The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (5 page)

She walks down Charlotte Street to the corner of Goodge Street and stands waiting for a taxi. There’s a sharp wind, it makes her eyes sting. She does not cry.

6

The rain has passed by the time Laura sets off for work. She drives the old Volvo down green lanes, the trees cut close on either side to the height of the highest truck. Overhead the branches are vaulted like the aisles of a cathedral. Through lime-green tunnels to the Newhaven road, through the straggling village of Edenfield, past the church and the shop and the pub, her handbag on the seat beside her, the letter in the handbag. She has made a resolution. She will not reply until she has talked to Henry.

So now as she follows her familiar route to Edenfield Place her mind is busy not thinking about the letter. Instead she thinks about her nine-year-old daughter Carrie, who has got herself into a tangle over her friendships. Carrie’s best friend Naomi won’t talk to her because Carrie was paired on an art project with Tessa and Carrie and Tessa went on with their art project in break. Now Naomi won’t even look at her when Carrie tries to make up and won’t answer when she speaks to her and Carrie is frantic with misery. Not that she shows it or talks about it. Only her eyes red from secret crying and her little face white from lack of sleep admit that her soul is desolated. Last night after she was supposed to be tucked up it all came hiccupping out, the dreadful tale of unjust punishment and love denied.

‘I’m not Tessa’s friend, Tessa’s friend, it’s only for the project, I had to do it, do it, why does she hate me? I ask her why, her why, she won’t talk to me, I try to be nice, but she won’t talk, won’t talk.’

Is this bullying? Should Laura alert her daughter’s class teacher? How do you order one little girl to be friends with another little girl? Laura held Carrie in her arms and told her it wasn’t her fault and people just do get jealous sometimes and at least it means Naomi wants to be her friend because it’s only when you really love someone that you hurt them this way.

‘I know that,’ said Carrie, nine years old but wise to the ways of the world. ‘I just wish she’d talk to me.’

Laura turns into the park gates and down the long drive to the immense and ugly house. Until recently Edenfield Place was considered absurd, its sprawling mass of turrets and towers assembled with a deliberate asymmetry, a Victorian fantasy of the middle ages created for a pharmacist grown rich on patent medicines. But a century has gone by, the false past has become the real past, and now the Gothic Revival style is admired and preserved. Edenfield Place’s listing has been promoted to Grade I. Its third-generation owner, William Holland, Lord Edenfield, finds himself obliged to maintain the acres of carved stone and woodwork, the tiles and the marble inlay, the stained glass, the mosaics, and the Victorian ironwork. The original source of the Holland fortune, no longer generously laced with opiates, no longer enriches its patent holder; and the present Lord Edenfield, known to all as Billy, finds that as the prestige of his estate rises, his ability to support it falls.

Laura Broad, formerly of Bernard Quaritch Antiquarian Books, is one small part of the survival strategy. The library at Edenfield Place houses a famous collection of travel books and maps, established by the family patriarch and enlarged by his son George. No one knows the value of the collection, but it is supposed that its hundreds of shelves bear a treasure that can be exchanged for hard cash. Laura’s task is to catalogue and to estimate.

So far she has unearthed one golden nugget: a rare first edition of the
Peregrinaçam
by Mendes Pinto, one of the first Europeans to travel in Japan. She carried it excitedly to Billy Holland, who said, ‘How much?’ She guessed £30,000. ‘Not enough,’ he replied. She has raised his expectations too high with her stories of First Folios selling for millions.

She parks by the west wing and goes in by the servants’ entrance. Pat Kelly the housekeeper sees her pass by down the passage.

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Please, Pat. You’re an angel.’

Laura works the bank of switches that turn on the library lights, and bay after bay emerges from the gloom. The long hall has only one window, at the far end, but it is enormous: wide and arched and crowded with stone tracery. Above it the intricate scrollwork of the carved wood walls rises to a hammerbeam roof. The floor is a riot of inlaid marble, a flowering meadow that is cold under foot.

She settles down in her work corner, opens the hard-bound lined notebook in which she is listing the results of her search. The first rapid trawl is done: ahead the slow labour, volume by volume, shelf by shelf. She is doing the job for a finder’s fee of four per cent. On total sales of, say, a quarter million this would net her £10,000. Surely in a library of this size she can rack up at least that. You need luck, of course. A page annotated by Daniel Defoe. A previously unidentified account of a voyage that turns out to be by a crew member on the
Beagle
. The first Lord Edenfield bought on impulse, in batches, some of which have never been broken up. There is no catalogue, only files of letters from booksellers and intermediaries.

These letters are her initial source of information. Here she tracks dates, titles, prices paid. One by one she is excavating the forty-four big box files, converting the unstable stacks of papers into methodical lists. She has reached File 17.

Pat Kelly comes with tea and biscuits. Pat likes Laura’s company, the house can be lonely. She brings chocolate bourbons.

‘Pat, you shouldn’t. I like them too much.’

‘And why not? What harm is there in a little of what you like?’

Pat is Irish, beautiful in a comfortable cushiony way, unassailably good-tempered. Her sympathy is easily roused, most frequently by the stories she reads in the newspaper, where she locates on an almost daily basis tales of the abuse or murder of children. ‘The little angel, she’ll be in heaven now, her sufferings are over. But what was he thinking when he did it? Does he not have a mother that loves him?’

She also brings Laura reports on her employer, whose solitary life touches her heart.

‘The poor man, what does he do all day but watch television? He needs company. Yesterday I heard noises in the chapel. It was him, talking to his mother.’

Billy Holland’s mother has been dead for years. A shrine in the chapel created to her memory by her husband George has an inscription that reads: ‘You loved so well the Lord took you for his own.’

‘Do you mean he was saying prayers?’

‘Prayers? Don’t I know prayers? He was talking to her, the soft onion.’

Pat proffers the idiosyncratic term with tenderness.

‘Well, Mummy, he says. You know I’ve never been the clever one, he says. I don’t know that I can hold it together much longer, he says, with Celia gone.’

‘You listened, Pat!’

‘So I did. With Celia gone, he says.’ Pat’s round eyes widen with scorn. ‘It’s ten years at least since that lady was kind enough to cease tormenting the poor man.’

Laura knows there’s concern over money, but not that it has reached crisis point. Celia, the departed Lady Edenfield, was reputed to be a tight manager.

‘Do you think he’ll sell up, Pat?’

‘Not him. Didn’t he make a promise to his father? I never knew a man respect his father the way that man does. He says to me one day, Forty years, Pat. My father lived for forty years after my mother died, and never looked at another woman. That’s love, Pat, he says.’

‘Is it true?’

‘It’s true enough, there’s no denying. As true as it’s daft.’

‘You don’t say that to Billy.’

‘Would I say such a thing? But it’s a terrible thing to see a good man go to waste.’

By now the tea is drunk and the three chocolate Bourbons eaten, two by Laura. Pat takes up the tray.

‘You’re the only one comes in here now,’ she says.

Laura returns to her file. There, half an hour or so after Pat Kelly has told her George Holland never looked at another woman for forty years, she finds the love letters. They are tied together with string, and there’s a covering note dated October 10th 1955.

Doll has returned my letters. I will never see her again. I will not burn what remains of the greatest happiness I have ever known.

She unties the string. The first folded sheet carries a single line written in erratic pencil.

Waiting in lake house 6oc. Doll.

Then another folded sheet, an impulsive line in fluent ink.

Swear to be there if only for a quarter hour. I miss you every minute. G.

Laura reads no more. These letters have no commercial value. She refolds the papers, re-ties the string.

She walks through empty halls to the chapel. The heavy door swings open without a sound. Inside is a space as big as a city church, illuminated by the melancholy colours of Victorian stained glass. The memorial to the second Lady Edenfield is halfway down the north wall, a marble effusion of urn and drapery presided over by a life-size angel. Laura tracks the carved inscription below for a date of death.

October 2nd 1955.

Eight days later her husband brought his liaison to an end. His forty years of devoted celibacy, it seems, formed the long coda not only to his marriage but to his adultery. Other people’s lives always so much more complicated than they seem.

My own life so much more complicated than it seems.

She sits in a mahogany pew and stares unseeingly at the altar furnishings. Only words on paper: but words, paper, these are the constituents of high explosive. Libraries not dry as supposed, not dusty, but coursing with blood, hissing with passion. She has learned in the course of her work to love libraries, to find in long-untouched books the shivery excitement of waking the dead. Now she learns they can destroy the living.

Shall we meet and compare notes on the vagaries of life’s journey?

Billy Holland is in the little room he calls his office, though it also contains a single high bed that has an air of being slept in. He is seated at his desk, reading glasses low on his nose, hands clasping greying temples. As Laura enters his big blank eyes rise up to meet hers, and he blinks as if emerging from sleep.

‘Oh, Laura. Hello.’

‘Sorry to bother you, Billy. I found something I thought you should see.’

‘How much is it worth?’

‘Nothing of any value, I’m afraid. Even so.’

She holds out the string-tied bundle.

‘I’m relying on you, Laura. Rumple— Rumple—’

He waves one hand in the air to grasp the elusive word.

‘Rumpelstiltskin?’

‘That’s the fellow. Weave straw into gold.’

He reads the covering note. Bewilderment spreads slowly over his mottled face.

‘What is this? I don’t understand.’

‘I found them in one of the letter files. I’ve not looked at them, beyond a first glance.’

He nods, and begins to untie the string. His fingers fumble helplessly. She leans over the desk, and with quick precise movements releases the knots. Easy to do for other people.

She leaves him reading the letters in silence.

7

There was a note waiting for her in her pigeon-hole in the porter’s lodge. The handwriting was unfamiliar and there was no name at the end.

4pm. Came to see you but you’re not here. If you come to see me I’ll be there.

She knew at once the note was from Nick Crocker, without entirely knowing how she knew. She showed it to Katie, who was indignant.

‘Why can’t he put his name? It’s ridiculous.’

Laura wanted to say that it wasn’t ridiculous at all, that it was both a test and a declaration. He was saying to her: if you know who I am then I’m right about you. If I’m right about you, we’ll meet again. And it was more than that, it was a promise.
I’ll be there
.

‘He doesn’t know when you’ll call on him. He doesn’t know he’ll be there. What’s he going to do? Stay in his room for days in case you drop by?’

‘No,’ said Laura. ‘I don’t think so.’

He’s waiting for me now. He wants me to come. She had that melting feeling she got in her stomach when she was very excited or very afraid.

‘So what will you do?’

‘I expect I’ll look him up. Some time.’

From this moment on she thought about Nick Crocker without ceasing. This certainly was ridiculous. She didn’t know him at all. They had talked at Richard’s party, but not for long, and she had hardly been able to hear him over the chatter and the music. How was it that on such a slender basis she imagined her life was about to change?

Her first thought was that she would call on him in a day or two. It wouldn’t do to seem too keen. On the other hand she had no wish to appear indifferent. Maybe tomorrow evening? Soon, however, she realized she was incapable of waiting until tomorrow. Either this is all about nothing, she reasoned to herself, in which case the sooner I get it out of my system the better. Or it’s the real thing at last; in which case, why wait?