I still play a lot of Dvořák, by the way. Not the symphonies so much; nowadays I prefer the string quartets. But Tchaikovsky has gone the way of those geniuses who fascinate in youth, retain a residual power in middle age, but later seem, if not embarrassing, somehow less relevant. Not that I’m saying she was right. There’s nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there’s something wrong with the young who can’t be fascinated by a genius. Incidentally, I don’t think the soundtrack to Un Homme et Une Femme is a work of genius. I didn’t even think so back then. On the other hand, I occasionally remember Ted Hughes and smile at the fact that, actually, he never did run out of animals.
I get on well with Susie. Well enough, anyway. But the younger generation no longer feels the need, or even the obligation, to keep in touch. At least, not ‘keep in touch’ as in ‘seeing’. An email will do for Dad – pity he hasn’t learnt to text. Yes, he’s retired now, still fossicking around with those mysterious ‘projects’ of his, doubt he’ll ever finish anything, but at least it keeps the brain active, better than golf, and yes, we were planning to drop over there last week until something came up. I do hope he doesn’t get Alzheimer’s, that’s my greatest worry really, because, well, Mum’s hardly going to have him back, is she? No: I exaggerate, I misrepresent. Susie doesn’t feel like that, I’m sure. Living alone has its moments of self-pity and paranoia. Susie and I get on fine.
A friend of ours – I still say that instinctively, though Margaret and I have been divorced for longer than we were married – had a son in a punk rock band. I asked if she’d heard any of their songs. She mentioned one called ‘Every Day is Sunday’. I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. Also that the same sardonic wit is used to escape from it. ‘Every day is Sunday’ – the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. I asked our friend what the group’s other songs were. No, she replied, that’s their song, their only song. How does it go then? I asked. What do you mean? Well, what’s the next line? You don’t get it, do you? she said. That is the song. They just repeat the line, again and again, until the song chooses to end. I remember smiling. ‘Every day is Sunday’ – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?
It was one of those long white envelopes with my name and address shown in a window. I don’t know about you, but I’m never in a hurry to open them. Once, such letters meant another painful stage in my divorce – maybe that’s why I’m wary of them. Nowadays, they might contain some tax voucher for the few, pitifully low-yielding shares I bought when I retired, or an extra request from that charity I already support by standing order. So I forgot about it until later in the day, when I was gathering up all the discarded paper in the flat – even down to the last envelope – for recycling. It turned out to contain a letter from a firm of solicitors I’d never heard of, Messrs Coyle, Innes & Black. A certain Eleanor Marriott was writing ‘In the matter of the estate of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased)’. It took me a while to get there.
We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient – it’s not useful – to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
I was asked to confirm my address and provide a photocopy of my passport. I was informed that I had been left five hundred pounds and two ‘documents’. I found this very puzzling. For a start, to get a bequest from someone whose Christian name I had either never known or else forgotten. And five hundred pounds seemed a very specific sum. Bigger than nothing, not as big as something. Perhaps it would make sense if I knew when Mrs Ford had made her will. Though if it had been a long time ago, the equivalent sum now would be quite a bit larger, and make even less sense.
I confirmed my existence, authenticity and location, attaching photocopied corroboration. I asked if I might be told the date of the will. Then, one evening I sat down and tried to resurrect that humiliating weekend in Chislehurst some forty years previously. I searched for any moment, incident or remark which might have seemed worthy of acknowledgement or reward. But my memory has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation. I stared into the past, I waited, I tried to trick my memory into a different course. But it was no good. I was someone who had gone out with the daughter of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased) for a period of about a year, who had been patronised by her husband, loftily scrutinised by her son, and manipulated by her daughter. Painful for me at the time, but hardly requiring the subsequent maternal apology of five hundred pounds.
And anyway, that pain hasn’t lasted. As I mentioned, I have a certain instinct for self-preservation. I successfully put Veronica out of my mind, out of my history. So when time delivered me all too quickly into middle age, and I began looking back over how my life had unfolded, and considering the paths untaken, those lulling, undermining what-ifs, I never found myself imagining – not even for worse, let alone for better – how things would have been with Veronica. Annie yes, Veronica no. And I never regretted my years with Margaret, even if we did divorce. Try as I could – which wasn’t very hard – I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don’t think this is complacency; it’s more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I’m not odd enough not to have done the things I’ve ended up doing with my life.
*
I didn’t read the solicitor’s letter immediately. Instead, I looked at the enclosure, a long, creamy envelope with my name on it. Handwriting I had seen only once in my life before, but nonetheless familiar. Anthony Webster Esq. – the way the ascenders and descenders finished with a little curlicue took me back to someone I had known for a mere weekend. Someone whose handwriting, in its confidence rather than shape, suggested a woman perhaps ‘odd enough’ to do things I hadn’t. But what they might have been, I couldn’t know or guess. There was an inch of Sellotape on the front of the envelope, centre top. I was expecting it to run down the back and add an extra seal, but it had been cut off along the envelope’s top edge. Presumably the letter had once been attached to something else.
Finally, I opened it and read. ‘Dear Tony, I think it right you should have the attached. Adrian always spoke warmly of you, and perhaps you will find it an interesting, if painful, memento of long ago. I am also leaving you a little money. You may find this strange, and to tell the truth I am not quite sure of my own motives. In any case, I am sorry for the way my family treated you all those years ago, and wish you well, even from beyond the grave. Yours, Sarah Ford. P.S. It may sound odd, but I think the last months of his life were happy.’
The solicitor asked for my bank details so that the legacy could be paid direct. She added that she was enclosing the first of the ‘documents’ I had been left. The second was still in the possession of Mrs Ford’s daughter. That, I realised, would explain the cut piece of Sellotape. Mrs Marriott was currently trying to obtain this second item. And Mrs Ford’s will, in answer to my question, had been drawn up five years previously.
*
Margaret used to say that there were two sorts of women: those with clear edges to them, and those who implied mystery. And that this was the first thing a man sensed, and the first thing that attracted him, or not. Some men are drawn to one type, some to the other. Margaret – you won’t need me to tell you – was clear-edged, but at times she could be envious of those who carried, or manufactured, an air of mystery.
‘I like you just as you are,’ I once said to her.
‘But you know me so well by now,’ she replied. We had been married about six or seven years. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer it if I were a little more … unknowable?’
??
?I don’t want you to be a woman of mystery. I think I’d hate it. Either it’s just a façade, a game, a technique for ensnaring men, or else the woman of mystery is a mystery even to herself, and that’s the worst of all.’
‘Tony, you sound like a real man of the world.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ I said – aware, of course, that she was teasing me. ‘I haven’t known that many women in my life.’
‘“I may not know much about women, but I know what I like”?’
‘I didn’t say that, and I don’t mean it either. But I think it’s because I’ve known comparatively few that I know what I think about them. And what I like about them. If I’d known more, I’d be more confused.’
Margaret said, ‘Now I’m not sure whether to be flattered or not.’
All this was before our marriage went wrong, of course. But it wouldn’t have lasted any longer if Margaret had been more mysterious, I can assure you – and her – of that.
*
And something of her rubbed off on me over the years. For instance, if I hadn’t known her, I might have become involved in a patient exchange of letters with the solicitor. But I didn’t want to wait quietly for another envelope with a window. Instead, I rang up Mrs Eleanor Marriott and asked about the other document I’d been left.
‘The will describes it as a diary.’
‘A diary? Is it Mrs Ford’s?’
‘No. Let me check the name.’ A pause. ‘Adrian Finn.’
Adrian! How had Mrs Ford ended up with his diary? Which was not a question for the solicitor. ‘He was a friend,’ was all I said. Then, ‘Presumably it was attached to the letter you sent.’
‘I can’t be sure of that.’
‘Have you actually seen it?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ Her manner was properly cautious, rather than unhelpful.
‘Did Veronica Ford give any reason for withholding it?’
‘She said she wasn’t ready to part with it yet.’
Right. ‘But it is mine?’
‘It was certainly left to you in the will.’
Hmm. I wondered if there was some legal nicety separating those two propositions. ‘Do you know how she … came by it?’
‘She was living not far from her mother in the last years, as I understand it. She said she took various items into her safekeeping. In case the house was burgled. Jewellery, money, documents.’
‘Is that legal?’
‘Well, it’s not illegal. It may well be prudent.’
We didn’t seem to be getting very far. ‘Let me get this straight. She ought to have handed over this document, this diary, to you. You’ve asked for it, and she’s refusing to give it up.’
‘For the present, yes, that is the case.’
‘Can you give me her address?’
‘I would have to have her authority to do so.’
‘Then would you kindly seek that authority?’
Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?
The less time there remains in your life, the less you want to waste it. That’s logical, isn’t it? Though how you use the saved-up hours … well, that’s another thing you probably wouldn’t have predicted in youth. For instance, I spend a lot of time clearing things up – and I’m not even a messy person. But it’s one of the modest satisfactions of age. I aim for tidiness; I recycle; I clean and decorate my flat to keep up its value. I’ve made my will; and my dealings with my daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife are, if less than perfect, at least settled. Or so I’ve persuaded myself. I’ve achieved a state of peaceableness, even peacefulness. Because I get on with things. I don’t like mess, and I don’t like leaving a mess. I’ve opted for cremation, if you want to know.
So I phoned Mrs Marriott again, and asked for the contact details of Mrs Ford’s other child, John, known as Jack. I called Margaret and asked for a lunch date. And I made an appointment with my own solicitor. No, that’s putting it far too grandly. I’m sure Brother Jack would have someone he refers to as ‘my solicitor’. In my case it’s the local chap who drew up my will; he has a small office above a florist’s and seems perfectly efficient. I also like him because he made no attempt to use my Christian name or suggest I use his. So I think of him only as T. J. Gunnell, and don’t even speculate on what his initials might stand for. Do you know something I dread? Being an old person in hospital and having nurses I’ve never met calling me Anthony or, worse, Tony. Let me just pop this in your arm, Tony. Have some more of this gruel, Tony. Have you done a motion, Tony? Of course, by the time this happens, over-familiarity from the nursing staff may be way down my list of anxieties; but even so.
I did a slightly odd thing when I first met Margaret. I wrote Veronica out of my life story. I pretended that Annie had been my first proper girlfriend. I know most men exaggerate the amount of girls and sex they’ve had; I did the opposite. I drew a line and started afresh. Margaret was a little puzzled that I’d been so slow off the mark – not in losing my virginity, but in having a serious relationship; but also, I thought at the time, a little charmed. She said something about shyness being attractive in a man.
The odder part was that it was easy to give this version of my history because that’s what I’d been telling myself anyway. I viewed my time with Veronica as a failure – her contempt, my humiliation – and expunged it from the record. I had kept no letters, and only a single photograph, which I hadn’t looked at in ages.
But after a year or two of marriage, when I felt better about myself, and fully confident in our relationship, I told Margaret the truth. She listened, asked pertinent questions, and she understood. She asked to see the photo – the one taken in Trafalgar Square – examined it, nodded, made no comment. That was fine. I had no right to expect anything, let alone words of praise for my former girlfriend. Which, in any case, I didn’t want. I just wanted to clear off the past, and have Margaret forgive my peculiar lie about it. Which she did.
Mr Gunnell is a calm, gaunt man who doesn’t mind silence. After all, it costs his clients just as much as speech.
‘Mr Webster.’
‘Mr Gunnell.’
And so we mistered one another for the next forty-five minutes, in which he gave me the professional advice I was paying for. He told me that going to the police and trying to persuade them to lay a charge of theft against a woman of mature years who had recently lost her mother would, in his view, be foolish. I liked that. Not the advice, but the way he expressed it. ‘Foolish’: much better than ‘inadvisable’ or ‘inappropriate’. He also urged me not to badger Mrs Marriott.
‘Don’t solicitors like to be badgered, Mr Gunnell?’
‘Let’s say it’s different if the badgerer is the client. But in the present case the Ford family is paying the bills. And you’d be surprised how letters can slip to the bottom of a file.’
I looked around the cream-painted office with its potted plants, shelves of legal authority, inoffensive print of an English landscape and, yes, its filing cabinets. I looked back to Mr Gunnell.
‘In other words, don’t let her start thinking I’m some kind of loony.’
‘Oh, she’d never think that, Mr Webster. And “loony” is hardly legal terminology.’
‘What might you say instead?’
‘We might settle for “vexatious”. That’s quite strong enough.’
‘Right. And on another point. How long does it take to wind up an estate?’
‘If it’s fairly straightforward … eighteen months, two years.’
Two years! I wasn’t waiting that long for the diary.
‘Well, you deal with the main business first, but there are always things that drag on. Lost share certificates. Agreeing figures with the Revenue. And letters sometimes get mislaid.’
‘Or slip to the bottom of a file.’
‘That too, Mr Webster.’
‘Have you any other advice?’
??
?I’d be careful with the word “stealing”. It might polarise matters unnecessarily.’
‘But isn’t that what she’s done? Remind me of the legal tag when something is blindingly obvious.’
‘Res ipsa loquitur?’
‘That’s the one.’
Mr Gunnell paused. ‘Well, criminal work doesn’t often cross my desk, but the key phrase when it comes to theft is, as I remember, “an intention permanently to deprive” the owner of the thing stolen. Do you have any clue as to Miss Ford’s intention, or her wider state of mind?’
I laughed. Having a clue as to Veronica’s state of mind had been one of my problems forty years ago. So I probably laughed in quite the wrong way; and Mr Gunnell is not an imperceptive man.
‘I don’t wish to pry, Mr Webster, but could there be something in the past, perhaps, between you and Miss Ford, which might become relevant, were it eventually to come to civil or indeed criminal proceedings?’
Something between me and Miss Ford? A particular image suddenly came into my mind as I gazed at the backs of what I assumed to be family photographs.
‘You’ve made things much clearer, Mr Gunnell. I’ll put a first-class stamp on when I pay your bill.’
He smiled. ‘Actually, it’s a thing we do notice. In certain cases.’
Mrs Marriott was able, two weeks later, to provide me with an email address for Mr John Ford. Miss Veronica Ford had declined to allow her contact details to be passed on. And Mr John Ford was clearly being cautious himself: no phone number, no postal address.