Mr Magenta

By Christopher Bowden

Stephen Marling thought he knew his aunt Flora. But when he inherits her house in a quiet south London square a series of discoveries among her papers brings to light another person entirely. Who, for example, is ‘Mr Magenta’ and what part did he play in her life?
In the process of uncovering the secrets of one life, Stephen is forced to re-evaluate his own and decide what he really wants. Was he right to turn his back on Nancy Steiner, the young actress he met in New York, when he came home to take up his inheritance?
Interweaving past and present, the story takes him from a Brooklyn bookshop to a theatre in Marseille to a cottage on the east coast of England where the truth about Mr Magenta is finally revealed.
Delicately crafted noir fiction at its best.
“A very original writer.”
Charles Harris, best-selling author of Room 15

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amolibros
• Release date: Oct 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781912335329

Book preview

About This Book

Stephen Marling thought he knew his aunt Flora. But when he inherits her house in a quiet south London square a series of discoveries among her papers brings to light another person entirely. Who, for example, is ‘Mr Magenta’ and what part did he play in her life?

In the process of uncovering the secrets of one life, Stephen is forced to re-evaluate his own and decide what he really wants. Was he right to turn his back on Nancy Steiner, the young actress he met in New York, when he came home to take up his inheritance?

Interweaving past and present, the story takes him from a Brooklyn bookshop to a theatre in Marseille to a cottage on the east coast of England where the truth about Mr Magenta is finally revealed.

Table of Contents

Notices

About This Book

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

Chapter Twenty-five

Also by Christopher Bowden

About The Author

She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,

Feed on her damask cheek: she pin’d in thought,

And with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance;

pray you, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Chapter One

Paxton Square seems a quiet place, set in a secluded spot away from busy roads and the prying eyes of passers-by. A place in which nothing much will happen. A haven of peace and tranquillity, an estate agent might say, given half a chance. But no property has come on the market for many years and the residents have no plans to change the position. Fittingly, perhaps, the square is a cul-de-sac; there is no way out except by turning round and going back to the narrow entrance and working through the maze of streets beyond.

The term ‘square’ is a misnomer, if taken to suggest the shape of the space. It is not square or even rectangular but an elongated horseshoe, curving gently round the communal garden in the middle. The houses themselves are large and semi-detached, bays and balconies and elaborate details playing against the weathered yellow brick, with steps up to the front doors and down to the basements below.

Stephen Marling stood at the first-floor window of number twelve looking towards the garden’s tall chestnuts, their white flowers tinged pink by the setting sun. At one end, a woman with a trug snipped blossom from the lower branches of a lilac while a pair of pugs snuffled through the bluebells and the last lingering daffodils of the year. She turned and gave him a frantic wave, as if she had just caught sight of a long-lost friend on a crowded station platform. He recognised Audrey Butters from number five and raised a hand.

They had been kind to him, welcoming, the residents of this south London square, when he moved into number twelve a few weeks ago. Cakes appeared, bottles of wine, homemade lasagne. A tribute, he knew, to the memory of his aunt. She had lived here for forty years until her death on Bonfire Night at the age of seventy-nine. Her name was Florence, known as Flora. She had left house and contents to him, apart from some specified items that went to his father, her younger brother Henry. She had no children of her own.

Much as Stephen missed his aunt, he had to admit that the inheritance was timely. A chance to take stock in familiar surroundings after he had thrown in his job in New York – and the relationship with Nancy Steiner that had become suffocating in its intensity, threatening to overwhelm him.

Did he really need a five-bedroom house to himself, a single man in his mid-thirties? He knew that contemporaries – school, university – were struggling to buy anywhere at all. But the idea of selling a place he had known all his life was unthinkable. It offered continuity, a comfort-blanket, a cocoon, while he pondered, at leisure, what he wanted to do. And it helped that Flora had also left him a substantial sum of money.

Without his aunt – he could barely remember his uncle, Clive – the house felt empty. Yet it was crammed with her possessions, a constant and tangible reminder of her presence and personality. What to do with them? What to keep and what to let go? Disposing of her things felt like a betrayal but he could not let them take over, smother his own taste and personality.

You’ve got to be practical, Stephen, his mother said when they came up from Kent to collect the ‘specified items’. It’s not a museum. And they did take away a substantial quantity of clothing, mostly Flora’s, some that must have been Clive’s. Laid in their hangers on the back seat, almost like a shroud, or stuffed unceremoniously into bin bags and pushed into the boot.

Not the kimono! He wrenched it from his mother’s arms on the landing at the top of the stairs. An elaborate design of pale cream and burnt orange, sugar pink and deep purple: chrysanthemums, irises, cherry blossom and other flowers he could not identify. Flora had worn the kimono around the house well into old age. It brought back memories of the time they had spent together over the years, summed her up somehow. But what on earth are you going to do with it? Put it back in the wardrobe where they found it, for the time being.

So it would be a gradual process of adjustment, making number twelve less the house he had inherited and more a home of his own. There was no rush and plenty of space to accommodate many boxes pending longer-term decisions. Once he had sorted out the house, he told himself, got things as he wanted, with all his books unpacked and in their right places, he would pause and devote himself for a while to living a life of the mind. By this he meant not so much a life of the intellect as of the imagination, pursued through reading. Specifically, fiction, where anything is possible.

*

After two hours of going through the contents of his aunt’s walnut davenport one morning Stephen needed a break and a change of scene. Wednesday, was it? Thursday? It hardly mattered. He took a turn round the square trying to remember the names of those who lived where. The Mandibles, or some such, at number two. Lady Something at number nine. And, next to her, Ron Parody.

In honour of his late wife, Ron conducted the finale of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, the ‘Ode to Joy’, from his balcony on the first Sunday of the month. Seven pm sharp (weather permitting). Just him and his CD player, the music washing into the square and the houses around. It had become a small institution, treated with indulgence and pride by the other residents, though Stephen was already feeling the novelty wearing off.

Outside number fourteen, he was hailed by the redoubtable Miss Bugle, only a little less brassy than her name suggested. She sounded like a pantomime dame, with slight undertones of Cockney. In front of her, a West Highland terrier with a tartan collar. She called it Scotty, as if to resolve any lingering doubt about the animal’s Caledonian credentials. And some steps behind, her companion, Miss Wilting, looking as faded and careworn as ever. Stephen had never heard her speak.

He made for a bench in the communal garden. It was not one of those gardens in London squares surrounded by railings with entry through a locked gate to which only residents had a key. Anyone could amble in at any time and they often did, even though the houses had generous gardens of their own. It functioned as an informal meeting place and was in the care of self-styled Garden Master Walter Butters, husband of Audrey.

The garden of number twelve was one of the larger ones. It was beginning to worry Stephen. The crispness and clarity of early spring was already softened by rapidly advancing growth as bare earth vanished and trees burst into leaf. Like the house itself, the garden reflected his aunt’s approach, almost as if she had never left.

It’s a fine line between naturalism and mess, she said. That was the trouble. It was a lot of work. He had cut the grass with the mower he had found in the shed and dead-headed the daffodils – but that was all. In her later years, Aunt Flora had had a gardener to help. He could do the same but first, he felt, he needed to understand the garden, to wait and see it through one annual cycle at least. If only he knew what everything was. Did she have a plan?

The davenport cache included photographs, some in albums, many loose. One drawer comprised pictures only of Stephen himself, arranged in date order from babyhood to his last visit to London before he returned for good. He was touched; he had no idea she had them. Odd to see, to hold, this unexpected summary of his own life. The set pieces – in school uniform; wearing cap and gown – stiff and formal and the looser, more relaxed snaps of baby on rug, toddler on slide, boy up a tree, on the beach, behind a mound of candy floss. And one of him years taken ago on the steps of number twelve, affecting a proprietary air that seemed distressingly prescient now. What the future held was another matter.

Photographs of his parents absurdly young, his father when he was even younger, someone he assumed was Uncle Clive. He had yet to find any pictures of Clive’s wedding to Flora but here was one… . Good God, it can’t be. It was. Written on the back: ‘Me. 1967.’ Flora in her twenties in the shortest of miniskirts and a ridiculous floppy hat. How easy it was to forget that people now considered old had been young once. He’d like to have met her then. By some twist, he held next a photograph of her taken fifty years later in the garden of number twelve. A sobering juxtaposition but, if Flora had diminished in form over the years, she had lost nothing in spirit, as far as he could see, and that twinkle in the eye brought her right back.

He had known her all his life. She had always been there, here, in this house. A fixed point like a familiar landmark. He supposed he had realised she was getting older, frailer, but she had seemed indestructible, even on that final visit in the summer, barely nine months ago. He wondered now if she had realised, as they said goodbye, that it was the last time they would see each other. It hadn’t occurred to him – she didn’t make a fuss, of course – and when the news came the sadness was compounded by guilt, a feeling that he should have done more, said more, asked more.

He leafed half-heartedly through the rest of the photographs and decided to leave them where they were. Among the many people he could not identify, one or two recurred with some frequency. Maybe his parents could help. One oddity, though, was the envelope he had found in a compartment hidden under a small lid at the top of the davenport, just above the writing slope. It was a plain buff envelope, a little larger than a postcard. He tipped out pieces of a colour photograph that had been torn up. Why tear up a photograph and keep the bits? He took them to the table in the kitchen and tried to put them together. Easier than a jigsaw, surely.

There turned out to be four photographs but each one was incomplete. They all showed legs and torso but had nothing above. Four headless men. At least, they looked like men but whether four different men or one decapitated four times he could not decide. He went back to