony confirmed.

They began the long ascent.

“You were saying.”

“It doesn’t matter. Never mind.”

They climbed in silence.

“I haven’t been up here in years.”

“I know,” Anthony said. He thought for a moment. “Do you know why I decided to become an actor?”

“I would have thought it was because you were passionate about the theatre, Anthony. And talented.”

“But the passion and the talent had to come from somewhere—from you. Nobody else in our family’s the least bit inclined towards the stage.”

He stopped, not because he was tiring, but because his father was. He’d forgotten how steep the pathway to the top was: the walk was too familiar to him.