Death by Sheer Torture (11 page)

‘Remarkable chap, that. Engaging, too.’

‘What on earth was he with you at lunchtime for? His better half—who is
not
engaging—said something about Mrs Trethowan. Sybilla calls herself Miss Trethowan these days, so I suppose she must have meant Maria-Luisa?’

‘Yes. He was translating.’

‘He was
what
?’

‘Translating. Unorthodox, but since they didn’t seem to be able to get anybody locally, and thinking of the time it would take to get someone from London, I decided to take the risk. She obviously had enough English to protest if he misrepresented what she said. Just won’t speak it, the lazy bitch.’

‘And how come the Admirable Crichton is fluent in gutter Italian?’

‘War service, so he said.’

I calculated. ‘The war’s been over thirty-five years or so. That makes McWatters at least fifty-five. I’d have put him five or ten years younger myself, but he is sort of ageless. The quiet, withdrawn type that time doesn’t line. Still, his wife looks all of mid-fifty, so I suppose it’s probably true. Interesting in the circumstances, I must say. Did you get anything out of Maria-Luisa?’

‘Protestations of the innocence of her infants, swearings to God and the Holy Virgin that they were locked in, maledictions—I learned the word
maledetto
without any trouble—on those who tried to pin such an atrocious crime on her innocent angels. Nothing of any substance,
in other words.’

‘Predictable, I suppose. Still, a bit more engaging than their ghastly father, whose first thought was to shop them for the crime.’

‘Doing anything this afternoon, Perry?’ said Tim. ‘If not, I’ve got a job for you.’

‘Interviewing the Squealies or something dangerous like that, I suppose? I think you should call in the Specials.’

‘Actually, I’m doing that myself, with assistance. No, I’d like you to go upstairs into your father’s quarters and go through all his papers and things. You know your way around up there, know where he kept all his stuff, I imagine, and it’s possible you might come across something we might pass over.’

‘I suppose I could. What am I looking for?’

‘Well, obviously anything that could have caused trouble between your father and the family. Money, those pictures, anything of that sort. And possibly anything connected with his nasty little sexual practices. The person who made the machines, any pals with similar tastes—I’d like to know about them. Do you think he had contacts with others of his kind?’

‘For all I know they held a von Sacher-Masoch memorial dinner once a year at the Savoy,’ I said. ‘Or else they got my Aunt Kate to cook one for them. Actually, that’s what put me in mind of that song . . .’

‘What song?’

‘“When thy lips had such lovers to flatter;
When the city lay red from thy rods,”’

I bellowed.

‘Don’t do that, Perry, please.’

‘That song-cycle
Dolores.
I wondered whether it wasn’t some sort of covert announcement—of his tastes, I mean, and an appeal to others of his kind to make contact. It makes it pretty bloody obvious. On the other hand, Uncle
Lawrence said not: implied it was very much a solitary thing with my papa.’

‘Well, keep it in mind while you’re looking around, eh, Perry?’

And so I climbed the stairs and at last went back to my childhood home. I can’t describe the sensations I had: for minutes on end I just pushed open doors and wandered through the old rooms—so well remembered, and hardly changed. The drawing-room, my mother’s little sitting-room, my father’s library and study, my cosy round bedroom in the turret, and Cristobel’s room just beside it. I imagine everybody going home after a long time away feels a bit like me. But I suppose most of them have a lot of happy memories. It wasn’t that I had none; on the other hand, it wasn’t those that came back to me. The oddest thing of all was that, though my father and Cristobel had lived here alone for fifteen years, it wasn’t their presence I felt here at all: it was my mother’s, investing every room with memories: I came upon her as I turned corners, I saw her back as she sat at her writing-desk, I imagined her lying on the sofa with a rug over her, I heard her thin voice calling to me. My mother—whom I’d barely thought of twice a year since I’d grown up and left home.

I think my mother was a sort of survival, one of a species that could not fend for itself in the modern world but had clung precariously on in tiny numbers. I suppose you’d call her well born: she came of a very old Cumberland family with a splendid pedigree and lots of in-breeding. My mother drifted through life—thin, Roman-nosed, kind and remote—with not a thought of how to grapple with realities or fight battles for herself. Things were done for one, weren’t they? It was an odd world she lived in—one where she had family, ‘birth’, a place in society, appointed duties, the respect of the peasantry. Even in Jane Austen’s time such people ought
to have known the world was changing; my mother never seemed to learn. My father proposed. She was thirty and unmarried. Her family was hard up, as an old family always is that has not sent representatives into the big worlds of banking and commerce and industry. They told her she should accept, and she accepted, drifting into marriage as she had drifted into everything else she had done in life.

I don’t suppose she was marked down for happiness, but in some other marriage, or in respectable spinster-hood, she might have got through life with some dignity and contentment. My picture of her is of sickness, and bewilderment, and a sort of helpless and impractical love for me and Cristobel. She was an ailing body, probably from my birth, or even before. I remember in the ’fifties her taking long cruises for her health—cruises to the West Indies, cruises round the world, in the belief that what she needed was sun and change. Nothing helped. She lay, almost throughout my childhood, on the sofa in her little sitting-room, flickering, angular, sad.

I remember her taking me to her one day and telling me that if anything happened to her—as if I didn’t know, at ten, exactly what was going to happen to her—I was to look after my small sister. It came to me now with a pang that I hadn’t made much of a fist of it. I’d walked out on the job.

The memories got on top of me. To get away from them I went through into my father’s study, a room where I never remember my mother going. It was the room with fewest personal associations for me, too: not a place we were called into often, or to which we went of our own accord, though it opened out into the little library, where I spent many hours. Dominating the room, on the wall that got most sunlight, was a painting by Salvador Dali, a picture of various things melting into various other things, a purchase of Aunt Eliza’s in the ’twenties: it was
vaguely nasty, but it went with the room. Also dominant was the grand piano over by the leaded windows, where my father would go and try over the inspirations that crowded in on him. It was very dusty. I tried it and it was out of tune. On the table nearby was a pile of music, including a few of my father’s own compositions in manuscript. I took up the Jubilee
Hymn of Tribute,
written in my father’s thin, quavery musical notation: a page of it looked like the death-throes of a consumptive spider. It was a setting of some bilge by John Masefield, and I wondered whether it had in fact been written for the 1935 Jubilee, and resurrected for the more recent one. I moved over to the desk.

In spite of his apparent openness about his amusing little vices, my father was in many ways a secretive man: he certainly didn’t ‘give himself’ (thank God) to his family, nor, I imagine, to his friends. On the other hand, he was meticulous in his habits, and I found evidence in the desk that my Uncle Lawrence’s condition of intermittent senility had frightened him and made him take precautions. For example, he left a notebook labelled ‘Apparatus’, with precise details of what had been ordered for his games room, and how much had been paid for it. It was clear that almost all the equipment had been devised and constructed by one Ramsay Percival, of 118 Reform Street, Newcastle. I went through the book, marvelling at the scrupulous recording of the progress of the various machines, often with little diagrams. He had noted down the sums paid to Percival—‘to prevent fraud in the event of my death or incapacity’. I totted up the various amounts relating to the strappado: it came to about the cost of a second-hand Mini. Well, I suppose we all have our own forms of self-torment. The rack, unfinished, looked as if it would have cost considerably more.

The stubs of my father’s cheque-book also bore the
name of Percival pretty frequently, but otherwise were unrevealing. Mostly they were to Cristobel, presumably for housekeeping purposes. There was nothing else around on the desk that was at all personal—no blotters with letters that could be read in reverse, no letters
to
him either (but who would write?). I tried the drawers: little clipped bundles of bills, unrevealing except for some from Soho bookshops and a receipt from a theatrical costumier (for the tights, no doubt).

In the bottom drawer was my mother’s will. I thought of it fondly: it had left everything to be divided equally between Cristobel and me, and what it came to was about a thousand pounds each. It’s rather a neither-here-nor-there kind of sum, but I thought of it with gratitude, because it had tided me over when I slammed out of the house, before I got myself into the army, and it had paid for a fortnight’s honeymoon in Portugal, more or less. It hadn’t gone astray, my mother’s thousand. I took a bet with myself that Cristobel had just saved hers—a pretty lunatic procedure these days, but she is the sort that tries to be farsighted and falls into a gravel pit whilst being so.

As I opened my mother’s will, a little slip of paper fell out—the sort of slip that you tear off a pad and write messages to yourself on. It just said, in my father’s anaemic script: ‘Letter WOAF.’ I puzzled over it for a bit. No doubt one of his hedges against mental decay, but what did it mean? Had it just fallen into my mother’s will, or did it for some reason belong there? There was nothing about a letter in the will itself, which was simple and touching in its references to Cristobel and me, and did not mention my father at all. And what on earth were the initials? It looked like some female branch of the armed services, but if so I’d never heard of it.

I got up and shook myself: how my mother seemed to be coming back to me, like a courteously reproachful ghost, getting a gentle revenge for all those years when I’d
shoved her to the back of my mind. It was my father that was my business, though. I walked over to the bookcases in the study. There were the tall shelves with his favourite scores: wispy composers like Fauré, Poulenc and Hugo Wolf. There were the books of musical reference. And then there was the case devoted to his own special kink: much loved works like
Salammbô, Justine
and (oddly in such company) various novels by Harrison Ainsworth. Then there were two shelves of those distasteful pseudo-scientific studies of torture which had haunted my childhood, shoulder to shoulder with several gloating studies of all varieties of corporal infliction. I flicked through the torture books and found the fullest possible description of strappado: it was much-thumbed, and had clearly formed the basis for the streamlined, motorized version downstairs. I put the book aside to show Tim Hamnet.

I felt unclean. That sounds like a piece of evidence given by a respectable lady witness to one of the Whitehouse commissions on porn, but it’s exactly how I felt. I wanted to get out of that room, and I pushed open the door to the library and went quickly through. It was dark and musty and unused. Perhaps like the chapel it had outlived its day, had now only the stale whiff of an old habit, discontinued. I had spent many happy hours here in childhood—when I was a small child, that is, in the days before the apple-stealing and the sportiness and the general anti-Trethowan rumbustiousness. When I was small my mother worried about me—roaming around, climbing trees and fells, playing with the rough village boys. She liked me to be where she could call me, from her sofa. When she saw I was substantially there, she would fade away quite happily again into the chintzy background, and I could go off—to sit, as often as not, in this library and read. That’s the paradise of children with too much time on their hands. I read books much too old
for me (or so librarians today would say, but how can they have been too old for me if I enjoyed them?). I read
Oliver Twist
and
Nicholas Nickleby
—I always loved the Dotheboys Hall scenes, till my father put me off them by reading them aloud. I suppose I sensed the relish. I read
Jane Eyre
and
The Mill on the Floss,
and I even read bits of books ridiculously old for me:
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,
and
The Way Of All Flesh.
Here they all were, in their musty, dull bindings: heavy, three-volume editions that I had difficulty heaving off the shelves and propping up on my small lap. Here was my absolute favourite of all:
Dombey and Son.
Why had I loved that so much? There never was a boy less like Paul Dombey than I was. I suppose it was just the vague general resemblance which gave it its special relevance: the boy and his sister, the antipathetic father, the frail, distant mother floating gradually into eternity at the end of the first chapter.

My mother . . .

I sat there, with all my thoughts, and impressions, and the ideas that danced and jeered and tantalized by refusing to come forward. Only connect . . . I had an odd feeling that I had connected momentarily, and it had flown from my mind. I pulled myself together. It must be an illusion. In fact, I had spent the whole afternoon and early evening wallowing in my past, and not at all doing what I was supposed to do. Still, I doubted if there was much here to discover that I had missed. I made a quick decision. I would go down and report to Tim Hamnet, and then I would go and tell the family (God! what an awful expression! As if they were mine!). I would go and tell the Trethowans that I would not be dining tonight. Then I would hijack a police car—the place was crawling with them—and go off to the village and spend the evening and night with Daniel and Jan. Since they had come, I might as well take advantage of it. I looked at my watch. Half past six. They could even have arrived by now.