Tremor (30 page)

In September of '61 Letty had a son, whom they named Thor, and two years later a daughter, Christine.

Letty settled well into her new life as Mrs Lee Burford. Lee's friends, most of whom she knew at least by sight already, accepted her, and the arrival of two children made everything more assured. Hannah stayed on, accepting the changes with scarcely the lifting of an Irish eyebrow. Henry and Jessie Hayward were the only two to look askance and to ask Lee privately when his wife was not there what
exactly
Letty's antecedents were. But the old man said it was all Ann's own damn silly fault, and drove over to meet his new grandchildren.

Ann continued to write, but the letters became more infrequent. There did not seem any hint at all that she was not happy in her new life or regretted her decision. When her father died she was trekking in North Borneo and word could not be got to her in time. So she wrote but did not come. As the years passed it became a Christmas letter, part of it Roneoed so that all her family should be able to read it at the same time. There was always a separate one for Letty, but only topped and tailed with affectionate messages.

Lee continued to practise law until he was seventy, and then for another five years went to the office three days a week as a consultant. He played more golf in his days off, and enjoyed his wife and children and his evenings at home.

Letty's only worry was for her son, Leon, who remained a drop-out and preached flower power until well into his twenties. He came to stay with them for a day or so every six months and looked with unconcealed contempt on the luxury and wastefulness of their life. Then when he was twenty-four he turned up one day and told them he was going to England, where he was to work for an Anglo-American company prospecting for new oilfields in the North Sea. Lee concealed his surprise and Letty her gratification until the weekend was past. It was clear that over the past year or so his views, unnoticed by them, had been gradually shifting, and that making love not war was no longer foremost in his mind.

Making love on a more permanent basis may have had more influence on his decision, for six months later he married a girl called Rachel Wightman, a pretty Jewess from Philadelphia whose common sense and stability impressed itself on both the older people the first time they met her.

Thor – not so called after the god of thunder but because he had been born on a Thursday – was a healthy, engaging boy and a joy to both his parents; Christine was more tetchy but early on showed she had inherited her mother's good looks and elegance. On his seventieth birthday Lee, after an evening out to celebrate, found himself sitting in front of the fire opposite Letty planning the schooling of their children.

‘I'm looking forward to the next decade,' he said. ‘It will be expensive but real fun – and it's the sort of fun I've never had before. Much of the snobbery has gone these days, but I'd still like Thor to go to one of the good schools like St Paul's or Groton – because it helps when you get to Harvard.'

‘I wish you would let me do without Hannah. Now both children are at school there's little or nothing for her to do during the day that I cannot do. I think Hannah would not mind, as her own husband has not been well.'

‘You have your painting and your pottery. Hannah will tell us if she wants to leave.'

‘Still better,' Letty said, ignoring him. ‘Keep Hannah on and allow me to go out to work. I am a good cook – you know; I am trained as a nurse. There is work enough, I'm sure, even if only part-time.'

‘Certainly not,' Lee said. And then after a pause: ‘ You know I've settled money on you if I should suddenly drop off the branch.'

‘I neither know nor care!'

‘Well, I've been figuring all the angles. When I'm eighty Thor will be seventeen and Christine fifteen. Of course I might not achieve that age.' He went on before she could interrupt: ‘Or I might live
years
after that. Golf keeps me fit, and you and the children keep me young. If, or when, as I say, I cease to be, there should be money enough. If it should run short, with inflation and things,
that
would be the time for you to look for work. Not now, not in the immediate future while I am still around to take care of you.'

Letty was aware of the fact that if she had had some professional skill he might not have minded. It was natural for many wives to work. But her skills were domestic. So.

‘You do not mind staying home a bit longer?' he asked.

‘Of course I don't mind staying home.'

‘You do not think it a chore?'

‘No, I do not.' Letty was aware that he was watching her, and gave a slight smile.

‘It is not too much of a chore living with me?'

‘No, I find much comfort in it.'

Both children were asleep and nothing stirred in the house.

He said: ‘Letty, would you look on it as a chore if I asked you to come to bed with me right now?'

She was serious, thinking of it. Then she said: ‘No, Lee, I would not consider it anything of a chore at all.'

The Air France plane AF 1061 from Casablanca to Libreville on Monday the 7th of March, 1960, carried among its passengers one Henri Delaware. Had anyone taken the trouble to look at the photograph in his passport with a suspicious scrutiny they would have remarked that he looked younger in real life. But no one was that interested. In the chaos following the earthquake, people simply registered a name and address and took whatever means was available to leave the country. Most of the non-Moroccan survivors were flying to Paris or London or Hamburg or New York. Planes were crowded and places on them difficult to get. Almost all the civilized world had mustered its resources to help. No one was specially interested in a single young man who happened to want to fly off with a few businessmen and hardened travellers to Gabon.

In Casablanca Matthew had fitted himself out with underwear, shirts, shoes, a couple of new suits, a watch, a wallet and a pair of dark glasses. He stayed only two days in Libreville, during which he discovered there was a Thursday evening flight to Nairobi. From there he flew to Johannesburg, and a week later was in Cape Town. He stayed at the Mount Nelson Hotel, and proceeded to take stock. Until this point he had felt himself obliged to keep on the move lest his deception should be spotted. Now, it seemed, he was safe – or temporarily safe. At least safe to choose for himself.

Already he partly regretted his decision. He had had a varied career but had never ventured onto the wrong side of the law. (If one excepted one occasion when he had gone down the fire escape of a smart French hotel and left without paying his bill.) This, this impersonation of a man who was either dead or never existed, accompanied by his seizure of a small suitcase stuffed with stolen money, was out of his class. It put him among the serious felons, and he didn't like it.

But the money was there, in his hands. Three times he spread it out on his bed and counted it. It was staggering. He could live for ten years – maybe much longer – out of it. Dollars, pounds, francs, Deutschmarks. He doubted the good sense of what he had done – there must be pitfalls that he didn't yet know of – but even if he had not been suffering from a sort of shell-shock at the time, combined with his awful unbelieving grief over Nadine, even then, if he had been stone-cold sober and totally in his right mind, would he have chosen otherwise? Would the temptation not have been too great? He had always been short of money. He had always wanted the things money could buy. Could he have resisted the sight of it piled on the bed and the knowledge that the person from whom he had taken it was dead, and anyway had no right to it in the first place?

He looked at himself in the mirror and said aloud: ‘I can ring England tonight, say I'd lost my memory; my passport and belongings are buried in the ruins of the Hôtel Saada – can you come out?'

His mother would come, establish his identity, they would apply for a replacement passport, return to England together. And the money? It would go back to the merchant bank from which it had been stolen.

A grey area here? The police would be suspicious. He had travelled out all the way to Agadir on the same day as one of the robbers. How to prove that he had not been implicated in the robbery itself? The police would want to know what he knew of the identity of the other criminals. They would go on asking and asking questions. They would keep on calling on him, trying a new angle, a new approach.

But suppose he went back and still did not return the money? So far no one had bothered to open the case when he came through customs, but it was a risk each time. It would be in character for some fellow at Heathrow to question what he carried.

And if he got through? Put the money in a safe deposit, help himself when he needed a bit. There would still be questions, even if not from the police. How justify to his mother and stepfather, and indeed Rona, a gradual affluence? A perilous and worrying business. Say his second novel had brought him in much more than expected? It could hardly account for his buying an Aston Martin.

If he stayed here, who would question anything?

But he would be officially dead. Rona would be sad – she would not grieve, he was certain, in the way he was grieving about Nadine – but she would be sad. Then there was his mother. She was the main stumbling block. She had never shown him much affection after the children of her second marriage came along; but he knew she loved him in her critical but generous way. She would grieve. She would be the only one really upset by his death. But if he had been five years older she could well have lost him in the war.

And, when he eventually reappeared, would she not be all the more delighted to welcome him back?

At this stage it was never in his mind that he would not return to England at some later date, claiming loss of memory over a much more prolonged period, whatever it was, two years, five years, whatever he felt like making it. His mother would be all the more delighted to see him. Rona might have remarried – if so, good luck to her. But
after
he had wandered about the world for a while,
after
he had spent some of the money. In a few years, while he was living in Cape Town or Sydney or Rio, he would suddenly remember who he was, remember his real name, remember his past and make himself known.

In the second week in Cape Town he spent some time in the public library, reading up in encyclopaedias about the district he had come from in French-speaking Canada. He learned that Chicoutimi, on the River Saguenay, was a thriving little town exporting great quantities of timber and was the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop. Tadoussac, at the mouth of the river, was the oldest trading port in Canada. These and other facts he stored away in his memory in case of need. It was to be his excuse, if found wanting in information about it, that he had left in childhood.

As an experiment he did not at all mind changing his identity, inventing and experiencing a new life. He always found it stimulating and exciting. He had already changed his father and his name in childhood, and continued to use one name for his own life and the other for his writing. Not to mention when he had run off as a schoolboy of seventeen, using a third name which he had picked out of
The Times
. (Then he had been
brought
back, but hadn't minded that: he'd had his fun.)

After two weeks at the Mount Nelson he bought a smart new yellow Austin Healey. (He had found Johannesburg extremely convenient for the changing of currency – it seemed almost as good as Switzerland.) The following week he left the hotel and took an apartment in Constantia.

Already he was making friends: he was a cheerful, likeable, moneyed young Canadian. No one seemed to mind that he spoke English with an English accent and French with a French accent – it only showed how well he had been educated. He met a man who worked on the
Cape Times
, who introduced him to the editor, who took a liking to him and offered him a freelance job to observe the South African scene and write an occasional column about it. The
Cape Times
was bitterly and loudly anti-apartheid – it surprised Matthew to find such freedom of expression in what he had been told was a police state – and he wrote a few articles, signed Visitor, deriding the absurdities of the racist system, by which people in the Post Office were segregated into Whites and Ne-Whites, but went next door to the supermarket and stood in the same queue to pay. His tone in writing was generally light and humorous, but sarcasm was wanting in the system, and his sarcasms became more telling than the outright hostility of the editorials. He was shown some of the townships, and commented on them in language that became increasingly acrid. Then he met a Boer girl, beautiful and intelligent and eloquent, and the next article he wrote put something of the Boer history and point of view: that South Africa was their country, that they had built it into its present state of great prosperity, that it was the only such prosperous state in the continent of Africa, that the Boers had lived there for three centuries, much longer than most of the blacks and coloured people who had flocked in to participate in the prosperity; that to expect them to renounce their right to their creation was like asking the Americans to hand back Chicago to the Red Indians. This brought him popularity and unpopularity in several directions.

The following year he moved on, taking an Italian cruise liner to Sydney. South Africa was about to leave the Empire and become a republic, and he sensed the irreconcilable ambitions of the whites and the blacks and foresaw trouble wherever he looked. Apart from this, as a writer of a weekly column in the
Cape Times
, he was becoming noticed. Though he wrote under a
nom de plume
his friends knew, and from them others who might be less well disposed towards him – particularly the government and the police. He couldn't yet afford to be noticed. It was not time for anyone in authority to start asking questions. Also he had an affair with the Boer girl. She was one of the prettiest and most charming girls he had ever met, but his loss of Nadine was too fresh. He found he could not bring himself to commit himself in this way. Although he was officially divorced and free to marry, what legality or sincerity was there in marrying under a false name? It was not quite like writing a column for a newspaper.