Death Comes First (3 page)

Their first winter in the leaky aft cabin was a cold and wet one. Joyce had never known what it was to be cold, and it amazed her that Charlie didn’t seem to feel it or be affected by it. She shivered and coughed and spluttered her way through until spring, but it didn’t faze her. Only one thing mattered: she was with the man she loved, living his dream.

Charlie was unlike anyone she’d ever met. With hindsight she wondered whether that was why she’d been drawn to him. He couldn’t have been more different to her father. In those days, anyway. To his daughter, Henry Tanner seemed an utterly conventional man, to the point of being boring. Whereas Charlie was wild and free, bursting with dreams, like a throwback to the sixties, when young people had been obliged to rebel, in their dress and appearance if nothing else. Joyce’s father had been a teenager during that era. She’d seen photographs of him, resolutely suited and booted in his classic style. He’d allowed his hair to grow a fashionable inch or so longer, but that was the extent of his rebellion. Even as a teenager, he’d refused to bend his ideas or principles to fit the times.

Charlie, on the other hand, declared that rules were made to be broken. He had an unruly nature to match his unruly hair. He loved and lived exactly as he pleased, and he carried Joyce along with him on a jet stream of youthful enthusiasm.

Joyce had known from the start that Charlie was unlikely to meet with the approval of her parents. Particularly Henry. Nevertheless a meeting was arranged. And the head-over-heels-in-love Joyce took her beau home to meet Henry and Felicity. Henry’s offer to send his car and chauffeur was, of course, spurned by the free-spirited pair. And since Charlie said he couldn’t afford train fares and wasn’t going to take charity
from anyone, they ended up trundling their way to Bristol aboard Charlie’s Lambretta.

While it was obvious to Joyce that Henry Tanner did not share her enthusiasm for Charlie, he behaved with courtesy and was a warm and generous host. But during the course of the evening, when Charlie needed to use the bathroom and Joyce showed him where it was, she returned in time to hear her parents, unaware that she was in earshot, discussing her romance.

‘Don’t worry about it, dear,’ her mother reassured her father. ‘She’s so young. He’s her first serious boyfriend – they’re sure to grow out of each other.’

Joyce knew better. And her mother’s remarks incensed her. She burst into the sitting room, bristling with indignation.

‘Little do you bloody know,’ she began, pointing a forefinger at Felicity.

‘Don’t swear at your mother,’ said Henry.

‘I’m not,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m swearing at both of you. How can you be so bloody stupid? Don’t you know the difference between casual sex and proper love? You should do – you’ve been married long enough.’

Henry looked poleaxed. Felicity blushed. Sex was never mentioned in the Tanner household. Joyce sometimes thought her parents hoped that she and her brother believed there had been a double immaculate conception.

‘There’s no need for that sort of talk, dear,’ said her mother.

‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Joyce, as a bewildered Charlie re-entered the room. ‘Look, you two met each other when you were younger than either of us, and you’re still together. Anyway, you may as well get used to it. Charlie and
I are going to be together for the rest of our lives, aren’t we, sweetheart?’

It was Charlie’s turn to blush.

Joyce nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Aren’t we, sweetheart?’ she repeated, a tad edgily.

‘W-well, yes, of course,’ stumbled Charlie. ‘Of course we are, darling. I just don’t want to upset your parents, that’s all.’

‘Do you know what,’ said Joyce, finding a courage she didn’t know she had. ‘I don’t give a damn whether they’re upset or not.’

And with that, leaving her parents dumb with shock, she led a spluttering Charlie from the room, out of the house and aboard the Lambretta.

Naturally, she telephoned to apologize. Throughout her life she seemed to have been torn between wanting her freedom and being afraid to grasp it. But she wasn’t about to give up Charlie for anyone.

Joyce’s mother later told her that she and her father had remained convinced the relationship would not last. One thing came out of the otherwise disastrous meeting, however. Having seen the Lambretta his beloved only daughter was travelling about on, Henry Tanner presented her with a new Mini Cooper. Just as he ultimately would his eldest grandson.

Charlie muttered something virtually incomprehensible about the moral dilemma of accepting lavish gifts from wealthy parents, particularly if you were a paid-up member of the Communist Party. But, for once, Joyce ignored him. And his conscience did not prevent him from spurning his rusting scooter in favour of riding with Joyce in her shiny new Mini at every opportunity. Particularly when it was raining.

If she hadn’t been head over heels in love she might have
noticed the ease with which Charlie abandoned his principles, she thought, as she sat at her kitchen table so many years later, with that letter before her, desperately seeking to make sense of the senseless. But she’d been blind to such things back then.

Immersed in her new life, she’d continued to spend the occasional weekend at Tarrant Park, but her visits were nowhere near as frequent as Henry and Felicity would have liked. They raised no objection though, perhaps because they were still getting over the shock of Joyce’s ‘sex’ outburst. The Cooper made the journey to and fro both easy and fun, and more often than not Charlie accompanied her. While unfailingly polite in Charlie’s presence, Henry would invariably find some pressing reason to spend much of the weekend in his city-centre office or tucked away in his study at home, emerging only for meals. And Felicity would try, usually without success, to lure her away to the golf course or on a shopping trip, in order to spend time with her apart from Charlie. But her parents soon learned that if you wanted Joyce you had to take Charlie. They were, after all, JC.

If Joyce had thought about it at the time, which again she didn’t, she would have realized that her father was trying to drive a wedge between her and Charlie. He knew better than to confront his daughter directly, so instead he attempted to bribe her with solo treats such as a session with a top tennis coach in Spain, or getaways with one or other of her parents to London, Paris or New York. She turned down all his offers: no Charlie meant no Joyce.

Then, at the beginning of Joyce’s third year at Exeter and just as her parents were reconciling themselves to the idea of JC, tragedy struck. Her brother William was killed by a
hit-and-run driver as he crossed Bristol’s busy Victoria Road right outside the Tanner-Max office.

The whole family was devastated. After the funeral Henry went into deep mourning and shut himself away for a month. The running of the business was left to his father, Edward, who came out of retirement to hold things together. Although well into his eighties, he was not the sort of man to sit in a fireside armchair while the business he’d created descended into terminal collapse through neglect.

After that month Henry re-emerged and once more took over the reins, conducting himself as if it were business as usual at Tanner-Max. But if anyone presumed to express their sympathy over William’s sudden death, or if William’s name cropped up in conversation, Henry Tanner simply purported not to hear.

Joyce was perplexed by his reaction. Felicity at least made no attempt to hide how devastated she was at the death of their only son. Every time Joyce saw her she seemed to be either in tears or red-eyed as if she’d been crying. But both parents seemed indifferent to getting justice for William. Their response to Joyce’s demands to know what the police were doing about finding her brother’s killer left her dumbfounded and dismayed.

‘I’m sure the police will let us know if they find out anything,’ they told her. ‘Anyway, what does it matter? It won’t bring him back.’

It mattered a lot to Joyce. She wanted to see her brother’s killer brought to justice. It became, for a time, her foremost motivation in life. She badgered the police on a daily basis, and at one point even attempted to conduct her own investigation.

In the end her father took her to one side.

‘You know, sweetheart, the longer this goes on the more upset your mother is going to get,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid she may be heading for a breakdown. Her only hope is to move on. William is dead and nothing can change that. If you persist in what you are doing you are only going to bring her more grief. Every time you talk about it you open the wound, just when it’s starting to heal. Let it go, sweetheart, let it go, for your mother’s sake.’

With considerable regret, Joyce did as her father asked and let it go, though for her the wound could never heal while William’s killer walked free.

Six months after William’s death, Henry suddenly expressed a desire to spend time with Charlie alone. He invited the younger man to join him for lunch at the country house hotel just outside Bristol which he habitually used for business entertaining.

Predictably, Charlie was not keen.

‘You must go,’ urged Joyce. ‘This is Daddy’s olive branch. It could mean he will accept you at last. You are the two men I love most in the world. Hey, the
only
two men I love in the world. It would be so great if you could be friends.’

Charlie had been unimpressed. ‘I reckon your dad’s more likely to make friends with a boa constrictor,’ he said.

‘Don’t think he couldn’t if he set his mind to it,’ countered Joyce.

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ enquired Charlie.

He agreed to the lunch, for Joyce’s sake, but made it clear that he had absolutely no desire to spend time alone with Henry Tanner. Neither had he any wish to lunch at a staid and achingly conventional hotel, the kind of establishment he
had always despised. And his reluctance turned to alarm when Joyce informed him that there was a dress code.

‘Formal jacket and tie, I fear,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s the final straw,’ said Charlie.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you have a proper jacket?’ enquired Joyce, who had never seen him wear any such thing.

‘Course I do,’ muttered Charlie. ‘Somewhere. If it still fits me. I don’t have a tie though.’

‘Well, I think we could run to buying one of those, don’t you?’

‘I just don’t understand what your father could want,’ Charlie sighed.

‘He doesn’t want anything,’ said Joyce. ‘He’s trying to get to know you, that’s all. He’s finally come round to the fact that I’m determined to have you, for ever, and so there’s nothing left for him to do but accept you. I think it’s fab – now stop whingeing and let’s go buy you a tie.’

And so the appointed day came and Charlie set off to Mendip House in his one and only formal jacket, which turned out to be the top half of a suit that had been bought for him on his eighteenth birthday by his mum, Joan, who had apparently been determined he should go into adulthood with at least one presentable suit in his wardrobe. The plain but good quality navy-blue jacket had only been worn on a couple of occasions; although a little tight across the shoulders, it looked quite smart once a light dusting of mildew on the collar and sleeves had been dealt with.

Joyce knotted for him, over an old but honourable and very nearly white shirt, the subtly patterned silk tie in varying shades of blue, which he had reluctantly allowed her to purchase at Exeter’s Debenhams. Then she eyed him up and down approvingly. His hair, murky yellow or dark blond,
depending on the light and how recently he had washed it, remained as unruly as ever and was even longer than when she’d first met him. It curled untidily over his shoulders, a bit like an avalanche of dirty snow. Joyce liked it. But she knew her father didn’t. She reached out to touch Charlie’s hair with one hand, wondering whether he might be persuaded to allow the lightest of trims around the ends.

Charlie read her mind.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said.

It had been arranged that Henry’s driver would pick Charlie up at Topsham, take him to the Mendip Hotel, more than an hour away, then drive him home afterwards. That way he could have a drink if he wanted, said Henry.

Charlie had muttered dissent, telling Joyce it was against his principles as a communist to ride in a chauffeur-driven car. But he said nothing of this to Henry, meekly accepting the arrangement.

Joyce spent an anxious afternoon awaiting his return. It was a sunny autumn day and there were any number of jobs on the boat she could have been getting on with, but she was too restless to settle to any task. Instead she threw a blanket on to the well-worn deck, lay back and tried to concentrate on the modern espionage thriller she was reading whilst enjoying the sun. But she was on edge. She so wanted this lunch between her two men to be a success. Maybe she was getting things out of proportion, but she couldn’t help feeling her whole life depended on a successful outcome.

It was well gone six before Charlie appeared, weaving unsteadily along the tow path. She waved a greeting. Charlie managed a half wave in response, gave her a weak smile, then lurched to his left and was sick in the water.

‘Good lunch then,’ Joyce remarked, more to herself than to him.

‘Oh God, I feel terrible,’ mumbled Charlie as he staggered towards her.

‘I should have warned you about the flow of booze at Dad’s lunches,’ said Joyce.

Charlie groaned.

‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me what happened? I want to know all about it. Are you friends for life or what?’

Charlie responded with another groan, his body swaying precariously as he stepped on to the gangplank. Convinced he was going to fall, Joyce hurried towards him, grabbed a flailing arm and pulled him on to the boat.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you to bed – I can tell I’m not going to get any sense out of you until you’ve slept it off.’

She’d never seen Charlie so drunk, but Joyce remembered that, far from being unhappy at the state he was in, she’d taken it as a good sign. If things had gone badly with her father he would have returned much earlier and stone-cold sober. And what she wanted more than anything was for the two of them to become friends. Lunching and drinking buddies had to be a good start.