The Graveyard Position (9 page)

Merlyn kept going, and glanced through the window as he passed. His father had merged into the vastness of the largest pub bar in the land, invisible, undistinguishable from the punters dotted here and there throughout the drinking hall. Merlyn turned, crossed the road, then went back toward the Crowne Plaza. It was illogical to conclude from the fact that his father went from a drink in a bar with his son to another drink in a bar on his own that he was not quite the reformed and blissfully contented and changed person he claimed. But illogical or not, that is what Merlyn did conclude.

It was two days after Merlyn's confrontation with his past in the form of his father that he had another, less direct confrontation with the force that had made him what he was. This second encounter came from an unexpected source. When he got back to the Crowne Plaza after lunch for his usual siesta, relic of his years in Italy, his key had a note on it:
Ring 2415676. Peace.
His first thought was that he was being solicited by an evangelical Christian group. Then he remembered Charlie.

“Detective Sergeant Peace.”

“Merlyn Docherty here. Are those the sounds of the Leeds CID solving the city's crimes?”

“They are.”

“With Sergeant Peace at the forefront of the struggle?”

“Absolutely so. And it may be
Inspector
Peace soon, so let's have a bit of respect as a preliminary gesture.”

“Well, congratulations first, and then increased respect.”

“I said ‘may be.' My wife calls me Pollyanna. I go around saying ‘Be glad' without having anything to be glad about. But the signs do seem to be encouraging…. It's something my wife has come up with that I'm calling about.”

“Your wife?”

“Yes. Felicity's in the fiction business—like most of the people I deal with here, now I come to think of it. She's got nothing on them for sheer invention. She's at the stage of getting a nicer sort of rejection letter. She thinks she's going to make it to publication and I think she's going to make it to publication, but then some people might say we're biased and she's as much a Pollyanna as I am.”

“The idea would never have crossed my mind.”

“Good. Meanwhile she's doing a bit of teaching and supervising for Leeds University English Department. Recently she's been doing a lot of reading in minor Victorian novelists in the Leeds Library—that's a private library dating back to seventeen-something-or-other, and older than the London Library, or so they keep telling people. All the books from the cellar come up with a quarter of a pound of in-built dust.”

“Sounds inviting.”

“It
is
for some people, including Felicity, particularly when they tell her that what she wants to read was last borrowed in 1852. But while she's there she does work on her own behalf, especially in local history. Her next book—next manuscript, I should say—is set in Headingley in the 1920s, among the comfortably-off classes.”

“I begin to get your drift.”

“Don't get your hopes up too high. The local Leeds historians are not primarily into the middle classes. It's the millworkers and the tanners and the forge men they like. All very interesting, but Felicity isn't aiming to be the next Catherine Cookson. So when I told her about the Cantelo family, she did her best in all the background books on Leeds, and came up with nothing—not even a mention. She wasn't surprised. But just as a last resort she looked up Cantelo in the general card index (they're not computerized in the Leeds Library, and probably won't be until the twenty-second century). And there was a card for a book by an X. Cantelo. It was a novel called
Family Business.
”

“Sounds a possible title for a novel by a Cantelo. What is its date?”

“No date on the card. Felicity took it to the librarian. It was a typed card, typed on a very dirty manual, in fact, and the librarian thought it would be sometime in the seventies. He compared it with cards for other books—early Martin Amis, late Greene, Spark, and Olivia Manning—and they seemed to confirm that sort of date.”

“Seventies. Old Man Cantelo, Clarissa's father, would still be alive then.”

“Yes, it's—But I shouldn't be talking about this. I'm the world's greatest ignoramus about such things, and anything I throw at you is the sort of thing I've picked up from Felicity since we've been together. Any chance of your coming round to see us, so you can talk to her? She thinks it could be of some relevance, or at least of background interest.”

“I'd like that. It would be getting things from the horse's mouth. If your wife knows anything about Leeds in the just-after-the-war years, she knows more than I do. I was born in the 1960s, but I didn't come visiting Clarissa until the late seventies, and I came to live with her in the early eighties. I'd like to talk to her.”

So it was that, that evening around seven, Merlyn parked outside the nineteenth-century house in Cumberland Road and went up to the first-floor flat that was spacious and suitable for a small family, though the square patch of garden at the front and the small wilderness at the back made it less than ideal for older children.

“We'll get more garden when I get the inspectorship,” said Charlie. “Though goodness knows, inspectors aren't paid a fortune anymore.”

“Better put your faith in fiction then,” said Merlyn.

At that point Felicity came in with Carola, already dressed for bed but raring to put on a performance for a twenty-minute charm session before going quietly. A born pop star couldn't have done more to woo her audience. Merlyn reserved judgment on Charlie's confident pronouncements on her intelligence and her intuitive good taste, but her determination was evident on the slightest acquaintanceship, and so was her calculated charm. On the evidence of that session, she would go far.

When Felicity had put her to bed they all drank coffee, and soon Felicity went to the desk in her study and brought out for Merlyn the copy of
Family Business.

“Not very impressive, as you can see,” she said.

Even on a first flicking-through he could see that the pages were browned—the cheap paper used, though, had later become standard for English books: some of the typeface was askew on the page, and the binding was the cheapest imaginable, with only the author's surname and the title on the spine. The publisher's name at the bottom of the title page was simply given as Hurstmonceaux. On the verso title page no date was given, and no publisher's address.

“Looks a shoddy job,” he commented.

“In every respect,” agreed Felicity. “This was when vanity publishing was just that. No halfway houses, as there are now. You paid to have something in print that you could hand to your friends. This firm clearly made no pretense at all that it was anything other than a commercial bargain between writer and printer.”

“They took the money and ran?”

“Probably. Or a kinder interpretation might be that they were honest, and made no pretense of being a mainline publisher.”

“Hmmm. So one of the Cantelos vanity-published a book in the seventies. Do I take it that the Cantelos themselves are the family whose business—that's an ambiguous word, isn't it?—is dealt with in the book?”

“That's for you to decide,” said Felicity firmly. “I've only flicked through it. I have the collected masterpieces of Mrs. Trollope, Caroline Norton, and G. P. R. James to gorge myself with, to supervise eager-beaver Ph.D. students. All I can say off-the-cuff is that the plot seems to follow the fortunes of two younger members of the family, one male and one female. And that an early chapter—the second, I think—has a family scene, with the members all assembled at breakfast, the whole thing presided over by the formidable figure of the paterfamilias—a Victorian father well out of his time.”

“The usual tyrant?”

“No, not really. But someone with firm opinions and a sententious manner—someone who apparently always gets his own way. It's really a sort of comic caricature—something out of Dickens or Waugh.”

“But the novel is set in what was then the present day?”

“Seems to be. I've seen references to the cinema and the radio, but not so far to television. It existed then, of course, but maybe Dad thought it beneath the family.”

“Maybe. Clarissa had an old black-and-white set she almost never watched.”

Merlyn sat thinking, flicking through the already fragile pages. There seemed nothing in the book that brought back the past, but of course it was not his past.

“I'm trying to calculate my dates,” he said. “The member of my family—my mother's family, that is—that I can most readily imagine writing a novel, maybe as a species of revenge, would be Malachi. Now, I think we can take it that the X is a sign of an unknown quantity. There is no Xavier in the family, and I can't think of any other normal Christian name beginning with that letter.”

“Xenia,” said Felicity. “But it's not common.”

“Why do words that start with
X
get pronounced as if they started with a
Z
?” asked Charlie.

“I'll give you a short lecture on that,” said Felicity, “when I've found out why myself.”

Merlyn cut them short.

“However, I do rather doubt whether Malachi has the staying power to write a whole novel as an act of revenge or anything else, let alone to get it published. He'd flake after chapter three.”

“A lot of people do that,” said Felicity.

“Not you,” said Charlie. “We're piling up rejection slips and putting a star on the ones where the manuscript seems to have been read.”

“Not many of those,” said Felicity. “Now, if we're thinking seventies we're talking about thirty-odd years ago. I'd say an age of twenty to twenty-five is the lowest we could imagine for writing a novel and getting it vanity-published. So we are looking for someone who is now at least in their mid-fifties, and probably older. And at a guess I would say a woman.”

“Why?” asked Charlie.

“Because if it's a young person who wrote it I feel the men would be active getting qualifications and starting in a job, making a place in the world for themselves. Even at that late date in Leeds, middle-class women were expected to have a mildly good time when they were young, while fitting themselves to become virtuous wives and mothers, which was their destiny. This seems to be the worldview of the father of the family, if we can believe the picture to be based on the Cantelos. So the women had more leisure time, more unexpended emotional energy, more sheer frustration.”

“That sounds convincing,” said Merlyn. “Except that Hugh seems to have been the only Cantelo boy who was interested in money and a career. Gerald got religious mania quite young, if my memory serves, and Paul took off to America, leaving a wife and child, and becoming a sort of intellectual hobo, if the family gossip when I was living with Clarissa is to be believed. Which admittedly is a big
if.
”

“Then perhaps we should leave open the sex of the writer. Is it terribly important anyway?”

“I suppose I'll have to read the book to decide.”

“I wanted you to see the book mainly to get an idea of the sort of atmosphere in the family when the children were all younger.”

Charlie had been thinking.

“Why would you use the misleading initial X when you were willing to put the name Cantelo to the book?”

“Maybe because he or she wanted to have the family identified, as part of some kind of revenge or scheme to bring ridicule down on them, but didn't want his or her own identity to be revealed. There were enough Cantelos to spread the suspicion,” said Merlyn.

“Fair enough,” said Felicity. She turned to Merlyn. “Well, it's up to you now. You're about to have an encounter with your family in earlier days—if I'm right, of course.”

They all three (because Felicity was as interested as Charlie) chewed over the case, had a drink, went into the DNA test, and the implications of Jake's coming back into the picture. Merlyn reported on his talks with Malachi and Rosalind, they had another drink, and then started to talk about Carola. Normally Merlyn was perfectly willing to talk about other people's infants and toddlers, and rather looked forward to the day when he would have one or two of his own, but now he felt the copy of
Family Business
burning a hole in his briefcase.

It was the first thing that he extracted from it when he got back to his hotel room. Felicity had loaned it to him with the proviso that he return it to the library. He put on his pajamas, brewed himself a little pot of tea, then sat down in the easy chair with the book. In the bright light of the standard lamp it looked an even less impressive production than it had seemed in Charlie and Felicity's flat—like many much more recent British books, it seemed to be made to fall to pieces at the first excuse. Luckily it had probably had few readers, if it had had any. Then he thought about that. Who had read it? Members of the Cantelo family? Perhaps, especially if copies were distributed gratis among them. He seemed to remember that several of them had shares in the privately owned library—perhaps shares were the sort of thing that the Cantelos were given on their twenty-first birthdays. And the book could have been a creator of disunity and grudges and have been intended as such.

He flicked through the later chapters, as Felicity obviously had done. A story of two young people making their ways in the world, against the combined opposition of parents and siblings. It was hardly riveting stuff, Merlyn thought, and the pall of adolescence hung over it—grievances nursed, naiveties nourished as if they were blinding insights. It was saved, if at all, by the humor of the pictures not only of the parents, but also of some of the siblings: as they grew up in the story, the ambitious Hugh, the tiresomely conventional Emily, the Bible-bashing Gerald, all took on a sort of fictional life.