The Graveyard Position (2 page)

The big dining room at number fifteen Congreve Street had been transformed by moving the long table to the window and spreading the twelve chairs around the wall. The table had been decked with cold bakemeats, pies, and gâteaux, and an elderly retainer, whom some of them recognized as Clarissa's longtime home help, went backward and forward to the kitchen with tea urns and coffeepots. Some of the older members of the family had memories of uneasy meals here in the days of their father, the guiding force behind Cantelo Shirts. The memories didn't make them any happier, so the atmosphere in the room had been edgy from the start. The representative of the Association of Leeds Clothiers had gulped down a cup of tea and disappeared into the afternoon pleading a prior engagement.

“One doesn't have a prior engagement at a funeral,” pronounced Rosalind.

Getting the groups to mingle proved an impossible task. Even getting the relatives to talk to one another was less than easy. They were all hugging to themselves the thing they most wanted to talk about, for fear of saying something that Rosalind or Emily might pounce upon, or of being interrupted by the arrival of the thing itself. Emily, in welcoming the guests, kept shooting glances at the door in case he slipped in in the wake of more expected arrivals. Even Barnett was uneasy, having been enlightened about the identity of the surprise guest in the car from the church, and he kept throwing surreptitious looks through the window. This inattention to his job of dispensing drinks, in which he was already hindered by his wife trying to do the same things as he at the same time, meant that he had an accident with the bottle opener, making a gash across his thumb that ruined his usually airy de-corking technique.

“Why doesn't he
come
?” demanded Rosalind under her breath. “He said he was.”

“Maybe he's trying to produce the effect he actually is producing,” said her husband bad-temperedly, sucking vigorously at his thumb. “He'll come when he's good and ready.”

“I'm looking forward to having a chat with him,” said Emily, bad omens in her voice. “I shall be interested to hear his recent history.”

Rosalind nodded with a wicked relish: Emily had always had something of the Inquisitor in her nature. Cousin Malachi, however, incurred a squelch when he turned from his conversation with his brother, Francis, to say, “Interesting to hear what he's been doing all the time he's been away. Probably been round the world.”

Rosalind was nervily putting little sandwiches and sausage rolls on a plate for Aunt Marigold, but she managed to throw in her pennyworth.

“More likely cooling his heels in a Turkish jail,” she said.

“Merlyn was never in trouble with the law,” protested Malachi.

“All he needed was time,” said Rosalind, whose face had twisted when the name had been spoken for the first time. “And now he seems to think—” she began, and then seemed to feel she had been wrong-footed. “But of course it's not him,” she lamely concluded.

What she had been about to say, as everyone around her realized, was “to think that he can come back and take over all this.”

What she intended by “all this” was no palace. It was a three-story detached house from the late 1880s. It had a fine cellar, good-size ground-floor rooms, and five large bedrooms. It was situated in one of the good, but not best, parts of Headingley, too expensive to be converted into student lodgings. It would fetch a tidy sum on the booming property market, but it did not represent riches.

“Here he is now,” said her husband. The moment he said it, all conversation stopped. They watched as the figure of a man in his thirties proceeded across the street and opened the front gate, walking confidently forward.

“The hide of him—walking straight in!” said Rosalind, as he did just that.

“Merlyn never knocked at his aunt's door in his life,” said Malachi. “Why should he now?”

Already two distinct pictures of the young Merlyn were emerging, the differences perhaps not unconnected with the question of whether the speaker had his or her own expectations from the dead Aunt Clarissa. Or perhaps the differences sprang from an ambiguity in the young Merlyn himself, the sixteen-year-old they remembered. At sixteen, no one's character is set in stone.

Merlyn had followed the murmur of voices and now came into the long, high dining room. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking around him. He was very English-looking, brown hair and blue eyes, and the edges of his mouth were again turned up in the tiny smile that was attractive as well as quizzical. Aunt Emily swallowed, then advanced toward him as she had to all the guests.

“So glad you could join us,” she said, though her face was grim. “Have you come a long way?”

There was a brief laugh, unconcealed.

“Not from a fetid Indian or Pakistani jail, anyway, Aunt Emily.” How could he know what they had been saying? they all wondered. “Actually from Brussels.”

“How fascinating!” said Emily. “Please have something to eat, and Barnett will get you a drink. Wine or something stronger?”

Barnett was holding his bandaged hand ready, looking at the man whom he was seeing for the first time.

“Squash would be fine if you have some,” said Merlyn, smiling at him. “I need to keep my wits about me, don't I?”

Barnett had turned to the unopened bottle of orange squash, his expression quizzical.

“And why would you need to keep your wits about you?”

Merlyn smiled, this time an ingenuous, young man's smile.

“All these relatives. Everyone's changed after twenty or so years away, as I have myself. But they'll feel insulted if I get their names wrong, won't they? How is Rosalind?”

Rosalind had slipped across the room, and was now talking to her cousin Caroline and her two small children. Barnett sloshed water from a jug into the glass and merely said, “Mostly she keeps well.”

Then he turned to Cousin Francis to signify that this conversation was at an end and Merlyn—if it was he—was now at the mercy of the lions.

Merlyn turned to Cousin Malachi, geniality itself.

“Cousin Malachi! Good to see you again. You know when I was a child I accepted that Malachi was the most normal name in the world. Children do, don't they—accept whatever they find around them, I mean? Now I wonder how you got it.”

“My father was going through a phase with the Peculiar People,” said Malachi, delighted to be singled out. “He was a bit of an oddball, as Clarissa was in her way.”

“Yes—she was something else I just accepted.”

“So how are you, Merlyn?” asked Malachi affably and apparently unsuspiciously. “What have you been doing? We've just been saying you've probably been around the world. I think the last we heard you were in India. I should think that must be a wonderful place. Full of mystery, Eastern wisdom, that sort of thing.”

“I expect you're right,” said Merlyn. “I've never been there.” He patted Malachi on the shoulder. “Don't believe everything you hear. It's not only Peculiar People who swallow tall stories.”

He turned around, his quick eyes taking in the collection of family and friends. He immediately discarded the odd reporter and the lady from the Leeds Society of Spiritualists and focused on the figures that mattered, the family. He made a surprising choice and went over to shake hands with Caroline, his cousin as well as Rosalind's, with her two children keeping close to her in the unfamiliar surroundings. As an introductory gesture he mussed the hair of the smallest of them.

“Well, it
has
been a long time, Caroline,” he said. “And what lovely little girls! They remind me of you at the same age.”

“I was a bit older than Angela when you…went away,” said Caroline, who was fair, with a face lacking in firm contours. She said the words with a faint trace of a simper, which reminded Merlyn of figures on chocolate boxes. “I regarded you with awe and longing. I cried for weeks when people said you must be dead.”

“People say what they want to believe half the time, don't they?” said Merlyn.

“Oh, I'm sure they wouldn't want…” mumbled Caroline, fading into silence. She attempted to retrieve the situation. “Did I hear you say you didn't go to India after all?”

“Never been near it. Never been to Asia, come to that, unless you count Istanbul. Was that one of my ambitions twenty-odd years ago? Some kind of backwash of the Beatles, I suppose. Some nonsense of George Harrison's, probably.”

“It's disappointing in a way,” Caroline said, pouting. “I imagined you in an ashram, in a loincloth, with your feet tucked up under you, thinking holy thoughts for hours on end.”

“Sorry! I've hardly had a single holy thought in my life…. Did you ever marry, Caroline?”

“Yes—I mean—” She gestured at the children. “For three or four years…”

“I expect that doused your overheated imagination,” said Merlyn.

“He still sees the children,” said Caroline inconsequentially.

“But we all go through it, don't we?” said Merlyn, ignoring her. “Imagining we're in love. Imagining nobody's ever been
quite
as much in love before.”

“I don't know that I—”

“Mine was in Verona.”

“Verona? That was—”

“Appropriate. Yes, it was. Her name wasn't Juliet, but she did have a balcony. She lived in a modern block of flats on the Piazza Simoni, but each flat had a balcony, so I used to moon around the streets nearby, imagining her letting down a rope of knotted sheets, and me shinnying up it and enjoying her in her little bedroom. I suppose it was more Errol Flynn than Shakespeare.”

“I don't think I've ever heard of—”

“Errol Flynn? You should watch the old daytime movies. A hundred times more erotic than the sweaty late-night ones. They really knew about titillation in those days. Anyway, Cecilia was the love of my life. It overwhelmed me for six months. Every hour of the day, including working hours, I was thinking of Cecilia Carteri. And she was thinking of me. I know she was. I was the love of her life, as she was of mine…Damned horrible thing, life, isn't it? If only those emotions could last…. At least you have these two to remind you.” Hebent down and looked into their faces. “Now, you're Angela, I'm told. Lovely name, that…And what are you called?”

“I'm Jacqueline,” said the blonde five-year-old.

“We call her Jackie,” said her mother.

“I suppose you would. But Jacqueline is a lovely name too.” He straightened up. “Well, I hope we'll meet again soon. I'd really like to make these family get-togethers a regular thing. We could meet up here—don't you think so, Caroline?”

Caroline nodded dumbly. She was not one of those who had expectations from Aunt Clarissa's will. She had thought her a charlatan, or “an old fraud,” as she put it to her friends, and she had taken Clarrie's kindness in return as condescension. But she knew perfectly well that many of the others in the room had been banking on a substantial remembrance coming to themselves, and she knew that Merlyn's proprietorial tone, as if he were already in a position to
invite
people to
his
house, would arouse fierce antagonism among the family. She cast a quiet glance at Rosalind, and saw fierce antagonism at its most naked.

Merlyn had wandered, as if at random, over to where Cousin Francis was standing on his own, perhaps having been cast into the wilderness even by his brother for his late and conspicuous arrival at the service. His appearance was shambolic, as if he had dressed with boxing gloves on—his shirt buttoned only halfway down, revealing a neat little paunch, his tie failing to conceal the top button. But there was about his manner a latent prissiness which seemed to proclaim that his inability to cope with traffic, the workings of cars, or even buttons was the outward sign of an inner closeness to some tremendous spiritual truths.

“So glad you managed to be there for the service,” said Merlyn, holding out his hand. “The situation on the roads around Leeds seems a hundred times worse than when I left.”

“It
is,
” said Francis. “Utterly unpredictable. Who would have thought there'd be a jam like that on a Tuesday morning? It got me one of Rosalind's fiercest looks, but it wasn't my
fault
—”

“I expect you'll survive. She's not quite the dominatrix she thinks she is. Are you still at St. Clarence's, Francis?”

“St. Cuthbert's. Yes. Another ten years before retirement. And every day a battle.” He sighed. “Boys—what horrible little creatures they are. Every one a Jack Russell. What I would do without my faith to hold me together I don't know.”

Merlyn looked at him quizzically, as if he thought Francis was held together more by bits of string than by faith. His cousin, however, seldom noticed anyone's reactions.

“I can understand why your faith is so important to you,” said Merlyn, who seemed to be leading everyone on in order to savor their peculiarities. “I once had the idea of entering the Catholic priesthood.”