The House of Women (32 page)

‘
They weren’t much fun, were they?’ McKenna asked, stifling a yawn. ‘I sorted other people’s dirty linen in a laundry, folded millions of Christmas cards in a printing works, worked from dusk to dawn filling shelves in Woolworths, pulled pints and broke up murderous fights every term-time weekend in one of the worst pubs in Liverpool, and tramped miles around Anglesey delivering Christmas mail.’

‘
I thought your family was comfortably off,’ Rowlands said to Williams. ‘Couldn’t they shield you from the rigours of student life?’

‘
I wanted my independence.’ He turned to McKenna. ‘Tell him to get off my back, or he can get out!’

‘
Tell me about the manuscripts,’ McKenna persuaded. ‘Tell me how you forged them.’

‘
It was a joke,’ insisted the professor. ‘A game.’ He took a swallow of gin, and licked his lips. ‘I don’t know whose idea it was, or where it came from. It just happened, the way things do, one thing leading to another. We were sick of hearing about these bloody relics, we were bored, I was reading about left-over wartime chaos, Ned’s lying on his bed yawning like a hippo because he hadn’t slept off last night’s sleeping tablet, and then he wondered if the authors of these precious relics would have taken drugs, or chewed leaves, or stewed magic mushrooms.’ Shifting in his chair, he went on: ‘When I asked him why they should, he said if he deliberately stayed awake after he’d taken a sleeping tablet, he’d feel like a lark in the eye of the sun, and it was worth the terrible depression he had next day.’ He ceased speaking for a long moment, staring at the floor. ‘He showed me some of the verse he’d written when he was fighting the drugs, and it was so wonderful I felt sick with envy. I looked at him lying on that narrow bed with his hands folded across his chest and his old-fashioned clothes, and he still looked like a pathetic runt from the backwoods, even if there was this magic inside.’

‘
What was he taking?’ McKenna asked.

‘
Mandrax. It was banned.’

‘
Because it was lethally addictive,’ McKenna commented.

‘
It was marvellous!’ Memory glittered in his eyes. ‘What the doctor gave me instead was like the difference between a miracle and a sleight of hand.’

‘
Ned shared his prescriptions with you?’

‘
Very, very occasionally. The tablets were too precious, you see. He kept the bottle tucked inside his waistcoat pocket, and every so often, he’d get it out, and we’d count the dreams.’ He sighed, his bony fingers trembling. ‘I told Ned that God had opened the door for us to write about what we saw, and sometimes, the words flowed so fast we couldn’t catch them all. I thought it was like clinging to a raft of twigs in a mountain cataract, but when we survived the journey, you can’t imagine the exhilaration.’

‘
And the power, too, I suspect,’ McKenna suggested.

‘
No!’ He shook his head. ‘Not the power, simply the knowledge, of what lay beyond the edge of the world. You’ve written yourself,’ he added, glancing at McKenna. ‘You’ve hunched over the paper well into the small hours, pen in hand, mind on the run with angels and devils, and the words coming from somewhere you never knew existed. You write, and read, and write, and when you’re too exhausted to make another scratch, you read it again, and almost stop breathing for the wonder of what you created.’ He paused, smiling with a ghastly weariness. ‘Then you sleep on it, and wake up with that excitement still making your heart thump nineteen to the dozen, and get the paper out from where you hid it, because if anyone else reads it while it’s so new the magic might vanish, and you read it again, and find the magic’s gone anyway, and you’re looking at a load of crap.’

‘
It happens,’ McKenna said. ‘Nothing worth having comes easy.’

‘
People say Mozart plucked his notes from the air as if God were handing them down to him, crotchet by quaver, and if that’s true, I know how he felt. In the cold light of day, what we wrote with the help of Ned’s tablets was even more marvellous than we thought.’ The remnants of the smile soured to a sneer. ‘Ned said that monstrous child of Edith’s has the gift, and she can get hold of it whenever she wants, without the help of God or medicine.’

‘
I think he was right,’ McKenna agreed, offering his cigarettes. ‘Is that why you resent her so much?’

‘
I don’t resent her!’ He fumbled in the packet. ‘I simply loathe her attitude, her impudence, her mouthiness, and, worst of all, her appalling nosiness. Never in my life have I come across anyone so blatantly and bluntly inquisitive.’

‘
That’s how she gets the knowledge she needs to stoke the flames.’ As McKenna leaned forward to light Iolo’s cigarette, the other man’s odour drifted in his nostrils. ‘I don’t think she has any control over it.’

‘
Well, she’ll be sorry when she finds herself like us, lashed to a wheel of fire!’ commented Williams, blowing smoke towards the dingy ceiling.

Rowlands flicked his own lighter.
‘We’re still waiting to hear about the manuscripts.’

‘
We didn’t do anything wrong!’

‘
You’ve admitted to misuse of prescribed drugs.’

‘
Don’t be so petty! Artists have to reach their visions, by any means, because it’s our destiny and our duty to show them to the rest of the world. You can’t expect us to be bound by common laws.’ Sulkily, he watched his interrogator. ‘Anyway, I had my own prescriptions. My doctor didn’t believe unsettled nights should interfere with my studies, and he talked as if taking tablets for this and that was the way ahead for everyone. Edith’s doctor probably convinced her of a pain- and misery free utopia at the bottom of a bottle of tranquillizers.’

‘
Did you become addicted?’ McKenna asked.

‘
That bloody dago at the surgery thinks I was! He said my anxieties and insomnia were caused by the drugs, and stopped my scripts.’ He picked up the tumbler of gin, and drank again. ‘So I took my custom elsewhere.’

‘
To the off-licence?’ Rowlands asked.

‘
To another bloody doctor!’ he snarled. ‘One who knows better than to bite the hand that feeds!’

‘
Edith’s beginning to realize how much she lost through drug dependency,’ McKenna said quietly. ‘Perhaps it’s worth thinking about for yourself? Psychotropic drugs release negativity, inhibition, and memory, as you and Ned discovered, but there’s an equally powerful downside, as Edith’s learned to her cost.’

‘
You’re one to talk!’ Williams said. ‘You must get through forty or fifty cigarettes a day.’

‘
And I expect you do, too,’ McKenna replied. ‘But I rarely drink, and when I had to start upping the sleeping pills to make them work, I stopped taking them.’

‘
Bully for you!’ he commented, reaching for the gin bottle. ‘Give yourself a pat on the back for all that self-control.’

‘
The manuscripts,’ Rowlands said, his voice sharp. ‘Can we please get to the point of this visit? It’s very late, and forgive my deploying the kind of bluntness you so deplore in Phoebe, but to my mind, Professor, there’s no difference between your descent into drug-related crime and the teenage deadleg robbing to feed his habit. Except, of course, you can afford to support your habit, and even private prescriptions must come a lot cheaper than anything the local pusher dispenses.’

‘
I won’t tell you again! I did not commit a crime!’

‘
You engaged in a deliberate deceit, and however much you obfuscate the issue, you gained considerable social, academic, and material benefit.’ Rowlands paused. ‘In fact, your whole career rests on that fraudulent foundation, and I’m still not convinced you didn’t have a hand in silencing the only person in the world who could expose you for what you are.’

‘
You can’t understand, can you?’ he asked, gazing at Rowlands with a strange light in his bloodshot eyes. He nodded towards McKenna. ‘He can, though, which is why he’ll listen to the bitter end. I
couldn’t
hurt Ned, because he was the only person on earth who knew me for what I am, so he was the only person on earth with whom there was not need to perform or pretend. We were in it together, both of us beyond the pale, and when the deceit and pretending stuck in my craw and started to choke me, I could go to him and find myself again. And before you start on the psychological bullshit bandwagon,’ he added, looking again at Rowlands, his voice harshening, ‘imagine how
you’d
feel in my shoes, if your imagination can stretch far enough. I’m worse off than any slave. For the last God knows how many years I’ve struggled through shifting sands, fettered with chains I put there myself, producing papers for academics the world over to scrutinize, lecturing to huge audiences, and pretending to a scholarship I don’t own and never had.’

‘
No-one made you,’ Rowlands commented. ‘And, as I said, you profited considerably, if this house and your car are any indication. And your professorship, of course. By the way, does your wife drive?’

‘
My wife?’

‘
Mrs Solange Williams. Your wife.’

‘
No, she doesn’t! And what’s she got to do with this?’

‘
Then how does she get around if you’re not on hand to drive her?’

‘
Taxis! Trains, when there’s First Class! Why?’

‘
And she knows nothing of your deception?’

‘
No!’

‘
So, Professor,’ Rowlands encouraged, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, ‘what exactly did you do, all those “God knows how many years” ago?’

‘
Slipped over the edge into the other world,’ he said, almost happily. ‘And wrote about it in verse which put the old bards to shame.’

‘
I know,’ McKenna said. ‘I’ve read it.’

‘
It was out of this world!’ he added, gazing up at McKenna as if he had found a saviour. ‘We saw further, we heard more, we smelt the earth as never before, we felt everything! We thought we might die from the wonder of it, and even that didn’t frighten us.’

‘
People under the influence are prone to flights of fancy,’ Rowlands said acidly. ‘And some of them think they can really take wing. We’ve all done our share of scraping up hopheads from the pavements.’

‘
You’ll spend your life with your head and heart alongside your feet in the dirt,’ snarled Williams, ‘because you’ve no imagination. You’ll never know how it feels to half-divine the magic. You’re pitiful!’

‘
You sound like an old hippie, Professor,’ Rowlands said.

‘
Sneer if you like. I don’t care for your opinion, because I’ve seen something you don’t even know exists.’

‘
And is that enough to outweigh the consequences?’ McKenna asked. ‘Because you and Ned squandered your gifts on a dishonest prank you could never claim what you owned. How do you reconcile that? Did Ned’s pain come from his guilt and fear, like your confusion and degeneration? And why have you suddenly decided to tell us? What prompted this confession?’

‘
There’s no-one else to talk to now.’

‘
Is there not?’ McKenna enquired. ‘People say conscience is the voice of the dead wanting their due, so if you turn around, perhaps you’ll see Ned looking over your shoulder, as I can.’

9

‘What was all that about, sir? You were making less sense than him in the end.’ Rowlands quietly closed the gate to Williams’s garden. ‘And aren’t we bringing him in to make a statement? Suppose he decides to swallow a bottle of pills on top of the gin?’

McKenna stood by the car, keys drooping from his fingers.
‘He won’t overdose more than he does most nights, and he’s in no condition to make a statement. Wait until tomorrow, when he’s sober.’ Unlocking the car, he climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘
Is he ever sober, as we understand the term?’ Rowlands asked. ‘And what was that about Ned looking over his shoulder?’

‘
Provocation.’ McKenna gunned the engine, and drew away from the kerb. ‘I’m not convinced Ned was party to the fraud, I’m not convinced Iolo wrote the verse, and I’m extremely disinclined to share the view that he’s a victim of forces beyond his control.’

‘
So you think he might’ve killed Ned after all?’

Driving fast through the web of narrow hilly streets between Williams
’s house and the main road, McKenna said: ‘Not really. He’d have done it years ago if he was going to. What would be the point now?’

‘
He’s got more to lose.’

‘
According to him, the strain of pretence is near unbearable. Loss of prestige might be a release.’

‘
I was thinking more about the posh house, however filthy it is, and his fancy car, not to mention his trophy wife.’ Rowlands sniffed at his sleeve. ‘The stink off that dump’s got on my clothes.’

‘
Living in squalor probably reflects the way he sees himself,’ McKenna said, jumping traffic lights on College Road. ‘You can delve deeper into his psyche tomorrow, which won’t be very taxing, because he’s a shallow man, for all his talk of wondrous visions.’ The car rocked around the tiny roundabout by Safeway supermarket. ‘If he saw anything at all, that is. I suspect Ned’s death is hastening the collapse of whatever ethical structure Iolo has, and I think the words he used and the sight he claims were Ned’s alone. And,’ he went on, roaring down Deiniol Road towards the police station, ‘if I’m wrong, it’s a tragedy, with Iolo forever condemned as a charlatan for admitting to one lapse.’

‘
Once a con, always a con,’ Rowlands retorted, stifling a yawn. ‘His childhood mates would probably tell us he cheated his way through school, and played dirty the rest of the time.’ As McKenna turned into the police station yard and parked, he added: ‘If he had this wonderful creative spirit, where is it now?’

‘
Stifled by the contentments of the material world, perhaps,’ McKenna said. ‘Or sealed up, like the clouds and dreams in Ned’s boxes, because it chafed.’ He paused, then said: ‘Which makes no sense. Phoebe would tell you she can’t help herself putting pen to paper, because creative energy rages like Iolo’s mountain cataract. Ned dissipated his in arcane research and nurturing Phoebe, but it had to find an outlet.’

‘
You’re still disinclined to look for lumps of clay on the end of his legs, aren’t you?’ Rowlands asked.

‘
I’ve heard nothing to persuade me I should, least of all Iolo’s pretentious and pedestrian description of a drug-induced flight of fancy. As you said, people under the influence only
think
they can fly.’

‘
Well, with Ned out of the way, he can lay claim to whatever he wants.’ He yawned again, and stretched.

‘
Feasibly, drugs
can
let loose greater potential, and people of an artistic bent go in for excesses of alcohol and drugs in any case, but the potential has to be there in the first place. All the Mandrax in the world couldn’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.’

‘
I think Iolo’s still trying to find this magic in his bottles of gin and pills,’ McKenna said. ‘But we’ll never know, any more than we’ll know if Ned only
pretended
to find inspiration in his own bottle of pills because he was afraid of what was in his head; or of going the same way as Gertrude, who had her own distinctions from the herd.’

‘
Or maybe he got sick of snide remarks about being different, and pretended to join in with the flower power drug culture.’

‘
Whatever else, joining forces with Iolo ruined him. Even if the manuscript fraud began as a game, once Ned realized the measure of Iolo’s corruption, he was effectively muzzled. He couldn’t let the cat out of the bag because no-one would believe he wasn’t party to the deception.’

‘
Wouldn’t it be more in character for him not to break the bonds of friendship?’ Rowlands asked. ‘What other friends has he had, apart from an old tramp, an unbelievably odd child, and a black man?”

‘
Iolo really hates George, doesn’t he?’ McKenna commented.

‘
He’s a dyed-in-the-wool racist. According to him, Dr Ansoni’s a “dago”.’

‘
Only because he stopped his scripts for pills,’ McKenna said, finally opening the car door. ‘He thwarted him and threatened his ego, which Iolo can’t abide, any more than he could bear the prospect of George eventually seeing through the fog of years to the truth.’ Walking slowly up the back steps, he added: ‘In the morning, you can unravel the roots of his racism, if you want, when you’ve found out the specifics of making pieces of paper look as if they’re hundreds of years old. You can also ask him when and where he met up with Ned, when the strain of his chicanery got the better of him.’

*

Diana Bradshaw was waiting for him, lolling in a chair in his office, her smart shoes kicked off and askew on the carpet.

‘
I didn’t expect to see you again this evening,’ McKenna said.

‘
It’s more like night than evening, isn’t it?’ She reached for the discarded footwear. ‘What a horrible day! I stayed at the hospital as long as possible, but Janet’s still unconscious, so I couldn’t talk to her.’ Gingerly easing the shoes on to her slightly swollen feet, she continued: ‘The doctors say she’s as well as can be expected, which really means very little. I tried to get more detail from her parents, and got a mouthful of near abuse from her father, instead.’

‘
It’s easier for him to blame us than look into his own conscience.’

‘
Well, whatever you might say about Janet’s wilfulness, I blame myself for not noticing something was badly wrong.’

‘
Perhaps it’s not a matter of blame,’ McKenna suggested, ‘but more of a young woman’s fear.’

‘
Fear of what?’ she asked. ‘Single pregnancies don’t attract stigma in this day and age, you know.’

‘
Maybe not in England, or in other levels of Welsh society, but Janet’s circle is very different. It’s not a year since her father refused an unwed mother the traditional blessing, humiliating the girl before the whole congregation.’

‘
How cruel people can be!’

‘
Men of God are often the least charitable about human failings,’ McKenna added. ‘By the way, did you see Dewi at the hospital?’

‘
They wanted him in for observation, but he insisted on going home.’ She retrieved her handbag from beneath the chair. ‘I told him to take tomorrow off. I hope you don’t mind.’ She smiled. ‘I’m rostered off duty this weekend, but call me if you need anything. Are there any problems I should know about? Any progress?’

‘
I’ll keep you posted.’

‘
But only during the hours of daylight, if that’s possible!’ She smiled again. ‘I’ve forgotten the feel of a good night’s sleep.’

*

Feet on the desk and a cigarette glowing between his fingers, Rowlands said, as the firedoor sighed at the top of the stairs: ‘Does she know how lucky she is to be getting
any
sleep?’

‘
Are you going home?’ McKenna asked.

‘
Is it worth it? I won’t get there before midnight, and I usually leave before seven. I’d kip here but for the stink of paint.’

‘
Then call your wife, and tell her you’re borrowing my spare room.’