At Death's Door (6 page)

“Don't know about that, miss. We're nigh on full. . . . Oh, would your mother be this Myra Mason that people have been going on about?”

“That's right.”

“Oh, well, then, we'll surely have a room for her. A very fine actress, people do say.”

A very fine actress, and a dame. In spite of the summer saturation by tourists, this was a combination rare enough to startle a landlord out of his habitual cynicism. In fact, he mentioned the possibility of her coming to his regulars
several times in the course of the evening, and when the phone call did come next morning, he mixed affability and servility in equal measure and promised the well-bred, throbbing voice the best room in the inn, though it meant depriving a good and regular patron and his wife of it. The main use of a title—as titled people say with such monotonous regularity—is that it gets you a good table in restaurants. This was the rural equivalent.

The landlord told Cordelia and Pat, when they were in on Thursday night, that Dame Myra was coming on Sunday and had booked initially for three days.

Myra, it seemed, was on everybody's minds. The fact that the father of her child had been one of the great novelists of his generation seemed to have been forgotten—as the old man upstairs, in his senility, had somehow become an irrelevance. Cordelia now, like the rest, seemed totally preoccupied with her mother. On Friday, in some fitful sunshine, she took a break from the dreary study and, walking in the shrubbery, came upon Roderick wielding clippers.

“How did you come to meet my mother?” she asked abruptly, as if continuing a train of thought. Roderick put the clippers down and thought.

“I
think
my father wrote me a letter inviting me down for a few days. He would do that, you know. We'd hear nothing from him for months, and then suddenly there'd be a visit or a letter, as if quite by chance he had remembered that we existed. Only by then the visits had stopped, because they distressed my mother too much and upset us children. . . . He was by any ordinary standards a quite terrible father, you know. Anyway, they'd rented at that time a cottage in Norfolk. That would be—let me see—19—”

“—'60. Probably early 1960, if she was visibly pregnant with me,” said Cordelia.

“That's right. I was in my last year at Oxford. He invited me, making it clear he was living with a woman—‘a rather remarkable young lady,' I seem to recall he called her in the note. I remember, too, that I was rather flattered that he considered me man enough to accept the situation. That's why I decided to go, I suppose: to show how sophisticated I was about such things. But I remember I said nothing about the visit to my mother.”

“Your mother is an enigma in all this,” said Cordelia thoughtfully. “I've virtually found no mention of her in the letters. What kind of woman was she?”

“Intelligent, self-effacing, and Catholic. There was no question of a divorce—and since my father never met anyone he wanted to marry and probably realized after the second attempt that marriage was not for him, the question never came up. They just lived separate lives.”

“So what kind of establishment did you find when you got to Norfolk?”

“Odd.” Roderick scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Or so it seemed to me at the time. I expect I had some stereotype in my head of a dirty old man and a luscious young thing. It wasn't like that at all. For a start, though I could see that Myra was naturally a beautiful girl, she certainly wasn't looking it. Pregnancy did not suit her.”

“Probably that's why she's never gone in for it again,” said Cordelia, chuckling. “That and the fact that children have to be looked after. Or at any rate, that other people rather expect them to be.”

“Yes . . . Anyway, here was this very intense, self-possessed, ambitious girl who'd had to throw up the part of Ellie Dunn at the Haymarket when the pregnancy started showing. I say ‘self-possessed'—maybe ‘self-obsessed' would be a better term. She was clearly half-resentful of the pregnancy and wondering what stage offers she would get after the baby was born. She was without doubt pleased,
even proud, at having so famous a lover, yet she made no apparent effort to make him happy or comfortable. Her housekeeping was atrocious.”

Cordelia laughed delightedly.

“It would be!”

“This was the dawn of the era of convenience foods. They were not as good then as they are now. All the food we ate was frozen, or from tins, and even then it was always overcooked or undercooked. My father was never a gourmet, but he always liked a minimum of creature comforts. I remember he got a woman in from the village to cook my welcome dinner. The other meals he tried to make a big joke out of, with me.”

“It's very typical. I remember at some crisis or other my mother taking me to a cottage in Lincolnshire, to ‘get away from it all.' We had to come back after five days, because I was half-starved.”

Roderick was thinking back.

“I said the situation was odd. The difficulty was to find the basis for the relationship. Sex, of course—but it had become much more than casual, so there had to be something else. She was wild to get him to write a play for her. Badgering wouldn't be too strong a word.”

“I'm sure,” said Cordelia.

“Remember his novel-writing career was over, or so everyone thought. He hadn't published any fiction since 1952. He'd said all he had to say, that was his public line, and in fact his last one had been rather thin. It had been a splendid career, stretching back to 1927, when D. H. Lawrence was still alive—”

“I know,” said Cordelia with a touch of impatience. “I did my M.A. thesis on him.”

“Really? You've never told us that. I can't imagine your mother approved.”

“I told her it was on Elizabeth Bowen. She never knew
till the degree had been awarded. You say she was badgering him for a play.”

“Right. Well, Father had announced to all and sundry for years that his novel-writing days were over, and I think Myra hoped that the idea of a play would stimulate him creatively. He'd written one play, years before. It had been put on by Binkie Beaumont, but it had been a critical success rather than one with the public.”

“Was anything done about a second play?”

“Ideas were tossed back and forth. We'd sit eating our half-heated steak and kidney pudding out of tins, and Father would say: ‘What about this?' And Myra would sit, considering the idea in her intense, egotistical way: What part was there for her? How effective would her scenes be? And he would watch her, his eyes sparkling. . . . I have to say it: Your mother has no sense of humor.”

“None at all. But what do you mean? Was he just playing with her?”

“I think there was a strong element of that. But there was something else—and I'm not sure that I should mention it, because it reflects no credit on our father: I think he was mostly interested in observing her.”

Cordelia laughed joyously.

“For
The Vixen
? Planning it even then?”

“That's what I decided later, when the book came out. Then I realized that that was the basis for the relationship as far as he was concerned. Material for one more book. I found it quite deplorable. Completely cold-blooded.”

“Not nice,” agreed Cordelia, but unwillingly. She fiddled with some twigs on the bush. “But you don't know how my mother . . . invites it.”

“I suppose she may do. It's odd how egotistical people always seem to expect great consideration from others, isn't it? But my father was a beast of prey, a scavenger, just as much as your mother is—at least during this particular
episode he was. I'm going in now. I can probably find that photograph I mentioned, if you'd like to see it.”

He found it quite easily, stuck in the album that also had the first pictures of him and Caroline together. It was a threesome at the cottage door, taken by the next-door neighbor. Roderick was boyish and sporty, with open-necked white shirt and gray flannels. Myra was heavy and drawn—her face almost bleary, her dress suggesting that she had given up caring for the duration. Benedict Cotterel stood beside her, looking down on her with a glance that suggested some degree of lecherous pride in her pregnancy and perhaps some sardonic pleasure in her depressed and bedraggled state.

“It's wonderful!” said Cordelia. “You must let me borrow it. She looks dreadful!”

As she carried it off to the study, Roderick felt returning his twinges of compunction. It was not pleasant to think of Cordelia gloating over ugly pictures of her mother. What had Myra done to her in the years of her childhood that she should need at the age of twenty-seven to do this? He thought that after a day or two he would ask for the album back.

The matter went out of his head, though, because on Saturday evening there was a phone call from his sister Isobel. Caroline happened to take it, which he was grateful for. He was always glad when it was Caroline who took the calls from Isobel.

Isobel—now Isobel Allick—was a little over a year his junior. His father's brief period of uxoriousness had coincided with a Jamesian phase. Isobel had been named for Isabel Archer, just as he had been named for Roderick Hudson. Neither child, of course, had grown up bearing the slightest resemblance to its fictional namesake.

Isobel had married money and had immediately regretted not having married a man. Her husband was by now a
caricature capitalist—gross, blubber lipped, smoking fat cigars at the end of heavy expense-account lunches. He was the sort of figure who might be photographed for a Labour party election poster. Isobel, not unnaturally, was discontented. Her gentle mother, somewhat deterministic as far as her children were concerned and always looking to discern traces of either parent in their characters, had been quite bewildered by her. In Roderick she could see much of herself, but in Isobel she could see nothing of either Benedict Cotterel or herself. Isobel was materialistic, neurotic, and perennially dissatisfied.

She hated her father. So strong an emotion was odd, since the marriage of her parents had virtually broken up when she was about three. Benedict Cotterel had gone off to do something interesting with codes quite early in the war. Thereafter he might visit his family once or twice a year for a weekend. When Isobel was just into her teens, he stopped coming at all. Soon after she had left school, Isobel had written asking if she might come and live with him in his London flat. She had received a coolly affectionate refusal. She had had nothing to do with him ever since. Roderick thought that her real grievance was that she expected some kind of distinction to accrue to her from being a famous writer's daughter, and because of his neglect of his family, little had. Isobel felt desperately the need for some kind of kudos.

“Oh, Isobel, how nice,” he heard Caroline say from the hall. Then the responses followed a course predictable from all Isobel's previous phone calls.

“Is he? . . . Don't you? . . . Well, of course businessmen have to keep busy, I suppose. . . . Won't you? . . . Don't you? That's a shame. We were looking forward to seeing you.”

Caroline was not struck by lightning for a liar. In the sitting room, Roderick was rubbing his hands. Clearly,
Isobel was not intending to pay them a visit. Isobel was quite aware that in the last legal will of their father she stood to inherit the Rectory, while Roderick and Caroline inherited the estate, which included the royalties on the books. She thought this was a most unfair division, but she came down periodically to keep an eye on “her” property and to monitor the meteoric rise of property values in general in the area.

Eventually they got through Isobel's complaints about her husband, his absences, his stinginess, how she “never got out,” how their son was proving “a chip off the old block,” how she hadn't bought a new dress in years, and a few more standard items from Isobel's list of grievances. Eventually, exhausted, she asked how the Cotterels were.

“Oh, fine,” said Caroline. “Busy—what with Father and Becky. And we've actually got young people camping in the garden at the moment. Roderick's half sister—oh, and yours too, of course . . . That's right; Cordelia Mason.”

There was a long pause while Isobel digested this and expatiated on it. Roderick could guess the broad outline of her remarks: Little hussy! What's her game? What does she want out of us? Eventually, Caroline was allowed to explain further.

“Actually we get on very well. They're both very nice. . . . Yes, there's a boyfriend. . . . Well, she is twenty-seven, you know, Isobel. . . . She's been digging around in your father's papers. . . . I can't see why not. She's—she's writing a book about her mother. . . . Why shouldn't she have got a damehood? She's a very fine actress. Are all knights chaste? . . . Actually she's expected down here tomorrow.”

Roderick groaned. He knew Isobel so much better than Caroline did. He'd been willing her not to say that very thing. The direction of the conversation immediately changed, and Caroline's voice took on a tone of strained banter.

“Do you? . . . So you think you might come, after all? . . . Don't tell me you're becoming a tuft hunter, Isobel. . . . Yes, it will be interesting to see her. . . . Oh, I admit we're interested, too, though we've no reason to think she will actually call here. . . . So you will come? . . . You'll stay at the Red Lion as usual? If they've got room, of course. . . . No, she'll be staying there as well, I gather. . . . Then we'll probably see you on Monday. . . . We'll be looking forward to it.”

Coming back into the sitting room, Caroline raised her eyebrows to heaven.

“Well, I really let us in for that, didn't I?”

The next morning, Sunday, Roderick got up and made the tea as usual. He looked in on Becky, who was playing with her beads, and who gave him her smile of delight that her day had begun. The old man was still asleep, but Roderick let in a little light, which would probably mean he would have attained a sort of consciousness by breakfast time. At the front door he picked up the
Observer
from the mat and opened the door to let the cat in.