‘What! What the hell are you doing there?’
‘He fell down the stairs and had an accident. He has lost his memory: retrograde amnesia, they call it. He doesn’t have any relatives. Aunt Madeleine asked me to come and look after him until she can get here from America.’
‘Why didn’t you check with me first, Clémence?’
‘Because we never speak to each other.’ It was true. They had only spoken twice in the last six months: once in September when she had returned from her disastrous stay with him in Vietnam, and then again when she had looked for sympathy after telling him about Patrick, and had received contempt. He never called her, and whenever she had called him over the last couple of years, he didn’t seem at all interested in talking to her. And it cost a fortune. So she had stopped.
‘There is a good reason why that man has no friends in England,’ her father said. ‘I want you to leave there right away. I want you to have nothing to do with the old bastard. Aunt Madeleine should never have sent you.’
‘All right, Dad,’ said Clémence. ‘She’s coming this afternoon, so I can hand over to her then. But I’ve still got a couple of questions to ask you. And they are important.’
Her father sighed. ‘All right. What are they?’
Clémence swallowed, listening to the long-distance hiss in the pause. She suspected her father wasn’t going to like her questions, but she had to ask them.
‘We are reading this book together, to help Alastair remember. It’s called Death At Wyvis by Angus Culzie. Do you know it?’
‘Yes, I know it.’
‘Was it written by Alastair? And is it true?’
‘How far have you got?’
‘They’ve just gone to Capri. Angus has had an argument with Sophie.’
‘Well don’t read any more, Clémence. Just leave Wyvis right away. There are things in that book that you are better off not knowing.’
‘No!’ said Clémence. She didn’t often defy her father, but she was angry. ‘No, Dad. That’s exactly what Grandpa said when I asked him about it—’
‘You spoke to Grandpa?’
‘Yes,’ said Clémence.
‘Jesus. You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Well, I did. And he didn’t answer my question. It’s all true, isn’t it? It must be true or else you wouldn’t be so worried about me reading it.’
There was silence, or a hiss, for several seconds.
‘Yes. It is true.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? Why didn’t you tell me that my grandmother was murdered?’
‘Because I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want you to think about it. You didn’t even know her. She was my mother, remember. After she was killed I ran away to Morocco. I have spent a lot of time and effort making sure that you aren’t troubled by that mess. So please do as I ask, Clémence. Promise me you won’t read any more of that fucking book.’
Clémence never said no to her father. But what he had said made it even clearer than it had been before, that the key to understanding her screwed-up family lay in the pages of that book. And if she didn’t understand her family, she didn’t understand herself.
‘No, Dad. I don’t care what you say, I’m going to read the rest of it. I need to know.’
‘Clémence—’
But she hung up.
She felt a mixture of anger and guilt. Clémence had mostly been an obedient child, but she was older now and could make her own decisions. It was OK for her father to warn her that she might not want to learn what had happened at Wyvis to her grandmother. But it was her decision; he had no right to stop her.
She’d had a mostly good relationship with her father, until he had walked out on her and her mother. Subtly encouraged by her mother, she had believed that it was all his fault, that he had abandoned his wife and daughter in a fit of selfishness, but now she was pretty certain that Patrick was the reason that her parents had split apart.
She had hoped that when she had gone to visit him in Hoh Chi Minh City over the summer, she would have been able to rebuild the relationship, at least to see things from his point of view. But she had been surprised — shocked — to find that he was living with a girlfriend, Ngoc, of whom she had never even heard. Ngoc was about thirty, slinkily beautiful, with a simpering, insincere smile. For the first couple of days father and daughter had had some good conversations, but as each day passed Ngoc’s displeasure at Clémence’s presence became clearer, and her father withdrew. Until, by the time she left, she was under the impression that they were both glad to see the back of her.
For years now, Clémence had lived her life alone. She had envied her friends at boarding school whose homes were only twenty miles away, and whose parents loved each other and visited every other weekend to take their daughters out for lunch or to watch them play netball. She had a mother whom she was growing to hate, and a father whom she never saw. The only thing her parents seemed to agree on was that she should live thousands of miles away from them. Everyone else had a family; why couldn’t she have one too?
Inevitably, she had blamed herself for this. There was something wrong with her, there must be or why wouldn’t her parents care about her? One good thing about reading Death At Wyvis with the old man, was that she was beginning to suspect that actually her problems weren’t rooted in the present and defects in her personality, but in the past, between the covers of that book.
She considered the people she had been reading about: Angus’s friends, or rather Alastair’s. She was getting a pretty good idea of them, but she didn’t know what they looked like. She wondered whether there were any photos in the old man’s study; Sheila MacInnes had suggested that there were.
The old man would probably be out for a while. She nipped up the stairs to the study and opened the desk drawers. There were some letters, an exercise book, a passport, a birth certificate, bank statements, bills. There was an article from Cognitive Neuropsychology dated 1997 and entitled ‘Confabulation: knowledge and recollective experience’.
And in the bottom drawer was an old leather-bound photograph album, with the dates ‘1935–1939’ written on it in white pencil.
She opened it. There was a picture of a boy with Alastair’s cleft chin standing next to a middle-aged couple by a tree near a stream. They were all smiling at the camera; and the older man was clutching a pipe. Beneath it was scrawled in white Mother, Me, Father.
Clémence flipped the pages, fascinated. There was a girl called Joyce — Alastair’s younger sister. There was his college at Oxford: a group of male students in jackets and ties, including a tall and incredibly handsome Stephen, her grandfather, standing next to Alastair in the quad of a college. Stephen’s smile was knowing, warm, yet dangerous. A couple of Alastair playing rugby for the Greyhounds, whoever they were. Each photograph was labelled in neat white writing.
Then Paris — the Eiffel Tower, the Seine. Nathan, short and swarthy, sitting with Stephen at a café. Deauville: a tall half-timbered house with turrets. Two smiling girls — Madeleine and Sophie — one dark, one fair, both beautiful, both wearing scarves around their necks. It was true, Sophie did look a bit like Clémence, although Sophie was blonder and much prettier. No wonder Alastair had fallen for her. But there was Stephen’s wicked smile again, and Clémence could see why Sophie had picked him rather than Alastair.
Only two or three photographs of Bart’s, a family Christmas in 1938 and then Capri. Towering mountains, sea of shining grey, flowers blooming in monochrome, two or three shots of the friends relaxing around an outside table on a terrace, always including Sophie. Then a ruin that was labelled Villa Jovis, water cisterns. Then a more modern façade with peeling plaster, unlabelled but it must be the Villa Fersen. And the ornate but tattered interior of the villa itself, and a semicircular room with tapestries: the opium den.