Читать книгу The Villa on the Riviera - Elizabeth Edmondson - Страница 9

Dr Roger Harrington was waiting at the corner as Polly came panting up. Sturdy, good-looking, he had an air of competence and a cleft to a strong chin that betokened a firm if not obstinate nature. This evening there was a weary look about his eyes, not surprising when he’d been on duty for more than twelve hours.

‘Really, Polly, you must try to be more punctual,’ he said, as she put up her face for a kiss.

‘Sorry,’ said Polly.

‘I thought we’d go to the pictures, but we’ll have to buck up if we’re going to get there on time.’

Polly had to jog to keep up with him. ‘What’s on?’

‘We’re going to see The Mayor of Hell. James Cagney.’

Polly sat through the film with the action on screen barely registering in her mind. Somehow, that evening, she must tell Roger what she had discovered: that she wasn’t who he thought she was, that he was engaged to a woman who didn’t exist, and instead had attached himself to the illegitimate offspring of Thomasina and God knew who.

It was made worse by the fact that Roger, after the film was over — a film that he said he’d really enjoyed — was full of his latest medical interest. ‘Heredity is the key to everything,’ he was saying. ‘That’s what makes us what we are. There’s no getting away from it. Just like with racehorses, who your parents and your grandparents and great-grandparents are determine just who and what you are.’

‘I don’t know much about my grandparents,’ Polly began, seeing an opening.

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve seen photos of your father, a fine, upright man, and he died bravely, so he clearly had a good character. That’s what counts. And there’s nothing wrong with your mother, she’s healthy and reasonably intelligent. Hardworking, responsible, look what a good job she’s made of bringing you up single-handed, there’s no reason why you won’t be the same. And she’s artistic, and so are you. With her it’s music, with you it’s paint, but it’s all the same. Temperaments and choices are predetermined you see, by our genes.’

Polly wasn’t sure what genes were, and felt that she’d rather not know.

‘And here I am, a doctor and the son and grandson of doctors. It’s in my blood.’

Polly could see a number of objections to this. There was Shakespeare, the son of a glover, or had his father been a butcher? No literary genes there, unless his mother had been a poet in secret, but she had a suspicion that the female line didn’t count as much in Roger’s thinking as the male one. ‘What about someone like Leonardo da Vinci?’ she said, tucking her hand into his.

‘What’s he got to do with it?’

‘His parents weren’t artists. He was illegitimate, you know.’

They were under a streetlight, and Polly could see the frown on Roger’s firm brow.

‘Was he? That’s something that we, as a nation, are going to have to be very careful about, now that all this new stuff about heredity is being discovered. It’s too risky having children growing up who don’t know who their fathers were. Besides, the chances are that the children of a woman who isn’t married will inherit her lax morals, and will go the same way themselves.’

No, this wasn’t the moment to tell Roger about Polyhymnia Tomkins.

At Polly’s house, he took the key from her and opened the front door. Then he gave her a chaste kiss and walked briskly away. Polly stood for a moment in the doorway, watching his upright retreating back.

He never came up to her room with her in the evening. The only time he ventured there was in broad daylight, at teatime, and then he left the door open. ‘You don’t want to get a bad name with your landlady or your fellow lodgers,’ he told her.

What if he was right, like mother like daughter, and she was destined for a wild life of immorality instead of a safe marriage to a good man? Yet her life so far had hardly been characterized by sexual recklessness.

Polly’s first fling had been a minor one, a step taken in a spirit of determined curiosity with an older man, a friend of Oliver’s who had invited her into his bed when she was spending a weekend in the country, a bohemian household ruled over by a famous painter, where it seemed that bedroom doors opened and shut as a matter of course. He was an attractive man, but she hadn’t enjoyed the experience greatly, He had laughed at her and said that the worst was over, and once she lost her heart to a man, she would find sex exciting and ecstatic.

Then she met Jamie, a fellow artist, and she discovered that Oliver’s friend had known what he was talking about. Jamie; no, she wasn’t going to think about Jamie, brilliant, erratic, blissful in bed, funny — and, like so many of his contemporaries, with his soul scarred by four years of war that he’d been lucky to survive.

Polly pulled the pillow over her head to shut out her thoughts as well as the sounds of the dachsund on the other side of the street, who barked every night until his mistress came home, and she felt nothing but gladness that the day, a day which had held such astonishing revelations, was over.

Tomorrow, she would go first thing to Somerset House and get that damned birth certificate.

Polly Smith was a sound sleeper, oblivious to the world almost the moment her head touched the pillow.

Polyhymnia Tomkins, it seemed, was troubled with insomnia. Polly woke at four in the morning after several restless hours. She slid out of bed, pushing damp hair back from her forehead, why was she so hot? She drank a glass of water, and looked around for something to read, anything to take her mind off the thoughts that were driving round and round in her mind.

Her eye fell on her passport photo, clipped to the passport application form. It was waiting for the birth certificate, so that she could take it to the Passport Office in Petty France.

What was it that it said on the accompanying instructions? The photograph had to be signed by an MP, a JP, a solicitor, a member of the medical profession, a clergyman. Who had to declare, in solemn words, that the photograph was a true likeness of … of whom?

How could anyone declare that the photograph was a true likeness of Polyhymnia Tomkins, when no one in the whole wide world knew or had ever known Polyhymnia Tomkins?

She’d intended to go to her old school to ask the headmistress to sign it. How could she look Miss Murgatroyd in the eye and say, ‘Actually, I’m not Polly Smith, and the woman you knew all the years I was at school as my mother is no such thing. I’m her sister’s illegitimate daughter.’ Polly grew pale at the thought. Who could she ask to sign it? Could anyone sign it, given the circumstances? What would people think of Dora Smith if word got out that the girl everyone knew as her daughter was in fact her niece, father unknown?

The feeble grey light of a November dawn was spreading across the sky before Polly fell asleep again, and when the alarm clock went off with raucous enthusiasm, she felt as though she’d had no sleep at all.

Well, she might as well get the birth certificate, she told herself as she washed in the basin. After that she would have to tackle the problem of the photograph.

This time, she went alone to Somerset House. Last time — was it only yesterday? — she had gone with a light heart, a sense of being on her way to the excitement of going abroad. Oliver had been with her, now, on her own, she found the imposing eighteenth-century building had a sinister air to it.

She hoped, unreasonably, that there would be a different clerk on duty, but no, the woman who was sitting at the enquiry desk was the same one, grey hair twisted into a severe bun, grey eyes enlarged by the pince-nez, eyes that didn’t look at all kind this morning, but full of suspicion.

‘You were here yesterday,’ the clerk said accusingly.

‘I was, but it’s a different name I’m looking for now.’

Polly hoped she was speaking with calm self-assurance, but the woman’s eyes glinted with malicious understanding.

‘Not who you thought you were? We get that all the time. They say it’s a wise child who knows its own father, don’t they? If you’ve got the details right this time, you should have no trouble.’

She went back to the cards she was filling in.

Polly cleared her throat and waited.

The woman looked up. ‘Well?’ she said sharply.

‘You said yesterday that people born abroad weren’t in these books.’

‘Are you now saying you were born abroad? Are you sure you’re English?’

‘Quite sure.’

The woman banged her hand down on the bell on the corner of her desk, and after a short pause, a lugubrious individual in a brown linen coat appeared.

‘Mr Grier will show you where to go.’ And, to Mr Grier: ‘Foreign.’

She bent her head again, and Mr Grier looked at Polly. ‘Which country?’

‘France.’

‘This way.’

They went out of the big room with its serried ranks of ledgers and along a corridor, then out into the central square. ‘It’s in a different section,’ he said, pushing open a door and standing back to let her through. They went along another passage, and he stopped at a door with a single word written on it: ‘Miscellaneous’.

It was a small room, with more of the red bound ledgers, but only a handful of them compared to the room they had left. ‘France,’ he said, hauling a volume down and laying it on the high wooden stand, which stood against one wall in a narrow gap between the shelves. ‘Leave the volume here when you’ve finished, I’ll put it back.’

Miscellaneous. That was what she was, miscellaneous. Wasn’t there a famous aristocratic woman in the eighteenth century who’d had so many children by various fathers that they were given the surname Miscellany?

The book opened at the year 1920 — how few English people seemed to have been born in France. After the war, they would mostly have been diplomats’ children, she supposed. Perhaps, being so close to England, women preferred to come back home to give birth. She turned back the pages until she came to 1908. And there, halfway down the page, she found the entry. Polyhymnia Theodora Tomkins.

She had a middle name; Dora Smith had never mentioned that. Theodora, Dora’s own name. Perhaps the sisters hadn’t been quite so estranged, after all.

She copied the details on to one of the slips of paper provided in a wooden box on the stand, and retraced her steps to the main desk. She handed the slip to the clerk, signed the form, which was filled in with firm, clear letters, and wrote her address.

‘It should arrive within the week,’ the clerk said. ‘You want a short certificate, do you? I see.’

Polly felt her colour rising, she resented the clerk’s knowing look. A short certificate, proclaiming her illegitimacy to the world, was to be despised.

That’s that, she said aloud as she stepped out into the Strand. The first step had been taken to bring Polyhymnia Tomkins to life.

Perhaps as Polyhymnia she would turn out to be quite a different creature from her old self. Even if she were Polly Tomkins — and no one would use a name like Polyhymnia on an everyday basis, for heaven’s sake — a Polly Tomkins must be a different person from a Polly Smith.

Or was that so? If Polly Smith married a Mr Tomkins, would she be different from when she used her maiden name, was a Tomkins in essence different from a Smith? Would she become a different person when she was Polly Harrington?

Yes, she would be different, because she would be a wife, and in due course a mother.

The thought depressed her.

The last traces of the previous day’s fog had been blown away by the brisk westerly wind that brought instead gusts of rain sweeping across the city. People walked quickly, heads down, black umbrellas held aloft. Polly didn’t have an umbrella, she had given up on umbrellas a long time ago, since, unless it was raining and the brolly in her hand, she invariably left it somewhere. She turned up the collar of her mac and stood for a moment in a tobacconist’s doorway, out of the rain, while she decided what to do.

She could go back to her studio and work. No; the painting on her easel at the moment wasn’t coming out as she wanted it to, and it grew more unpleasing by the day. Figures on a street, but as Oliver remarked, it looked like the worst excesses of the industrial revolution, with gaunt figures against a backdrop of chimneys.

‘It’s London.’

‘Never. It’s undoubtedly some dreary northern street, you’ve caught the spirit of disillusion and hopelessness wonderfully well.’

‘It’s meant to be Russell Square in the rush hour.’

‘One day, Polly, you’ll find what you really want to paint, and it won’t be rat-coloured figures in a dismal landscape, no, nor those fetching but trivial book jackets you do for WH Smith. Nor touching up flower paintings in Rossetti’s workshop.’

‘The jackets and the flowers make me money.’

‘Of course, and even an artist must live, if only on eggs and soup. I daresay you could make an excellent career out of nothing but the book jackets; they have a charm which is, you don’t need me to tell you, quite lacking in your paintings.’

His words had stung Polly. No artist himself, he chose to find his company among artists, and was renowned for having an eye and an unerring instinct for putting his finger on the weakness in any artist’s work. And Polly, honest with herself, had to admit that her art was never going to please her or anyone else unless it changed dramatically.

Her friend, Fanny Powys, happy in her own work of silkscreen printing, had tried to cheer Polly up.

‘Oliver doesn’t bother to make his sharp remarks about painters he doesn’t think have any talent. If he’s polite, you know that artist’s a no-hoper.’

And Fanny should know, for it was at the private view of an exhibition of her prints that she had introduced Oliver to Polly. Polly, her attention entirely on a vigorous design taken from the whorls of oyster shells, had paid scant notice to the tall man who remained standing beside her.

‘It’s a matter of patterns,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes Fanny’s work different from most of her kind.’

And Polly had found herself drawn into a lively discussion about silkscreen printing, which led to wider topics of contemporary art. Polly was amazed that Oliver, who was, he had at once told her, not an artist, should have such an eye, such a quick appreciation of what artists such as Fanny were about.

‘I grew up surrounded by paintings and works of art,’ he explained. ‘My father is a collector, and very knowledgeable. He’s always been interested in the artists of the day as much as in past masters, and so I follow in his footsteps.’

Polly disagreed with Oliver about the work of several painters, and the argument was continued over supper at Bertorelli’s, the restaurant that was to become their favourite eating place.

Polly had taken an immediate liking to Oliver. ‘We are snip and snap,’ she explained to Fanny. ‘Oh, it’s not sex, although I suppose … No, it really isn’t. Affinity, that’s the word.’

‘A strange affinity,’ Fanny said drily. ‘Polly Smith and the Hon. Oliver.’

‘Hon.?’

‘His father’s a lord. Didn’t he tell you?’

Polly pondered on this piece of information. Did it make a difference? No, Oliver was Oliver. Of course he had another life, far removed from the impecunious day-to-day existence of artists like herself. Yet he was, in his way, one of them. ‘He’s a friend,’ she told Fanny. ‘We like one another’s company. Our minds are in harmony. That’s enough for me, his being an Hon. is neither here nor there.’

A man in a dark coat said, ‘Excuse me,’ in affronted tones, as though Polly were standing there with the express intention of keeping him from his tobacco, and she moved out of the way, back into the full force of the wind and the rain.

She made up her mind. She would go back to Highgate, and consult Ma about the passport photograph. Maybe she could suggest who could sign it for her.

Dora was at her piano; even on her busiest days, she never did less than two hours’ practice. In the kitchen, Mrs Babbit, the char, was singing loudly to herself as she turned out a cupboard.

‘How can you play with that noise going on?’ Polly said, as she always did.

‘Focus,’ said Dora, as she always did. Polly, somewhat hesitantly, because she didn’t want to sound accusatory, explained her problem.

‘I never thought of that.’

‘If I’m illegitimate, which I am, then that’s a fact, and there’s no point denying it,’ Polly said.

‘And no need to go broadcasting it from the rooftops, either. I’ve protected you from that all these years.’

‘And it wouldn’t be good for you if word got around. I don’t live here any more, but you do. I’ve been racking my brains, but I simply don’t know these professional kind of people, except the vicar here, and Miss Murgatroyd.’

‘It’ll have to be Dr Parker,’ Dora said. ‘He knows you aren’t my daughter, and he’ll sign it for you.’

‘You told him?’

‘When Ted and I were still hoping for children. He’s never said a word to anyone all these years, he won’t say a word now. Go along right away, and you may catch him before he sets off on his rounds.’

Polly arrived at the doctor’s house just as he was putting his medical bag into his black Wolseley. As she called out to him, he looked up with the long-suffering expression of a doctor trying to get away, but he smiled when he saw who it was.

‘I thought you were another patient.’

‘Well, I am, I suppose, but I’m not ill. I’m never ill.’

‘So what can I do for you?’

‘It’s a photograph, for a passport. It needs a signature. I thought … Ma said …’

Dr Parker was suddenly alert, and he drew his bushy brows together. ‘Passport, eh? So Dora’s had to come clean at last, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

He ran his eyes down the form. ‘I’ve done this often enough before.’ He opened the car door. ‘Can’t do this standing in the rain.’

The car smelled musty and leathery. Comforting, somehow. He rested the photo on the steering wheel and took a fat black fountain pen out of his inside pocket. He unscrewed the cap and turned the photo over. ‘Read out the exact words, Polly, and then you can tell me who you are.’

‘Polyhymnia Tomkins, I’m afraid.’

‘Good God. Let’s hope I can spell Polyhymnia.’

‘P-O,’ began Polly.

‘It’s all right, I can remember enough of my classical education to cope with that. One of the muses, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Tomkins was Dora’s maiden name. You’re her sister’s child.’ And then, catching sight of the bleak look on Polly’s face. ‘Cheer up, young lady. As a doctor, I could tell you, if I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut, how many people even in this small part of London aren’t quite what or who they think or say they are.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Daughters who are actually granddaughters, sons who were born a year after their named fathers went away to the war, married couples who never went before a priest or a registrar. Your secret’s perfectly safe with me, Polly. Besides, you’ll soon be Mrs Harrington, and no one will know or care what your name was before that.’

‘No,’ said Polly, as he wrote on the back of the second photograph and handed it back to her.

‘Tuck those away safely, or the ink will run in the wet and it’ll be all to do again. Are you going abroad for your honeymoon?’

‘Roger likes mountains, so it’s to be the Alps.’

‘The mountain air will do you good, bring some colour back to your cheeks. As your medical man, I can tell you that you’re looking a bit peaky.’

‘I don’t like the winter. And I’m not sure about mountains. It’ll be cold.’

‘But bright.’

The birth certificate arrived in a brown envelope, stamped OHMS. Polly hesitated, then pulled it out and read it. Brief was the word. Name, place of birth. She would go today to the Passport Office; if she put it off, she might never do it, but once she’d handed over the form and the photographs and the birth certificate, it would be out of her hands.

What would Roger say when he asked for the birth certificate? Would he ask why she didn’t have a full one? Could she pretend she asked for a short one because it cost less? That wouldn’t be quite honest, she must pluck up her courage and tell him the truth about her parentage.

With this uncomfortable thought in her mind, Polly went off to Petty France, to wait on a hard wooden bench before being called up to show her papers, hand in the forms and address an envelope to herself. The passport arrived three days later, dark blue, embossed in gold with the royal coat of arms, and filled with stiff empty pages.

And there, written in an official hand was her new identity, Polyhymnia Theodora Tomkins. Born Paris, May 1, 1908.