The Shell Seekers Read online

  It was a joke, really.

  The flats had been designed as pieds-à-terre for business men finally defeated by the sheer exhaustion of commuting daily to the depths of Surrey or Sussex or Buckinghamshire. Each had a tiny hallway, with a cupboard where you were meant to keep all your City clothes. Then there were a minuscule bathroom, a kitchen the size of a galley in a small yacht, and a sitting room. Here, a pair of louvered doors folded back to reveal a sort of kennel totally taken up by a double bed. This was not only impossible to make, but, in summer-time, hideously airless, so much so that in the warm weather Noel usually ended up sleeping on the sofa.

  The décor and the furniture had come with the place and were included in the hugely inflated rent. All was beige or brown and incredibly dull. The living room window faced out over the blank brick wall of a newly erected supermarket, a narrow alley, and a row of lock-up garages. The sunlight never penetrated, and the walls, which had once been cream, had darkened to the colour of old margarine.

  But it was a good address. To Noel, that mattered more than anything else. Part of his image, like the showy car, the Harvey and Hudson shirts, the Gucci shoes. All these details were intensely important, because in his youth, due to family circumstances and financial pressures, he had not been sent to a public school, but educated at a day school in London, and so had been deprived of the easy friendships and useful connections of attending Eton or Harrow or Wellington. This was a resentment that continued, even at the age of almost thirty, to rankle.

  Leaving school and finding a job had posed no problem. A post was ready and waiting for him in his father’s family firm, Keeling & Philips, an old-established and traditional publishing company in St. James’s, and for five years he had worked there before moving on to the infinitely more interesting and lucrative business of advertising. But his social life was a different matter altogether, and here he was thrown back on his own resources. Which were, fortunately, legion. He was tall, good-looking, clever at games, and even as a boy had learned to cultivate a sincere and open manner that swiftly disarmed. He knew how to be charming to older women, to be discreetly respectful of older men, and, with the patience and cunning of a well-trained spy, infiltrated with little difficulty the upper circles of London society. For years he had been on the Dowagers’ lists of suitable young men for Debutante dances, and during the Season he scarcely slept, returning from some ball in the early sunlight of a summer dawn, stripping off his tails and his starched shirt, taking a shower, and going to work. Weekends saw him at Henley, or Cowes, or Ascot. He was invited to ski in Davos, fish in Sutherland, and every now and then his handsome face appeared in the glossy pages of Harpers and Queen, “enjoying a joke with his hostess.”

  It was, in its way, an achievement. But all at once, it was not enough. He was fed up. He seemed to be getting nowhere. He wanted more.

  The flat crouched around him, watching like a depressed relation, waiting for him to take some action. He drew the curtains and switched on the lamp and things looked marginally better. He took The Times from his coat pocket and tossed it on the table. Pulled off his coat and flung it across a chair. He went into the kitchen and poured a strong whisky and filled the glass with ice from the fridge. He went back to the sitting room and sat down on the sofa and opened the paper.

  He turned first to the stock-market prices and saw that Consolidated Cables had gone up a point. He turned next to the Racing Page. Scarlet Flower had come in fourth, which meant that he was fifty quid down the drain. He read a review of a new play, and then the sale-room news. He saw that a Millais had gone, at Christie’s, for nearly eight hundred thousand pounds.

  Eight hundred thousand.

  The very words made him feel almost physically sick with frustration and envy. He laid down the paper and took a mouthful of whisky, and thought about the Lawrence Stern, The Water Carriers, which was coming up for sale at Boothby’s next week. Like his sister Nancy, he had never had any opinion of his grandfather’s work, but unlike Nancy, he had not missed out on this extraordinary resurgence in the art world of interest in those old Victorian painters. Over the last few years he had watched the prices in the sale rooms slowly rising until now they had reached these mammoth sums that seemed to him out of all proportion.

  The top of the market, and he had nothing to sell. Lawrence Stern was his grandfather, and yet he had nothing. None of them did. At Oakley Street there had only been the three Sterns, and these his mother had taken with her to Gloucestershire, where they dwarfed the low-ceilinged rooms of Podmore’s Thatch.

  What were they worth? Five hundred, six hundred thousand? Perhaps, against all odds, he should make some effort at talking her into selling. If he did manage to persuade her, the profits would, of course, have to be divided. Nancy, for one, would insist on her share, but even so, there should be a good chunk for Noel. His imagination nosed cautiously ahead, filled with brilliant schemes. He would chuck his nine-to-five job with Wenborn & Weinburg, and set up on his own. Not advertising, but commodity broking, gambling on a superscale.

  All that was needed was a prestigious address in the West End, a telephone, a computer, and a lot of nerve. He had plenty of that. Milking the punters, buttering up the big investors, moving into the big time. He knew an almost sexual stirring of excitement. It could happen. All that was missing was the capital to set the exercise into motion.

  The Shell Seekers. Perhaps, next weekend, he would go down and visit his mother. He hadn’t seen her for months, but she had lately been unwell—Nancy, in doomlike tones, had given him this news over the telephone—so this would give him a good excuse for calling in at Podmore’s Thatch, and then he could ease the conversation gently around to the subject of the pictures. If she started making excuses, or bringing up such objections as Capital Gains Tax, he would mention his friend Edwin Mundy, who was an antique dealer and an expert in flogging stuff in Europe and stashing cash away in Swiss banks where it would be safe from the insatiable maw of the Inland Revenue. It was Edwin who had first alerted Noel to the enormous prices being paid in New York and London for the old allegorical works so fashionable at the turn of the century, and once even had suggested that Noel come into partnership with him. But Noel, after some thought, had demurred. Edwin, he knew, sailed dangerously close to the wind, and Noel had no intention of spending even so much as a week in Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

  It was all almost insuperably difficult. He sighed deeply, finished his whisky, looked at his watch. A quarter past five. Amabel was coming to pick him up at half past. He heaved himself out of the sofa, collected his suitcase from the cupboard in the hall and swiftly packed for the weekend. He was an expert at this—having had years of practice—and it took no more than five minutes. After that, he stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom to shave and shower. The water was boiling, which was one of the good things about living in this benighted rabbit hutch, and after his shower, warm and scented, he felt better. He dressed again in clean casual clothes—cotton shirt, cashmere sweater, tweed jacket; he put his washbag on top of his suitcase, zipped it up, and bundled his dirty linen into a corner of the kitchen for his daily lady to find and, hopefully, deal with.

  Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she didn’t even come. He recalled, with the deepest nostalgia, the old way of life, before his mother had decided, with thought for no person but herself, to sell Oakley Street. For there he had enjoyed the best of everything. The independence of a latchkey and his own suite of rooms at the top of the house, along with the endless advantages of living at home. Constant hot water, open fires, food in the larder, drink in the wine cellar, a great garden for the summer weather, the pub across the road, the river at his doorstep, his washing done, his bed made, his shirts ironed, and for all this he had not been expected to pay for so much as a roll of lavatory paper. As well, his mother was as independent as her son, and if she was not deaf to creaking stairs and the light tread of feminine feet going past her bedroom door, then she acted as thou
gh she were and never commented. He had imagined that this idyllic way of life was permanent, that, if any changes were to be made, he would be the one to make them, and when she first told him of her intention to sell out and move to the country, he felt as though his feet had been knocked from beneath him.

  “But what about me? What the hell am I going to do?”

  “Noel, my darling, you are twenty-three now, and you’ve lived in this house for the whole of your life. Perhaps it’s time you flew the nest. I’m sure you’ll be able to make other arrangements.”

  Other arrangements. Paying rent, buying food, buying Scotch, spending money on horrible things like Vim for the bath and laundry bills. Right up to the very last moment he had clung on at Oakley Street, hoping against hope that she would change her mind, and he hadn’t actually moved out until the furniture van arrived to load her possessions for transport to Gloucestershire. In the end most of his things went too, because there was no space in the ratty little flat he had found himself for the accumulated clobber of a lifetime, and these were now stacked in the small and cluttered room at Podmore’s Thatch which was known, euphemistically, as Noel’s.

  He went there as little as possible, resentful not only of his mother’s extraordinary behaviour, but also because it irked him to see her so contentedly settled in the country, and without him. He felt that she should at least have the decency to show a little nostalgia for the good old days when they had lived together, but she didn’t seem to miss him in the least.

  He found this hard to understand because he missed her very much.

  These poignant musings were brought to a halt by the arrival of Amabel, only fifteen minutes late. The buzzer sounded and when he went to open the door she stood outside bearing her luggage, two bulging tote bags, one of which sprouted a pair of muddy green Wellingtons.

  “Hi.”

  He said, “You’re late.”

  “I know. Sorry.” She came in and dumped the tote bags and he closed the door and gave her a kiss.

  “What held you up?”

  “I couldn’t get a taxi, and the traffic’s hell.”

  A taxi. His heart sank. “Didn’t you bring your car?”

  “It’s got a puncture. And I haven’t got a spare tyre, and anyway, I don’t know how to change the wheel.”

  This was to be expected. At anything practical, she was totally useless, and probably one of the most disorganized women he had ever met. She was twenty, and tiny as a child, small-boned and thin to the point of emaciation. Her skin was so pale as to be almost transparent, her eyes, grape-green, were large and thickly lashed, her hair long and fine and straight, worn loose and usually falling over her face. She wore, on this cold, wet evening, clothes remarkable for their meagre inadequacy. Skinny jeans and a T-shirt, and a skimpy denim jacket. Her shoes were flimsy, and her ankles bare. All in all, she looked like an anorexic from Bermondsey, but she was in fact the Honourable Amabel Remington-Luard, and her father was Lord Stockwood, with large estates in Leicestershire. Which was what had attracted Noel to Amabel in the first place, coupled with the fact that he, for some obscure reason, found her waiflike appearance enormously sexy.

  So now they would have to drive to Wiltshire in the Jag. Swallowing his annoyance, he said, “Well, we’d better get moving. We’ll have to stop at a garage to get some air in the tyres and fill up with petrol.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry.”

  “You know the way?”

  “Where? To the garage?”

  “No. To where we’re going in Wiltshire.”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “What’s the house called?”

  “Charbourne. I’ve been there heaps of times.”

  He stood looking down at her, and then at her so-called luggage. “Are these all the clothes you’ve got?”

  “I’ve brought my wellingtons.”

  “Amabel, it’s still winter, and we’re meant to be going to a point-to-point tomorrow. Have you got a coat?”

  “No, I left it in the country last weekend.” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “But I can borrow something. Camilla’s bound to have stacks of suitable garments.”

  “That’s not the point. We’ve got to get there first, and the heater in the Jag’s not always very reliable. The last thing I want is to have to nurse you through pneumonia.”

  “Sorry.”

  But she did not sound particularly sorry. Stifling his irritation, Noel turned and pulled open the sliding door of his cupboard, felt around in its overcrowded interior, and finally found what he was looking for, which was a gentleman’s overcoat of incredible age; thick dark tweed, with a faded velvet collar and a lining of tattered rabbit fur.

  “Here,” he said. “You can borrow this.”

  “Gosh.” She seemed inordinately delighted; not, he knew, by his concern, but by the faded grandeur of the ancient garment. She adored old clothes and spent much of her time and money scouting round the stalls of Petticoat Lane, buying droopy evening dresses from the 1930s, or beaded bags. Now she took the dignified old wreck of a coat from him and put it on. It engulfed her, but at least the hem did not drag on the floor.

  “Oh, what a scrumptious coat. Where on earth did you get it?”

  “It was my grandfather’s. I nicked it out of my mother’s cupboard when she sold her London house.”

  “I couldn’t keep it, could I?”

  “No, you couldn’t. But you can wear it this weekend. The point-to-pointers will wonder what’s hit them, but it’ll give them something to talk about.”

  She hugged the coat about her and laughed, not so much at his mild joke but with the sheer animal pleasure of wearing a fur-lined coat, and she looked so much like a wicked, greedy child that he found himself filled with a sudden physical desire for her. In normal circumstances he would, then and there, have taken her straight to bed, but right now there was not time. That would have to wait until later.

  The journey to Wiltshire was no worse than he had expected. The rain never ceased, and the traffic out of London was three lanes deep and snail-slow. But at last they were on the motorway and able to get up some speed, and the knocking sound in the engine obligingly did not make itself evident, and the heater, faintly, worked.

  For a little they talked, and then Amabel fell silent. He thought that she had probably gone to sleep, which was what she usually did on such occasions, but then he became aware of various shiftings and gropings going on in the seat beside him, and knew that she was not asleep.

  He said, “What’s up?”

  She said, “There’s something crackling.”

  “Crackling?” He was filled with alarm, imagining the Jag about to burst into flame. He even slowed down slightly.

  “Yes. Crackling. You know. Like a bit of paper.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside the coat.” She groped again. “There’s a hole in the pocket. I think it’s something inside the lining.”

  Much relieved, Noel accelerated back to eighty. “I thought we were in for a conflagration,” he told her.

  “Once I found an old half-crown down the lining of a coat of my mother’s. Perhaps this is a five-pound note.”

  “More likely an old letter, or a bit of chocolate wrapping. We’ll investigate when we get there.”

  An hour later they reached their destination. Amabel, somewhat to Noel’s surprise, managed not to lose the way, directing him off the motorway, through various small country towns, and finally down a narrow winding road that led through darkened farmlands to the village of Charbourne. Even in the rain and the darkness this seemed picturesque, with a main street flanked by deep cobbled pavements and thatched cottages fronted by small gardens. They passed a pub and a church, drove through an avenue of oak trees, and then came to an imposing pair of gates.

  “This is it.”

  He turned in through the gates, past a small lodge, and up a driveway leading through parkland. In the beam of his headlights he saw the house, square, white and Georg
ian, with the pleasing proportions and symmetry of that period. Lights shone from behind drawn curtains, and Noel circled the wide gravelled sweep and drew up at the front door.

  He killed the engine and they got out of the car and collected their luggage from the boot and went up the steps to the closed front door. Amabel found a wrought-iron bell-pull and gave it a tug but then said, “We don’t have to wait,” and opened the door herself.

  They stepped into a stone-flagged lobby, with another glassed door that led into the hall. The lights were on, and Noel saw that this was large and panelled, with an impressive stairway rising to the upper floor. As they hesitated, a door at the far end of the hall was opened and a woman appeared, bustling forward to let them in. She was stout and white-haired, wearing a flowered pinafore over her good turquoise-blue Courtelle dress. The gardener’s wife, Noel decided, come in to give a hand over the weekend.

  She opened the door. “Good evening. Come along in. Mr. Keeling and Miss Remington-Luard? That’s right. Mrs. Early’s just gone up for her bath and Camilla and the Colonel are down at the stables, but Mrs. Early said I was to watch out for you and show you up to your rooms. This all your luggage, is it? What a dreadful night. Did you have a bad drive? The rain’s something awful, isn’t it?” By now they were inside. There was an open fire in the marble fireplace, and the house felt splendidly warm. The gardener’s wife closed the door. “If you’d just like to follow me. Can you manage your luggage?”

  They could. Amabel, still bundled in the old coat, carried her tote bag with the Wellingtons, and Noel carried the other tote bag and his own suitcase. Thus burdened, they followed the stout lady as she led them up the stairs.

  “Camilla’s other guests arrived at tea-time, but they’re up in their rooms now, changing. And Mrs. Early asked me to tell you that dinner’s at eight, but if you’d like to be down by a quarter to, there’ll be drinks in the library, and you can meet everyone else then.…”