The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (11 page)

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? These things, though, never work like that. So long as rumours just “circulate”, as you put it, they can’t do too much harm, because so many stories circulate, true and false alike. It’s when they get into print, even as rumours, and they become news – that’s when they become dangerous.’

‘Yes, I believe I get what you’re saying.’

‘And it wasn’t only the drugs. There was also –’

At that point she fell silent again.

Trubshawe waited a few seconds before pressing her.

‘There was also what?’

‘I – well, it’s really not for me to bring up the – the other thing.’

‘Please, Miss Rutherford, as far as I’m aware you’ve dealt an honest hand so far. I insist you let me know everything that could be relevant to the situation you’re all in.’

The actress continued to remain mute.

‘Could your reluctance to go on,’ he then asked her, ‘have something to do with’ – he once more pulled Gentry’s page of notes out of his pocket and read aloud what he suspected must be the operative line: ‘“CR + EM = COCA + LES”?’

‘Ye-es – yes, it could,’ answered Cora Rutherford after a moment of hesitation. ‘The problem, Trubshawe, is that another person’s privacy is involved. I feel it would be –’

‘Oh, Cora, just tell the man,’ Evadne Mount brusquely interrupted her. ‘It’s bound to come out. Eventually.’

‘You really mean that, Evie?’ said the actress. ‘After all, can we be certain he was referring to – you know what?’

‘Course he was, the obnoxious little toad. What else could it have been? But if we have Trubshawe’s word that none of this will leak beyond these four walls, then I’m willing to be as outspoken as you were.’

‘I’ve already given you that word.’

Now the moment had come for the novelist to take up the story.

‘Well, you see, Chief-Inspector, Cora and I – we’ve been best friends since the year dot. When we were both still in our twenties, she was a struggling young actress and I an aspiring young writer. For a couple of years we actually shared a flat in Bloomsbury, quite the weeest flat you ever saw.’

‘Wee!’ said the actress. ‘Wee wasn’t the word! You literally couldn’t have swung a cat.’

‘A cat?’ said the novelist. ‘You couldn’t have swung a mouse!’

Suddenly assailed by memories of a dim, unknowable past to which they alone were privy, both women fell to giggling like the two gawky, galumphing young gals they probably once were. There was something almost poignant about the spectacle.

‘Anyway,’ Evadne Mount continued, wiping a nostalgic tear from her eye, ‘I was writing my very first book and –’

‘Ah no!’ the Chief-Inspector shouted her down. ‘Here I really must insist! Now is not – I repeat,
not
– the time or place for another one of your hyper-ingenious plots.’

‘Oh, don’t get yourself into such a tizz! This is one novel whose plot I wouldn’t dare to relate in detail. At least, not in front of the Vicar.’

‘Eh? What’s that you say?’ interjected the policeman, now clearly intrigued in spite of himself. ‘So, eh, so tell me, exactly what kind of a novel was it?’

‘That’s just it. It wasn’t a whodunit. In those days my ambition was to be a great literary genius. The model for the book was
The Well of Loneliness
– Radclyffe Hall, you know. Its title – I blush to think of it now – but its title was
The Urinal of Futility
and it was all about a virginal young woman who has just graduated from Somerville, about her painful reconciliation with her own’ – here the novelist’s
voice dropped to a whisper – ‘her own h-o-m-o-s-e-x-a-l – no, wait, there’s something wrong there, h-o-m-o-s-e-x-
u
-a-l-i-t-y’ – then, having at last managed to spell out the offending word, she at once raised her voice again to its natural booming resonance, just as though she’d turned up the volume switch on a wireless – ‘and her intimate relationship with a – with a – well, let’s just say it was autobiographical and be done with it.

‘Yes, Clem, you heard me. It was autobiographical. And, yes, I know how terribly delicate your susceptibilities are, but there’s no call for you to look so scandalised. I’m not the only one of us on whom life has played a sneaky, underhand trick. You have flat feet, after all.’

‘Evie, please!’ the Vicar tut-tutted. ‘I cannot concur with such an idea – that flat feet and what you suffered from – and I hope I may use the past tense – are to any degree comparable.’

‘This is all very interesting, Miss Mount,’ Trubshawe intervened, ‘but I must be getting dense again, for I simply cannot figure out what it has to do with Miss Rutherford.’

‘Judas to Judas, man,’ cried the novelist, ‘it’s positively shrieking at you!’

‘Is it? Yet I still –’

‘Look. Cora and I were both, as I say, in our early twenties and she was ravishing and, incredible as it may seem to you, I wasn’t actually too bad-looking myself – certainly not the tweedy panda you have in front of you now – and
we were lonely and we shared a minuscule flat which had just one great big bed and – well, to quote Cora, would you like me to draw a picture?’

‘No!’ shuddered the Chief-Inspector. ‘I’m afraid you already have.’

‘In any event,’ was Evadne Mount’s brisk rejoinder, ‘nothing was ultimately to come of it for either of us. Indeed, as readers of
Kine Weekly
well know, Cora has had no fewer than three husbands. It
is
three, isn’t it, Cora darling?’

‘Four, darling, if you count the Count.’

‘I never count the Count.’

‘Neither do I,’ chuckled Cora.

‘As for me, I chose to channel my emotional energies into my books, by which I mean my whodunits.
The Urinal of Futility was
published – privately – but I’ve never let it be reprinted and I’ve always left it out of my entry in
Who’s Who
. Its author is not
Who
I am any longer nor
Who
I’ve been for many years. It was a road not taken, as they say. And thank God too, I say. My readers are all very nice people, I’m sure, but it’s my experience that, once you get beyond the pleasantries, the how-d’you-dos and lovely-to-see-yous, it’s these same very nice people who tend to spout the most horrendously bigoted opinions.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Trubshawe impatiently, ‘but could we get back to Gentry, please?’

‘Oh well, there’s not much more to say. Precisely the same thing happened to us as happened to poor Clem.
Having somehow got wind of our mutual past, Cora’s and mine, Gentry started to taunt us both across the
dinner-table
. And all in so sly and subtle a fashion that, as Cora has told you, only she and I could have known what he was talking about.’

‘How did the subject come up?’

‘Really, it was so puerile I can barely remember.’

‘“Lady of Spain”, Evie?’ the actress prompted her. ‘You might mention that.’

‘“Lady of Spain”?’ repeated a bemused Trubshawe.

The novelist winced at the memory.

‘Yes, it was that silly. Selina happened to be seated at the piano and she asked if any of us had a request. When Cynthia suggested “Lady of Spain” – you know, “Lady of Spain, I adore you, tra la la la, I implore you!” – Gentry instantly treated Cora and me to one of his sniggery stares and proposed that, for our benefit, the song be titled not “Lady of Spain” but “Ladies of Lisbon”.’

Now Trubshawe looked downright baffled.

‘Ladies of Lisbon? I don’t understand. Lisbon’s in Portugal, not Spain.’

Once again both actress and novelist burst into gales of uncontrollable laughter. Once again a glimpse, so fleeting as to be almost imperceptible, was afforded of two fun-loving young women who, eons before, had shared a small cold flat and a big warm bed in Bloomsbury. Then, as rapidly as they had emerged, the ghosts of their younger, gayer selves
beat a discreet retreat into the past where they belonged, just as a matching pair of blushes lit up Trubshawe’s cheeks. It had taken a few seconds, but he had, finally, got it.

‘I see – yes, yes, I do see,’ he mumbled, audibly mortified.

‘Your word, mind?’ said Cora Rutherford. ‘You gave us your word?’

‘Oh yes. I gave you my word and I assure you I’ll keep it. Queer, that is, giving something you end up also keeping, but you know what I mean. You can trust me, ladies.

‘And now,’ he concluded, ‘I have, of course, that one direct question of mine to put to you both. Miss Rutherford, Miss Mount, did either of you murder Raymond Gentry?’

‘You first,’ said Cora Rutherford to Evadne Mount.

‘No, no, I insist, you first,’ said Evadne Mount to Cora Rutherford.

‘Age before beauty,’ said Cora Rutherford.

‘My sentiments entirely,’ said Evadne Mount. ‘Which is why you’ve obviously got to go first.’

‘Curses! Why must you always have the last word, you hideous old bag?’ said Cora Rutherford with a boxy shrug of her padded shoulders.

She faced up to the Chief-Inspector.

‘No, I did not murder Raymond Gentry. Though, to be candid with you, Trubshawe, I wish I had. It’s profoundly satisfying to me, as it is to everybody else in this room, I’m sure, that the monster is no more. But it would have been
even more satisfying to know that it was I who had had the pluck – the pluck or the luck – to put him out of his misery. I mean, of course, out of
our
misery.’

‘Snap!’ cried Evadne Mount.

The Rolfes, whose turn it was next, had in reality two stories to tell, not one, and it was the Doctor who narrated the first and his wife the second. Since, in their case, the Chief-Inspector’s interpolations were relatively few and far between and, until the very end of Madge Rolfe’s account, were mostly routine and pedestrian, and since neither husband nor wife saw fit to question the other on a matter of interpretation, or interrupt on a matter of fact, it will make better sense to edit out all extraneous comments.

Well now (said the Doctor, caressing his moustache, so neat and pencil-thin it scarcely seemed to belong to the same species as Trubshawe’s hirsute excrescence), Madge and I settled down here, as many of you are aware, some seven years ago. Most conveniently for us, old Dr Butterworth in Postbridge was on the point of retiring. He’d put his practice
up for sale, I bought it off him, and I also bought the charmingly dilapidated cottage which went with it and in which we’ve been living ever since.

In Postbridge, of course, I’m nothing but a common-or-garden GP. Most of my work seems to involve colic, corns and chilblains. I never see a serious case, I mean an interesting study, from one twelvemonth to the next. I am what you might describe as a human placebo. And I’ve long suspected that my bedside manner, which those of you who think me something of a cold fish may be surprised to learn I can turn on and off at will like a bathroom tap, has a markedly more remedial effect on my patients than anything I ever prescribe for them.

It wasn’t always thus. I trained as a paediatric surgeon and, even though I say so myself, it was becoming pretty clear that I was destined, if not perhaps for greatness, then let’s say for real eminence. I published several admired papers in the
Lancet
on the pathology of parturition – that’s childbearing to you – and at St Theodore’s was considered very much the coming man.

In those halcyon days Madge and I were, I suppose, as content as we’ve ever been or are ever likely to be again. We had a circle of attractive, clever acquaintances, even a cluster of famous or semi-famous ones, and we lived in a minute mews house in Notting Hill. Hardly a fashionable area, I grant you, but for those of us who couldn’t afford Kensington it was a nice enough place in which to live, to entertain our friends and, above all, to envisage bringing up a family.

Bringing up a family. Ah now, there was the terrible, tragic irony of our lives. It may be hard for you to credit this, you who’ve only come to know her in recent years, but all Madge ever wanted was to have lots of children. Even among my own patients, I’ve known few women with such a strong maternal instinct. And it was that maternal instinct of hers that made our plight so horribly ironic. For, you see, we – I should say, I –
I
couldn’t have children. Even though I was raised alongside half-a-dozen brothers and sisters, I myself am … well, I’m sterile.

So now you know. On us, too, life played, to borrow Evadne’s phrase, a sneaky, underhand trick. There I was, a distinguished paediatric surgeon, aiding and abetting healthy young wives every day of my professional life to bring bonnie babes into the world, and I was incapable of giving my own wife the sprogs she so desperately desired.

Our marriage was undone by that failure of mine. It was haunted by the children we never had. It was almost as though we
had
had them and they’d died – as though, don’t you see, they’d died on us even before they’d had a chance to be born. They lived with us, those unborn children of ours, they lived with us like little ghosts, like little baby ghosts, in our nice little house in Notting Hill.

My apologies. I haven’t let many people see me like this. Not even Madge, when I think of it. I tend to reserve my bedside manner exclusively for my patients.

Anyway – to continue. Naturally, we discussed the possibility of adoption. I have to say, though, we were seriously discouraged by the experience of some neighbours of ours. They were childless too, and they adopted a little orphaned boy, hardly more than an infant, whose parents had both been decapitated in a motor-car accident. But what they weren’t told – not, at least, until the problem had got out of hand – was that the tot’s father had been an illiterate navvy and his mother a gin-swigging, half-gypsy slattern. In short, they were as common as dirt and, as was inevitable, that bad blood had been inherited by their wretched offspring.

By the age of fifteen he was getting all the local school-girls into trouble, he was repeatedly hauled up before the magistrates’ court for petty, and not so petty, pilfering and he was obstinately incapable of holding down any of the jobs his decent and despairing foster-parents had found for him. He ended on the gallows, needless to say.

So, you see, no matter how careful you are, you can never,
never
be sure what kind of child you’re adopting. Breeding
will
out – as a doctor, no one knows better than I that that is one of the most inflexible of all biological laws. And considering how far down the road to self-destruction our marriage had already travelled, Madge and I simply couldn’t take the risk.

Then something happened which seemed heaven-sent to help us patch up our relationship. I had an aunt, a maiden
lady who’d been living out her last years in Farnborough. She’d been Lady-in-Waiting to the exiled Empress Eugénie, who, on her death, left her a legacy of five thousand pounds, a legacy that was virtually intact when she herself passed on. I was her only living relative and, even though Madge and I had never what you might call cultivated her – to our eternal shame, we’d never once bothered ourselves to visit her and her little court of decrepit royal hangers-on – it was into our laps that the windfall, um, fell.

Five thousand pounds was a tidy sum in those days and while we were pondering what to do with it, I received the offer of a post as resident surgeon at the Cedars of Babylon Hospital in Ottawa, Canada. It was, so we both imagined, the miracle we’d been praying for and I accepted without hesitation.

Alas! As Thomas Carlyle, I believe, eloquently expressed it, ‘Here or Nowhere, and Now or Never, Immigrant, is thy America.’ Our roots were here, and uprooting ourselves ultimately changed nothing. I had my work to occupy me, of course, but poor Madge found the Canadians almost as chilly as their climate.

My colleagues, for instance. They’d invite us to dinner – just the once – then drop us. Not, I venture to suggest, because they didn’t care for us, or anything of that sort, only because they believed that, having once had us over, they’d done their duty by us. It was as though, you know, we were nothing more than acquaintances in transit,
friends of friends, merely passing through. They’d established their own little social circles and our invasive presence must have skewed the symmetry. It would be wrong to say they treated us as interlopers. It was just that there was no room, no vacant space in their lives, left for us.

The effect on our marriage was devastating. Night after night, we’d have nothing to do but scream at one another – sometimes silently, if you know what I mean, sometimes in a whisper and sometimes, too, at the tops of our voices. And that’s when I started drinking.

Not that I was ever an alcoholic. I really wasn’t. But every evening, as I prepared to go home, I realised I was going to need a dose of Dutch courage in order to face my own wife. No, no, that’s unfair, what I’ve just said. Madge wasn’t at all to blame. It wasn’t my wife I couldn’t face, it was our marriage – or what remained of it.

Anyway, I began drinking and, worse, I went on drinking. If the city of Ottawa had nothing else to offer, it did boast a generous selection of friendly bars and I was soon propping up most of them.

Till, one day, the inevitable happened. I had to perform a Caesarean. To start with, it all looked quite unproblematic, no trickier than any other. But it turned out to require rather more drastic abdominal surgery than anyone could have foreseen and – well, to cut a long story short, I was obliged to sacrifice the baby in order to save the mother’s life.

Again I swear I made no mistake. Every paediatric surgeon in the world would have found himself in the same predicament I did, would have been faced with the same dilemma and would unquestionably – I repeat, unquestionably – have arrived at the same decision. These things happen. And they can happen to the most eminent of medical men.

The father, a Mountie, was naturally distraught at losing his son, though he was also deeply grateful to me for having returned his wife to him more or less in one piece. But then, you know, most ordinary people hold a doctor, any doctor, in such awe it goes against their instincts ever to query whether so heroic a personage, as they perceive him, could possibly have been negligent.

So it could all have passed off without any adverse reflection on me had not some nosy nurse gone straight to the Dean of the hospital to complain that, when tying on my mask, she’d smelt Scotch whisky on my breath.

Naturally, I was called into the Dean’s office where I made the point, quite calmly, that there’d been no imprudence on my part. The anaesthetist, I said, would assuredly support me in my contention that nothing more could have been done to save the child. And he did just that, except that, under the Dean’s unexpectedly pugnacious questioning, he also confessed that he, too, had had the impression, apparently from some alleged slurring of my voice, that I’d been drinking. And not, he added, for the first time.

And
not for the first time
. Those were the words that did for me. The Dean went off the deep end. He ordered me there and then never to darken the hospital’s door again. Initially, I fought back. I protested that I couldn’t be, that I shouldn’t be, dismissed on an anaesthetist’s word, but he refused to hear me out and, frankly, my heart was no longer in it. If I’d decided to pursue the case, it would have provoked a scandal not only for the hospital but also for me personally and I didn’t know whether a marriage already as rocky as ours could have survived all the ensuing publicity.

That, you might think, was the end of it. But no – it was neither the end nor, in a way, the worst. I have no idea who blabbed – the nurse, I daresay – but, well, there are secrets which are impossible to keep, in spite of the Hippocratic oath, and it eventually came to the ears of the Mountie and his wife that I’d been ‘dead drunk’, can you believe, in the operating-theatre.

They wrote letter after letter to the hospital’s Board of Trustees. They started to plague us with threatening telephone calls. And even though they didn’t know our home address, his being a policeman meant of course that he would have had no problem digging it out. You’ll understand, then, why Madge and I chose not to hang around.

We immediately packed our bags, fled to New York – ‘fled’, I’m afraid, is the
mot juste
– and booked passage on the first ship, the
Zenobia
, bound for Europe. Six days later
we disembarked in Le Havre, that very evening found us in Paris and the following day we were Southward bound on the Blue Train.

From which point (he concluded in the same clipped and concise tone as he’d delivered his whole speech) the story becomes more Madge’s than mine. So, if I may, I’ll pass the baton to her.

Throughout her husband’s confessional, Madge Rolfe’s eyes had been so intently trained upon him you had the sense she was not just watching him, watching his face, but actually watching his
lips
, watching them formulate those words and phrases which might damn them for ever in the eyes of the only ‘set’ to which the two of them could any longer aspire to belong. Now at last she turned away from him towards those who had been watching and listening to him almost as intently as she had.

She cleared her throat. Then she lit a cigarette – an actress through and through, albeit an actress who’d never trodden the boards, she was using both lighter and cigarette precisely as a professional would, as Cora Rutherford herself would have done. For her they were, supremely, a couple of handy theatrical props, ones that would permit her to stall for a moment or two while she mentally rehearsed her lines and re-gathered her forces.

She sat frowning prettily for a few seconds more, then commenced her own account of their shared past.

You have all heard Henry (she said) dissect our marital
problems. You’ve heard him
operate
on them, with a steadier hand than he operated on that poor woman in Ottawa. Yes, yes, Henry, I know, you weren’t ‘dead drunk’, I know that. But I also know that, if you weren’t drunk, you
were
drinking, and I think, if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that perhaps after all you weren’t in a fit state to perform that operation.

What was it Socrates said? That a doctor can’t make a mistake because, the instant he does make a mistake, he ceases to be a doctor. Well, let’s just say that, for a few instants in the operating-theatre, you ceased to be a doctor.

Perhaps, too, according to the same logic, I was never truly unfaithful to you because, the instant I started going around with other men, I ceased to be your wife. Oh, and please don’t pretend to be surprised or shocked, my dears, you all knew
that
was coming. You all saw Gentry’s notes and I can’t imagine you haven’t already worked out for yourselves who he meant by ‘MR’.