Gloria has been down here for a long time on her own. Not that she has much concept of time, these days. But where are the other inhabitants of the house today? The garden is empty. The swing seat sways to and fro vacantly. The surface of the pond holds a section of sky. The trees extend their branches stiffly and at their ends the leaves are crisp and curling.
A clock upstairs strikes midday; seconds later another answers it, at a higher pitch.
In the drawing room, Margot is sitting in a chair near the window. She doesn’t know this but it is the chair Ferdinanda used to favour for doing her embroidery: a Georgian nursing chair, armless, with a low seat and dainty, fluted legs. It has since been re-covered, by Gloria, in a rather unbecoming tomato-red velvet. It sits, by chance, very close to the place Ferdinanda used to have it – angled towards the window, towards the light.
Margot has been crying, on and off, all morning, in different locations about the house. She sits now, surrounded by a litter of tissues, her head leaning on her arm. She is still crying and has assumed the shuddering, swollen-faced aspect of someone worn out by grief.
Two floors above her, past the bedrooms, and up into the attic, is the noise of someone moving heavy boxes around, shifting furniture. Someone is conducting a search. A crash, a thud, the sound of someone swearing, a pause, then another thud.
Margot sobs, tweaks another tissue from the box, blows her nose, sobs again, then stops, drawing in a sharp breath. Felix is standing in the doorway. He is holding an ancient, dusty typewriter in his hands.
‘Felix,’ Margot says unsteadily, ‘that’s mine.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘It belonged to my father. Mother said so and—’
‘It was Lexie’s. I know it was.’
‘Yes, but, you see—’
‘What about everything else?’ Felix says, in a voice so quiet she has to strain to hear him, and Margot knows that voice. It’s the one he used to employ in interviews with particularly slippery politicians – icily calm, insidiously polite. It’s the voice that said to them, and the nation: I’ve got you and you’re not going to get away. It’s the voice that made him famous, all those years ago.
And now he’s using it to her. Margot swallows, tears rising in her eyes again. ‘What do you mean?’ she says, trying to rally herself.
‘You know what I mean,’ he says, still in tones of Arctic courtesy. ‘Lexie’s stuff. Where is it?’
‘What stuff?’ she blusters, but she knows he’s got her and she knows he knows.
‘Her clothes, her books, her things from the flat. The letters Laurence wrote to Ted, before he died.’ He lists these things with infinite patience. ‘All the stuff I cleared out of her flat and put in the attic.’
Margot shrugs and shakes her head at the same time. She reaches for another tissue.
Felix puts down the typewriter. He advances towards her. ‘Are you telling me,’ he murmurs, ‘that it’s gone?’
Margot holds the tissue to her face. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’
‘This is unbelievable,’ he says, and his tone has moved up a notch or two in volume. She’d forgotten that this is where the voice goes next – strident, domineering, in for the kill. ‘Unbelievable. It’s gone, hasn’t it? You and your bitch of a mother got rid of it all. Behind my back.’
‘Don’t shout,’ she whimpers, even though she knows he isn’t shouting, that Felix never shouts, never needs to.
‘Tell me,’ he says, standing above her. ‘Did you throw everything out?’
‘Felix, I really—’
‘Just give me a simple answer. Yes or no. Did you throw it out?’
‘I will not be bullied like this—’
‘Yes or no, Margot.’
‘Please stop.’
‘Come on. If you’re brave enough to do it, you’re brave enough to say it. Say, “Yes, I threw it out. All of it.” ’
There is silence in the room. Margot picks at the skin around her nails, discards a tissue on the floor.
Felix turns and walks to the window. ‘You realise,’ he says to the glass, ‘that Elina is coming? That I asked her to come. I told her we had all Lexie’s things up in the attic. That we’d give them to Ted and he could look through them. The least we could do, I said. You realise she’s coming here to collect it and you,’ he turns to her, ‘have gone and thrown it out.’
Margot begins a fresh bout of sobbing. ‘I’m sorry,’ she wails, ‘I didn’t mean to . . . I . . .’
‘You’re sorry. You didn’t mean to,’ Felix repeats. ‘I’ll tell Ted that, shall I? Margot didn’t mean to throw out all your dead mother’s things but she did anyway. Dear God,’ he spits, ‘Elina will be here any minute. You’ll have to tell her that all we’ve got is an old typewriter and some dusty paintings, and you can tell her why as well—’
Margot half rises from the chair. ‘Those paintings are mine, Felix,’ she begins. ‘They were never Lexie’s. They were mine all along. I took what belonged to me and—’
‘Spare me your petty, avaricious—’ Felix stops. The doorbell is ringing downstairs.
Felix opens the door to the street. Elina stands on the step. She is, as ever, dressed in an ensemble of extraordinary clothes: a long, loose cloth thing with hems that are ripped and fraying. Purple tights. Paint-stained sneakers on her feet. Jonah is in a sling on her front, like a small marsupial. He is awake, his eyes wide with astonishment, and when he sees Felix his face breaks into a delighted smile. Which is more than can be said for his mother.
‘Elina,’ Felix says, standing back to allow her to step inside, ‘how are you, my darling?’
‘I’m . . .’ She shrugs, avoiding his eyes. ‘You know.’
‘Thank you so much for coming.’
She shrugs again. ‘I don’t have much time. I have to get back.’
Felix realises at this point that he usually greets Ted’s girlfriend, the mother of his grandchild, with a kiss on the cheek. But it seems too late to give it now.
‘Yes, of course.’ Felix clenches and unclenches his hands. He finds it often helps him think. ‘So, how is he?’
‘Not good.’
‘Still in bed, is he?’
‘Yes.’
Felix swears, very softly, then says, ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘Would you . . . would you give him a message for me?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tell him . . .’ He hesitates. He is acutely aware of the presence of Margot, a floor above him, and that of Gloria, a floor below. ‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m truly sorry. For all of it. Tell him . . . tell him it wasn’t my idea. And that I never agreed with it.’ He sighs. ‘They cooked it up between them and I . . . It sounds pathetic, I know. I should have made a stand at the time, but I didn’t and I must take responsibility for that. It was a terrible, terrible mistake. And . . . and tell him I’d like to see him. Whenever he’s ready. Tell him to call me. Please.’
She inclines her head. ‘I will.’
Felix carries on. He finds he cannot stop speaking now that he has started. He finds himself saying things about Lexie, about how they met, about the night he picked up Theo in Lyme Regis, about how he got into an argument with Robert Lowe at the police station and a policeman had to come tell them to keep it down, to think of the boy, please, gents. At one point, he is clutching Elina’s arm and telling her that he loved Lexie, like no one else, that he made mistakes, yes, but that she was the love of his life, does she hear him, does she understand? Elina listens with a kind of doubtful intensity. She looks down at the tiled floor of the hallway. She runs the toe of her sneaker, stained red with paint, over the cracks. And then Felix tells her that the things have gone. Been thrown out. That there’s nothing. Nothing for Ted.
Elina looks straight at Felix, shaking her fringe out of her eyes. Then she says, ‘Nothing?’
Jonah chooses this moment to start to yell. He struggles and shouts in his sling, arching his back, his face reddening. Elina jigs up and down. She makes soothing, clicking noises at him. She unstraps him from the sling and hoists him to her shoulder.
‘There’s a typewriter. And some pictures.’
Elina is rubbing her hand up and down Jonah’s back. She is turned away from him, still jigging up and down in the way that women with babies have. Jonah’s cries are subsiding. He looks at Felix over his mother’s shoulder with an expression of injured outrage. Sorry, Felix wants to say, I’m sorry. He is filled with an urge to apologise to all of them, one by one.
‘I can show you,’ he says instead. ‘Come up.’
He and Elina and Jonah go up the first flight of stairs. There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The
clac-clac-a-clac
of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn’t, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The
ding
every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in.
He looks away from it. He clears his throat. ‘And these are the pictures. I think I found all of them. There might be a couple more around but I can always—’
Elina astonishes him by handing him the baby.
‘Oh,’ Felix says. Jonah dangles there, hoisted by his armpits in Felix’s hands. His feet circle each other, as if he’s riding an imaginary bike. He looks at a point above Felix’s hair, at Felix’s ear, down at the ground; he tips back his head to check the ceiling.
‘Jubba jubba whee,’ Jonah says.
‘Right,’ Felix says, ‘old chap.’
Elina is wiping her hands on her cloth dress. She is crouching beside the pictures stacked up against the wall. She looks at the outermost one – a jumble of triangles in murky colours, Felix has never liked it much – eases it forward and looks at the next, then the next, then the next. She is frowning the whole time, as if displeased. Perhaps, Felix thinks, she doesn’t much want these dusty old things in her house, but then he’d have thought that she might have shown a bit of interest, painting being her thing, after all, and—
She astonishes him again by saying: ‘I can’t take these.’
‘But, my darling, you must.’ Felix is firm. ‘They are rightfully Ted’s. They belonged to Lexie. They hung in the flat where, you know, he lived when—’
‘No,’ Elina interrupts. ‘I mean
I
can’t take them.’
Felix looks at her, perplexed. She has, he’s always thought, unusually large eyes, set into that pale, pierrot face of hers. They look larger than ever in the dim light of the landing. ‘Sweetie, I’m afraid I don’t follow you. They were Lexie’s pictures. They are now Ted’s. He may want them.’
‘Do you have any idea . . .’ She stops. She puts a hand to her forehead. ‘Felix, these paintings are extremely valuable.’
‘Are they?’
‘Beyond valuable. I have no real idea what they’re worth but they ought to be . . . I don’t know . . . somewhere. In the Tate. In a gallery.’
‘No,’ Felix says. ‘I want Ted to have them. They’re his.’
She rubs her hand over her face, seems to think. ‘I understand,’ she says. ‘I understand why you want that. But . . . the thing is . . . it’s not as if we can . . .’ For a few seconds, she lapses into a foreign language, Finnish, he supposes, muttering something under her breath, turning towards the pictures, then away. ‘I can’t take them now, anyway,’ she says again.
‘But—’
‘Felix, I can’t just sling them into the boot of Simmy’s car. Please understand. These are . . . They need proper crates and packaging. Insurance. We need a qualified art transporter.’
‘We do?’
‘Yes. I can get you the number of someone, if you like. I just don’t know . . .’she leans out and takes the baby from him ‘. . . I don’t know what Ted will think about this.’ She looks at her son. She straightens his hat. ‘I should go,’ she murmurs.