The tightrope walkers, p.1
The Tightrope Walkers, page 1
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Contents
Daphne Wright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Daphne Wright
The Tightrope Walkers
Daphne Wright
Daphne Wright is a historical novelist with a special interest in the way wars have liberated women. Born in London, she worked in publishing for ten years before becoming a writer. After six historical novels, she turned to crime under the pseudonym of Natasha Cooper. She now divides her time between the city and the Somerset Levels.
Dedication
For Sylvie and lb Bellew
Chapter One
‘Amanda Wallington, the first of our “New Stars”, is studying Fine Art at the University of East Anglia. The daughter of David Wallington MP and his wife, Julia, who is a barrister, Amanda spends as much of her vacations as she can in Florence.’
The girl in the photograph was slender and long-legged with a square-chinned, bony face that looked both intelligent and seductively sulky. Her dark hair was long and straight and her eyes, ringed with black make-up and fringed with false lashes, looked enormous. Dressed in a minute skirt of blackberry-coloured wool and a clinging yellow sweater, she was lying along the golden-stone balustrade of a garden overlooking Florence. One of her arms was lifted above her head so that her hand could hold the heavy mass of hair away from her face.
Felicity Suvarov stared down at the photograph of her goddaughter and wondered what she was really thinking as she lay there faintly smiling. She looked languid and sophisticated and entirely confident; yet as a child she had been both passionate and angry. Felicity had often thought that Amanda might have been rather lonely as well, but if so she had had far too much pride to tell anyone.
Thinking of her transformation from difficult child to moody adolescent and then to the stunning, self-satisfied beauty of the photograph, Felicity was conscious of sympathy mixed with dislike and even fear, which surprised her. Reluctant to examine the fear, she tried to concentrate on the sympathy, knowing that although Amanda had the world at her feet for the time being, there was a lot that fate could do to her in revenge.
Felicity felt as though she was battling with that revenge herself. For twenty years she had had almost everything anyone could want and had never considered what might happen if it were to be taken away. She dropped the glossy magazine back on her desk and turned to stare out of the window at the leafless trees in the park, trying as so often before to concentrate on the happy past or even the possibly bearable future instead of the grim present.
Her hands clenched as she tried to remember. For a while she could not until, listening to the emptiness of the big house around her, she forced herself to think of it as it had been for so long. What she remembered most clearly was the dark, slender figure of her husband, around whom the whole glorious circus of sound, colour, scent and happiness had revolved.
‘Happiness,’ she said to herself. ‘What a funny little word for something so powerful!’
The house had been so full of it in the old days that it was almost as obvious as the scent of the flowers and pot-pourri she had kept in every room. Their sweetness had been mixed with the spiciness of beeswax polish and the warm smell of yeast lifting sticky dough for the bread she had always made herself because Peter liked it so.
There never seemed to be enough time to make bread any longer, even though three of her four children were away at boarding school and the fourth at university. The food she cooked for herself when she was alone was the quickest and cheapest she could find, and the house seemed to smell of little but dust. Flowers were too expensive a luxury and the pot-pourri had lost its scent long ago.
With an immense effort of will, Felicity stopped herself thinking of the present and went back again to the past. There had been characteristic sounds as well as scents, she reminded herself: the children’s music thumping down from their bedrooms, usually punctuated with screams of laughter or rage; and Peter’s never-to-be-forgotten voice – slightly drawling, faintly accented, utterly seductive – as he called for her to tell her the latest joke that had tickled his cynical fancy, to arrange another party or, more gently, to tell her how he loved and wanted her even after twenty years of marriage.
In the waves of misery that washed over her, she could not hold on to the past any longer. Her hands gripped the cold iron of the radiator as she tried to force back the useless, rasping tears she hated. Peter was dead. The house was full of dust and loneliness. There were debts to grapple with and work to be done. Refusing to surrender, she straightened her back, tucked her hands inside the sleeves of her fur coat to warm them up again and returned to her desk.
As she was pulling out her chair, she heard the sound of a key in the front door and her lips lifted into a smile. The only person it could possibly be was Andrew, her elder son. Running to the door, she pulled it open, ready to call out. Before she could even say his name, she heard his voice.
‘Put it there, Fred. I’ll go up and see if my mother’s in.’
Her delighted smile died and with it much of the excitement at his unexpected return. She stood for a moment, one hand on the blackened brass door handle and the other at her throat.
‘Andrew?’ she called when she had got her voice under control. ‘Can you come up here a moment?’
Heavy feet pounded up the stairs and then he stood in front of her. For a moment delight resurfaced at the sight of him, tall and slender, dark-haired like his father and with the same flashing eyes and fine bones. Felicity held out her arms and he walked forwards. Bending his head, he kissed her forehead. At the touch of his lips, she smiled and stroked his clean and floppy hair.
As he straightened up, Andrew left his hands on her thin shoulders.
‘Hello, Mama,’ he said, considering her and noticing that her blonde hair was dishevelled and her dark blue eyes were damp. ‘You look slightly worn.’
‘I am a bit,’ she admitted, almost amused by the understatement. She hugged him again, feeling a moment of pure pleasure as he let her hold on to him. ‘Come in here for a minute,’ she said as she released him.
‘But I’ve…’ he was beginning as she seized the ravelled wool of his sloppy jersey and urged him into her study, shutting the door firmly behind them. Before he could say any more, she added as quietly as she could, ‘Andrew, I’m sorry but I cannot have any more draft dodgers in the house.’
He stood in the bright winter sun that streamed through the smeared window, squinting slightly against the glare, wondering why she sounded so sharp. Her sympathy with his views on the war in Vietnam had always been a matter of satisfaction and some pride.
‘But you agree with us,’ he said slowly. ‘You always did. What’s changed?’
Felicity took a long, slow breath.
‘I do agree with you. I hate the war and I have unlimited sympathy for the young men you bring here, but I cannot house any of them any longer.’
She looked at him, seeing the surprise and the hurt in his long, dark eyes.
‘It’s not just that tripping over their rucksacks in the hall drives me mad,’ she said as lightly as possible, ‘or that they tend to wear filthy sandals to breakfast and read their books at the table, or…’
‘Mama, you’ve got this enormous, empty house. Can’t you put up with little things like that for something that matters so much?’ Andrew’s eyes were puzzled and his voice tentative, but the twist of his beautifully cut mouth made him look yet more like his father. Felicity took a grip on herself and made herself say what had to be said.
‘I could put up with it easily if I could afford to keep feeding them and letting them have all the hot water they need. The horrible truth is that there is no more money.’
Andrew looked round the elegant room in which his mother had always written her invitations and done her household accounts. The white wallpaper with its fine gold trellis was the same as it had always been and the flat-topped French desk was still there at right -angles to the window, but half the paintings had gone, leaving dust marks on the paper, and it seemed to him that there had once been a gilded clock on the empty chimney-piece. The smears on the window had not struck him before, nor the fact that, despite the sun, the room was bitterly cold. The significance of his mother’s wearing her old fur coat and a pair of thick woolly socks in the house began to dawn on him.
‘I think we need to talk,’ he said, sounding more cautious than he had earlier. ‘But I can’t leave Fred in the hall.’
‘I suppose not. Go and tell him that he’s not going to be able to stay here and make him a cup of coffee or something and then come back. He can always go to the youth hostel for tonight and then think again if he’s planning to stay in England.’
Andrew left the room and his mother sat down in one of the squashy chairs that stood on either side of the empty fireplace. Her head had started to ache, but it was such a familiar condition that she hardly noticed it.
‘Now tell me,’ said Andrew a minute later from the doorway.
As he walked towards the other chair, his mother looked carefully at him. She knew that his father’s death had affected him badly, but she did not know exactly how. Discussions with her friends had taught her that Andrew told her far more than did their sons, but anything that touched on his feelings seemed to be out of bounds.
Felicity’s turmoil of loss and growing anger made her afraid for him, but she was reluctant to force his confidence and perhaps destroy whatever it was that kept him functioning – and affectionate. The knowledge that one day soon she would have to lose him, too, was always with her.
‘There’s not much to tell, and it’s very simple: I do not have enough money to run the house and feed and clothe the children.’
Andrew, thinking of the size of the huge Kensington house, the thickness of his mother’s furs, and the lavishness of the life she and his father had always lived, asked simply, ‘Why not?’
Felicity, who thought that she had already explained their situation to him, was puzzled.
‘Did Papa leave a lot of debts?’ Andrew asked when she said nothing.
‘No. But all he did leave was a tiny pension that just about clothes the younger ones and pays for a little heat during the school holidays.’
‘I don’t understand. There always seemed to be stacks of money.’ Andrew flushed slightly. ‘It used to bother me, actually.’
Felicity raised her eyebrows and managed to smile.
‘Well, it needn’t bother you any more,’ she said drily. ‘It turned out to be only a life interest in capital that has reverted to Connie Wroughton. But you knew all this, surely?’
‘I don’t think I did,’ said Andrew slowly. ‘Did you tell me? I can’t have understood.’ He bit the left-hand corner of his lower lip as he had done since babyhood whenever anything worried him. ‘Then why are we still living in this vast house?’
‘Because there are only fifteen years of the lease left to run,’ said his mother patiently. ‘I can’t afford to buy another fifty years yet and if I tried to sell what’s left it would not raise enough to buy anywhere else into which we’d all fit. For the duration of the lease we’ll be safe here, if cold, provided that I can earn enough to pay the rates. By the time the lease runs out even Nicky will have left school and you and the girls will be earning your own livings.’
Andrew’s face changed and he got up to walk slowly towards the window. Felicity remembered the magazine that still lay open on her desk and hoped that he was too shocked to notice it.
‘What about the school fees? And my allowance?’
‘Connie pays those, which is remarkably kind of her, given that our only connection with her is that Papa was once married to her sister.’
At that Andrew came back to stare down at his mother. He looked angry and she hoped that he was not going to try to argue with her. She loathed conflict with her family and could never help taking seriously and personally – anything that was said.
‘She says that she’s paying them so that I can concentrate on work and ensure that there is at least one more woman in the House of Commons,’ Felicity went on. ‘But I think it’s probably more personal than that.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ asked Andrew, thinking of the times he had taken girls out to dinner instead of eating in hall, and the books he had bought, the clothes and the records. ‘There’s not much I could have done, but it would have been a bit.’
‘Oh, Andrew, darling!’ Felicity stretched out her hand. He took it and rubbed his fingers over the roughness of hers.
‘Did you know?’ he asked, looking down at their hands. ‘While he was alive, I mean.’
‘Know what?’
‘That it was only a life interest?’
‘No,’ said Felicity, clamping her lips shut so that none of the rage, none of the doubts, should escape.
‘Didn’t that make you… cross with him?’
‘Andrew,’ she said helplessly, broke off and then decided that the truth might hurt but that it would be less destructive than any kind of lie, however well-intentioned: ‘Yes, it did. It does. It’s probably unfair of me to say that, but I’m so tired of being fair. And while we’re on this horrible subject, Andrew, another thing I can’t afford is all those telephone calls to Paris.’
He looked self-conscious and muttered that he was sorry.
‘I know you’ve still a lot of good friends at the Sorbonne, but it would help if you could do most of the keeping in touch by letter.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise. Look here, I’ll take Fred round to the youth hostel and then come back for lunch.’
‘All right,’ she said, thinking of the two boiled eggs and lump of cheese that she had planned to eat.
‘I won’t be long.’
He was back twenty minutes later, by which time she had decided that a tin of soup would make her proposed lunch fit for him. They ate in silence at the scrubbed wooden table in the kitchen until he started to peel his boiled eggs.
‘I wish I’d understood all this properly before.’
‘Don’t think about it now,’ said Felicity. ‘You’ve schools at the end of next term and you need to concentrate all your energies on your work.’
She saw a hint of a smile on his lips as he shook his head and her own eyes narrowed in amusement.
‘I know your dons have all told you that you’re safe for a first, but the last thing you ought to do is let complacency trap you into making a clot of yourself.’
Andrew’s lean face creased into a real grin as he watched his mother turn back into the familiar, beautiful, teasing, safe person she had always been.
‘I won’t do that,’ he said. ‘I promise. By the way, last week I accepted the BBC traineeship.’
‘But that’s wonderful news,’ said Felicity, relieved of one pressing anxiety. ‘Darling, I am glad.’
‘They don’t pay at all well to start with. If I’d known about the money, I could have gone for something more profitable like … oh, like accountancy.’
Felicity lost all control of herself and for the first time for ages had to wipe tears of laughter out of her eyes.
‘I don’t see what’s so funny.’ Andrew sounded rather dignified and even a little hurt.
‘My dearest boy.’ Felicity had stopped laughing, but her face was warm with love and amusement. ‘Anyone less like an accountant would be hard to imagine. It’s not just your grasp of Russian, which Professor Grainger was going on and on about last time we met…’
‘Glad to hear the old buzzard’s noticed it, given that his own grasp of everything is distinctly peculiar.’
‘But your politics,’ she went on as though he had not spoken, ‘and your general… oh, I can’t think of a word – your excitement. The thought of you sitting at a desk in some dim office adding up columns and columns of figures is just absurd. If that’s what you’d have done, I’m glad you didn’t know about the money.’
Andrew grinned at her again and, having finished his eggs, took out a packet of cigarettes. He shook one half out and offered it to his mother, who shook her head. She had decided long ago that she simply could not afford the habit. He lit his and she winced slightly at the smell, finding it half unbearably tantalising and half disgusting.
