Desire Line (17 page)

An entire layer of journals to remove next. October's edition of
The Historical Review
was flaunting ‘Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England': but where was the woman who cared? It and the rest went the way of modern fiction, leaving a single slim clothed-in-drab monograph.
The Ladies' Persistence
. Irritably, she flicked through… hardly persistent… a paltry ninety pages. According to the flyleaf, ‘it catalogued for the first time the achievements of the Kensington Circle, four genteel Edwardian wives to powerful men intent on improving the lot of vulnerable young girls in London's East End…'

Surely a mis-choice for the pursuer of her own runaway daughter… and from Fleur who was so precise in her classifications usually. But the author turned out to be Apolline Reith. Of course. And only a month launched (Garden Quad, 7pm St Clement's College, Drinks and Savouries) by the same diligent toiler in the field they had shared. Sad surpassed, outsoared friend Polly… once. She let her eye cherry-pick the half-dozen scholarly puffs filling out the unadorned cover until it closed on, ‘Here is a quartet of interwoven women's lives, undramatic yet well worth the recovery…'

But no Thomasina Swift amongst them. (How punishable is a smile Polly if you never see it?)
No Thomasina Swift.
In the protracted period of abstraction this caused her, she almost missed the picture postcard of a donkey, identifiable as Crook, standing foursquare in the Uptons' yard; on his underside Eurwen's handwritten line, more telling to Sara than twelve volumes of Gibbon, than the whole of Herodotus, ran,
just lush… super time…
soon see u!
before it blurred.

Still Fleur had not finished with her. Thick A4 envelopes padded out the bottom of the box, justifying its weight. Attached was the inevitable letter.

Darling,

Just a few necessaries. I think of you every day and I hope this distraction can be useful. If not, then humour me and let me pretend.

Would it help if I came? You've only to say, darling. No, you've only to hint and I'll be there. Geoffrey and I talk of little else. Your father is very concerned. I also but I believe that Josh will be doing all the necessary things. He's a good man who loves his daughter very much. Try to keep that thought uppermost.

Eurwen is intelligent and mature beyond her age. When I think of you at fifteen! You were a fey little creature. But from the note she left she had a plan and somewhere she was making for. In many respects she's quite an extraordinary girl, as were you but in a very different way.

I promise not to plague you with calls. Are you able to check emails? I know it would give Geoffrey peace of mind to let you have a sentence or two and be sure of getting one in return.

My intention was to gather and send your current working material for when or if you felt able, you understand? I can find nothing. You appear to have had a very recent and thorough clear-out. So I enclose a nice fresh photocopy of ‘A First' taken from the draft you showed us. You will have a disk or whatever but I know how deeply you are wedded to the word on the page!

It's such a familiar world and our dear Lady Quarrie the choicest of companions.

With my very best love

Fleur

Was
she
wedded
to the word on the page? Fleur would not intend the rebuke, but…? Like an automaton she straightened her spine, pushed off from the floor and left the room. When she returned and resumed her position she was running the back of one hand, coarsely, across her mouth not caring if the glass held in it dripped a final drop. An open bottle of Stoli was placed down next with greater care.

The photocopy of
A First
divided between envelopes, being too much for a singleton, her
Peerless Girl though the book made no such claim. The story was fable already, if only from Virginia Woolf's catty, eighteen-hundred-word essay, ‘Who?' which she made sure to acknowledge, here in Chapter 1: ‘…tiresomely exquisite, abnormally calculating girl. I suspect the taste she brought to Heystrete would have caused her lord to blush, the acquisitions made in her occupancy, ripe fodder for its lumber rooms. Yet the past is unserviceable in attempting to assess her life. She is the first potato pulled from the pease field; though no more savoury to a refined palate, the future is hers.'

Woolf was accurate in this if nothing else. Thomasina was certainly destined to be Sara's future as sole subject, a book, a play and a film, as they used to say in a game played at Pryorsfield Christmases… all there, even the earliest synopsis, written at Geoffrey's suggestion and delivered by him to Pythian Press's old office in the Euston Road she had loved visiting.

Thomasina Swift was born at Heystrete Newton, 30 miles from Bristol in 1758, the daughter of an innkeeper. At fifteen, she became mistress of Louis Quarrie, heir to Heystrete Hall, a spoiled young man. Sent up to Oxford he continued the affair and, having boasted in drink about the accomplishments of his lady, bet John Cane and the Hon Spencer Goodridge fifty guineas each Thomasina could keep a term there, passing for a student.

At the start of Michaelmas, Louis Quarrie reappeared with his young cousin, Tom Swift. (He bore the cost of the adventure. His account book shows expenditure of 10s for a greatcoat, 4/9d for a plain cloth coat, also two waistcoats, a dozen muslin cravats plus stockings, breeches and shirts and a hat all bought for his ‘cozin'). The pair took rooms in Longwall Street. It was not a completely successful ploy. To Cane, who had left the University early, Louis describes having ‘thrash'd an insulent fellow in The High who calt my good cousin Tom Swift a molly'.

Tom attended lectures in classics, philosophy and divinity and came to the attention of Dr George Buller, (1719-1788). A classicist, he was Louis Quarrie's tutor and despite humble origins, a much-feared character in the University. No one's fool, yet Buller encouraged Tom Swift's studies. The curmudgeonly don had fallen under Thomasina's spell and the masquerade was sustained. Tom Swift kept ‘his' term at Oxford and returned to The King's Arms, at Heystrete with 100 guineas in ‘his' pocket.

When Sir Philip Quarrie's horse threw its rider at the Heystrete Newton crossroads, the twenty-two-year-old heir was suddenly Sir Louis, with an income of £8,000 and only a pious mother cluttering up his Hall. Thomasina and he married before the harvest was in and she became celebrated as a charmer and wit. Invitations to Heystrete were sought by statesmen, artists and philosophers for the next four decades. The poet Robert Southey had to be thrown bodily down the main stairs at Heystrete by Sir Louis for ‘versifying to my wife and therefor causing much anoyance'. Though her beauty dimmed, she remained, as William Lyle Bowles was moved to write in a fit of hot blood and bathos, ‘the wonder of her sex, our age, and this blessed County of Wilts,' the peerless Thomasina.

An impressive thickness of paper, grown out of that couple of hastily written sheets, forced itself down onto her thighs. Each envelope had been enumerated and headings and pagination added. You could believe an actual revision was about to get underway! Yes? No? When I'm drinking I'm not working and when I'm working I'm not drinking, a pithy and presumably sober other writer once said. How long had the fool lasted after double usage of a word immeasurably potent? See! That ba-ba-ba-bum of the pulse resulted from merely thinking it… now Fleur's shocked face flashed up. She would have recognised the scattered ashes from both bin and grate as the putative new edition, notes and letters and, who knew? The leads unfollowed, even where the references had been tracked and indexed. But no final draft: attenuated preparation, a type of scholarly foreplay, had proved that pithy sometime-drunk's adage.
She
had not been working. Had not worked for years. How could she? How dare she?

Her glass was empty again. Reply to Fleur, she counselled herself. Or at least speak to Fleur before… you… before you get… She did neither. But when she answered her phone, ‘I'm up at the Clear,' Kim said without preamble, ‘and don't take forever!' She complied.

Kim's Lycra still bagged at the knees yet everything else about her had altered subtly. Movements were smoother and more controlled. The wide eyes shone despite pinpoint pupils. To Sara's anodyne ‘How are you?', Kim catalogued her regime with a sort of bravado, ending in the teatime Rhyl Hotshot: diazepam and codeine phosphate needing to be injected ‘to get down'. Why not a Coldshot?
Sara wanted to ask but substituted, ‘I'm ignorant when it comes to drugs.' It was what Kim would expect. ‘Hence so worried about Eurwen.'

Kim simpered over the top of her mug. ‘I was a bit of cow the other time. This kid of yours—'

‘Eurwen.'

‘I know. Well, I'll tell you this for free.' She leaned in closer. Her pointed little chin was sore-looking today as though she had been rubbing at the clustered whiteheads stuck like mites into the flesh. ‘I reckon she don't want to be found.'

Sara had to lace fingers beneath the table so as not to slap her. ‘How can you know that?'

‘Som'dy would be seeing her. That lot at the stables, for one.'

Coffee gathered in Sara's throat ready to be fully regurgitated. Harvey's afternoon blend had a fugitive aftertaste of fish but Kim happily knocked back a couple of pills with hers. Then her phone buzzed and she read the text with a pursed mouth.

‘Please Kim— if you can think of anything—'

She held up a hand for quiet. ‘I've thought of something, as it happens. But— na, never mind. You won't want to.'

‘Anything.'

‘All right. Well, maybe.'

Trying to maintain a conversation with Kim was like a steeple chase, one difficult fence cleared revealed the next. Her touchiness was infectious, tempting Sara into a surface narrative, playing her game… because it was
her
game. ‘Maybe sounds hopeful.' The woman seemed appeased or at least not about to quash the overture. Relief bloomed before she wondered what was coming or even what category of proposition it might consist of.

Kim's face was tight with self-importance. ‘I read the cards. That's it. I'm bloody good as it happens. Ask anybody— never wrong.'

The rattle of crockery and a range of cleaning up sounds filled the background as the café prepared to shut. Without warning the hatch crashed down behind Sara's back but Kim didn't so much as blink and, without sunglasses, the blue unguarded eyes were even more disarming.

‘I see.'

‘Na-a! Forget it.'

‘I've never met anyone who was… adept at that… type of thing.'

‘Like I said let's bin it.'

A steeple chase, maybe, but not lost, not yet. A steeple chase, a sine wave: having dipped at the ludicrous offer, now it began its ascent on an assemblage of possibilities. Sara could feel the effort involved in mentally plumping up the heap. ‘Really, what I meant was—' Her own first day's foray into Rhyl must be weighed:
With my mind I will touch my child,
she rebuked herself. But what of the myriad cultures where divination was accepted, from classical times to… no,
no!
predating the classical, three thousand years earlier in Ancient Sumaria whose every city hid an entrance to the nether world of knowledge and power. What were the rules that gave access?
Do not wear fresh clothes to find
it; do not treat your kin in the familial way?
She had known the entire list… and in the Egypt of the Old Kingdom priests and scorpion charmers tried to foretell disasters, protect houses and give assurance to women in childbirth, who would then survive. That day, crossing the bridge, reaching out to Eurwen
she had awaited a response;
maybe the one and only excuse for flirting with the Inexplicable was that it could prove we are more than cloven tissue? If only you had faith… As the actual world seemed to spin off and leave her free-floating, there it was. Faith. ‘Yes. I think we should try,' she heard herself respond. The one thing she must not do now, for Eurwen's sake, was to play the sceptic. ‘Why not?'

Kim's focus was on the room. To the backs of heads she said. ‘It takes a lot out of me. I don't do it for a laugh, you know. I have to charge.'

‘I see.'

‘Takes years of studying. Like being a vet or something, isn't it?'

‘That's fine.'

‘OK. We'll do it then.' Kim got to her feet.

‘So where do you practise your… your skill? Here?'

‘I'll come to the house, won't I? Could be tomorrow— or the next. Depends. But you'll have to be in on your own.'

‘Yes.' Sara had no idea what Josh would be doing on any particular day, where he was likely to be. ‘I will be,' she promised, surprised at the steadiness of her voice when her nervous system was telling her it was shot to pieces. ‘Yes… I can arrange that. Whenever suits.'

October 5th

Until then, do something. How about information gathering, where once she had excelled? The real Thomasina had to be painstakingly resurrected from the sort of dross the landed families of England waded in: sermons by second sons, orders for ‘black furniture' to smarten up the Norfolk Trotters, amateur treatise on the cultivation of the apricot, and bills for tablecloths, sulphur paste, lemons and lump sugar that somehow survived linen, horses and orchards. When at home she might call a friend she had left who was
not
Polly Reith… But there would be no stain of
mañana
on today. Her latest brush with Kim had the effect of a stimulant. In research, for instance, at the third or maybe the thirtieth look at some scribbled note, a door springs open. From near-defeat you are offered the prospect of Canaan, though for her it always took the form of an intricate walled Italian town
a la Bellini.
So rather than self-laceration, let us, she reasoned, label dealings with addict-cum-charlatan Kim as one of those long slogs against the gradient, the stones sliding under the feet, the terracotta roofs as far above as ever. And for what? There's the rub. Maybe nothing or maybe precious, squirreled away booty, as had been brought her, carton after battered carton, that amazing day. And not to a mediaeval scriptorium on a sun-baked Tuscan hilltop, but to Heystrete Hall and its Comptroller's chilly den.