Beyond Recall Read online

  Beyond Recall

  by

  Robert Goddard

  Once again Robert Goddard teases and questions our assumptions, as he challenges those of his characters. Once again he confirms his reputation as

  ‘a compelling storyteller of our time’.

  Also by Robert Goddard

  PAST CARING

  IN PALE BATTALIONS

  PAINTING THE DARKNESS

  INTO THE BLUE

  TAKE NO FAREWELL

  HAND IN GLOVE

  CLOSED CIRCLE

  BORROWED TIME

  OUT OF THE SUN

  Robert Goddard

  BEYOND RECALL

  BANTAM PRESS

  LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS LTD 61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5

  5SA

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD

  15-25 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 2170

  TRANS WORLD PUBLISHERS (NZ) LTD 3 William Pickering Drive, Albany,

  Auckland

  Published 1997 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd

  Copyright Robert Goddard 1997

  The right of Robert Goddard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0593 036174 (cased) ISBN 0593 042824 (tpb) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Typeset in 11/12’/2 Linotype Times by Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Mackays of Chatham nlc. Chatham. Kent.

  In fond memory of Terry Green, friend, colleague and boon companion, on whom time was called far too early.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am indebted to the following for help and advice generously given to me during the planning and writing of this novel: Christopher Street, who supplied background information on the classic car restoration business; Charles and Thelma North, whose recollections of grocery and credit drapery before, during and after the Second World War proved invaluable; and in particular Malcolm McCarraher, who tirelessly vetted the legal ramifications of the plot and was considerate enough to provide ingenious solutions to any problems he identified.

  TODAY

  The air is different here, purer somehow. The light is clearer, the edges of the leaves and the lines of the buildings as sharp as the memories. Recollection invades my senses through the unchanged brightness of this place called home. I raise the window on the evening, cool and sweetly washed by late afternoon rain. I touch the wood and test the paintwork with my thumb. I watch a rabbit, disturbed but not startled by the squeak of the sash, hop away into the trees.

  The direction of his leisurely retreat draws my eyes towards St.

  Clement’s Hill, where I can make out the roofs of Truro School, and just to the north, the white dots that could be sheep in a field but for the regularity of their spacing, sheep safely grazing rather than the headstones of the dead resting for ever on a familiar hillside.

  I didn’t ask for an east-facing room. I didn’t let slip my connection with Tredower House when I booked in. I didn’t even disguise my name.

  The receptionist was too young to remember anyway, probably too young even to care. Pure chance, then, puts me here, in this particular room, where my great-uncle kept his vast old day bed and his jumble of assaying equipment and his battered leather trunks and cases, laid out as if in readiness for a journey. Maybe he rested here, listening to the cooing of the doves and sniffing the summer air, before setting out that last time, nearly fifty years ago. Just up there, half a mile away at most, his bones are dust beneath a slab of Cornish granite. I stood beside it a few hours ago, waiting to be met; waiting, but also willing to be forced to remember. I read the inscription, cursory and reticent, declaring just as little as propriety demanded, and thought of how carefully my grandmother would have chosen the wording. “Brevity and seemliness,” I imagined her saying to the monumental mason. “His name.” Joshua George Carnoweth. “His dates.” 1873-1947. “The customary initials.” RIP. “That, I rather think, will suffice.”

  And you must have thought it would, mustn’t you, Gran? You must have been so confident, even when your own life ebbed away twenty-five years later. No cold grave on a windy hilltop for you, of course, but neat hygienic cremation. Well, some things can’t be burned, or even buried.

  You must have thought they could be. But you were wrong. Only you’re not here to face that fact, are you? I am.

  I was early for my appointment at the cemetery. Not by much, but early enough to recover my breath after the climb and draw some calmness from the scene. The wind was up, heralding the rain that hadn’t yet arrived. The speeding clouds shifted the sunlight around the city below me, lighting first the single copper spire of the cathedral, then its taller central tower, then the long pale line of the viaduct and the deep green fields beyond; and finally, closer to, a flight of birds above the cemetery chapel, tossed up in the breeze like a handful of shingle on a gale-ripped beach, lit and seen and swiftly lost.

  The houses have crept up the slopes around the cemetery since Uncle Joshua was buried, crept up unsuspected, like some besieging enemy by night, unnoticed until suddenly perceived. The thought struck me just as I saw her approaching up the path, walking fast and straight, anonymously dressed, thinner and gaunter and older than when we’d last met.

  She stopped a few feet away and stared at me, breathing steadily.

  Hostility, if it was there, was expertly masked. But what else would I have expected? She’d always worn a mask. I just hadn’t always known it.

  “You’ve aged well,” she said neutrally. “Still off the drink?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “That must be it, then. Unless it’s the effect of marriage and fatherhood.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I made it my business to. Where are they your wife and son?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “Handy for the banks, I imagine.”

  “Is that what this is about money?”

  “What else? I’m short.”

  “Didn’t they pay you enough for those imaginative memoirs of yours?”

  “Not enough to keep me indefinitely in the manner I’m accustomed to.”

  “You mean you’ve run through it all.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, bad luck. You’ll get nothing from me.”

  “I’ll get as much as I need from somebody. You or the highest bidder.

  And I think the bidding will go pretty high for the story I have to tell. Don’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If the truth gets out, a lot of people are going to look very stupid.”

  “Worse than stupid, in your case.”

  “That’s why I’m willing to keep my mouth shut. At a price.”

  “What price?”

  “Half of what I stood to net last time. You can afford it. Just half.

  Isn’t that fair?”

  “No, not in the least.”

  “I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think it over. Meet me here this time tomorrow with your answer.”

  “Why here?”

  “Because this is one grave I know the exact location of.” S
he almost smiled then. It would have been an admission that something beyond greed and envy were at work, but the admission never quite came.

  “I don’t believe you have the courage to drag it all into the open now.”

  “I don’t need courage, just a lack of alternatives. I’ve had to scrape by on a budget lately, leading the kind of dull deadening life I swore I never would. Well, I’ve had enough of that, and this is the only way to escape it.”

  “Isn’t it better than prison?”

  “Oh, I’ve no intention of going back there. With what the papers will pay me for the truth, I can leave the country and become a different person. You know how good I am at that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But that’s not an option for you, is it? Now you’re a committed family man. Think about it. We made a deal before. We can make another. It’s simple enough.”

  “If you really believe ‘

  “I believe anything you say now you might look back on as rather foolish when you’ve had a chance to weigh up the options. Take my word for it. I’ve been weighing them for a long time.”

  “And I get twenty-four hours to do the same?”

  “Exactly. Generous in the circumstances.” She held my gaze for a moment. Whether she felt the same strange complicity with me as I felt with her I had no way of telling, and I’d never have dared to ask, for fear of the answer. We’d set ourselves up for this years ago, by agreeing however reluctantly to share and conceal the truth. What is a secret without trust but a bargain waiting to be broken? “Until tomorrow?” she added.

  I nodded. “Until tomorrow.”

  So there it is. The threat I’ve lived with since we first struck our deal. The dilemma I’ve liked to pretend I didn’t anticipate. Well, if it had to happen, let it happen. Here and now. There’s no more fitting place or time. And I have until tomorrow to reach a decision.

  Who needs more than that?

  I look from the window down at the sloping flank of the lawns and listen to the roar of the traffic accelerating up the hill. I remember a time when there was so little of it you could hear a single car cross Boscawen Bridge and labour up the road towards the Isolation Hospital.

  Just as I remember a time when I knew nothing of the truth about Uncle Joshua’s death except the little that the average newspaper reader on the Clapham omnibus knew. For more than thirty years, as child and man, I inhabited that happy state. Then, early one Sunday morning in September 1981, on the path near the rhododendrons down there, where my gaze lingers, I caught my first sight, partially blocked by undergrowth, of what brought that phase of my life to an abrupt and horrifying end. And set the next in motion. Moving towards this day.

  And tomorrow.

  I lower the window and shut out the noise. But not the memories. They rush in and surround me as I slowly cross the room and lie down on the bed and close my eyes, the better to confront them. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not running away. I have until tomorrow to relive them all. As it seems I must. Before I decide.

  YESTERDAY

  CHAPTER ONE

  By September 1981, the murder of my great-uncle, Joshua Carnoweth, had ceased to be a shocking and lamented blow to Truro’s peaceful image of itself. Thirty-four years had transmuted it into a quaint footnote of civic history. Most of the many things said about it at the time had been forgotten, and all of the passions stirred had been dissipated. It wasn’t that nobody remembered, it was just that nobody cared enough to call the events to mind. Three decades of the affluent society had cast the rationed pleasures and abundant pains of 1947 into relative antiquity, and with them the memories of those who’d failed to outlive the year.

  Even within the family, of which old Joshua had been a semidetached member, his name was seldom mentioned. Some of us lived in his house.

  All of us to varying degrees prospered thanks to the fortune my grandmother had inherited from him. But most of us had trained ourselves to pretend he’d played no real part in transforming the Napiers from humble shopkeepers into company directors and absentee hoteliers. He hadn’t intended to, after all. He hadn’t wanted to shower his wealth on us. He’d probably have been outraged that his murder should have such a consequence. To that extent, perhaps our neglect of his memory was justified. Perhaps anything beyond collective indifference would have been like dancing on his grave.

  That’s how I’d have defended it if I’d had to. But then I was among the least witting of his beneficiaries. I thought I knew the whole story, but I didn’t know the half of it. I thought I remembered it exactly as it had been, but what I remembered was a cunningly wrought fiction that had worn dangerously thin without anyone noticing. And by September 1981, it had reached breaking point.

  Saturday the fifth of September was the day my niece, Tabitha Rutherford, was to marry Dominic Beale, a good-looking and highly eligible young merchant banker. It was also, by happy contrivance, my parents’ golden wedding anniversary. A full-scale family celebration was therefore arranged. The wedding was to be at St. Mary Clement Methodist Church in the centre of Truro, followed by a reception at Tredower House.

  Since my grandmother’s death, the family home had been converted into Cornwall’s premier hotel and conference centre (according to the brochure), managed by my brother-in-law, Trevor Rutherford. This had been my father’s solution to the problem of what to do with Trevor when he sold off the chain of six Napier’s Department Stores which Gran’s inheritance from Uncle Joshua had helped him establish in the Fifties.

  He’d done that almost as soon as death had neutralized her veto on such a conservative move, and retired with my mother to Jersey. A few years later, realizing Cornwall really did have a claim on their souls, they’d moved back to what must still be the most desirable residence on the Helford estuary. Tredower House Hotel had meanwhile begun to live up to its reputation, thanks more to my sister Pam’s organizational abilities than any managerial excellence on Trevor’s part.

  The hotel was closed for the weekend, so that the vast gathering of friends, relations and business associates could revel in our hospitality. And on Saturday morning, reluctantly obedient to Pam’s summons, I drove down from Pangbourne to join in the merrymaking. I’d given the Stag a tune-up for the journey and made it in four hours dead, little short of a record in those days. Pam had wanted me to go down on Friday, but I’d claimed an open-top drive against the clock was just what I needed to blow away some end-of-week cobwebs.

  That was an excuse, of course, as I’m sure she realized. I couldn’t boycott an event of this magnitude, but I could minimize my exposure to it. A last-minute arrival and a prompt departure the following afternoon: I had it all planned. I’d be there, but with any luck I’d feel as if I hadn’t been.

  There’d been a pretty classic falling out between me and Dad. It went back twenty years, to when I’d walked out on a managerial traineeship at the Plymouth store and the generous allowance with which he rewarded filial obedience. I was making a living now, and not a bad one, but there had been times, too many for comfort, when I hadn’t. I’d not asked to be helped out of any of them, and Dad hadn’t offered. Pride got in the way on both sides. He wanted me to admit my mistakes without acknowledging any of his own, and he probably thought I wanted the same of him. So an armed truce was what we got. It left me with a unique status in recent generations of my family: that of a more or less self-made man. Self-remade was actually nearer the mark, in view of a sustained attempt at drinking myself to death in the late Sixties.

  But the upshot was the same. I wasn’t in and I wasn’t out. I was one of them, but it didn’t feel much like it to them or to me.

  Something of the same ambivalence characterized my relationship with the city of my birth. Truro’ sboth what you expect and what you don’t of a cathedral city at the damp and distant tip of the south-west peninsula. A place of long, steep, curving hills, of bright light falling on rain-washed stone, of Georgian elegance cheek by jowl with malty warehouses and muddy
wharves, of poverty and deprivation crammed in with the tourism and the Celtic romance and the strange, stubborn sense of meaning. None of the features of it I can most readily picture the huge out-of-scale cathedral, the viaduct soaring above Victoria Park, my old school high on its hill to the south, the house in Crescent Road where I was born, Tredower House itself none of them were much more than a hundred years old then. Yet what I carry about with me of Truro, and can neither discard nor visualize, seems both older and stronger. We Napiers are partly in comers One of Grandfather Napier’s principal attractions as far as my grandmother was concerned was that he wasn’t a Cornishman. But the Carnoweths are as Cornish as saffron cake. Their Truronian roots lie deep, and some stem reaches me, however far or long I stray.

  All this rendered any visit of mine to Tredower House a venture into well-charted waters that were nonetheless turbulent. It stood, bowered in trees, near the top of the hill on the St. Austell road, a Gothic mansion that must have looked stark and ugly when built for Sir Reginald Pencavel, the china clay magnate, back in the 1870s. But the maturing of the grounds and the weathering of the sandstone had given it a sort of acquired avuncularity, like an old acquaintance you suddenly realize has become a friend.