She Died Young (12 page)

He’d been no good at all in the bedroom – too much alcohol, probably – but she’d been sweet about that too. It had only occurred to him afterwards that she might have been relieved. She’d coaxed and then comforted him and managed to make him feel less embarrassed, even suggested it was her fault. And they’d talked. He told her about his work at the paper and she seemed genuinely interested. She in turn had described the dreariness of life in Portsmouth and how she didn’t get on with her mother and how she’d come to London to see the bright lights.

In the morning he’d escorted her downstairs and hailed her a taxi. He gallantly handed her into it, crushing an extra five pound note into her hand.

‘You can always get in touch with me through Sonia,’ she said.

But he hadn’t. It wasn’t exactly shame for his feeble performance, nor the shadowy consciousness that he’d be exploiting her. He probably wasn’t exploiting her; she probably enjoyed the life. But there was something about her that made him feel sad and to wish that life were different, that things didn’t have to be like this, that somewhere they could have met in a different way. It wasn’t that he wished she was an innocent sixteen-year-old again, but rather that he longed to be young and innocent himself, wanted for a crazy moment to recover all those illusions he’d so readily jettisoned along the way.

So he hadn’t got in touch with Valerie again. And Sonia hadn’t said anything either. She usually followed up on the arrangements she made. But this time she didn’t and the weeks and months slipped past. For a while Blackstone was seeing the woman who wrote the
Chronicle
agony column, and after that a girl who worked in the canteen, and he more or less – almost – forgot about Valerie.

Until Rob Crowther at the mortuary pulled out the drawer. The shock of it; he’d thought he was going to be sick, shaking all over, fumbling for a cigarette. ‘Steady on, old man,’ Crowther had said. ‘Didn’t know you knew her. I’m sorry. Rotten luck.’

Blackstone ordered a brandy with his coffee at the end of the meal. The caffeine and alcohol were poison, really, and didn’t promise a good night’s sleep, but he lingered in the half-filled dining room with the clatter of plates and the buzz of voices for company.

Most likely, he thought, it was that ferret of a hotel manager who’d done her in. Nasty piece of work. He’d done his research on Camenzuli – Maltese Mike as he was known in the underworld; dug up all the previous on the nasty little low-life. But motive, that wasn’t so easy. Whoever it was Camenzuli was working for – he must have been working for someone – might have told him what to do. The important thing was to find out who that was, but Blackstone had so far drawn a blank.

Marriage and happiness – the endlessly recurring dream. There must have been a man, though, to foster the illusion.

Blackstone wondered who that man could have been. Could have been anyone. Could have been Sonny Marsden. Could have been one of Sonia’s clients, introduced to Valerie in the way he himself had been.

She had been so young, twenty or twenty-one at most. Her warm flesh had been so alive. And then to see her laid out in the mortuary … a tag from some old play – Shakespeare? – was haunting him.

Cover her face – mine eyes dazzle – she died young.

chapter
15

C
HARLES HALLAM WAS GRIPPED
with cold, his whole body pinched together, stiff and hampered with it. Sweaters, scarves and duffel coat couldn’t protect against the chill. He’d woken at the blackest point of the night from a nightmare in which a deeply buried event had burst from the mausoleum of his unconscious. Something that had happened a long time ago was happening again. He stared down at the broken body on the flagstones below. This time the man he’d pushed off the terrace, his mother’s hated admirer, wasn’t properly dead, but struggled to his feet and with blood running down his face began to climb the steps before Charles was propelled back to consciousness on a wave of terror.

He’d lain for a long time in the dark, unable to shake off the fear – and the sickening uncertainty: that he now no longer knew, and perhaps had never known, if he had acted deliberately to kill or if it had been a fatal accident.

He had to forget again.

The wind skinned his face as he biked in from his digs in Park Town. The colleges huddled dark as the sky. There’d been no sun for two weeks. He left his bike outside Balliol. He was due to meet Fergus Berriman in the Cadena, the idea being to proceed from there to the Free Hungary meeting, to be followed by a rally. Oxford politics, when it meant pompous posturing at the Union by middle-aged twenty-year-olds planning to become prime minister, had always bored Charles rigid, but since the arrival of the Hungarians, things had improved.

He thought if he browsed through the bookshops along the Broad, he might forget the nightmare, but first he wandered into Elliston and Cavell’s, the stuffy department store on the corner. It was the last week of term and there were parties. Even the postgraduates held parties at this time of year, although most were dreary affairs in suburban digs with beer and Algerian wine. There was always a single light bulb that hung from the ceiling and shed a deadening glare on proceedings. Such festivities made a dispiriting contrast to champagne at Christ Church. All the more reason to cut a dash of some kind, to at least be striking, to mark his distance from them. He thought he might buy a new shirt, but first he paused by the scent counter. He liked to wear scent himself, partly in order to shock, and had run out of Chanel’s Cuir de Russie, a current favourite. He gazed dully at the array of bottles and sprayed his wrist with Lanvin’s Arpège. At once he wished he hadn’t, for it had been his mother’s favourite. Scent was memory itself, and memory intensified absence. His eyes filled with tears and he turned quickly away.

The cold outside air made him gasp. The tears stung his eyes. He walked along the Broad crushing all thoughts, all memories.

The dusty gloom of Thornton’s second-hand bookshop steadied him. After a while he was thinking about the Romans, then Quinault, and from there his thoughts moved to Reggie. So she was having an affair and her boyfriend knew Quinault, but it seemed strange that she should have been so interested in the Professor. Gossip was vulgar, of course, particularly when it was about the famous. Charles regarded it as totally beneath him to be interested in celebrity gossip of any sort. It was the sort of thing his stepmother, Brenda, liked to talk about.

Reggie’s interest in Quinault was a different matter. It flattered Charles to have been let in on her secret and Turbeville’s connection with the Professor shed a new light on the old man. The student view of the dons was of an archaic and dried-up species, an evolutionary curiosity, inhabiting college corridors like lizards rustling through ancient ruins, oblivious to modish undergraduate obsessions such as jazz and existentialism.

Charles, on the other hand, having now passed into a new Oxford with a different perspective, had begun to understand how very modern some of the lizards were. It was the undergraduates who were parochial and frivolous. Their tutors had a far wider view of the world, a far greater grasp of the meaning of power. Quinault was no longer some out-of-touch old buffer with a musty and possibly dubious interest in the early Roman emperors, but an actor in the modern world of power and politics.

More changed, however, than Charles’ view of Quinault, was his vision of himself.
Then
, before Schools and the – he had to admit – rather wonderful moment of his Congratulatory First (he had walked into the room for his viva and instead of asking questions the examiners had stood up and each shook his hand) he had taken himself and his peers for the life and soul of the party, the stars in the firmament. Now he was no longer the effortless success, but found himself on the lowest rung of a ladder he wasn’t sure he wanted to climb. That he was there at all must mean he had ambitions, a fact that had previously escaped him. You couldn’t go on just being wonderful – and wonderfully clever – for ever. You had to scrabble around in the dirt like everyone else. It bored him.

He tried to remember what Reggie had said about the relationship between the Professor and her lover. Charles did not see why it worried her; there was nothing so very odd in the visit of a politician to his former tutor; but Reggie must be jealous or insecure and he’d promised to help her. He really had no idea how, or what more he could discover. Poor Reggie, madly in love: it didn’t quite fit with his picture of her. He enjoyed the interest she showed in him and that, twice his age, she’d made him her friend. It was flattering and enhanced his sense of sophistication. To him she was a glamorous figure, but he’d seldom wondered about her inner life.

Even when she’d managed to get him into her bed before his sixteenth birthday, he simply hadn’t noticed that she was infatuated with him. The experience had been interesting, if not overwhelmingly pleasurable, but his interest had concerned himself and his own reactions.

He was so accustomed to being desired that in a strange way, it cut him off from the feelings of others. Yet he was not vain. He took his looks for granted. So far as he was concerned, there was nothing unusual about them. It was even rather a bore at times, so that – rather like Penny and her friends, although he didn’t know this – he would complain that his would-be lovers ‘only wanted one thing’ and were uninterested in him ‘as a person’. Fergus’ response to this had merely been that he should be so lucky and had he ever considered that his looks might be more interesting than his so-called personality.

He approached the corner of Cornmarket. The smell of roasting coffee – better, to be honest, than the drink itself – wafted from the Cadena. Fergus Berriman was seated at the back of the café. He was the only postgraduate Charles found at all sympathetic. This was because he was not like the others. While Charles was younger than the rest, Berriman was older. He came into the ambiguous Oxford category of ‘perennial student’. His research – into the work of the Latin poet Lucretius – had lingered on for some years; he wrote for
Isis
and published poetry in obscure little London magazines and had been a communist until, like many others, he’d left the Party after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin.

Fergus was already going bald and had fierce horn-rimmed glasses. He never wore a coat, seemed not to possess one, but his tweed jacket was invariably buttoned up over his portly form and completed with a red scarf that swathed his neck.

‘Have you heard the latest? Imre Nagy’s been arrested in Budapest. They’ve taken him to Moscow.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘It’s appalling. I don’t know what to think – I still can’t believe communists would do a thing like that.’

Charles hoped Fergus was not going to wrestle with his conscience over coffee. He’d followed through his friend’s eyes the upheaval among the British communists, as the Party was split between those who left and those who stayed. Fergus had often said ‘I come from a Party family, you know,’ as if it were some alternative form of aristocratic descent, but now his family and many others were riven with conflict. He and his mother had renounced their membership, while his father had stayed ‘in’.

‘You know … the Soviet troops going in like that – some of them are just peasants, or they come from places like Uzbekistan – some of them even wanted to side with the students, but – God, what a mess.’

Until the Khrushchev revelations Fergus had always seemed aggressively sure of his political views. But perhaps that had been precisely because he had always had inward doubts. Fergus did protest too much sometimes.

‘You’re so cynical and blasé, you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’m not even on speaking terms with Dad any more, but at least I’m here, not there. At home, I mean. He won’t speak to my mother either and she has to go on living in the same house with him.’

‘You should be an anarchist, like me.’

‘Anarchism’s a bourgeois deviation,’ said Fergus, retreating into the jargon of the Party heritage he had renounced. ‘Anyway you’re the opposite of an anarchist. You’re just bloody
bourgeois
.’

Suddenly it seemed absurd and they started to laugh.

‘Drink up. We’ll be late.’

‘I wanted a bun. I’m hungry. I didn’t have any breakfast.’

‘No bun. We haven’t time.’

The Free Hungary meeting took place in a small hall in Lincoln College. This college had been at the forefront in helping the Hungarians. A group of Lincoln students had started a petition of protest that had reached the national dailies, and three of them had even set off on a mission to take penicillin to the freedom fighters in Budapest, flouting the rule that forbade students to leave Oxford in term time without permission.

The abrupt passage from frozen outdoor chill to fusty interior charged Charles with tension and heightened his awareness of everything around him as if his nerves were exposed. He was sweating, yet he was shaking as well. The buzz of voices, the crowded panelled room and the smell of damp wool and cigarette smoke combined in a wired-up atmosphere of expectation. Something momentous might actually happen. It was like going to meet someone with whom you were in love.

A very young-looking bespectacled undergraduate called the meeting to order. As his words fell on the unusually silent and respectful audience, Charles was still scanning the room, and became aware that a whole cohort of actual Hungarians were crowded at the right side of the hall. One was holding a red, white and green flag. These must be the refugee students who were now settled at a hostel in Headington. They looked, really, like students anywhere, but shabbier and to Charles more romantic. One in particular stood out. He was wearing an off-white Aran sweater – surely an item from the clothes collected for the new arrivals. His dark hair fell over his forehead, and his jagged profile and the intense manner in which he was gazing at the speaker had something grand and noble about it, or so it seemed to Charles. He was standing next to two young women, one of whom wore a peasant kerchief, the other a black beret.

Two of the Lincoln protest leaders spoke, each briefly, to an audience eager to be urged on to action against the international outrage. ‘Tens of thousands of students and workers have died!’

Charles steadily watched the Hungarian who’d caught his attention.

‘This grotesque invasion must be condemned by all liberals, libertarians – and
socialists
– above all, socialists who care for freedom and democracy—’

A communist tried to heckle, but was shouted down.

When a Hungarian rose to speak the room was silent as it had not been until now. The fidgeting and shuffling and muttered asides ceased. Bluish smoke floated across the hall.

He was a round-faced and rather unattractive youth in an old leather jacket, but he spoke well in fluent English, with quiet passion. As Charles listened the events ceased to be just another absorbing yet abstract item of international news. This boy had lost his brother in the fighting. His parents had been arrested. He himself had only just escaped conscription into the Soviet army.

The quiet words gave Charles some glimmering of what had actually happened, what it meant in terms of actual lives, of fate. Perhaps after all it was worse than Suez. The testimony from the four Hungarians who spoke, three well, one in halting English, moved him far more than he would have expected. He even had a lump in his throat. Yet, absorbed though he was, his gaze remained on the dark Hungarian and finally he caught his eye. The Hungarian stared back. Charles held his gaze. He was sure he wasn’t mistaken.

The meeting ended with a rallying call to the march the following day. As the audience banged against chairs and surged raggedly from the hall, Charles eased his way past the loiterers and caught up with the Hungarian he’d noticed earlier.

‘I don’t suppose you have a light?’

It was a hackneyed ploy. The Hungarian gazed at him sombrely. ‘Of course.’

They walked across the quad side by side. Charles looked back a little guiltily, but Fergus had stayed behind to argue with the communist heckler.

‘When did you get here?’

‘Last week. Before that I was in Austria. You English have been very kind, but I think I only just begin to know – only now am I understanding what has happened. I think I am still shocked, you know.’