How It All Began Read online

  Henry found that note-taking became tedious. He dozed off a couple of times, woke to jot down a few more points, accepted another coffee from the trolley. He was not too concerned, confident enough that the complexities of eighteenth-century politics would spring readily to mind once he was on his feet in the lecture theater, though he was annoyed that the wording of a particular witticism escaped him for the moment. Never mind, it would arrive once he was under way, in full flow. He was after all known for his fluency and spontaneity—not for nothing had he been in demand as a speaker on both sides of the Atlantic. All the same, it was tiresome not to feel that he had the ballast of his old outline of this lecture; Rose would have seen to it, too bad she had had to let him down, good of Marion to come but so far her performance fell short. Henry made a few more notes, irritated now, and then sat back to stare at the passing scenery, and doze again.

  They arrived in Manchester and progressed seamlessly from the station to the university, where suitably deferential officials were standing by to conduct them to the lunch. Henry cheered up. He always enjoyed being lionized. There were twenty or so people for the lunch party; it had clearly been made an occasion for the university to entertain some of its supporters. Captains of industry, Marion saw, skimming down the guest list, local bigwigs. This was an annual event; the lecture by a visitor of distinction.

  Henry had the Vice-Chancellor to one side of him, and a Professor someone on the other—a youngish man to whom he turned with a benign inquiry about his field of interest: “Know your name, of course,” (he didn’t) “but can’t for the moment recall…”

  The man grinned. Said that he believed Henry would have known his old tutor, way back—contemporaries, he rather thought. He mentioned the name, a smile still on his lips. He knew all too well of what he spoke: this was one of Henry’s archenemies, a man with whom he had waged intellectual war for many a year. Henry represents—with pride, let it be said—the last gasp of the Namier school of history, the insistence that events are governed entirely by politics and persons. The old enemy was an ideas man, a political theorist, nicely contemptuous of that reductionist vision of how the world works. And now here was one of his disciples, one of his acolytes. The old enemy was dead, so Henry had the advantage of him there, but he was serving up this ace from beyond the grave. His protégé had a Chair. A rather prestigious Chair, indeed: Henry had managed a glance at the guest list.

  The day was now tarnished. Henry made a few chill remarks to the man, who was polite—urbane, indeed—self-confident, and appeared to be suppressing amusement. Henry abandoned him as soon as possible and took refuge in the Vice-Chancellor.

  Marion, meanwhile, was doing rather better. She had engaged at once with the man to her right, who introduced himself as “George Harrington—a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Clark. I gather you’re looking after our distinguished visitor. And are you also in academic life?” Marion told him what she did; her trade sounded distinctly lightweight in the context of the occasion and the company but Harrington displayed interest, asked questions.

  “How satisfying—creative and constructive. I’m just a money man, I’m afraid.” He named a financial institution. “One of those people everyone hates at the moment.” A wry smile. “Though actually I do have a little personal sideline that is more in your area.”

  He bought and restored flats in London for rental purposes, it emerged. “It’s a sort of hobby, I suppose, a diversion. I even see it as vaguely creative”—an apologetic laugh—“making something pleasant out of something neglected. I cater for the top end of the market—foreign diplomats, businesspeople. It’s pretty low down the creative scale, but an antidote to the day job—figures, figures, figures. But my creativity is limited—I’m good at the bricks and mortar side but I can be all at sea when it comes to bathroom fittings and curtains. My PA helps out but I’m not sure she always gets it right.”

  Marion was paying close attention. She liked this man: his self-deprecating manner, which masked, she suspected, considerable status within his own world. This was some rather high-up money man, for sure. He had a certain charm, but not too much—Marion was well aware that charm can be both self-serving and deceptive. His talk was entertaining: a recent visit to China and the disconcerting food encountered, the temporary loss of his BlackBerry a few days ago, rendering him “helpless and useless, a salutary experience, we are only as good as our technology these days.” His financial institution had funded some new IT installations for the university, which was why he had been invited here: “Though after the BlackBerry event I wonder if we are doing them a favor.” He encouraged Marion to talk of her own life, was amused by her account of the search for a marble bath to meet the requirements of an opera singer. “I can see you have to be versatile—take the client’s deplorable taste on the chin. I too have to pander to clients, but at least it doesn’t involve marble baths.”

  Both paid token attention to their neighbors on the other side, but resumed the conversation as soon as possible. It came as no surprise to Marion when George Harrington said, “You know, I am wondering if perhaps you might be the answer to a prayer.”

  Marion, who had been wondering the same thing, inclined her head gracefully. This could be interesting. She was not taken in by the “hobby” talk. His was an investment project, she could see—buy to let, no need to get fancy about diversions and creativity. George Harrington was using his handsome bonuses to build up a property portfolio. Fine. A sensible thing to do, no doubt, if you’ve got surplus cash.

  “Let’s have a talk, back in town,” he said. “I think we could work out some rather nice arrangement. Give my PA a break—the poor girl’s overstretched looking for sofas and I don’t know what. Can you do—you know, that business where you have just one elegant chair and a glass table with a vase on it, and goodness knows where they’re supposed to put down their newspaper?”

  “Minimalist,” said Marion. “Yes, I can do minimalist, if pressed. And oriental—Chelsea Arabian Nights. And Cotswold manor. Traditional American a specialty.”

  George Harrington beamed. “This is most exciting. What very good luck that Manchester brought us together in this way.”

  “It’s only by chance that I’m here,” said Marion. “My uncle’s secretary’s mother…Oh, we needn’t go into that.” She too was smiling.

  Cards were exchanged. The lunch drew to a close.

  Once in the lecture hall, Henry’s spirits rose somewhat. This was after all his natural habitat. He listened appreciatively to the Vice-Chancellor’s introduction, rose and moved to the lectern during the audience’s suitably welcoming applause, smiled around the room, said what a pleasure and an honor to be here today, so forth and so on, and launched into the eighteenth century.

  For the first few minutes, fine. He was on autopilot—the introductory stuff. The general picture, the setting of the scene. Then to the detail: the defining political moves, the names. That was when everything came unstuck. This infinitely familiar scene dissolved into

  mist, this period that he knew better than his own time, the age in which he moved with absolute confidence, became uncertain, betraying; the chronology escaped him, he started to get things in the wrong order. The notes he had made in the train were useless; they merely confused him. And the names, the names…He would begin to speak of a key figure and the man’s name would have vanished into a black hole. Henry hesitated, he stumbled, he corrected himself. He had to resort to the most appalling, blatant circumlocutions: “Walpole’s confidant…Walpole’s right-hand man…” He had lost his grip on the contents of his own mind: he knew these names, he knew the events, they were the element in which he lived—had lived—but now, suddenly, they had slithered into some pit from which he could not retrieve them. He waffled, he digressed, he gave himself pauses in which to retrench, to delve wildly for that name. He was fighting his way through a nightmare; from time to time he sensed an audience that was both restless and embarrassed. The Vice-Chancellor, in
the front row, stared ahead with a fixed expression. Next to him, Henry’s other lunchtime neighbor looked down at his own shoes, concealing perhaps a smirk.

  At last, Henry managed to bring things to a close. Polite applause. The Vice-Chancellor joined him on the platform. Would Henry care to take a few questions? Henry would, with clenched teeth.

  The first question he could deal with, just. And then someone wanted to quiz Henry on the later part of the century. Would Henry like to comment on the relative roles of the prime minister before and after 1750?

  Henry began to speak. And as he did so he realized with horror that he could not remember the names of the late eighteenth-century prime ministers. The Elder and the Younger. Elder and Younger what? Name. The name? He spoke; he avoided, he danced away from the crucial word, he sounded odder and odder, he skirted, he fluffed, he knew that it was becoming obvious. And then at last the name surfaced: Pitt, Pitt, Pitt. He flung it out, triumphant, but too late: the puzzled faces before him told him that.

  Almost never before had Henry experienced humiliation. Occasional embarrassment, yes—moments when one had been at a loss, or when one was aware that one had not performed quite up to scratch. But not this total, absolute chagrin. He felt as though he had been flayed, mercilessly exposed to the scornful gaze of all those strangers. He wanted only to get away from this place, to end this horrid day, to be on the train, heading home, but was obliged to proceed to a room where tea was on offer, and submit himself to strained conversation. He could see only derision, he thought, in the eyes that he tried to avoid. His old enemy’s protégé came up, smiling sweetly, and made some comment about a recent publication on eighteenth-century politics that Henry had not read. Henry sipped his tea, inclined his head, and was silent. From somewhere far away, the old enemy was jeering.

  At last, he and Marion were back on the train. It suddenly occurred to Henry that she had not previously heard him lecture; perhaps she thought it was always like that.

  He said, heavily, “I suppose you realize that that was a disaster.”

  She had. She could not think what to say. “Not a disaster, Uncle Henry. I did feel those bright lights must have been rather distracting for you…And those people who came in late…”

  “A disaster,” said Henry.

  “Your notes,” sighed Marion. “All my fault.”

  “No,” said Henry, surprisingly. “Not your fault. Anno bloody domini. Suddenly I knew nothing—nothing—about the eighteenth century. Can you conceive of that?”

  That period, for Marion, meant certain furnishings and styles: Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Robert Adam. Stripes. Tottery little tables. The names so devastatingly lost to Henry would have meant nothing to her anyway. One had got through life quite easily knowing nothing much of the eighteenth century.

  She suggested a drink. She would look for the chap with the trolley.

  Fortified with a half bottle of Virgin Trains red wine (“What is this fearful stuff?”), Henry became eloquent. “Let me tell you something, my dear. Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind—though I say it myself—until you can appear as ignorant and inarticulate as some…some assistant lecturer at a polytechnic.” Henry ignored the fact that the polytechnics were long since laid to rest—they remained a term of abuse. “Some paralysis of the brain occurs. It’s like…like being thrown into the pitch dark and you can’t find the bloody door but you know it’s there. Pitt, for Christ’s sake! I couldn’t remember Pitt’s name. I couldn’t remember anything about the South Sea Bubble. It’s a suffocation of the intellect. One’s mind—one’s fine mind, if I may say so—becomes incompetent. Impotent. Yes, impotent.” Henry stared intently at Marion, as though she might not be following him. “One cannot perform. One is emasculated. One…” Perhaps this line had gone far enough. “The long and short of it is that you can’t bloody well remember what you were going to say next when you know perfectly well what it was.”

  “Poor Mummy used to ring up and then forget what she’d rung about,” murmured Marion.

  Henry waved a dismissive hand. “All right. The human condition. Which is no reason why one shouldn’t protest. Which is what I’m doing. Vehemently. I have been made to look stupid through no fault of my own. That is an outrage.”

  Marion nodded. She agreed, with fervor. She made a little moue of sympathy. At the same time, she was thinking of George Harrington, with a certain complacency. This might turn out to have been a rather fortunate encounter; at best, a solution to her declining revenue. Work; lucrative work, maybe. A bit of luck, really, that Uncle Henry’s Rose had had to “let him down” today.

  Henry finished his wine and fell into a doze. Cruising that interface between sleep and wakefulness, he found himself in a seminar room, required it seemed to discuss Hobbes and the concept of liberty. His old enemy stared at him expectantly, flanked by acolytes. The room they were in was rocking and swaying. One of the acolytes rose to his feet and said that the buffet car was now serving hot and cold drinks, sandwiches and snacks. Henry surfaced, to a splitting headache and a certain sense of relief. Hobbes—Christ!

  Jeremy Dalton also had a disagreeable day. He made further attempts at conciliation with Stella; she either hung up on him, or wept hysterically. By late afternoon her sister was with her, and came on the line to say briskly that Stella was in no condition to talk and that Jeremy had better not get in touch for the moment. She, Gill, the sister, might contact him in a day or two. Stella had seen her doctor and was on tranquilizers.

  Jeremy was not accustomed to adultery. He had done it a few times before, but these had been transitory matters. Now, he was branded, condemned, sentenced, and all because of a change of plans and a message. So…so fortuitous. So unfair, in a way. The situation as it was—had been—really wasn’t hurting Stella. Their married life was going on as it ever had done; he was home as much as his work allowed, he was an attentive father, he and Stella—well, when you’ve been married nearly twenty years you’re not in the first flush of passion, are you? But there was nothing basically wrong; Stella of course was inclined to fits of depression, and frequent manic reactions, he’d learned to live with that, to manage her, in a way. She was needy, he knew that, you had to pander to that, but all in all they got along well enough; sexually, things were fine, unless Stella was in one of her states, and anyway he wasn’t a man who always felt the grass would be greener elsewhere. Until Marion hove on the scene, and he found her most attractive, and so invigorating, and there was always so much to talk about and…well, before he knew what was happening he was entirely involved with her, in bed, out of bed, and not really feeling all that guilty because this wasn’t going to interfere with his life with Stella and the girls. Almost certainly not.

  But now it had. Everything had gone up in smoke; that blasted woman Gill had muscled in, Stella was allegedly heading for another breakdown, the girls had been told that Daddy would be away indefinitely on business. Marion had been a comfort, on the phone; rational, soothing. Look, just take things day by day, try to get past this tiresome sister, talk to Stella when she’s calmed down, everything always looks a bit different after a week or two. She wasn’t saying—well, there’s us to think about too, you and me, what do we want? And he was grateful for that; he didn’t really know what he did want, except that he was a man who didn’t care for upheaval, and things weren’t good at all on the financial front, and he certainly couldn’t let himself in for anything that involved expense. Let alone divorce.

  Jeremy may seem a somewhat contradictory figure. Here is someone whose occupation is the acquisition and disposition of a superior form of junk—reclamation, after all, is just that—who spent most of his days scouring the landscape for the antique doors, wash basins, chimney pots, old brewery signs, cast iron radiators that one person did not want but another would, and the rest of his time prowling around amid the heaped, piled, stacked confusion of his wares; a man who worked with random chaos, but for whom a stab
le and orderly base was a necessity. He liked to know that the carefully restored farmhouse in Oxted was always there. And his girls. And Stella.

  Jeremy did not see his wares as superior junk, or himself as a serendipitous junk-hunter. Of course not. He saw himself as a connoisseur, as a skilled investigator. He knew how to study sales catalogues and estate agents’ Web sites; he could smell out any mansion prime for stripping and be there at the point when the builders got going. He knew just how casual an interest to display before handing over a wad of notes and getting on the phone to the guys who did the heavy work for him. He knew the thrill of the chase, the discovery: the overmantel spotted jutting from a pile of rubble, the stained glass panel behind some smashed-up kitchen fittings. You never knew what might surface, but when you saw it you recognized it at once: that supposedly redundant artifact which could be given a new lease on life, that could spark acquisitive fire in a customer. The railway waiting-room clock, the wrought iron gate, the intriguing tiles, the church pew.

  Jeremy had passion—that overworked word of the moment. Passion for his stock, passion for the pursuit of stock. Passion is infectious; Jeremy’s enthusiasm, his stream of comment and information, could fire up a customer so that suddenly they realized they could not live a moment longer without that Victorian grate. Jeremy was not so much a salesman as an evangelist; he wanted others to share his fascination with the stuff that time discards. People came away from the warehouse (with the Victorian grate, the Edwardian glass) feeling not that they had been sold something but that they had understood how to see and appreciate.

  It was this quality that had attracted Marion, initially. She had enjoyed drifting with him through the warehouse as he pointed things out: “…last week from this extraordinary castle place in Wales, I hope nobody wants it, I can’t bear to part with it…and just look over here…” She too knew the excitement of discovery, of recognition, the rush you get from your own discerning eye. She warmed at once to Jeremy; this was her kind of man. Why hadn’t Harry been like that? But Harry, ex-husband, was history. To be honest, she did not that often think of him. Nor had she been in the market for a replacement until Jeremy appeared. And even then…She had seen the situation as a delightful, unexpected adventure. But now they were compromised, forced into something darker, more guilty, by Stella’s extravagant reaction.