The Favour

'Absorbing, intelligent and atmospheric ... a razor-sharp twist. Genius' Elizabeth Haynes

Laura Vaughan

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781838952044
• eBook ISBN: 9781838952037
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

' Absorbing, intelligent and atmospheric... Genius' Elizabeth Haynes
_________________________ Fortune favours the fraud... When she was thirteen years old, Ada Howell lost not just her father, but the life she felt she was destined to lead. Now, at eighteen, Ada is given a second chance when her wealthy godmother gifts her with an extravagant art history trip to Italy. In the palazzos of Venice, the cathedrals of Florence and the villas of Rome, she finally finds herself among the kind of people she aspires to be: sophisticated, cultured, privileged. Ada does everything in her power to prove she is one of them. And when a member of the group dies in suspicious circumstances, she seizes the opportunity to permanently bind herself to this gilded set. But everything hidden must eventually surface, and when it does, Ada discovers she's been keeping a far darker secret than she could ever have imagined... ' Intelligent, elegant and immersive' Claire Kendal ' A compulsive story, written with steely intelligence and wicked prose' Elizabeth Buchan

PART ONE

Trompe l’Oeil

CHAPTER ONE

Inevitably, I blame my mother.

I am aware that this is unreasonable of me. Perhaps entirely so. But when all’s said and done, things would have turned out differently if she hadn’t sold the house.

Garreg Las was what people generally think of as a ‘country house’. While very far from being a stately home, it was still large and dignified enough to be the seat of landed gentry, which is what my father’s family had always been. Our particular branch – the Howells – hailed from an overlooked corner of Carmarthenshire. It was there, in 1807, that my great-great-great-grandfather Edwin built the house. His design was almost aggressively plain. The roughcast façade didn’t boast so much as a pair of pillars, let alone a portico. Yet the entrance hall, with its sweeping staircase and arcaded gallery, was pared-down classical perfection. The cornicing was delicately moulded, the windows tall, the rooms brimming with pale light.

‘It’s rather awful to admit,’ I heard my mother saying on the phone to one of her friends, ‘but I never liked the house. With Anthony gone, it’s even more of a millstone.’

I was thirteen years old at the time and my father had only been dead three weeks. But even before his diagnosis, and the cancer’s ferociously swift assault, the house had always seemed an extension of his best self. Although my father was gone, the spirit of the place did not leave with him. It lived and breathed within our walls.

If one was going to be unkind, one could say that both the house and my father had seen better days. Once a well-regarded novelist, Daddy’s career had petered away into self-published volumes of unintelligible poetry. Garreg Las, too, was not what it was. A lot of the rooms didn’t have quite enough furniture, their walls sporting sad bleached squares where paintings had once hung. The roofs were a catalogue of leaking valleys and blocked drains. There was a perpetual chill, even in summer, and the bathwater was never more than lukewarm.

Those memories are distant. I have others which carry with them the sheen of a fairy tale. I remember the mossy smell of apples softening on the larder’s shelves. The faded gold of the drawing room walls, the same colour as the roses that foamed by the rotting entrance gates. And the narrow valley in which the house lay, its hills as rain-sodden as the sky and the heavy yet tender colour of a bruise.

I accept that my mother may have seen things differently.

My mother had been a self-avowed city girl the moment she escaped her provincial Midlands town for university in London, and then a job as a publisher’s PA. That’s how she met my father. Our move to the country was meant to be a temporary break, intended to cure Daddy of a bout of writer’s block. But although the block came and went, the three of us stayed put – in a valley that seemed to spend three-quarters of the year under cloud. My parents’ circle was chiefly composed of the old county set Daddy had grown up with and a handful of raddled hippies.

Meanwhile, I went to the village primary along with the local farmers’ kids, who, though they quaintly referred to Garreg Las as ‘the Big House’, rather pitied me for the lack of hay bales and quad bikes in my life. Other gatherings involved the children of my father’s own childhood friends. They too grew up in large draughty houses with shabby portraits on the walls and damp stains on the ceilings – yet by the age of eleven, vast sums of money were mysteriously found to send them away to public school. By contrast, I was sent to the only independent college in the area, a cheerful but rackety establishment under constant threat of closure. I was dimly aware that this, together with my lack of trust fund or wealthy older relation, was a source of parental concern. But then Daddy fell ill, and everything changed.

‘Garreg Las’s always been too big for us, darling,’ was how my mother broke the news. ‘And it eats money. If we try and stay the house will literally fall apart around us. That’s why we need to pass it on to people who can give it the care it needs.’

The estate agent sucked his teeth as he was shown around and looked doubtful. ‘Big old houses like these … there’s not much call for them round here. Nowadays, people want the mod cons. Shame you aren’t any closer to the motorway. And just the garden, you say? No real land?’

Hearing this, a rush of hope scalded my heart. Perhaps the house would never sell. However, against the odds, Garreg Las was snapped up by a Manchester businessman with Welsh roots, whose younger wife ‘fell in love with the place’. There was an illustrated feature about them in the local paper once they’d finished their renovations. One of our old neighbours sent it to us, perhaps to commiserate, or else out of some private spite:

The substantial 6,000 square foot country home now oozes period elegance, combined with modern additions all done to the highest of standards.

‘Oh, it was a real wreck when we bought it,’ laughs Tania Price, the glamorous new lady of the manor. ‘The fittings were hopelessly dated, and nothing worked. All our friends thought we were crazy! But I saw the potential straight away.’

The old stables now contained a hot-tub and gym. There were gold taps in the bathrooms and feature walls papered in whimsical designs of palm trees and pagodas. The final photo showed one of the Prices’ lumpish teenage daughters posing on the stairs in a fish-tail sequinned ball-gown. When I saw this, I cried so hard I was sick.

Should it have made a difference that Daddy was not my biological parent? I suspect my mother thought so. There were times when I sensed the words coiling in her mouth: He was not your real father. And it was his family home, not ours. She never said them out loud, though. I’ll give her that.

I was conceived during one of my mother’s rare visits home, when she ran into an old schoolmate in her parents’ local. Two weeks later he was killed in a car accident. I was a year old when my parents met; Daddy always said he didn’t know which of the two of us he fell in love with first. He was close to fifty at the time and had assumed he would be childless.

I can’t remember a time when I was not vaguely aware of the facts of my birth, so my mother must have followed the conventional wisdom to be open about such matters from the start. The couple of photos she provided showed a blandly cheerful twenty-something with sandy hair and broad shoulders. Tim Franks, I was told, had been sporty at school. Good at maths. He became the manager of a regional sales office. His parents and younger sister had emigrated to Australia; he enjoyed Korean food and Formula One. But my mother’s efforts were tepid at best; I could tell that the man was essentially forgettable. That made it easy for me, too, to shrug off the idea of him.

I only remember one conversation with Daddy about this. It was some weeks before his diagnosis; though he was already ill, we didn’t yet know how badly. I was helping him to clean the frame of one of the portraits. It was of great-great-great-aunt Laetitia, young and roguish in pink satin. She had always been a favourite of mine, partly because the painting was overlaid by an ironic melancholy: poor, beautiful Laetitia had died of TB two weeks after her wedding day. ‘Do you think I look like her?’ I had asked.

‘I think you do,’ Daddy replied gravely. ‘It’s in the eyes. You have the Howell eyes.’

‘But how can I? If I’m … if I’m not really a Howell?’

Everyone in Wales, and therefore everyone we knew, assumed I was Daddy’s biological child. Nobody ever said anything to correct this. I think this was the first time I openly acknowledged it myself.

Daddy looked surprised. ‘Of course you’re a Howell. The last of a long line of ’em.’

I nodded. I knew the stories: our branch of the Howells could be traced back to the ninth century and a Welsh prince named Rhydian.

My father must have guessed something more needed to be said. ‘You think there haven’t been love-children or foundlings before? Every family has its share, if you look hard enough. That’s because a so-called family line is actually a series of links. Think of a long chain of different metals, forged together. It’s the variation that makes it beautiful. Strong.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I might not have made you, Ada, but I chose you. You’re my legacy, cariad.’

The Welsh endearment sounded odd in his public school tones. I think Daddy must have guessed he was dying. Perhaps he was convincing himself as much as me. Perhaps he sensed that his books and his poems were not enough, that any kind of heir was better than none. But he loved me. Of that I was sure. He gave me his name. He left us his house.

The house was proof of everything.

The sale of my father’s ancestral home and the auction of most of its contents bought us a three-bedroom Edwardian terrace house in Brockley, London. It had an Ikea kitchen, waxed pine floors and a small garden bright with geraniums. At least the portraits came with us. Aunt Laetitia, of course. Uncle Jacob, the East India Company colonel. Grandfather Edwin, who had built the house. But I could tell my mother was embarrassed by her dead husband’s entourage of ancestors. All those cracked faces and dusty smiles.

Although Daddy’s family might not have changed history (no great rebels or reformers or potentates), his ancestors were still a visible part of it. You could pin their individual stories next to the timeline of the national one, and the symbiosis was plain to see. They were people who had always had a tangible stake in the world. Without Daddy, and far from everything he loved, how was I to find mine?

The few bits of furniture we’d kept looked as cramped by the new house as I felt. I stood in the boxy living room, listening to the traffic grind up and down the high street at the end of our road, and assured myself that this exile was temporary. I did not belong here. This was not my life.

For good or ill, our lost house was no longer just the stand-in for what I loved and remembered about my father. It had become the talisman for everything I wanted to be. Austere, yet romantic. Picturesque. Patrician.

Mine is a familiar story, I suppose. The lonely outsider who craves the status and glamour of a privileged elite. But, so I told myself, my trajectory was different. I wasn’t trying to break in, you see. I was trying to get back.

I really believed that.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I’m having trouble with the meaning of three words: lie, deceive, mislead. They seem to mean something similar, but not exactly the same. Can you help me to sort them out from each other?’

To study English Literature at Oxford, at the same college as my father, had gradually supplanted my impossible ambition to reclaim Garreg Las. Various teachers had remarked on my facility with words; I had begun to hope I might even share Daddy’s gift for storytelling.

And like hundreds, thousands, of misty-eyed hopefuls before me, I was convinced that Oxford’s hallowed ground would provide both rescue and reinvention.

Until I faced the three little words that struck my dream dead.

Lie. Deceive. Mislead.

I was moderately happy with my performance in the first interview and my analysis of a poem that I guessed, correctly, to be a Seamus Heaney. In fact, when I took my seat before the second panel, I thought I was on my game. I knew the point of these so-called ‘trick questions’ was to show that you were capable of thinking creatively, and on your feet. E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Part One: Trompe l’Oeil
• Part Two: I Trionfi
• Part Three: Pentimento
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements