Fairness Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ferdinand Mount

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  The Ville

  Minnow Island

  Woodies and Padders

  On Edge

  At Sea

  Turkey Creek

  St Col’s

  Fairness

  Afters

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Fairness is about Helen, the tiny, blonde, serious girl whom the narrator meets when they are both looking after children during a summer vacation in Normandy. Her adventures in search of a morally satisfying life lead her into situations that are neither satisfying nor moral, from the mining boom in Central Africa to the child abuse scandals of the late 1980s. Fairness is the latest novel in Ferdinand Mount’s Chronicle of Modern Twilight which includes The Man Who Rode Ampersand and Of Love and Asthma.

  About the Author

  Ferdinand Mount has been editor of the Times Literary Supplement since 1991. His earlier novel Of Love and Asthma was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. Umbrella, the first of his Tales of History and Imagination, was described by the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson as ‘quite simply the best historical novel in years’. He is also well known as a political columnist and essayist and has written several works of non-fiction, including The Subversive Family and The British Constitution Now.

  BY FERDINAND MOUNT

  Tales of History and Imagination

  Umbrella

  Jem (and Sam)

  A Chronicle of Modern Twilight

  The Man Who Rode Ampersand

  The Selkirk Strip

  Of Love and Asthma

  The Liquidator

  Fairness

  Very Like a Whale

  The Clique

  Non-Fiction

  The Theatre of Politics

  The Subversive Family

  The British Constitution Now

  Communism (ed.)

  Fairness

  A Chronicle of Modern Twilight

  Ferdinand Mount

  The lines from ‘for Anne Gregory’ are quoted by kind permission of A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.

  ‘. . . only God, my dear,

  Could love you for yourself alone

  And not your yellow hair.’

  W. B. Yeats, For Anne Gregory

  ‘Take a beryl stone and hold it in a clear sun, and so that stone will take heat of the sun and then with tinder you may get fire.’

  John Wycliff

  The Ville

  IN THE MORNING when it was low tide the old women in black came in their black boots to dig up shellfish – winkles, cockles, I don’t know what. They swung big buckets under their arms as their caber-thick legs stumped over the crumbly tarmac road through the withered sea-grass. When they came to the skimpy shelter of the bushes, they sat down to have breakfast. The ham was so thick in their baguettes I could identify it from two hundred yards and could see the steam coming off the coffee when they unscrewed the thermos. After breakfast they squatted in the bushes and hoisted their black skirts in unison, great white rumps bared to the branches of the bushes – tamarisks were they, such frail protection from the wind blowing up the Channel. Sometimes I fancied I could smell their shit, although it was impossible to open the little round window with its violet and yellow strips round a hexagon of clear glass. I fancied, too, that on a clear day I could see across to the other side and pick out the high ground where the clinic was perched in the fir trees. It was a couple of years since my father had taken me away, but I imagined the timetable would not have changed much. Just about now my fellow asthmatics would be yawning and scratching their way through their breathing exercises. There was an exquisite sense of liberation from all that as I myself yawned and scratched, although what I had stumbled into might seem like anything but a liberation.

  ‘You’ll take Brainerd and Timmy to the beach from nine-thirty to eleven-thirty, and they must spend at least an hour with Monsieur. Remember to tell Monsieur about Brainerd’s special exercises. It’s so wonderful you can speak French.’

  It was a strange house with a little turret on the corner nearest the sea and a pointed red-tiled roof and the occasional fake timber cutting across its cream roughcast walls. The house stood alone on a scruffy road which petered out beyond it and led nowhere, not even to the beach. Were there once other houses on the road, since demolished or bombed to nothing in 1944? Perhaps there had been a whole row planned and this was the model house which had found no buyers and the developer had lost heart.

  The Stilwells had rented it for the summer, at a sickening rent they said, but then you know the Ville, in August it’s like Park Avenue. They always called the resort the Ville. No one else then, the early 1960s, seemed to use the term. Perhaps it went back to before the war, Mrs Stilwell had come as a little girl with her mother, the legendary Buzz Nielsen (Buzz was usually a boy’s nickname but she was as feminine as crêpe de Chine). There was money on both sides, Mrs Stilwell told me, such old money, by our standards of course, by yours we’re all nouveau.

  I liked the way she went on. She didn’t expect to be interrupted but she wasn’t relentless either, and she would answer anything I asked her. And the way she put her long bony face round the door and said, Are you receiving guests, that was nice too. With her brindled copper hair swept back and tied with a black bow she looked like an early President on an American stamp. Her fluttery gestures and her bubbling talk came out awkwardly but made me take to her more. She smelled of fresh flowers, and she wore flowery skirts that swirled when nobody else’s did. How could she get up so fresh each morning? I could barely raise the energy to kneel on my bed and look through the stained-glass window at the cockle-gatherers lifting their skirts. Dr Maintenon-Smith, the self-styled Napoleon of Asthma, had pronounced me cured, yet there were days still when I felt my breath come quick and shallow, and I retreated into my old solitude, that light-headed state in which the rest of the world seemed not hostile but hazy, insignificant, like the fret which blew up along the beach without warning, first blurring all outlines and landmarks into a pearly grey, then blotting them out altogether as the damp shuffled down into the lungs and the foghorn began to boom from the lighthouse out beyond the rocks.

  Jane Stilwell had taken me on as a tutor, thinking my delicate state would make me sympathetic to Brainerd’s needs. These were more complex and more obscure than mere asthma. He was an invalid child of the Victorian sort, subject to spasms and fainting fits which they couldn’t put a modern medical name to. Someone with my background would be sensitive and understanding when he had one of his attacks.

  She was wrong. Being an old hand, I simply thought, Here he goes again. His Bambi teeth seemed to stick out further over his blubbery lower lip and his eyes filled with tears as his whole wimpish body shook.

  ‘Do you want a pill?’ He glared at me, to let me know that his condition was too appalling to be put right by anything so trifling. When the shaking had ceased, I asked if he would like to go to the beach.

  ‘Do you think he should? Maybe he should rest?’

  ‘He needs some air in those lungs,’ I said with unusual authority.

  ‘And Monsieur would do him good.’

  ‘He would.’

  ‘I don’t like Monsieur.’ Brainerd had emergency recourse to speech. At the best of times, which this wasn’t, he had a drawn-out wailing voice that suggested that his patience had been tried too far.

  ‘I don’t like him much either,’ I said. ‘But his exercises are OK.’

  ‘His exercises are crap.’

  ‘Brainerd.’ His mother’s tolerance suffered an abrupt caesura when
confronted with bad language. Anyone who was well enough to swear lost all invalid privileges.

  ‘So they are crap.’

  ‘Brainerd Stilwell, you will put on your sweatshirt and sneakers and go straight to the beach this minute.’

  We set off with Timmy, doe-eyed, taciturn, dawdling behind us, not because he didn’t want to go – he was a docile boy – but to wait for tempers to ease. He kept a little apart to give Brainerd a yard or two’s start in case of trouble.

  We went through the rickety glass door that led to the little garden with its beige gnomes glued to the cement balustrade and out through the gate to the beach. On fine days Brainerd would set out his collection along the balustrade, finds from the beach mostly: Coke tins, Seven-up, bottles of Pschitt lemonade and Orangina, queer-shaped bottles of local cider. These items, carefully spaced along the cement parapet, looked as if they were on show in a gallery. Brainerd fussed over them but refused to discuss the project, fearing mockery. When the fog came down, he would scamper outside and scoop them up in a couple of carrier bags he kept for the purpose. The scooping was unceremonious, just like anyone chucking empties into a carrier.

  We idled along the smooth stumbly shingle, kicking stones, slipping on the seaweed bubbles. The first ragged wisps of mist began to float towards us. ‘There’s a fog, it’s bad for me, we must go back,’ Brainerd wailed. The thin wisps thickened into trailing scarves and then into a damp suffocating blanket. The noise of traffic from the far-away promenade faded and then was obliterated. Even the gravelling thump of the sea was lost to us. All we could hear was the sound of our breathing and the rasp and slither of the shingle beneath our sneakers. We met an elderly couple going for a walk, and they loomed up at us with a menace which drove Timmy to cling to my trouser leg.

  We trudged on, beginning to lose all sense of distance. ‘We’ve gone too far,’ Brainerd wailed, ‘we’ve missed it’, and I was inclined to agree with him. But we hadn’t.

  The bars came at us out of the mist, nearly twice my height and only a couple of yards away so that I could see how black and wet they were from the mist. Beyond the bars, I could already see the children huddled under the orange awning rigged up in the far corner as a shelter. The lower bars had netting on the outside to stop the smaller children escaping but the upper levels were open, and the nimbler ones would roost up there for most of the period, now and then spinning round the uprights or curling their toes round the horizontals and hanging like bats. But these perches were now untenanted. Monsieur had his entire troupe corralled under the awning. I could see his brown bald head juddering as he barked instructions. He was always clad in white from head to toe, T-shirt, tracksuit, sneakers and on very wet days, not today, a flat white cap. He jogged over to unlock the gate, which was at the children’s height, so he did not bother to make the necessary crouch to come through it and barked at us from the other side of the bars:

  ‘Vous êtes en retard.’

  ‘Nous pensions, à cause du temps, vous savez . . .’

  ‘Ça s’élèvera.’

  His leatherbrown face had all expression tanned out of it, though his cracked voice was full of ill-humour. He shooed Brainerd and Timmy through the gate into the stockade – ‘Allez, allez’. But Brainerd stopped, never missing an opportunity to display willpower, and with some dignity entrusted a fresh acquisition to me, an Orangina bottle, a squatter version of the standard model, perhaps an earlier design (Brainerd himself was indifferent to rarity, accumulating two or three examples of a common item without being fussed). I watched the two boys stumbling across the sand towards the awning past the vaulting horse and the hanging rings and Monsieur’s other instruments of torture. Then my eye wandered back along the beach the way we had come, to see if there was any prospect of the weather lifting as Monsieur had promised.

  To my surprise, at that moment the thick mist was suffused with a very faint gleam, and slowly the air began to move past me, leaving cool dew on my cheeks. The strands unravelled and went gliding on down the beach, as though gathered by some spectral force. The white outline of the breakers returned and with it the sound of the surf on the shingle. That peculiar world without sensation dissolved and all my senses seemed to tingle, as when feeling comes back to a frozen limb.

  The mist was light and summery now, trembling with the refracted rays of the sun behind it, so that the two figures coming the way we had come seemed not so much obscured as shimmering. At first I thought they were two children. There was so little difference in their height and the taller of the two was stalky and slender like a child. But something about her walk – I could see it was a girl now – seemed grown-up and assured. The smaller one was a dark boy, as dark as she was fair, with a tousle of black curls and a quick jigging way of getting along, which made her pace seem deliberate by comparison. She was pale, extremely pale, and had a severe look, not so much reproving perhaps as severe on herself.

  ‘Bonjour, M’sieu’. Je regrette que nous sommes en retard.’ She spoke with one of those confident English accents, quietly but with no fluster and not much apology about it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘we only just got here ourselves.’

  ‘Ah I’m sorry, I thought you were – that must be him over there.’

  ‘It is,’ I said.

  She allowed me a pale smile, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just recognising the facts of the situation. She went to the little gate and finding it locked called Monsieur. He trotted over and let her in. She scarcely had to duck, she was so small, but then had to come back to pull the dark boy through. He grizzled in what sounded like French with some sort of accent but eventually allowed himself to be handed over to Monsieur.

  She shut the little gate behind her and came and stood beside me, leaning against the bars, and rolled a cigarette.

  ‘I’m Helen. I’m working for the Farhadis.’

  ‘Faradays?’

  ‘Farhadi. They’re Iranian. Close friends of the Shah and all that.’

  ‘Ah.’

  I told her my name and my employer’s details.

  ‘Are they rich?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘So are the Farhadis: super-rich. They’ve got a bodyguard and two Mercs.’

  ‘Can’t match that. I don’t think anyone wants to assassinate the Stilwells.’

  ‘Not even you?’

  ‘Not yet. I quite like her.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. Where – where do you come from?’

  ‘The lower-middle class. Or, middle-lower-middle to be more precise. My dad’s a radio engineer, but he works for the BBC, so that puts him up a notch.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I expect you did. You can always hear an English person listening out for your vowels.’

  She spoke in a gentle flat way, and what she said did not sound as sharp as it might have. Now that she had brought the subject up, I started to listen to her voice, but as far as I could tell she might have come from anywhere. She was plainness itself, an unearthly kind of plainness, though. There was nothing remarkable about the way she looked either – five foot one or two I suppose, jeans and an old T-shirt – nothing remarkable except her hair which was golden, a milky gold, so that at first I thought its colour was muted by the mist, but even now that the sun was coming out it was still the same colour. Cut short, nearly straight except for a careless curling at the ends – perhaps that was the mist frizzling it. She might have meant it to be a no-nonsense cut, but that milky gold defied any such intention and the wayward hint of the curling made it difficult to keep my mind on anything else. Standing beside her, smoking one of her roll-ups, I felt not shy, as you do when close to a person who is generally supposed to be beautiful or alarming, but pleasantly inconspicuous, as you might feel if you were doing some household chore in the background of the Annunciation while the angel was passing on the news in the matter-of-fact way that a genuine angel would have of doing things, but still your eyes
can’t drag themselves away from the golden flicker of the angel’s wingtips.

  ‘The Thames, just below Sunbury, is the answer you wanted. Tell me, is this concentration camp really all right?’ She jerked a finger at Monsieur who had shooed the children out from under the awning and was now putting them through the usual warm-up exercises.

  ‘No casualties so far. I usually get through a chapter while they’re in custody.’ I tapped the book under my arm (Moby-Dick – I was finding it uphill work).

  ‘Oh, literature.’

  ‘You’re against it?’

  ‘I’m a chemist,’ she said.

  ‘You could be a literary chemist, like, wasn’t Goethe a sort of chemist?’

  ‘I’m not interested in the history of science. That’s why I did science, to get away from history.’

  ‘You going to be a scientist?’

  ‘No, I’m not good enough. But you wouldn’t have asked that question if I’d been doing history, you wouldn’t have asked me was I going to be a historian.’

  ‘No, I suppose not, but why does that matter?’

  ‘Because it shows you think of science as the sort of subject which only trolls and grey people do.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t.’ This conversation began to annoy me, partly because she was at least half-right, but also because it was not a topic that appealed to me, not here as the sun slipped out of the cloud and the blue came back into the sea. But she went on.

  ‘My real interest is biochemistry, but it’s all, what’s the word people like you use, all “stinks” to you isn’t it?’

  I indignantly denied it, which made her smile. Though her lips curled at one side to show that this was a superior smile, the expression seemed put-on as though it was the way you were meant to smile when you had said something sarcastic but what you had said was only the sort of thing you might be expected to say and had no real force or feeling behind it. No, on second thoughts, put-on was not the right way to describe her, she did not seem affected. It was more that she had some still, reflective quality which was indifferent to her words, like a tree unstirred by the rustling of its own leaves.