Little Honour Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Penny Freedman is a teacher, academic, actor and director. She lives in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she indulges her passion for Shakespeare and theatre. She has two grown-up daughters.

  Little Honour is the sixth book in a series. Previous books are This is a Dreadful Sentence, All the Daughters, One May Smile, Weep a While Longer and Drown My Books.

  Little

  Honour

  PENNY FREEDMAN

  Copyright © 2018 Penny Freedman

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Matador

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  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1789011 944

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Robert

  The odds is gone

  And there is nothing left remarkable

  Beneath the visiting moon.

  Ha! Little honour to be much believed

  And most pernicious purpose!

  (Measure for Measure Act 2 Scene 4)

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Naomi Perry for putting me right on the organisation of barristers’ chambers, to Madeleine O’Beirne of Wise Owl for insightful and constructive comments beyond the remit of simple proof-reading, and to Elsa Lake for convincing me that a bright and competent ten-year-old could do all that Freda is required to do here.

  My thanks, too, to my family and my friends who ushered me gently through the dark months when I was completing this book.

  Great Ormond Street Hospital

  In the course of this book, four-year-old Nico Biaggi is treated in hospital. It was necessary, for the working of the plot, that the hospital should be near Gina’s home in Bloomsbury, so Great Ormond Street was the only choice. I could have given the hospital a fictional name, but that seemed pointlessly coy, given its location. This is a work of fiction, however, and I have only the most superficial knowledge of the hospital, so the Great Ormond Street of this book is a fictional place and I would not want my imagining of the staff, the organisation or the medical procedures there to be taken as an informed representation of the real hospital.

  SOAS

  My version of SOAS as Gina’s workplace is also entirely an invention, and Maria does not work there and does not represent anyone who does.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Appendix

  Chapter One

  AB INITIO

  Monday 18th July 2016

  It starts, I suppose, with the phone call from Freda. ‘Granny,’ she says, ‘what’s wrong with Mum?’

  Now, this is the kind of question that sends the room spinning around you. One minute you are engaged in some safely mundane task – in my case, sorting books – feet securely on the dull ground, not so much as a warning tremor to disquiet you, and the next everything is in free fall – no safe purchase at all. I sit down, hard, on the floor, since there is nowhere else to sit, and ask, ‘What do you mean by wrong, Freda?’

  ‘Hasn’t she even told you?’ Freda asks.

  Well, obviously she has not. I haven’t, in fact, spoken to my daughter for ten days, and that’s my fault, although I have been busy telling myself that it is hers. Ten days ago, I told her that I could not drop everything, yet again, and take the train down to Marlbury to look after my four-year-old grandson, Nico, who seems to go from one minor ailment to another – coughs, colds, earache, general malaise – just bad enough for the nursery not to want to take him. Ellie has a full-time job as a teacher, so Nico’s being ill so often has made life difficult for her, I know, and I have done my best to help, but I have a full-time job too. I teach English Language at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, and – yes – as Ellie has pointed out, the university term has finished, but I have much to do, including finishing a paper to present at a conference next week and negotiating a complicated house move, more of which later. Ellie got tearful, I got stubborn and neither of us has picked up the phone since.

  ‘What makes you think something’s wrong?’ I ask, striving for a sympathetic-cum-reassuring tone but somehow managing to sound only irritated. ‘It’s the end of term and things always get stressful, and Nico hasn’t been well…’ I trail off.

  ‘She keeps crying,’ Freda says. ‘She and Ben keep whispering together and today Ben was crying too.’

  Divorce, I think. Divorce or death. Ellie is seriously ill.

  ‘Haven’t you asked what’s wrong?’ I ask, and there’s that irritated tone again.

  ‘Of course, I have.’ Freda can be snappy too.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she said she couldn’t tell me yet, but she would when things were sorted out.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And she said not to worry, it would all be all right.’

  ‘Well. There you are then.’

  ‘Except…’

  ‘Except?’

  ‘Except she doesn’t tell me things. She keeps saying she’ll tell me about my dad, but she doesn’t.’

  ‘No. Well, that’s a difficult one, Freda. And you’ve got Ben now, and he’s a lovely dad, so…’

  ‘Can’t you tell me?’

  ‘I can’t, my love. She hasn’t told me, either.’

  This was always going to be an issue one day. Ellie got pregnant at the beginning of her first year at university, possibly in freshers’ week. She has never talked about the boy concerned, but I suspect a drunken, thoughtless encounter with disproportionate consequences. Anyone else might have gone for a quick abortion but Ellie was too stubborn for that. She saw it through. Now she is married to Ben, a nice musician who teaches at the same school as her, and who is being a lovely father to Freda, and they have Nico as well, and it’s all happy families, except that Freda is wondering who she is.

  ‘I can’t help you there, Freda,’ I
say, ‘but I will ring Mum when she gets back from work and try and find out what’s wrong.’

  I look at my watch. ‘Why aren’t you at school, anyway?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s lunch time. We’re allowed to have our phones at lunch time.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Bye.’ She rings off.

  Ellie said she would let Freda know when things were sorted out. That sounds more like divorce than illness. I get up off the floor.

  I should probably explain why there is nothing to sit on here. I am not at home. I am sorting out books which I abandoned two and a half years ago, when I left the seaside hovel in which I had been living and swapped it for a studio flat in Bloomsbury, where I now work. The hovel went unsold for two years and the books stayed here, as there was no room for them in the flat, which is so small that I have felt like a battery chicken in it. Now, however, the hovel and the chicken cage are both sold, and I am about to move upmarket to a flat which I shall describe later, as it is my pride and delight and deserves your full attention.

  The hovel has sold for more than I had any right to expect. It is one of a terrace of six, overlooking the sea on a depressed and unattractive bit of the Kent coast. In the fall-out from a murder on the beach, virtually on our doorsteps, all the inhabitants, for various reasons, tried to sell up, but the place felt jinxed and no-one was buying. Now a property developer is purchasing the whole lot, ready to knock all the houses down and put up a block of luxury seaside apartments. And good luck with that, I think, as I look out at the sea, which, even in July, manages to look greyly uninviting.

  I turn back to my books, which are, in fact, wrecked. Two years of damp and neglect have ruined everything, actually. I took nothing with me to my new London life: the furniture, such as it was, went to a charity and everything else in the place – clothes, bedding, rugs, kitchen equipment – was left to moulder, and has now been consigned to the giant skip outside the front door. The books, I decide, will have to join the rest. I was already moving to that conclusion before Freda rang – the pages have all gone crinkly and have stuck together – so now I can vent my anxiety and self-blame by hurling the lot of them into the skip. My favourites and my work books are safe in London; these are for pulping.

  It is good exercise heaving the bags out to the front and swinging them over into oblivion, and by the time I have finished it is four-thirty and Ellie might be home from work. I take my phone and go and sit on the sea wall. I need to be in the open air for this.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Ma,’ she says. Her voice sounds flat.

  ‘You sound tired,’ I say, fatuously. ‘How many days to go?’

  ‘What? Oh – three. Three till the end of term.’

  ‘How’s Nico?’

  ‘He’s …’

  She stops.

  ‘The summer holiday will do him good, won’t it?’ I rush on, feeling blame coming my way. ‘When do you go to Italy?’

  ‘We’re not.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  Divorce.

  ‘Nico’s got to have an operation.’

  ‘Why? Is this his ears? Are they putting grommets in or something?’

  Suddenly, she is shouting. ‘No, they’re not putting bloody grommets in his ears. He’s having heart surgery. That’s what they’re doing.’

  I have to lean forward because I feel dizzy and I could easily topple backwards off the wall and become another fatality on the beach.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, stupidly. ‘What’s wrong with his heart?’

  ‘He has an atrial septal defect – it’s a hole –’ her voice wobbles ‘– a hole in his heart.’

  I gather rapidly anything I think I know about this.

  ‘It’s an operation they do quite a lot, isn’t it? I mean, it’s serious, of course, but…’

  ‘Don’t!’ she says. ‘Don’t tell me it’s just a routine operation. They’re mending his heart. How can that be routine? He’s four years old and they’re having to mend his heart. And I didn’t even see. I didn’t see. I just saw it as a problem – him being ill all the time and me having to take days off work and you not being here – and all the time his little heart was struggling, and I didn’t even know!’

  She is crying now, and I am forty miles away, without a car and with no possibility of wrapping my arms round her, so all I can say is, ‘It’s not your fault, Ellie. It’s not your fault.’ And then I stay sitting on the wall and I cry too, because actually it is my fault, isn’t it?

  Eventually I ask, ‘Have you got a date?’

  ‘Next Monday. A week today.’

  ‘At Marlbury Royal?’

  ‘No. Great Ormond Street.’

  I feel dizzy again and decide it will be better to stand up.

  ‘Ellie,’ I say. ‘My new flat is about two hundred yards from Great Ormond Street. You and Ben must come and stay there. How long will Nico be in for?’

  ‘They say five days to a week. We’ll get the train to and fro, and maybe one of us will sleep on the ward – they do let you –’

  ‘You’d be exhausted. Stay with me. I can feed you and look after you.’

  ‘Ma, you haven’t even moved into the new place yet, have you?’

  ‘Friday. We complete on Friday and I move in.’

  ‘But you won’t be sorted out. You won’t be able to manage with us around.’

  I have no idea how I’m going to manage, but I say, ‘Course I will. Give me the weekend and it’ll be all ready for you. You can sleep in my room and I’ll sleep in my study. I’m putting a single bed in there so Freda will be able to come and stay.’

  ‘That’s the other thing,’ she says. ‘What are we going to do with Freda?’

  Freda. I think about her taut little voice on the phone: Granny, what’s wrong with Mum?

  ‘What were you thinking of doing?’ I ask.

  ‘I was going to ask you to have her as first option.’

  Of course you were.

  ‘She’s welcome, of course,’ I say. ‘I can sleep on the sofa.’

  ‘Are you free to look after her during the day, though? She won’t be allowed to hang around in the hospital and she won’t want to.’

  Am I free? No. In fact, I’m not. I’m due to be giving a paper at the three-day conference at UCL next week – my usual shtick on cross-cultural pragmatic competence – and it’s quite important that I give those three days my full attention. I’m on a discussion panel, as well, and I was quite flattered to be asked. I’m up for a senior lectureship so I really need to put myself about next week and appear to be an asset to the university. I can probably manage to do that after nights spent sleeping on the sofa, but I can’t look after Freda as well.

  ‘I’ve got this conference…’ I say.

  ‘Of course you have. Why didn’t I guess?’

  This is not fair, but for once I bite my tongue.

  ‘Monday to Wednesday,’ I say. ‘After that –’

  ‘I’ll see if Charlotte’s mother will have her. Otherwise I’ll have to ask Lavender.’

  ‘What about Annie? Couldn’t she help? Then, at least Freda would be in London and she could visit Nico.’

  ‘Annie’s working, Ma. She’s got a job to do.’

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘She’s a lawyer.’

  Law, it appears, trumps education. I say nothing.

  ‘Freda won’t be happy,’ Ellie says. ‘She likes Lavender but she’s not comfortable with Dad and she doesn’t like the boys.’

  ‘They do seem to be little monsters.’

  ‘They’re not like Nico.’

  ‘No.’ I wait, helplessly, for something better to say. ‘Nico will be fine, Ellie. It will all be all right.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  I stay on the wall for a long time. My legs are so stiff when I stand up that I can bar
ely totter as far as the steps down to the beach. It had always been my intention to have a walk on the beach, for old times’ sake, regardless of its homicidal associations. I walked my dog here every morning for two years, in the odd sabbatical from my life that I had decided to take. At the time, I didn’t think of it as a sabbatical – I thought I had given up the world for good – but it turned out that the world – Forster’s world of telegrams and anger, I suppose – came and found me, and I couldn’t resist its lure. Only a light breeze plays on the beach today, but I turn into it, remembering how driving into a gale could knock all thoughts out of my head, and that was peace, of a kind.

  I have thought about going to see Caliban, my dog, who was my companion and my excuse for those battering walks. A friend – Lesley - who lives here took him on when I defected to a London life, so he still has his sandy playground. I don’t think I loved him, but I would quite like to see him again. What holds me back? I suppose it is that I shall find out what he felt about me. Either he loved me and will greet me ecstatically – in which case, I shall feel terrible about leaving him again – or he didn’t really like me much at all and will greet me with indifference. I suspect that this is the more likely scenario, and I shall mind, because I have a sneaking feeling that dogs are rather good judges of character. I tell myself that it would be an imposition to turn up unexpectedly on Lesley’s doorstep, and call a taxi to take me to the station.

  Chapter Two

  ALTERNATIVE VERDICT

  Saturday 23rd July 2016

  When I told Ellie that I could easily get the flat ready over the weekend, I was, of course, lying. It’s not that it takes long to arrange a few pieces of furniture, or to unload kitchen tools into drawers, clothes into cupboards and books onto shelves. It’s the technical stuff that’s the problem, and there are, it pains me to admit, some jobs for which I need to get a man in. I am not helpless. I did manage to work out the complexities of the hot water system and the state of the art shower last night, because I was determined not to go to bed dirty, and today I will work out the cooker controls, which look as though they belong on a flight deck, but I am too small and – yes, all right – too female for other jobs, and I would be in despair today if yesterday evening had not brought an overdue piece of good luck.