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With an amiable nod to the statue that gave the square its name, Aubrey turned his back on her ma
considerable fortune which he had amassed along the way had been wisely reinvested and his instincts were underpi
Driven by pride rather than by ambition or greed, Aubrey was not the sort of man who contemplated failure easily, or who liked to be anything other than a few steps ahead.
Today, as usual, he rejected the convenient option of a ten-minute journey to work courtesy of the city’s underground railway and set off on foot. The peculiar atmosphere evoked by London’s tu
Too old at forty-five to take part in the trench war but with a distinguished military record behind him, he had spent those terrible years as a tu
with blood, and which rendered the precious air thick with the stench of death.
Four years of battling with earth and suffocation as well as with an unseen enemy played lasting tricks on the mind, and the fear and anxiety of those years had haunted Aubrey ever since. On one occasion, not long after the war had ended, his wife had endeavoured to free him of his crippling claustrophobia by persuading him to try the underground at Piccadilly Circus. Before he was halfway down the steps, he could smell burning hair once again, and the pounding of his heart sounded in his head like the muffled thud of a miner’s pick. Giving in to the panic which he had always managed to suppress when it mattered, he emerged choking and sobbing into a crowd of embarrassed shoppers. A cure had never been spoken of again, and his illness had only worsened with time: to mix with the crush of bodies in a confined space – even in a theatre bar or foyer – demanded from him the strictest self-control. A vast underground city had opened up beneath London’s pavements, expanding further as its open-air counterpart grew, but he was more than happy for it to remain out of bounds.
Pulling his hat further down against the rain which had begun to fall more steadily, and cursing the umbrella that was still in its rack in the hallway, Aubrey strode past the government offices in Great George Street and into Parliament Square, one of the wide open spaces that he blessed the city for preserving. Not even the shabby row of houses to the west of the square could mar the grandeur over which so many of the faces from the past presided. As he walked on, he looked up to see if a regular occupant of one of those dust-dimmed windows was sitting in her usual place. He was not disappointed: there she was, as still and indistinct as ever, but framed this morning in an oblong of yellow light which she had switched on to counteract the gloom of the day. In the last few weeks, this figure had become as much a part of his daily walk as the impassive statues in the square. Every morning, no matter how early the hour, she sat at that window with such reliability that he had begun to question whether she, too, were a statue, until one day he had seen her get up and move back into the room. He won-51
dered at the life she led in that faded building, too near the top to be the lady of the house and not high enough to be the maid –
although this was the sort of house in which a maid’s services were no longer required. There must be thousands of women like her in London now, widowed or single and long past the age at which marriage would be a realistic prospect, living in reduced circumstances in a bed-sitting-room, staring out at life rather than taking part.
He considered waving but decided, on reflection, that a greeting from a stranger, particularly a well-dressed and affluent stranger, might be regarded as impudent or condescending, so he moved on.
A quick glance at his watch confirmed that there was plenty of time to make a detour to Westminster Bridge for a view of which he never tired, no matter what the weather. For once he was in no hurry to reach the New Theatre, where a long and no doubt argu-mentative day awaited him. That afternoon, he was due to make the final arrangements for the provincial tour of one of his longest-ru
As for Josephine Tey, she was far too principled to be easy to deal with, although he admired and respected her writing and could see its long-term potential. In a reversal of his difficulties with Terry, the issue with Tey was getting her intothe public eye, and that wretched trial had not helped. Not for the first time, he cursed himself for allowing it to happen. Knowing Vintner, he should have seen it coming.
In fact, those newer to the taste of success than Aubrey seemed to 52
have been transformed by their sudden notoriety – and not always for the better, in his opinion. The entire cast seemed to think that one hit play was enough to keep them in work for the rest of their professional lives, and all the bickering and tension was begi