‘Is there an autobiography?’
‘So he told me,’ Daubney said. ‘And I had no reason to doubt him.’
‘You don’t have it, then?’
‘I’m waiting for you to find it among his papers. Have you thought any more about your own autobiography?’
Daubney had been keen to take advantage of Watts’ notoriety post-Milldean to rush out an autobiography of some sort. Watts had decided he should wait another couple of decades.
‘I haven’t begun my career yet, Oliver,’ he joked. ‘I told you that.’
Daubney chuckled.
‘I’ll tell my son to get back to you after I’m gone.’ He paused. ‘How are you getting on with the papers?’
‘Badly. I haven’t even found a will — but it is early days.’
‘Not in his bureau? Your dad was an orderly man.’
‘Nothing there.’
‘You know there are always a couple of hidden drawers or compartments in those old bureaux?’
Watts laughed.
‘I didn’t — but that’s typical of my dad to hide things away. Him and his bloody secrets.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Bob Watts ran his hands over his father’s mahogany bureau, pushing randomly at extrusions. A concealed drawer sprang out from one side.
He took out a large brown envelope marked for his attention. In the envelope were smaller envelopes marked ‘Will’, ‘House Deeds’, ‘Insurance Policies’, ‘Passport’, ‘Birth Certificate’ and ‘Bank Details’. He skimmed the will. There were no surprises. Everything split three ways, with small bequests for grandchildren. He shuffled the other envelopes and saw a second one also addressed to him.
He took it over to the wingback chair in the bay window. Slit the envelope with his father’s ivory-handled letter-knife. There was a single sheet of paper inside. A letter, dated only a few weeks earlier, addressed ‘Dear Robert’. He thought for a moment. He was pretty sure the date was the last time he’d seen his father, in a pub beside Kew railway station. He laid the letter on the chair-arm and got a whisky from his father’s old-fashioned drinks cabinet.
Settled again, he picked up the letter.
Dear Robert,
I know I don’t make things easy for you. Never have. I don’t really know why. Perhaps because I had you so late in life I didn’t know how to be a father. Perhaps it’s just my temperament.
Anyway, I’ve always loved you, in my way. For what that’s worth. I was sorry to see you come a cropper and proud of the determination you have shown to get through it.
I’ve been keeping a few things from you. I got caught up in things when I was young and stupid, and mistakes made early on have a habit of clinging to you down the years. Not that I didn’t make mistakes late in life too.
I’ve tried to be open in some jottings I’ve been writing for a while now. Not quite a diary, perhaps. Notes for an autobiography, if you will. Flakes of my life, to be published after my death, if anyone is interested. The notes aren’t complete — just different things that came into my mind.
You’ll find them on the top shelf in the study, piled up with all the manuscripts of my novels. A couple of Yank universities have been asking for those manuscripts, by the way. There will be a big cheque.
I don’t believe in regrets but I do regret the way I treated Elizabeth, your mother. She was a fine woman. I like to think that next time round I’d treat her better. But I fear that I’d treat her just the same.
Good luck, son,
Your father.
Watts dropped the letter into his lap and sipped his drink, looking down at the rushing Thames. The wind whipped a tree branch against the long window. The rain started again, sluicing down the glass. He put music on. Arvo Part’s
TWENTY-EIGHT
George Watts, Bob’s brother, came from Australia for the funeral. George was an accountant. Quite successful. The two brothers didn’t have much in common — didn’t even look alike — but Watts took him down to their father’s local to talk about this and that, looking over the river Thames, then went back to the house and talked some more until both made their excuses and went to bed.
Watts put his brother in his father’s room at the front of the house. Whilst staying at Barnes Bridge, he hadn’t been able to sleep in his father’s double bed in the large front bedroom. The room in which, if the obits were to be believed, his father had bedded the world-famous ballet dancer.
Instead, he slept in the poky box-bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking his father’s pleasant courtyard garden. It had been used by the live-in Polish housekeeper, but Watts had given her a month’s paid leave whilst he decided what to do with the house. She had gone home to see her family in Kielce.
There were only three mourners at the graveside. George decided it was because his father had outlived everybody. Watts wasn’t so sure — and was stupidly disappointed that the enigmatic woman had not turned up and solved her mystery for him. Watts’s sister, Alicia, could have come over from Canada but had refused. She had sided with her mother after the divorce and had refused to have anything to do with her father. According to Molly, Alicia took a dim view of her brother’s ‘shenanigans’ too.
The funeral was a dank affair in the chapel in Mortlake cemetery, then the three men went over to stand around the tree planted in Kew Gardens in memory of Donald Watts. They stood in the driving rain, Daubney and George sheltering under Daubney’s incongruously gaudy golf umbrella. Watts’s black umbrella turned inside out so he abandoned it and stood, rain-bedraggled, contemplating the sapling shaking in the wind, feeling stupid.
After, they had a desultory lunch in a small restaurant beside Kew station. Daubney, a trencherman all his life, attempted to liven things up by telling stories of the celebrated fellow residents of The Albany, his home off Piccadilly for the past fifty years. George remained taciturn.
‘So who was the ballet dancer?’ Watts said after a solemn toast to Donald Watts aka Victor Tempest.
‘Bob, I hardly think that’s appropriate at such a time,’ George said, his Aussie accent grating on Watts. ‘We’re remembering our mother too.’
Daubney winked at Watts.
‘You know, of course, how he came to adopt the name Victor Tempest?’
Watts and his brother shook their heads.
‘It was suggested to him by a crime writer he met in the early thirties. Peter Cheyney. Heard of him? No? Well, Cheyney was a best-seller in England, though he never did very well in the United States, where he set most of his books. Perhaps because his fervid attempts at American slang came out as cockney. He was a supporter of Oswald Mosley’s National Party — its secretary, in fact, though I don’t think he was in its successor, the British Union of Fascists, for very long.’
Daubney paused to take a sip of his wine.
‘Don — your father — was a serving policeman at the time so had to join the Blackshirts under another name. He’d told Cheyney that he intended to be a writer and Cheyney thought Victor Tempest sounded good, both as
‘Whoah — back up there, Oliver,’ Watts said, putting down his own wine glass. ‘You’re saying Dad was a fascist?’
George shook his head wearily.
