A Coat of Varnish (31 page)

‘Nonsense, love. Sheer nonsense. Just luck.’ She was silent for an instant, then said, struggling out with a confession: ‘I’ve never had much of what I want, either.’

‘I think I’d guessed that.’

She hesitated again. ‘I don’t like being disloyal to him. Even now,’ she said. ‘But you have to understand, that’s the first thing. I never really got on with him, ever. Even in ways I ought to have coped with. You’d have thought I was practical, wouldn’t you? I wasn’t really. When I was a girl, I had all sorts of dreams.’

Humphrey was thinking again of Alec Luria’s lucubrations, and advice. Humphrey was also thinking that Alec Luria ought to be listening. Kate continued: ‘You know he’s always taking care of his health?’

Humphrey laughed out loud.

‘Well,’ said Kate, ‘four or five years ago – I was thirty-five or so – he talked to me very seriously. He was concerned about his blood pressure. He had seen his doctor. His blood pressure had to be kept down. Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do his thinking. Otherwise his life might be shortened. So he had to ask me, did I mind if we gave up intercourse?’

Humphrey was sure that that was the actual word Monty had used.

‘Not that there had ever been much of it.’

‘What did you say?’ Humphrey asked, offhand, gentle.

‘Oh, I agreed. I took it. I thought I had to take anything. It wasn’t altogether easy. I’m not cold. As you may just possibly have discovered.’

She chortled, so did he, with satisfaction, maybe desire.

Soon they could return to bed. They had had no real clarification. She had tried to explain, but what did she mean? There were promises away in the future. But they had confidence in each other, much more than that, a kind of unanxious delight, as though, just for once, the present was good enough.

They were tired of explanations, as a couple could be after a quarrel, though there had been none. It was then, absently, as though for casual relief, that Humphrey brought in Susan’s name. He had for a long time trusted Kate as an ally, and now that trust was absolute. He was telling everything that was known or suspected of Susan’s doings on the Saturday night.

‘This is rather a facer, isn’t it?’ she said, eyes acute, head nodding.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you really believe it was Susan? Knocking about outside?’

‘You know her miles better than I do. What do you think?’

She pressed him about the Loseby story. There was no getting away from it, he said, Loseby had spent all that evening and the small hours and probably the next day with the unfortunate Gimson. Loseby wasn’t innocent of much on this earth, but he was certainly innocent of being with his grandmother that night.

‘I wasn’t brought up to these goings-on,’ Kate said, remembering her father, a steady conventional soldier. What would he have thought of Loseby?

‘Loseby’s a free soul. You and I are mildly constrained. You don’t often meet a free soul, even now.’

‘If that’s a free soul, Lord deliver me from them.’

With Loseby disposed of, where had Susan been? On the Monday, she had been with Loseby concocting an account of the Saturday night, the two of them together, later described to the police, as Humphrey had been told, with uninhibited thoroughness. Humphrey, not especially given to sexual outspokenness, nevertheless gave a few details. Kate guffawed.

‘What a girl,’ she said. But where had Susan really been on the Saturday? And why after all this had Loseby married her? Neither he nor Kate could understand how she had finally landed him.

‘She’s a resourceful creature,’ said Kate. ‘She’s not her father’s daughter for nothing.’

‘That doesn’t get us any distance, does it?’

She asked sharply, intimately, half-accusingly: ‘Why are you so interested in her?’

He answered, also straightforward: ‘You know Frank Briers is a friend of mine? I wouldn’t mind saving him some trouble if I can.’

‘Do you really like him?’

‘Very much.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s as honourable as you are, which is saying something. He’s doing a job. On the whole, I prefer people who are doing a job.’

‘He struck me as pretty hard.’

‘No harder than the rest of us have to be, in order to get along.’

She didn’t often run against Humphrey’s dark stoicism, but she was glad that he wasn’t uniformly gentle, all the way down.

‘Well, have it your own way,’ she said, though not conceding about Frank Briers. After a moment she said: ‘Look, you can talk to Paul Mason, can’t you?’ He acquiesced.

‘He might be able to give you some light on Susan. If that’s what you want.’

Humphrey explained the practical point, whether she could be eliminated as a suspect. Loseby now was; her father was.

‘Whether Paul could have anything useful to tell you, I can’t say.’

‘Why ever should he?’

‘Come on, you’re supposed to be perceptive, aren’t you? Haven’t you noticed that she was running after Paul, when Loseby seemed to be cooling off. On the rebound. Or she may have fancied Paul. He’d be a better bet than Loseby, for my money. Anyway, he could have picked up something.’

She smiled, and began to stretch herself.

‘But whether you ought to be doing this at all, I’m not too sure. If you must, you must. But I am sure that we have had enough of it for just now, haven’t we?’

This wasn’t tender-hearted, as Frank’s wife might have been. She was thinking only of him. She didn’t want him to regress to anything like his old underground existence. He was so different when he was breaking free. That night, looking at him with expectancy, she was wishing that she could have known him when he was young.

It was pleasant, Humphrey was thinking, to take the advice of a woman one was fond of, particularly if the advice was likely to be sensible. Thus Humphrey invited Paul Mason to have dinner with him. Humphrey said that they might as well go to Brooks’, the one club he kept up. Though young men hadn’t much use for clubs by this time, Paul in his job had to co-exist with a more old-fashioned life, and Brooks’ seemed an appropriate background for him. It was a mild November night, windless and misty, soothing to the senses. Humphrey decided that he would walk across the park.

Not that his senses needed soothing. Exactly as though he were a younger man, he was high-spirited because a love affair had begun, really begun. It was absurd, for one who so distrusted his own fortune, but he found himself looking passers-by in the face, and thinking they were dumb beasts and didn’t get much fun. He was looking forward to his evening. In his rational fashion, Paul was the most intelligent of company. He might provide a piece of information. It had been a good idea.

That was the tone, cheerful, interested, uninvolved, in which they began. They were sitting in the bar downstairs. There were only a few men around and they were comfortably private in a corner seat. Paul was satisfying his curiosity about Humphrey’s family. How many generations had been members of this club? Humphrey said, his father certainly, his grandfather certainly, his great-grandfather certainly – maybe one more, but that wasn’t sure. Humphrey expatiated, sounding sarcastic to conceal his secretive pride. They were really modest country gentlemen. They never did much. The grandfather did get a job in Gladstone’s last government. They never made much money. The curious thing was, they were Whigs. Their kind were almost always Tories, and if they had a London club went across the road. (He meant White’s.) Why the Leighs were Whigs no one ever knew. Just perversity. The real Whig grandees were immense landowners. They lost fortunes at the tables upstairs. The Leighs were very small beer. None of them would have ever been asked to Devonshire House, nothing like grand enough, or Holland House, nothing like clever enough. ‘It isn’t a very creditable record,’ said Humphrey. ‘Considering that they started with certain advantages. As you see with me.’

Paul was entirely capable of playing this game. ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘that the poor old Masons might have been slightly superior servants in some of the poor old Leigh houses. They came from the Norfolk land. The first to emerge from outer darkness seems to have been my grandfather. Somehow, God knows how, he managed to make himself into a country lawyer. It may not have been so difficult, if you had a knack for passing examinations, which the Masons haven’t been so bad at. He built up a practice as a provincial attorney. In Norwich. He made a surprising amount of money. Then came my father. Process repeated on a more lavish scale. He made a much more surprising amount of money. The rest you know.’

Being English, they took a pleasure in these exchanges which might have mystified others. They both liked hard liquor, and Humphrey fetched their third drink. There was nothing much in the news that day, said Paul, who by profession and by private preoccupation studied the European and American Press each morning. Things were going roughly according to expectations. It didn’t mean that they were going well, he added.

Humphrey said: ‘A bit more criticism of the police, I noticed. About that murder of ours.’

‘Yes?’ Paul’s voice was uninflected.

‘I bet they’re being pretty thorough.’

‘I suppose you know.’

‘I fancy they’re getting some of the answers.’

‘Should you say so?’

Paul’s voice had now gone brittle-hard, more so than Humphrey realised until some moments later.

‘Paul,’ Humphrey went on, ‘I wonder if you can tell me one or two things about Susan. You know Susan?’

‘Yes, I know Susan.’

‘You might be able to tell me one or two things.’

‘Why do you think I can?’

‘You said you knew her.’

‘Why in Christ’s name do you think I should?’ Paul said that in dead quiet, but with violence.

‘She’s produced some stories which contradict each other, and it’s bad for her if they’re not cleared up.’

For minutes past, Humphrey had been mishandling the talk. He had been slow to detect the young man’s tone. Now that it was too late, he was suddenly attacked by a wave of bitter temper.

‘When I accepted your hospitality,’ Paul said with frigid formality, ‘I didn’t think I was being invited for the sake of evidence. I have none to give you. As I take it that exhausts my value, I can see that I have outstayed my welcome.’

It was curiously elaborate, almost like bad theatre, for someone who was such an easy talker. Humphrey said: ‘I’m very sorry. I wouldn’t have had this happen…’ and went on, using any sort of speech to keep the young man from walking out. Humphrey was thinking of something silly, a relic from the days when he played games. It was a piece of games players’ folk-wisdom that men in crises divided into two classes, those who went red and those who went white. It was the latter you relied on when things were tight. In the last moments, Paul’s face, which never had much colour, had gone corpse-pale.

It was a foolish thought; but also Humphrey was thinking that this was a strange kind of anger. It didn’t need saying, a trigger had been touched, but as to why, Humphrey was at a loss. Yet Paul, as a rule abnormally controlled, had thrown civility or even common good nature right away.

Humphrey took him in to dinner. By a principle of natural injustice, it was Humphrey who didn’t feel like eating. While Paul, with all the signs of good appetite, ordered a standard club dinner, smoked salmon, steak, and began methodically to eat. Humphrey consoled himself by starting on the bottle of claret.

Neutrally, without any introduction, Paul said: ‘What precisely are you interested in about Susan?’

‘No one knows where she was on the Saturday night. I mean, the night Lady Ashbrook was killed.’

‘I don’t know, either.’ Paul’s voice was distant, but civil enough. ‘I simply don’t know. You must have been told, I have been gone over two or three times myself, and I can’t prove a single thing. Actually I was in my own house. By myself. Doing nothing more remarkable than reading. Quite impossible to prove, for anyone under suspicion. But I have a faint idea that I’m not.’

‘No, I don’t believe you ever have been.’

‘No doubt you’d know.’ That was said distantly again but with a faint ironic edge. ‘The only thing I can remember about that whole damn night is that I rang Celia Hawthorne. That was after we split up, you know.’

He mentioned Celia with complete equanimity. Whatever or whoever was a forbidden subject, she wasn’t.

Plates cleared, Paul was gazing down at the table, brow furrowed. Then he stared across at Humphrey.

‘I am prepared to tell you one simple fact about Susan. I did see her the following day, the Sunday.’ He was talking with the care and accuracy of a high official. ‘I am prepared to tell you that, to the best of my judgment, she hadn’t any knowledge that Lady Ashbrook had been murdered. Again to the best of my judgment, she didn’t know anything of it, until I did, on the Monday morning.’

‘It is pretty well established that she met Lancelot Loseby that Monday afternoon.’

‘Perhaps that was when she would have heard of the murder.’

‘That was when she concocted one of her stories about the Saturday night. Entirely fabricated. Maybe you’ve noticed, but the young woman doesn’t suffer from certain bourgeois frailties, such as a slavish addiction to the truth.’

That was a deliberate attempt to touch the trigger, but Paul gave merely the impersonation of a smile. Humphrey tried another flick: ‘Where did you see her on the Sunday?’

‘Nowhere particular. It’s not material.’

Paul repeated that he had nothing more to say about Susan. Some while later, however, as he was eating some Stilton, he did remark, as though back to his normal gibing poise: ‘Since you’re so interested in the Thirkill family, you might like to know that I am working close to father Tom. Had you heard?’

No, Humphrey couldn’t have heard. It was one of the quasi-secret financial manoeuvres of that autumn. A Treasury team, reporting to Tom Thirkill, was negotiating in Washington, and Paul had been seconded to it from his bank. ‘The deal will happen all right,’ he said, with his natural calm authority, transformed from the blinding rage of not so long before. ‘It’ll keep us afloat for a while. Reasonable, as far as it goes. But it won’t go very far.’