The Colonel's Daughter Read online

  Jim Reese gets up, lights a cigarette, looks at his watch. He can hear a blackbird in the cherry trees above his window. He begins listening for a car. He returns to the bed and sits on it, still smoking, still listening. High summer, yet his body is pale – kept underneath the road where soon trucks will thunder, kept uselessly out of sight. He is thirty-seven. Far too old, says his mother’s fat-spattered ghost, to be a pop star. You should have put all that out of your mind.

  Time passes. He makes tea, sits and waits. Sun glints on the rail of the rusty area steps. Saturday traffic starts to rumble. He feels knotted, anxious. Charlotte. He says her name, listens to the minute echo of her name that hangs for a second in the drab room. When she is with him, he feels breathless, hot. Her intelligence suffocates him. Now, without her, he feels the same breathlessness in his fear that she’s deserted him, as he’s sometimes wondered if, even hoped that, she would. Yet the flat is hers and everything in it except him and his drums. In place on the desk is her typewriter and in place beside it, half finished, is her latest article, Eve and the Weapons of Eden. She worked on the paper all the previous day, he remembers, until seven-thirty when she came and found him sitting by the drums with a tin of chrome-cleaner and a T-shirt rag, crouched on the floor beside him and told him: ‘I’ll be out most of the night. I’m driving to Buckinghamshire, to collect some things. I can’t say what they are. I’ll show you when I get back – probably very late, towards morning.’ He took up the chrome-cleaner and the rag blotchy with stain and didn’t look at her as she went out, carrying a suitcase. I don’t own you, he said to her when she could no longer hear him, don’t imagine it.

  The tea is cold. The traffic is loud. The traffic reveals to him, day after day, his own stasis. His air is blasted with the lead fumes of other people’s purpose; they fart their travelling ambitions into his face. He thinks of moving, as he has always moved, on. Somewhere quieter. Wales, even. Go to a mountain and hear the silly bla of sheep. Why not? Quit the notion that you can ever make anything of the city, or the city of you. Yet it is Charlotte who holds him, balanced on the edge of being there and not being there. She stands between him and his own disappearance. She feeds him tiny grains of her own purpose in the meals she makes and a little of herself creeps inside him.

  Jim Reese will wait for another twenty-seven minutes before the green Citroen is parked near the gate to the basement and he sees Charlotte come slowly down the iron steps. In these twenty-seven minutes, a brilliant yellow sun rises on Wengen, flooding the balcony of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne’s room in the Hotel Alpenrose. Lady Amelia, wearing a blue robe de chambre, slips out onto the balcony without waking the Colonel, who has returned to his muddled dreaming, and begins her breathing exercises, gasping in the champagne air, dizzying herself with the cutting breath of the mountain. Into her mind, as her thin chest rises and falls, comes a delicious flowering of appreciation for the well-ordered world spread out like a gracefully laid table before her. Even, she notices, the arrangement of geraniums on the balcony itself is scrupulously wise, colours tossed into each other, growing, spreading, hanging, each bloom excellently placed. For Amelia Browne, order in all things has been an absolutely satisfying principle of sixty-eight years. In her valuable Victorian dolls’ house, given to her when she was four, the little pipe-cleaner men and women she moved from room to room never – as occurred in the dolls’ houses of her friends – stood on the beds nor lay down on the kitchen floor.

  Charlotte is lying on the basement bed. The traffic is roaring now. Jim Reese finds her beautiful in the early morning light, with her tired eyes. He touches her with a tenderness he often feels yet can seldom express.

  ‘Jim,’ she says, pushing away his hand, ‘this is the most important day of my life.’

  Jim leaves her body, snatches up the cigarette packet. He stares at the crammed suitcase she has planted in the middle of the room. The explanation, he thinks suddenly, will be worse than what she has done. Because she is grave with achievement. She sits up, pushes wisps of hair out of her eyes.

  ‘Open the suitcase,’ she says.

  Jim feels cross, weary. Revelations have always disturbed and irritated him. But Charlotte’s eyes are pools of red. It’s as if she’s tracked for days and nights across some desert, living only on her will. Her hand shakes as she fingers her hair.

  ‘Go on . . .’

  Bored, resigned, he goes to the suitcase and opens it. As the lid springs back and the case falls with a thud onto his bare feet, bruising them with its extraordinary weight, Jim curses, tips the case, extracts his feet, kneels and rubs them.

  Now he looks into the case for the first time and is motionless. Charlotte’s red eyes stare at his crouching back and over his shoulder.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  ‘It’s for you. Some of it for my work. But most of it for you. There are other things in the car – pictures and a clock . . .’

  So he begins to scoop it all out now and pile it round himself: loops of pearls, diamonds stiffly jointed into necklaces and bracelets and inset with emeralds, gold chokers and chains and pendants, a moonstone tiara, rings, earrings, jewelled paperweights and boxes, boxes of amber and onyx and lapis lasuli, an ivory fan, silver knives, forks, spoons, silver tea spoons and napkin rings and salt cellars, silver table birds, bronze statuettes of deer and dogs and naked women with fishes, gold snuff boxes and cigarette boxes, tortoiseshell card cases and combs and brushes . . .

  So he is trapped, between this weight of devastating objects at his feet and Charlotte’s burning at his back.

  ‘We’ll put you on the road now. Pay agents. Find someone to replace Keith . . .’

  He looks dumbly down, stirs the treasures and they clink and clack. Minute lasers of light glance off the diamonds. ‘Shit,’ he says.

  Charlotte stands up, crosses to him, crouches down.

  ‘Jim, it’s a simple conversion.’

  Conversion? When he couldn’t understand her, he hated her.

  ‘It’s so obvious, so right. We convert all this artifice into life.’

  ‘Shit,’ he says again.

  ‘It’s the most perfect thing I’ve done.’

  But Jim stands up, kicks a pearl necklace away from him like a snake and it scudders under a chest of drawers. He can’t look at Charlotte with her eyes like coal, so he turns away and leans his head against the wall. I want to break her, he thinks now. I want to break her for imagining this. For her vanity. She relegates me, miniaturises me: ‘his life is so pitifully small, it can be transformed, reshaped by the selling of pearls and little boxes and ornaments.’ But yes, for once in my life, I want to break someone. I can feel it start. Anger. Starts in my temple, but pushes out across my shoulders and down all the length of my arms and into my hands.

  ‘I could kill you!’

  His voice is a sob, weak, vanquished. But when he senses her moving to him, he is round like a whip and facing her. She reaches out to him, but he binds her arms to her side and shakes her, shakes her till she screams and pulls away, stumbles over the suitcase and almost falls. But no, he grabs her again and his hands cut deep into her arms, so hard does he grip, because he can feel her strength, equal to his and he must keep hold, keep hold and let it mount in him, the new anger so long buried in bone marrow and trapped, but now flooding muscle and sinew, pushing and bursting till it hurtles from him and he sees it arc and fall in Charlotte’s body hurtling over into the air, then falling, falling as slowly as his long cry, her head crunching the grey metal of the typewriter and all her papers crushed and scattered as the body dives to the floor and is still.

  Jim Reese gazes at the ribbon of blood threading her golden hair. And breathes.

  *

  A blue ambulance light turns. Four thousand miles from the ancient, restless mother he is dreaming of, Franklin Doyle is driven to hospital covered with a red blanket. All night, blood from his flayed arm flowed onto the vinyl floor of his kitchen, where he had stumbled in search of cloths
with which to bind it, and where, as he began to wrap it round with a faded jubilee tea towel, a deep unconsciousness tipped him head-first into violent and useless dreaming. He lay with his head in the cat litter tray. The cat (a London stray who lent permanence to his long sojourn in the city) came and sniffed at his nostrils, sniffed at his blood, put a probing paw into it, licked the paw, then went to her milk saucer and drank, leaving a fleck of blood in the little saucer of milk. She urinated feebly near to Doyle’s hair, then wandered to the sitting room, where she went to sleep on the sofa. Mrs Annipavroni, who made a tiny income cleaning the homes of exiles like herself, found Doyle at eight-thirty and rang for an ambulance. By that time, he was near to death. This would be the first time in Mrs Annipavroni’s life that she could claim to have saved a life – unless you included her children, whose lives she saved in her mind many times a day.

  As Doyle is received by the hospital, sunlight falls into the gunroom, where the dog, Admiral, has begun a violent barking and tearing of the door, a yowling and whimpering which express its desolate confusion. Its bladder is full. It is yowling for the damp and earth and shiny leaves of the rose beds, yowling for Garrod, jailor and deliverer.

  Garrod is lying in the hall. The yellow bar of light over the Duke of Abercorn’s portrait is still on, though the sun is flooding in and glimmering on the dead scales of the stuffed marlin and the post has crashed into the wire basket fitted to the inside of the letter box. It is at this moment when, if Colonel Browne were at Sowby Manor, he would be relishing a substantial breakfast and Lady Amelia toying with an insubstantial one. Then they would separate, he to his study to write letters and orders concerning the estate, she to hers, where she would spend considerable time rearranging her snuffbox collection before settling down at her bureau to ‘tidy up a few odds and ends’. But the thoughts of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne are not with Sowby. They are certainly not with Garrod, lying under the light of the Duke of Abercorn in the thick pyjamas he’s had for eleven years. Their thoughts are with the Swiss morning that has broken so exquisitely, with such purity of light, on the thirteenth day of their holiday.

  ‘Lunch at that nice high-up place with the fat owner?’ says the Colonel as he dresses.

  ‘The Glochenspiel?’

  ‘That’s it. Fancy that, do you?’

  Lady Amelia has put on a lilac dress and new lilac shoes. She feels weightless, young.

  ‘So pretty, the Glochenspiel.’

  ‘Cold lunch at the Tannenbaum, if you prefer?’

  ‘No, no. The Glochenspiel would be lovely, Duffy. What a heavenly day!’

  So they go out – the large man and the thin, meagre-breasted woman – into the ‘heavenly day’, while Admiral pees in zigzags onto the gunroom floor and Garrod’s doleful breaths confirm the pattern of his life: through seventy years he has rendered service and found none in return.

  *

  But Mrs Annipavroni and Jim Reese are doing the ultimate service – saving lives. Charlotte’s head is bound so thickly the brilliant hair is hidden to all but Jim who mourns it, knowing it will be shaved when the head is stitched. Like Doyle, Charlotte rides to hospital under a red blanket. Like Doyle’s dreams, hers are of her mother. And it is through the same hospital doors that Doyle has been wheeled only moments ago that Charlotte now travels, along the same corridor, nurses pushing, hastening, flat, bright light tingeing her palor with green, Jim Reese, a frayed tweed jacket put on over the vest he has slept in, jogging and pushing with the nurses till green swing doors open and receive Charlotte on the trolley and close on Jim, while a surgeon holds his hands up for the sterile gloves, moistens his mouth before the mask is tied round it. Jim stares at the closed doors. Only then, as Charlotte is snatched from him, does he remember the diamonds, the silver spoons, the gold and onyx boxes that still littered the floor when the ambulance men arrived to take her away.

  *

  Just before mid-day on this Saturday which is warm in the Swiss Alps, warm in Buckinghamshire and stickily hot in London, the police arrive at Charlotte’s flat. The door is unlocked and they walk in: Sergeant McCluskie and Police Constable Richards. A voice growls on McCluskie’s intercom. He snatches it and speaks quietly to it, like a man calming a dog: ‘Delta Romeo X-Ray two five McCluskie. Arrived Flat Nine, Five Zero Ballantine Road. Er. Valuables. Liberal quantity of. Pictures and gun in Citroen car. No sign of residents, over.’

  By 12.10, Charlotte’s hoard has been returned to the suitcase which is wrapped in a polythene sack like a corpse and placed with the gun and the paintings in the boot of McCluskie’s Granada. Delivering the treasure into the surprised hands of Camden Police HQ, McCluskie is then ordered to find Jim Reese and bring him in for questioning. McCluskie sends PC Richards to buy him a cheese sandwich from Vincente’s Sandwich Shop. Vincente Fallaci is a cousin by marriage of Mrs Annipavroni, who has recently saved the life of Franklin Doyle. But such is the fine mesh of the British judicial system that this extraordinary fact entirely escapes it, and the relatedness of Julietta Annipavroni and Vincente Fallaci swims away from detection like a tiny glimmering sardine.

  McCluskie and Richards drive to the hospital. Charlotte Browne is in no danger, they are told. However, the head wound is more than superficial. She is weak. She is sleeping. She cannot talk to them, and no, Mr Reese, who accompanied her in the ambulance, has not returned. Nobody can remember seeing him leave, yet he isn’t there. McCluskie says he will wait and parks his heavy, muscular body on a plastic chair which creaks under his buttocks. Richards is ordered back to 50 Ballantine Road, to ‘clobber’ Jim Reese if and when he returns there. Meanwhile, police at Camden are sifting the diamonds, the lapis lasuli boxes, the bronze statuettes of naked women with fishes and trying to trace their origin. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Garrod and Doyle lie in pools of light and dream of their loneliness.

  It’s lonely, lonely utters Charlotte child to her parents on a sand-dune, to be sliced as I have been sliced with Timothy Storey’s metal spade, lonely, lonely to feel the blood of my buried leg flow into the sand as Timothy Storey runs away to his Nanny in a deck chair. I call out – to you, to Timothy Storey’s Nanny with her crochet, to anyone – but no one comes to the bleeding leg in its tunnel of sand, no one comes because I am no longer here, I have slithered away in my own blood and the same tide that washes away the crochet pattern inadvertently dropped by Timothy Storey’s Nanny will wash away the shiny crimson puddle that was once a girl, only child of a Colonel, a girl with hair the colour of the sand which now receives her life.

  Far away on the dunes, the wind clutters through the pages of Colonel Browne’s Daily Telegraph, slaps through Lady Amelia’s copy of The Day of the Tortoise which she is reading for the first time. Above and below and round and inside the wind, all is silence.

  Garrod has turned. He lies face up to the sun. The stone in his back has turned and grown in size and weight and sits on his white chest. Heat floods his head. His head drips with the pain of the boulder flattening his heart inside the light and brittle rib casing. His heart has become a moth, beating its wings in a glass bottle. Far away where the tanks are massing, where the lads cool their skulls on their ice-blue visions of Rommel’s eyes, a dog called Admiral is yowling for the battles to come, and the dead.

  In slatted light, blood drips and fills, drips and fills. The body of Franklin Doyle is returning, drip by drip, from the death gathered up in the wide arms of Julietta Annipavroni and exchanged by this exile for an exile’s life. Doyle is enjoying his journey back to existence. The way is littered with hope. This hope takes the form of glittering stones and flints as dazzling as jewels. He picks his way among their sharp surfaces, treading softly, walking on, on to the beat of a muddled verse twanged out by an old man whose skin has the colour and texture of rust:

  ‘Fuck the Lord and screw damnation,

  Pappy’s bought a gasoline station!’

  Only the hand holding his is missing, the quiet hand of a girl called Margaret with shiny e
yes and a fawn summer coat. She is hiding somewhere. She refuses to come out and introduce herself to the rusty man, his father, singing his rhyme. She is waiting, out of sight. Why waiting? Doyle doesn’t know. But he walks on. Happy.

  *

  Colonel Browne leads his wife onto the cool terrace of the popular mountain restaurant, the Glochenspiel.

  ‘It’s so perfect,’ sighs Amelia, ‘don’t you think?’

  All, all that day is singing and yodelling with joy in the heart of Amelia Browne.

  ‘They know how to do things up here,’ smiles the Colonel.

  Down below, in the basement of number fifty Ballantine Road, Constable Richards, alias Delta Romeo X-Ray two four Richards, picks up scattered papers, some torn, some stained with blood, and begins to read an article entitled Eve and the Weapons of Eden by Charlotte Browne. Constable Richards’s A-level results enable him to understand that the article is talking to him about the oppression of women and their children, born and unborn, by the militaristic souls of the descendants of Adam. Constable Richards takes out a slice of Dentyne from his heavy blue pocket and chews on this anxiously, perplexed as he follows the jumpy words, the capital letters of which keep leaping up above the line, but which begin to reveal to him patterns, looping, diving, zigzagging, the mighty capitals standing over them like irregular trees, patterns of thought for which his A-levels, his obligatory studies of Marx and Mao, his months at the Police Academy have not satisfactorily prepared him. Into the hands of women, say these orchards of words, we commend the salvation of mankind. Constable Richards bites on the Dentyne, sighs, sets the papers down, rubs his eyes.