The Graveyard Position (10 page)
Read The Graveyard Position Online
Authors: Robert Barnard
When he went back to the beginning of the book to find the breakfast chapter he made a discovery that Felicity apparently had not noticed. The family were introduced in a rather amateur way in the opening pages, and by each fictitious name there was in pencil in the margin a faint initial. Were these the author's identifications, before giving the book (they would hardly have bought it) to the Leeds Library?
He went through in his own mind what he knew about his aunt's generation of Cantelos. Rosalind's father was Hugh, Caroline's mother was Marigold. Malachi and Francis's father was Gerald, Edward's mother was Emily. Here, as the children of the family appeared, were an
H,
an
M,
a
G
and an
E
, as well as a
Th
for his own mother and a
Cl
for Clarissa. A
P
identified the man who had flown the nest before Merlyn had ever gone to live with Clarissa, and was never mentioned except with a sharp intake of breath by Aunt Emily.
The identification had one big advantage: when he came to the chapter of the family at breakfast he could substitute in his own mind the real name of the person mentioned, in place of the fictitious one. Taking it up, the second chapter had something of the broad humor one would hope for from a picture of a disunited family seen from inside.
“Kidneys!” said Mr. Cantelo, waving one on the end of a fork, and taking care none of the rich sauce dripped down onto his blue and silver tie. “The prince of breakfast meats. You children don't know what you're missing.”
“Ugh!” said Marigold. Her mother blinked reproof at her.
“Your father always says a good breakfast sets you up for the day,” she said.
“Yes, he always does,” said Paul.
The irony passed Mr. Cantelo by. His substantial stomach swelled, as it always did when he was about to make a pronouncement, which was frequently.
“And bacon!” he announced, his voice throbbing with passion. “The essence of Englishness, that's what bacon is. It's what marks us off from âlesser breeds without the law.'”
His wide lips, sensual and self-regarding, opened to receive a forkful of streaky, after the napkin had been adjusted over his tie.
“Perhaps Kipling should have said âlesser breeds without the bacon,'” said Paul.
“Perhaps he couldn't find a rhyme for
bacon,
” said Clarissa.
Mr. Cantelo treated his children's lightest remarks as if they were possible specimens of childish wisdom.
“Perhaps he couldn't,” he said. “The ways of poets are beyond the understanding of a practical man of affairs like myself. If you can't find a rhyme for a word like
bacon,
why on earth put it at the end of a line?”
His tummy swelled once more, and his children were reduced to silence, with some twisting at the corners of their mouths. Their father was king of the breakfast and dinner tables, but the first rumblings of revolutionary republicanism trembled beneath the surface calm.
“And how,” asked Mr. Cantelo in the apparently cowed silence, and turning to Hugh, “did your essay on Disraeli's foreign policy go?”
“All right,” said Hugh. Then, fearing he might have given a hostage to fortune, the boy amended that to: “not too bad.”
“Disraeli was a great charlatan,” asserted his father.
“Well, perhaps,” said Hugh. “But that doesn't get one far on the subject of his foreign policy.”
“He had not a principled bone in his body. And
that
could probably be discerned in his foreign policy.”
Hugh was one of those who pursued the useless strategy of battling with his father on his own terms.
“The trouble is that I thought foreign policy was something big, something high-flown and difficult to graspâ”
“Do you mean
abstract
?” his father asked, showering condescension.
“Yes,” gulped Hugh, grasping at the straw. “Abstract. But all it is, is bits and piecesâthings he did when something or other turned up. Not a principle at all.”
“Exactly what one would expect of an unprincipled person. Reacting to events, taking chances. Like making the poor old Queen Empress of India, a piece of foolish vanity on both their parts which burdened the British crown for seventy years.”
“Well, yes, I said thatâ¦something like thatâ¦I think I did all right. At least I hope so.”
Having reduced his confident son to a nervous jelly, Mr. Cantelo pressed home his advantage, smiling around the table with teeth that flashed warning signals.
“I hope so. I really hope so. Or you will suffer where it hurts you most, Hugh: in your pocket.” He put his knife and fork across his plate, and the maid immediately whipped it away and put the tea plate and knife onto his placemat. “And what you lose, someone else will gain. If I find that good work has been done, the worker will be rewarded.” He smiled his civilized-crocodile smile. “But mind: betas and beta-minuses are not regarded as good work in the Cantelo family!”
Most assuredly they were not! Mr. Cantelo's masterstroke in child-rearing had been to devise a series of rewards and penalties, and a week's pocket money could be seriously eroded by two or three poor performances. The fact that the money docked was then awarded to a child whose performances at school had rated beta-plus or higher did not improve relations in the large brood.
“I'm not going to do History in GCE,” said Gerald. “I'm going to take Religious Knowledge.”
There was silence. No one except Gerald would have lobbed a bomb like that across the breakfast table. All eyes were on Mr. Cantelo. His cheeks became larger and rounder, as if a volcano were casting foul air up from the depths of his esophagus. He glared at his son, taking in his uncombed hair and his tie congenitally askew and showing his top shirt button.
“Religious Knowledge? Religious
Know
ledge! A subject for plain girls in pinafores in love with the curate! Over my dead body are you going to do Religious Knowledge.”
Gerald looked as if he was ready, nay anxious, to take that risk. However, he merely muttered: “I'm going to do it, though.”
“And what does Religious Knowledge do for you in the great wide world? Who is impressed by it? Who would care to employ a
boy
who had a gradeâwhatever gradeâin Religious Knowledge?”
Mr. Cantelo faded to a silence, and seemed to be engaged in a fight to calm himself down.
“I don't care who's impressed. I'm never going to impress anyone whatever subject I take. That's the one I want to do.”
Mr. Cantelo leaned forward, sorrow-not-anger suffusing his face.
“Gerald, Gerald. You know how we do things in this house. We discuss things. We sit down and go through the pros and cons. What the decision could lead to, what the advantages and disadvantages might be. Certainly we must discuss this, because religion has never had great importance in our family. What can you have against rational discussion?”
“Perhaps he's noticed that the discussion always ends with us doing what you want, not what we want,” said Hugh, his nerve restored now he was no longer in the firing line. The puffed-up red cheeks, the scimitar eyes, were turned on him at once.
“If that happens it is because a sensible child acknowledges that its parents have the experience, and the knowledge of the way of the world, that makes
his
judgment safest to follow.”
“His or her, I suppose you mean,” said Paul. “You and mother, whose two votes somehow outweigh the seven of ours. I must say it seems unfair for you to decide on a matter like this when you have no religion yourself.”
His remark gave Gerald courage.
“I can't think of any subject more important than religious faith. It's being brought up in a godless family that's made me see that.”
His father stood up. He thinks he's prime minister, thought Paul. Facing a motion of No Confidence. He even put his hands on the lapels of his jacket. He was Gladstone, preparing to outface the skeptics.
“If this family has been skeptical in the matter of religion,” he intoned, “it is because it believes in the supreme value of personal endeavor. It is through your own efforts and endeavors that you will make your way in the world, not by clutching the imagined hand of some supernatural figure in the skies. Have confidence in yourselves, children, and you will need no comforting fictions about a God in an afterlife.”
And he stalked, exuding self-satisfaction, out into the hall and began rummaging in the cupboard for hat and overcoat.
“Listen to what your father says,” murmured Elspeth Cantelo. “He only wants what is best for you.”
“I think we all want what is best for ourselves,” said Hugh.
His mother shook her head. She was imbued with the family philosophy as interpreted by its undoubted head. She knew that the Cantelo method of child-rearing had been developed over several generations of the family. The Cantelos gloried in their reputation as pillars of the community, models of a responsible and thoughtful attitude on moral and social questions. The idea of physically punishing children had been abhorrent in the family for many decadesâindeed this idea had resulted in the family being considered eccentric. But Mr. Cantelo's system of rewards and penalties mainly of a financial kind was (he believed, and thus so did his wife) proving brilliantly successful in directing his children toward the goal of self-sufficiency and financial probity. They would be model businessmen (and businessmen's wives), and in their turn, model parents. Such a view of future generations was a much more concrete hope, Cantelo believed, than any trust in so dubious a concept as eternal bliss.
As the maid cleared away, the Cantelo girls talked with their mother, overheard by their father in the hallway.
“Do you really think father's way of docking our pocket money if we do poor work is the right one, Mother?”
It was Clarissa speaking.
“But of course it is, dear. And augmenting it when you do good work. Your father has vast experience, and he does know what works best.”
“Sometimes it seems as if all it does is produce arguments and bad feeling,” said Thora.
“What it produces is a spirit of competition between you,” said Elspeth. “And that can't be unhealthy.”
Mr. Cantelo threw back his head, placed on it the trilby which had been his headgear for two decades, and sailed through the door on a billowing cloud of self-satisfaction that conveyed him down to the street and to the company car, whose door was being held open by the company chauffeur.
God was not in His heaven, but all was right with the world.
Merlyn shut the book and turned off the light. It was early for bed, but he had had enough of Mr. Cantelo, and Mrs., too, for that matter. He was glad that it was his mother who had made that point, the one that exposed the fatal flaw in the Cantelo method of upbringing. What the self-satisfied Mr. Cantelo's method produced was not healthy competition but enmity, grudges, and bitternessâthat, he felt quite sure about.
And he thought that it was this spirit that Clarissa had always been conscious of in those she should have been closest to, those she should have been able to call on for support and love. It was her consciousness of the spirit her father had unleashed that had made her perceive the jealousy that her virtual adoption of Merlyn had aroused, and to sense too that the jealousy was getting out of hand.
And, if what the neighbor Mr. Robinson had reported was accurate, she was disturbed not just by the prospect of violence in the future, but by a knowledge of violence in the past.
Family Party
The phone rang at ten o'clock in the morning.
“Merlyn Docherty.”
“Erâhelloâis that Merlyn Docherty?”
Merlyn sighed. He knew the voice and he felt he knew the dimness behind it.
“Hello, Caroline. Good to hear from you.”
“Oh, did you recognize⦔ The brightness in the tone faded as she realized she was not being too sharp. “But of course, you said my n⦔ The voice contracted into silence, then cranked up again like a train after a long stop. “â¦ErâI hope you don't think this is a silly ideaâ¦it's just⦔
“Tell me, Caroline.”
“What?â¦Oh, you want to hear the ideaâ¦of courseâ¦silly of meâ¦it's justâWell, it's Jackie's birthday tomorrow, and I'm having a party for all her little friendsâ”
“How nice.”
“Yesâ¦if they don't quarrelâ¦. They often
do
quarrel, but I suppose that's just children, isn't it? Anyway, I've asked some of the family roundâ”
“The family? You mean the Cantelos?”
“Oh yes, the Cantelos. I don't have any contact with their father's family.”
“I see. So you've asked the Cantelos round at the same time as the party?”
“Well, yes, sort ofâ¦I mean some of them don't have any⦔
“I don't have any children myself, Caroline.”
“I know that, but you don'tâ¦I meanâ¦you don't dis
like
â”
“Oh no. Quite the contrary, actually. I don't know about Malachi or Francis.”
“Oh, I think theyâ¦I haven't asked Rosalind. She really is quiteâ¦wellâ¦you knowâ¦I mean almost un
pleas
ant. And she's always
diff
icult.”
“Yes, I had noticed. I talked to her recently, and it wasn't exactly a meeting of minds. Is her marriage happy?”
This question, demanding an answer on an intimate matter, seemed to throw Caroline entirely.
“Well, I mean, so far as Iâ¦I mean, how can one
know,
unless one asked, and I wouldn'tâ¦but
some
thing isâ¦I don't know⦔
“Bugging her?”
“Well, yes. I suppose so. She is very⦔
“Isn't what's bugging her the fact that I've reappeared, and am going to inherit?”
“I suppose so. But I'm not sureâ¦anyway,” she finished up triumphantly, “we'd all, the rest of us, be awfully pleased if you could come.”
“I'd be delighted. Should I bring a bottle?”
“Well, it would help, if you don't mâ¦It's from five o'clockish.”
“I'll be there. Look forward to seeing you all.”
Merlyn pondered as he went about the various routine tasks for the rest of the day. It couldn't be said that Caroline intrigued him, but puzzle him she certainly did. He could imagine a mother throwing a side party for the parents of the children invited to a birthday party, though the noise might be offputting and he imagined most parents would prefer to dump their children for a few hours and then decamp to enjoy peace and freedom. But he did not see the point of Caroline's inviting her own relatives, and he wondered what she was up to. It seemed likely that one of her motives might be influencing him in favor of her own little girls. Orâmore dauntingâinfluencing him to consider herself and her maleless predicament. If that was her idea, her plans were doomed to failure. He had always preferred women of spirit and grit, and Danielle certainly had both. Guile, however, he could do without.
Next day in Oddbins he selected a middling-to-good bottle of white wine, the current national drink, and then hesitated between a bottle of whisky and one of brandy. He himself preferred the latter, but to take it might be deemed unpatriotic, particularly in a servant of the European Union, so he went along with the national preference for whisky. He decided that he would try to introduce the bottle as unobtrusively as possible, and brandy would have stood out as an unlikely offering.
He realized the following morning that, typically, Caroline had not given him her address or telephone number, and that he couldn't remember her married name, though Mr. Featherstone had mentioned it. He rang Directory Inquiries, but the only C. Cantelo in the Leeds area was his aunt Clarissa. So Caroline had retained her married name, no doubt so as not to confuse the girls. In the end Merlyn rang Malachi at his bookmaker's job and got the information from him.
“Her married name is Caroline Chaunteley. Doesn't it just sound Old World? Her husband's father was a bricklayer, but never mind. She lives somewhere in Pudsey. It's in the phone book.”
“Right.”
“Do I take it you're invited to the kiddies' party?”
“That's right. Or to a family affair in the next room.”
“So am I. What
fun
!”
“Well, a bit more fun than the funeral bakemeats, anyway.”
“Maybe. I'm sure everyone will be glad that you're coming. But what is Caroline up to?”
“Probably nothing very startling,” said Merlyn easily. Malachi sniggered nastily.
“No, she wouldn't be able to carry it through, would she? Any more than she can carry through a sentence to its full stop. She probably doesn't know herself what she's up to.”
Caroline Chaunteley, Merlyn found, lived in Mount-grave Rise, and when he got there on the appointed day, earlyish, he found it was a gently ascending street of houses ten minutes' walk from the center of Pudsey. The houses were postwar semidetached, well cared for, and even spacious beside the scrimped houses of the recent developments, including a group of stone houses apparently designed for midgets at the bottom of the hill. Merlyn could have found the house inhabited by Caroline by the noise alone: the party was already in progress. He got out of his car and stood for a moment in the warm May sunshine. Then he got his bag of bottles from the back-seat and went up to the front door.
“Oh, hello, Merlyn, I'm so glâ”
Caroline's eyes had lit up, bright centers in a careworn face.
“It sounds as if everyone is having a good time.”
“Oh yes. I'll just get them all out into the garden round the barbecue, and then we can⦔
“It's good you can trust them not to start a fire.”
“Oh, their father's here. I always invite him to birthdays. It shows him what he's missing.”
Merlyn caught a brief flash of malice pass over her face at this rare finished sentence. Then she gestured to a door on one side of the hall and herself turned and went through one on the other side. Briefly the noise was deafeningâover a dozen children there, Merlyn guessed from his swift glimpse of themâthen the door shut on the sound of French windows being opened and children rushing out into the garden. Merlyn turned and went through to the drawing room.
Edward was there already, and Aunt Marigold was ensconced in a wheelchair in a corner, ministered to by a stern-faced Emily. There was also a young man, looking early twenties, though with something of a Peter Pan or Cliff Richard air about him that suggested to Merlyn that he was older than that. He was wearing a rather old-fashioned sports jacket and gray trousers, and was standing a bit apart from the rest by the window.
“I'll just get rid of my bottles,” murmured Merlyn, and unloaded both onto the sideboard. Though Edward was the most congenial person in the room, and Aunt Marigold the one Merlyn most wanted to talk to, he felt he ought to get a handle on the young manâtoo young to be Caroline's husband, he decided, but too old to be the result of an early indiscretion of hers. He went over, holding out his hand.
“Hello, I'm Merlyn Docherty.”
“Yes, I sort of guessed that. I'm Roderick Massey. You probably won't remember me.”
“Not really. But I know you're Paul's son.”
“That's right, or at leastâ¦I don't quite know why I'm here.”
“It's good to meet you, anyway.”
“That's what Caroline said, that we ought to be on speaking terms, all of us. The idea seems to have got around that I'm mentioned in the will.”
“You are. If I had died you would do quite nicely: twenty-five percent of half the estate. But I'm afraid I'm alive, so you shouldn't get your hopes up. I've made a will, just a temporary one, leaving everything to the NSPCC. I'll make another one when the fact that I'm Merlyn Docherty is recognized, and I'll try to respect what I can gather of Aunt Clarissa's intentions. But nobody's going to get riches. Lottery winners are luckier. I hope you weren't depending on hundreds of thousands?”
“Not at all. I wasn't depending on anything. I hardly knew Aunt Clarissa, and I can't think why she mentioned me, unless it was for completeness. All the rellies, as Australians say.”
“I can assure you all the rellies were not in the will. Just a select few.”
“So Iâ¦? Oh well, never mind. I imagine things are in train for you to be declared the heir. It's a case of winner takes all, isn't it?”
“Well, nearly all.”
Roderick Massey swallowed any disappointment he might feel.
“It must be very confusing for you, meeting all these Cantelo relatives again.”
“It is, rather. It's as if a film had suddenly skipped forward twenty years and the makeup artists had had to get busy putting lines on faces, gray powder on the temples, and so on. Luckily I haven't made any mistakes so far, never taken one person for another, which would have been seized on. And it would have been easy to do, because there is a sort of family likeness that several of them have, and others not.”
“I suppose so,” said Roderick, looking around the room. “I don't really know most of the people here. My mother wasn't a Cantelo, of course, and my father took off soon after I was born.”
“And your mother married someone called Massey?”
“That's right, and changed my name then. Quite right too. I've had practically nothing to do with my birth father, and I'm very fond of my adoptive father, so it
feels
right to call him father. What else? It would feel very odd to call Paul Cantelo father if he reappeared.”
“I suppose it wouldâ¦Actually,
my
father has just reappeared.”
“Oh? Had you lost touch?”
“Totally.”
“How did it feel?”
“Odd, as you've just said. But in this case there's no rival or alternative father. It was not much more than reestablishing contact with a not particularly close friend. I felt all the time I was checking for resemblances to and differences from the person I had once known.”
Roderick nodded.
“I see. Interesting.”
“Complicated by the fact that he claimed to be a new and changed personalityâcaring, responsible, possessor of all the cardinal virtues.”
“But you're skeptical?”
“By nature.”
“Merlyn!” It was Edward and Francis, the latter newly arrived, who came over carrying glasses of whisky and barged into the tête-à -tête, breaking it up, whether intentionally or otherwise. As Roderick slipped away, Merlyn turned reluctantly to his cousins. He felt moderately close to Edwardâthe tie of being schoolfellows as well as of the same family oddly surviving all the years of separation.
“Back in the lions' den?” Francis giggled.
“That's right. Caroline dangled a children's party before me, and I couldn't refuse.”
“Ha!” said Edward ironically. “But at least you did come. Does that mean that when you come into your inheritance, you're not going to cast us all off? Not going to wash your hands of us, like Pip did with the Gargerys?”
“No, why should I? It's only Rosalind who's making a fuss. With some help from her husband and from Aunt Emily, perhaps. I don't think there was ever a chance of my getting close to Rosalind, though Barnett may be having a change of heart.”
“Barnett is generally seen in the family as long-suffering. But we may have got it all wrong.” Francis tittered as he spoke. “You've got to remember, Merlyn, that we're not a close family. We never have been.”
“Haven't we?” said Merlyn, creasing his brow. “I know all of you, or nearly all.”
“That's because your mother was generally loved, and the one member of the family all the rest got on with. When she died, and when your father went to pieces, everyone felt protective of you, asked you round, slipped you five shillings.”
“That's true. I remember the five shillingses.”
“But how many of them visited Clarissa, how many of them asked her, or any of the other Cantelos, to their homes? The truth is, many of them loathe each other, and the others are suspicious of each other. It's that sort of family.”
“It's true,” said Edward, in genial corroboration. “They're always in competition with each other.” He turned toward the window. Out in the garden Caroline's husband was engaged with about a dozen children, cooking them hamburgers and sausages, and generally making sure they had a good time. If he was being forced into being a good father for the day, he was disguising it well. “And marrying a Cantelo is not much fun either,” added Edward.