The Cherry Blossom Corpse (2 page)

“I can't think what Amanda Fairchild is doing, coming to a mere guest-house,” I said. “I'd have thought she would have preferred to jet-set it in one of the international hotels.”

“More romantic?” suggested Mary Sweeny. “And Amanda always did like being a big fish in a small pond. Though, to be fair, Amanda these days is a big fish
wherever she swims. Of the English writers she's second only to Barbara Cartland—and Barbara's not coming this year.”

“Busy tending her bees, I suppose.”

“Probably. And Barbara isn't getting any younger, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Amanda will be Queen of the British bees at this conference. As far as sheer awfulness is concerned, though, she will face very stiff competition from one or two of the Americans.”

“Oh God,” I breathed. “What have I let myself in for?”

And I went rather quiet for the rest of the journey.

We arrived at KvalevÃ¥g after about forty minutes, and were indeed met at the roadside by a spare lady with a ramrod back, dressed in rather drab greys and fawns, and wearing shoes so sensible as to verge on the downright. She shook each of us by the hand, unsmiling, and to all of us murmured the formula “Good afternoon. Welcome to KvalevÃ¥g.” Then she directed a young man to pile our luggage on to a trolley, and led the way down the little dirt road towards the guest-house. We followed obediently, rather like a scout troop, and if we let out “oohs” and “aahs” at the scenery, it was, I assure you, scenery so indescribable in its loveliness that they were perfectly appropriate responses. Finally we passed a little notice saying
Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri,
and we saw the house.

It was a square, solid, white wooden house, of no great pretensions, but of immense charm. It had been built, I learned later, by one of the many Norwegian First World War profiteers, as a summer house for his family. Less gracious than an American colonial mansion, it looked domestic, comfortable, welcoming. In the centre of its façade was a large porch with chairs, above which was a little wooden balcony around the doors of one of the bedrooms, and above this in turn was a pair of gabled
windows. But what gave the house its real charm was its setting—the circular path to the front door, the stunning quiet, broken only by the birds, the trees in which one imagined squirrels watching us, the blossom, the spring flowers.

“
Isn't
it lovely?” said the insignificant man.

“Haven't we been clever?” said Mary Sweeny.

The proprietress's face broke into a rare smile. She paused to let us admire, then led the way slowly round the drive towards the house. We exclaimed, we examined shrubs and flowers. Daniel ran ecstatically here and there, looking for animals, and finding them. Even I had to admit that, if romantic novelists had to meet anywhere, this was undoubtedly the place. Finally we all collected on the porch, gazed at each other, smiling at our luck, and then one by one tore ourselves from the prospect and went into the shade of the house.

Last to tear herself away from the view was Amanda. She had been unusually silent during the walk, and I had the impression that she was plotting. Now she stood there, pink, powdered, and rapt, it seemed, with the romantic loveliness of it all.

“Darlings!” she called. “We are going to have such
peace
here!”

Little, as one of her Victorian precursors might have said, did she know.

T
HE SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE FIRST NIGHT
were decidedly cramped. Cristobel and I both had single rooms, and a camp bed had been put up in mine for Jan's one night, and another in Cristobel's for Daniel's. However, the splendour of the surroundings made us forget any discomforts, and since we found in our room a folder with details of the conference and the participants, there was a certain grisly pleasure in going through that. Mostly this consisted of Jan laughing herself silly at the thought of what I was going to have to endure.

“Oh, look: on Wednesday there's a symposium on ‘New Trends in the Romantic Hero'—Amanda Fairchild one of the panel. Do you think you might put in a contribution from the floor? And on Tuesday there's a lecture
entitled ‘Whither the Gothic?' What
can
that mean? Ah—here's one on ‘New Markets in Eastern Europe.' You don't think they're allowed to read Amanda Fairchild in Albania, do you?”

“I shouldn't think so. I believe all pop music is banned there—it's the only good thing I've ever heard about the place—so I can't see anything so unsocially-realistic as Amanda getting through the censorship. What about the excursions?”

“Grieg's home, with a short concert of piano music. Pity you've always hated Grieg. Bus tour of Hardanger to see the trees in bloom.”

“Oh God. Amanda will announce that they've come out specially for her. I'll have to make sure I'm on a different bus.”

“Ah—here's a list of participants.”

“I've already seen that. Cristobel has managed to imply that I'm her husband.”

“Really? Is that to fend off passionate suitors? I did rather wonder whether Cristobel hoped—”

“I gather only husbands and wives are allowed to go along to the sessions. So you may still be right. Do you think she's ripe for romance again?”

“I suspect she wants a father for her fatherless child. She's been reading all this stuff about the danger of a child growing up without a male influence.”

“That's nothing to the danger of a child growing up under the influence of the sort of male Cristobel is likely to saddle herself with. Better a one-parent family any day.”

“Oh look: they tell you where everyone is staying. It's rather like the peerage—an order of precedence. Who's here, I wonder? Arthur Biggs—Lorinda Mason in brackets. I expect that's the sandy little man Amanda was discussing contracts with. He looks like an Arthur
Biggs, though not much like a Lorinda Mason. Patti Drewe, no brackets, so presumably she writes under her own name. And Amanda Fairchild admits to no other either. But here's someone called Lorelei Zuckerman, who writes under the name of Lorelei le Neve. Now I've heard that name.”

“Good God, Jan. Don't tell me you've taken to reading this sort of garbage secretly?”

“Don't be insulting. Actually, I did read one while I was at school—could well have been an Amanda Fairchild. But I decided they weren't for me. You've never found me one of the fluttering hearts mob, have you, Perry? But there's so many of them in the newsagents', you can't avoid sometimes seeing the titles and authors. How they think of the names I don't know. I expect that's where I've seen the name Lorelei le Neve.”

“It's memorable,” I admitted. “Only one degree less memorable than Lorelei Zuckerman.”

“The funny thing is, they don't ask for them by the author's name anyway. They just ask for the latest Bills and Coo romance. I say, Perry—isn't this odd: your badge for the conference calls it the ‘Romantic Novelist's Conference,' the label on your folder calls it the Romantic Novelists Conference, and the heading on all the bumf is ‘Romantic Novelists' Conference.' You'd think they'd make up their minds, wouldn't you?”

“No. It proves what I've always imagined. Romantic novels are written by the semi-literate for the moronic. Amid all that breathless passion, who could give a thought to the inverted comma? Come on, let's go out for a walk in the grounds.”

We collected Cristobel and went downstairs. Others seemed to have had the same idea. As we went out into the garden, Amanda was wafting back in.

“Such heaven!” she said. “Such utter, perfect heaven!”

She let the words float magically on the clear air. So, at any rate, I felt she might have put it.

Around on one of the shadowy little paths I saw the man who I thought must be Arthur Biggs, deep in a discussion of practicalities with Mary Sweeny. We took the path down to the fjord, where we found a simple little boathouse perched on a rock, and a rowing-boat. I took Daniel for a row, while Jan and Cristobel lay in the early evening sun on the wharf of the boathouse. This part of the fjord was quite narrow, because the boathouse looked towards a small island, with summer cottages dotted over it. I rowed some way, then put up the oars and lay there, parrying lazily Dan's questions about Norway with answers of unparalleled ignorance. Soon it was time to go back for dinner.

We had not been the last to arrive at Kvalevåg. When we had climbed the path and reached the garden in front of the house, we saw an immense and svelte Mercedes parked immediately in front of the porch. A uniformed driver soon trotted out and drove off. Whoever it was who had arrived, the proprietress had not been there to meet her. She was marching back again from the road, with another collection of people from a bus. A jolly-looking woman wearing sneakers, a rather voluptuous one, and a thickset man, gaunt of face and bloodshot of eye, who gave the impression that he had seldom been so long between drinks. Sure enough, as the party went up the steps of the porch towards the front door, I heard him say in heavily accented English:

“Vair's de bar?”

The proprietress ignored him, and swept on into the house. We lingered behind, observing and pretending not to observe. At do's such as this, you spend the first few hours watching the players and deciding who there is that you could bear spending a few hours in the company of.

“Mary Sweeny and those two jolly women who just went past,” said Jan.

“What's that?”

“You were wondering who you could manage to put up with for the next few days.”

“Smartyboots. Know-all,” I said. One of the most demoralizing things about marriage is that it gives someone a platform ticket into your mind. Sharing rooms in Baker Street did the trick, too, for Holmes and Watson. “Anyway,” I said, “I expect there are others. Arthur Biggs didn't look too bad.”

“Hmmm,” said Jan.

We were delaying going in, to let the newcomers disperse, but as we went through the porch and into the lounge we could not avoid seeing, disappearing slowly up the stairs, a heavy form dressed in black, taking the stairs one by one, and resting on both a stick and the arm of a companion. There floated down to us, in a thick, unlovely New York accent, words presumably addressed to the proprietress:

“I eat alone. I invariably eat alone. See that I have a table to myself. Give me
support,
Maxwell—support, for God's sake!”

Cristobel looked alarmed. Jan raised her eyebrows at me.

“Not
destined to be one of your buddy pals at this conference, I think, Perry.”

Dinner was an hour later, at seven-thirty. The normal routine of the guest-house would have seen the main meal served much earlier, but it had been changed to take in the various times of arrival of the conference-goers. When we got down to dinner there was no mistaking the important, Mercedes-borne new arrival. Seated, vast and immobile, at a table to herself was a malevolent-looking old woman, her hair dyed an aggressive black, and dressed in a shiny black material that may not have
been bombazine but was what I have always imagined bombazine to look like. She was smoking a small cigar while she waited for her soup, and in front of her was a half-bottle of brandy, and a decanter of water. She poured from both into her tumbler, inhaled on her cigar, and sat there silently watching us from her malevolent little eyes.

“Nice,” muttered Jan.

The single table stood out the more because the rest of us were seated at two long tables—not crowded together, but still forced to mix, to make ourselves known to each other. I think in normal circumstances this would have worked very well, and brought the party happily together. But there we were making embarrassed little social gestures under the dark, contemptuous eye of the Buddha in black over by the fireplace, sipping periodically from her brandy and water. It was also ludicrous. I began to laugh, and Jan, on the other side of the table, began to giggle too. Cristobel said “Shh,” scandalized, so we both subsided. Everyone seemed subdued, even Amanda, who had come down intending to queen it, and found herself talking in hushed tones, for no pin-downable reason.

From the next table I heard a quiet-looking young woman whom I took to be the black monster's companion say in a whisper: “Lorelei Zuckerman,” and then repeat it to another questioner.

“It's Lorelei Zuckerman,” I hissed to Jan.

“Well, I didn't think she looked like a Doreen Smith,” she hissed back.

Meanwhile the bombazined figure was taking in a deep slurp of soup, alternating this with a sip at the brandy and water, her eyes all the time on us, as if evil-mindedly contemplating our idiocies. For an instant social icing-over, her presence would have been hard to beat, so that
even those of us who had bought a bottle of wine hardly felt more cheerful or more relaxed with our fellow delegates by the time the meal ended. I formed the conviction that I was going to have to make for the bar when this gastronomic experience was over. But before that could happen, there was an interesting little scene.

The meal finished with an extremely good crème caramel. The cooking at
Kvalevåg Gjestgiveri
was not adventurous but it was extremely satisfying, and as over the next few days I got to know the horrors of the cooking in the larger hotels of Bergen I came to appreciate it more and more. When the meal was over there was nothing to keep us there. Our conversational gambits were nervous and short-lived, as if we knew we were being bugged by the KGB. We began pushing back our chairs and discussing what we would do next, and we did not notice that Amanda—in a vivid green and over-dressy frock—had swanned it over from her table and had gushed her way up to the black Buddha.

“I
couldn't
forbear coming over to say hello,” she cooed. The black eyes stared at her, the mouth puffed cigar smoke in her direction. “A little bird told me you're Lorelei le Neve.” A pudgy hand went down to the brandy and water, and the glass was raised, while the eyes continued to regard Amanda consideringly, as if she were a rat in a laboratory. Even Amanda faltered. “And I just wanted to say . . . to say how
very
much I enjoyed
The Belle from Baltimore . . .
and
all
your other lovely stories . . .”