Two Loves Page 5

  ‘Joss? I don’t suppose he’ll understand much of it, will he? He’s not ten yet.’

  ‘That boy understands far too much, dear. The things he insists on watching on the television! And if I pretend not to understand something, oh, he explains it to me. I blame all this sex education they have nowadays. I didn’t know anything about erections, dear, until I started nursing, but Joshua…’

  At the same moment they both realised that Brian was standing at the open door of the lounge – in stockinged feet, of course – and listening to them with some interest.

  ‘I came in for a cup of tea,’ he said, ‘but don’t let me interrupt you.’

  ‘Come and sit down, Brian. Rosamund’s a bit worried because Anthony had been writing some rather risqué poems to one or two of his mistresses and now they’re going to be published. There’ll be quite a little scandal, Rosamund says.’

  Brian seemed to come to life. ‘Fancy that, now! That’ll be something to live up to in the George, won’t it? What relation is he to me, Marian? My late stepson-in-law? Yes, my late stepson-in-law. Harvey, have you read those little verses by my late stepson-in-law? All right, aren’t, they? What are they like, Rosamund? “There was a young man of Khartoum…” How does it go? That was a good one.’

  ‘That’s a limerick, dear. Not the same thing at all. And no, we don’t want to hear it.’

  They had tea and some home-made lemon cake, Marian and Brian seeming very lively, Brian telling them about the time he did National Service and knew a thing or two, and Marian recalling her three months on Men’s Surgical when she did her nursing training.

  ‘I must get back or Joss will be home before me,’ Rosamund said after her second cup of tea. ‘And by the way, Mum, I love the new rug.’

  * * *

  A few days later, Anthony’s son Alex contacted her. Rosamund and Alex had always treated each other warily; he resented her, with the result that she was nervous of him. ‘I’m ringing on my mother’s behalf,’ he said stiffly. ‘My father’s agent has been in touch with her about something rather worrying.’

  ‘Is it to do with Erica Underhill?’

  ‘How did you know? Did Giles contact you?’

  ‘No, of course not. He’s completely loyal to your mother, still regarding me as an interloper.’

  ‘So how did you know? Erica Underhill’s been in touch with you?’

  ‘I’ve never spoken to her in my life. Nor heard from her.’

  There was a long pause before Alex decided to continue.

  ‘Giles had a phone-call from a journalist who asked whether he could have access to my father’s private papers as he intended to write his biography. He was a little suspicious since there’d been two official biographies already, so he said he’d need a written application with full details of his proposal, the name of his publisher, etc. etc. And in the meantime he heard from a friend, another literary agent, that Erica Underhill had been making enquiries for a writer to ghost her autobiography. Naturally he warned my mother not to speak to anyone however plausible he might seem. And naturally she’s in a state about it. You can imagine how Erica Underhill’s autobiography would upset her.’

  Rosamund sighed. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘It’s all so long ago, and anyway Erica Underhill was the guilty party. Your mother would have nothing to fear.’

  ‘She’s thinking of my father’s reputation.’

  ‘His reputation seems in pretty good shape.’

  ‘It’s all very well to say that. Up to now his biographers have been very circumspect. They naturally mentioned his divorce, but not the circumstances leading to it. They’ve been very civilised.’

  ‘They even made his marriage to me sound fairly innocuous.’

  ‘You had nothing to do with the break-up of my mother’s marriage. She doesn’t feel any animosity towards you.’

  ‘That’s magnanimous of her.’

  ‘She’s got a proposition to make to you.’

  On this occasion again Rosamund was silent so that Alex had to continue. ‘She wants you to write a book about him. Your personal recollections. She knows you’d be careful of my father’s reputation and she’s confident you’d be fair to her, so it would be an answer to Underhill’s. She also thinks you should be in a position to make money from it – as well as his mistress and some cheque-book journalist. She knows you weren’t very adequately provided for.’

  ‘She’s right about that.’ There was another long pause before Rosamund added, ‘And it’s kind of her to think of it.’

  ‘My mother’s not an ogre, whatever my father might have told you.’

  ‘He mentioned her very little, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Will you think about it?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to. I’m at a stage of my life when I’m restless and on the lookout for some new project, though I’ve no idea whether I’m capable of writing a book. Anyway, will any publisher be likely to be interested in a further book after Erica Underhill’s?’

  ‘Giles thinks so. He thinks hers will have whetted the readers’ imagination so that yours could be a real money spinner. My mother would let you have access to all his private papers and she’d give you permission to quote from any of his poems. She owns the copyright of all his poetry, as you probably know.’

  ‘Though I suppose Erica Underhill would own the copyright of the poems he sent her.’

  There was another pause. ‘She has poems of his? Love poems, presumably?’

  ‘Yes, love poems. And I think they’d be the reason her autobiography would be rather well received.’

  ‘You’ve read them? These poems?’

  ‘Yes. Anthony kept copies of them, but asked me not to have them published until twenty years after his death.’

  ‘So that they shouldn’t upset my mother?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Perhaps you could inform Erica Underhill of that.’

  ‘She may need the money, though. She must be quite old by this time. Well, I may go to see her. I suppose I’ll have to if I take this on. But I really can’t see that I can ask her not to include the poems. They’re erotic but very beautiful, and they’d be the book’s main attraction, wouldn’t they?’

  * * *

  That night in bed Rosamund went over the last weeks of Anthony’s life. He was very weak and frail, and unhappy, too, knowing that he was dying. Occasionally she would read aloud some of his poems, hoping they’d comfort him, remind him of his achievements, but he didn’t seem to think much of them. ‘I didn’t read that very well,’ she’d say. ‘Shall I try it again?’

  He’d shake his head feebly as though all his most famous lines meant nothing to him now. To Rosamund it was unbearably sad. That he had nothing to say and nothing he wanted to hear.

  During the last days, though, he seemed to rouse himself and want to talk. He gripped Rosamund’s hand, though she wasn’t sure that he knew who she was, ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said over and over again, but without saying anything else.

  At last she guessed what he wanted. She got a pad and pencil and said, ‘Right, I’m ready to take it down,’ and then he dictated a few sentences to her – the beginning, she realised, of his life’s story. Less than half a page it turned out to be, before he lapsed into sleep again.

  Rosamund had kept that page in a cardboard box with Joss’s baby clothes, and that night she got out of bed to fetch it. She hadn’t looked at it for years, hadn’t thought of it for years: ‘When I was two or three years old, my nurse would take me past the grounds of a mansion where there were soldiers convalescing, soldiers wounded in the First World War. They would come over to the gate as we walked past. Some of them had only one leg and walked on crutches, but the ones I was really frightened of were those with bandaged heads. I was afraid the tops of their heads would fall off. I used to dream of those men.

  ‘I was very fond of my nurse who was called Florence Maud. She was a large pretty girl with dark eyes. Her breasts would bob up and down wh
en she ran downstairs. One night I woke up and went upstairs to the attic to find her and discovered my father lying on top of her and hurting her. I said, “Papa, Papa.”’

  That was the last thing Anthony said. ‘Papa, Papa.’ He repeated it several times over.

  Chapter Five

  Rosamund and Erica Underhill sat at the window looking at photographs of Anthony. He was certainly handsome when he was young, Rosamund thought. She wished she’d known him at that time.

  She’d expected at least a measure of hostility when she’d first contacted Erica, but there’d been none; Erica had agreed to a meeting as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I expect you’ve heard about the book I’m planning to write,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘I hope you’re not worrying about it. I won’t have anything bitchy to say about Anthony, I promise you. You see, I loved him.’

  ‘Do you live on your own these days?’ she asked Rosamund when they met.

  ‘Apart from my son who’s almost ten now.’ She described Joss; his charm, his forthright manner, his dark eyes and hair.

  ‘I’d have liked Anthony’s child,’ Erica told her, ‘but it wasn’t possible. In my day it was one thing to have a lover, quite another to have a baby outside marriage. Anyway, I still hoped to get married at that stage. I needed to get married. I needed money. All my life I’ve needed money. Such a bore. I’ve never had a proper job, just odds and ends.’

  Was she apologising for publishing the poems, Rosamund wondered. If so, there was no need for it; she already felt both pity and affection for her.

  Erica had great style, even now. A grey jersey suit, a bottle-green blouse exactly matching her eyes, peacock-blue glass beads, elegant shoes. Rosamund, who had made an effort with her appearance, subduing her natural enthusiasm for too many colours, too many patterns, had only managed to look neat in a cream linen suit her mother had chosen for her.

  ‘You see, I wasn’t educated for anything,’ Erica continued. ‘Girls weren’t in my day. I stayed on at school, a boarding school in Kent, until I was eighteen, then went abroad for ten years. It was the thing to do in those days. You got a job as companion to some American woman who was travelling to South America or India, and hoped to pick up a rich admirer while you were at it.’

  ‘I bet you did, too.’

  ‘Not the right sort, though. I think I was always seen as a girlfriend or mistress rather than a wife. I don’t think I had that steely determination that other women seemed to have, that insistence on the wedding ring. Oh, I had a good time with one or two wonderfully handsome young men, but didn’t manage to get myself a husband.’

  ‘You were too beautiful. Men are easily frightened.’

  Erica smiled. Such blatant flattery! She liked Rosamund.

  ‘How did you meet Anthony? He wasn’t the type you’d come across abroad.’

  ‘I came home because my mother was ill. She died in a few months and left me this flat and some money which gave me the opportunity to change my lifestyle. It was time for change.’

  Rosamund looked round the room with added interest. She hadn’t realised that this was the flat that Anthony had visited so often. She felt rather as though she were spying on him. It was easy to imagine him here.

  ‘Not enough money, of course,’ Erica continued, ‘but just sufficient to live on with some other odds and ends. Never had a proper job. Wasn’t trained for anything.’

  ‘You used to cook for parties, Anthony said.’

  ‘Yes, I did for a time. What else did he tell you about me?’

  ‘That you posed for several well-known artists.’

  ‘That didn’t last long. Oh, I did a bit of everything over the years, took parties of tourists round London and Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon, translated from Italian for publishers and film companies; I’d lived in Italy for several years. That’s how I got to know Anthony. He’d seen my advertisement – in the Statesman I think it was, and brought along some Italian poems for me to translate.’

  ‘He was already married to Molly at that time?’

  ‘Yes. His first wife had died, as you probably know, and he’d married again almost immediately.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Molly?’

  ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘No. Of course I shall have to if I decide to go ahead with my book.’

  ‘Tell me what she’s like, won’t you?’

  ‘You must know what she’s like.’

  ‘No. You can never trust a man when he’s talking about his wife; always that mixture of slavish devotion and implacable hatred. She can’t be as bad as I imagined her … Shall we have some tea?’

  ‘Lovely. I brought some pastries from the delicatessen by the tube.’

  ‘Oh, darling, they’re hideously expensive! What a treat though.’

  Erica sat back, the thought of tea quite forgotten. ‘The poems are all I have left to sell,’ she said.

  ‘They’re wonderful poems. You should be very proud to have inspired them. Anthony showed them to me a few weeks before he died. He asked me not to have them published for twenty years, but I’m sure he wouldn’t want you to be short of money.’

  ‘You can’t be rich yourself.’

  ‘No, but I’m not desperate … Shall I make the tea?’

  ‘That would be very kind. Are you sure you don’t mind? The kitchen is an unholy mess, I’m afraid.’

  ‘My mother says that. “What an unholy mess!” But only about my kitchen, not hers.’

  * * *

  Even after the warning, Rosamund was appalled by Erica’s kitchen, not the untidiness, but the filth. She’d already realised that Erica was at least ten years older than she admitted to, she was nearer eighty than seventy, almost eighty, and needing someone’s care. Still the remains of beauty, the deep-set eyes, the cheekbones and the wonderful jawline, but an old woman and unable to cope on her own. The sink and the working surfaces were squalid, the only tea she had was the cheapest variety, the milk in the grimy fridge old, not quite sour, but full of blue lumps, a smell of rotting swede coming from somewhere. She washed some cups and saucers, a milk jug and a plate for the pastries and carried in the tray.

  Erica was leaning back in her chair, her eyes shut. ‘Oh,’ she said, waking with a jolt. ‘It’s you, Stevie.’

  ‘No, it’s Rosamund. Rosamund Gilchrist.’

  ‘Of course it is. Such delicious cakes!’

  ‘Who is Stevie?’

  ‘Did I say Stevie? Oh dear: She was a maid my mother had in the old days. I haven’t thought of her for years.’

  The room was getting dark, shadows of the plane trees outside the window patterning the dark red carpet and the heavy furniture. Rather nice furniture, Rosamund thought, solid Edwardian mahogany, a faint smell of potpourri coming from somewhere, a marble fireplace fitted with a gas fire.

  ‘Anthony would have liked this room,’ she said. She could imagine him sitting in the straight-backed wing chair, spreading a napkin over his thin knees, cutting the pastry very precisely, leaning forward to avoid making crumbs, looking at the young Erica as he’d later looked at her. ‘Was he a very ardent lover?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m far too old to remember,’ Erica said, but looking as though she remembered very well, ‘but his letters seem to suggest that he was fairly happy in my company.’

  ‘I bet he was.’

  ‘But not so happy that he was prepared to leave his wife – who didn’t make him at all happy, or so he said. Men have a strange sense of reality.’

  ‘He had a family.’

  ‘Yes, he had a family. And the family won. And I have no children and no grandchildren … I’d have enjoyed grandchildren, I think.’

  Rosamund looked at her spearing the last piece of éclair, raising it to her mouth and chewing robustly. ‘That abortion you had made a tremendous impact on Anthony,’ she said. ‘He told me he’d never been so unhappy as he was then.’

  Erica raised her hand to steady her trembling mouth, while in her other han
d her fork clattered against her plate. ‘He shouldn’t have told you about the abortion,’ she said. ‘He promised he’d never mention that to a soul.’

  ‘He was very old when he told me. He’d obviously forgotten.’

  ‘I won’t mention that in my book and I hope you won’t.’

  There was a silence during which they looked hard at each other.

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ Rosamund said.

  ‘It upset him, you think?’

  ‘It devastated him. He said you very nearly died. The poem called The Reckoning was written about it. You must have known.’

  ‘I suppose I did. But you know, I hardly saw him after that. I went to Provence for a short holiday – which he paid for – and there I met Roger Kingsley whom I married the following year.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d got married. Anthony never mentioned that. It hurt him too much, I suppose.’

  ‘I went to America with Roger and lived there until his death three years later. I never saw Anthony again.’

  ‘Did your husband know about the abortion?’

  ‘Of course not. Nobody knew about it. Abortion was highly illegal in those days. Roger would certainly not have married me if he’d known about it.’

  ‘That’s why Anthony wouldn’t hear of my having an abortion – because of the agony you and he had gone through. So it’s you I have to thank for Joss, I suppose. My son, Joshua.’

  ‘You weren’t married, then, when he was conceived?’

  ‘No. We’d never considered it. No, Anthony was just someone I visited in the holidays. I was teaching in Liverpool and of course used to love being able to visit the famous poet. He was always so pleased to see me, took me out to expensive restaurants, cooked for me, tried to educate me. But marriage was the last thing either of us had thought of.’

  For a while they were both caught up in memories, their eyes losing focus.

  ‘My inside was all messed up. Though it was done privately of course and cost plenty,’ Erica said, her voice harsh.

  ‘He was nearly fifty years older than me, almost half a century older. If he were alive now he’d be eighty-four.’

  ‘I meant nothing to him.’