The body in the ruins that had been identified as that of Robert Castleford, in 1951, had been as much of a shock as if he had been murdered that day or the previous one. She had never been allowed to imagine that her father was dead or would not return — not for a single moment in five years. And he had indeed come back — as a hideous skeleton whose grinning, broken skull she had seen in grainy monochrome in a newspaper photograph. The placards had borne his name for days, the teachers and some of the older girls at school had reminded her by their looks and words for many weeks. Mummy had never coped with it. She had shut it out. To her, he would always, one philandering or amnesiac day, return to her; as he always had done.
After the sanatorium, the hospital, the mortuary, and finally the cemetery, her mother was buried next to the grinning skull of her husband. Margaret went to live with her paternal grandmother, where her relatives had, by degrees, explained her father to her. A warm man. Unfaithful, often. Everyone had assumed, without voicing the thought, that it had been a woman in Berlin who had been instrumental in his disappearance. Even after 1951, that assumption had continued. He had been killed by a jealous husband, another lover, by an enraged or abandoned woman.
It was her mother's image of him, however, that indelibly remained; the fictitious, idealised portrait of husband and father that so suited her years and her sense of loss. And it still continued plaguing and paining her.
Throughout her adult life, she had been able to comprehend her attitude to her father, explain it rationally to herself. Like stunted growth. Yet, like dwarfism, it was impossible to grow out of or beyond. She had only her child's veneration, nurtured in the hothouse atmosphere of her mother's quiet madness. Mummy had never admitted him to be less than a saint, a minor god. Never permitted any other view of Robert Castleford as her reason slipped beneath dark water.
And, after Mummy's death, grandmother had taken Robert Castleford up like a beacon with which to lead her granddaughter. Her memories of her father formed an enchanted circle from which she could not escape. Had never wanted to.
Handel was being played on the radio. There were crumbs of toast on the front page of The Sunday Times and on the lap of her dressing-gown. And the remains of a Valium sleep in her head, squeezing like a closing vice. She had never needed Valium since her marriage to Paul, and had only taken to it originally in the aftermath of a previous affair, when the pain and blackness of the first weeks had seemed like an echo of her mother's quiet madness. It was late. Almost midday.
The Insight article, a Sunday Times exclusive, became smudgy print once more. There was a damp spot where a tear had fallen. She still felt the first moment of shock at her father's picture, at Aubrey's picture, at an unidentified silhouette between the two snapshots, and at the headline, Menage a trois? Beneath that, even more pompously, The meaning of treason?
A warm man. Her grandmother had ignored her questions. Her beloved and only son's sexual peccadilloes were of no significance, and obviously allowable in such an able, brilliant, ambitious man. But, like dark jewels, sly and covert pieces of gossip had decorated her adolescence. His name had been associated with an abortion, an almost-expulsion from one school, desperate, ineffectual blackmail by one married woman, affairs…
Robert Castleford had attracted sexual indiscretion, and had always charmed it into harmlessness.
There was something else on the front page, too — something concerning 1974 and Germany, under the headline, Who else has been betrayed? She had begun to read it as a distraction — World Cup, Olympic massacre, advisory role for Aubrey, investigation, Gunther Guillaume… she could make little sense of it, and it possessed no interest for her. Her eyes and her mind and her memory continually returned to the Insight article. She could not bear to turn to page eighteen for a fuller account. There was sufficient on the front page — her father and Aubrey involved in some sordid sexual triangle in Berlin with the wife of a sought-after Nazi war criminal…?
Lurid, melodramatic — attested to by a former intelligence agent in Berlin, someone who knew the protagonists well. Now living in retirement on Guernsey, so the article claimed. Sexual jealousy, rage, quarrels, despair, hatred, violence.
She understood the emotions. Her own sexual experience confirmed that it was possible; emotions in riot and disorder, passion amounting almost to madness. Her father could have died in such circumstances. Aubrey could have had killed him over a woman. It was so much more convincing, so much more real than the world of callous treasons and betrayals, of politics and intelligence work and the Cold War. And it made more sense than person or persons unknown. The latter seemed like a senseless and more contemporary piece of violence such as the two and a half lines in the extreme left-hand column of the front page, accorded to an old woman's death at the hands of muggers.
Margaret's loss had begun in 1951, and she knew she had never recovered from it. It was as if she had contracted some childhood disease as an adult when the consequences were much more serious, even fatal. Her mother had deluded her for five years, and when the truth dawned and could no longer be avoided, her mother went slowly and utterly mad and killed herself. Margaret had found herself abandoned in a way she could not have imagined possible. Since that moment of the skull grinning from the newspaper, held in some German workman's hands, she had been completely and utterly alone. Rich eventually, by report beautiful, intelligent, possessed of energy and a capacity for work and enjoyment — but solitary, isolated, bereaved; alone.
Until Paul. Father-lover-husband Paul. Paul, in unholy, unforgiveable alliance with her father's murderer. After more than thirty years he had appeared and now had removed himself from her. For that, for the deception of hope followed by betrayal, she could never forgive him.
She let the paper fall to the carpet. She sniffed loudly, sitting erect — she remembered her mother doing the same, in the same stiffly defiant posture and now she realised that she, too, had been fending off painful realities. She would not cry again. She would, instead, finish her toast.
The Handel was solemn, like a pathway into grief, so she left her chair and switched it off. The transistor radio — which Paul never used to listen to music, always preferring his stereo equipment in the study — was on the dark Georgian oak sideboard. Apart from the small dining-table, it was the only piece of furniture in the alcove that constituted their breakfast area. The wood gleamed like satin, like a mirror. Her fingers touched it. It was carved, narrow-legged, three-drawered; a piece her father had acquired before the war. Almost everything — everything with any pride of place — had been collected by her father. She felt herself to be only another of his possessions, one of the prize pieces. Her father still owned her, even now, when she possessed his furniture and his money.
She returned to her chair. The toast broke and crumbled under the pressure of her knife. There was sticky marmalade on her fingers. Her eyes became wet—
The telephone rang.
She looked up from her plate, startled and almost as if rebuked for her poor table manners. She stood up and removed the extension receiver from the wall, flicking her hair away from her cheek before holding the telephone to her ear.
"Yes?" Only as she spoke did she realise it might be someone she did not wish to speak to, a friend appalled and considerate because of the article and whose sympathy was unwanted. Then she heard Paul's voice.
"Margaret — are you all right?" he asked breathlessly, as if she had been the one endangered.
"Paul—!" she blurted in reply. "Are you all right?" The Valium headache tightened in her temples. She had taken the tablets in her misery, but in her fear, too. He had talked of danger—