Page 25 of Happily Ever After
‘We fell for one another instantly,’ Lady Tanith went on, talking over the top of me. ‘It was a true meeting of minds. We understood one another without saying a word.’
‘Lucky old him,’ I muttered into my collar. I was now deeply regretting getting her on the subject of Ozzie. It wasn’t going to lead me to the whereabouts of the diaries, it was going to lead to more borderline salacious details about their relationship. Which Isodid not want to hear.
‘But, of course, Caroline was so frail, so dependent, and Oswald was such a gentleman. She needed him so utterly.’ Lady Tanith gazed up at Oswald’s face again, her tone softened. ‘I used to sit with him in this library, while he wrote his poetry and his novels, and suggest ideas to him.’ She stroked the frame again. ‘He was always so grateful.’
I had a horrible mental flash of a very young Tanith ‘suggesting ideas’ to an older man with a frail wife and, again, hoped that none of those ideas had come to fruition on this table. I found I was wiping it with my sleeve, just in case. The thought that Lady Tanith might have hastened Caroline’s departure from this veil of tears to get Oswald all to herself struck me suddenly and horrifically.
‘How did Caroline die?’ I asked tentatively, a little worried that a fall down the stairs or other nasty ‘accident’ might be the next thing I had to worry about.
‘She’d been ill for a long time,’ Lady Tanith said, still wearing the expression of misty fondness that she always adopted when staring at Oswald’s picture. ‘It was a release at the end.’
That didnotanswer my question.
‘I had the plaque with the dates put onto the portrait, after he… passed.’ Lady Tanith started stroking the plaque now. ‘So that nobody could forget. Oh,’ she sighed. ‘He was a genius, Andromeda. A genius. The world will never see his like again.’
A silence fell. I didn’t feel that I could go and get another pile of books, not whilst she was having misty remembrances.
‘So, you married his son?’ I tried to bring her back a little more into the here and now.
‘Mmm? Oh, Richard, yes. Of course, he was alotolder than me, but, with Oswald gone – it kept me close to the family.’
I felt a pang of sympathy for poor Richard, who seemed to have been an also-ran to his own father. I wondered if Lady Tanith had ever loved him, or even liked him, or whether she’d only married him because of his father.
‘Then, of course, the boys came along and Richard died.’ She turned away from the portrait now. ‘But now I feel the time is right to find and publish Oswald’s diaries, to let the world know what lay behind his genius and what we meant to one another. He idolised me, you know. Idolised. Far more so than Richard ever did, but the boys are old enough now to learn the truth. Edited, of course. I’d prefer them to think of their grandfather as the creative talent he was, without stressing the importance of my own contributions.’
I held my breath for a minute, in case any great revelations were about to appear about the parentage of her sons, but then I realised that Oswald had been dead for some while before they were born and I was trying to force a book narrative onto real life. Of course her father-in-law wouldn’t be the father of her children, that wasn’t how real life worked. That sort of relationship belonged to the concupiscent world of daytime television and the tabloid press, not Lady Tanith’s world. Jay was right. Life was messy and didn’t have proper endings.
‘Caroline had the portrait commissioned as a birthday present,’ Lady Tanith carried on. Even spreadsheets were starting to look appealing now. ‘Oswald asked to have it hung in here; the library was very much his space, you see.’
And of course he’d have wanted a gigantic version of his own face staring at him every time he sat down for a read or to write, I thought, and wondered if Caroline had been as off the wall as Lady Tanith was, and whether that had been Oswald’s ‘type’.
‘It’s very…’ I tried to think of a word. Big wouldn’t do. Neither would ominous, oppressive, egocentric or off-putting. ‘Powerful,’ I settled on.
Lady Tanith nodded. ‘It was painted by someone quite famous. Spencer, possibly. Caroline did tell me but I really don’t remember.’ The dismissive way she said this told me an awful lot about how she’d felt about Oswald’s wife. Maybe Lady Tanith reallyhadhastened Caroline’s end. Then I remembered what Hugo had told me, about this being Caroline’s family home and Oswald ‘marrying in’ and wondered whether Lady Tanith had a big chip on her shoulder about it. ‘But I don’t know why we’re talking about dear Oswald. You are supposed to be sorting my books.’
I couldn’t say ‘well, bugger off and let me get on with it, then,’ so I just raised my eyebrows, which she couldn’t see, and opened a new sheet on the screen.
‘The stringing of the fencing wire
Hangs tighter than the player’s lyre.
Whilst all around the pigeons flock,
And with their calls, the humans mock.’
‘That was one of Oswald’s verses. It’s from a poem he called “Party on the Estate Lawn”. I know all his work by heart, obviously.’
I stopped, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. That had to be the worst piece of poetry I thought I’d ever heard, but I couldn’t say so. ‘Are his published books in here?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t come across one yet.’
‘Oh.’ Lady Tanith looked around vaguely at the shelves. ‘They’re all in the house somewhere. He wrote fifteen novels and three collections of poetry, all privately printed, of course. He was far too much of a gentleman to deal with editors and all that nastiness.’
I was beginning to utterly loathe Oswald Bloody Dawe now. ‘Interesting,’ I said, half-heartedly. ‘I’m sure I’ll come across his books at some point.’ And then burn them, if that poem was a typical example of his work, for the good of mankind.
‘But thediaries.’ Lady Tanith lowered her voice. ‘The diaries are what you’re really here for, Andromeda. Please, do try to find them. I feel they could be such an important contribution to the world of literature, a true historic voyage into the working mind of a creative genius.’
But theyweren’there, were they? For the look of it, and because Lady Tanith was watching me expectantly, I fetched another armful of books from the nearby shelf and plonked them down on the table with a resulting puff of dust. I also peered into the gap the books had left, in case the pile of diaries was in there, double stacked and waiting. They weren’t.
I wanted to tell Lady Tanith what Jay had told me. Life isn’t like the books. Being brought into the house to find the diaries didn’t mean that Iwasgoing to find the diaries. Find the diaries, marry her son, wait for her to die and then open the house as a hotel or sell up and move to somewhere where Hugo could wear his beautiful dresses all day. Wasn’t that how the story was shaping up?
