Talking to Strange Men (20 page)

‘I've a notion boys don't mind as much as they used to,' said Lucy.

‘Human nature doesn't change.'

‘You know who it is anyway, darling. It's Mrs Mabledene who's married to the garage man. She's a hairdresser. Well, she's got a hairdressing shop.'

She began a conversation with the O'Neills' aunt. Their parents were back in Saud. The tent had been decorated with hanging baskets, white flowers and green foliage, the Pitt colours, by Mrs Lindsay. Angus appeared with a tray of teacups and tuckshop cake. He had rather distinguished himself by coming third in the long jump while Mungo, hardly famous for his sports prowess, had at least been among the first five in the mile. Mungo, whom Fergus hadn't yet spoken to, now joined them rather breathlessly. He was still wearing his green and white striped tee-shirt and shorts, though Angus had changed into grey flannels and blazer as befitted a prefect.

‘That lady in the green dress is Mrs Mabledene,' said Angus, starting on madeira cake. ‘Don't you think she's very beautiful? She is my idea of an English beauty.'

‘What an extraordinary thing to say!' exclaimed Fergus.

‘Why? You mean you don't think she's beautiful?'

‘I certainly do not but that isn't what I meant. Please don't
take this amiss, Angus, but I do think it a most peculiar and unnatural comment for a male person of your age to make.'

‘Hardly unnatural, darling. Anyway, I'm always telling you times change. Your sons aren't carbon copies of you.'

Mungo had been sitting in a kind of bursting silence as if unless a lid were quickly removed he would explode. Now he said on rather a high monotone:

‘Did you get planning permission, Dad?'

‘What?' Fergus seemed confused. He looked from the younger to the elder of his sons with an almost distressed bewilderment, and then back again at Mungo's intense staring face.

‘Did you get planning permission? For the surgery extension? Did they say you could do it?'

‘Yes. Oh, yes. Of course they did. Weeks ago now. I told you I'd had a letter before you went back to school.'

Mungo said warily, ‘And that was all right, was it?'

‘What do you mean all right? Of course it was. Why shouldn't it be?'

‘I just wondered.' Mungo wondered whether he dared, then decided he must. ‘You didn't ever hear any more?'

Angus flicked him a look. With a face as blank as Charles Mabledene's Mungo gazed innocently at his father.

‘It's funny you should say that,' Fergus said, ‘I had a second letter, not exactly confirming the first but saying what amounted to the same thing. These departments, you know, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. But I thought it was rather strange. Still, the main thing is we can go ahead. Why are you interested? I can't imagine why it should interest you.'

Angus said quickly, ‘Mrs Mabledene won't be able to have her salon there after all.'

Fergus forgot the suspicious circumstances of Mungo's inquiry in his anxiety to know how Angus could be aware of events in the life of a woman twenty years his senior, a woman whom he appeared to admire and had called beautiful. Was it possible that his seventeen-year-old son . . .? Could he possibly have . . .? Worry dug lines all over Fergus's face.

‘I have my spies,' said Angus.

Traditionally, after the Sports, on the Saturday evening, the long Summer Half began. Rossingham would be down until the following Monday week. Before joining his parents and Angus in the car, Mungo picked up the message Charles Mabledene had left him in the cricket pavilion drop. It was in the June code, based on the first lines of William Crisp's
Spytrap
. ‘Dragon to Leviathan. Agree safe house Sunday 7 p.m.'

The flood of relief, which had come when his father told him of the arrival of a second letter of permission, settled now into a steady feeling of satisfaction. Very likely Dragon was all right. Most probably Autoprox had come to a dead end simply because there were no witnesses of the car park incident and not for the more sinister reason that Moscow Centre had been secretly forewarned. Walking back from the cricket field, Mungo found himself remembering the time of Charles Mabledene's defection, those glorious weeks with Guy Parker's code book in his possession, Stern's rage. Stern had been beside himself with anger . . . Mungo stopped in his tracks and stood still for a moment on the steps of Pitt.

How did he know Stern had been so angry? Because Charles Mabledene had told him so. There had been no other source. Dragon had told him that when Stern had heard that one of his best men, whom he had thought a mere sleeper in enemy territory, had defected, he had ‘gone mad'. But he had had nothing more than that to go on. For all he knew Dragon might have made it all up. He might have made it all up because in fact he had not come over at all, he was not even a double agent, but still working entirely for Eastern Intelligence. And who was to say that Guy Parker's code book was not simply a plant? True, the codes from it had continued to be used for a week or two but possibly only for the passing of information Stern wanted him to have. It could all be a colossal con . . .

‘You look as if you're at a loose end, Mungo,' said the voice of Mr Lindsay.

Mungo looked up at the window behind which was the Lindsays' living room. ‘Just going home, sir.'

‘A
negotiis publicis feriatus
, eh? Have a good holiday.'

‘You too, sir.'

There was a rumour that the Lindsays went to a health farm every holiday. No doubt they needed it. Mungo went upstairs, collected one small suitcase, and made his way towards the car park.

REVELATIONS THAT OVERTURN
a world can also change a man. John felt himself radically changed by Mark Simms's confession and by Mark's reasons for doing what he had done. He realized that all his life up till now – and this in spite of Cherry's death – he had acted as if the world were a quiet ordinary place in which people followed a routine of work and duty, lived by rules, loved and made marriages which endured, in which at best a cheerful acceptance and at worst a stoical resignation prevailed. Now he felt that he saw things differently. He saw the world as a dangerous place, the seemingly ordinary men who lived in it as dangerous, and himself as potentially so. The events of that evening in Mark's flat he had many times relived. He had gone over and over in his mind the things Mark had said. At first, though, he had tried to forget, had tried to close his mind and give himself up to innocent things, to his own flowers at this most beautiful season of the gardener's year. But the real events, the real words, bored through, like worms, like termites.

Also there was the impulse to take his knowledge to the police, though this was gradually receding. He was almost sure now that he wouldn't go to the police, for he couldn't see what good that would do to anyone. There was only himself left of the people who had been close to Cherry – unless you counted Mark. For his own part, he couldn't imagine deriving any satisfaction from knowing Mark had been arrested and brought to trial. At the time of the
confession his feelings, though, had been very different. There had been a moment when he had wanted to kill him.

Facing John, crouched on the floor with his back against the legs of a chair, Mark had made that incredible confession. His face was in shadow but his eyes gleamed. A trickle of wine ran from the corner of his mouth.

‘I killed her. I killed Cherry.'

‘You mean,' John said, staring, breathing shallowly, ‘you physically murdered her? You killed her with your own hands?'

‘What other way is there of killing someone?' Then Mark seemed to understand what John implied, that he might only figuratively have killed her. With unkindness, for instance, or by neglect. ‘No, I mean 1 murdered her, I strangled her.'

‘But why?' John cried out. He didn't wait for an answer. ‘Oh, I don't believe you. You're making it up.'

‘I tell you, I killed Cherry. I strangled her on the Beckgate Steps.'

‘Were you mad or something? Had you gone mad?'

Mark was quiet and still. It was almost dark in the room by then. He wiped the trickle of wine off his chin. John said:

‘Are you really telling me you killed my sister?'

‘How many times do I have to say it?'

‘It was you all the time and no one knew it.' John felt as if his eyes were starting from his head. He stared at Mark with strained bared eyeballs. It was as if he were seeing him for the first time. He said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Do you understand what you did? It wasn't just Cherry you killed, it was my parents too. And you made us all desperately unhappy. You said how wonderful our family life was and what it meant to you, yet you destroyed all that . . .'

‘I wasn't exactly happy about it myself, you know.'

All Mark's shaking had stopped and his face, or what John could see of it, seemed to have relaxed. He got to his feet, stood at the window, stretched. John felt the shock of what he had been told fully reaching him, effecting a buzzing in his head, a palpitating of the heart. He said it again, his voice breaking:

‘Was it a temporary madness, a fit of madness?'

Mark sat in the chair, on the edge of it, leaning forward.
‘It must have been, when I actually physically did it. There wasn't anything mad about my reasons for doing it.'

‘Why did you do it?'

‘Jealousy. Rage. Hurt.'

‘But you hadn't any reason to be jealous of Cherry. She loved you. She never looked at any man but you and I'm sure no man ever looked at her.'

Mark gave that brittle laugh of his. ‘Are you kidding?' He said in a very artificial way, like an actor in a bad film, ‘She was the biggest whore in town.'

For the first time that he could remember John knew what it was to be totally out of control. His body acted without his apparent volition. A redness of the kind you usually only see when looking at the light through closed lids appeared before his eyes. He jumped up and lashed out with both fists at Mark. But Mark dodged and was struck only a light blow on the neck. He sidestepped and when John lunged again he found himself pummelling the upholstery of the chair. Mark reached for the table lamp and a switch by the door and the whole room was flooded with brilliant blinding light. John fell head foremost into the chair and crouched there in silent misery.

‘You and your parents,' Mark said. ‘You must have been living with your heads buried in sand. From the time she was fifteen, long before she left school, she was going with anyone. And it wasn't some sort of insecurity, mark you, it wasn't because she needed her ego bolstering or anything like that. It was because she loved it. She was mad for sex, it was the mainspring of her life. I suppose that was what made her so attractive.'

‘Attractive?' John said. ‘Cherry attractive?' He felt dreadful saying it, wicked and abominably disloyal, but at the same time that it didn't matter what he said, nothing like that mattered or ever would again. ‘She was one of the plainest girls I ever saw.'

That hateful laugh of Mark's made him wince. ‘Those eyes,' he said. ‘That hair. She had the most beautiful body. She had a breathtaking body.'

John faltered, ‘You mean you'd seen . . .?'

‘Of course I'd seen. Do you think she'd go to bed with all those others and not with me? She was going to marry
me
. At least she did want me – only she wanted all the others as well. Anybody, old, young. I suppose she couldn't help it. I really do suppose that. It was a pity I couldn't take it, wasn't it? It was a pity I couldn't say to myself, this is the most wonderful woman I will ever know and the best sex I will ever get, surely I can put up with her promiscuity if she's discreet about it, if she doesn't broadcast it. I was right thinking it was the best. My marriage was a travesty compared to that. But I couldn't put up with it, John. I couldn't take it. Not when she'd promised me to change and then I found she was sleeping with old Maitland.'

‘I don't believe it!'

‘I know. That's what I said. A sixty-year-old bricklayer with a bricklayer's hands. He stank of Guinness. He had white stubble on his face.'

‘But when was all this? When could she have . . .?'

‘Half those visits to Mrs Chambers were never made, for instance. Nearly all the times she was supposed to be staying with your aunt she wasn't there. It was very convenient for Cherry your parents not having the phone. And as for old Maitland, at work of course. I walked in there unexpectedly one evening – I was half an hour early fetching her – and I found her sitting on his knee.'

‘Perhaps she was sick,' John said. ‘She was ill.'

‘Nymphomania? Don't give me that. We don't say a man's ill if he's crazy about sex, if he can't get enough sex. Why should a woman be different? You're the one that says women are the same as us. There was nothing wrong with Cherry. It was me that was wrong, that was inadequate if you like. I killed her because she admitted going with other men and said she couldn't stop, it was no good her pretending she could stop.'

‘You could have left her. You could have broken the engagement and left her.'

‘I know, but I didn't. I'm going to tell you what happened. I called for her that night. Well, about five. It was already dark. We walked along the embankment quarrelling. She
told me quite frankly that old Maitland had been screwing her every day, or as often as he could make it. She said she didn't see any point in lying to me, nor would she have lied to her parents if they'd asked her, or you, only none of you ever asked. We came up Beckgate Steps. I got hold of her. I put my hands round her throat and once they were round her, John, I couldn't let go. It was as if my hands were fused there. I squeezed and squeezed and I heard something snap and as soon as that happened the life went. She went limp and slipped down, she fell through my hands and lay on the stones . . .'