The Talisman (11 page)

‘Look, sorry about all the carry-on down there, but the old man is out of it, been that way as long as I can remember.’

‘Just so long as he doesn’t undress me next time. You want Clarry’s suit back? Tie? Shirt?’

Charlie thumped him on the shoulder and then sprawled on the bed. ‘You know Freddy was engaged to my mother when they were young, and then she ditched him for old loonydrawers . . . Apparently Freddy is still getting the old leg over her, and I can’t really say I blame him – or her, for that matter. Neither of them have what one could describe as perfect partners. Lord Freddy was married for his title – the little hairy woman is
très riche
, but poor Ma married for love.’

Edward was unbuttoning his shirt. ‘What happened to your father?’

‘Well, it’s all cloaked in mystery, something like shell-shock. He was getting better for a while, then this scandal blew up . . . Well, that’s what Ma says put the lid on him.’

Edward sat next to Charlie, cocking his head to one side. ‘Well, don’t stop there, you’ve got me hooked now . . .’

Charlie’s face puckered, and then he stuffed his hands in his pockets. ‘I don’t know all the facts, but I had an uncle – he was a boxing promoter. You know the kind – “Gentleman Jim” – with more money than he knew what to do with. Well, Pop took some tart to a boxing match – you know, bare-knuckle job. What the hell he was doing there I don’t know. But then he was a bit of a social climber, ya know, maybe thought it was infra dig. But he dragged poor old Freddy with him, and a bunch of debs too – not, I hasten to add, my dear mother, she’d never have been seen dead at a boxing match.’

Edward could feel the hairs on the back of his neck prickling again, and he started to feel cold, icy cold.

‘Well, go on,’ he said.

Charlie continued, ‘Well, it all got out of hand and some blokes raped a gypsy girl. Then this tart tried to make Pa take her home. Well, he paid her off, and all of a sudden these horrific murders started, they called them the revenge murders . . . the gypsy revenge murders. Seems the lads who raped the girl were found bound and gagged, throats slit. Oh, yes . . . and some weird markings on their forehead, or so the story goes.’

Edward stared at his tie. It was hanging down the door like a noose, a hangman’s noose.

Charlie yawned and sat up, rubbing his head. ‘Next thing, this whore reappears, saying she’s going to stand as a defence witness for this gyppo, who was charged with the murders, and she wants Pa and Freddy to act as witnesses because they were at the fight. I think she wanted them as character witnesses, not for the gyppo but for herself, so you can imagine what a scandal that would start up . . . so they refused. Then Gentleman Jim, Uncle Charlie, swashbuckles his way into town. He wants this gyppo for his boxing stable, so he organizes all the legal buffs, and gets poor old Pa into such a state that he agrees to appear. He also gets Lord Freddy to stand up for this dreadful woman.’

‘What was she called?’

‘Dear God, I haven’t the slightest. You’ve no idea how tough it was trying to get that much out of Freddy, and he was pretty tight so I’ve no idea how much of that was true. Ma won’t even discuss it, says that if that tart hadn’t made such a fuss, Pa would never have had a relapse.’

‘What happened to the fighter?’

‘No idea. I was just getting to the nitty gritty when Freddy got all tearful . . . Apparently, this old bastard uncle, the gent I owe my name to . . . well, apparently he was a tough negotiator, blackmailed Freddy and Pa . . .’

Edward interrupted. ‘How? What did he have on them?’

Charlie stared at Edward, finding his interest a little distasteful. ‘Freddy never said what made them step forward, but . . . Look, what’s it to you?’

‘But what?’

Charlie’s face tightened, then he shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just deserts.’

‘I don’t follow?’

‘I didn’t really intend you to, old boy . . . It’s not something one likes to broadcast, but Clarry knew. Maybe that was why he couldn’t wait to get to the front, get himself shot in a decent hero’s death.’ He ran his hand along the name scratched on the bedpost, tracing the childish letters over and over with his fingers. Then he stuffed his hands back into his pockets, no longer joking; Edward felt that he was ashamed.

‘The old man, Edward, turned custard yellow and fled. He left his entire regiment to be hacked to death, that’s why he’s loony. He can’t face the past, can’t face the truth . . .
C’est la vie
, huh?’

Edward knew who the fighter was, knew the woman Charlie had referred to as a ‘tart’ was his mother, but he showed no sign that anything Charlie had said had affected him personally. He spoke flippantly, hoping to get more information. ‘So what happened to the tart and the fighter?’ he asked.

Bored by the subject now, Charlie picked his nose, then lurched to his feet, dismissively. ‘God only knows. No doubt they lived happily ever after – luck of the gyppos, I suppose. And I’ve said too much, always do when I’ve been on the gin. Well, g’night, I’m falling asleep on my feet. See you on the morrow, old chum.’

He sauntered out, and Edward relaxed, stretching his hands, his fingers . . . Then he undressed and lay, naked, on the small bed. He was sure Charlie had no inkling of his background, it had been sheer coincidence. Freedom Stubbs and Edward were too far apart, worlds apart now, and no one could link him with the gypsy and the ‘whore’, as Charlie had called her. He turned to lie on his belly. He would make sure no one else would make the connection.

Softly, he practised his speech over and over again, listening to his voice, modulating the accent Lady Primrose had mimicked so poorly, flushing as he remembered. He knew she would have been horrendous to his mother, and he would have liked to shove the cufflinks down the old fool’s throat. He found himself wondering if his mother had been David Collins’ girlfriend, and why a man as well connected as the captain would have been involved with a girl like her. He would have liked to get up and leave there and then, but he was stuck without enough cash to walk away. Anyway, something held him here, held him to this dead boy’s room, to these half-dead people. Somehow he knew that by the end of the summer he would change.

Eventually he slept, while the noose he had made out of his tie slid slowly from the door to lie on the floor.

The following morning, Edward borrowed a bicycle and rode into the nearest town. He spent four hours in the public library, looking over the old newspaper cuttings of the trial of Freedom Stubbs. His mother had never mentioned her past, her life in the valleys or the murder trial.

His father, the man Edward had knifed to death, had himself been charged with four murders. Again and again Edward turned the pages to look at the black-and-white photograph of Freedom. The strange, youthful face glared back. In one shot, his long hair swirled around his shoulders as if daring the photographer to take his image. There were also several photographs of his mother, often blurred, out of focus, but it was Evelyne, haughty yet shy, arrogant yet so innocent. The photograph touched a chord inside him that made him ache to see her.

He read the articles over and over; how she had become a heroine, standing as a witness for a man she barely knew because she believed in justice. There was an account of how she had been asked, before the jury, if she had had any kind of sexual relationship with the accused, and she had replied that she had not, she was there simply to see that an innocent man did not hang. She had been with the gypsy on the night of the last murder and knew he could not have committed it. The lawyers were able to prove him innocent of all charges, and he was freed.

Edward wondered if her story was true. It certainly read so, yet his mother had eventually married Freedom. There was so much he wanted to ask her, so much he wanted to know, but he knew he now had no right ever to ask. He had killed the man she had saved from the rope, killed his own father – he even mused over the fact that it was possible his father had been a murderer. He read of the way the gypsy had caught the press’s imagination with his handsome looks, much like the film star, Valentino. With a sense of foreboding he read of the curse sign on each of the four young miners’ foreheads. So much he had no knowledge of, so much of his father he had never known. And the more he read the surer he was that he did not want it known, the more he reconciled himself to moving further and further away from his roots. He wanted no part of this past, no whispers attached to him of his gypsy father; yet carefully, surreptitiously, he cut out as many of the newspaper photographs as possible. Then he returned to the castle.

The days passed by, and although Edward spent two or three hours in the early mornings reading and revising, Charlie made no effort to study. He was out shooting rabbits for food, or chasing the farm girls for other reasons. Charlie was a walking time bomb, full of energy.

One morning, after Edward had been at the castle for three weeks, he went as usual to the breakfast room. The housekeeper shuffled around, carrying dishes and muttering about everything being ‘short’. Yet there never seemed to be a lack of food. It was never cooked well, but no one went hungry. The feeling that the war was far away was more prevalent here in the country.

Edward sat between Lady Primrose and Charlie as they argued about money, and was astonished yet again by Charlie’s total unconcern. He talked to his mother as if she were one of the girls from Woolworth’s, at the same time wolfing down his breakfast as though he had a train to catch.

‘You’ll just have to find the money yourself. Two hundred pounds, Charlie, how could you?’

Charlie munched on his toast and shrugged, then he scraped out the marmalade jar and kicked Edward under the table.

‘You’ve got the cash, Ma, I know it, all the booty you got from Uncle Charlie – you’ve just become a miser in your old age.’

Lady Primrose turned to Edward for help, and told him his cousin Charlie had been dead for nearly twenty years. ‘He just doesn’t know the meaning of money, Edward, but he’s going to learn, I’m not going to pay this time. Last term how much did you owe? Three hundred, and you promised me, you promised me faithfully.’

Charlie laughed. He knew if he encouraged his mother to talk about Uncle Charlie, his namesake, she would forget about the bills. Lady Primrose sighed. She wandered around the room while she told Edward about Sir Charles Wheeler. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about boxing, do you, Edward? Well, Charlie was a promoter – you know, he used to find boxers and then take them all over the world – he was such a sportsman, everyone knew him. He died in a plane crash in Nevada, or was it Florida, I don’t really remember – anyway he never married, and his money went to the trustees of his estate, and they are so mean, really awful. You see, we are the only heirs, and it should all be ours.’

As Lady Primrose talked on and on, Edward felt as if a ghost were walking across his grave.

‘I say, are you all right? Gone a paler shade of yellow, you should come out shooting with me, get some colour into your dark cheeks.’

Edward smiled and drank the dregs of his cold tea. Lady Primrose was called to the telephone, and Charlie stuffed the bills away in a drawer with a bow.

They walked for miles, and Charlie showed Edward how to use his shotgun. As they walked, Edward turned the conversation to their studies, asking when Charlie was prepared to begin work. ‘And you did mention paying me for my time here, sorry to bring it up, but I would have got a job during the vacation. Unlike you, Charlie, I don’t have a rich mother, so when do we start?’

They began, in a haphazard way, to set aside a few hours a day for work, and Edward began to realize that his pupil was way below himself in his studies. It was something of a shock, how on earth had he got himself into Cambridge? ‘Look, why don’t we start at the first lecture and work our way through, Charlie? You don’t have the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about.’

Charlie admitted it, saying he had actually wanted to read English literature, but as his brother had done that he chose geology. He hadn’t the slightest interest in rocks or anything to do with mineralogy or petrology, and to prove it he began to hurl his books across the room. ‘I want to live, Eddie, really live, you know, enjoy life. What’s the point of being cooped up in those ruddy lectures, those interminable centrifuges? I am so fucking bored all the time. My mind’s petrifying like your bloody rocks.’

Edward had never seen Charlie so ‘real’, this was what he was really like, and all the laughs and the madcap antics were out of frustration.

‘Clarence was the clever one, you see, always Clarence, and he went and got himself shot to pieces. So I have to go to Cambridge, I have to emulate the “Boy Wonder” . . . Well, I can’t, I simply can’t. Added to that I’ve got this wretched farm girl up the spout and she’s chasing me all over the place with a pitchfork.’ Charlie’s face tightened and he chewed his lip. ‘Look, I’m going off for a while, see a few old friends, you won’t mind being on your tod, will you? Only I’m sure they’d all bore the pants off you . . .’

Charlie didn’t wait for a reply, he just turned and marched off, leaving Edward feeling like a spare part. He somehow knew Charlie didn’t want him to meet his friends.

Edward sat at the small nursery desk for a few hours, studying, until he heard a car outside on the gravel. He looked out of the window to see Lord Carlton in his car. He opened the door and Lady Primrose ran to join him. They drove off, and Edward could see her kissing Freddy’s neck as they disappeared from view. He felt slightly disgusted – Lady Primrose had to be in her early fifties, yet she was acting like a teenager, and a naughty one at that.

By mid-afternoon the sun was hot enough to crack the flagstones so Edward crept into the dead Clarence’s room and found himself a pair of swimming trunks. The water was icy cold, and the surface of the pool was covered with leaves. He nervously lowered himself into the water. Clinging to the edge, he dog-paddled, never having swum in his life. He tried a few strokes, and made it from one side of the pool to the other. Then he got out of the water and sunbathed, lying on the marble side of the pool. He had still not been paid, and it was beginning to irritate him. So Charlie was in a mess, that didn’t mean Edward had to follow in his tracks. He was going to succeed, even, perhaps, one day, live in a place like this. He liked the old furniture, its weight. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘one day I’ll have a place like this.’