A Fall from Grace (11 page)

“People always talk about preventative measures,” said Charlie grimly, “ways of preventing crimes before they happen. I'd just like someone to explain to me what measures there are one can take.”

“Well, stopping their daughter from going to an older man's house seems a reasonable start.”

“I'm beginning to think I would back Anne Michaels against any type of present-day parent I know of,” said Charlie.

* * *

The next day was Sunday, and Charlie was in at work from early morning. Felicity, though, had an early-morning call from Alison Carlson.

“Are you going to church?” she asked.

“Let me think, wasn't I in church last night?” said Felicity.
“Yes, I was. I wouldn't want to overdo it, Alison. I'm not entirely sure, even, that I'm a Christian.”

“I'm not rounding people up. My aim was entirely social. I thought we might have a talk on the way there or the way back.”

“That would be nice. You can drop in whenever you like.”

“It's just that . . . I could see you were upset last night.”

Felicity grimaced.

“I think I made a bit of a fool of myself.”

“No, not at all. But I could see you were worried. It's your father and that young girl, isn't it?”

“Yes. I realize I made that obvious. But it's not sex I'm worried about—more that people will assume it is . . . And there are other things. Charlie tells me that she's a girl from the drama stream at Westowram High. She's also the leader or one of the leaders of this little group of children going round the village and making people's lives a misery. She targets outsiders who have moved here. She's immensely talented, though, Charlie says. Her name is Anne Michaels.”

“I think I know the parents,” Alison said. Of course the Carlsons knew everyone in Slepton.

“Oh? What are they like?”

“Perfectly nice people . . . Not awfully bright.”

“Well, that's a pity. It'll make it difficult for them to cope. How can dim parents have a child like that?”

“Oh, don't let's get on to heredity. Do you think Chris talking to them might help?”

“Talking to my father might be more to the purpose,
but he doesn't respond to reason, or even sympathy . . . And doesn't Chris usually leave it to the person who is worried or uncertain to approach
him
?”

“That's the idea. And informally. Just to sit down somewhere, anywhere, have a chat, throw suggestions around. Chris loves it all. It's part of the process of healing. You sounded doubtful. Do you think your father would be unlikely to make an approach?”

“I think hell would freeze over first.”

“You hate your father, don't you?”

The suggestion came out of the blue, put very matter-of-factly. She was forced to think it over.

“I think I'd prefer the word ‘detest.' ”

“Whatever. I'd understood you did.”

“Well, I've certainly never made any secret of it, but only when I'm with friends.”

“No, you haven't, but it was only last night that I actually
felt
it. Saw you walking toward him and that girl and saw the body language. Whatever word you prefer to use, you can't stand him.”

“Is that so surprising or unusual? Dreadful people don't lack the power to have children. And if they do, they are likely to be loathed by them. I think too that I looked at that girl and—whatever she's done—I thought: I could have been that girl. I could have been the person that he uses as his acolyte, his worshiper. And I wanted to save her from that.”

“Anyway, I've said what I wanted to say, so I won't drop in. But if you ever want to talk . . .”

Felicity thought as she put the phone down that Alison was beginning to sound like Chris, to take on
the role of universal counselor and comforter. Or perhaps she just wanted to take over the women. Could it be that she had begun to feel jealous? Felicity liked Alison, but she wasn't sure she had Chris's appeal as someone to be confided in. Chris had a strange way of making himself disappear like the Cheshire cat, and taking on some part of the person who was confiding in him. He became their better self, and could influence their thinking by seeming to come from within them. Alison, more determined and definite, more
human,
in fact, did not have that ability, or that appearance of general tolerance that made Chris so approachable.

Charlie was due back about three, but midmorning Felicity found she was out of milk, wrapped Carola up against the bright, cold weather and walked with her, at her pace, down to the supermarket, which had started opening on a Sunday. It was just outside the door that she was accosted by a couple she didn't know.

“Oh, excuse me, but you're Mr. Coggenhoe's daughter, aren't you?”

It was the woman who spoke—comfortable, blue-costumed, probably just out of church. The man was vaguer, with a faintly military air that perhaps sprang from his mustache, and a tendency to hang back.

“That's right,” said Felicity, stopping.

“I don't want to take up your time, I'm sure you're busy, with your lovely little girl to look after, but we just wanted to say—because we wouldn't dare to talk to
him
—how
much we appreciate your father taking so much trouble with our Anne. It's an honor for her, it really is! To us it's been quite unexpected, and wonderful, because she's been a bit of a handful in the past—until quite recently, actually—and him taking such an interest has really transformed her, hasn't it, Jack?”

“It has that,” said Jack.

“We'd so like it if she could develop the writing side a bit—she's always been interested, but your dad has really brought it out—and we sort of hope that it'll dampen down the drama, which I think was the cause of some of the trouble, not wanting to cast aspersions, but things were happening . . . So will you tell him we are very grateful—we are, aren't we, Jack?”

“Appreciative.”

“That's it. We appreciate the trouble he's taking. Well, we won't take up any more of your time.”

“I think, you know,” said Felicity as the substantial form started to turn away, “it would be better if you could tell him yourselves.” She kicked herself the moment it was out. The last thing to help the situation was gushing thanks to her father from fond but imperceptive parents, who in effect would be giving the green light to . . . whatever he was aiming to create out of the adolescent clay of Anne Michaels. She felt she had been so anxious to avoid the burden of carrying the naive thanks herself that she had forgotten that her own cool thanks would have been infinitely less dangerous than the Michaels's gush.

“Oh, I don't think we could,” said Mrs. Michaels, and gush was what she was doing, even to Felicity. “We
smile if we pass in the streets, and he knows who we are, but no—we couldn't do more. Such a famous novelist, we've heard. It would be months before we could summon up the courage.”

“Well, I'll just mention your appreciation then. Don't let him monopolize Anne, though. She'll have her exams to do soon, won't she?”

“Oh yes, next year. But what could be more stimulating for her than an interest taken in her by a great novelist.”

“In the end it's grades people look at on the CV,” said Felicity firmly, and, gathering up Carola in her arms, she went into the little supermarket. Great novelist indeed!

The Price-rite Supermarket was humming with customers—ones just out of church, ones on the way to the pub and ones who had discovered a lack in the middle of cooking the traditional Sunday lunch. To the surprise of some of its more conservative citizens, Sunday shopping had quickly become a matter of routine in Slepton Edge, and not at all a cause for shame. Convenience had won its usual victory over principle.

“I saw you talking to the Michaels,” came a voice from behind Felicity's shoulder. Turning she saw Nancy Stoppard.

“That's right. They introduced themselves.”

Nancy's voice went very low.

“They're rather dim, I'm afraid.”

“Not the brightest lights in the candelabrum,” said Felicity.

“But you mustn't assume they automatically get
everything wrong,” said Nancy, apparently keen to defend villagers from outsiders. “They are Anne's parents. They know her best.”

“How did you know we were talking about Anne?”

“What else? I was in the back pew last night, and I saw you interrupting your father's tête-à-tête with Anne.”

Felicity grimaced.

“I thought I was just joining it to make a threesome, but she took off immediately.”

“Yes, and that made you suspicious, didn't it? But why should it? Teenagers don't obey any courtesy codes, and didn't even in my day. And they don't particularly welcome older people whom they don't know.”

“That's true enough, though Anne seems to get on particularly well with older people.”

“Have you any reason to think there's anything . . . not quite right about this relationship?”

Felicity looked at her. Nancy seemed to her a straight person, one who was trying to be honest and to force her to look honestly at a complex situation. It also struck her that by now she must know Rupert Coggenhoe pretty well.

“Not as such, no. In fact, I feel sure there isn't, if what we're talking about is underage sex.”

“But you don't like him having admirers at all?”

“There's a streak of vanity in my dad—,” began Felicity.

“People had noticed,” said Nancy dryly. The two women looked at each other and then laughed.

“All right—a strong streak. He loves admiration, and
he would be over the moon if anyone tried to set up a fan club. I think this kind of relationship is bad for him, rather than for her.”

“But why worry about that? He's in his seventies, you have your own life to live, you don't greatly care for each other, so why can't you let him be? If you can't make your own mistakes at his time of life, when can you?”

“Yes, of course. But I hate to think he might make a slave of her as he made one of my mother. She hardly existed, but just revolved about him. And another thing—”

Nancy put her hand up to stop her.

“If you know something I don't know, I don't want to hear it. If he's come up here from Devon to make a fresh start, I'd rather it be that, as far as I'm concerned.”

And she went off toward the tills, leaving Felicity once again feeling rebuked. Nancy was quite right that a fresh start should be just that, but the trouble was that it wasn't. As far as she could see, her father was intent on making exactly the same mistake all over again. She was quite willing to leave him to dig his own grave where Slepton was concerned, as he had in Coombe Barton, but there was the girl to consider. What effect was the intimacy (call it that, with no preconceptions what it consisted of) going to have on her, whether it flourished or was stopped? Now she came to think of it, Madge Easton had been noncommunicative about the girl in the previous relationship. Had the girl been devastated, left feeling empty
and let down? Or had she just picked up the pieces and got on with her life? Somehow Felicity didn't think it was the latter.

Of course this girl seemed different—all too confident and worldly. Had she in fact gone into the relationship with open eyes? Engineered it, quite possibly. Could it be she was intent on making a public fool of the great (in his own estimation) Rupert Coggenhoe?

The more she thought about it the more likely Felicity felt it to be.

“Mummy, why are you always talking about Grandad?” asked Carola as they made for the tills. “He's not very interesting.”

By the time they had reached home Felicity had decided she was not going to worry about her father. Ever again.

* * *

The path to the quarry began where Forsythia Avenue ended. Tarmac gave way to dirt track, and between the trees there was a splendid view over the lower parts of Halifax. Fifty years ago it would have been a prospect of smog. Then the inhabitants hardly ever saw the sun. The Clean Air Act had changed all that. Now, on clear days, you could get a sharp view of the town from the path as it wound around the quarry. It was long disused, and trees, gorse and scrub covered the sides of it—some sides a fairly gentle slope that children could climb up, others precipitous and quite unnegotiable whether up or down. It was not a popular walking place, and no fences or railings had been put up along the path, even at the more dangerous spots.

Rupert Coggenhoe sometimes walked here, when the plot of his new book or his life had reached a knotty point. The fact that the Slepton Edgers found it fairly sinister and threatening did not bother him—in fact he did not notice it. Nor did it bother him that he was frequently alone here. On the day after the carol service he left his bungalow in early afternoon, having had a phone call from Anne Michaels to say she couldn't get round to see him that day. She called from a phone box, and acted up the part of a schoolgirl calling one of her girlfriends. Rupert Coggenhoe knew what she was doing, because she told him. He smiled indulgently. When she rang off she told him she'd come and visit him the next day, after school. Coggenhoe felt warmed by her friendship and her devotion to him. He dwelt on those things as he walked. Oddly he was not an imaginative man except where he himself was concerned, and then he was more concerned to imagine slights than to imagine dangers.

He walked on, seeing no one until he came to one of the more dangerous parts of the footpath, and then it didn't occur to him to wonder why the person he saw was lingering there, rather than walking either toward him or away from him. He went blundering forward regardless.

* * *

Charlie finished his early Sunday stretch at three o'clock, and made for his car, parked by the empty Leeds market. It was a bright, cold December afternoon and he had been out for most of Sunday morning bringing bad news and good to people involved in
a variety of his cases. Felicity had phoned him while he was wolfing down a Marks & Spencer's sandwich to tell him her new resolution not to worry about her father, and he had had to strain his stomach muscles to prevent himself from laughing. Perhaps that was why she had phoned him at work, though: to cheer him up with something to hoot at. Still, if only halfway serious, it was at least a step in the right direction. She knew what she ought to be doing, if she was unlikely to follow her resolution for very long. Her phoning him at work with things that could and should wait was one of the last relics of the uncertainty that had been so strong in her when they had first met, and could be put down to her upbringing with a man like Rupert Coggenhoe in the house.