The Pleasure Quartet (9 page)

Knowing I was alone and there was no reason to actually get up, I unconsciously prolonged my time in bed, basking in the heat retained between the bedcovers, stretching endlessly in a vain bid
to settle the turmoil dominating my body and thoughts, tossing and turning until the light seeping through the washed-out grey net curtains won its battle against my laziness. Which left me with
too many free hours until I had to present myself at the theatre again.

Increasingly unsettled in our tiny rental when I was alone and a dangerous prey to my unexpressed fears, to fill the time I would often take public transport at random, catch a bus on a whim and
just explore new parts of London, wandering aimlessly through the city’s immensities and quirky corners, uncovering secret parts, hidden parks, miraculous waterways and low-slung bridges,
empty estates and industrial zones. And when autumn began in earnest and the weather started to limit my urban travels, I would sit idly at the kitchen table trying to make my coffee and toast last
longer, or attempt to read a book and wake up from an aimless reverie an hour or so later still focused on the same page and with no memory of anything that had occurred earlier in the story in
question.

That morning saw me again prey to inactivity.

The phone rang.

‘Moana Irving?’

‘Yes, speaking.’

‘Wonderful. It’s taken me ages to trace you . . .’

‘I’m sorry?’

A man with a youthful voice and a pronounced self-satisfied Oxbridge tone. Somehow the wrong sort of voice for a nuisance or unwanted sales call.

My mental cobwebs still lingered.

‘And you are?’ I ventured.

‘Your cousin.’

‘You must have called the wrong number. I don’t have any cousins . . .’

‘Oh yes you do . . . I’m Gwillam.’

‘Who?’

‘Gwillam Irving. I realise it’s a bit of an uncommon first name, but it’s the one I was given at birth. Never had much of a choice in the matter, I fear.’

I felt inclined to like him after that. People were forever getting my name wrong too.

I took another sip of coffee from the mug. It was cold and useless.

‘So how exactly are we related?’ I asked him.

‘Ah, it’s a long story,’ he replied.

‘I’m all ears.’ I still found the whole thing dubious.

‘Not actually a first cousin. The connection is more remote. Your dad had a step-brother. He married my mother.’

It was the first time in ages I’d had to even think of the father I had never known. I felt a pang of anger.

‘I think something happened and they all became estranged. I’ve never found out what exactly happened,’ he continued.

‘My father died before I was born,’ I told him. ‘On our way to New Zealand.’ There was no need to explain the actual circumstances.

‘Oh . . . I wasn’t aware of that . . . I’m so sorry. That’s very sad. I feared something of that nature as there were no traces of him in any of the documentation or
searches I made.’

‘So how did you come across me?’ I asked my new-found distant cousin.

‘A death notice in a newspaper, for your mum. I located it on a micro-fiche . . .’

I recalled how, after my mother had passed away, Iris’s parents had insisted on placing the formal announcement in an Auckland publication. ‘No one should depart this realm in total
silence,’ Iris’s father had said. He was always a very dignified person, a man with compassion and consideration.

‘Why were you looking?’

‘Genealogy is a hobby of mine. I’m studying for the bar,’ he said. ‘So it’s the sort of research that can always prove useful,’ he added. ‘And I was
curious about our family tree.’

It felt odd, but I was intrigued. In a strange way, it meant I wasn’t totally alone, in the blood. Gwillam was such an uncommon name, though. And he sounded so terribly posh and
worldly!

He beat me to it.

‘We should meet,’ he suggested.

‘Absolutely,’ I agreed.

I had to explain my lack of availability in evenings. He sounded genuinely excited by the fact that I worked in the theatre, before I had a chance to reveal how menial my position at the
Princess Empire was. He confessed to me that life as a legal student was mostly dull and he was envious of me moving in such by comparison decadent circles. I was about to correct him, but then
thought why the hell should I?

I, dull and repressed Moana, could become his highly exotic cousin!

It then occurred to me that maybe this was some sort of prank being played on me by Thomas, or even by Iris. After all, she was employed at a lawyer’s, and Gwillam had similar connections.
Was it just a coincidence?

I asked Gwillam where he worked and he mentioned a chambers in the Inns of Court that didn’t sound familiar to me. Iris was with a large firm of solicitors based in Chancery Lane. Which
didn’t mean that there was no collusion between them all, but still made me less suspicious. We settled for lunch a couple of days later. Gwillam suggested the Tavern Bar on the corner of
Bleeding Heart Yard, off Greville Street. It was a part of London I was unfamiliar with but within walking distance of his office.

He was standing to the right of the bar counter when I arrived and was nothing like I expected. Medium height, wearing plain NHS-issue brown-framed glasses, a blue cotton button-down shirt,
black jeans and brown leather moccasins.

His hair was lustrous and fell to his shoulders, which made him the least lawyerly lawyer I could have imagined. It was pale brown and combed back, highlighting a vast, smooth forehead beneath
which his eyes twinkled incessantly, combining with a permanent half-formed smile to give the impression that everything amused him. To me, he looked like something of a hippie, were it not for his
more traditional clothing. Had he come from his workplace dressed like that? Back in New Zealand, I knew that a lawyer, even an apprentice, would have been clad in solid black from head to toe, and
a plain white shirt with an anonymous necktie. I remembered the gloomy office Iris and I had been summoned to, where we had been passed Joan’s note and the open tickets for the journey to
Britain.

Were it not for our respective expressions, and if we had switched hair length, I felt we could have been brother and sister, with me the introvert one and he the extrovert. I warmed to him
immediately.

‘Hello, cousin,’ he said, his smile creasing further into welcoming realms of irony. ‘So, what’s your poison?’

He was drinking Guinness. I asked for the same, but in a half-pint glass to his larger one.

We found a seat in a corner of the darkened bar and made ourselves comfortable.

I was bursting with questions and the first hour we spent together rushed by as we compared stories about our parents, families, and connected all the necessary dots. Apart from actually
learning their names and personal idiosyncrasies, there were no major revelations, but I found it warming to learn of his side of my family and get an idea of what my parents had left behind when
they decided to emigrate.

We were already well into our second round of drinks, and the bar was almost empty with just a handful of pinstriped City types lingering in the gloom, when the conversation turned to me and my
growing up in New Zealand. I tried to make a dull subject interesting. By the time I reached the point in my story when my mother died and I had kindly been taken in by Iris’s parents, I
found it difficult not to reveal the fact of my almost puppy-like attraction to Iris. Whether Gwillam could read between my halting lines and guess the feral nature of my feelings was hard to say,
but he refrained from bombarding me with questions in response to my awkward reticence when it came to Iris.

A mad, stray thought rushed across my overworked brain when Gwillam left me on my own for a few minutes to visit the toilet, that he was just perfect; if Iris truly needed a man in addition to
me, he would make an ideal candidate that I could more than tolerate.

I would quickly learn how absurd that concept was.

‘So what prompted you two to come to England?’ he asked when he returned.

I explained Joan’s bequest and described some of her stories to him. Although I held back on the episode of the Ball. It was a shared memory that belonged to just Iris and me, and I
didn’t feel comfortable revealing all its details, even to Gwillam, apart from the fact that so much of it would sound absurd to an outsider.

‘She sounds like she was the life and soul of the party, Grandma Joan.’ Gwillam smiled. ‘A life well lived,’ he added.

‘She was lovely,’ I said.

‘I’m curious, though, about what she wrote about ghosts and all that. Bit of a strange message, don’t you think?’

Iris and I had initially been surprised by her note, but after finding out that she had left us the means to leave New Zealand and travel to London, we had been overly ebullient and had somehow
brushed the subject aside in our enthusiasm to arrange the journey as soon as we could manage.

‘I suppose so.’

‘What could she have meant? Was she a believer in the supernatural?’

‘I haven’t a clue. Iris neither. Though I doubt it. She scoffed at religion, I know, so I can’t imagine her putting much faith in ghost stories.’

Gwillam had explained earlier in our rambling conversation that as part of his training for the Bar he had become something of a specialist in hunting down lost heirs and estate beneficiaries.
It was like detective work, he said, and he was already an avid fan of crime and mystery books anyway, so it felt like combining his job with his hobby. I’d even found out that he had seen
our Jack the Ripper play at the theatre, although it had been a week before I had begun my work as an usherette there so our paths hadn’t crossed.

‘Maybe I could look into it?’ he suggested. ‘Find out more about her life here and why she jumped ship?’

‘Would you? Could you?’

‘I feel I’m obligated to do so now. You know, I’m like a dog with a bone once something catches my attention!’ He chuckled. ‘Here you are, a hitherto unknown cousin
from the other side of the world, bringing your own mystery along with you. How could I resist?’

He took out a small notebook and wrote down the details I could recall about Joan and her time in London, and the stories she had regaled us with, and quizzed me about what I knew about
Iris’s family background.

He was still methodically interrogating me and I was running out of answers when I realised, by the increasing flow of punters into the pub, that time had flown, and with a quick glance at my
wristwatch that I was soon due at the Princess Empire. Fortunately we weren’t too far distant from Covent Garden.

I quickly excused myself.

‘I’m so sorry, Gwillam. I have to go to work for now . . . By the way, what about you? Shouldn’t you have returned from your lunch break?’

‘No. I took the afternoon off. Just had a hunch that we’d need the time.’

We made arrangements for our next encounter – a new psychedelic music club was opening, called The Electric Garden, and he had an invitation – and I rushed into the commuter flow and
made my way towards High Holborn, orientated myself and set off for the theatre.

I arrived just in time.

‘You have colour in your cheek,’ Clarissa said, greeting me in the foyer, herself straight in from the teeming street, dressed in a mannish white shirt with a stiff folded collar and
matching grey pinstripe waistcoat and trousers. Her shoes were black brogues, well shined. She looked like an extra from the
Mary Poppins
set, as if she ought to be carrying a cane and might
break into a tap routine alongside Dick Van Dyke at any moment.

‘I’ve been running,’ I explained.

‘How wonderfully eager,’ Clarissa said. And suggested we have a drink together after the show. Still buoyed by the unexpected comfort of my meeting with Gwillam, I accepted.

I busied myself between the seats more quickly than usual that night, impatient to meet Clarissa and put off my return to the bedsit. Each time I returned there these days, I feared what I would
find. The loneliness of an empty home, or maybe worse, Iris and Thomas together relaxing in easy domesticity, or just Iris alone and the wall of awkwardness that had formed between us like a
fortress, impenetrable.

A fog of blueness came over me at the thought, and I pushed Iris out of my head and tried to busy myself with the task at hand, picking up discarded sweet wrappers and empty plastic cups, but it
was no use. I let my mind wander instead.

Gwillam had cheered me today. There was something soothing about the notion of a blood relative, distant though the connection might be. I often felt so alone in the world, with no particular
family to speak of and the country of my birth so many thousands of miles away. I thought again of Iris and of the strange ties that bind us to others, whether through family lines, or romance, or
friendship. How those chains could be at once so strong, and yet so brittle.

Finally I finished tidying my allotted corner of the auditorium, returned a silk scarf the colour of butter and a blue and red striped neck tie to the lost property counter, and tallied up the
takings from that night’s sales of ice creams and programmes.

It was nearing midnight, but I was by now used to the late work and had become something of a night owl. The witching hour, it occurred to me, as I prepared to fetch my belongings from the staff
area within the dressing rooms and seek out Clarissa. I had half expected to find her waiting there, sitting on the low stool in front of one of the wide, gilt-edged mirrors, her face cocked to the
side and her chin jutting out as was her habit, but the room was empty.

I was the last usher to leave. Only Gerry remained, somewhere upstairs, storing the receipts away in the safe and preparing to lock up.

The racks of clothes and array of headgear on the hat stand took on an eerie feel without the usual hustle and bustle of panicked wardrobe hands preparing for a scene change. I brushed my
fingers along the clammy arm of a leather jacket. The costumes, with no one in them, had the same appearance to me as a room full of toys in the absence of a child playing. I was certain that when
I turned my back, the boots would clomp, the skirts would rustle, the shirts would stretch out arms to one another, as if the props had a certain magic in them that they bestowed on the wearer
instead of the reverse.