Charades (24 page)

And Bea told her; “A certain kind of Pom always does.”

“They left together, right?” Charade asked. “They got married before they left. Or else in England. They must have, right?”

Bea had gone on shelling peas, and the peas drummed into a chipped enamel bowl like hail.

“I was mad that she didn't answer,” Charade confesses, pleating the football jersey, rubbing one bare foot against the other like a fly. “I tried to goad her.”

Here is Charade in a tumbledown house in Tamborine, with a cacophony of voices, the sounds of younger half-siblings, in the air. “I guess I have more half-brothers and sisters in England, hey Mum?” She sticks her tongue in her cheek and says in a plummy Brit voice: “My little brother, my half-brother Julian, is going up to Oxford next year.” She laughs. “What do you think, Mum?”

And Bea says quietly: “I got no opinions on that,” and goes on shelling peas.

The in-between, Charade says, is tedious; the letters sent to the Misses Alicia and Penelope Truman and not answered, the saving up and getting there — all that's another story, and a boring one, not worth telling. But the being there is worth a short tale.

Once upon a time, Charade says, a young woman with the improbable name of Enigma, armed only with her Australian accent and a foolish quantity of hope, went tapping on the door of her history. There was a brass knocker beneath leaded glass inserts, a profusion of wisteria at the lintel, and lavender, hollyhocks and roses in all directions. The house was in Twickenham. When the door opened, she smelled the Edwardian era.

“Oh my
dear
,
”
said Miss Alicia Truman with a rustle of violets.

Her sister Penelope put a hand to her throat, where the points of a lace collar quivered.

“We shall have to enter her,” Alicia said, circling her slowly. “Yes, her name will definitely have to be inscribed. She has Alfred's eyes. Another branch, another twig.”

“Where will it end?” asked Miss Penelope. Her breast rose and fell beneath the purest wool cloth, cloth so woollen and so pure that a phrase (from Thackeray? from Carlyle? from Burke?) lodged itself in Enigma's mind:
woollen stuff.
She wanted to touch it, to know the intimate and whimsical kiss of hackles. She half reached out with a questing hand.

Penelope, incredulous, clasped her arms across her breast and stroked her woollen stuff herself — an involuntary gesture — in search of comfort. From the napped surface of her sleeves rose sweet and musty and calming thoughts of Harrod's, though her visitor caught a whiff of camphor.

Alicia patted her sister's arm. “The sherry, my dear,” she whispered. She made her eyes go very bright. “I think it's absolutely dashing to have a young … a young
connection
from Australia.

We've met some
lovely
Australians, haven't we, Penny? Remember that ball before the war?”

Miss Penelope offered sherry (Bristol Cream) in Waterford crystal, and turned back to the decanter and the sideboard. At the nape of her neck, the collar of Valenciennes lace betrayed not so much as a pucker, not a wrinkle, while she poured a quick glass and gulped it down. It was delicately done. She refilled her glass. “Lovely,” she confirmed, though a small furrow between her eyebrows bore witness to a struggle in summoning up Australian names. “And you mustn't think,” she murmured on a swell of graciousness, eighty proof strong, “that anyone would dream of blaming you for where you were born.”

“Nor for the circumstances,” Miss Alicia hastened to add.

“Every family has its Alfred,” Miss Penelope sagely observed.

Oh Alfred, they sighed, smiling at each other and settling onto the Queen Anne settee. What a naughty boy he was. What scrapes he used to get into. Remember the country weekend in Buckinghamshire? Oh dear, they laughed. Oh dear. And their laughter was like music boxes being opened.

“Australia was the best place for him, really,” Alicia said. “Some very fine families have sown their wild oats in Australia. Though Father was furious at first.”

“It was the suddenness, you know.” Miss Penelope shook her head. “And the waste. Such a splendid marriage, vis-
à
-vis society I mean. Thrown away, simply thrown away.” She flicked her frail little right hand over her shoulder, once, twice, three times, to illustrate reckless abandon. “And taking little Nicholas with him.”

“His poor dear wife,” Alicia sighed.

“He was besotted with that boy from the start. The actress's child, wasn't he?” Penelope shook her head in fond dismay. “Oh Nicholas, Nicholas, what a little madcap he was. Bad blood will out, I'm afraid.”

“Sarah — Alfred's wife, you know — was a saint about Nicholas, an absolute saint,” Alicia said. “Alfred was so … impetuous, so stubborn about things like that. Insisting on grammar school and riding lessons and having Nicholas always in the house.
Living
here, I mean. Just as though he hadn't been born” — here Alicia rolled her eyes slightly upwards to show what a woman of the world she was — “on the wrong side of the sheets, so to speak. Sarah was a
saint
about all that.”

“She looked very well in black,” Penelope mused, the impeccable gowns of the impeccably abandoned Sarah in her sartorially educated mind's eye. “She was very fortunate in that sense.” Penelope again stroked her own woollen stuff, which had talismanic powers, and cast down her eyes. “But in other respects …”

“Though once we came to realise …'' Miss Alicia, conspiratorial, leaned forward on the settee and lowered her voice. “He was such a naughty boy about liaisons. One could never know
who
might make trouble. It was a gallant thing, as it turned out, a gallant thing, even Sarah had to agree. I mean,” she said, with a thrill of horror in her voice, “imagine if he'd been
here
when the scandal broke.”

“Of course,” Penelope smiled fondly, indulgently, “he has made it most awfully difficult to keep the tree up to date. The unofficial side, I mean, the ah … But the records,
complete
records, must still be maintained.”

“Oh dear yes,” Alicia said. “Branches and twigs, branches and twigs, you have no idea.”

“The tree?” Enigma blankly inquired.

“Two
South Africans!” Alicia gleamed, leaning into the fabulous labyrinth of family history like the wing
è
d lady on her Rolls Royce.

“… that we know of, ” Penelope said. She touched the points of her collar.

“Another branch,” Alicia explained. “Before Alfred sacrificed himself… oh yes, well before he left for Australia …” She dropped her voice to the whisper favoured for daring pronouncements. “He was only fourteen the first time. Right in the house with a scullery maid. Father was stunned.” She fortified herself with sherry. “Oh yes, from well before his marriage, but it didn't stop there, the bad boy. Even during the marriage I'm afraid there were …” She paused delicately, searching for a word.

“Love children,” Penelope said.

“Oh yes. We don't even know how many. And now each of those …”

“It's a kind of epidemic,” Penelope said, discreetly reaching for the decanter.

“One of them, we understand” — and Alicia leaned forward, her eyes glittering, a hand to her palpitating heart — “in fact the first one, the scullery maid's son, went to India with the 58th Highlanders in '46 and
stayed on.”
Her eyes invited Enigma to consider possible battalions of Anglo-Indian cousins.

Enigma smiled and said politely, “My father Nicholas. He came back here in 1963?”

Isn't it adorable, they smiled at each other, the way she
talks
? Such a quaint, such a wittily outr
é
accent, the Australian one. Oh and as for Nicholas, they smiled, settling comfortably back into anecdote shared and worn smooth as a pebble. A chip off the old block, we're afraid. A regular scamp.

“One of his, it's the little Canadian one I believe?” — Alicia raised her eyebrows at Penelope, who nodded in confirmation — “she's only fourteen or fifteen, a very sweet child. She's at Thornhill Academy for Girls. She comes to visit once or twice a year and plays her clarinet for us. Your half-sister dear. Isn't that quaint?”

“My father …” Enigma's voice faltered just a little. “Then he didn't marry the woman who … What happened to the woman who came here with him from Australia?”

Both the Misses Truman leaned forward slightly on their cushions, fluttering, giving off a soft whirr of interest. Enigma thought of hummingbirds around a syrup feeder in a garden trellis, the way they marked time in air. What woman? asked the bright waiting eyes of her father's aunts.

Enigma said carefully: “I have reason to believe that when he arrived back in England, he was either married to, or travelling with, a woman named Verity Ashkenazy.”

A little gasp of shock escaped from the tastefully arranged lives of the Misses Truman, and trembled through their silver-grey curls.
Ashkenazy,
they murmured. Or rather, their lips silently shaped themselves around the word. “Your
mother
?” they breathed as one, and Enigma saw herself catalogued with the Anglo-Indian cousins: exotic, racy, not so much disreputable as endearingly, non-threateningly, deliciously dangerous.

“No,” she said. “Nicholas ah left my mother, in a manner of speaking, for Verity. At least, I think so.”

They patted their knees with the air of having sewn up a complicated matter (though not without a smidgen of regret, not without wistfulness for the risqu
é
road not travelled) and ran index fingers along the trim creases of sideseams and pleats.
To the best of their knowledge, they confessed, there had been no woman with him that time, though perhaps dear Sarah — He hadn't realised, you know, that she wasn't his mother, oh dear such a shock it had been for poor Sarah when he turned up like that without warning. They smiled; it was typical Nicholas behaviour, oh dreadful dreadful really, but only to be expected, and rather lovable in its own outrageous way. And they did find it charming to have this Australian connection. It made the tree so interesting, so far reaching, a kind of King Oak of the genealogical forest.

Enigma cleared her throat and put her Waterford goblet on the side table and gathered up all her courage. “And where is my father now?”

Oh my dear, they smiled, turning up their hands (it was like Queen's Birthday doves released from cages in Buckingham Palace). Oh my dear. With the most elegant, the most sinuous of movements, they shrugged their shoulders. Who could say? they wondered. Who could even hazard a guess at the name he was writing under now?

“Footloose, incorrigibly footloose,” Alicia said. “When I pick up
The Times,
I ask myself: Could this be from his pen? Or this? With absolutely no way of knowing, of course. No way at all.”

“India, Africa, Uruguay.” Penelope shook her head in wonder. “Sefton claims — you'll be meeting Sefton shortly — Sefton claims there are books and books by your father.” A born storyteller, a writer for newspapers, even a novelist, so people said. At any rate, a compulsive liar. “Sefton says there's a tragedy behind it, that he can't stop running. But really, you know, I don't think we need a theory like that. I think it's simply … well, son of an actress, gypsy blood, that sort of thing.”

“Though you must admit, Penny. It's perfectly Alfred too, it's really very very Alfred. He used to drive Father mad with his stories.”

“The position,” Enigma said. “He came back to take up a teaching position. Which university was it, could you tell me?”

Dear me, they said, reproachful, mildly offended. They could be quite certain that Nicholas had never been one of those. Swashbuckling perhaps, a bit of a rover, a dilettante, a literary man in the sense of Dr Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith or even Laurence Sterne, that naughty trifler; a literary man who roamed the world and wrote amusing pieces under a pseudonym. But he had never been one of those scruffy university people.

“One could say, I suppose,” Penelope mused, “that Marlow is scruffy.”

“Marlow's kind of scruffiness,” Alicia said firmly, “is different. But there have never been, I am pleased to say, any academics in our family.”

“Well,” Enigma said, standing and smoothing down her skirt, “perhaps I'd better be going then.”

But my dear! they protested. You simply can't leave yet, we haven't had dinner. And we've planned a little surprise for you. Your cousins, your second cousins have been invited, our sister Isolde's children. In a sense, they explained, strictly speaking, they belong to your father's generation — they're his cousins at least; but Isolde was much the youngest, and her two are not much older than you are. They're
dying
to meet you, they'd never forgive us if … And you
will
be surprised, oh won't she? We're not such old fogies as you think. And besides, they said, Marlow and Sefton, they're in the same kind of, ah, the same
demi-monde
as Nicholas.
Artistic.
Bohemian connections. Why, it's probably no time at all since they last saw him.

And so, of course, Enigma was seduced, and she dallied, and “Oh!” Penelope clapped her hands with delight. “I can hear
them now.”

“I'll have dinner served,” Alicia said.

“Personally,” Marlow announced, a forkful of roast pumpkin paused meditatively between the dinner plate and her mouth, “I can say that everything I do, every artistic statement I make — and I'm speaking particularly of my more recent work, especially the experimental feature films that Sefton and I have worked on in the last five years — every cinematic declaration is done for the sisters.”