Seven Dials (38 page)

Harry seemed to become aware of her gaze then, because he turned his head directly towards her and smiled at her; a smile so wide and so full of - what? - relief, Letty decided, that it seemed as though he were sitting in their own private patch of sunlight. He inclined his head slightly, indicating, and Letty followed his direction and saw that Lee’s hand was held in his, on his lap, and she looked back at Harry’s face and returned his smile as widely as she could, putting on once more the necessary expression of funereal solemnity.

Across the aisle another uneasy group sat, clearly as Jewish as Lee, and Letty looked at them and then remembered; the Henriques clan, the ones who owned that great chain of chemists’ shops and who were so amazingly rich and successful. What were they doing here? And then she remembered that they had been cousins by marriage of the Old Man and nodded approvingly. It was good and right to see so many people turning out to pay their respects to him.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder and she turned her head to see Peter just behind her and she smiled at him too, and then even more widely as she saw him stand back to make way for his companion, Sophie, to enter the pew before making his own way to the front of the church and the pew reserved for the chief mourners, where his sister Johanna sat with her children and David and Andrew. Really, she told herself, thinking about Sophie and Peter arriving together, things are looking up for this family; and then she grimaced a little at the irreverence of thinking such a thought at a funeral and she restored her own expression to a suitably melancholy one.

Not far from her, resting on its trestles, Sir Lewis’s coffin, rich with brass handles and gleaming wood and almost masked with flowers stood large and mute and she stared at it, remembering the Old Man with affection. Although they had shared the same surname their relationship had been far from close; though they had met at Lackland family affairs and been on polite dining terms, and she had become quite involved with them for a while in the long-ago days just after the Great
War when she had first found Theo, the links between herself and Sir Lewis’s family had been tenuous, and as she sat there listening to the organist indulging himself luxuriously with a piece of sombre Bach she let her mind slip into genealogies, working out just how she had been related to Sir Lewis.

Her father hadn’t been a Lackland; he had been Wilfred Brotherton, but for some reason Letty had now quite forgotten he had changed his name to his wife’s when they had married; Sophie, her mother, had been born a Lackland, the daughter of old Bartholomew and therefore the granddaughter of the grand old man himself, the one who had founded Nellie’s so long ago, Abel Lackland. Now, Letty thought as the organ rumbled its long low notes all round her, how was Sir Lewis related to him? But she couldn’t remember who his parents had been and pushed the thought away. She and Lewis had been distant cousins; no more than that, and now she sat here in a cool dim church on a brilliant July day bidding him goodbye -

And I don’t feel too marvellous myself, she found herself thinking wryly, aware once again of the dull ache that so often came to plague her belly these days, and refused to think any more about that. It’s morbid to be concerned about your own innards, she told herself stoutly as at last the music changed and the congregation got raggedly to its many feet; this was the time to think about the good old departed, not the about-to-depart-sometime-in-the-future, and she opened her hymn book and settled herself to enjoying the ceremony. She always enjoyed services in church. There was a lush theatricality about the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the readings from the King James’s version of the Bible that appealed to her dramatic nature, and today was no exception.

By the time the whole thing was completed and the congregation was lining up behind the coffin to make the melancholy procession to the corner of the churchyard where Lewis’s grave waited she was feeling tranquilly content. Not happy to see the last of Sir Lewis by any means, but aware that he had had a good and long life, and was being turned off with all due pomp and circumstance; and she found herself humming Elgar’s funeral march beneath her breath as she came blinking out into the sunshine.

The interment went smoothly as the vicar stood there
beside the grave with his cassock flapping about his knees and the birds trying to shout him down and then, as the gravediggers took over, grunting a little over earth baked hard and dry by the long heatwave under which London still sweltered, and the mourners turned to make their way back to the front of the church, she felt the mood of the occasion lift, and looked about again for people to whom she would like to speak.

Max was there now; and she went over to him and took his hand and shook it and kissed his cheek and he nodded at her, a little abstracted but clearly glad of her attention.

‘I should have thanked you sooner, Letty,’ he said.

‘My dear chap, whatever for?’

‘For what you’ve done not just for the hospital but for Peter. Pa was very pleased, you know, very pleased. To have seen Peter as well as he is before he died - I think that made him feel good -’ And he lifted his chin to look about for his brother, and saw him standing talking to the dumpy figure of Sophie, beside a rather bedraggled-looking rhododendron.

Letty followed his gaze. ‘He’ll do, I reckon,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘He’s taken no end of a shine to that niece of mine. What’s more important, she’s taken a shine to him. Very Yorkshire, our Sophie. I don’t think you need worry any more about Peter. Not if Sophie’s decided to take him on. She’ll ruin him, of course. Make him quite helpless. When Sophie’s around no man has to wipe his own nose. She was born to look after people, especially male people.’

‘Well, perhaps Peter’s earned it,’ Max said and then nodded as his sons, still together as they always were, touched his elbow and tipping their hats at Letty, made their way to the gates of the churchyard. ‘I must go, Letty. I ought to be back at the house before most of the rest of you get there - you will come, won’t you? You are expected -’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, unwilling to leave the sunshine, and stepped back. ‘Don’t worry about me. You’ve got enough to do. My condolences, dear boy. But he had a good life.’

‘Yes,’ Max said and went away, collecting Johanna, who was looking pale and very sorry for herself as she drooped on her son Jolly’s arm, and Letty stared after them and shook her head. Pity Johanna had turned out to be so useless, she thought with all the contempt of the clever woman for the merely
pretty, and then went to sit down for a rest on one of the wooden benches that lined the pathways. To watch other people go, in their own time, and then join on behind them would be agreeable. And she needed to catch her breath, to get rid of the ache.

There was a little scurry along the path and she watched, a little amused. A newspaper reporter and a photographer, unless she missed her guess, she thought, trying to talk to Brin and Katy, and she watched, her eyes narrowed a little sardonically. She had seen them arrive and been amused to see how thoroughly Katy had thrown herself into the role of mourner. Her black silk shirt and suit of black barathea were the smartest Letty had seen for a long time, and were clearly imported from somewhere a good deal less austere than England was at present, and the whole outfit, surmounting the sheerest of silk stockings over the most elegant of high-heeled suede shoes, and topped off by an extravagantly veiled little hat of the most delicious prettiness, was designed to make people stare. And then when they did, Katy looked back at them with haughty disapproval. Oh, thought Letty, but she’s enjoying herself!

And so, she decided, was Brin, as she watched him bend his head to talk to the reporter who stood a half head shorter than he was, and almost on tiptoe with the excitement of having the chance to talk to the man who had been labelled Hollywood’s Next Heart-throb in every popular newspaper on Fleet Street. He too was well dressed, in a sombre suit with the most sparkling of white shirts set off by his black tie and bowler, and he held his head to one side so that the scar on his cheek could be seen easily in the sunlight. There was no doubt but that he had an air of distinction and of something else; of bravery and insouciance and impudence - it was a heady mixture. Now that he was so self-assured and aware of his own attraction, it was no wonder people were so eager to stare at him and talk to him and that the photographers hung about waiting for him even if doing so meant crashing funerals.

The last of them now were leaving, and as the churchyard at last emptied, Letty sighed and got to her feet. It would be as well to go back to the house after all; she hadn’t wanted to, not finding it agreeable to eat funeral baked meats - and she turned the words in her mind, relishing their archaic sound - but
there, it would be expected of her, and she liked old Max and Peter. They were entitled to all the family support they could get at this moment in their lives and she went stomping on her way up King Street towards St Martin’s Lane. Maybe luck would be on her side and she could find a taxi soon -

Charlie had meant to go into the church, to be part of the congregation proper which followed the old man to his grave, but when she had reached the gates of the churchyard she had seen him just ahead of her, and her courage had completely deserted her. She had turned and fled back along the street in the direction of the hospital and when she had at last allowed her steps to slacken she was almost there.

But then she had stopped and thought and turned round again, very deliberately, and gone back. To refuse to attend the funeral of a man she respected just because a man she could never feel any respect for ever again was there too, was to be chicken-hearted in the extreme; she had set out to go to Sir Lewis’s funeral and go she would.

But when she got back to the church the service had already started, and she couldn’t bring herself to walk in in the middle; it would have seemed too ill-mannered altogether, and she had stood in the cool shade of the doorway, staring unseeingly at the notices on the board there and listening to the sounds that came out of the doors; the reverberation of the organ and the rather querulous singing that for all it lacked in tunefulness was agreeable to hear, and the professionally resonant voice of the vicar; and then, as the service had ended had slipped along the path and stood quietly in the shadow of the wall to let them go by. The moment had passed to be part of it all; but that didn’t matter. To be an onlooker was quite enough. Sir Lewis wouldn’t have cared either way, she decided, not from any basis of close knowledge of him, but because of the sort of person Max was. His father could never have been the man to take offence at someone watching his funeral, rather than taking an active part in it.

When Brin went by, he didn’t see her; he was talking with some animation, albeit in whispers, to his sister but she could see him clearly and she stared at him, trying to see the man she had loved so much that she had lost all sense of her own value and dignity, hoping that it would all be gone; that his
treatment of her since then had somehow managed to shatter the feeling she had. But her hopes were ill-founded. As soon as she saw that face, saw the liveliness of its expression and the way his eyes glinted in the sunlight her belly tightened in the old familiar way and she felt sick; but whether that was with excitement at seeing him or disgust with herself for feeling as she did, she couldn’t know.

She watched them all go, saw the little flurry of excitement at the gate where the newsmen were taking pictures of Katy and Brin and didn’t emerge until they had gone at last, hurrying up King Street. She saw Letty follow them and then, when she was sure everyone had gone, stepped out into the sunlight herself.

But when she reached the gate she found that the newsmen were still there as the photographer was packing up his equipment and almost without thinking she stopped and said casually, ‘Who was that you were talking to?’

‘See tomorrow’s
Sketch
,’ one of them grunted. ‘It’ll all be in there -’

‘Newest dreamboat that was, with his sister. Brinsley Lackland.’ The photographer seemed more communicative. ‘Where
do
they get these names? I ask you - Brinsley! Bet he was born plain Ted or Joe -’

‘I don’t think so,’ Charlie said. ‘He told me it was a family name. One of his father’s uncles -’

‘If you know who he is, why did you ask who we were talking to?’ The photographer squinted up at her and grinned. ‘Checking up on us, are you?’

She managed to laugh. ‘No, not really. Just couldn’t be sure I’d seen him properly. He was at the hospital, you see - I work there -’

At once the two men relaxed. ‘Nurse, are you? Lovely, you girls are, really lovely! From round the corner? Nellie’s?’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Nellie’s.’

‘Was he there long?’ The reporter seemed interested now, pulling his notebook from his pocket. ‘Was he there for treatment to that scar of his?’

She looked at him and tried to think what to say and then, deliberately, shook her head.

‘No - something quite ordinary -’

‘Oh.’ He put the notebook away, uninterested now.

‘Nothing I can use then?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the photographer said. ‘Saying he was cared for at Nellie’s - that’d make it nice. Human, you know? Coming to the funeral of one of Nellie’s doctors and all. But all he talked about to us was Hollywood and all that. Off tomorrow on the
Ascania
from Liverpool, he said - lucky sod. No rationing there they tell me. Imagine - all the grub you can eat and giving the whisky away. Ah, well, we can’t all be born good-looking, can we? Goodbye, nursie! Take good care of the patients, and when I turn up there with a black eye and a thick head next week, be nice to me!’ And she managed to smile at them and watched them go, then turned to walk slowly back to the hospital, pulling off her black beret and shaking her hair free to cool her head as she went.

Going tomorrow. Tomorrow. And obviously with no intention of letting me know, or saying goodbye or - and she felt her eyes prickle with tears as she thought about that and hated herself for her own weakness. If he didn’t care why should she? What was he in her life, any more? Nothing, less than nothing -