‘That’s too bad.’
Alan glanced at his watch.
‘Look, Hilary, I’m sure you didn’t come all the way here just to look at the view of our forecourt, beautiful though it is. Would you mind coming to the point?’
‘That photo that went with your article,’ she said absently. ‘Was it taken in your office?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Was that a Bridget Riley hanging on the wall?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You bought it off my brother, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Lots of green and black rectangles, all on a slant.’
‘That’s the one. Why do you ask?’
‘Well, it’s just that there seem to be two men outside, loading it into the back of a van.’
‘What the—’
Alan leapt to his feet and came to the window. He looked down and saw a removal van parked by the steps, with the contents of his office stacked on the sunbaked tarmac: his books, his swivel chair, his plants, stationery and paintings. Hilary smiled.
‘We thought this would be the kindest way to tell you. It’s best to get these things over with quickly.’
Somehow, he managed to say: ‘We?’
‘Is there anything I should know about the job before you go?’ When no answer was forthcoming, she opened her briefcase and said, ‘Well look, here’s your P45, and I’ve even written down the address of your nearest DSS office. It’s open till three-thirty today, so you’ve got plenty of time.’ She offered him the piece of paper, but he didn’t take it. Laying it down on the window-sill, her smile broadened, and she shook her head. ‘The barbarians aren’t at the gate any more, Alan. Unfortunately, you left the gate swinging wide open. So we wandered right inside, and now we’ve got all the best seats and our feet are up on the table. And we intend to stay here for a long, long time.’
Hilary snapped her briefcase shut and made for the door.
‘Now: how do I get to your office from here?’
September 1990
1
It was purely by chance that I found myself writing a book about the Winshaws. The story of how it all came about is quite complicated and can probably wait. Sufficient to say that if it had not been for an entirely accidental meeting on a railway journey from London to Sheffield in the month of June, 1982, I would never have become their official historian and my life would have taken a very different turn. An amusing vindication, when you think about it, of the theories outlined in my first novel, Accidents Will Happen. But I doubt if many people remember that far back.
The 1980s were not a good time for me, on the whole. Perhaps it had been a mistake to accept the Winshaw commission in the first place; perhaps I should have carried on writing fiction in the hope that one day I would be able to make a living at it. After all, my second novel had attracted a certain amount of attention, and there had at least been a few isolated moments of glory — such as the week when I’d been featured in a regular Sunday newspaper article, usually devoted to vastly more famous writers, entitled ‘The First Story I Ever Wrote’. (You had to supply a sample of something you had written when you were very young, along with a photograph of yourself as a child. The overall effect was rather cute. I’ve still got the cutting somewhere.) But my financial situation remained desperate — the general public persisting in a steely indifference to the products of my imagination — and so I had sound economic reasons for trying my luck with Tabitha Winshaw and her peculiarly generous offer.
The terms of this offer were as follows. It seemed that in the seclusion of her long-term inmate’s quarters at the Hatchjaw-Bassett Institute for the Actively Insane, Miss Winshaw, then aged seventy-six and by all accounts madder than ever, had taken it into her sad, confused head that the time was ripe for the history of her glorious family to be laid before the world. In the face of implacable opposition from her relatives, and drawing only upon her own far from inconsiderable resources, she had set up a trust fund for this purpose and enlisted the services of the Peacock Press, a discreetly operated private concern which specialized in the publication (for a small fee) of military memoirs, family chronicles and the reminiscences of minor public figures. They, for their part, were entrusted with the task of finding a suitable writer, of proven experience and ability, who was to be paid an annual, five-figure salary throughout the entire period of research and composition, conditional upon a progress report — or a ‘significant portion’ of completed manuscript — being presented to the publishers and forwarded for Tabitha’s inspection every year. Otherwise, it seemed that time and money were no object. She wanted the best, the most thorough, the most honest and most up-to-date history that it was possible to compile. There was no deadline for final submission.
The story of how I came to be offered this job is, as I mentioned, a long and complicated one, and must wait its turn; but once the offer was made, I had little hesitation in accepting it. The prospect of a regular income was itself too much to resist, but I was also, if truth be told, in no hurry to start writing another work of fiction. So it seemed like the perfect arrangement. I bought my flat in Battersea (property was cheaper in those days) and set to work with some eagerness. Inspired by the very novelty of the enterprise, I wrote the first two thirds of the book in a couple of years, delving deep into the Winshaws’ early history and recording everything that I found there with absolute candour: for it was quite obvious to me, from the very beginning, that I was essentially dealing with a family of criminals, whose wealth and prestige were founded upon every manner of swindling, forgery, larceny, robbery, thievery, trickery, jiggery-pokery, hanky-panky, plundering, looting, sacking, misappropriation, spoliation and embezzlement. Not that the Winshaws’ activities were openly criminal, or indeed ever recognized as such by polite society: in fact, as far as I could determine, there was only one convicted felon in the family. (I refer, of course, to Matthew’s great uncle, Joshua Winshaw, universally acknowledged as the most brilliant pickpocket and burglar of his time — the most celebrated of his achievements being, as you will scarcely need to be reminded, his audacious visit to the country home of a rival family, the Kenways of Britteridge: where, during the course of a public guided tour in the company of seventeen tourists, he succeeded — quite unnoticed — in pilfering a Louis XV grandfather clock worth tens of thousands of pounds.) But because every penny of the Winshaw fortune — dating right back to the seventeenth century, when Alexander Winshaw first made it his business to corner a lucrative portion of the burgeoning slave trade — could be said to have derived, by some route or other, from the shameless exploitation of persons weaker than themselves, I felt that the word ‘criminal’ fitted the bill well enough, and that I was performing a useful service by bringing this fact to the attention of the public, while staying scrupulously within the bounds of my commission.
There came a point, however, somewhere in the mid 1980s, when I realized that I had lost nearly all enthusiasm for the project. For one thing there was my father’s death. I hadn’t been in close contact with my parents for a number of years, but the days of my childhood — a calm, happy and untroubled childhood — had formed bonds of empathy and affection between us which made the fact of our physical separation irrelevant. My father was only sixty-one when he died and his loss affected me deeply. I spent several months in the Midlands, doing whatever I could to comfort my mother, and when I returned to London and the Winshaws it was with unmistakable feelings of distaste.