Death by Sheer Torture (3 page)

‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ I said. ‘We each went our own way a long time ago.’

‘Yes, indeed—thirteen years, is it? Or fourteen? A long time. And now you’d be—ah, yes, thirty-two. So you heard about our little problem in . . . in the course of duty, as it were?’

It struck me, momentarily, that the Aunts were taking this with a quite chilling degree of calmness. Then I realized that sensation, public clamour, the scorn of
vox populi,
these were meat and drink to a Trethowan: the legend had been a pure publicity creation, and if my father at his death had been recognized as an obscure minor composer, he would have been a totally unknown one had it not been for the Trethowan PR machine. And much the same went for Lawrence and Syb.

‘I was officially informed of my father’s death,’ I said stiffly, ‘and of some of the details. You can probably tell me more, I imagine.’

Kate bounced anew. She made an odd, soaring gesture with her hands to signify being hauled up, then, with relish, a great swooping one to signify being dropped down. ‘Bump! Ouch!’ she guffawed.

‘Catherine! Any more and you leave the room!’

‘Oh Syb, you are a spoilsport.’

‘Your father,’ said Sybilla gravely, turning to me (but I thought I detected a certain enjoyment in her, too), ‘met his end while conducting one of his little experiments. Of course, you know all about them . . .’

‘To be frank, Aunt Sybilla, I don’t. You forget the last time I saw him I was only eighteen. I had some . . . inkling . . . about his tastes. But the fact is, I really don’t think he was actually . . . experimenting, at that time.’

She thought, her scratchy little face, all crow’s-feet and old chicken skin, puckered in malicious calculation.

‘You know, I think you must be right. The experiments came later, I think. With age. Probably he needed more . . . stimulation. Anyway, the fact is, Peregrine, your father was exceedingly interested in the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition (among others), and he began to experiment to see whether he might not . . . reproduce their effects . . . if you understand me . . . on himself.’

At this point Aunt Kate could not repress another chortle.

‘I see. Now, was this something that was generally known—I mean in this house?’

‘Oh, yes. We’re a very uncon
ven
tional family, as you know, Peregrine. We are
not
censorious: we can encompass human variety. No, give your father his due: he wasn’t like those poor little men who shop furtively in Soho. He never made a grubby little secret of it!’

I was seized with a conviction that the best thing to do, if you have inclinations like my father’s, was to make a grubby little secret of the fact.

‘When you say you all knew,’ I said, trying not to make this sound like a police enquiry and not succeeding very well, ‘what does that mean? Did he invite you all to exhibition performances?’

‘You are being a teeny bit vulgar, Peregrine dear. No, he did not. Though I’m quite sure he would not have minded. I would not have thought twice of breaking in on him, if anything important had come up. He talked about it quite openly, even at meals.’

‘I watched him through the keyhole once,’ volunteered Aunt Kate. She was going to do a repetition of her pantomime, but thought better of it.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘So the whole household would have known. And so what happened?’

‘Well, of course, it was just a
little
unwise, at his age. And I suppose he overdid it . . .’ She averted her eyes. ‘They say a thread snapped, or a pulley broke, or something, and he just . . . couldn’t stop it.’

‘I see.’

‘That’s really all there is. Your poor sister—’ she looked at me conspiratorially, to see whether we mightn’t have a snigger together over my poor sister, but I maintained my professional policeman’s poker face—‘your poor sister woke towards midnight, wanted some water or something; she heard the machine still going, and she went down and . . . found him, poor thing. She had hysterics all over the house. And it’s a big house to have hysterics all over.’

‘Poor Cristobel,’ I said. ‘And at the moment the police are in possession of father’s wing, I take it.’

‘Exactly. Though why they should have been called I don’t know. Anyway, they’re infesting the entire house.’ A thought transparently crossed her face, and she leaned towards me. ‘Now, Peregrine, dear boy, let me have your candid opinion. What is the best thing for us to do?’

In a flash I understood that Aunt Syb was on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand there was the aristocratic (well, upper-middle, with oodles of the necessary) instinct, bred into her, that at times of family crisis one sat tight, closed ranks, said nothing, and waited for things to die down. On the other hand there was the newer Trethowan feeling (fostered by her and her siblings) that everything ought to be capitalized on, everything done to the clashing cymbals of publicity. The Trethowan legend, the creation of publicity, had been kept alive by periodic injections of it (including one hideously embarrassing libel action I remember from my adolescence). Now my father’s death could perhaps be the latest in a long line of front-page spreads. She rather nauseated me, did my Aunt Syb.

‘Well,’ I said, cautiously and reluctantly, ‘the first thing to say is that, even if it was an accident, it can’t—the strappado business and so on—be kept quiet. There will have to be a coroner’s inquest —’

At this point my Aunt Kate clapped her hands with happy anticipation and woke Uncle Lawrence, who began to shout: ‘What am I doing here? Gross negligence on somebody’s part! Why haven’t I been put to bed?’

‘Take him up, Kate,’ said Sybilla. ‘No, this minute! You brought it on yourself!’ And Kate, dragging her old feet, began the long wheeling of Lawrence’s chair towards the door. I rose to help her, but Sybilla’s arm restrained me.

‘No. It does her good. Gives her something to think about. You know she was Not Well last year?’

‘I heard she had some kind of . . . breakdown,’ I ventured.

‘All that
wonderful
strength of mind—gone! As you can see. Now, you say there is no chance at all of keeping all this
absolutely
quiet?’

‘None at all, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, then, we’ll have to make the most of it,’ said Aunt Sybilla, with something like a happy smile on her face.

‘I don’t quite know what you mean by that, Aunt Sybilla, but . . .’

‘Now never you mind, Peregrine. You leave this to me. I
know
the press! I’ve been dealing with them for years! Meanwhile
you —
since you are here, by happy chance—can help me by being my
liaison
with the gentlemen of the Police! You must know this man they’ve sent. Get in with him! Find out what he’s up to! And I can feed judicious fragments of information to my friends. Oh, by the way, you will stay for the funeral, won’t you?’

‘I —’

‘Then that’s settled. I’ll go and tell McWatters to get a spare room ready. Your father’s wing—?’

‘Well, there are places I’d rather —’

‘Splendid, that’s settled. And I’ll tell Mrs McWatters there’ll be one extra for dinner. I’ll try and get
all
the
family there for dinner, a real reunion. That will be nice, won’t it?’

‘Yes, well, perhaps I’d better go and see Superintendent Hamnet.’

‘No hurry, Peregrine dear. Do finish those sandwiches. You do look as if you need an . . . awful
lot
of food.’

And she tottered out with the tinkling laugh that had echoed through the smaller London theatres on dress-rehearsal days in the ’thirties. I took another sandwich and was just stuffing it into my mouth (to get a healthy sized bite) when she surprised me by putting her birdlike head round the door again.

‘Oh, by the way, are you married, Peregrine?’

‘Yes, I am actually. But —’

‘Splendid. Thought I ought to know. I didn’t want to make another
false step
—like about the police. Do gobble up all those, won’t you? Dinner’s not until eight thirty.’

I cursed her, but I did as I was told. I took up the plate and stood with it in the centre of that enormous room. Chomping away, with Trethowanian irreverence, I gazed at the portrait of my great-grandfather. I winked at it, but it was one of those portraits that could never, by any stretch of the imagination, seem to wink back. I looked at the enormous, wonderfully literal Victorian story-telling canvases:
The Love Potion; The Capulets’ Ball; Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath.
They had been on the family walls over a period so long that their critical esteem must have done a graph rather like a political party’s between general elections.

Then I looked at the portraits—by my dead aunt, Elizabeth Trethowan. The witty, affectionate one of her father (my grandfather, the first actual occupant of this elephantine monstrosity of a house). Then the little group of pictures of her brothers and sisters, done just after the war: Lawrence, posing like mad as the Man of Letters; Kate—stern in greens and khakis; my father, looking
every inch a minor composer. And my eye came to rest on the picture of Sybilla—all bright modern blues, greys and pinks, colours which highlighted the crow’s feet around the eyes, the discontented droop of the mouth, the souring of the bright little talent of ten or fifteen years earlier.

I have always said that Aunt Eliza was the only one of the family with talent. I’d go further: there was a touch of genius about the work of Aunt Eliza at her peak. And she was dead these twenty years or more, leaving behind the brood of siblings that had swung merrily into the glare of publicity on the skirt-tails of her gifts. ‘That enormously vital and gifted family,’
The Times
had generously called them. Us. No, it was wrong. There was really only one Trethowan.

CHAPTER 3

THE PAINFUL DETAILS

Eventually it had to be faced up to. I supposed that Hamnet was still at work in my father’s wing of the house, and before dinner I would have to meet him and face the appalling
professional
embarrassment of my father’s death.

I left the drawing-room, crossing the gargantuan hall on my way to the Gothic wing where my father and sister, and myself when young, had had their home. But as I passed through the hall my eye was caught by a lectern standing near the door, on which was placed an enormous book well remembered from my childhood: Great-Grandfather Trethowan’s Family Bible. It had always stood, before, in the chapel—now, I presumed, not merely disused but abandoned. I went over and opened it, curiously, for here were entered all the family births,
marriages and deaths—things Hamnet would no doubt expect me to have at my fingertips, though in fact of all that had happened in the family over the past thirteen years or so I had merely the haziest of notions, culled from occasional meetings with my sister, or the inevitable newspaper paragraphs.

So here (in thick black Gothic script) they all were: on the first page JOSIAH BENTHAM TRETHOWAN, 1828-97; his entry the thickest and blackest of all, with details of his marriage and his three children—my grandfather and his two maiden sisters, who spent the first half of their lives ministering to their father’s every wish and whim, and on his death, suitably rewarded, took up their residence in a Mediterranean country, where they lived happily if respectably to a ripe old age, upholding the Protestant religion and fighting cruelty to animals.

The next page was assigned to my grandfather,
CHARLES ALBERT TRETHOWAN,
1870-1946, in much smaller letters. My grandfather, I believe, was an inoffensive, loving man, who tended the family fortune as best he could and devoted himself to his wife, his duties as magistrate, and his garden. He married Charlotte Victoria Matcham, 1877-1939, the daughter of a Yorkshire baronet. She was a gay, witty creature—as a hostess much loved by Edwardian society and on several occasions by King Edward himself. Her husband doted on her, obeyed her every whim, and turned a gallant blind eye when necessary. She loved children, but mainly, it was said, when they were little: she tended, I believe, to lose interest when they were six or seven. A psychiatrist might make something of this to explain the family. I’ll leave you to do your own diagnoses. The offspring of this marriage were:
ELIZABETH ALEXANDRA,
1898-1955;
LAWRENCE EDGAR,
1900- ;
SYBILLA JANE
, 1905- ;
CATHERINE SIEGLINDE
, 1908- ; and
LEO VICTOR
, 1911- . The date of my father’s death had not yet been
inserted, but no doubt Sybilla, with the zeal of the survivor, was already scrabbling around for the printer’s ink.

From now on one got a page to oneself only if one produced offspring. Aunt Eliza, for all her honours and talents, missed out. On Lawrence’s page, however, it was recorded that he married first in 1918 Florence Emily Horsthorne, 1901–34, and produced a son, Wallace Abercrombie Trethowan, born 1919, missing, presumed dead 1944. And, second, in 1946, Lily Beatrice Cowper, born 1920, divorced 1954, by whom he had issue Peter Clement Trethowan, born 1947. My cousin Pete. Lawrence’s page also recorded worldly honours—his election to the Royal Society of Literature, his knighthood (both ludicrous but very British elevations).

My Aunt Syb’s page was shorter. It recorded her marriage in 1936, her divorce in 1942, and the sole offspring, Mordred Winston Foley, born 1941. My cousin Morrie. The page also recorded the most notable of her theatrical works.

My father’s page recorded his marriage in 1945 to Virginia Godrich, and her death in 1958. You will observe that he was already in his mid-thirties by the time of his marriage, and you may like to connect this marriage with Lawrence’s loss of an heir in 1944. My father, naturally, denied any connection, and claimed that my sister and myself were not afterthoughts but long-delayed intentions. In any case, as you will have seen, Lawrence stole a march on him by marrying in the following year and producing a replacement heir before he did. Anyway, my birth was recorded, Peregrine Leo, 1948- and that of my sister, Cristobel, 1951- , but I did not get a page to myself on which my marriage was recorded, or the birth of our son. I did not expect it: I had not, as you may say, paid my subscription. My father’s page also recorded two or three of his less unsuccessful musical works, and the fact that he had served on the Arts Council
Music Panel, 1958-60. Wowee!