CHAPTER ONE
Breaking into television was proving unexpectedly stressful for Harry. Which seemed particularly unfair given that he was on the cusp of forty and had been working in TV for two and a half decades. He’d assumed he’d be in his stride by now, but then he’d made the mistake of swerving out of his lane and suddenly it was this invisible maze of attitude and prejudices, all of which seemed to be personified in Margot Lorne, the semi-beloved presenter of How Even Me?
Margot Lorne was not even slightly beloved of, or by, Harry. Their few days of association had kindled an intense, unspoken dislike between the two of them. By mutual and instant agreement they expressed this by being over-jolly and backslappish, all not-quite-touching hugs and kissing the air past their cheeks, each ringing with distaste for their opposite number.
Margot Lorne had gone to a mid-ranking drama school and landed some roles in The Bill and Casualty. She’d now found her comfortable rut being the pleasant, chatty face of programmes where celebrities got to bare their hearts—usually when they had a book out or a new show on or some other reason to remind the general public of their existence.
Felix ‘Harry’ Bodie, on the other hand, had gone to a different mid-ranking drama school and scored a couple of roles on Eastenders and the early run of Doctors. He’d found his feet presenting children’s programming as one of the revolving cast of hosts on the CBeebies circuit, providing filler segments between the gaily-coloured puppets and cartoon characters.
They had never even met, before Harry’s stint on Margot’s program. Possibly the problem was that, right then, Harry had a huge chip on his shoulder about anyone whose broadcasting career didn’t involve having to work with bloody kids. He had already alienated a fair number of his regular co-hosts for exactly the same reason, because they all seemed to be able to caper and gurn and get through the interminable clapping songs without wanting to drop an F-bomb in front of half a million four-to-seven year olds. Not so he.
And there was the elephant in the room, of course. His other, ersatz claim to fame, that he simultaneously insisted wasn’t important while being secretly resentful that it hadn’t somehow propelled him magically to greater heights of success. The books. Bloody Underhill.
And so, because he was in the midst of one of his sporadic attempts to break into serious drama, he’d agreed to go on How Even Me? and expose his genealogy to the glaring public spotlight that was Margot Lorne’s warm smile and gentle Scots accent. His agent reckoned it would be good PR at just the time when Harry’s resumé turned up on people’s desks. And Margot’s production company had taken him on because his genealogy included one children’s author who was at least vaguely remembered seventy years after her works first came out.
From Margot’s perspective, they were doing Harry a solid. From Harry’s perspective he was slumming it for the sake of a future career where he didn’t have to gurn or caper even a little, save in service of the serious actor
’s art. By halfway through the first day of filming, taking a chainsaw to the lesser branches of Harry’s family tree, they loathed each other with a polite and icy passion.
It turned out that Harry’s maternal great-grandfather—hitherto known to the family as a respected captain of industry and Conservative MP hopeful—had been neck-deep in a stock market scandal and had actually done time At Her Majesty’s Pleasure. This was unaccountably something that had never come up at the family dinner table, and Margot’s expression of woeful sympathy had glimmered with gloating triumph. Harry spent that evening on the phone to the production company, insisting that they cut or downplay it. Hide it amongst the… except they had turned up very little else of interest in that part of the family, so the whole white collar crime angle was looking mighty attractive as a crowd-pleaser.
“It’ll be fine,” he told a succession of executives, in tones between a grovel and a growl. “We’re doing the book stuff tomorrow. Magda—Mary—Bodie, my sainted gran. Bury it behind that. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be better than you imagine. You just wait.”
Because Gran’d had a secret.
Alright, not a secret, because she’d told it to her sole daughter, Harry’s mum. She’d told it to Harry. She’d told it to quite a lot of people at the care home and a number of medical professionals, too, but that last, drawn-out part of her life wasn’t the way Harry wanted to remember her. A non-secret, then. A non-secret about her own mother, the great-grandmother neither Harry nor anyone else in the family had ever met. The mysterious woman whose stories, back in Magda’s own childhood, had been the inspiration for the Underhill books in the first place.
“Your great-grandma,” she used to say, “was someone very special. She came to this country from somewhere where she was very important.” And she’d touch her brow in a special way, and child Harry could almost see the glint of gold and gems there.
And Magda had something
of a Slavic feel to it, obviously. And ‘Bodie’ wasn’t necessarily their original surname. And, well, Harry wasn’t actually saying that he was the rightful Tsar of all the Russias, but he had wondered… Not enough to actually put the legwork into investigating, admittedly, but why would he need to, when he had the whole research team of How Even Me? to do it for him? Even if that team was mostly a harassed-looking office junior called Mei. Which unfortunate piece of nomenclature led to endless ‘How even Mei?’ jokes from the rest of the crew. Mei was the only person on set who disliked every other human being involved even more than Harry.
Ever the consummate professional, Margot’s greeting on the second day was an actor’s masterclass in ‘How to sparkle for the camera while showing your colleague just how much you dislike him.’ At least today they were dealing with the good stuff. In their hearty air-kissing was the understanding that they would both mine today for whatever they could get out of it and then never have to see one another again.
They were in the Oxford Story Museum for the shooting. How Even Me? preferred to film in the attics of their guests’ grand houses where they could pretend to unearth dusty old photographs of sainted ancestors undergoing privation or doing praiseworthy things. Harry’s two-room flat was unaccountably missing an attic, because the house had gone with Lisa—along with most of the money—during the divorce. However, the museum still had a wall panel about the Underhill books as one of its permanent exhibits, and probably the whole thing got waved through as mutual good PR that didn’t have to impact on anyone’s balance sheet too much.
They positioned him in front of the display. There were a couple of first editions, the once-bright covers faded, plus some stills from that 1973 animation and a creepy little puppet from the Polish stop-motion of ’87 which still figured in Harry’s nightmares. With that as a backdrop, they did the preliminaries, the little interview sections where he reminisced fondly about Granny Magda, or Mary as her pen name had been. He even went so far as to mention the secret, those little hints she’d dropped about the provenance of her own mother. And he wasn’t really expecting Margot to play God Save the Tsar and then crown him, but it was nice to have the whiff of it hanging in the air. And he relaxed and let his guard down, and then they brought out the box.
“Harry,” Margot said.
And he’d wanted them to call him Felix. He wanted to start calling himself Felix, instead of the godawful clownish Harry, that non-name he’d taken on and which he was thoroughly sick of. But he was Harry Bodie to the world, and to Equity, and his agent reckoned it was still more help than harm when it came to names to conjure with. “Harry,” Margot said, “what would you say if I told you that we’d been able to track down some real information about your great-grandmother. Far more than Mary ever told you?”
And, the bitch, she was doing her excited voice, as she did in every show where the guest’s past held a cornucopia of riches rather than hardship and grief. And he should have thought that they could easily re-shoot her part later, if she wanted to give it the opposite spin. That the Margot Lorne speaking to him then and there needn’t be the one who made it to screen. He fell for it hook, line and sinker.
And they had a box there, an old metal chest that eagle-eyed afficionados of How Even Me? might have recognised as turning up in a number of mid-list celebrity attics, because the show got sloppy with re-using its props.
Because they wanted the true and honest reaction, they passed it into his hungry hands for him to open. They’d arranged the papers inside quite carefully, so that their narrative was laid out step by step. The admission notice, the treatment reports, the doctor’s notes, the birth certificate. Filming as Harry’s excited sounds of discovery ground down to something bleak and sad.
The London County Asylum was stamped on half the pages. That was where his great-grandmother had turned up, apparently. January 8th 1916, which he reckoned was a time when the asylums were doing a booming trade, so small wonder the paperwork looked rushed. Admission of a pregnant woman answering to the name of Devaty Svoboda, initially speaking no English, though she appeared to have picked it up quickly enough. No clue as to where she’d come from, but the country had a lot on its mind right then. And incurably deranged, as the spiky handwriting of one professional had it. Possessed of such detailed and elaborate delusions that the specialist had insisted she be kept in residence for study.
She claimed to be the
Queen of Fairyland, said the notes.
Her daughter had been taken from her, obviously. Named Magda, at her insistence. Permitted to visit by the unusually lenient foster family, and the indulgent alienist who’d sat in on their encounters. Listened to the increasingly lurid fantasies she’d spun for the kid. Honestly, for a destitute pregnant woman beset by incurable delusions, great-granma had fallen on her feet. She’d died in the institution in 1930, the records said, of pneumonia.
And Harry did his best, and probably he could have turned the whole thing into a career exercise whereby he used the heartstrings of the audience as bootstraps for his upcoming career. But in that instant, wrong-footed as he was, he was just so painfully aware that Margot Lorne and her entire crew were laughing at him. That they’d all taken a profound dislike to him from the first moment he turned up, on the not-unreasonable basis that he had made himself profoundly dislikeable. And so his reaction was less noble sorrow and more peevish anger that his goddamn great-grandmother hadn’t been anything more useful to him, and the cameras were rolling all the time.
Worse than that, if even possible, ...
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