Marisa, p.1
Marisa, page 1
Marisa
Peter Cowlam
Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills everything it touches. It kills love, it kills art.
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Peter Cowlam has asserted his rights under the Copyright and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by CentreHouse Press at Smashwords. Also available in paperback.
The 1970s. Bruce takes over a financial consultancy firm founded by his father, while student Marisa inherits property. Love, lust and money drive them both, until their relationship ends, with Bruce committed to commerce and Marisa setting off in search of social justice.
Twenty-five years after an intense and bad-tempered affair, a chance entry in one of Bruce’s business listings shows that Marisa is now boss of the Rae Agency – a media PR concern. Bruce, as he recollects their partnership, is torn between his staid if harmonious family life, and renewing contact with Marisa. Finally, he does commit to a course of action, but must face the truth of not having grasped the widening cultural and social separation their two different views of the world have wrought over the intervening quarter century.
Contents
Marisa, a novella
• 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
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Chapter Twenty-Three
• Chapter Twenty-Four
Other Books by Peter Cowlam
• Utopia
• New King Palmers
• Across the Rebel Network
• Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize?
• Laurel
• Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles
• Meakin
• The Patient’s Diary
• Manifesto
For more information on these and other titles visit the CentreHouse Press website.
Chapter One
These are my autumns. That almost forgotten suburb of my birth, just a blur of twilit streets for the last twenty-five Octobers, shifts into focus suddenly – a concrete atmosphere timed to undermine my walk from the station to my office. There is a gust of burnished orange leaves, a freight that having left the trees, and swirling across the streets and squares, marks one of those family anniversaries I’d rather have forgotten. In the breeze of that one instant I consider a call to my secretary, cancelling all appointments, a park bench appealing to me more, when having turned up my collar the hum of business melts away.
That decision is never made. Invariably, at a few minutes to nine, the glassy motif etched in the double doors seals my world of moving capital from the cold exhilaration and eddies outside. A marble-faced security man, paid to scrutinise a bank of TV screens, signals our exclusive fraternity – I am emperor, and this is my empire – and with usual deliberation avoids my second glance. These are delicate times, I say, and insist on showing ID. I summon a lift, and wait in the foyer, just watching for its clock to run down. Then strike those two demotic notes of its chime, so that now, as I cross hands over my document case, I leave all sentiment to the bluster outside, the whole day before me measured in a womb of padded walls, as I rise to the heights of my penthouse. Already a dozen overseas investors have wished me good morning, leaving messages, all wanting me to phone.
On this Monday morning, shaking off those snares of my past wasn’t quite as straightforward. Our cleaning contractor, as usual ironic, had dusted our founder’s bust, a bronze head and shoulders done shamelessly Churchillian-style, and was waiting for the coffee straining through its filter. I sat down, my back to the window, still unbuttoning my coat. I switched on my computer, awake to the sudden glow of colours from its screen.
Then, having hung my coat, I began my day with monthly reports – shares, mortgages, insurance. There was one list I always insisted on, for the scale of its information on small and mid-size companies. I scrolled through it, checking names I hadn’t seen before, then backtracked suddenly, to confirm an address I knew, an old rambling house called Aitken Aspires, a place tucked away behind a terrace of small business properties and private houses on the edge of Ealing Common. Its owner was Marisa Rae, or rather still Marisa Rae – after twenty-five years.
Chapter Two
In those days of course Bruce Senior was very much alive, and not yet thinking of busts, portraits, or any other guarantee of his posterity. His was the evangelising principle. He insisted on the material transformation of honest hard work – in this case his, and later mine – to a tough and lasting fabric for the firm he ran. He had built it himself from a handful of shares he’d inherited young, mostly blue chip, though one or two were genuinely exotic. Not all augured well for the succession he had in mind. I was not an attentive student. I scraped only a lower second in the business degree I half-heartedly entered into – a poor return at his expense and sacrifice. It’s one of those cool observations I hear echoed even now, for I liked the college bars, where I un-wadded my cash, where I splashed it around. I got involved backstage with theatre productions (a Royal Hunt of the Sun stands out), though never had the courage to audition for parts, tempted as I was. Nights I played draw poker in only my swim shorts and sucking a cigar, till dawn and its twitters made bed a better prospect.
That gamble was cut short when an inflamed appendix brought unexpected revelations. There was only one book to hand, while I recovered after surgery, a delve into the complex dilemmas faced by the sixth Dalai Lama. It’s a cliché now, in a world of colliding cultures, but here was my foil for the values of Western society – a tonnage I had sometimes groaned under, but so far taken for granted. The dust cover showed someone supposedly the great man himself, with members of his retinue, in spiritual poses, pictured on the timber deck of an oriental pavilion. So there I had it: there were other things apart from an English middle-class.
Bruce Senior’s first decree, as I entered the family firm, debarred me, for the time being, from an office or staff of my own, most of whom – men and women in their thirties – would resent a boss so young. One of our portfolios, of relative unimportance, was control of a pension fund he’d picked up cheap circa the early Seventies. Some on its list lived as expats. There was an ancient couple in Vienna. A one-time highway engineer had stayed on with the much younger bride he’d found in Bogotá. A lot had ventured east, to Hong Kong or Singapore – or farther, to Perth, Melbourne, Sydney. Most had gone for the cities, plains and holiday resorts dotting the Iberian peninsula. A perennial question these happy weatherworn people faced was how to receive their pay – in pounds sterling or their local currency. Whole mornings I spent pulling on hats and slacks and sun blocks, getting to grips, in the slant of my mirror, with the opening patter my first commission came with: ‘You know most if they make a choice make a wrong choice.’ The firm wouldn’t run to flights and hotel bills in South America or anywhere near the Pacific Rim, and so I settled on a flying visit to half a dozen clients in Spain.
The casualness of youth, a fresh face and even temper were the right bag of tools in selling other financial products as I combed their affairs. The ploy was successful, and the lowlands of Andalusia saw my return often enough that desk space at London HQ was less and less an issue.
But not all my clients had settled for a life testing the loungers on Mediterranean shores. One of my ex-Home Counties bankers had invested in the muscat grape, a man intimate with kosher produce and Jewish celebrations. He exported to synagogues everywhere: product a fortified wine – red and too sweet for me. By its appellation its origin was better known. Málaga.
Málaga City he didn’t take me to, though Granada and Cádiz he did. From the latter my albums filled with snaps of its salt ponds, marshy lagoons, the orchards, vineyards, olive groves, the cork trees up in the mountains, and endlessly the views I never tired of, up and down the branch line from Seville to Algeciras.
My banker-turned-entrepreneur offered insight into the variety of grape he used, centred on the sun-dry technique concentrating its sweetness. A gesture alone took in the sierras, then with his lopsided smile he drove me in his Jeep to the caves of El Romeral, where most of my postcards home were written. It seemed important enough that once back in the leafy greys of Ealing I enrolled for conversational Spanish – a class of twenty-odd, run by a thinly moustached Isabel McFadden (or MacFard – I never remember her name). By lesson two I had exchanged a first thoughtless desk for a spare nearer to Marisa’s, who ignored my advances, and was very conscientious. Her complexion was unblemished ivory, and her hair was flame.
I never engineered the right moment socially, and left it to chance, which arrived one blustery evening when Isabel paired us for fluency practice (these the stupendous edicts of fate). That threw us together in a stutter of conversation, mine the part of an Anglo-Spaniard, and both with a great capacity for lung cancer—
‘Buenas tardes, señorita. ¿Habla Vd. español?
‘No muy bien, señor…señor….’
‘The name’s Bruce.’
‘¡Español!’ (a shrieking McFadden).
‘Perdón. Me llamo Bruce. ¿Cómo se llama?’
‘Me llamo Marisa.’
‘Marisa. ¿Y de dónde eres?’
‘Soy de west London, Bruce.’
‘As I am too.’
‘¡Bruce!’
‘Perdón, Isabel. ¿Vd. fuma, Marisa?’
‘Con mucho gusto. Vd. es muy amable. ¿Es un cigarrillo español, no?’
‘Ah no, Marisa, es un cigarrillo francés. Gauloises. Have one.’
‘Con mucho gusto. Un millón de gracias.’
‘De nada.’
Getting to know her via café Spanish and the chalk blue crush pack of French cigarettes I carried I didn’t put much faith in, and so, on a wet November night I drove her to the room she’d got (East Acton), hoping she’d invite me in. The house was a mid-terrace, in painted brick, with peeling fascia, and rotten soffits. Its number was an elegant 32, wrought in English iron and spotted with rust. She shared the house with two others – a tall leggy blonde her own age, who went to secretarial college, and an older man who serviced computers. I assumed his was the large powerful bike under a rain sheet parked under Marisa’s window, but I was wrong about that. This was not a point I appreciated until after the fogs of winter, and an April downpour ushered in the spring – all too belatedly in my view. Then she did invite me in.
But that was only to look at some documents she didn’t know what to do with.
Chapter Three
Unlike me – moneyed and glad to be off-campus – Marisa wore the garb of student pauperdom with mystical relish, which I never understood. This was her gap year, she said, deciding then un-deciding on a degree, an elastic stretching to two, then three years, until finally education was not an option, as that was an obstacle to other plans. Her subjects were French, English and history, clues I’d seen in the books that littered her room – the room dominated by its bed, a king size. The floor space flanking three of its sides was only just broad enough to walk all round. We sat in the tiny kitchen, Marisa with a mug of coffee she was careful spooning honey into, me with my caffeine plain (this I tipped down the sink the instant she left the room). Signs of her two house mates were the hum of a hi-fi overhead, and a torrent of bathwater filling the tub.
The documents she wanted me to look at were to do with probate and a property about to be hers, her grandmother having died and left it in her will. I looked them over and told her all she had to do was wait. I looked up as I folded them away, and saw in her eyes a cold intensity I hadn’t noticed before. Then indiscreetly I asked intrigued questions, wanting to know where this property was exactly. Her answer was blunt silence. Then as time was getting on I searched my pockets for keys. She led me to the front door and hung on the latch as I stepped across the mat. I cast eyes on that antlered machine under cover outside her room, and asked if she’d ever thought to have its owner move it, as it blocked the view from her window – pleasant if unspectacular. There was a small muddy lawn, a privet hedge, a half-dozen decorative paving slabs.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘I am the owner.’
‘Oh.’
In the next few weeks I missed Isabel’s class, with a virus – it spread its flames upwards into my throat – and stayed out of the office, where Bruce Senior (patient and endlessly diplomatic) had made plans for my nameplate, on a newly varnished door. Letterheads and calling cards I had in abundance. When I came back to my Tuesday class I was surprised at the burst of applause I was greeted with.
Marisa had dyed and straightened her hair, through several shades of henna, and was tanned and auburn. She was slimmer, through a regime insisting on a chicken breast one day, a melon the next, and so on. She’d somehow overcome the limitations of her floor space, and had reopened her wardrobes. The long, loose-fitting skirts and cable-knit cardigans I knew from winter were exchanged for blue denims and a tee shirt.
Unobtainable as she was, she seemed pleased to see me. ‘Bruce! You’re back!’
I explained I’d been busy with work. ‘Contamos el dinero. It’s company year-end.’
Things arcane in corporate finance to her were a waste of human ingenuity. She eyed me, with a grain of pity. I tried to get her to meet me, but she too was busy. She was packing up for the move from East Acton to the house in Ealing Common her grandmother had left her. I offered to help, but that wasn’t necessary. A string of ex-boyfriends had formed queues, with trucks, transits and camper vans. Later, I got a call at the office, midway through her caravan east to west, with a plea for help.
‘Can’t think of anyone else,’ she said. She’d unveiled her bike, but couldn’t get it started, and now that her things were in Ealing she was stuck. I cancelled meetings and found a mechanic, and followed him through the back streets to Marisa’s tiny garden plot, where I watched him chirpily lather himself in grease, as he coaxed a first oily bloom of smoke from her exhaust.
Chapter Four
I never understood why she was so gloomy, at least when she hung around with me, that mood at its depth when we went to her house, a place I was more attracted to than she seemed to be. There was a lost grandeur in its gables.
‘Why Aspires?’ I said, puzzled at the nameplate.
The answer wasn’t simple. Her grandmother, widowed young, reverted to her maiden name, and calling herself Miss Paterson chose to live alone. She claimed a distant connection with the Beaverbrook name, with Lord Beaverbrook sixteen years older. She survived him by a decade, into 1974, with Marisa not yet twenty. Max Aitken, or Lord Beaverbrook, the inspiration for Marisa’s new escutcheon, was the dead embodiment of its inscription, when Grandmother Paterson saw in that name fibre her son-in-law lacked. Her son-in-law was Martin Rae. To put it another way, Martin had witnessed that un-merry widow rattling round in a large unheated house, which now that she’d gone had skipped a generation.
I saw the handful of photographs of Martin’s abrupt metamorphosis, a youngish man shocked to the grey of his temples, a change taking place over the ten days of his honeymoon. In an album starting at a decades-old September, Marisa easily picked out her mother, yet identified her father more by his suit than his raven hair. By June that same two-piece had shiny lapels and was baggy at the knees – two emblems that quickly became perennial – with its wearer seedy, defeated, and prematurely middle-aged. A first marital crisis was postponed, when vows were renewed in a hotel in Boston Spa – this only the third anniversary of Rae and his spouse’s union. Martin had renounced, he said, the last of his indiscretions, and was ready for married life. The point was agreed contractually. Marisa, an infant at that time, did not travel with them – though nor did she stay with her grandma.
Unhappily for Rae, it still meant a return to the grammar school he taught at, whose jaded traditions he’d been complicit in for too long, and conceits he abhorred – a philosophical position that if we believe his outpourings was as much to do with personal discontent as genuine social conscience. His subject was English, whose literature he’d loved as an undergraduate, but since had systematically learned to hate, a small insight his wife could not have possessed, perplexed as she was at the lowbrow detective yarns he packed with their bags for the journey home. After this came another liaison – less protracted but messier than usual – which despite his contract obligations, or perhaps because of them, was one he willed his wife to discover. This time it involved long-distance assignations with a gym mistress teaching in Dudley. Chance had thrown her in his way at an annual congress, when two nights of conquest prompted her to write him sloppy postcards every day for a fortnight. The thing fizzled out, and anyway by now the family thought it must act. Grandma Paterson left her house in Ealing Common, having converted it to flats, and retired to something smaller in Surrey. She sensed his disaffection, and took him aside, asking him to manage both the property and its tenants, with the promise of bigger projects if he made a go of it.
