The Graveyard Position (13 page)

Merlyn was puzzled. Why the uneasiness? Was this an attempt to change the subject?

“Oh yes—the Forensic Science Service.”

“That's them. That's how I knew you were in the country, and still alive. I told them to get stuffed.”

“Oh? Why?”

“They said they didn't really need any fresh samples, because they could access police ones I gave…years ago. You know when. We discussed it. So I didn't see any point in wasting my time.”

“I see…” Merlyn thought hard, and then risked asking: “Why are you so uneasy?”

“I'm not uneasy,” said Jake belligerently. “Just wondering where Roxanne's got to. I'd better be getting to school to fetch Win—”

“You're not uneasy about that. It's since I mentioned Grandfather Cantelo, isn't it? The man I was named after.”

“Bloody silly name. Why name a boy after a wizard? Unless you're into Harry bloody Potter, I suppose.”

“You tell me.”

“Well, it's really a question of why your grandfather was named that, isn't it? People always said it was because his mother was infatuated with Tennyson. Did he write about King Arthur and that lot?”

“He did, yes. Nobody reads it these days. Where did the
y
come from?”

“Search me. I expect she thought it sounded more Old World. Like the pubs that advertise ‘pub fayre.'”

“Maybe. But why name me after Grandfather Cantelo if you didn't like him?”

Again Jake shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Don't be so bloody naive, Merlyn. He was the one with the money. We thought you'd be put down for a hefty sum in his will if we did what he wanted.”

“Oh, he wanted it, did he?”

“Thora was his favorite daughter. Anyway, he said that the original Merlin was named after
his
maternal grandfather—Ah! There's Roxanne. I've got to nip off and fetch Win. Hello, love. This is Merlyn, come to pay us a visit. Won't be a tick, then we can introduce him to his half sister.”

Roxanne was a matronly figure, perhaps in her early forties—much younger than her husband, but his rather childish insouciance and her air of greater responsibility made this less obvious. She had reddened hair and was wearing workaday, drab clothes. She turned to the door.

“I could go and fetch—” But the front door had slammed. Roxanne shrugged and sank down into a chair. Her smile was warm, tinged with satire. “Hello, Merlyn. You're very welcome. I ought to set to and clear up this place a bit, but that's Jake's job, and I've had a hard day at work. Did he feed you beer? I expect you'd have preferred a coffee.”

“I just had a mouthful. I'm driving. I think I made Jake a bit nervous.”

“Maybe…He's not a bad man, Merlyn, however bad a father he was to you. He's a bit feckless, definitely lazy, goes off at tangents the whole time, and he'll never really make anything of his life, not now. But he gets on all right with the kids—rows with them off and on—”

“I heard him and Jason, but it sounded pretty normal.”

“Getting him out of the house, I expect. He likes it to himself to have a snooze, watch the racing, whatever. He's just like their real father might have been—rows and threats, but underneath,
all right
. We're just a standard, normal family.”

“When I said I thought he was uneasy, it wasn't so much that he feels guilty about me, I don't think. His uneasiness seemed to start when I asked him about Grandfather Cantelo.”

Roxanne looked mystified.

“Thora's dad?” She shrugged again. “Don't know anything about that. Way before my time. I know about her, just as I
know
about you and Deborah. I think Win's taken Deborah's place now. What I'm saying is we don't
talk
about any of you. We're ‘now' people, I suppose, not people who want to churn over things in the past.”

“Fair enough.”

“So you'll have to talk it over with him, I'm afraid.”

“If he will, of course,” said Merlyn. “I get the impression that's the last thing he wants to do.”

“You have to force him into a corner. Make it so that it's easier for him to talk than to run away. I have to do that all the time, even on quite trivial matters. It's become a sort of game. I quite like it.”

“You know the rules and the match-play techniques. I don't think I have the skills.”

“It's your best chance. Here he is now.”

Jake came through from the hallway with a small girl clutching his hand and looking at their visitor shyly. Jake was now smiling the blissful smile of one who thinks he has just circumvented a difficulty and with one bound is free. He led Win over to Merlyn.

“This is Merlyn, darling. He's just dropped in on a visit. We used to know each other very well, but we haven't met up for a long, long time.” He gave Merlyn a meaningful look that meant that he considered it a bit too early to tell Win that he was her brother, or a sort-of brother. With perhaps a subsidiary meaning that with a bit of luck Merlyn might disappear from their lives once again, and explanations would not need to be given. But Merlyn reminded himself that it was Jake who had introduced himself back into his son's life, not vice versa, so perhaps he was interpreting the expression wrongly.

“Go upstairs and put your school things away, Win,” said Roxanne obligingly. As the little girl scampered away, Merlyn said, “You were going to explain, Jake, why I was given the name Merlyn, after my grandfather.”

Jake's face changed to one of obstinacy.

“I told you: we were hoping for something nice in the will. Now give it a rest, Merlyn. You're becoming a bore.”

“I'm sure I am. But the fact is, Jake, I don't remember you as particularly greedy, or as a particularly calculating person, apart from wondering where the price of your next drink was coming from.”

“I wasn't, Merlyn, but still—”

Merlyn came up close to him, with a strong sense of being younger and fitter than his father. Jake took two steps back and found himself in a corner, with his face showing surprise that he'd been trapped.

“So it was my mother who insisted that I be named after her father?” Merlyn persisted.

“Well, she wanted it, yes.”

Light suddenly struck Merlyn. The reason the Cantelo family were so embarrassed about Grandfather Cantelo was that he not only went after girlies but he went after the girlies in his own family.

“And did you get the idea later, after she was dead, that Grandfather Cantelo might have been my father? And was that why you never gave a damn for me after Mum died?”

Jake looked at him with the terror of a trapped weasel. Then he raised his right leg and gave Merlyn's left kneecap a hefty kick. As Merlyn bent down in agony, Jake scooted by him out of the room and then out of the house.

“I don't think I've got the hang of this game,” said Merlyn.

It was six days later, the Tuesday of the next week, that Merlyn received notification from the Forensic Science Service that their investigation had concluded that he was the son of Thora Docherty, née Cantelo, by her husband John Jacob Docherty. The letter appended two pages of succinctly summarized scientific reports, which noted that the full records of the investigation would be retained at the offices of the FSS for twenty years, in case of any dispute arising from the conclusions that had been come to. The bill for the service was enclosed.

“Eureka!” said Merlyn.

His training as a lawyer and as an economist made him instinctively take thought before acting. Sometimes, indeed, in his job at the European Union, his department bosses had meditated for several years before taking action, or deciding not to take any, on reports laid before them, and experience told. However, Merlyn made an appointment next day with Mr. Featherstone, then drove to Stanbury and went walking on the Haworth moors to think through the consequences of the letter.

At some stage Jake had become convinced that he was not in fact his son's biological father, and, more important, that this son was the result of an incestuous relationship between Merlyn Cantelo and his daughter Thora. This conclusion, typical of Jake's random thinking and undisciplined powers of reasoning, was conceived after his wife's death, so it seemed likely that it came into his mind as a result of Merlyn Cantelo's behavior in the last years of his life.

Merlyn decided that his grandfather had gone off the rails sexually after, and as a consequence of, his wife's death. She, as
Family Business
had made clear, was his prop, his center, his butterer-up-in-chief.

Had his grandfather's aberrant behavior included incest with one or more of his other daughters, and was it this that had given Jake his idea? Had his grandfather in fact had a much earlier sexual relationship with Thora that had been without result? Or had he had eyes in those last years for any young woman in his vicinity, including the wives of his own sons? This idea appealed to Merlyn as more likely, as the sort of thing that would send Jake off on his harebrained course of thinking. It also threw an interesting spotlight on Roderick Massey, and on his mother, the wife of Paul Cantelo.

He tried to get a picture in his mind of the Cantelo family and its dynamics. A strong, opinionated man, of considerable power in his smallish world, who has ruled his family by dividing them each from the other, loses his wife, the emotional, sexual, and ego-boosting prop in his life, and starts behaving like a dictator in the last, demented years of his rule. That seemed to make sense, to cohere as a picture.

Other possibilities grew up around it: that Merlyn Cantelo's behavior earlier had been similar but more discreet; that his behavior was aggravated by the fact that he was losing, or had already lost, the control he had once enjoyed over his family, particularly the male members, and hated his loss of power.

When Merlyn went to the Cantelos' lawyer in East Parade next morning he took the papers from the Forensic Science Service along with him. However, the firm had been associated in the request for a DNA test, and already had a copy of the letter and the appended scientific material. Mr. Featherstone's manner was notably warmer than it had been on the previous meeting.

“I think the whole unnecessary dispute can now be put to rest,” he said, shaking Merlyn's hand. “You are Miss Cantelo's nephew Merlyn Docherty, therefore the provisions of her will based on the assumption that you are alive can be put into effect. Very satisfactory all round.”

“Not to some of my relatives,” Merlyn pointed out.

“Perhaps not. They will no doubt receive the news of the new development in different ways. I have already drafted a letter informing them of the Forensic Science Services findings, and I shall send it today. Now, there's the question of the house in Congreve Street—”

“Yes, I've thought about that,” said Merlyn, sinking again into the chair in Mr. Featherstone's office. “I presume that the firm that boarded up the place can now undo their work?”

“Of course. I can phone them as soon as you like.”

“I wonder if you could ask them to change the locks, both front and back, and deliver the keys to me at the Crowne Plaza Hotel?”

Mr. Featherstone nodded thoughtfully.

“Ah yes. You think that necessary?”

“I think some members of the family had free access from the time of Aunt Clarissa's death to the time it was boarded up, so it's probable that I'm merely asking you to shut the stable door. Frankly, I don't think the contents were of great value, though the house is. But still, I have to say I don't like the idea of anyone in the family having free access at any time I'm not there.”

“Naturally. In any case, this is a perfectly normal procedure when a property changes hands.”

“I suppose so…. I wonder if you could satisfy my curiosity about something—merely to save time, because it's a matter that's already in the public domain.”

“I will try,” said Featherstone, his caution returning in some measure.

“I should like to know the terms of Grandfather Cantelo's will.”

“Hmmm,” said Mr. Featherstone, obviously not entirely pleased. “That is going some way back into the past.”

“One often has to, to understand the present. There is a great gap in my knowledge of the family timewise, remember.”

“Quite, quite…You have to remember that the old man's last years were…shall we say, sad?”

“Sad may cover it. And embarrassing, I gather?”

“I believe so,” said Mr. Featherstone quietly to show his discretion. “I know no details, and don't wish to know any. There was talk in his last years of his affairs being taken out of his hands.”

“
Really
? And was his will made in those years?”

“Yes, it was. In 1975. There was one great difficulty about that proposal to take control of his affairs.”

“My grandfather himself?”

“Exactly. He would have fought it. And really, the main evidence—apart from the usual, fairly trivial signs of old age—was in his…irregular behavior. It was not possible to argue that this made him incapable of managing his own affairs. He just—”

“Went off the rails?”

“Exactly. And the people arguing for affairs to be taken out of his hands would have been accused of the most obvious self-interest. He would certainly have fought it, and would have won. The will itself was perfectly sane, and in accordance with views he had held for much of his lifetime.”

“And the terms of the will?”

“He left the house to Clarissa—his favorite daughter, and the one who looked after him in his last years. And the accumulated fortune, including the money from the sale of Cantelo Shirts, the clothing firm, was to be divided among all his children, including Clarissa.”

“I see. Divided equally?”

“No,” said Mr. Featherstone decisively, as if he were taking on the character of the man he was talking about. “He had always brought up his family to believe that the men were for the hurly-burly of earning their own livings, making their own way in the world, while the women were to provide the graces of life—the beauty, the delicacy…. It's not a fashionable viewpoint.”

“Practically actionable…But some of the women were married.”

“Yes, both Emily and Marigold, though Marigold's husband was much older than her. Your mother was dead, but her share was left to Clarissa in trust for you.”

“Ah. She always said she had money that was really mine. It financed my stay with an English family in Italy and my years at university.”

“And what's left will come to you now, with all of Clarissa's own money.”

“So how was the money divided up?”

“The boys shared thirty percent of it—ten percent each. The women shared the remainder—seventeen and a half percent each. So all of them got an appreciable, a
useful
sum.”

“But the men very much less than the women. Was he annoyed none of the men went into the family business?” asked Merlyn, something that had bothered him.

“Maybe. Who knows? He could hardly say so. Or that Gerald was a dead loss, Paul unsatisfactory, and Hugh on his way to not needing any help. He'd always put a lot of emphasis on independence, initiative, carving your own way.”

“If you were a man.”

“Exactly. He was at least consistent, in tune with his own beliefs.”

“Yes, indeed. But I don't think I'd have liked Grandfather Cantelo all the same.” Merlyn got up. “I'll wait to hear that the house has been opened up, and the locks changed. Then I might go to a car dealer and buy myself an old banger, something dispensable, for use during the rest of my time here.”

“You don't anticipate settling in Leeds, then?”

Merlyn shook his head.

“I have a job in Brussels.” Then he decided to be honest. “Somehow the call of family seems just as faint now as it has done for the last twenty-odd years.”

Mr. Featherstone smiled bleakly. He liked dry humor. In fact, it was the only type of humor he recognized.

So Merlyn fetched his car from the hotel car park and took it back to the hire firm. Then he went to a used-car dealer ten minutes' walk from Congreve Street, and looked over their older stock, most of which he suspected of having had their mileages gently massaged. Honest Sam of Sam's Wheels followed him around, a hulking presence, to see how high up the price range he could be expected to go.

“What you want it for then?” he asked.

“Just to get me around for a few weeks, then to get me home to Brussels,” said Merlyn.

“Brussels? You one of these Common Market bureaucrats? You could afford something better than an old banger.”

“I could. But I've got a BMW at home.”

He picked up a ten-year-old Ford for £1,500, went through all the paperwork, and drove it to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where a set of house keys was awaiting him at Reception. He paid his bill, packed, and drove off to the house he must temporarily consider his home.

The houses in Congreve Street were too old to have any garages, and the streets of Leeds, he had found out during his stay, were not the best place to leave cars of any pretensions. Still, beggars can't be choosers, he thought, as he left the old car outside the front gate.

So Merlyn went back to the house where he had spent some fairly happy years of adolescence. He went back, however, without any expectations of sentimental reactions. He was aware that his sudden exile at the age of sixteen had left him cool, uninvolved, a man who stood on his own. If he felt strong emotion about anything in his current situation it was for Clarissa, not for her house, even though at the time when he had lived there she had been just beginning to make it her own. Warmth, fellow feeling, sympathy, sheer fun, all these he had got—it seemed sometimes as if for the first time—from his aunt, but the house had been a mere setting, hardly more than a stage set, apart from the little room that was his bedroom. Love and security meant people, and for Merlyn houses could not offer more than a symbolic version of them.

Unboarded, the house looked like any other in the street. He got out of the car and raised his hand to Mr. Robinson farther down, who was cutting back shrubs in his front garden. Then he turned, took out the shining new keys, and in the declining evening sun went into his old home.

The hall, he noticed for the first time, had not been redecorated since his time in the house, in the early eighties. Typical of Clarissa to take the view that a hall was a mere convenience, a transition, and not worth bothering about. Its neglect meant it exuded a feeling of desolation, nonoccupation, though Clarissa had only been dead for a few weeks. Merlyn turned into the dining room, where the wake had been held. Then a nest of tables, large and small, had been dotted around its length, but now it had reverted to its state, presumably, in Clarissa's later years: the large table had been shunted to beside the wall—no big family dinners in her time, then. In fact, the large table had been virtually unused even in his time in the house, and Clarissa and he had, as often as not, eaten in the kitchen or off their laps. A couple of the other tables were still in the center of the room, but in spite of the fact that some redecoration had taken place, it seemed a space that had not had a purpose since the big family gatherings of Grandfather Cantelo's time, only regaining it briefly for the family get-together at the funeral.

Crossing the dim and probably dirty hallway, he went into the sitting room. This was the center of life in the house, but also Clarissa's professional backdrop as well. The low table surrounded by sofa and easy chairs still had packs of cards on it—ordinary playing cards, tarot cards, and others Merlyn could not put a name to. The curtains were heavy and dark green, which Clarissa found a comfortable color, but they would only be drawn closed in daytime if his aunt thought her current subject would be happier in near-darkness. On the whole she tried to establish an atmosphere of normality and everydayness, and eschewed any suggestion of the bizarre.