A Man Over Forty (33 page)

‘I never saw my father again after we left Edinburgh,' said
Ricci. ‘He died in 1941 when I was in the army. I was in Tobruk when he died.'

He got up and refilled their glasses. ‘What the hell!' he said. ‘It's all ancient history, there's no need to go into mourning now.'

‘Is anyone beginning to feel hungry?' asked Myrtle.

‘There's no hurry,' said Ricci.

‘If you want lunch within the next hour, I'd better go and see to it myself.'

She went below, and Ricci said, ‘It's funny that neither of us ever liked your mother.'

‘She wasn't my mother.'

‘If we'd been fond of her – if you had been fond of her – you might never have discovered that.'

‘She would have had to tell me some time.'

‘Ay, maybe. But as things turned out, we forced her hand, so to speak.'

‘What did you do?'

‘We made up our minds to murder her,' said Ricci.

‘To murder his mother?'

‘It was boyish nonsense,' said Balintore with a loud and sudden irritation in his voice. ‘Adolescent nonsense – not vicious, not really wicked – but romantic. Romantic after a fashion.'

‘The inspiration,' said Ricci, ‘being Paymaster Commander Wilfred Patch, late of the Royal Navy. “The Commander,” your mother always called him. He became a friend of your family – of your father as well as your mother – after he retired from the navy and got a job with the Country Gentlemen's Association, selling cultivators and lawn-mowers and grass-seed mixtures at a discount to landed proprietors in East Lothian.'

‘I disliked him from my first sight of him,' said Balintore, ‘and he tried to make friends with me. He used to slip me half a crown – and I, God forgive me, used to take it.'

‘He gave me half a crown once,' said Ricci, ‘and told me the best steward they'd ever had aboard some bloody cruiser he was serving in, in the Mediterranean, was a man called Ricci. A Maltese. He wondered if he was a relation of mine.'

‘And after my father died – the man I'd been taught to call my father—'

‘He went to your house, and was seen at your house, more and more.'

‘And she told me one night, after I'd come home from school, she told me that he'd asked her to marry him – and because she was lonely, after my father's death—'

‘She hoped it would make you happier too! That's what she said, didn't she?'

‘She said it would bring happiness to both of us.'

‘And the next day you told me the whole story—'

‘And we decided,' said Balintore, ‘to kill her.'

‘Because what she suggested was an insult to your father,' said Ricci.

‘That's what we felt.'

‘But what did you do?' asked Palladis.

‘For about three weeks,' said Ricci, ‘we did nothing but talk. We talked and borrowed books from the Public Library: books on crime. And finally we decided that the best way to do her in was a way that had been used by a man called Smith, who used to murder his brides in the bath. Because Ned's mother—'

‘Call her Mrs Balintore – or Mrs Patch.'

‘– because she used to take her bath every day at half-past six in the evening, regular. And she'd lie in it for a full half-hour. So that was our opportunity. And the only obstacle, so far as we could see, was the bathroom door, which was closed by a wee bolt. And then Ned had a good idea.'

‘I thought it was yours?'

‘No, it was you who thought of chewing-gum. And it worked fine. I went home with you, about five o'clock, or maybe a bit later, and one or other of us chewed a stick of gum till it was soft, and filled the slot with it so that when it hardened the bolt couldn't go in. And then we waited. We waited till your mother went into the bathroom, and we heard her running the bath, and we waited another ten minutes, watching the time by the big grandfather's clock that stood in the hall. You remember the grandfather's clock? – And by that time we were so excited we might have been running the
Junior School Hundred Yards. We were both of us just about thirteen: the same age. But you said “It's our duty,” and I said “Out of respect for your father,” and we shook hands, down there in the hall, and ran up the stair, and with one shove on the bathroom door it flew wide open. And your mother sat up with a howl of wrath – the room was full of steam and smelling of some fancy scent – and we made a dive for her feet, for that was the plan we'd concocted.'

Palladis looked from one to the other with a slightly gaping incredulity, with an expression of close but strained attention; and Balintore, sipping his drink, stared over the rim of his glass with the glum indifference of an ill-made mask. But Ricci spoke with serious and lively recollection of an unforgettable scene.

‘But to drown a woman in her bath is more difficult than you might think,' he said. ‘Oh, much more difficult! Maybe it's easy enough if she's lying half asleep, and before she gets a guess at what you're up to, you snap up her ankles and pull her towards you till her head's under water; which is what we'd hoped and planned to do. But Mrs Balintore – she was a big woman, mind you! – she was sitting up in her bath, and when Ned and I made a dive for her feet, she kicked out like a breaking scrum with a loose ball in front of it, and Ned got a jolt on the chin that sent him flying, and I was near drowned with the water she threw up.

‘And the next thing we knew – she was a big woman, I said – there she was, striding across the floor, naked as the dawn and screaming like fury in that room full of steam, and Ned and me, half-soaked and half-stunned, running out and running down the stair like a couple of wee mice with a tomcat at their tails. And Ned slept in our house that night, above the shop in Queensferry Street, being feared to go home.'

‘I'm not surprised,' said Palladis.

‘It was my father who went and made peace between them,' said Ricci. ‘Or what could be regarded as peace, giving a liberal interpretation to the word. He'd a certain advantage, you see, being Italian. He'd a good command of the English language, for one thing, and he could talk about jealousy with
less restraint, and a deeper knowledge than a typical, well brought-up Edinburgh man would have considered decent. He persuaded Mrs Balintore that Ned's behaviour, bad as it was, was no more than could be expected from a boy so consumed by love of his mother that he couldna bear to see her bestow affection on anyone else: meaning, that is, Paymaster-Commander Patch. So she agreed to let Ned come home again, and promised not to punish him. But you could hardly say she kept her promise, could you?'

‘She took a fiendish revenge on me,' said Balintore. ‘She told me the truth. The truth about myself.'

‘Till then,' said Palladis, ‘you had never suspected—'

‘Till then,' said Balintore, ‘I had been brought up as the son of Professor and Mrs Balintore, with no suspicion that I had not been begotten in their legal bed; though I had always found it difficult to accept, still more to understand, my presumptive father's apparent affection for my presumptive mother. But now she told me I was an adopted child, a foundling taken in because they, being unable to beget or bear – I don't know which – had felt that a house without a child was almost as unnatural as a house without a cat and a dog. They had a white Persian, perpetually moulting, and an ill-tempered Border terrier to which she was devoted. So I had been acquired, as another household pet, and she had, she said, no intention of repudiating her responsibility for me. But what had become obvious, she told me, was that I had been born of low, debased, and probably criminal stock – otherwise my behaviour was incomprehensible – and I could no longer expect to be trusted or shown affection. A roof above my head, a sufficiency of clothes, and food on the table – that was all I could look forward to. And six months later she married “the Commander”, who made things worse by being sorry for me, and kind to me.'

‘There's no telling who a woman will marry if she gets the chance,' said Ricci, ‘but even she could surely have found something more attractive than him.'

Myrtle came up from the saloon to say, ‘Lunch is ready at last, and I hope you like fish. It's red mullet.'

There was little conversation over the luncheon table, and
thereafter they retired to their cabins to sleep for an hour or two. At about half-past four Myrtle and Palladis swam from the anchored yacht, and after they had climbed aboard again, the engine was started, and they cruised slowly south; returning to their good anchorage before dusk quite obscured the shore-line.

When the engineer, who was also the steward, again brought drinks up to the after-deck, Palladis said, ‘I wish you would tell me how you provision your ship – on what scale you provision her – when you're setting out on a cruise.'

‘We don't always drink as much as this,' said Myrtle, ‘but Peter likes to have plenty on board, just in case of visitors.'

‘At present,' said Ricci, ‘I'm only experimenting. As yet, you see, I havena had much experience in being a millionaire, and I'm just going about it cautiously, trying to make the best of it. I'm building a house in Townsville, as I told you – a house that's going to have the finest carriage-drive in the Antipodes – and a friend of mine, a naval architect in Sydney, is designing a boat for me. A boat about the size of this, but a different hull altogether, that we can use for cruising about the Barrier Reef, and up to the Islands: to New Guinea, and maybe as far as the Solomons, if we want to.

‘Well, that will keep us busy for part of the year. But I was born in Scotland, and I'm not forsaking Europe altogether. Oh, no! So we came here, for a cruise among the Greek islands, to see what sort of a boat would be suitable for these parts. And when we've decided I'll build another here in Greece, and keep her in Greece, and we'll spend part of the year in the Mediterranean, and Myrtle can do some shopping in Rome. If you've time to spare it's easy enough to combine good sailing with a few weeks ashore to look at the shops. It's a small auxiliary schooner I think I'll build here, and man her with a Greek crew. They're good sailors, the Greeks.'

Balintore and Palladis listened with admiration to Ricci's projected policy for life-with-a-million-pounds: ‘And royalties coming forbye: don't forget that,' he said. They offered suggestions, as to where he should go; and how, to best advantage, he should spend his money. They had found a
subject that held them enthralled in argument – in project and counter-project, in extravagance and ultra extravagance – for three or four hours. They went down to dinner, and had finished dinner, before they had exhausted their ideas for deploying wealth in a campaign for enduring pleasure; and with invention worn out, but their brandy glasses generously filled, they sat for some time in comparative silence, their minds still occupied with elusive or vicarious enjoyment.

It was Ricci who brought them back to reality – or the realities of ordinary life – by leaning across the table and saying to Balintore, ‘And thirty years ago, ay, thirty years ago and more, if We had a shilling or two to spend, how did we spend it? As like as not we'd go down to the Portobello Baths, and a swim there would give us more pleasure than swimming nowadays on the finest beaches of the Mediterranean Sea or the Pacific Ocean!'

This observation provoked no response but the acquiescence of bored agreement, and Ricci, with a little more assertiveness in his voice, said, ‘You settled down fairly weel after your mother married the Commander. You canna say your life was one long, stark chapter of unrelieved misery.'

‘I endured it,' said Balintore. ‘I was thirteen when she married him. What else could I do?'

Myrtle yawned and said, ‘I think I'll go to bed.' But Ricci said, ‘No, hen, don't leave us! I like to have you here, where I can look at you.'

‘So do I,' said Palladis.

Myrtle sat down again, and Ricci said, ‘There's one thing that's always puzzled me. After your mother died – and that was two or three years after she married the Commander: it was just before we ran away and went to sea – well, what I'm thinking of is this: the Commander gave you his stamp-album. Now that collection of his, they were all British Colonials, was a valuable collection. I remember him showing it to us and saying, “Many of these stamps are worth a lot of money.” And he set great store by them, there's no doubt of that. But when your mother died, he gave them to you. Well, why?'

‘He was sorry for me,' said Balintore.

‘That's a poor reason. That's no explanation at all.'

‘I fell ill—'

‘You took to your bed and stayed away from school – you stayed away a week – because you were due a thrashing from the Rector.'

‘I was ill.'

‘I don't believe it. No, what I believe is this: your mother had diabetes—'

‘What has that got to do with it?'

‘My father was a chemist, and I know this: that if someone has diabetes, it's easy enough to kill him – or her, as the case may be – by depriving him, or her, of their proper dose of insulin. Now the Commander was away from home when your mother died—'

‘She wasn't my mother.'

‘I know, I know that. There's no point in harping on that. The point is that the Commander had gone to Loch Leven for a week's fishing, and two or three days later his wife died in coma. And when the Commander came home he gave you a collection of British Colonial stamps. A valuable collection.'

‘And you've reason to be grateful to him.'

‘I'm aware of that. When you and me decided that we'd had enough of school, and enough of Edinburgh, and wanted to go to Copenhagen to join the
Herzogin Cecilie
, we sold his album to a junk shop in the High Street for £40. They gave us £40 without question, and that means the album was worth £400 at the very least. Well, why did he give it to you?'