A Parcel of Fortunes Read online

  A Parcel of Fortunes

  Frank Ahern

  Copyright © 2018 Frank Ahern

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

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  ISBN 9781788034760

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  About the Author

  Frank Ahern is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. He has spent much of his life working in the home counties and now lives in Dorset, enjoying its rich natural world.

  He is currently working on his second novel, Ghost-lines.

  For Sue

  I see men’s judgments are

  A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward

  Do draw the inward quality after them

  To suffer all alike.

  – Antony and Cleopatra, Act III

  Contents

  About the Author

  PART I VISITINGS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  PART II CONCLUSIONS

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  Acknowledgements

  PART I

  VISITINGS

  CHAPTER 1

  He rises from his desk and walks to the window, gazing out across the river. At eye level, perched on the blanched, bone-like branches of a dead Alder tree across the river, is a cormorant, its wings outstretched in a gesture of crucifixion. They are striking, these large birds sitting in this tree, spread in heraldic posture as they dry their black, sun-flecked feathers. Matthew feels spread-eagled in his own way. But with no warming sun, only a cold creeping sense that his life is slipping beyond his control.

  Who was the sinister man who’d approached him that morning, delivering what might be construed as a death threat? Or might not. Matthew Agnew is not, after all, a typical target for a would-be-assassin, or even for a would-be-assassin’s messenger boy. Too old and, a mere archivist, too peripheral to be swept into the unpredictable currents and eddies of political life. And too peripheral, surely, to be of any interest to the cloak-and-dagger world of hit men and their errand boys.

  The window from which he has been gazing is set high in the towered corner of the main school building. It is reached by the seventy-one steps of a narrow spiral staircase. The stone stairs have been worn in their centres by decades of footsteps; generations of grimy hands have created a patina of shiny, seamy blackness on the stone handrail spiralling down the scuffed walls.

  Matthew emerges from the tower by the river, the cormorant still emblazoned in the tree. He needs someone to share the burden of the morning’s bombshell. If that’s what it is. He needs to tell someone about the mysterious stranger. He will explain that the warning he has received is probably a response to a letter that he had sent a fortnight earlier. A letter to a former pupil of his, asking for clarification on some matters he has been researching. The trail that has led to the writing of the letter has been a trail that has twisted and turned, a trail which perhaps has more in keeping with a detective enquiry than a piece of historical research. Or perhaps neither.

  *

  It should have been ordinary, the tour that morning; one of the occasional tours Matthew gave of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parts of the main building complex. Today’s group – a local history society – contained the usual suspects, pursuing what might be called their geriatric daytime distraction: it could be walking, or touring, or eating out, or visiting places of historic interest; it didn’t really matter which, so long as the outings filled some hours and occupied their minds.

  Their clothing and footwear were predictable, a uniform of age, you might say, with their sensible shoes and baggy anoraks. Only today, there had been one person who had seemed somewhat out of place. Younger and differently dressed. Tall and thickset – a bit of a bruiser? – he had a large, square-shaped head with a heavy jawline and, incongruously, large blue eyes. Who did he look like? Who?…Tommy Cooper? Yes! Tommy Cooper! Wearing a cheap-looking suit and heavy, thick-soled black shoes; tie knot hung at an angle a good two inches beneath the collar of his shirt, the top button of which was undone. Tommy Cooper, comedian and magician. But his lookalike today was giving no hint of comedy and, beyond suddenly and mysteriously appearing in this group of people, no hint of magic.

  The visitors are at the heart of the school campus, a large Georgian country house, built originally because of its easy reach to the London to Bath road. Matthew has talked briefly about the school and is now introducing his guests to the Grand Hall, where he is starting his tour. ‘In the 1850s, shortly after the country house became a school, the buildings were improved and extended through the endowment of a rich ironmaster. His one stipulation was that a neo-Gothic dining hall be created in the style of an Oxford college refectory.’ He explains that the impressive room is too small these days to serve as the school dining hall, but is regularly used for concerts, small drama productions and the occasional formal dinner. And of course as an attraction to visitors.

  He invites his guests to look upwards to the striking timber roof. Sculpted stone corbels carry the arch-braced trusses; these and the purlins and wind-braces are colourfully and ornately decorated in Burgundy red, cyan and gold. ‘Many people find the roof the most impressive part of this room and they take for granted what in many ways is much more interesting, the delicately worked panelling below. I suppose it’s because the eye is immediately drawn towards the colour and the scale of the roof. And then to the high-set perpendicular windows…I guess that the expanse of dark wood creates a rather gloomy atmosphere.’ There is some nodding of heads; one or two of the guests look on in quizzical disagreement. ‘On the other hand, perhaps one should see the rather oppressive over-timbering as entirely appropriate to a Victorian creation mimicking a medieval style.’ More nodding of heads. Matthew then proceeds to discuss the panels. Created by a well-known Venetian woodcarver in Italian walnut, they are Renaissance in style, finely detailed and rich in symbolism. ‘No two panels replicate each other. What I want to do is c
oncentrate simply on one or two so that you get a sense of the close detail and of what the panel is saying to us.’ He points out motifs and images, glosses the classical and literary references in the carving.

  Matthew enjoys giving the tours. He likes the interaction with people, the interest they show as he explores and explains the different features of the building. But today, he is somewhat hesitant in his delivery. He is uneasy. The Tommy Cooper character is striking a wrong note. He does not seem to be paying much attention; in fact, if anything can be read on his almost expressionless face, it is the sullen indifference of a bored pupil, with just a hint of mild hostility.

  As the group leaves the hall for their next stop, Matthew is approached by their leader, a small man with thick glasses and a comb-over of thin white hair, who asks him about the ill-dressed stranger.

  ‘Oh, I thought he was one of yours.’

  A look of distaste appears on the man’s face. ‘No. No. Certainly not.’

  Reluctantly, Matthew approaches the tall man. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says quietly, ‘I gather you’re not part of the history group, and I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.’

  ‘Actually, Mr Agnew, I’ve come to have a chat with you. But that can wait. I’m finding this, er, most, um…instructive.’

  The tour comes to its conclusion where it started, in the Grand Hall, the stragglers hobbling up to thank their host before a more formal thanks is offered by the group leader.

  The Tommy Cooper lookalike hangs back as the group exits and, once they have eventually filed out, Matthew asks him if he’d like to come to the Archive Room.

  ‘No, this will do…Mr Agnew.’ A leer on his face?

  In the gloom of the darkly timbered hall, Matthew notices a change in the man’s voice. It sounds coarser and deeper than earlier. ‘I’ve got a simple message for you, Mr Agnew. Stop delving. Desist. You won’t want Special Branch descending on you, believe me. They can be very…unpredictable. They can…magic…people away.’ He smiles and gives a dismissive laugh that once again has echoes of Tommy Cooper.

  ‘Can you tell me who you are, please, sir?’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Agnew.’

  The man walks past his host, bumping him roughly with his shoulder, nearly knocking him off balance. And is gone.

  Leaving Matthew to think, after he has regained his composure. Is he frightened? Should he be? What is the appropriate response to this unsettling visitation?

  ‘Desist’. Quaint choice of word. And a vague injunction, too. Desist from what? The message is cryptic. ‘Stop delving’. Delving, digging. Ah yes, a little clearer. But isn’t that what archivists do? Delve? Explore? Research? And isn’t Matthew now a school archivist of three years standing, with a successful career of English teaching behind him? No longer delving into rich literary soils, delving instead into the lumpy and sometimes stony substratum of records, documents, ephemera and the suchlike?

  No calling card from the caller. No provenance, as the archivist might say. No provenance, no name. Name not necessary. Matthew knows who it is. ‘I hereby christen this man…Tommy Cooper.’ Tommy Cooper, interloper, ill-dressed thug. Thug? Ah, perhaps he should be frightened.

  He hazards a guess, as an archivist should, at the provenance of Tommy Cooper. And decides that he should at least be apprehensive.

  *

  In the evening Matthew and his wife, Rachel, were due to attend a drinks party at the Headmaster’s. His house was a short walk from the Agnews’ two-hundred-year-old cottage, which lay just beyond the school grounds on the edge of the arboretum.

  The door of the house was open, so they walked in and were greeted in the cavernous hallway by Rosie Dogget, the Headmaster’s wife. A warm, generous-spirited woman with a knack of making people feel that they mattered to her and that she was there for them if needed. Someone to turn to if Tommy Cooper proved too troublesome?

  She pointed them towards the large drawing room. As they entered, Matthew could hear chatter about the Scottish Independence Referendum, taking place today, 18 September 2014: early indications were of a very high turnout. What would the morning bring? News that the United Kingdom had been fractured? A difficult result to call.

  Immediately, on the far side, Matthew spotted Henry Baines, the Deputy Head. A portly man with a round puffy face, he had a large, angry-looking wart on the side of his neck just above the collar. On most days the collar would chafe the wart to the point of bleeding, leaving speckles or streaks of blood on his shirt. Henry had been Head of History for many years before his elevation. There had been some vitality to the younger man. Now, as he approached retirement, the energy had drained; despite his position as Deputy Head, he was deemed largely irrelevant both to staff and to pupils.

  Although younger than Matthew, Henry was a relic from the past. Unmarried and without any other focus for his affections, he had invested his entire emotional being in the school. If in recent years it had, on occasions, tested his steadfastness – admitting girls to the school was a big betrayal in his view – the school remained all that he had; and so he in turn remained loyal, supporting a headmaster whose vision was to the future, while his was to a traditional past long gone. They needed each other. Henry craved the position and status that only the Headmaster, Toby Dogget, could give him in his beloved institution; and the Headmaster valued Henry’s daily reporting back of the tittle-tattle of the Senior Common Room, indiscrete and treacherous though it frequently was.

  Rosie Dogget approached Matthew with a plate of canapés. As he was about to take one, a plump, puffy hand appeared from behind him and clumsily scooped up a couple of smoked salmon blinis.

  ‘Thank you, Rosie.’ It is Henry. He stuffs both blinis in his mouth at once and, before finishing them, splutters, ‘Ah, Matthew, how did your tour go today?’ A sly smile spreads across his face. ‘I saw you trotting round with your admiring group of tottering geriatrics! Now, are you sure you are telling them the right things?’ The sly smile is replaced by a look of irritation. ‘You know, I really can’t…I never could…understand why Toby didn’t appoint a proper historian as archivist.’ And then another smile, smug this time.

  ‘What you mean, Henry…what you mean is that you can’t understand why Toby didn’t hold the job open for you so that you could slip into a quiet semi-retirement.’

  Henry harrumphs, dislodging a speckle of blini that has caught on the corner of his mouth, and stomps away.

  Matthew knows how dearly Henry would have loved the archive job. Knows that Henry wasn’t ready to step out of the limelight when the post came up. Knows that Henry will never forgive him for being in the right place at the right time and taking the cushy little number he wanted for himself. Poor Henry. If he’d been a little older he’d have pipped Matthew to the post. But he wasn’t. And didn’t. And the resentment he feels towards Matthew festers quietly away like the angry wart on his neck.

  Oh God! It suddenly strikes Matthew that Henry might have seen the Tommy Cooper man. If he has, he will want to find out who the incongruous figure was, will want some telling detail about the man that he can report back to Toby Dogget. Not that Matthew has any. But if Tommy Cooper comes from where Matthew thinks he comes from, then it will be as well that Baines knows nothing at all about the visitation. Or there will be complications.

  As Henry moved away, Matthew caught the eye of his wife from across the room. A quizzical look. He mouthed ‘Baines by name and bane by nature,’ knowing that she would read the familiar description. She nodded a smile back to him, then cast her eyes heavenwards.

  *

  ‘A proper historian,’ Henry had said, perhaps because he believed that an archivist should be a historian; more likely because he believed that the archivist should be him. But what exactly was a ‘proper’ historian? At the age of sixty, after many years of running a successful English department, Matthew had opted to retire and had been offered the
post of part-time School Archivist. Unsure of his suitability, it was to his father, a retired history lecturer, he had turned for advice.

  Michael Agnew, a widower in his eighties, lived in a riverside apartment in Marlow. He was a wise man, deliberate in his thinking, slow to judge, and by habit tentative and provisional in the counsel he offered. Matthew had visited on a sunny October afternoon, some four years before Tommy Cooper’s descent on the school. There was a cool breeze coming in from the river, despite which the two men had sat on the balcony of the flat, Michael with a rug over his knees. To the right loomed William Tierney Clark’s 180-year-old suspension bridge, elegant country cousin to his earlier streetwise Hammersmith Bridge. Beyond lay All Saints Church and a little further downstream Marlow Lock.

  There was something bracing in the cool, lemony October sunlight, and sitting out on this balcony gladdened Matthew’s heart. His father had bought the flat shortly after the unexpected death of his wife, selling Hyghcliff, the rambling house in which Matthew and his siblings had grown up.

  A large cruiser sailed by beneath them, the engine throatily throbbing, the water outlet whooshing gently. On the upper deck a group of people chattered and bantered, drinks in their hands. They had wrapped up well, clearly determined to drain the last dregs of summer before winterisation beckoned the craft into dock. Matthew watched the cruiser’s wash moving towards the riverbank until, with hollow slaps and muffled claps, it hit first the moored boats and then the pontoon below the balcony.

  When Michael Agnew had downsized to his riverside flat, he had allowed himself one great indulgence to satisfy an old ambition, the purchase of a 23-foot slipper launch, Farewell, which for most of the year he kept moored to the private residential pontoons in front of the flat. The wash had given the boat some movement, and it was now straining at its mooring ropes, rising up like a tied-up dog trying to break free.