Lynda Plante - The Talisman

Softly, he practised his speech over and over again, listening to his voice, modulating the accent Lady Primrose had mimicked so poorly, flushing as he remembered. He knew she would have been horrendous to his mother, and he would have liked to shove the cufflinks down the old fool’s throat. He found himself wondering if his mother had been David Collins’ girlfriend, and why a man as well connected as the captain would have been involved with a girl like her. He would have liked to get up and leave there and then, but he was stuck without enough cash to walk away. Anyway, something held him here, held him to this dead boy’s room, to these half-dead people. Somehow he knew that by the end of the summer he would change.

Eventually he slept, while the noose he had made out of his tie slid slowly from the door to lie on the floor.

The following morning, Edward borrowed a bicycle and rode into the nearest town. He spent four hours in the public library, looking over the old newspaper cuttings of the trial of Freedom Stubbs. His mother had never mentioned her past, her life in the valleys or the murder trial.

His father, the man Edward had knifed to death, had himself been charged with four murders. Again and again Edward turned the pages to look at the black-and-white photograph of Freedom. The strange, youthful face glared back. In one shot, his long hair swirled around his shoulders as if daring the photographer to take his image. There were also several photographs of his mother, often blurred, out of focus, but it was Evelyne, haughty yet shy, arrogant yet so innocent. The photograph touched a chord inside him that made him ache to see her.

He read the articles over and over; how she had become a heroine, standing as a witness for a man she barely knew because she believed in justice. There was an account of how she had been asked, before the jury, if she had had any kind of sexual relationship with the accused, and she had replied that she had not, she was there simply to see that an innocent man did not hang. She had been with the gypsy on the night of the last murder and knew he could not have committed it. The lawyers were able to prove him innocent of all charges, and he was freed.

Edward wondered if her story was true. It certainly read so, yet his mother had eventually married Freedom. There was so much he wanted to ask her, so much he wanted to know, but he knew he now had no right ever to ask. He had killed the man she had saved from the rope, killed his own father — he even mused over the fact that it was possible his father had been a murderer. He read of the way the gypsy had caught the press’s imagination with his handsome looks, much like the film star, Valentino. With a sense of foreboding he read of the curse sign on each of the four young miners’ foreheads. So much he had no knowledge of, so much of his father he had never known. And the more he read the surer he was that he did not want it known, the more he reconciled himself to moving further and further away from his roots. He wanted no part of this past, no whispers attached to him of his gypsy father; yet carefully, surreptitiously, he cut out as many of the newspaper photographs as possible. Then he returned to the castle.

The days passed by, and although Edward spent two or three hours in the early mornings reading and revising, Charlie made no effort to study. He was out shooting rabbits for food, or chasing the farm girls for other reasons. Charlie was a walking time bomb, full of energy.

One morning, after Edward had been at the castle for three weeks, he went as usual to the breakfast room. The housekeeper shuffled around, carrying dishes and muttering about everything being ‘short’. Yet there never seemed to be a lack of food. It was never cooked well, but no one went hungry. The feeling that the war was far away was more prevalent here in the country.

Edward sat between Lady Primrose and Charlie as they argued about money, and was astonished yet again by Charlie’s total unconcern. He talked to his mother as if she were one of the girls from Woolworth’s, at the same time wolfing down his breakfast as though he had a train to catch.

‘You’ll just have to find the money yourself. Two hundred pounds, Charlie, how could you?’

Charlie munched on his toast and shrugged, then he scraped out the marmalade jar and kicked Edward under the table.

‘You’ve got the cash, Ma, I know it, all the booty you got from Uncle Charlie — you’ve just become a miser in your old age.’

Lady Primrose turned to Edward for help, and told him his cousin Charlie had been dead for nearly twenty years. ‘He just doesn’t know the meaning of money, Edward, but he’s going to learn, I’m not going to pay this time. Last term how much did you owe? Three hundred, and you promised me, you promised me faithfully.’

Charlie laughed. He knew if he encouraged his mother to talk about Uncle Charlie, his namesake, she would forget about the bills. Lady Primrose sighed. She wandered around the room while she told Edward about Sir Charles Wheeler. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about boxing, do you, Edward? Well, Charlie was a promoter — you know, he used to find boxers and then take them all over the world — he was such a sportsman, everyone knew him. He died in a plane crash in Nevada, or was it Florida, I don’t really remember — anyway he never married, and his money went to the trustees of his estate, and they are so mean, really awful. You see, we are the only heirs, and it should all be ours.’

As Lady Primrose talked on and on, Edward felt as if a ghost were walking across his grave.

‘I say, are you all right? Gone a paler shade of yellow, you should come out shooting with me, get some colour into your dark cheeks.’

Edward smiled and drank the dregs of his cold tea. Lady Primrose was called to the telephone, and Charlie stuffed the bills away in a drawer with a bow.

They walked for miles, and Charlie showed Edward how to use his shotgun. As they walked, Edward turned the conversation to their studies, asking when Charlie was prepared to begin work. ‘And you did mention paying me for my time here, sorry to bring it up, but I would have got a job during the vacation. Unlike you, Charlie, I don’t have a rich mother, so when do we start?’

They began, in a haphazard way, to set aside a few hours a day for work, and Edward began to realize that his pupil was way below himself in his studies. It was something of a shock, how on earth had he got himself into Cambridge? ‘Look, why don’t we start at the first lecture and work our way through, Charlie? You don’t have the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about.’

Charlie admitted it, saying he had actually wanted to read English literature, but as his brother had done that he chose geology. He hadn’t the slightest interest in rocks or anything to do with mineralogy or petrology, and to prove it he began to hurl his books across the room. ‘I want to live, Eddie, really live, you know, enjoy life. What’s the point of being cooped up in those ruddy lectures, those interminable centrifuges? I am so fucking bored all the time. My mind’s petrifying like your bloody rocks.’

Edward had never seen Charlie so ‘real’, this was what he was really like, and all the laughs and the madcap antics were out of frustration.

‘Clarence was the clever one, you see, always Clarence, and he went and got himself shot to pieces. So I have to go to Cambridge, I have to emulate the “Boy Wonder”... Well, I can’t, I simply can’t. Added to that I’ve got this wretched farm girl up the spout and she’s chasing me all over the place with a pitchfork.’ Charlie’s face tightened and he chewed his lip. ‘Look, I’m going off for a while, see a few old friends, you won’t mind being on your tod, will you? Only I’m sure they’d all bore the pants off you...’