‘Your father was still working abroad?’
‘No, Foreign Office. When he married my mother he came back, bought Mysleton.’
‘Your mother died, right?’
‘My mother died when I was four. I don’t think she could stand the cold and the drabness and stiffness. A black woman in the Cotswolds, even then …’ A match flared. Callard applied it to a candle on the mantelpiece. ‘They said she died of cancer, but I think she withered.’
‘Withered?’
‘Like an exotic flower,’ Callard said heavily.
‘You remember her?’
‘I remember her essence.’
‘Right.’
Callard slumped back into the sofa, said snappishly, ‘When people keep saying “right”, it usually means they haven’t understood anything and don’t propose to.’
The candle sat crookedly in a pewter tray. It looked warmer than the fire.
‘I don’t think you want to tell me what this is about, do you?’ Grayle said.
‘I don’t know you. I don’t trust journalists. I might be reading about it in the New York Courier next week.’
‘You might be reading about it in The Vision.’
Callard smiled. ‘That I could cope with.’
Grayle thought, Me too. I could just about cope with this if it was gonna make a feature for The Vision. She’d never even dared suggest that to Marcus, but yeah, it had been at the back of her mind.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to come here. You contact a guy after twenty years, no way are you gonna want to talk to the help. I came because Marcus was too sick to come, and Marcus felt you were in some kind of trouble, and he didn’t want it to be … too late. Or something.’
‘Do I look like I’m in trouble?’
‘You don’t look too good, if I can say that. You look like the papers had it right.’
‘The papers are suggesting I’m mentally ill.’
‘Not necessarily that.’
‘Of course, that. No journalist who wants to stay on the national press can be seen to accept the spiritual.’
‘I did.’
‘Quite,’ Callard said. She laughed.
Grayle stood up. ‘Maybe I’ll call Justin, find out if he tracked down an exhaust for my car.’
In the candlelight, she saw Callard shrug. She reached for her bag and dug out Justin’s card.
‘That was rude of me,’ Callard said wearily. ‘Don’t go.’
Grayle didn’t look at her. Held the phone up to the candle, punched out the number, which she now realized was a mobile. Clearly, the rundown garage was no longer on the phone.
Callard said, ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’
‘That’s not possible.’ She heard the phone ringing at the other end.
‘Look,’ Callard said, ‘as soon as the oaf picks up your scent again, he’ll start reviewing his options. First, he’ll lie about your car …’
‘Mayfield Garage,’ Justin said.
‘Uh … it’s Grayle Underhill.’
‘Hello, Grayle!’ Real jovial. ‘You find Miss Seffi Callard then, did you?’
‘Yes. Listen, I wondered if you managed to hunt down any kind of exhaust.’
A pause. A chuckle. ‘Ah dear,’ Justin said. ‘I rang round six mates between here and Swindon. No can do tonight, but one of them reckons he might put his hands on something tomorrow.’
‘Oh.’ Not on me he won’t.
‘You’ll have to spend a night in the glorious Cotswolds, my sweet. Look, there’s a good country-house hotel not far from where you are. I could pick you up, take you there …’
‘That’s kind of you,’ Grayle said quickly, ‘but I already made a provisional reservation. In … in Stroud, I … Ms Call … Seffi’s gonna take me there.’
‘Fair enough,’ Justin said neutrally. ‘Fair enough.’
‘So I’ll call you from there tomorrow.’
‘Whatever you like.’
‘Well, uh … do your best with the exhaust.’ Grayle pressed end. ‘He can’t fix it tonight. I need to find a hotel.’
‘I told you,’ Callard said. ‘There’s a spare room here. Terribly twee and rustic.’
Grayle shook her head. ‘I’ll call a cab. You have a phone book. Yellow Pages?’
Persephone Callard didn’t move. Except to close her eyes.
‘Forget it.’ Grayle took the phone to the candle. ‘I’ll call Inquiries.’
No reaction from Callard. She was kind of breathing heavily. Jesus, she fell asleep? She fell asleep from all the booze?
Callard’s glass, still untouched, stood on the mantelpiece. Grayle punched out 192. ‘Directory Inquiries,’ a woman’s voice said brightly. ‘What name, please?’
Persephone Callard sat up on the couch and her breath came out in a long, hollow whooooosh. Grayle jumped. Somehow, it was like a corpse rising.
‘Directory Inquiries.’
The candle went out. Just went out. On its own.
Grayle said, too loudly, ‘Uh, could you give me the number of a hotel in Stroud, please? A big hotel.’
‘Tell me, Grayle,’ Persephone Callard said softly, ‘what was the awful thing that happened to a young woman very close to you?’
V
The room which had been, until her death, the bedsit occupied by Mrs Willis, Marcus’s housekeeper and resident healer, was now the editorial suite of The Vision. Marcus stumbled in with a glass and his dying bottle of Glenmorangie, brushing a hand down the light switches, gazing around in bleary despair.
The shelves which had held the herbal potions were dense with box files — Underhill having bought them as a job lot from a local farming accountant who was switching to computers.
The boxes contained — for the first time alphabetically sorted and categorized — the many years of handwritten case histories sent in by an ageing army of correspondents the length and breadth of Britain.
Loonies to a man, Marcus thought morosely. Although, in truth, most of them seemed to be women. Many of whom had, over the years, made vague proposals of marriage to the editor, whom they’d never even seen. And who were now expressing dismay at the large number of young women who appeared to be working with him.
Meryl Taylor-Whitney, Alice D. Thornborough and the rest.
All the pseudonyms of Grayle Underhill, who was changing everything.
For most of its life the flimsy pages of The Phenomenologist, as it was then known, had been grey with dense and smudgy type, its headlines not much larger. A typical one might read,
Report of Presumed Fairy Ring Received from Central Cornwall
‘And what the hell’s so wrong with that?’ Marcus had demanded of Underhill during their first, tempestuous editorial conference last year. ‘It’s straightforward, accurate and a direct statement of fact. The magazine has received, from an old biddy in Truro, a garbled letter relating to what is probably a mildly anomalous circle of mushrooms on her front lawn, but which she, in her precarious mental state, presumes to be a nocturnal meeting place for tiny men with bells in their little bloody hats.’
Underhill had let her unkempt, blonde head fall forward into her hands and had groaned. He’d stared at her, baffled and resentful.
‘Marcus,’ he’d heard from under the hair, ‘it just isn’t … it isn’t sexy, is it? And what are we doing with a magazine title that most people connect with a bunch of crazy German philosophers pre-World War Two?’
And so, just over six months ago, to surprisingly few complaints from the residual readership, The Phenomenologist had been relaunched as The Vision.
Marcus poured himself a quarter-inch of Scotch, held the whisky in his mouth as long as he could taste it. Sitting in the high-backed chair behind the bastard computer he refused to use, he leaned his head — thick grey hair lank with sweat — into its soulless foam-rubber padding.