The Frank Business

by Olivia Glazebrook

Genres: General Fiction; Siblings; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'A talented, witty writer with a sharp eye for social observation' Daily Mail After Frank drops down dead in Heathrow Arrivals on Christmas Eve, his estranged daughter Jem is called in to identify the body. When Jem travels back to Frank's house in France - a house she hasn't been in since she was a child - she realises that Frank had a son too. Frank has died of a congenital heart defect, a defect he may have passed on to his daughter - or on to his son. Jem must warn her brother, but in finding herself a family she risks ripping another apart. Shrewd, witty and poignant, The Frank Business is a vivid tale of love and other battlefields.

Release date: March 7, 2019

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

I

Frank had flown to London from Marseille. He had driven to Marseille from his home in the Luberon where he lived alone on a forested ridge, close to the village of Saint-Victor. He had got up early in the morning to catch his flight.

To fly at all had been a last-minute decision – he had only booked his ticket the previous evening, on an impulse, because of something he heard on the radio. He liked to listen to Radio 4 online, on his laptop, while he worked in his studio. To live in the south of France and hear the burble of British voices on Radio 4 was reassuring, as if he were shipwrecked alone on Mars and tuning in to voices on Earth. He did not want to go back to London but he liked to know it existed.

It was eight-fifteen in France and seven-fifteen in England. The Archers had just finished. Because of Christmas, the announcer said, there would be no Front Row tonight. Instead, a performance of Hamlet would be transmitted live from The Playhouse in London.

Frank did not call the eve before Christmas Eve ‘Christmas’ – not yet – but it seemed that any excuse to muck about with the regular schedule was good enough for the BBC. There was no telling what might happen at this time of year and one just had to go with the flow. He was working on a Christmas card for his friends Pierre and Agnes, who were coming to dinner on Christmas Day, and since he was already working he might as well listen to a bit of Hamlet.

Frank was an illustrator and he was often commissioned to draw pictures personalised with messages in his beautiful, old-fashioned handwriting, but he made this particular effort for his friends Pierre and Agnes because, every year, they took care of him at Christmas: dining with their lonely friend on the loneliest day of the year. The card was a way of showing his appreciation.

‘But it’s not pity,’ they protested. ‘We want to come.’

He did not believe them. It was the same every year.

After the announcement about the change of schedule came an introduction to the play by a radio presenter who was at the theatre waiting for the play to start. She spoke into her microphone in a low voice as the last members of the audience took their seats.

‘. . . Veteran star of stage and screen, Kathleen Griffin, will play Gertrude and her son Scott Griffin will play Hamlet, a relatively young Hamlet at only twenty-four, in tonight’s final performance of this acclaimed production, which has sold out every night of its three month run . . .’

When Frank heard ‘Kathleen Griffin’ his pen nib stopped what it was doing. He broke off inking holly leaves a rich green and sat motionless, listening to the rest of the introduction. He marvelled at the skill of the radio presenter, who kept talking until the auditorium lights were dimmed and the audience was hushed by the authoritative magic of the darkness.

‘. . . and,’ she whispered finally, ‘the light of one star shines on the battlements. The scene is set; the play begins.’

Then Francisco and Barnardo began their conversation on the battlements:

– Who’s there?

– Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

Frank listened. As he listened he dipped his pen nib into a jar of water and swirled it about to wash off the ink, then he dried it on a rag he kept beside him for that purpose. His hands, he noticed, were shaking. He put the pen down. He was waiting, listening and calculating: Scott Griffin, twenty-four years old.

Now here was Horatio and here was the ghost. This first scene seemed interminable. Frank waited. At last he heard Hamlet:

– A little more than kin, and less than kind.

Frank tilted his head, listening, but he could not tell from a voice what he wanted to know.

Then Gertrude:

– Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off . . .

It was Kathleen. Frank shivered and his eyes pricked with tears as if she had walked into the room. He had not heard her voice for twenty-five years.

 

He did not move until first Gertrude and then Hamlet were dead. Then he blinked and looked around and realised that it was dark and he was alone. Generally speaking he did not notice solitude because it was his usual state, but he noticed it now. He muted the laptop and sat in silence for a minute or two. He looked at his reflection in the black window and let untidy, dark ideas settle on his mind like rooks on a stubble field.

Pulling the laptop towards him he typed ‘Scott Griffin actor’ into Google. He peered at the biography and then, clicking on ‘Images’, he peered at those. It seemed very quiet in the room, as if it had just been emptied of a lively group of guests. Along with solitude Frank did not usually notice silence, but he did tonight.

He got off the stool on which he sat to work and went through a connecting door into the kitchen. Here he poured into a tumbler two inches of the quite good cognac he had bought to drink with Pierre and Agnes. The glass shook in his hand. He took a gulp of the drink and then carried it from the kitchen into the sitting room, across the hall and into the study where he sat down on a wheeled chair in front of the desk. He switched on the anglepoise light, opened the third desk drawer down on the left-hand side and pulled out an envelope containing a handful of photographs.

All these pictures had been taken before the death of his wife, more than sixteen years ago. He did not like to look at them often, but nor did he want to throw them away. He shuffled through them quickly, pausing only to glance briefly at one or two: himself and Romy on their wedding day; the car they had driven from London, filled with all their belongings; Romy in front of the finished house, pregnant; their baby Jem, who would now be twenty-five.

He was looking for a photograph of himself as a young man. When he found one, an old passport picture, he took it back to the studio. He threw a log into the woodburner, sat back down on his stool and leant the little portrait against the screen of his laptop in order to compare his own face with that of ‘Scott Griffin actor’.

There was no need to look for a likeness because it was perfectly obvious. He examined the images for a minute or more. He was transfixed. He scrolled down through the rows of little pictures offered up by Google until they became more loosely attached, and then entirely unattached, to the intended subject – pictures of other Hamlets, other Scotts and other Griffins. Pictures of no interest.

He finished his drink and got up. He had a curious urge to dash the glass against the wall. Instead he went back into the kitchen and poured more cognac. He felt anger tighten the bolts in his chest and skull. He put a hand to his face, blinking fiercely – he feared that hot tears might burst from his eyes even if he expressly barred them from doing so. The house had never felt more silent or more empty; tonight it was a container in which he existed like a spider fallen into a bucket.

In the study again he pulled open another drawer of the desk and got out a bundle of old address books and diaries tied up with string. In an address book he had not opened for more than two decades he looked up the name ‘Kathleen’. He knew it would be written under K for Kathleen rather than G for Griffin. He remembered deliberately not writing down her surname in case Romy had turned to the page and seen it. She would have been surprised. ‘But you didn’t know Kathleen. You never met her. Did you?’ And there would have been no reasonable answer he could have given her.

Kathleen had given him her number by accident: he had found her passport in her handbag and read in her enormous and bright blue handwriting on the inside back cover under the heading EMERGENCIES –

 

Walter Griffin

36 Beech Road NW3

01-794-2826

 

Frank had copied everything down, first secretly onto a scrap of paper in his pocket and then later into the address book. He had never dialled the number – he had never dared risk it. To break cover would be to break the unspoken pact.

But ‘Scott Griffin actor’ changed everything. Tilting the shade of the lamp on the desk so that the light did not glare at him Frank took a gulp of his drink and lifted the receiver of the telephone on the desk. He adjusted the number from ‘01’ to ‘0207’ and pressed each button on the keypad carefully.

A gruff male voice answered after five rings. ‘Hello?’

Frank’s mouth was dry. ‘I’m looking for Kathleen Griffin.’

‘She’s out. Who is this?’

Could it be Walter? Could it still be Walter? For a moment Frank was paralysed with nerves. When he was able to speak again he asked, ‘And Scott Griffin?’

‘Sonny’s out too. Who is this?’

‘I edit the arts pages here at the Sunday Times,’ Frank lied smoothly. ‘I was hoping to set up an interview with Kathleen and Scott. You can tell Kathleen I remember her from Yellow Afternoon.’

‘I’ll tell her nothing of the kind.’ Walter sounded suspicious as well as irritated. ‘Unfortunately for you I happen to know the arts editor of the Sunday Times, and you are not she.’

‘Oh . . .’ Frank stuttered. ‘I—’

But Walter had hung up.

Frank replaced the receiver. He was embarrassed but also resentful. He got up and moved through the house to the kitchen. You’ll see, he thought. You’ll find out who’s in charge. He realised he was sweating under his arms and that his grip on the empty glass was tight and strained.

After drinking another two inches of cognac and spending another few minutes staring mutely into the black window, past his reflection and into the night, Frank sat down again in front of the laptop and looked up flights from Marseille to London the next day. It would be Christmas Eve and therefore expensive but he did not care. When he found an available seat he clicked on ‘Buy Now’ and filled in his name, address and credit card details. Because his hands were shaking he made several mistakes that needed correcting, and when he had finished buying the ticket he tried to calm himself. Twenty-five years have already passed, he thought. There’s no rush. Scott Griffin isn’t going anywhere.

He poured another drink, which took him quite close to the end of the bottle, and imagined how the next day would play itself out: he would get to London in the early afternoon, he would travel by Underground to Belsize Park, he would fortify himself with a drink at a nearby pub and then he would walk up to Kathleen’s front door and knock on it with his knuckles. And after that? Here his imagination failed him.

II

1

A long time ago Frank had told Jem that when he shot a rabbit dead its relatives around it would not notice. Brothers and sisters might look up, startled by a sound they could not identify, but then they would forget about it and carry on eating or scratching behind their ears with their hind feet or chasing each other around a dandelion while their sibling, alive a moment before, lay dead on the ground beside them.

This was a horrible thought and somehow more horrible because Jem had just been given a pet rabbit for her eighth birthday.

‘Which rabbits?’ she asked.

‘Wild ones. I used to shoot them with my air rifle when I was a boy.’

‘Why don’t the other ones notice? The brothers and sisters?’

‘Because rabbits don’t understand about death.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’re too stupid.’

Frank did not believe in making things sound nicer than they were. If something was brutal, vicious, merciless or just ‘too stupid’ he would tell you. This made things more interesting but often also more unpleasant.

On this occasion Jem wanted to know more but there was a rule about not asking too many questions and she did not want her father to lose his temper, which was mighty and colossal. She resolved to ask her mother, but later when they were alone.

 

On Christmas Eve in the afternoon Jem took two Underground trains and a bus to the hospital near the airport. Inside the hospital she followed signs to the mortuary where she was asked to show her passport to identify herself: Jocelyn Eloise Martell, twenty-five years old, daughter of the deceased.

She had been informed of her father’s death by her guardian, Marian Frost, who had rung her up an hour ago from her retirement home in Norfolk. Marian was elderly: ‘eighty-odd’. She had always been something-odd. When she had first taken on the guardianship of Jem she had been ‘sixty-odd’ and Jem had been eight and three quarters.

Today Marian had been summoned to the telephone from a screening of The Spy Who Loved Me in the Community Room. On the other end of the line was an official-sounding young man whose name she did not catch. He wanted to know how to get hold of Jocelyn Martell. When she asked why he informed her that Jocelyn’s father, Frank Martell, was dead and that his remains were in a hospital morgue near Heathrow. He said that a formal identification was needed and that Miss Martell was next-of-kin.

A person’s next-of-kinship was not, it seemed, altered by an estrangement, however long or bitter. Jem had known this day would come. She agreed to identify Frank’s body. She wanted to do it: he was harmless. If she did not see him today she would never see him again.

‘I want to see what he looks like.’

‘You may not recognise him,’ Marian said. ‘And it may not be him.’

‘Of course it is. They’ve got his wallet, his passport and his driving licence.’

‘They’ll pull back a sheet,’ Marian said. ‘I’ve seen it on the telly a hundred times.’

 

At sixty-two Frank did not look old, but older than he had when Jem last saw him. His thick hair had turned grey – dark like a badger’s – and he seemed smaller, as if he had lost some of his stuffing. She remembered his face full of rage, but here it looked empty. Was it really her father? It seemed unfair that he should look so benign.

But when she saw the many different coloured ink stains on his fingers she was reminded as forcefully of his presence as if he had been alive.

‘Yes, that’s him.’

Now that she was here she had nothing to say to him. It would have been ridiculous to say anything: there was no point complaining to a corpse.

She took away his belongings in a plastic bag she found stuffed in her jacket pocket. She could not remember where it had come from or what it had once contained. It bore no brand name but only a printed instruction: Please Use Me Again.

Frank had not been carrying any luggage and so only the contents of his pockets needed to be collected: house key, car key, wallet, passport, the stub of a boarding pass and the parking ticket that would allow his car to exit the car park at Marseille airport. He had been wearing a watch but it was not an expensive one, only a black Swatch with a rubber strap and a white face. Jem tried it on and did it up. Her wrist was smaller than her father’s by three holes.

– What big arms you have!

– All the better to GRAB you with.

She took off the watch and dropped it into the plastic bag, which she shoved into her handbag to join all the other rubbish she kept in there and forgot about.

She retraced her steps: out of the hospital and back to the bus stop where, she noticed, one bus might take her back to the railway station but another might take her to the airport. She looked at the timetables posted on the rear panel of the bus shelter and it occurred to her that she had in her possession Frank’s wallet, his car key and the key to his house. She did not have the money to fly to France but he did. She looked inside the wallet and found a credit card, a wodge of euros, another of sterling and a driving licence. She counted the cash: two hundred euros plus change, and seventy-five pounds sterling. To take his money would not be stealing because it was rightfully hers – the money, the wallet, the car key, the car and even the house were all rightfully hers.

It was cold, waiting here. A bus was approaching and the banner above its windscreen read ‘Heathrow Airport’. Jem looked at it, considering. If I wanted to, she thought, I could fly to Marseille, drive to the house and let myself in.

The bus stopped and its doors opened with a hiss. No one got off, but three people boarded: two off-duty nurses wearing NHS lanyards round their necks and, at the last moment, Jem. The doors bleeped and closed and off they went.

As they rattled along, heaving and lurching over speed bumps and around corners, she looked on her telephone for a flight to Marseille. There won’t be a seat, she thought, but there was: the last one on the latest British Airways flight leaving Terminal 5 this evening. It was expensive – Marian would have called it criminally expensive – but Jem wasn’t paying: she bought it here and now, using her telephone and her father’s credit card. She checked herself in online and downloaded the boarding pass to her telephone. She would make it by the skin of her teeth.

At Terminal 5 she hurried towards Departures and scrabbled through her handbag trying to find her passport. Not looking where she was going she bumped into a young man heading the other way—

‘Sorry—’

‘My fault.’

She met his apologetic smile with an apologetic glance and then passed through the cattle crush of departures and security. Once she was through she breathed a sigh of relief. What an interesting day this was turning out to be.

At the gate she sat with the other passengers, waiting to board. It was the very last moment that anyone could fly home in time for Christmas and most of the other travellers were tired-looking businessmen no doubt looking forward to seeing their wives, sons and daughters. Jem wondered if her father had ever missed his only child at Christmas.

She looked at his passport photograph and compared it with her own. She peered to see a likeness. Perhaps the shape of her eyes? Perhaps the tilt of her upper lip? She hoped not. It used to keep her awake when she was younger, worrying that she might be like him. ‘God isn’t interested in what’s on the outside,’ Marian had told her. ‘It’s what’s on the inside that gets you to heaven.’ But God was not the consolation He should have been.

Inside the back cover of the passport there were spaces for the details of ‘two relatives or friends who may be contacted in the event of accident’. The spaces were blank. Jem wondered if there were any circumstances under which her father might have tried to reach her, other than the occasion of his sudden and unexpected death. She decided not.

2

Elsewhere in the same terminal of the same airport Scott Griffin, known to those who loved him as Sonny, had just waved goodbye to his American girlfriend Nina. He watched her wind her way through the departures channels and into security and out of sight. He waited until she had definitely gone and could not come back. Then he turned away, relieved.

As a matter of course he took his telephone out of his pocket and checked the screen. No messages. Not looking where he was going he was bumped into by a young woman hurrying the other way, towards Departures—

‘Sorry—’

‘My fault.’

He gave her an apologetic smile and then went back to his phone. As he walked towards the Heathrow Express train station where . . .