The Hobbema Prospect Read online

  In the morning, before they were out of bed, there was a phone call from their travel agency. The Spaniards were still on strike, so they would be flown to Portugal, taken on by coach. Their flight was not till three this afternoon. She drew the curtains: a steady rain was falling. The purpose-built-up Surrey landscape was a grey vacuity. A jet was climbing steeply into the murk. The day crept forward at a wretched pace. There could be a better decor for a hung honeymoon than Horley, Surrey. They had to avoid spending money. Anne had not flown before and was moderately apprehensive of take-off. As they juddered up through heavy cloud, she was grateful for Howard’s confident hand. Then somewhere over Biscay the atmosphere cleared. On the final approach to Faro she caught sight of a Noddy suburban train taking a curve. The world became golden-warm and palm-fringed. They were driven to the frontier and changed coaches there. By some sickening miracle, the women in creased Crimplene were still alive and making it towards the bingo at Torremolinos. Dusk had taken a grip before they moved forward from Ayamonte. It was a nocturnal hell-ride to Malaga.

  Not till the mid-small hours were they set down in their small resort, whose nucleus was still a fishing village. There was an unEnglish warmth in the air, a sweetness of unEnglish blossoms, a fragrance of citrus foliage. They carried their bags through a silent, cloistered plaza. The street-lamps accentuated the shadows of Moorish arcades, and unseen beyond the walls they could hear the sibilance of surf on shingle.

  On their bedside tables, a supper of monastic simplicity was waiting on trays: bread, butter, cheese and mountain ham, carafes of red wine and a bottle of Lanjaron water. The night was mild. It would have been unthinkable not to have flung their balcony doors wide open. A beach stretched below them, a whisper of gentle breakers.

  She slept for two hours, woke between five and six. The spreading red dawn silhouetted the shell of an ancient watch-tower. Men were hand-hauling a net up the beach, a ritual unchanged for centuries. Howard was sitting up reading, waiting for her.

  She got up and went to him. There was little fondling, no talk. Afterwards, he filled their glasses with what was left of the wine.

  ‘That was it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘The sum of all things.’

  ‘I’ll believe you this time, if you say you heard surf.’

  Because when she closed her eyes in that kind of happiness, it was always surf she said she heard and saw, a silver filigree of surf. Howard had a contented way of smiling when she was being whimsical. It wasn’t quite a smile of permissive disbelief, though he himself never talked capriciously. He always seemed gratefully surprised that a woman so different from himself should seem to want only him.

  Chapter Four

  Anne talked with lyrical abandon. She believed that when people slept, their souls went journeying. In this still largely unspoiled corner of Andalusia, she found plenty to rhapsodize about.

  But a good deal of her talk was mundane, and she was uncomfortably aware of it. For a honeymoon, she was talking a good deal too much about her mother—yet she seemed unable to stop herself. Howard did not complain, but he sometimes sat with an arrested smile when she embarked on some ‘new’ anecdote. When he came to talk about it afterwards—when he came to have to talk about it, to Shiner Wright and the redoubtable Kenworthy—it showed through to those ruthless sizers-up that his patience had been beginning to wear thin.

  They went to Granada, and because it was out of season, had the courts of the Alhambra largely to themselves. They sat in the life-giving sunshine in the Generalife Gardens and Anne compulsively told her husband again of their cruel migration from the Thanet coast to some hell-hole in the North when she was four and a half years old.

  It had been irrational, chaotic to a child. Quite certainly there must have been a fairly simple explanation for it. But Anne’s mother, even when Anne was grown up, had always refused to discuss it. Howard found Jean Cossey in many ways an estimable woman. Stand-up comics’ mother-in-law jokes need have no part in his life. But there were things about her that defied understanding. Was she deep—or cheap? It was, of course, a question that he never asked aloud.

  The upheaval had happened at the age when Anne’s memory was just beginning to take a grasp on things. She and her mother had lived on the outskirts of Broadstairs, near to North Foreland, on the lip of the estuary, in a road that led down to a cliff-sheltered beach. She started school, at a private kindergarten a couple of avenues away. It was an old-fashioned, tone-conscious little academy. It had its own uniform, of which she was extravagantly proud: a pudding-basin hat with a velvet band, skirt, pullover, blazer and socks, all in sober navy with Cambridge blue trimmings. And at half past three every afternoon, when her mother met her laughing at the gate, they as often as not went straight for a picnic to an unfrequented little cove that they reached under a natural arch in the chalk. It was a long first term at school, a long late spring, a long early summer.

  Then suddenly, without prologue, without preparation, came a morning when she learned that she was not going to school. Her uniform was not on her bedroom chair. In its place was an old outfit that she hated because she was not grown-up in it: a sun-bleached dress that she had had before she was old enough for school. It was now much too short for her.

  ‘I know she had sold my uniform. She had advertised it on a card in the post-office window. Yet I don’t know how I know that.’

  They went by train, crossed London, and then in another train for many hours, to a place called Slodden-le-Woods, though where the woods were was a local joke. The power station had ogreish cooling towers. The water in the canal was black and smelled of oil and supported no kind of life at all. Early-morning workmen left oysters of phlegm on grey pavements. Anne hated Slodden: she could not even go to school there at first, because of some awkwardness about her birth-date. And there were complications because her mother had to go out to work—dirty, repetitive work, for which she left the house in a man’s boiler-suit. She had to be in the factory by eight every morning, and Anne had to be dragged along the street in all weathers to the infant-minding Mrs Gregory, who was overweight and bad-tempered, and who laughed at Anne’s precise turn of speech.

  ‘I lost my identity. My mother made us start calling ourselves Carter. In Broadstairs, we had been Cresswells. It was only when we came to live in London that we became Cosseys. She never explained it to me. I just thought that when people moved to a different place, they were called by a different name. I thought it happened to everyone. Sometimes in Slodden I forgot I was no longer Anne Cresswell, and once or twice I actually came out with the wrong name. People looked queerly at me.’

  There were some things that she did not tell Howard about her mother. Her thoughts about Stella Davidge, for example. It was an old file that she had handled, a similarity of circumstances that was frightening. Yet there were half a dozen good reasons why her mother, known for the last thirteen years as Jean Cossey, could not have been Stella Davidge. There were things about Jean Cossey that could never have belonged to Stella Davidge’s background. Northwood Hills? Stockbroker’s Metroland? Not Jean Cossey. Her mother did not even speak that kind of English. She still had more than a trace of North Country in her speech, though she did her best to hide it. Well, it was always possible that Stella Davidge’s mother had had a Lancashire or Yorkshire connection. Even the landed gentry up there sometimes spoke with a noticeable accent.

  They had laughed at Anne’s speech at that school at Slodden. That school, when her birthday finally fitted into the system, did not have a uniform. It did not even have a proper playground, only a yard, in which boys scuffled, and where the fifty-a-side football game put any passing girl in peril. Anne could not even understand the language of that playground. The other children distrusted her with a hard rancour that went back deep into their tribal defences. Even when holidays came, there was no release. She had to go back to Mrs Gregory again: Mrs Gregory, who blew on her sandwich when it had fallen on the floor, and raged at her when she w
ould not eat it.

  They were in Slodden-le-Woods for three years. They did not come to London to live until Anne was nearly seven. There had never been any explanation of the episode. But some things about her mother had not been changed by their period of misery. Jean Cossey’s work brought her home exhausted in the evenings, but she never shirked sharing the things that the child needed to have shared: Magic Roundabout or a chapter from Pooh. But there were some things that Anne learned never to ask about. Her paternity was one of them; the reason for Slodden was another.

  ‘Financial crisis, obviously,’ Howard had said, the first time he had heard all this.

  ‘It was certainly that, but I always thought—I always knew—that there was more to it than that. If it was only money she was desperate for, she could always have gone to Egbert.’

  ‘Who on earth was Egbert?’

  ‘An uncle?’ he almost added—but he was not given to that type of jibe.

  ‘Oh, Egbert wasn’t a person. It was her pet name for some money that she had, some savings that she was looking after for me. I think she might have got the name from the idea of a nest-egg. And I never had any idea how she had been able to save up Egbert. In those days, it didn’t occur to me to wonder. I suppose I used to think that all families had their Egberts.’

  ‘Most Egberts don’t last all that long.’

  ‘That’s the amazing thing—one of the reasons I’m grateful to her. Egbert did last. I remember once being furious with her because she wouldn’t let Egbert buy me an ice-cream. My Broadstairs uniform came out of Egbert. So did my trip to France in the fifth form at school. And our wedding reception. And the balance left over was our wedding-present cheque.’

  ‘Good old Egbert!’

  ‘It was something she kept quite separate from the housekeeping. The job she had at Slodden was terrible. Our standard of living wasn’t much above survival, after she had paid Mrs Gregory. I can see that now. But Egbert was still intact when we came back down south.’

  ‘Maybe Egbert’s solvency varied.’

  ‘I don’t think the trouble had just to do with money. I always thought it had to do with Mr Camel-Leopard.’

  ‘Egbert’s brother-in-law?’

  ‘Mr Camel-Leopard was just my name for him. The word camelopard was in one of my picture-books. I thought Mr Camel-Leopard looked like one. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Roughly.’

  ‘He was waiting higher up the road one afternoon when my mother met me out of school in Broadstairs. He was a fairly good-looking man, I suppose, quite old. Nowadays, I’d probably think quite young. I thought he looked sinister, but that may just have rubbed off on me from what happened afterwards. I could see my mother was upset to see him. She dragged me down the road faster than I could walk, and she would not let us go to our special beach. I remember throwing a tantrum. I can see now, though, why she would not let us go there. He could have trapped us down there, if the tide had come in. Instead, she made us walk all the way along the clifftop to Cliftonville. As compensation, she took me to an Italian place opposite Margate Harbour, and she bought me an ice-cream with two sparklers alight in it. We went home by bus.’

  ‘I never cease to wonder at how much you remember.’

  ‘Probably that’s because I’ve thought about it so often since. We threw Mr Camel-Leopard off, but there was nothing very clever about that. He could have followed us to Margate, if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t have to. He came round that evening. I knew who he was, although I was in bed, and my window was at the back, overlooking cornfields and the sea.’

  ‘You knew?’

  Howard was poking fun in the nicest possible way.

  ‘One of those things—not all that hard to explain. I had him very much on my mind, and unless it was a neighbour wanting to borrow something, we didn’t often have evening visitors. I could hear voices downstairs, though not what they were saying. I know they were angry with each other. And I don’t know how long after that that we made our move to Slodden. But you can’t fool children. I knew there was a connection.’

  ‘You have a wonderful way of knowing things. You’d do well in my job.’

  ‘Well—didn’t you solve your best case yet because of something I dug out for you in our office? I say—do let’s go and see the Gypsies.’

  There were cliff-dwellers on the Sacromonte side of the city who were said to put on a less inhibited brand of flamenco than one saw in the cafés. The guide-book said steer clear of them, but Anne and Howard were their own travellers.

  One afternoon towards the end of their honeymoon, they had tired of beach routines and had taken a local bus up into the Sierra to a dazzling white village. A man in the street with a falcon on his wrist was a casual ingredient of the scene: no one paid any attention to him. They walked down a track such as Don Quixote might have ridden.

  In this setting Anne chose to return to the subject of her identity. She had never known more than the name and occupation of her father: Peter Burne Pennyman, Shipping Clerk. But the lack of that knowledge had never soured her life. No one had ever embarrassed her over it. It had been no bar to her employment on confidential work in a public department. Howard had fallen in love with her not caring a whit about the seam in her background. True, she had been anxious when it had come to meeting his parents. Howard’s father was something in banking—something that ranked above High Street manager, tucked away in the City square mile. His mother was the sort of woman whose coffee-mornings were never casual. The couple must have had their reservations about Anne. Even at the reception, Anne had felt that they had not lost all trace of them. But they were disciplined people who, once they had decided to repress their anxieties, would never willingly let them seep out.

  ‘It’s funny, you know, Howard. Pennyman was a name my mother never wanted me to know.’

  They had been watching a field labourer attending to irrigation channels, a complex system of ditches that got the mountain water to every individual furrow in a field of heavenly carnations.

  ‘It was the Moors who taught the Spaniards to do that,’ Howard said. ‘The hidalgos thought it beneath their dignity to work on the land.’

  ‘Pennyman—she did not even want me to see my birth certificate. When I needed it, she said she couldn’t find it. I had to have it for my passport. I thought it was going to stop me from going on that school trip to France. The deposit had already been paid—by Egbert.’

  ‘Understandable. Something she wasn’t all that proud of. We’ve nothing to gain from trying to dig it all up. Why bother with things that make no odds in our life? Whoever your Mr Pennyman was, I’m grateful to him. I wouldn’t want your genes and what-do-you-call-ems any different from what they are.’

  Then a new thought crossed her mind. Had there been a Pennyman in Stella Davidge’s background? There must be skeletons in cupboards, even in Metro-Tudorland. But Howard was now kissing her shoulder. The man crouching over his muddy gutters did not look up. They commanded a massive sweep of coast from Torre del Mar to Los Berenguelas. They climbed down the bed of a dried-out arroyo. But still her mind dwelled on Pennyman.

  Her mother had seemed startled when she came home from school demanding her birth certificate for the passport application. Anne had never seen the document. She only knew in theory that such things existed. At the age of sixteen, she had never had to ask for it before.

  ‘I’m trying to remember where I put it,’ her mother said. But she would not go through her papers in Anne’s presence. For two or three days Anne nagged her.

  ‘It must have gone astray when we went up north.’

  ‘What am I going to do? I shan’t be able to go.’

  At sixteen, alternatives have a habit of looking like extremes.

  ‘Don’t be silly. There are ways and means.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better write to Somerset House or something?’

  Her mother said she would go herself to get the certificate. She spent a day on her own in centr
al London. But she came back empty-handed.

  ‘They are sending it by post.’ But it did not come.

  ‘Civil servants!’

  She was away again all day, and this time when she returned in the early evening, she did have the document. Anne held out her hand for it, but her mother was reluctant to pass it over. Things were not easy between them at this period. They were always misunderstanding each other, as if deliberately. There had been almighty rows over lesser incidents than this. Jean Cossey dropped the buff envelope on the table and left the room.

  Anne shouted through to the kitchen: ‘Who was Peter Burne Pennyman, Shipping Clerk? And why isn’t my name Pennyman?’

  ‘Isn’t Cossey good enough for you? You can forget about him. Put him right out of your head. He never troubled himself over us.’

  ‘How come I was born in Carshalton?’

  ‘I happened to be living there at the time, and I rather wanted to have you with me.’

  ‘Ha-ha. Mum’s made a funny.’

  ‘I’ve often wondered,’ Mrs Howard Lawson said to her husband on the winding road below Frigiliana, ‘whether Mr Pennyman was Mr Camel-Leopard.’

  ‘In either case, it’s a pity he didn’t think of deed-poll.’

  ‘I mean—were we hiding from my own father in Broadstairs?’

  ‘Does it matter all that much?’

  Was there something in his tone that told of wearying tenderness? For once she had the sense to start talking about something else. It was their last whole day in the Mediterranean landscape. When would they be able to afford to see Spain again? Tonight they were going to celebrate. They had a small kitty of pesetas unspent, would be able to drink a more distinguished Rioja than usual with their candlelit dinner.

  A telegram was waiting for them on the board. They assumed that it was from their tour operator, giving them their homeward instructions: the air traffic people had now changed their tactics to one-day stoppages.