‘Peter?’

‘My cousin, Peter Naulls.’

‘You’ll have to ask your uncle Leonard about that,’ said Mrs Pettitt. She spoke in the tone of one cautioning a former associate of the Prodigal Son. ‘Nobody condescends to tell us, do they, Kay?’

They went on up, whispering together, tip-toeing. They were the kind of women who behaved in hospital as if they were in church. Stephen got into his car and drove home the long way round via Byss and Loomlade. The rain had stopped and it was warm and humid, the sky feathered all over with tiny golden clouds. The evening sunlight lay like a gilding over the distant reaches of the moor. Stephen, thinking of his grandmother, remembered those letters he had written while in his teens to Mrs Brenda Evans at Tobermory Park Road, Vancouver, and to which he had received no reply. His grandmother, probably, had given him a false address. What did it matter now? He was sure he no longer cared. He had put away childish things.

9

Chesney Hall was a mid-eighteenth-century house with a central portico equal to the whole height of the building. This portico had a double tier of Corinthian columns and windows set in massive dressings of ashlar between which nestled the blue plaque: Alfred Osborn Tace, Novelist, lived here 1883–1949. But the public were required to enter by a side door into a garden room from which, it seemed to Stephen, they were almost furtively huddled first to the study, then to the drawing room, lastly to the library, being carefully kept away from those regions private to the South worth family. He began to wish he hadn’t come, though he had felt that now at last the opportunity was offered to him it was impossible to stay away. He recalled stories he had read of dispossessed or unrecognized heirs returning to their ancestral homes as servants or in guises nearly as humble. That was how he felt.

Southworth was there but not, as he put it to the visitors who entered somewhat cautiously among the cane furniture and potted plants, himself doing the honours. This was the province of a guest in the house, a professor of English at an American university. Southworth could be heard telling the rector of St Michael’s that this friend of his was a world authority on Alfred Osborn Tace. He was a big rangy bearded man in jeans and the kind of full flowing smock worn by nineteenth-century painters. When Stephen came into the study he was holding forth, the centre of a circle of visitors, most of whom had never heard of Tace until the Bleakland series came on television. His words, learned, scholarly, uttered in the harsh accent of the Middle West, issued from out of a luxuriant brownish-greyish-fairish mass; moustache, beard, hair all meeting and intermingling to leave only a few bare centimetres about the nose and between the eyes. The expressions of his listeners were bewildered as he led them on into the drawing room.

To move around like this with the herd Stephen felt an injury to himself as Tace’s grandson. He resented the professor, his learning, his enthusiasm, his seeming indifference to his audience as individual people. Yet he was once or twice on the point of going up to the man, and if it were possible to interrupt his flow of talk, of declaring himself as Tace’s descendant. But the professor, he was sure, would only ask which university he had been to, a question to which he was always sensitive.

Lyn walked about, admiring furnishings, pictures, first editions, but Stephen could only feel more and more aggrieved. It was especially humiliating to have to take his turn in a queue before he could look at the photographs in their silver frames, Tace with his parents, Tace up at Oxford, Tace with his wife. The drawing room was spacious, the ceiling high, the walls panelled in white and apple green, and set about were those chairs Dadda claimed Whalbys’ had refurbished. Over the marble fireplace was John’s portrait of the novelist, in a glass-fronted cabinet his favourite reading matter, Gibbon, Fielding, Defoe.

It made Stephen’s heart swell, it was almost painful, to think that all this might have been his, that if the law in the 1920s had been what it was today, very probably would have been his. Only the other day he had read in the Echo about a man who had died without making a will, yet his illegitimate daughter, whose mother at the time of her birth even had a husband living, had nevertheless been allowed to inherit all her father’s property.

Thinking of this, he looked up from a rather bitter scrutiny of Tace with Lady Ottoline Morrell photographed at Garsington, to meet the eyes of a member of the Echo’s staff. Harriet Crozier was standing by the grand piano, taking notes on a small pocket pad. She was differently dressed today, wearing blue jeans and a white blouse, but once more her hair was hidden, tied up in the same blue, green and white patterned scarf.

‘I’m trying to get some impressions for a sort of atmosphere story,’ Harriet said. ‘Something to tie in with the TV series.’ Pointing to the photograph of Mrs Tace, she asked rather naïvely, ‘Was that your grandmother?’

‘Good Lord, no.’ Stephen gave her a mysterious smile. ‘Mine is a bar sinister connection, I’m afraid.’ She obviously didn’t understand. ‘The wrong side of the blanket,’ he explained.

She looked confused. He would have said more but for Mrs Newman and Joanne coming up to them. He scarcely recognized Lyn’s sister. The ballooning shape was the same, enveloped in a tent of flowered cotton, but a crop and short tight curls transformed Joanne’s face.

‘Kev said better safe than sorry.’

When she understood Harriet Crozier let out a nervous shriek of laughter. ‘Maybe you should have it dyed black as well. D’you mind if I write a story about it? I mean about Three Towns girls cutting off their hair and dyeing it. I’m a reporter. It’d make a great story.’

Joanne was huffy at first but presently relented. They all went back to Tace Way. Lyn made tea while Harriet interviewed Joanne and got what she called ‘quotes’ from Mrs Newman.

‘What about you?’ she said to Lyn. ‘Are you going to defy him and keep your hair long?’

Lyn said quietly, ‘Are you?’

‘I cover mine up. I don’t go about looking like Alice in Wonderland.’

Although it was hours yet before it would be dark, although the sun was still high in the sky, Stephen walked with Harriet as far as the bus stop. The last of the visitors to the Hall had gone and the professor could be seen walking back towards the house from the road.

‘He’s just had a biography of your grandfather published. I expect you know all about that, though. Muse of Fire, A Life of Alfred Osborn Tace by Irving J. Schuyler.’

Stephen hadn’t heard of it but he wasn’t going to say so. ‘I haven’t read it yet.’

‘They sent us a copy at the Echo.’ Harriet gave another of her shrill nervous laughs. ‘I don’t know who they thought was going to review that. D’you want to read it? I’ll drop it in to you sometime when we’ve done with it.’

For a moment he had thought she was going to ask him to review the book. She didn’t and he was affronted.

He said distantly, ‘I expect I shall get a copy sent to me.’

Was it his imagination that she seemed disappointed? It occurred to him that she liked him, liked him in a way he had never really ‘liked’ a member of the opposite sex. As Kevin or perhaps Ian Stringer might have put it, she ‘fancied’ him. He recoiled from her with a feeling that was part distaste and part fear.

The bus came before they had waited five minutes. He saw it bear her away with relief. It had been an unpleasant day, fraught with humiliation, with intensely irritating, troubled moments. But when he looked back over the past weeks it seemed to him that all his life recently had been like that, the even tenor of his way disturbed, even his marriage, once so smooth and serene, in some indefinable way changed. He could put a date to it, he could fix the point at which this change had begun. It was on the day in April that he had found the body of Marianne Price.