The Players And The Game (4 page)

‘Stepdaughter actually. Jennifer. I shouldn’t be surprised if she spread her wings soon, flew the coop. Youth, you know. She wants London.’

‘If there’s anything Alice would like to know, tell her to ring Val, she’d love to help. Has Alice joined the Townswomen’s Guild yet? Val’s on the committee.’

‘I don’t think so. She’s joined the bridge club.’

‘Plenty of time. Settle down first.’

‘As soon as we’re straight you must come round and have dinner.’

‘Plenty of time. Didn’t you tell me you played tennis? You should join the club. Sally’s a member.’

‘I’m meaning to. Just for these next few days I’m going to be pretty busy.’

‘I know. Still, you want to join one or two things, keep in the swim.’

Paul got up. ‘You won’t forget–’

‘What? Oh no, leave it to me.’

When he was alone Bob Lowson closed his eyes. The day had been exhausting, and he could easily have fallen asleep. Then the green light on his desk showed, and a bell tinkled gently. The call was from the managing director of one of Timbals’ European subsidiaries. It was about some confusion over export deliveries and should have been dealt with by O’Rourke, but the managing director had asked specifically for Lowson. He applied emollient remarks, said that he hoped to be making a European tour later in the year, and sent for O’Rourke. He did not ring Paul back until nearly five o’clock.

‘Paul, I think you’ve got the whole thing a bit out of perspective. Essentially the luncheon-room’s meant for the use of directors. When they’ve got guests.’ His laugh came warm, rich, easy. ‘Even directors aren’t really supposed to use it unless they have guests, though I dare say some of them will.’

‘Blaney and O’Rourke aren’t directors. That’s just my point.’

‘No. But Blaney’s on home marketing and O’Rourke handles exports. The way Brian put it to me is that they both often have guests from whom we’re getting business, people who demand a bit of special treatment.
You
know. That’s something you just can’t say about Personnel.’

‘I see.’

‘Just have a word with me any time you’ve got guests who seem to you to need the full treatment, I’ll make sure you use the luncheon-room.’

‘But my name doesn’t go on the list?’

You shouldn’t have said that, Lowson thought, you should have left it alone. ‘Paul, I don’t mind bending the rules but I never break them. And they’re not my rules, you know, they’re Brian’s, though I thought he was being quite reasonable.’

At that point Paul did leave it, and said thank you very much. If I made a list of the things he’s done wrong in dealing with that little matter, Bob Lowson thought, starting with talking to me about it at all, they would fill a page. But the satisfaction of his mood was too deep to be affected by petty annoyances.

The lift was packed. Paul found himself thigh to thigh with a middle-aged woman from Accounts. Joy Lindley, on the other side of the lift, smiled at him. As they walked towards the Underground she was a step or two behind him, and he stopped to let her catch up.

‘It was very nice of you, Mr Vane. Not telling Mr Hartford about the memo.’

‘Think nothing of it.’ He asked questions and found out that she lived in Highgate with her family, that her mother had had an operation and was more or less an invalid, and that she would have liked to go to University but didn’t get good enough grades. ‘I’m pretty stupid.’

‘Nonsense. You wouldn’t have lasted a week in Brian Hartford’s office if you were stupid.’ The presence of this long-legged filly cantering by his side made him feel youthful and frisky. At the Underground entrance he said, ‘Come and have a drink with me. Just a quick one.’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, she put out her tongue at him, said ‘Ask me tomorrow,’ waved, and walked across the street. He was delighted. Later the wheels of the train rattled out words he had heard before:
Vane Vane, off again.
Not really, he told himself, I won’t say another word to the little minx.

The place was just off the M4 near Datchet, a rambling Victorian country house approached by a winding drive of copper beeches. The evening was chilly, and no patients were in the grounds. Hartford went up to the first floor, spoke to the Sister on duty.

‘Good evening, Mr Hartford. Not quite so well today, I’m afraid. But we have our ups and downs.’

‘Yes.’ His lips were pressed thinner than usual as he walked down the corridor. The card on the door said Mrs Ellen Hartford. It was yellow, not white. His wife had been here for eight years.

She sat at a table by the window. From the door her profile looked like that of the girl he had married. It was not until you were close that the puffy cheeks and slack mouth became obvious. Her eyes were like dead cornflowers. They looked at Hartford without appearing to see him. He spoke her name, kissed her cheek. She brushed the cheek as though a fly had touched her, then made a gesture towards the gardens.

‘Nobody out there now.’

‘No. It’s fairly cold.’

‘But they’ve been there.’

‘You haven’t been out yourself today?’

‘They’ve been watching me. All the afternoon. Two of them, on patrol, up and down. Waiting to get in. Over that balcony.’ She made a gesture at the balcony outside her window. ‘But I have to watch, and I can’t watch all the time. I must get some sleep.’

‘Of course.’

‘I want the balcony taken away. Knocked down. So that I’m safe.’

He knew that it was foolish to argue, although for a long time he had tried to do so. Now he was silent. Her hands twined and retwined, a sure sign that she was more than usually disturbed.

‘Have you got anything?’

He drew from his pocket a half-pound block of chocolate. She broke off a piece, ate it greedily. ‘They’re trying to starve me here. Nothing to eat today since breakfast, you’re not to say I’m lying, it’s true.’ She put a hand up to her eyes as though afraid of being hit. ‘I don’t like it here, I want to go back to Bayley.’

Bayley was the village where they had lived before the accident. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘What?’

‘I said I’ll see. We’ll talk about it again.’ He knew that in half an hour she would have forgotten the conversation.

‘They may try to stop me, but I’ve made plans. Not silly ones. Shall I tell you about them? You’re not listening.’

‘I am.’

‘I shan’t tell you. Only that I’ve got a helper here. Somebody who is truly helpful. Or it seems she is. Only one thing that’s wrong, it worries me. At some time or other she has offended God. She bears the mark. Do you know what God did to show his displeasure?’ She leaned across, her spittle touched his face. ‘He made her black.’

Hartford looked at his watch. A little more than eight years ago she had been taking their ten-year-old daughter Eve to a party, had driven out of a side road without looking and run head-on into a bus. Ellen had been badly concussed, and it had been some time before she could be told that Eve had been killed. She had found it impossible to cope with the simplest household tasks when she came out of hospital, but it was six months before the extent of the damage to her brain was realised. For those six months he had kept her at home with a housekeeper to do the work, but when she set fire to the house he had accepted that she must go into a home. He was a logical man and liked to feel that he must ‘accept’ facts, although of course it was she who had had to accept life in the home. Sometimes she would seem perfectly rational, but evenings like this one made him accept also that she would probably never come out. Perhaps, after all this time, he did not even want her to come out. She said something through a mouthful of chocolate.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ve been lying to me. You sold our house at Bayley. You live in a flat. You sold it because you wanted to keep me in here, didn’t you?’

There would be another half-hour of this. He always stayed for an hour, and he came three times a week. He now felt no emotion at all in relation to Ellen, but he sometimes wondered what Eve would have been like now, at eighteen, if she had lived.

During this month of June Anne Marie’s elder sister Nathalie came over to England, and took her clothes and few other belongings back to France. She talked to Plender, who was impressed by her certainty that the girl would not have gone off without at least telling her family. They were Catholics, Anne Marie adored her father and got on well with her sister, and although Nathalie admitted that she was rather flighty and occasionally did things they disapproved of, it was inconceivable that she would have gone off and not been in touch with them.

Plender told Hurley, who was not much impressed. What, he wondered, were they expected to do about it that wasn’t being done already? Details about her had been circulated, her name and description were on the Missing Persons list.

The sergeant ran a hand through his black curly hair. He was a conscientious young man, and he had been worrying about the case. ‘Maybe something has happened to her.’

‘Perhaps it has. I dare say she deserved it. What then?’

‘It’s those two disappearances, sir. I can’t get over the idea that they’re connected. We haven’t heard anything of the other girl either.’

But a couple of days later they did hear something of the other girl, in the form of a telephone call from Joan Brown’s landlady, Mrs Ransom. She had turned up again, asking if her old room was still vacant. Mrs Ransom had told her of the police inquiries, and Joan Brown herself came into the station.

Plender saw her. She was a dumpy girl in her middle or late twenties, with no obvious attractions. Not the most likely candidate, Plender had to admit, for a sex crime. He told her that she had given them a lot of trouble.

‘I don’t understand. What have I done wrong?’

‘I didn’t say you’d done anything wrong, only that you’d caused a lot of trouble. Not only to us. Mr Darling, your employer, came in to see us. He said you just left without giving notice or saying a word. Is that right?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘That wasn’t very considerate. Why did you do it?’

‘He was an old pinchfist. It was rotten pay. And there wasn’t much to do anyway, business was slack. I got fed up.’

‘So you left him, just packed your things and cleared off. Why?’

‘I don’t see it’s your business.’

‘Boy-friend trouble?’

‘I wanted a rest.’

‘Where did you go to?’

A pause. ‘Home. At Kiley. Just outside Mansfield. In Nottinghamshire.’ Flatly she repeated, ‘For a rest. Things were getting me down.’

‘Just suddenly like that, you needed a rest.’ Plender got along well with most women, but he was finding Joan Brown hard work. ‘And what have you come back for now?’

‘Might as well be in Rawley as anywhere, I suppose.’

‘Are you going to ask for your old job back?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. I told you it was boring and he didn’t pay much. I’ll look around.’

‘Do you know a girl named Anne Marie Dupont? This girl.’ He showed her a photograph. He had the impression that her mind was occupied by some different subject, and decided that it was almost certainly connected with a young man, and that this was the reason for her leaving Rawley.

His eye automatically noted: no rings, nice hands but doesn’t take care of them, worn handbag but it looks like leather and not plastic. There was a vague wild look in her eye that he associated with religion, on the slender basis that he had once had a girl-friend with a similar look, and that she had become a Jehovah’s Witness. He said on impulse, ‘Are you very religious, Miss Brown?’

At last he had said something that interested her. ‘I was brought up a Methodist. But I don’t go to chapel now.’

‘Is your father a preacher?’

‘No, a schoolmaster. But they’re both Methodists, very strict. What made you think I was?’

Plender said truthfully that she reminded him of a girl he knew who had joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and her interest waned. She gave him her parents’ address and promised to let him know if she moved again in the next few weeks. Then she wandered out of the station as vaguely as she had come in.

He decided against ringing the parents. After all, what would he be ringing them for? As Joan Brown said, she had done nothing wrong. If she chose to pack in a job and leave Rawley because she wanted a rest or for some other reason, that was her affair. When he reported her visit to Hurley, the inspector made it clear that he was gallantly refraining from saying
I told you so.

So, with the Joan Brown disappearance cleared up, interest in Anne Marie Dupont dropped almost to vanishing point. Only Plender felt uneasily that perhaps something more should be done about it.

The centres of middle-class social life in Rawley were the Rotary Club and the golf club for men, the social club and the Townswomen’s Guild for women, and the tennis club. The Rotary Club was for business men, the golf club for those on a rather higher social level, including some Timbals executives, the social club (which included the bridge club that Alice Vane had joined) for their wives. Rawley was too big to be a company town, but there were five thousand workers at the Timbals factory, and the firm helped to support most of these organisations.

The tennis club was upon the whole the place where the sexes chiefly met, not just occasionally but all the time. The social grading there was not less accurate for being invisible and unmentioned. In theory anybody could join, but in practice the ordinary Timbals workers would no more have thought of trying to do so than would a grocer’s shop assistant. They belonged to the firm’s sports club, which had better courts than Rawley Tennis Club and more of them, available at a much lower cost. To join the club was, as Bob Lowson had said to Paul Vane, to keep in the swim – or rather, to swim in the right bath. Paul had taken his advice and joined. Jennifer had refused, on the ground that she’d finished with all that stuff at school, and Alice didn’t play. At the tennis club on a June evening he was the centre of a trivial incident which was later to assume some importance.

Paul played tennis as he played other games, flashily rather than well. He had a hard first service which went in only occasionally, and an erratic whipped forehand drive. He was playing a mixed doubles with Louise Allbright against Ray Gordon and Sally Lowson. Ray and Sally should have been much too good for the other pair, but Sally was expressing her boredom with the Rawley scene by playing almost every stroke a few seconds late, as though she were in Copenhagen and operating her racket by remote control. Paul, on the other hand, was playing altogether above himself. At four-five down he won two points by decisive smashes to pull up from love-thirty on Louise’s service to thirty-all. Then a third smash raised a puff of white on the back line. Ray called ‘Out’.

Paul said incredulously, ‘Out? I saw the chalk come up.’

‘Just dust. It was a foot out.’

‘Thirty-forty. Louise served, Sally returned it near to the baseline, Paul hit a stylish forehand which Ray moved to play at, then checked himself. ‘Out,’ he called. ‘Game. And set.’

Paul, at the back of the court, stood with hands on hips, then came up and spoke to Louise. They both laughed.

‘What’s the joke?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all.’

‘There must have been, you were both laughing. Let me in on it.’ Ray too had now come up to the net. ‘Louise.’

‘Nothing. Paul just said–’

‘Yes?’

She looked at Paul, who said, ‘It was just a casual remark. A joke.’

Ray’s nutty face looked as if it were being screwed by a vice. ‘I should like to know what you said.’

Before Paul could answer, Louise spoke. She had a delicate little-girl voice. ‘Paul said if you were taking one of those drunkenness tests where you have to walk along a white line you wouldn’t pass it, because you wouldn’t be able to see where the white line was. I thought it was rather funny. I mean, you know that last shot was in.’

Ray glared at her, then walked off the court. ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ Paul said mildly.

‘But it
was
in. Wasn’t it, Sally?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Paul put an arm round each of them. ‘Let’s just simmer down, shall we?’

The girls were drinking gin and tonic and Paul had a glass of beer, when Ray came into the bar. When Paul asked what he was drinking he looked deliberately at him. ‘I don’t drink with people who say I’ve cheated. Or with little bitches who try to make trouble.’

He turned and walked out. He had not spoken loudly, but the barman had heard and so had Peter Ponsonby, who was standing only a couple of feet away. Peter’s cherub cheeks trembled with indignation. ‘Such rudeness. It’s intolerable. I do apologise to you both. I shall see that the Committee hears about it.’

Paul said it was just a stupid joke that had been misunderstood, and Louise asked if she could have another drink. Sally went home soon afterwards. When she got home she told her parents what had happened. She was campaigning for a flat in London which she would share with a girl friend, but so far her father had refused to stump up any money, saying that she could finish her trainee management course first. He said now that Paul seemed to have stepped out of line, and she replied that the club was so fantastically dull that anything which livened it up was welcome. She went on to say that it was no worse than the rest of Rawley. Then she went upstairs, slammed the door of her bedroom, and played the latest James Taylor record much too loudly.

Paul and Louise stayed drinking and playing darts until ten o’clock. He was in good form at darts too, and after he had ended one game with a double, she hugged him closely. Then he drove her home, and kissed her good night outside her house. She kissed him back, then broke away. He sat with his fingers tapping the steering wheel.

‘I’m too old, is that it? Or is it Ray?’

‘Not really. I’m finished with him.’

‘You’ve got somebody else?’

‘Could be,’ she said with devastating coyness. ‘Could be I shan’t be in Rawley for ever. I mean, it’s dead, isn’t it? For young people.’

She was not particularly attractive but the words excited him, with the implication that they belonged to different worlds. He tried to drag her towards him with one arm and to put his other hand up her skirt. She pulled away, got out of the car and slammed the door. He watched her retreating back, started the car and went home.

That Sunday Paul and Alice went to dinner with her parents, the Parkinsons, who lived only a few miles away. When Paul had mentioned this as an inducement for going to live in Rawley, Alice was sharp.

‘I shouldn’t have thought you’d have wanted to see them more than twice a year. You know you hate them. And they don’t love you.’

‘I get on perfectly well with your father.’ Alice’s father had been a brigadier, and although his unit had been the Pay Corps and he was now retired, he still used the title. Her mother had spotted at once that Paul was not out of the top drawer, and had disapproved of him accordingly. There was a time when he had christened them the brigadier and his lady, and she had found it funny, but that was long ago.

‘You know Daddy never talks about anything but the weather.’

‘The trouble is that when you’re with them you become a different person.’

‘How would you know what sort of person I am? You’ve never tried to find out.’

He did not reply. This was as near as they ever got to quarrelling.

When they arrived the brigadier was in the garden prodding away with a hoe. He kissed his daughter, said to his son-in-law, ‘Hallo, young shaver,’ and added, ‘Need rain. Very dry.’

In the house Norah, the brigadier’s lady, met them with a jangle of bracelets, the offer of an enamelled cheek, a glass of very dry sherry. At dinner she spoke of the servant problem. Alice, in tune with her mother, said that it was hopeless to try to get anybody in Rawley, they were all employed at the Timbals factory.

‘What this country needs is a sharp dose of unemployment. It would bring people to their senses.’

The brigadier liked, as he said, to get his head down over his food, but now he lifted it. ‘Don’t suppose you’d want too much of that, eh, Paul? Expect you get it, though. Seasonal work and all that.’

‘We try to avoid seasonal employment as much as we can. After all, it’s my job to keep people happy. They aren’t happy if they know they may be out of work next month.’ He felt Norah’s eyes upon him. Was he using the wrong tools?

‘A personnel man, I’ve always thought that was a strange occupation,’ she said. ‘It’s what your army units used to be called, personnel.’ With no change of tone she said to Paul, ‘I think you need another knife.’

It was true. He had used a knife instead of a spoon for the melon.

The evening went on like that. When he drove back Alice said. ‘You hated every minute. Why did you say we should go?’

‘You were no help. You just echoed your mother.’

‘We’re not compatible,’ she said softly into the darkness of the car. She imagined that dark young man at her side.