The Closed Circle (28 page)

The circumstances surrounding this abandonment were widely reported in the
newspapers at the time. Our marital dispute centred on a trifling misunderstanding. That summer, during an otherwise idyllic badger-baiting holiday in north
Cornwall, I had taken her to visit a secluded cove (actually a good friend of mine,
Major Harry “Grapeshot” Huntingdon-Down, then engaged in putting a private
army together in a remote Cornish farmhouse), after which we took a stroll down
to the beach together. There, I persuaded her to remove most of her clothing—not
that it took much persuading: she had always, to be frank, been anybody's for a
half-pint of Old Peculiar and a couple of pickled onions; her virtue was not so
much loose as falling apart at the seams—and to pose for a series of tasteful and
artistic photographs which I took using my trusty old Brownie (whose name I
temporarily forget).

Now, it was Gladys's belief that these photographs were taken entirely for my
own entertainment, and would not be made public in any way—except, perhaps,
for framing one or two and putting them on the mantelpiece back at Hamilton
Towers, to provide a talking-point when friends came round for an evening of
bridge and conversation dried up over the saddled hare canapés. However, having
inspected the results, I took a
different  decision. It would be stretching a point,
admittedly, to describe her as an attractive woman at this advanced stage in her
arduous and dissipated life, when the ravages of time had wreaked a terrible
vengeance on a body which, even in the prime of her youth, had always inspired in
me feelings of awestruck medical curiosity rather than sexual arousal. It did occur
to me, nonetheless, that there were some sad and twisted individuals—long-term
inmates of high-security penal institutions, for instance, or ageing Benedictine
monks with severe visual impairments—who might, after a couple of strong
drinks, find in Gladys's naked form something to titivate their starving palates at
the end of a long day. Accordingly, I decided to publish the photographs: and made
them the centerpiece, soon afterwards, of the first edition of my new publishing
venture—a magazine called Aryan Babes, which aimed to combine the finest in
hardcore pornography with the most up-to-the-minute neo-Nazi news, features
and comment, and which for some reason (a mystery to me to this very day) never
caught the imagination of the reading public.

The magazine folded after three issues, and there was, I seem to remember,
some nasty business involving police raids and the seizure of computer equipment
and floppy disks. And then, after I had served out my three-year sentence (plus
another four or five months added on for minor sexual offences committed while
incarcerated), I emerged from my confinement only to find that Gladys had left
me. Yes!—Flown the nest, and stripped the house of all its contents. Taken even my
most prized possession—the framed photograph of Gladys and I shaking hands
with “Benny” Mussolini. (People told me that we had been duped—that we
couldn't possibly have met him at the Eastbourne Winter Gardens in 1972—but
it was envy, that's all—sheer envy.)

Happily, I am pleased to report that towards the end of her life Gladys saw the
error of her ways and came back to live with me. Our twilight years were perhaps
the most joyous of all (she always did look at her best in the twilight—or perhaps
better still, in complete darkness). But this has made my subsequent bereavement
even harder to bear and it has, I will be the first to admit, been a desolate time
here without her. For many weeks after she died, I could not get used to the feeling
of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed—and it was even worse when they
took the body away and buried her. Of course, I never travel these days without my
ouija board, and I communicate with her by this means every night. Sometimes we
have the odd game of ghostly Scrabble together, the midnight candle flames flickering as she transmits her words to me from the other side of great River Lethe. I try
to keep my spirits up by joking (“That was a dead heat!” I will quip, or “I'm facing
stiff competition tonight”), but it's not the same, not the same . . .

O Gladys. Life is so very hard without you.

I have passed the rest of my time here as productively as I can, making notes
towards my great work, The Decline of the West, which I intend to publish pri
vately in four volumes, bound in moleskin. In fact I have made great progress
towards that aim this week, because the grounds here are overrun with moles and
I managed to go out and brain more than thirty of the little buggers with the
poker at dawn on Wednesday morning, after a particularly restless and unhappy
night. When completed, I shall donate the work to the fine private library at this
castle—along with my brief autobiographical sketch of childhood, a little memoir
of the days I spent as a young stripling in Equatorial Africa, in the care of my
father: a good and honorable man—firm but fair—as the title, Birched Before
Breakfast, makes clear. Finally I will add a literary product of my later years, a
small but useful handbook called The Accidental Onanist: an Illustrated Guide to
100 Solo Sexual Positions for the Divorced, Widowed or Quite Frankly Unattractive Male. All of which I hope will be of use and interest to future occupants.

It has been a pleasure—albeit a lonely one—to spend some time in this fine old
corner of England; a pleasure to fly the flag of St. George above those ancient
battlements; a pleasure to feel, for a few fleeting days, that it might one day again
be possible to live in this country as our ancestors did, in a land that can and will be
free, unsullied, as all men of truth and honour desire it to be.

Arthur Pusey-Hamilton, MBE.

Philip read this passage with mixed feelings. It brought back many memories of his schooldays, of the increasingly outrageous articles that Harding used to submit anonymously to
The Bill Board.
Sometimes, the arguments over whether it was possible to publish them had been long and vociferous: but they had always succumbed, in the end, to Harding's humour, and to the conviction that no one could mistake the tone of these pieces for anything other than calculated irony. Often that irony had been almost too dark for comfort; often the milieu he wrote about—the lonely fantasy world of the Pusey-Hamiltons, with their traumatized son and their lunatic political beliefs—had seemed to be underscored by a real and unaffected sadness. But neither Philip nor any of the others had ever doubted one thing: that Harding was only doing it for a laugh.

Had he still been doing it for a laugh, nearly twenty years later?

As for the phrase “Albion resurgens”—well, that caused Philip a shiver of unease as well. He supposed it was a phrase that any literate British nationalist might be expected to use, and so would come naturally enough to the pen of someone who was satirizing the movement. But it was also, he realized now, the name of the record label that had released the “Unrepentant” CD.

Just a coincidence? Probably. But he wasn't going to be able to stop himself from making sure. After reading Harding's words for the second time, he went straight into his email program, and sent a message. He sent it to the editors of the anti-fascist magazine who had already helped him with much of his research. Philip told them that he needed to come down to London and look through their photo archives again.

3

For once, the roles were reversed, and it was Doug who had come to Benjamin for comfort. He was in Birmingham to visit his mother, and one Thursday evening they drove into town together and went to a Japanese restaurant in Brindley Place. Benjamin sat mesmerized as the bowls of food revolved slowly on a little conveyor belt before his eyes, while they sat perched on chrome stools and drank chilled Gewurtztraminer from fine, fluted glasses.

“Can you imagine what life would have been like in the 1970s, if we'd had places like this to come to?” he said, dousing his king prawn
tempura
with soy sauce. “I would probably have ended up marrying Jennifer Hawk-ins. It's no wonder that she dumped me. I remember for one date I took her to the chip shop and then for the rest of the evening we just sat on platform eleven at New Street Station. I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. There
wasn't
anywhere else, in those days.”

“As far as I remember,” said Doug, “she didn't dump you.
You
dumped
her.
In order to stay with Cicely. Interesting rewriting of history, though. I don't know quite what to make of it.” He noticed Benjamin hesitating over a plate of
maguro maki.
“I'm paying for tonight, by the way—if that's what you're worried about.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Slightly shamefaced, Benjamin took the plate from the revolving belt and added it to the collection already in front of him. “I'll do the same for you some time.”

“No hurry.”

Benjamin spent some time attempting to pick up his rice roll with the chopsticks provided. It kept slipping out of their grip, and fell back on the plate so often that it was threatening to disintegrate altogether. Hunger getting the better of him, he used his fingers and polished it off in one go. “So what's all this about you and Claire?” he tried to say, through the mouthful of food.

“Well . . .” Doug leaned in closer. The stools in the restaurant were packed densely around the central table, so that the other customers were well within earshot. It had perhaps not been the best place to come for a confidential chat. “It's not that we've fallen out or anything. It's just that she said something last night that . . . shocked me, I suppose. Or maybe it was what she didn't say.”

Benjamin's eyes were tracking a bowl of
tori nambazuki.
He wondered if there was going to be any left by the time it got round to them. “Go on,” he said.

“I suppose it started a couple of years ago. Mum came down to London for the weekend and we went out to Starbucks one afternoon—rather strangely, I know—and we were talking about all sorts of stuff. About your brother, among other things.”

Benjamin, half way through a chicken wing, grunted his surprise.

“It was when he was seeing Malvina. I was thinking of writing something about it.”

The grunts became more expressive, culminating in a swallow and the words: “You wouldn't have done that, would you?”

“No, probably not.” Doug decided not to say any more on that subject. Now that Malvina seemed to have disappeared, and no longer figured in any of their lives, there didn't seem to be much point. Hastily, he went on: “Mum advised me not to. She told me that nobody was perfect and people shouldn't always be judged by what they did in their personal lives.”

Benjamin nodded. There were some mixed vegetable dumplings coming their way now.

“And that was when she told me—by way of illustration—that Dad had been unfaithful to her.”

“God,” said Benjamin, scooping up a couple of the dumplings and reaching for the soy sauce again. “Had you never suspected anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“Did she tell you . . . who it had been?”

“Nope. She gave the impression there'd been more than one, actually. But I didn't ask who. It never really occurred to me that it might have been someone I knew. Anyway, last night I spoke to Claire and I found out.”

“Don't tell me,” said Benjamin, pausing in the act of taking another mouthful. “It was Claire's mother.”

“It wasn't, actually.”

“Not
Phil's
mother, surely?”

“No.”

Benjamin went a little pale, and put his chopsticks down. “
My
mother?”

Doug shook his head impatiently. “This isn't twenty questions, you know, Benjamin. Will you just listen to the rest of the story? Now, last year—just after Mum had her stroke—Claire sent me an email. She asked if she could go round to Mum's house and look through Dad's old papers. Which I believe she did, although they were in such a state that she didn't manage to find anything.”

“What was she looking for?”

“I don't know, exactly—but I think she's started wondering about Miriam again.”

Benjamin was sorry to hear this. “That way madness lies,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, God knows what that must feel like—to lose your sister that way, and never know what's happened to her—but it was . . . how long ago? More than twenty-five years, isn't it? She's never going to find anything out about it now. She's got to let it go.”

“Easier said than done, I should think,” Doug reflected. “Anyway—” (he took a deep breath) “—you can guess what's coming, I suppose.”

But Benjamin, apparently, couldn't.

“Well, the reason she wanted to look through Dad's papers,” Doug said, spelling it out, “is that
she
was the one. It was Miriam he was having the affair with.”

“Jesus . . .” Benjamin put down his wine glass and said nothing for a while, shocked beyond words. “When did she tell you?”

“Last night.” Doug pushed some food around his plate distractedly. He had hardly eaten anything. “Dad's papers have all been taken away now. I gave them to Warwick university and they've put them in a proper archive. Last week I phoned them up and asked if they were accessible yet and they said yes, and then I emailed Claire, because I promised to tell her as soon as this had happened. Well, I didn't get any answer to the email so last night I phoned her up. Seems she'd been on holiday and had only just got back.” He frowned. “Do you know anything about this new boyfriend of hers? Do you know who he is?”

“Not really. Phil said he was a businessman of some sort. A high-flyer. Absolutely loaded, by the sound of it.”

“Well, that figures, because he took her on holiday to the Cayman Islands, of all places. And it can't have gone very well because Claire told me that she'd come home early, by herself. She'd only just got in when I phoned so she hadn't read the email. Anyway, I told her she could go to Warwick now and look through the archive if she was still interested and obviously she is, because right away she said she was going to go this week some time.” He fell silent, and waited while Benjamin filled up his wine glass. Then drank deeply. “She sounded really excited about it: so I said, ‘What's this all about, Claire? Are you ever going to tell me?' and she went quiet for a bit at the other end of the line, and then she said, ‘What do
you
think it's about, Doug?' And I suppose I already knew, by that stage. So I said: ‘It's my Dad, isn't it? He was sleeping with your sister.' And she said: ‘Yeah, that's right . . .' ”

In the long pause that followed, Benjamin noticed how noisy the restaurant was: how loud the music rippling in the background, restless with the thump and tick of drum machines and the wash of synthesizer chords; how boisterously all the other diners were enjoying themselves, laughing together, shouting jokes at each other, living in the present, living for the future: not locked in the past, as he always seemed to be, as his friends always seemed to be; the past that kept reaching out to them with subtle tendrils whenever they tried to break away and move forwards. Unfinished business.

“That's not all, though,” Doug continued, slowly. “She said she'd made up her mind about something.”

Benjamin waited. “Yes?”

“She says she knows that Miriam's dead. She doesn't have any doubt about that any more. She's not hoping to find her or anything. She just wants to know the truth.”

Hesitantly, Benjamin asked: “What does that have to do with looking at your dad's papers?”

“That's what I wanted to know. What I asked her, in fact.”

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing, for a while. So I said to her, ‘I'm presuming that you don't think your sister died of natural causes. You think she was . . . murdered.' And she just sort of said, ‘Yes,' in a very quiet voice. Very distant. I wondered if . . . you know, I wondered if she'd actually used that word before. In that context. Even when she was just thinking about it.”

“Maybe she hadn't,” said Benjamin, not knowing what else to say.

“So anyway—” Doug looked down at his wine glass, and swilled the golden liquid around slowly, unthinkingly “—so I had to ask her, didn't I? I had to say to her: ‘Claire, you don't think my father did it, do you? You
can't
think that. You can't possibly.' ” He put the glass down, rested his face on his hands for a moment. When he looked up, Benjamin noticed how tired his eyes were. “And do you know what she said to that?”

Benjamin shook his head; though he could already guess the answer, by now.

“Nothing.” Doug smiled, the hardest and grimmest of smiles. “She did not say . . . a bloody word.”

Just behind him, a young man with spiked hair and a business suit reached the punchline of a joke and was rewarded with explosions of laughter from his two companions. They looked like sales reps, staying away from home and ready to make a night of it. Benjamin winced at the noise, could almost feel it knocking him backwards.

“Shit,” he said to Doug, feelingly, and put a hand on his arm.

“I hung up, then,” Doug told him. “I just said, ‘Bye-bye, Claire,' and put the phone down.” He looked up at Benjamin and, although he attempted a smile again, there was a sadness in it this time. He seemed to be looking back, back across the years to the schooldays which kept tugging at them: the past that wouldn't let go. “I always knew Claire hated me,” he said. “Now I know why.”

They decided that the best solution was to get drunk. Doug had driven them both to Brindley Place, but his car was now safely tucked away in a 24-hour car park and they could easily share a taxi home. Doug reckoned he could claim it back on expenses anyway. So they abandoned their stools, and the endlessly revolving circle of food, sat down on square, unyielding cushions on opposite sides of a low table, with their knees wedged up almost as high as their faces, and ordered another bottle of wine to get themselves started.

Benjamin told Doug about the discovery he had made in Dorset. He had read the log-book entry so many times by now that he could recite most of it from memory. A lot of it made Doug laugh; but it was uncomfortable laughter. He reminded Benjamin of how Harding had once taken part in a mock by-election at school, and put himself forward as the candidate for the National Front.

“He always thought it was hilarious to take the piss out of those guys,” he said. “It started to become a little bit obsessive. Now it sounds even worse.”

“Even this was seven years ago,” Benjamin pointed out. “We still don't know what he's doing now, or where he is.”

“As I've said a hundred times—it could only be a disappointment to find out. But look,” he said, taking Benjamin by the shoulder, his speech beginning to slur, “you're not seriously telling me that you've started to fancy your niece, are you? We're all getting worried about you, mate. It's been a long time now since you left Emily. It's about time you found somebody new. Somebody your
own age.
And preferably not a blood relation.”

“I don't
fancy
Sophie. Not in that way. We hit it off, that's all. She takes me on my own terms. She makes an effort to understand what I'm trying to do, and she doesn't pity me or think I'm some kind of weirdo. Besides, I can't help it if all the nicest and most interesting people I meet are younger than me. I like young people—I find them easier to empathize with.”

Doug chuckled derisively. “Yeah, right.”

“It was the same with Malvina.” (At the mention of whose name, Doug merely raised his eyes to the ceiling.) “I don't care what you think—I had a rapport with that woman, an amazing rapport. I don't think I've ever felt such a strong connection with someone. A real, immediate emotional connection. Not since—”

“Please.” Doug held up his hand. “Do you think we could possibly get through the rest of this evening without mentioning the C-word?” Benjamin went quiet, at this point, and Doug started to think back to the evening a couple of years ago, when he had taken Malvina out for a drink in Chelsea, and had begun to realize how unhappy she was. It was a real, deep-seated unhappiness, too, the kind you probably need years of therapy to fathom. He felt suddenly cold at the thought of it. “I wonder what happened to her, anyway? Where she ended up after your brother had finished with her.”

And Benjamin said, surprisingly: “We're still in touch.”

Doug looked up. “You are?”

“Well . . . sort of. I haven't seen her or anything. But every so often I send her a text message.”

“And? Does she text back?”

“Sometimes,” said Benjamin, and left it at that. In all honesty, he had no idea where Malvina was living at the moment, or what she was doing. All he knew was that her mobile number hadn't changed in the last two years. For a while he had tried calling her, but usually he just got the answering service, and on the two or three occasions when they had actually spoken, Malvina had been monosyllabic and evasive, and the conversation was impossibly stilted. Since then, he had got into the habit of texting her every two or three weeks. He tried to make the messages pithy, and amusing, and to tell her a little bit about what was happening in his life, and he liked the discipline of trying to accomplish all this in only 149 characters. It was like writing in some highly economic and constraining verse form. Sometimes she replied, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes the replies would come at the oddest hours of the night. He had noticed that she was more likely to reply if he finished his own message with a question, even something bland and formulaic like
How r things with u?
or
What r u up
2
now?,
to which she would more often that not furnish some even more generalized and unenlightening answer. But at least it was contact, of a sort. At least this way he knew that she was still alive. And it was more than his brother had: this, to Benjamin, was a very important point.
He
was the one who had found Malvina; she had been
his
friend, until Paul had stolen her away from him. But Paul had blown it. Paul was never going to see her again. Benjamin had scored a victory, in that particular contest. A tiny victory, maybe, to some people: but to him, a momentous one.