Pack of Cards

  He introduced Frances to Angela at the pub in which he had so often plied Angela with sandwiches (she always resisted food – it had struck him as curious that she remained so plump, there was in this also a hint about her of a determined survival against all the odds). Angela said, ‘I love your boots. I'd adore to wear ankle boots but my calves are too fat. Paul says you're a super cook. Can you teach me to make pizza? I've got this old schoolfriend coming to stay on Sunday and I want to make pizza for her. I thought, if you and Paul came on Saturday morning we could do it then and I could show you the street market round the corner. O.K.?’

  They had planned to go to Greenwich that Saturday. As it was, Frances showed Angela how to make pizza till nearly three. Then Angela was feeling a bit low so they stayed till six or so to cheer her up. They never got to Greenwich. They went to a film in the evening and Frances said, ‘Angela's very nice, really, isn't she?’ and Paul agreed that she was. Frances said, ‘It's the most awful shame,’ and Paul again agreed. They went to bed and had a lovely night and both, separately, thought once or twice of Angela and felt a trickle of guilt.

  When Paul was not with Frances he conjured her from the pavement or the opposing row of faces in the Underground or from the pearly spring sky and dwelt upon her and told her what he was thinking and doing. He hovered over the telephone because to be about to speak to her was almost better than to be actually speaking to her and when she rang him he sometimes delayed answering because the sound of her voice induced such pleasure that it was really almost impossible to do anything but savour it.

  Sometimes the voice was not Frances's but Angela's and then he would be hearty and welcoming and if necessary – and it frequently was – concerned. He advised and sympathised and reassured. Angela said, ‘I think it's marvellous about Frances and you, I do like her so much,’ and he muttered that Frances liked her too, naturally, of course. Angela said, ‘What do you think she wants for her birthday?’ and Paul said he didn't know, he'd try to find out. In the end he went with Angela to choose a very expensive iron casserole which he knew she could not afford. Frances also knew this, and thereafter the casserole glimmered at them from Frances's kitchen shelf, inducing discomfort.

  Once, they were in Frances's bed when the telephone rang. It was half past midnight. Frances said, ‘Oh lor, I hope that's not poor Auntie Liz died, Mum said she'd ring.’ She was gone five minutes. When she returned she said, ‘It's Angela. She tried you first and then supposed you were here. She sounds in the most awful state, poor thing. Something about a picture. Do talk to her, Paul.’

  He stood shifting from one bare foot to the other on a stone floor and Angela told him she was seeing these heads, these monstrous heads and she thought she would go mad. She said her doorbell had rung and she'd gone to answer it and there'd been no one there but she'd seen this silhouette of someone going down the stairs with a head like – like that ghastly picture. The teeth, she said, those teeth. That eye. Picture? he queried, flexing his toes, drawing Frances's cotton dressing-gown round his thighs, what picture? Oh, The Ghost of a Flea. But honestly, Angela, that's ridiculous, I mean you must know, really and truly, it was a trick of the light. You're having nightmares. And from far away across streets and buildings Angela's quiet and level voice told him of voids and chasms and a world that was only partly comprehensible and when presently she paused and for moments he could not hear her he said sharply, ‘Angela? Are you still there?’

  When he came back to bed Frances said, ‘Do you think she'll be all right? I sort of felt we ought to have gone over there; or one of us anyway.’ And for a while they lay in unease until they slept and in the morning they phoned her, early. She said she was a little better now but tired. At the weekend she came to see them, bearing a strange primeval plant which subsequently died in a protracted manner. She said she was sorry she'd been so silly but she sometimes got like that and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. The time when she'd taken all those pills had been when she'd got like that. She said it made all the difference having them there, knowing that all she had to do was pick up the phone. She said they'd been so sweet.

  Paul and Frances had planned to go to Brighton for the day and in the end Angela came with them. They walked between the green sea and the sparkling stucco and Angela talked about the school she'd been at and the friend she'd had there that she'd lost touch with now and the new woman in the office who didn't like her, she knew. She walked with her eyes on the pavement through the air that brushed the face like clouds of feathers, under a sky pegged to the horizon by tiny cut-out ships, past murmurous glistening shingle and piers sending long dainty fingers of white ironwork into the milky surf. She passed through all this inside the dark capsule of her own head. Frances said, honestly, Angela, I should forget about that, I mean it's years ago and as for the woman in the office she sounds an old cow, just don't take any notice of her. And Angela smiled her separate smile, her smile from an unshared world and said, yes, Frances, you're absolutely right, of course, you're so sensible, yes, that's what I must do.

  Look at Royal Crescent, said Paul, it's very famous, architecturally, isn't it handsome?

  Just a little bit like lavatory tiles, suggests irreverent Frances, skipping aside from the lecture that this provokes. And Angela looks with her shuttered eyes and says yes, isn't it pretty, when did you say it was built, Paul?

  They ate a fish tea and rode back to London in a train that stitched its way through the Sussex fields. Gorgeous, said Frances, heavenly, let's live in that house – no, that one. And Angela talked of this man she knew who lived in Burgess Hill, who played the flute, and said she felt better now, quite a bit, she'd sleep tonight, she thought, she'd take a pill and have a good night.

  Spring opened into summer. Paul and Frances went again to Brighton, alone, and Frances's skin turned a pale coffee colour and Paul wondered if the day would ever come when he could be with her and stop looking at her. He knew now that he would marry her, if this plan fitted in with her intentions, which he rather thought it would, and he woke every morning in a state of astonishment. He could not imagine why he should have been selected for such incredible happiness, there must be some mistake, he had no right.

  They were in Paul's room, late one evening, when the phone went. Frances, sleepily, fondly, watched him press the receiver to his ear, scowling, listened to him saying, ‘Yes, hello? Hello? Hello.’

  Put it down, she said, it's a wrong number. And then he was frowning more. ‘Angela? I can hardly hear, can you talk louder. What? Angela, where are you?’ There was a pause. Frances sighed and sat up. Paul said urgently. ‘Stay there. What's the number – I'll ring you back.’ He looked over at Frances. ‘She's in a phone box somewhere, she sounds awful, she says there's some man following her. She's talking about killing herself.’

  Frances said, ‘Oh God.’ They stared at each other for a moment. Paul dialled.

  Faintly, insistently, Angela's voice whispered into the room. Paul said, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes, I see.’ And then, ‘No, no, Angela, don't – stay where you are.’

  Frances stood up. She fetched pencil and paper, handed them to Paul. She watched Paul talk, scribble, talk. As he put the receiver down she was putting on her coat.

  They saw the phone box from some way off, a brown figure huddled within it. Behind, the river glittered away to left and right, a carnival of lights and rosy floodlit buildings. When Angela saw them she came out of the phone box and stood in front of them with her hands in her pockets. She said, ‘The man came again, the man in the drawing. He followed me and every time I turned round I saw his face, that awful face. I went up on to the bridge and he was still there. I was going to jump in.’

  They steered her to a taxi. They took her back to Frances's flat. She went to bed in Frances's bed. Paul went home.

  The next day Frances said to him, ‘I think this is going to drive me bananas. Quite honestly.’ After a moment she went on, ‘Do you think she ever would?’

&nbsp
; ‘Kill herself?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I don't know,’ said Paul. ‘You read things in newspapers. About – you know – cries for help and that sort of stuff.’

  ‘Some of them actually do.’

  They stared at each other.

  Paul said, ‘I'm sorry, darling. It's me who landed her on you. On us. But you can't just …’

  ‘No. I know you can't. That's the whole point.’

  Paul and Frances went to Cornwall for a holiday. They walked for miles on shaggy cliff paths and waded into icy seas and made incessant love and arranged to marry in the autumn. They sent Angela a postcard of lobster pots and a shiny unreal sea. On the day they returned to London they found a note from her at Frances's flat with a basket of fruit and a bottle of wine. A few days later they met her for a drink and she was animated, sprightly, and talked of this girl she'd met whom she might go to Portugal with later on. They told her about the wedding and she said I think that's marvellous, how super, you will invite me, won't you? She asked Frances to come shopping with her and help her buy some clothes. Afterwards, Frances said, ‘She seems fine, doesn't she? I mean really much better, more together, more …’

  ‘More like other people?’

  ‘That, I suppose.’

  ‘The terrible thing,’ said Paul after a moment, ‘about Angela, the terribly sad thing, is that she is only just one notch away from being, well, perfectly all right. To lots of people most of the time she probably does seem fine.’

  ‘Quite.’

  They were silent, with separate and similar visions of Angela's small resolute figure, forging on, alone, possessed, unreachable.

  The London summer ripened and the streets flowed with tourists and Paul redecorated Frances's flat as a preliminary to married life therein. He moved, gradually, his few possessions and spent long hours in the meticulous application of paint to walls and ceilings with the windows open to the warm clattering evenings. He had never been prone to religious belief except once briefly in adolescence when he had been smitten by the personality of the new school chaplain. Now, in the tranquillity of his happiness, he looked for someone to whom to offer thanks; it seemed irrational that all this should have come to him from a void. Frances cooked him exquisite meals with the minimum of fuss.

  It was in the midst of one such evening that a call came from St Thomas's Hospital. Were they, a voice wanted to know, Miss Frances Bennett and Mr Paul Freeland?

  In apprehension and with gathering expectation Frances replied that they were. She knew now what would come next, and Paul, the paintbrush arrested in mid-stroke, looked across the room, met her eyes and experienced for the first time that wordless communication of married people: he read her. When she put the phone down he said, ‘Angela.’ Frances nodded.

  At the entrance to the hospital ward a sister briskly held them. ‘Miss Bennett and Mr Freeland? For Angela Holywell? She's in the end bed. She gave you as next of kin. I gather there are no parents or anything. You'll find her fairly comfortable now, a bit dopey still. She was asking just now if you were coming, she specially wants to see you. I shouldn't stay too long.’

  ‘What exactly,’ said Paul, ‘happened? They just said …’

  ‘Sleeping pills. The usual. Not enough, fortunately, and she'd left the door of her flat ajar for some reason and a neighbour came in with a message.’

  They sat on either side of the high hospital bed in which Angela lay propped up on pillows. Her hair had been brushed and lay in two neat hanks down each side of her face. She wore a flannelette nightgown sprigged with small blue flowers. She looked rather younger than twenty-seven. She held their hands in her own small, surprisingly powerful grip and said, ‘Don't let go for a minute – d'you mind? Just for a minute. It was sweet of you to come. The thing is – I'd been seeing that man again, you know, the picture – for days and days now. I couldn't stand it any longer. You must think I'm an awful fool.’

  Paul said, ‘The man doesn't exist, Angela. It's just a picture.’

  ‘I know. Oh, I know. There's always been something you see. Voices, sometimes. There always will be. But I think I'll be all right now – they've been terribly nice to me here. There's this doctor – he's coming in to see me again tomorrow. And it makes all the difference just knowing you're there, both of you. You didn't mind me giving them your names, do you? You're not annoyed?’

  And Paul and Frances said that no, of course they weren't annoyed and of course they didn't mind. The grip of Angela's small warm hand slackened but her low voice continued to narrate and explain and Paul and Frances looked at each other across the bed, both separated and tethered by her, perplexed and saddened and sharing a spectral, queasy vision of what was yet to come.

  The Art of Biography

  SHE WAS eighty if she was a day. Which was of course to be expected: Edward Lamprey would be eighty-seven if he were still alive and the daughter had said Miss Rockingham was a contemporary. Miss Lucinda Rockingham. A curiously lavish name for the spare, slightly bent old lady who stood now in her doorway, looking up at him.

  He put out a hand, smiled his charming open young man's smile. ‘Miss Rockingham? I'm Malcolm Sanders. It's so good of you to let me take up your time like this.’

  Twenty-eight interviews, duly recorded and filed. Seventeen card index boxes. Seven hundred and nineteen letters in the British Library and the University of Texas and in God knows how many box files and drawers of desks. Notes and footnotes and references and cross-references; checks and cross-checks and headings and sub-headings. Names and places and times and dates. All sewn up and stashed away, or just about. A man's life reduced to paper and print – or rather, card and tempo pen. The material, the valuable laboriously gathered material for the definitive biography of Edward Lamprey, poet and man of letters, born eighteen-ninety-three, died nineteen-fifty-eight.

  He yawned, discreetly, into the back of his hand, turning momentarily aside as though to admire the view of the estuary beyond the wide window of Lucinda Rockingham's sitting-room. A flat, melancholy East Anglian view, all sea and sky and fleeing birds and, far away, cars twinkling along the coast road. Bleak and impersonal, as was the house bleak and impersonal – an Edwardian villa, faintly hostile from without and chilly within, the sofa too hard, the room too neat, the pictures too square upon the walls.

  And Lucinda Rockingham an agreeable enough old thing but not of any use, he could tell within the first five minutes, nothing of any significance to say about Lamprey (‘He was a great poet, you know, Mr Sanders, yes, I knew him since nineteen-forty, yes, he visited this house …’), the trip a waste.

  He smiled and jotted the odd note and let his mind drift. He examined his feelings – took them out and prodded them, held them up to the light, took their temperature, and they were the same. He was in love, no two ways about it. Conjure her up, right here on the worn patterned carpet beside the unlit Rayburn Maxistove, and there was that delicious liquefaction of the vitals. He smiled and made another note and held her in his arms, against his cheek, her mouth … Better phone as soon as he was through here, before she left the office, there was a phone booth on the sea-front, he'd just catch her if he cut this short …

  That, actually, was the funny thing about Lamprey. The one odd, unsatisfactory blank. Love. For a man whose passionate nature spun from every line of the poems, the absence of any evidence that he ever experienced intensity of love was curious to say the least of it. Certainly there'd been none in the marriage, probably not even at the very beginning. A haphazard union that drifted into a convenient arrangement for the upbringing of the four cherished daughters. For them, certainly, there had been love, devotion indeed, but not the kind of love to account for the depth of feeling that lurked in the poetry, the pastoral poems in particular that read at times like something quite other, like …

  ‘… occasionally helped with some of the more tedious clerical tasks,’ said the old lady. ‘The study of Coleridge, which I daresay you know …’ She
smoothed the cotton print dress across her knees and smiled, a rather sweet smile, a beauty once probably – no, not a beauty, just a very pretty woman (no husband, apparently, odd, that) – and bless her yes one did indeed know the study of Coleridge, every chapter and verse of it, what did she imagine one had spent three years doing, for heaven's sake? The daughters had had some vague idea that she did odd bits of secretarial stuff for Lamprey, that sort of thing – the kind of useful friend a man like that sometimes attracts. But they'd not known much about her, none of them, only as a name that cropped up once or twice, hadn't suggested her until this late point, with everything ready to be written, the first three chapters drafted indeed. And then she had to be looked into, of course, just in case. Another index card, another reference.

  He got up. He beamed. He thanked. He took her warm, dry small hand and thanked again. He went out to the car, got in, looked back, waved, started the engine, glanced down at the AA road book open on the seat beside him.

  And there she was suddenly at the car window, a little breathless, saying something he could not quite catch.

  He switched the engine off.

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘Letters, Miss Rockingham?’

  She hadn't known whether to mention, had wondered if it were perhaps better … had thought suddenly, seeing him about to go, had decided that no, really, that it would be wrong, that …

  About two hundred letters, she thought. Upstairs. In two shoeboxes. No, three shoeboxes.

  ‘Letters to whom, Miss Rockingham?’

  To her. All of them. Two hundred.

  They went back into the house. Upstairs. Into a spare bedroom with a whiff of damp to it and the sense of being for many years unslept in. And out of a cupboard came the boxes.